Page 53 of The Watchmaker's Hand

He said, “It means everything. Unsub Eighty-Nine, the crane man? It’s the Watchmaker.”

20.

AS HE WAITEDfor the couple who were soon to die, Charles Vespasian Hale wondered if they had children.

He didn’t want the children, if any, to die—and didn’t want them not to die. They were irrelevant. All that mattered was thehusbanddie because of what he’d seen, and that his wife die because he might have told her what he’d seen.

If that meant the kids grew up as orphans, so be it.

Unless they were accompanying their parents now and entered the house with them.

In which case, they wouldn’t grow up at all.

Hale eased back into the foliage of the small park across the street from their modest bungalow in Queens.

The house was owned by a worker at the jobsite where the crane had fallen. His name had been on the list that Gilligan had stolen from Rhyme’s apartment that morning. Hale had called the workers Gilligan had not gotten to, and only this man turned out to be a witness, having seen something “odd” at the site. An SUV parked where it shouldn’t have been.

It happened to be the vehicle Hale had driven there, to sabotage the crane.

Well, he’d ditched the Chevy already, but what was troubling was that the man had seen thecontentsof the SUV.

And so, the man had to die.

Hale hadn’t known that Moynahan Construction workers had a special lot. He’d parked on the street and left a hard hat on the dash. This is what caught the worker’s attention.

And signed his death warrant.

Hale had hurried to the man’s house here and, finding no one home, slipped inside and left the present for them.

Hale now remained behind the brush and weeds and waited.

Beside the park was a lawyer’s office. The attorney might or might not have been talented in court, but he or she was definitely a skilled linguist. A sign in the window reported that Spanish, Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Chinese were spoken. Hale had heard that soon the country would be minority white. He occasionally received calls from potential clients wishing to hire him to assassinate someone because they were of one of the “lesser races.”

Yes, that term had actually been used.

He always declined such offers, because, yes, he found such jobs distasteful, but also because those who held such views were invariably stupid—and that quality, in any criminal venture, was an undeniable liability.

Now a car slowed and pulled into the driveway. The couple got out. No children. That answered that question. Though, wait … The woman was roundly pregnant. So a partial yes.

His targets seemed to be an average couple. Average build, average hair, average gait. They walked quaintly arm in arm. No … That wasn’t accurate. He was grippingherarm for support. He was likely one of the half dozen injured when the crane collapsed. There’d been only two deaths, which was a disappointment. Not that he was sadistic by nature—hardly (sadism was inefficient); no,Hale simply wanted the attacks to splash. He needed the city to focus.

The two—in their late twenties, he guessed—walked through a white picket gate and past the—yes—average lawn and garden that dominated their front yard.

The man, athletic and solid like most construction workers, paused and gazed down at a bush with yellow petals. Hale knew some flora, but only those important in his work. Those that were poisonous or irritants or narcotic.

Then they continued to the front door, painted a bold red. After unlocking the latch, the man gestured gallantly for her to enter.

She did; he followed, limping, and swung the door shut for what would be the last time in their lives.

Assured that they were in the kill zone, Hale started up the street to his new SUV—a different color and make from the first. This was a black Pathfinder. As he walked, he placed a phone call from his burner. Inside the couple’s house, the receiving cell phone circuit silently took the call and began a countdown that would, after giving Hale twenty minutes to be nowhere near, set off a small packet of explosives. The charge would be so light that they would hear only a faint crack.

That the sound was gentle, however, did not mean that the consequences would also be. The explosion would shatter a container of hydrofluoric acid.

The liquid form is one of the most deadly surface toxins on earth, but anhydrous HF gas is worse. The resulting fumes—materializing spontaneously when the liquid met air at room temperature—would spread fast from the source and would flow through the entire house in less than a minute, as Hale had turned the HVAC fan up to high when he’d rigged the device.

And the deaths? Unpleasant, yes. HF on the skin was, ironically, not especially painful at first. Gas wafting into lungs andeyes and mouth and nose, though, caused instant unimaginable agony. But it wouldn’t last long, not with the quantity he’d filled the device with.

Now the threat posed by the inquisitive SUV voyeur had been eliminated. It was time to return to what was next on his agenda.

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