The Skin Collector (49 page)

‘
Exempli gratia
,’ Pulaski muttered and began typing fast on his keyboard.

A few minutes later, he looked up from the computer screen. ‘
Negotium ibi terminetur
,’ he said with a tone of finality.

‘The job is finished,’ Rhyme translated. ‘More elegant to say, “
Factum est
.” Has a nicer ring. That’s the problem with Latin. It sounds like you’re chewing on rocks. Bless the Italians and Romanians for
pulling the language out of the fire.’

Pulaski read from the screen. ‘Matthew Stanton was an only child. But Harriet had a sister, Elizabeth. Married Ebbett Haven. They had a son, William Aaron. Ebbett was an elder with the AFFC but he and his wife died when the boy was young.’ He looked up. ‘In the Branch Davidian standoff. They were there to sell guns to the Davidians and got caught inside
during the siege.

‘William went to live with Aunt Harriet and Uncle Matthew. Went by Billy mostly. He’s got a record – juvie, so there are no prints on record; it was sealed. The case was an assault charge. Hate crime. Billy beat up a Jewish boy at school. Then used an ice pick and ink to tattoo a swastika on the kid’s forearm. He was ten. There’s a picture. Check it out.’

The tattoo was pretty
well done. Two color, shaded, razor-sharp lines, Rhyme noted.

‘Then he studied art and political science at the University of Southern Illinois. Then, for some reason, opened a tattoo parlor.’

In Billy’s backpack were receipts for two apartments in town. One was in Murray Hill, in the name of Seth McGuinn – Pam’s boyfriend. The other, under the pseudonym Frank Samuels, was near Chinatown, off
Canal Street. Crime Scene had searched both. Billy had largely scrubbed them but in the second place – a workshop – the teams had recovered equipment and a number of terrariums filled with the plants from which Billy had extracted and distilled the poisons he’d used in the murders.

These boxes and their eerie lights now sat in Rhyme’s parlor, against the far wall. Well, all but one. That was
the sealed terrarium that had housed the botulinum spores. The bio-chem folks from Fort Detrick had decided it was best to take control of that one. Normally possessive of evidence, Rhyme had not made an issue of that particular box being handed off.

The criminalist finished logging the plants into evidence – noting the hemlock was particularly lovely – and rang up Fred Dellray, the FBI agent,
who would be handling the federal side of the investigation. He explained what they’d found. The eccentric agent muttered, ‘If that don’t beat all. I wondered where Hussein’s WMDs got themselves to. And we finally found ’em about two blocks from my favorite Chinese restaurant. Happy Panda. The one on Canal. No, not the Happy Panda on Mott or the Happy Panda on Sixth. The original one and only Happy
Panda. Yu-um. The jellyfish. No, no, ’s better’n you think. Okay, call me when you got the report ready to go.’

After he disconnected, Rhyme heard a laugh across the room.

‘That’s pretty good,’ Mel Cooper said, staring at a computer screen.

‘What?’ Rhyme asked.

Pulaski laughed too and turned the screen: It was the
New York Post
online edition. A headline over the story about the Stantons was
Poison Pen.

Referring to Billy Haven’s murder weapon.

Clever.

As Cooper and Pulaski continued to analyze and catalog the evidence from both Pam’s apartment and Billy’s workshop and safe house, Rhyme motored back to the evidence table. ‘Glove,’ he called.

‘You want—?’ Thom asked.

‘Glove! I’m about to fondle some evidence.’

With some difficulty the aide slipped one onto Rhyme’s right hand.

‘Now. That.’ He pointed to the slim notebook titled
The Modification
, which contained pages of details on the poison plot: timing, victims to choose, locations, police procedures, quotations from
Serial Cities
, the true crime book about Rhyme and directions on how to ‘anticipate the anticipator’. The notes were written in Billy’s handsome cursive. Not surprisingly, given his artistic skill, the
handwriting resembled that in an illuminated manuscript inked by scribes.

