The Watchmaker’s Hand

Like Rhyme, Amelia became so focused on searching for relevant evidence that the external world vanished. It was one aspect of their lives that had drawn them together.

Still, he thought, she should have checked in by now.

The door buzzer sounded. Rhyme looked at the monitor, hit Enter and NYPD detective Mel Cooper walked into the parlor.

Trimly built, with a perpetual half smile on his face and the habit of pushing his thick black-framed glasses higher on his nose every few minutes, Cooper was the best forensic lab man in the city. Years ago, Rhyme had used all his negotiating skills (and budgetary cudgels) to steal him away from the small-town police department where he ran a crime scene lab. Cooper took seamlessly to urban forensics, though he occasionally expressed regret at not working crimes like the famous one in his hometown, involving a taxidermied fox, a sugar-maple log and a homemade rocket — a case he’d never gotten around to explaining to an intrigued Lincoln Rhyme.

Cooper had two passions: science and ballroom dancing, at which he and his mesmerizing Scandinavian girlfriend excelled.

He greeted Rhyme and Sellitto, who nodded distractedly, as he was on the phone.

After hanging his jacket, the tech took the Lipton tea Thom had brewed just for him (he liked to say he had simple tastes), then began to robe up. He looked around the parlor, frowning.

“I know. There’s no evidence.” Rhyme scowled. Then: “Have you heard from Amelia? She was on grid at the crane site and should’ve called in by now.”

Cooper lifted a dismissing hand at the curious question; there’d be no reason for him to have heard from her.

“Is that anything?” He was now nodding at the documents that the foreman had provided: maps of the site, diagrams of the crane.

“Just backgrounder,” Sellitto said after hanging up.

And Rhyme said staunchly, “Of. Zero. Evidentiary. Value.”

Cooper looked over the chart on which Sachs had drawn the wreckage path. “Terrible. How tall was it?”

Sellitto said, “It’s a self-erecting model...”

“A what?” Cooper asked, lifting a wry eyebrow.

The detective scoffed. “It’s just what they call it. The tower expands by adding other segments. This one was at the maximum height they can go. About two hundred twenty feet.”

And where the hell are you, Sachs? Rhyme looked to his phone once more, then grew angry with himself for the juvenile move.

Without evidence to analyze, there was nothing to do at the moment but a task he truly hated: scrubbing the security videos taken at the site.

He had a brief desire to fling the computer across the room.

Which he very likely might have done if he’d been able to. Lord knew he’d had enough temper tantrums when he was running CSU. Woe to anyone — brass included — who contaminated a scene or was too lazy to search or investigate as completely as they should.

More scrubbing.

Not a single goddamn frame of the person who’d climbed the tower to loosen or cut free the counterweights.

Nothing, nothing.

No-effing-thing.

“What was that?” Sellitto asked.

Rhyme, unaware that he’d spoken aloud, shook his head.

The doorbell rang and Rhyme looked at the video monitor. It was Sonja Montez, a talented evidence collection technician. He knew her diligence and savvy; she “got” crime scenes, understood them. She spoke to them and they spoke back. This might have been, she admitted candidly, because she knew the streets, having run with a girl gang in high school, though whatever they’d gotten up to, Montez had a clean record.

In her arms were two plastic bins like those that milk cartons are kept in. She’d hit the buzzer with her elbow.

Why had she brought the evidence from the scene and not Sachs?

Something was wrong.

He hit the door lock button on his keypad and the woman entered. No longer in Tyvek, Montez wore a bright green blouse and black leather skirt, and her heels clattered on the ancient oak floors. At her throat was a locket that contained pictures of her two young children, he knew; she’d showed them off proudly the first time she’d been here with a trove of evidence for him to analyze.

“Captain Rhyme. What’s all this?” She stood at the X-ray machine and explosives and radiation detectors, and a small biotoxin chamber, in the front hallway.

“Just being careful.”

A nod. “Can’t have too much careful in this day and age,” she said earnestly.

When Rhyme had learned a few months ago that an assassin was targeting him, he’d asked one of his most brilliant criminalist students to get into the attacker’s mind and come up with the most logical way to kill Rhyme. The young man had decided the perp would exploit a weakness, something Rhyme loved and couldn’t resist: evidence. He would plant a bomb or toxin in something from a crime scene.

So, until the assassin was identified and the threat eliminated, everything that came into the house from unknown origins was scanned.

Cooper and Montez greeted each other, and the lab man and Thom began feeding the envelopes and containers through the security machines.