Jenny cast her husband a playfully exasperated look, and he realized he’d forgotten to tell her there’d be a houseguest calling.
“We’ll be out back.”
“The game!” Martine called.
“I won’t be long.”
“Coffee? Beer?”
Both declined Jenny’s offer.
Brad called, “Detective Spencer? Were you like Special Forces?”
“SEALs.”
“Man... Team Six?”
“No.”
“But did you do secret missions?”
“Oh, you bet. But I can’t talk about them.”
“Cool!”
Ron nodded to the kitchen and the two men walked through it, and onto the back porch. The covered rectangle, unscreened, overlooked a patch of lawn ringed with planting beds in which nothing had been planted. They were weed free, though, and filled with fragrant mulch, which Ron and the children had spread themselves. It was not that long ago — less than a month — though that pleasant Saturday afternoon might have been a decade ago.
Ron noted the big man’s somber expression, not present when he’d arrived.
They looked over the grass.
Filling the silence, Spencer asked softly, “When did it happen?”
It...
“Or we can move on. Just wanted to ask.”
“No. It’s okay. A few years. How’d you know?”
“Your wife said ‘our children.’ Not ‘two of our children.’ And I met an older boy and a younger girl. But there were pictures on the mantel of Brad and an older girl.”
The man was, after all, a detective.
And looking at the face, big and tough, but tinted with pain, Ron Pulaski knew another fact about Lyle Spencer. They had something in common.
Ron said, “Cancer. Happened fast. Man, you do everything... and sometimes everything isn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Over the years we must’ve had a hundred people over, Jenny and me. Probably looked at that same picture. Nobody made the leap. Maybe they wondered and didn’t want to ask. But I don’t think so. They just didn’t notice. And your situation?”
Looking out over the yard, the man said, “Wasn’t that different. We had a daughter too. Then... It was an orphan disease.”
Ron shook his head.
“Term of art, our doctor said. A rare disease. In the U.S., the definition is less than two hundred thousand people have it.” He gave a dim laugh. “I told Lincoln. And you know him. He said the word ‘orphan’ comes from the Greek. And it doesn’t mean just a child without his parents. It can mean a parent who’s lost a child.
“There’re sometimes drugs to treat orphan diseases, but the companies don’t develop them on scale. Not profitable. A single pill might cost a quarter million dollars.”
“No!”
“That’s what she needed. I was upstate, at a small sheriff’s office. I helped myself to some drug money to pay for it.”
Ron knew that Spencer had had a convoluted route to becoming an NYPD detective. He’d heard about a conviction, but the governor had pardoned him and expunged his record, which allowed him to join up. He’d wondered what had happened.
“It work at all, the drug?”
“For a while. Then it didn’t.”
If there ever was a justifiable crime, it was the one Spencer had committed.
Spencer asked, “Lincoln and Amelia know?”
“No.” There was no discernible reason for not telling them. He just hadn’t. “You? You said Lincoln knows.”
“He deduced it. He wondered why I was about to play high dive off the side of a building, that Locksmith case we worked, little while ago.”
So, the detective had considered killing himself. He must have been a widower, or his wife might have left him after the daughter’s death and his arrest. Ron knew too that after his spinal cord accident, years ago, Lincoln had found a doctor willing to rig a setup so he could end his life.
After his daughter’s death, Ron had never considered anything that extreme. He had the rest of his family to be there for. But that wasn’t to say that he — and Jenny — didn’t die in a way. Part of them would forever remain lifeless.
Spencer said, “One of the hardest things. Bug — our nickname — she knew. Knew everything, and it was like, she just accepted it, got on with life while she had it. ‘What’s for dinner?’ Or, ‘Dad, like really? You forgot the Netflix passcode again?’ ”
Ron was nodding and, just barely, keeping the tears banked. “Same thing with Claire, yes. I never knew if it was courage or denial. Or something else.” A deep breath. “Never figured that out.”
Their grief counselor had said, “You need to embrace the memories and then do what she would have wanted for you two: to move on.”
But he and Jenny agreed that was bullshit. What Claire would have wanted was to cry at Disney movies, to gossip with other girls, to flirt with boys and fight with Mom and Dad when she turned thirteen and pick a college and meet the right person and maybe, someday, have children of her own.
That’s what the girl would have wanted.
Her parents’ state of mind wasn’t — and shouldn’t have been — a thing she considered at all.
So they had mourned then, and they mourned now. They would always mourn.
Jenny had said it best earlier: They had gotten through it, yes. But move on? Never.
Finally, Ron asked, “So. What I was asking?”
Spencer took a notebook from his sport coat pocket. “Did some digging. And hate to break the news, Ron, but you’ve got yourself one hell of a problem.”
52
As good a tactical solution as she could put together under the circumstances.
There was little cover on the cul-de-sac street, Hamilton Court, which was lined with buildings in various degrees of human-made destruction and natural decay. The short avenue had been a commercial area at one point, presumably devoted to wholesale food — the Meatpacking District was not far away. But developers had seen the glow of Manhattan profits and had scooped up the block.
Then, as Willis Tamblyn explained, the project crashed, thanks to a few pieces of old armament and traces of rum.
She was at the chained-off entrance, surveying the two hundred feet of cobblestones before her.
The evidence suggested that the Watchmaker and Gilligan had spent time here. The question, however, was whether this was the killer’s safe house, or simply a random spot they’d picked to stop at and have a conversation.
Except Rhyme and Sachs didn’t think it was the latter. Aerial views of Hamilton Court showed a trailer, the sort used as headquarters on construction jobs. It was dusty and battered and invisible from the main streets. A good safe house.
Sachs had also speculated: The street is old, the buildings are old. Which would appeal to the Watchmaker psychologically, as the place was from a different moment in time.
An analysis she did not, of course, share with Lincoln Rhyme, who maintained a negative view of psych profiling.
As she directed the three entry teams into place, she noticed something else that suggested the trailer was his temporary home: a video camera at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, facing inward and hidden in a pile of bricks. She could understand security cameras on the trailer itself, but why cover the street leading to it? The logical answer was: to give warning of officers approaching.
She and one of the dynamic entry teams, four persons total on each, were now staged behind this pile of rubble, out of view of the camera.