Rhyme had skimmed the booklet earlier but now he wanted to examine it in depth to search for other conspirators.

Thom arranged it on the arm of his wheelchair and, in a gesture at times awkward, at times elegant, but ever confident, Lincoln Rhyme turned pages and read.

The stocky, balding man, in a short gray overcoat, strolled along the wide sidewalk with feet pointed outward. He carried a battered briefcase. Few people on the street noted his physique or gait. He was as nondescript as could be. Businessman, accountant, ad agency executive. He was a Muggle. He was a Prufrock.

He liked this place. Greenwich Village was less chic than, say, SoHo or
TriBeCa but more of a neighborhood; Little Italy had come and gone but the Village remained a bastion for old-school Manhattanites, the quirky ones, the artistic, the descendants of European immigrants. The ’hood was populated by the families of, yes, stocky, balding husbands and stolid wives, ambitious yet modest sons, clever daughters. He blended here.

Which was good. Considering his mission.

The sun was down and the temperature low but at least the sky was clear and the sleet of the past few days had ended.

He walked to the window of the Café Artisan and perused the stained menu. It was a real coffeehouse. Italian. This place had been steaming milk before Starbucks was even a gleam in the eye of whatever Seattlian, not Sicilian, had created the franchise.

He gazed through the early
deployment of Christmas decorations in the fudgy window and studied the scene at a table against the far wall: A redheaded woman in a burgundy sweater and tight black jeans sat across from a man in a suit. He was lean and looked like a lawyer on the verge of retirement. The woman was asking the man questions and jotting responses in a small notebook. The table, he noted, rocked a bit; the wedge
under the north-by-northeast leg was not performing.

He studied the man and the woman carefully. Had he been interested in sex, which he was not, the woman would certainly have appealed.

Amelia Sachs, the woman he’d come here to kill, was quite beautiful.

Since the weather was cold, it wasn’t conspicuous for this man to be wearing gloves, which was fortunate. The ones covering his hands were
black wool, since leather gives a print nearly as distinctive as one’s own friction ridges. Traceable, in other words. But cloth? No.

He was now noting where Amelia’s purse sat – on the back of her chair. How trusting were people here. Had this been São Paulo or Mexico City, the purse would have been fixed to the back of her chair with a nylon tie, like the sort used to bind garbage bags and
prisoners’ wrists.

The purse was latched but this didn’t trouble him. Several days ago he’d bought a bag just like hers and practiced, practiced, practiced slipping something inside silently (he’d studied sleight of hand for years). Finally he’d honed the technique sufficiently so that it took all of three seconds to open the bag, slip a small object inside and refix the clasp. He’d done this
a hundred times.

He now reached into his pocket and palmed a bottle of an over-the-counter painkiller. It was identical in brand to those that Amelia Sachs preferred. (He’d learned this from her medicine cabinet.) She’d had osteoarthritis problems in the past and though she didn’t seem to be too troubled recently, he’d observed, she still popped the pills from time to time.

Ah, the trials our
bodies put us through.

The capsules in this bottle looked identical to the ones she bought. There was one difference, however: Each of his pills consisted of compressed antimony.

Like arsenic, antimony is a basic element, a metalloid. The name is from the Greek for ‘banishing solitude’. Antimony had been used in the past to darken the eyebrows and lids of promiscuous women, including Jezebel
in the Bible.

It’s a ubiquitous and useful element, employed frequently even today in industry. But antimony, Sb, atomic number 51, has also been the cause of thousands of excruciatingly painful deaths throughout history. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was perhaps the most famous victim. (The question remains: intentional or not? We’d have to ask Antonio Salieri.)

At a jab of pain from her reconstructed
knee, which she’d feel sooner or later, Sachs would pop two pills.

And instead of relief she’d be hit with a fierce headache, vomiting, diarrhea, numb extremities.

