Caligula believed the man and would spend hours playing with the timepiece, convinced that with it he could move back and forth in time.
As he sipped the coffee, finishing the cup, he let his thoughts wander away from imperial Rome — and away from Lincoln Rhyme.
A minute later he picked up an unused burner phone.
“No,” he told himself and set it down. He’d actually spoken aloud.
Then he lifted the unit once more and tapped in a number.
29
Driving north through Tribeca, Ron Pulaski was on the phone with an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives supervisor.
“I’ll tell you, Officer, we’ve been talking.” Nate Lathrop was speaking loudly, as he’d done throughout the conversation. This happened occasionally with those in this particular profession. Because of the explosives side of the outfit’s business, a number of agents’ hearing had suffered over the years.
Pulaski was on Bluetooth earbuds and lifted the phone to turn the volume down.
“Go on, Nate.”
“What?”
Pulaski shouted, “Go on!”
“Us and the Bureau and Homeland? No trace of Tarr on any of the wires. No intel on any target. We think he was transiting.”
“So he’s not priority?”
Nate shouted, “So I have to tell you he’s not high priority.”
“All right, but you’ve got the red sedan out, don’t you?”
“The sedan? Yeah. But—”
“I know there are a lot of them, but I sent you the likely time he hit either the bridge or the tunnel to get back to Jersey. I just want somebody to look over the vids.”
“Yeah, it’s in the system.”
Pulaski almost added, “Did your meeting include the discussion that, target or not, he had probably murdered someone?” But what was the point?
They would care, of course, about a homicide in Manhattan, but they wouldn’t care as much as Pulaski.
He thanked the man in a shout and disconnected.
In truth, he didn’t really mind how it was turning out — the investigation into Tarr was his alone. He didn’t have to answer to the feds, who could be overbearing at times. A lot of jurisdictional turf wars in this business. Tarr was his and his alone.
Good.
He turned and negotiated his way through the warren of streets in this part of Manhattan — old, and designed when horses and wagons were the means of transportation. The lead had not paid off. A video camera had recorded a red sedan at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, but the official camera had not been working properly and it didn’t record the tag. Pulaski had canvassed other cameras and finally gotten a number.
It was registered to a man who was a salesman for a drug company. He checked out.
Now time to get back to the Watchmaker and the cranes. He and Amelia were going to hit possible target sites.
He glanced at the time. Late. He’d hoped the search here, near the Holland Tunnel, would go faster and then he’d get a brief dinner with Jenny and the kids.
As he drove he reflected on Sellitto tapping him to be Lincoln’s replacement.
This, he did not count as a victory, because in order for it to happen, the criminalist would have to retire or... Well, no desire to finish that sentence.
He’d tell Jenny, of course. He’d tell his brother, Tony, a twin, who was Patrol, out of the 6 House in Greenwich Village.
He was debating where to go for a beer to talk about it. Next Thursday — the night he and Tone went out alone for drinks and dinner.
His mobile hummed. The caller was from Queens, the crime scene lab.
“Hello?”
“Officer Pulaski?”
“That’s right.”
“Hey,” the woman’s voice said, “sorry to bother you this late.”
“That’s fine. Go ahead.”
“I’m logging in the evidence from the Dalton murder? That you ran this morning?”
“Okay.”
“There’s an issue with chain of custody, I—”
A blaring horn filled the night and Pulaski’s car slammed full speed into an SUV that materialized in front of him. The Hyundai that he’d hit spun in a full circle, while the Accord that Pulaski was driving — their personal car — jerked sideways and flipped over onto its roof, skidding to a stop against a lamppost, which came tumbling down. Two pedestrians leapt out of its way.
Stunned, he blinked away the shock and began to assess if anything was broken. No. He was functioning okay. Fumbling for the phone, he glanced at the other vehicle. He had to get out and see about their condition.
But as he popped the belt and crumpled hard against the ceiling, he smelled the powerful, astringent odor of gasoline. And with a whooshing roar, orange and blue flames appeared as fast and as shockingly as the SUV had.
They danced around him, a bright and playful display that was in stark contrast to the monotone nighttime street.
30
“Complicated,” Hale said.
The light in this portion of the trailer, the office converted to a bedroom, was unenthusiastic, but he was close enough to make out the details of what he gazed at.
“When did you learn to do it?”
The two lay side by side on the weak mattress covered with pristine sheets and a down comforter, all of which were underneath their naked bodies at the moment.
Simone replied, “Young. I was young.”
He examined her handiwork once again, leaning closer, and in doing so, smelled her smells, and his. Saw a scar, of which she was not self-conscious in the least: a ragged slice under her left breast. Another was just below the rib cage.
She bore some tats too: a 5.56mm round, in silhouette, on one shoulder blade, and Chinese characters on the other. He didn’t know the meaning.
“May I?” Perhaps an ironic request considering how they had just spent the past hour. But it seemed right.
“Yes.”
He lifted her tawny braid and studied the twined strands.
The symmetry, the perfect intervals between turns... they touched Hale on some visceral level and gave him unusual pleasure.
“Your mother, she teach you?”
“She wasn’t part of my life.”
“Then how?” Maybe her father. Why only a mother could teach her child to braid hair was a thought from an older era. But if the topic of her maternal superstructure was off-limits, then paternal might be as well. “If you’re okay with it,” he said.
“Of course. It was my mentor. A former nun. She delivered food in sub-Saharan Africa. The outpost kept getting hit by a warlord. He told her to order twice the food she was allotted by the charity running the place and give it to him. If she didn’t, he and his men would take girls from the village instead. He ended up taking more than half and some girls anyway. She prayed they would stop. When that didn’t work, she quit the church. The warlord didn’t survive till their next encounter. He was gunned down.”
“And how did she become your mentor?”
“I found myself in Africa too. I was there with someone.” A pause. “Circumstances changed. I needed work suddenly. One of the men she paid to deal with the warlords turned on her. I found myself in a position to remedy the situation.”
Hale too used such euphemisms in his work.
Remedy...
“It seems I had a talent.”
She was not inclined to elaborate on this aspect of her biography either. He sensed there was nothing in the tale that was troubling or too sensitive to share. It was more that the narrative was tedious to her and, therefore, to anyone else.