Page 12 of The Watchmaker's Hand

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-eightminutesthat 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?

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?

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