The Watchmaker’s Hand

He walked off slowly and Sachs joined the team from Crime Scene, a trio, standing behind the bus, gearing up. They were evidence collection technicians, civilian employees of the NYPD. The city had been using ECTs more and more in recent years. So much crime, so much to analyze, it didn’t make logistical sense to tie up uniforms or gold shields with the grunt work that most crime scenes involved. Their training was arduous and they worked hard, many ECTs hoping they could join the department as officers.

After briefing them, she herself suited up in white Tyvek.

The hard hat was a contaminant, and it didn’t fit under the hood of the jumpsuit. She set it aside — though not without the thought that Lincoln Rhyme’s disabled condition resulted from him getting hit in the neck by a falling wooden beam at a construction site. Outside the suit, she strapped on a utility belt, which held a holster, and she snapped her Glock into the gray plastic. This too was a source of potential contamination, but one that was worth dealing with. Perps returned to the scene of the crime more frequently than one might expect. You constantly balanced crime scene integrity with survival.

After telling herself for the tenth time to stop looking at the bloody rebar, she tugged on gloves, picked up her personal collection kit, the one from her trunk, and walked to an opening that led to the first basement. A ladder was used to access the level and she climbed down it.

On that floor, she looked around the large empty space, dimly lit by ambient light from holes in the ceiling. She turned toward where the weights had fallen and her shoulders slumped. To get to them, she had to climb through a dark, narrow tunnel about twenty or thirty feet long, four feet high and three feet wide.

Of course, she thought wryly.

Amelia Sachs’s greatest fear was enclosed spaces.

Well, get on with it. The scene’s not going to search itself, and the Kommunalka Project is probably picking which crane’ll be the next to come down.

Her throat suddenly burned and she coughed. The scents were what you’d expect: damp concrete, sawdust, motor oil and diesel exhaust. But there was something else: some kind of chemical. Astringent. Strong. When the counterweights landed, they must have crushed a drum of cleaning fluid. She pulled on a second mask, which helped.

Sachs stepped into the tunnel, walking awkwardly in a taut crouch.

One yard, two...

Give me a high-speed pursuit any day, she thought, the tachometer kissing red.

Give me a firefight with a tweaker in East New York, muzzle to muzzle.

Anything but this.

Three yards...

Well, damn it, the slower you go, the longer you’re in here.

Finally she was out, and in a normal-sized corridor. At the end of this passage, she could see the weights, illuminated by light filtering through the hole they’d created. Dust floated around them.

Here, the chemical scent and the irritation, stinging both her throat and her eyes, were worse. Much worse.

Get to the weights. There was a chance that the unsub had left a dot of DNA or a fingerprint when he’d sabotaged the mechanism.

As good as a business card.

Dudley Smits...

She took one step forward and nearly tripped.

Shining her light downward, Amelia Sachs, the woman who rarely gasped, gasped now.

A worker — maybe the one the foreman had sent down here to check for casualties — lay on his stomach. A flashlight lay nearby; it was this beam of light she’d seen.

The man’s eyes were open but unblinking, and it was clear he was dead.

And yet, wait. It seemed his hands were moving. She aimed the beam of her own flashlight at one of them.

And now another raspy intake of breath.

His skin was bubbling and dissolving. The appendage was settling as it liquified.

And the part of his face that rested on the concrete floor was doing the same. From chin to cheek, the flesh was being eaten away and bloody bone and flaps of muscle and ridges of gum were becoming exposed.

Sachs was coughing harder now.

She took a deep breath to clear her lungs...

Mistake.

Bad mistake.

It simply drew in more of the irritant, stabbing her mouth and nose and chest, and she began coughing in earnest.

The searing pain of fire. She had to escape. Fast.

Dropping her gear, Sachs turned and stumbled back into the tunnel. Now the dreaded passageway was her lifeline.

Lurching forward toward the ladder, she tried to push the Transmit button of her Motorola.

She missed.

Her vision was crackling, black on the periphery.

She staggered toward the ladder. The cough had grown into choking.

She took one step forward and, losing yet more of her sphere of sight, realized she was going down.

When she landed, she had a thought: That’s weird. How can I smack the concrete so hard and not feel a—

7

“Detective.” Ron Pulaski was speaking into his phone. On the other end of the line was Lon Sellitto, who was — in the ever-changing structure of the NYPD — Pulaski’s sorta-kinda boss.