The Watchmaker’s Hand

The New York Police Department’s DAS was a network of twenty thousand CCTV video cameras around the city. The system collected and stored video and data from a wealth of information: license plate readings, summonses, recordings of 911 calls, complaints, officers’ reports, warrants and arrest notices. The entries numbered in the billions.

One of the DAS cameras had caught Unsub 212 walking out of the Engineering building, then disappearing around the corner. The alarm would be blaring, but he maintained a normal pace so as not to draw attention to himself.

How helpful was the vid? That was another matter. It recorded dark clothing, a hat. Head down, of course.

Rhyme’s assessment: useless, other than offering the man’s body build. Medium. A fact that was, he reflected, more or less useless too.

He glanced into the western portion of the parlor, where the lab was located behind a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, sealed against contamination. Past the instruments and workstations — the envy of small- or even some medium-sized police labs — were brown shelves holding cataloged evidence. His eyes were on the small red plastic tool kit 212 had left behind when, after he’d gotten what he wanted, he’d had to flee.

They’d examined the box when the lead detective first brought it in and had done a thorough job. But, to Rhyme’s irritation, it had yielded no fingerprints, DNA or other trace. This was also a surprise. Evidence that’s abandoned quickly tends to be the most helpful — not, for instance, wiped clean of prints.

Sachs’s hands went to her trim hips, in black jeans, and, head tilted, her long dark red hair fell straight down, plumb. “What was he after?”

The key question, of course.

Motive is irrelevant in a trial and Rhyme didn’t particularly care for the topic during the investigation either, preferring evidence as the arrow that might point to the perp. Yet, ever skeptical Rhyme had to admit that, absent solid forensics, discovering a motive might lead you to a helpful location or even perps themselves. His metaphor in class: motive might give you the neighborhood, and forensic analysis was the door-knocking that might get you the bloody knife or recently fired, if not smoking, gun.

Clumsy, but he rather liked it.

In 212’s case, though, no one involved in the investigation, nor anyone in city government, could figure out why the perp had committed the crime. Yes, he got plenty of details on infrastructure, tunnels, bridges, underground passages — of which there were enough beneath the five boroughs to form an entire shadow city. But how did that help the bad guys plan an attack? Even the dullest terrorists could find suitable targets in this target-rich city without having to resort to maps of tunnels or engineering diagrams.

The materials would also show which passages ran beneath banks or jewelry stores or fur warehouses. But digging upward into a vault for a heist is purely the stuff of 1970s TV movies, Amelia Sachs had pointed out. And stealing cash was pointless. The serial numbers of every twenty-, fifty- and hundred-dollar bill in circulation would fit on a single fifty-gigabyte thumb drive, and scanners to spot purloined bills were in use everywhere.

Gone were the good old days.

“Hm,” Rhyme offered. It was a variation of a grunt. When he spoke, it was, more or less, to himself. “No obvious reason for the heist. And yet the data were stolen. And it was risky.” He wheeled close to the board. “For. A. Purpose. And what might that be?”

Frustration sent his eyes to the bottle of Glenmorangie scotch sitting on a high shelf nearby. Rhyme’s right arm and hand were largely functional, yes, and could easily grip a bottle, and open and pour it.

He could not, however, stand and snag it from the perch where his mother hen had set it. Coincidentally, that very individual — his caregiver, Thom Reston — happened to enter the parlor just then and notice Rhyme’s gaze. He said, “It’s morning.”

“Aware of the time, thank you.”

When Rhyme didn’t look away from the colorful label, Thom said, “No.”

The man was dressed impeccably, as always, today in tan slacks, a baby-blue shirt and a floral tie. He was slim yet strong, his muscles largely developed not from hunks of iron or machines but from moving Rhyme himself. It was Thom who got the man into and out of the chair and bed and bath.

Another grunt and dark glance toward the liquor.

It was early, no disputing, but the concept of “cocktail hour” had always been a moving target for Lincoln Rhyme.

He looked back at the whiteboard devoted to the DSE theft, but his going-nowhere meditation on the theft was interrupted by the hum of the door buzzer.

Rhyme looked up. It was Lon Sellitto, his former partner from the days before the accident. He was senior in Major Cases, Amelia Sachs’s assignment, and was the detective who most often liaised with Rhyme when he was used by the NYPD as a consultant.

“He looks energized,” Rhyme said, ordering the latch to open.