The Watchmaker’s Hand

There had once been that bit of vital evidence. At the time of the murder. It had absolutely been present.

According to a Frenchman who died in 1966.

Edmond Locard had been a forensic investigator — a criminalist — in Lyon, where he established the first forensic science laboratory in the world. His most famous precept was simple and has remained true to this day: it is impossible for a criminal to act without leaving traces of his presence either on the victim or within the scene.

Ron Pulaski had heard those words a hundred times — from his mentor, Lincoln Rhyme. He’d come to believe them.

And he knew that here, somewhere, had been the clues to find the person who had murdered the man who lay at Pulaski’s feet in this dank cellar of a warehouse on the East Side of Manhattan. It possibly still was.

But that adverb was important.

Possibly...

Because after all this time — that infamous forty-eight hours — it might have vanished or morphed into something unrecognizable.

He knew the vital clue was nothing as tangible as friction-ridge prints or drops of the killer’s own blood or a helpful shell casing. Those obvious clues were absent.

So it came down to “dust,” Locard’s charming word for trace evidence.

Pulaski glanced again at the victim. Fletcher Dalton.

In a gray suit, white shirt and dark tie, he was on his back, dead eyes on the black ceiling. The thirty-two-year-old was a broker at a trading house on Wall Street and lived by himself at 845 East 58th Street. He had not shown up for work yesterday and hadn’t been found at home. His name and picture were put out on the wire. Two hours ago, an officer from Patrol happened to notice the door ajar in the deserted warehouse, which was scheduled for demo. He inhaled just one breath before he knew, and he called Homicide.

While Pulaski typically worked with Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, his crime scene reports and testimony at trial as a forensic expert had been noticed, and he’d recently been recruited to run scenes on his own.

Pulaski was pleased for the chance. He’d been Rhyme’s and Sachs’s assistant for some years, and both of them thought he should branch out. Forensic work proved to be far more engaging than street crime — the province of his official assignment, the Patrol Division. Another advantage: it made Jenny happier. The odds of her becoming a widow were considerably smaller when her husband’s job involved picking up hairs with tweezers rather than confronting meth-addled gangbangers.

Another thing: he was good at crime scene work.

And the icing on the cake? He liked it.

How rare was it for what you love and what you excel at to come together?

Rhyme had told him that some people are born to crime scene work, while others simply do a job.

Inspired versus functional.

Artist versus mechanic.

The criminalist didn’t exactly say aloud which camp Pulaski fell into, but he really didn’t need to; with Lincoln Rhyme, you had to infer much, and the younger officer knew how to read him.

Another scan of the forty-by-fifty room. The nature of the killing seemed clear. Dalton was shot outside on the sidewalk and dragged into the basement — after the killer kicked the door open. Only one perp was present here; the dust on the floor told that story.

It was clear that the shooter had dragged the body from the door, straight to where he’d dumped it, with no detours — but of course Pulaski searched the entire space.

He used a pattern of his own: a spiral, starting at the center of the crime and walking in ever-expanding circles. He then turned and did the same in reverse, moving in shrinking loops. Lincoln advocated the grid pattern; with it, you search the scene back and forth, as if mowing a lawn. Then you turn perpendicular and search the same way, overlapping the same ground again.

Pulaski respected the grid, but he liked his own method better; the idea had come when his wife asked him to serve a spiral-cut ham at Thanksgiving.

He squinted against the glare from the half-dozen powerful halogen lights sitting on tripods strategically placed in the room.

It’s here somewhere...

It has to be, right, Mr. Locard?

But where?

Find it, he told himself firmly now.

The clock is ticking...

His spiral-ham search completed, he concentrated on the most important parts of the scene: the path from the door to the body and the body itself.

And there, on Dalton’s lapel, he found it.

The thing that fell into the vital category of evidence at a scene: different from everything else.

It was a dark blue fiber. A synthetic polymer. Because of that composition and its length, it had come from either a scarf or a stocking cap, which the officer knew because he had spent long hours studying scarves and stocking caps (and most other fabrics, for that matter), so that if he happened upon a sample at a crime scene he would have a good chance of identifying it in the field, rather than back in the lab, where the same results would have been attained, but after considerably more time.

Move. Fast.