varnished wood
liquor
horsehair
charcoal
Garry Helprin, attempted homicide
◦ clay soil
◦ oyster shells, old
◦ decaying substances, all probably several hundred years old:
wool
leather
varnished wood
liquor
horsehair
charcoal
ammonia and isocyanic acid
“Let me look into it.”
This is what Tamblyn was now going to be Zooming about.
Rhyme clicked on the invite.
Tamblyn’s face appeared, wide-angle, from his phone camera. He was at a fancy dining table.
Lucien’s? He’d gone after all, it seemed.
The developer suddenly muttered to a man in a white jacket. “I know I’m on the phone. I know it’s against your policy. I also know I could write a check for this place on the spot and turn it into an Arby’s franchise. The maître d’ will tell you who I am. Now go away. Mr. Rhyme? So, that evidence you found? The best I can do is tell you that when foundation crews dig up anything that might be historical, they have to tell the city. And the construction comes to a halt, and the bleeding hearts get court orders to preserve the site for further inspection. Screw it if the company goes out of business and hardworking men and women get fired.”
He calmed. “Well, I’ve seen these items you found before. A military connection. Revolutionary War. The wood is from gun stocks, horsehair from, yes, you guessed it. The liquor’s key. Did you know that soldiers back then fought drunk? I saw a show on cable. Makes sense. Would you go charging up against musket balls and bayonets sober? I myself wouldn’t.
“That still leaves a lot of possibilities, though. Battlefields, training sites, camps. The army and navy’ve always been stationed here. The clay and oyster shells probably mean downtown Manhattan, southwest Brooklyn, north Staten Island, eastern Jersey down to Newark. But I don’t know that does you a lot of good.”
More than five hundred miles of shoreline...
Rhyme’s eyes rose to the ceiling, considering the man’s words.
And the thought emerged.
Military installations...
Ammonia and isocyanic acid.
Urea.
Which is the main source of saltpeter — sodium nitrate, used in the manufacture of gunpowder.
A student of explosives, like all forensic scientists, Rhyme knew that in the nineteenth century gunpowder was always in short supply and manufacturers — desperate for saltpeter, the main source for which was pee — would pay preachers so they could collect dried urine from church pews, where it accumulated after parishioners remained in their seats to listen to sermons that stretched on for hours, and let their natural functions simply occur — rather than risk the wrath of God or, more likely, the appearance of irreverence by slipping away to the outhouse.
Rhyme asked, “Is there anywhere you can think of where gunpowder was manufactured in the area back then — and in a place where construction might’ve been halted?”
“Ah, that’s easy. There’s a current job on hiatus because excavators found an old military installation where gunpower was made. Late seventeen hundreds. Down in Greenwich Village. It used to be known as Gunners’ Row. They changed it years ago. Now it’s called Hamilton Court.”
Before him, rising two hundred feet into the air, was an Engström-Aber tower crane, a self-erecting model.
Bold yellow with a blue cab, this model, he’d learned, was a workhorse in the city. Hale couldn’t help but admire it. The mast measured twelve by twelve feet, and the forward jib — made of eleven sections — totaled two hundred and seventy feet, while the counterweight jib extended sixty-nine. It could heft fifty-five thousand pounds. Not surprising, it was expensive to rent; few construction companies owned tower cranes; to justify the expense, a unit would have been used weekly, and not many contractors did high-rise jobs that required them. The E-A came in at $15,900 per month.
And the meter was ticking. Sitting unused did not excuse the rent, and a crazy man who might tip it over was not an act of God under the rental agreement.
He now parked a half block from the site. Gazing about and seeing no one, other than drivers of vehicles oblivious to him and his SUV, he tapped to life his tablet and found the diagram that was among those that the unfortunate Andy Gilligan had stolen from the city’s DSE department. He looked from the glossy surface to the grounds around him.
Yes, there it was — a four-foot-wide concrete tunnel that would be used to channel rainwater and snowmelt runoff to a drainage system under a nearby road and ultimately to the Hudson River.
All was good. Yes, the workers-turned-guards were diligent and took their task seriously. Their coffee and cigarettes did not distract from their vigil.
Of course, the danger they were looking for, like air-raid wardens in World War II England, was coming from the sky, they believed.
Searching for one of the acid-toting drones.
And once again the amateur guards were looking everywhere but the place they should be looking.
Climbing from the vehicle, he donned the hard hat — yellow like the other workers wore — and zipped his Carhartt overalls up tight at the neck. He walked to the back, raised the liftgate and pulled out the heavy backpack.
He made his way to the tunnel and began to shimmy through. At the end, some fifty feet away, he climbed the steel rungs set into the concrete as a ladder and emerged near the crane’s base. Above him the jib loomed. The wind was up and there was a faint whistle as it streamed through the yellow tubing and black support wires. The operator had released the clutch so that the jib weather-vaned safely.
He examined the base of the mast. The drone was resting in peace, but his plan didn’t call for that anyway. Nor was any of the lovely HF acid involved.
This crane incident would be different.
In a few minutes, the packages had been delivered and he returned to the tunnel and made his way back to the car.
In the driver’s seat he tossed the helmet into the back, began the drive back to his safe house on Hamilton. As he left, he examined the site once more.
He supposed that this particular crane, while towering, garnered less attention than others. The area around it had been completely cleared in a four-hundred-foot circumference. So if, for some reason, the terrorist, or pyscho, sabotaged it, there were no apartments or office buildings to crush.
Which didn’t mean there was no target within the crane’s reach.
The most important one in fact of his whole project.
51
Detective Lyle Spencer — a full foot taller than Ron Pulaski — stood at the door. He wore a black suit and white shirt, no tie. Pulaski looked up and shook the man’s meaty hand.
They stepped into the living room, and Ron introduced the detective to Jenny. They too shook hands.
The children, at the Dog-opoly board, looked up. Jenny said, “And our children. Martine and Brad. This is Detective Spencer.”
“You’re big.”
“Brad!” she said.
Spencer laughed. “Not a worry.” The detective’s eyes looked around the comfortable room: affordable furniture, pictures, vacation souvenirs, sports uniforms, family relics going back generations. Then the accessories that make a dwelling a home: video game cartridges, magazines, recipe cards, soccer and softball gear, mismatched running shoes, pretzel and potato chip packets.