The Watchmaker’s Hand

Wielding a pair of Nikon binoculars, the man remained motionless, gazing at a black-capped chickadee. He’d been to Central Park several times and knew the sizable inventory that birdwatchers could draw upon to fill out their collection lists.

He was dressed in casual, late-spring trousers (black) and a windbreaker (navy blue). Trim and athletic, thinning hair halfway to gray, but trimmed and combed carefully into place.

After a moment, the bird flicked away, and he recorded some observations in a small notebook. He continued to scan, slowly, south to north.

“Having much luck?”

The voice, a woman’s, was directed at him. He turned. Pear-shaped and binoculared, she was glancing at the notebook in the man’s hand. Her outfit was red and yellow, as if to make the point that camouflage was not a necessary component when birdwatching.

He said, “Saw an ovenbird.”

“No!”

“I did.”

“Did you put it on eBird?”

An online service that included rare sighting alerts.

“Not yet. You?”

She shrugged. “Not much. Just got here. I hear there’s a mute swan. I’ll check the ponds and reservoir later. Where was the ovenbird?”

“Near the museum.”

She turned toward the Metropolitan, across the park, as if the two-tone warbler might be winging its way from there to here at this very moment. Then she turned back and regarded him glancingly. He was hardly handsome, he knew. And his appearance put him around fifty. But he was of fit build and had one special attribute that often appealed: a naked ring finger.

She said, “I saw an American widgeon near the boathouse.”

“Did you?”

Silence fell between them. Then, suddenly, she blurted, “If I were a bird, that’s what I’d be.” She corrected. “Well, a water bird of some kind. Duck, swan, goose. It seems more peaceful. Not a pelican, though. They’re kind of shits. I’m Carol.”

“David.” Holding the notebook in one hand and the Nikon in the other prevented a handshake. Nods sufficed.

A pause. She said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

Birdwatchers were a close-knit crew. Especially in Manhattan.

“Just transferred here.” The man looked at his phone for the time.

“From where?”

“San Diego.”

“Oh, love it. It’s beautiful there.”

He knew she’d never been.

Another pause. He said, “I better be going. Have a meeting.”

“Nice talking to you. I’m going to go look for that ovenbird. Maybe I’ll see you here again.”

“I hope so,” he said with a smile and turned west, following the sidewalk to another stand of the bushes that were ubiquitous in this part of the park. He gazed past the greenery, without the binoculars, and examined a building across the street, a brownstone — also common here.

He noted, on the sidewalk in front of it, a slim and balding man wearing a loose-fitting dark suit. On his belt was a gold NYPD detective badge. Climbing the stairs, he pressed a bell and looked up at the security camera. A moment later, the door opened.

Ah, there he is...

Beyond the officer, the man in the park could see into the dim hallway. And he now made a sighting far more exciting than any bird — which he had zero interest in anyway, other than as an excuse to be in the park with binoculars.

The person he could see, before the door closed, was of particular — you might say obsessive — interest to him. His name was Lincoln Rhyme, and it was he whom the faux birdwatcher, Charles Vespasian Hale, also known as the Watchmaker, had come to New York to kill.

5

Move. Fast.

It’s not too late, but it soon will be.

NYPD patrolman Ron Pulaski was thinking that there’s that phrase you hear sometimes, about “the first forty-eight.” Meaning that if you didn’t get a solid lead within the first two days of a homicide, the case grew progressively more difficult to solve. That was crazy, as every cop knew, nothing more than a catchphrase from TV. It was the first forty-eight minutes that counted. After that, evidence and witness’s memories started to vanish.

This death was well past that time — in fact, it was about two days old, smack on the line of the true-crime cliché.

Which is why he was moving fast.

Trim and blond and carefully clean-shaven, features hidden by the CSU Tyvek suit and mask, Pulaski was now gazing over the scene: a concrete floor, stained and pitted and cracked from ancient industrial machinery, long gone, whose design and function couldn’t be deduced from the nature of the wear beneath his feet. Water in shallow pools coated with a skim of deep blue and red oil. Concrete-block walls from which rods and pipes protruded. Rusty banks of shelves, empty, their paint largely gone. Mold was a chief design element.

Narrow windows were horizontal slats at the tops of the walls, typical of cellars like this one. Spattered and greasy, they nonetheless let in some light.

A defunct hot-air furnace of galvanized steel dominated one end of the space.

But was that one magic thing that would lead to the killer still here? Or had it evaporated or been digested by rats or dissolved into a billion molecules of obscuring matter?