She’d be dead in a few days – according to the media, yet another victim of Billy Haven, who’d managed to slip the tainted drugs into her purse before he and his terrorist relatives were stopped.

Although in truth the Stantons had
nothing to do with this impending murder.

The man outside the Café Artisan, preparing to kill Sachs, was Charles Vespasian Hale, his birth name, though he was known by many others too. Richard Logan was one. And most recently: David Weller, the indignant attorney who’d contacted the New York Bureau of Investigation about the upstart young officer Ron Pulaski.

The only name that he truly liked,
however, was the one that described him best: the Watchmaker – echoing both his skill in crafting intricate criminal plots and his passion for clocks and watches.

He now regarded one of these, a Ventura SPARC Sigma MGS, a digital wristwatch that cost five thousand dollars. Hale owned 117 watches and clocks, the majority of which were analog, even if powered by electronics and batteries. He had
Baume & Merciers, Rolexes and TAGs. He’d had a chance to steal a six-million-dollar Patek Philippe Calibre 89, the famed commemorative pocket watch created to honor the company’s 150th anniversary. It had more complications – those windows and dials giving information in addition to the present time – than any other watch ever created. The eighteen-karat masterpiece offered such data as the phase
of the moon, power reserve, month, temperature, date of Easter, constellations, sunset and split second.

And yet Hale had chosen not to steal the masterpiece.

Why? Because the Patek was a relic. It was a new era now. The way of analog was gone. It had taken Hale some time to accept this but his arrest by Lincoln Rhyme some years ago had shown him that the world had changed.

And Hale had risen
to greet the dawn.

The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face – so to speak – of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.

And counted down.

Four …

Three …

Two …

One …

A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the café.

Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee
shop.

He was unseen by everybody – including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee – as they stared toward the kitchen, where he’d left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone smoke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn’t) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck
the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.

Amelia looked around – as did everyone – for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.

A new record: two seconds.

Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.

No. He’d go someplace else. The man rose and headed out into the chill.

The sound stopped – battery-plucking time. A glance back. Sachs returned to her coffee, to her notes. Oblivious to her impending death.

The Watchmaker turned toward the subway entrance at West Fourth Street.
As he walked along the sidewalk in the brisk air an interesting thought occurred to him. Arsenic and antimony were metalloids – substances that shared qualities of both metals and non-metals – but were rigid enough to be crafted into enduring objects.

Would it be possible, he wondered, to make a timepiece out of these poisons?

What a fascinating thought!

And one that, he knew, would occupy
his fertile mind for weeks and months to come.

‘Go with it,’ Lincoln Rhyme said. The criminalist was alone in his parlor, talking through the speakerphone as he gazed absently at a website featuring some rather classy antiques and fine arts.

‘Well,’ said the voice, belonging to a captain at the NYPD, presently in police headquarters. The Big Building.

‘Well, what?’ Rhyme snapped. He’d been a captain too; anyway, he never took
rank very seriously. Competence and intelligence counted first.

‘It’s a little unorthodox.’

The fuck does that mean? Rhyme thought. On the other hand, he himself had also been a civil servant in a civil-servant world and he knew that it was sometimes necessary to play a game or two. He appreciated the man’s reluctance.

But he couldn’t condone it.

‘I’m aware of that, Captain. But we need to
run with the story. There are lives at risk.’

The captain’s first name was unusual. Dagfield.

Who would name somebody that?

‘Well,’ Dag said defensively. ‘It has to be edited and vetted—’

‘I wrote it. It doesn’t need to be edited. And
you
can vet. Vet it now. We don’t have much time.’

‘You’re not asking me to vet. You’re asking me to run what you’ve sent me, Lincoln.’

‘You’ve looked it over,
you’ve read it. That’s vetting. We need to go with it, Dag. Time’s critical. Very critical.’

A sigh. ‘I’ll have to talk to somebody first.’

Rhyme considered tactical options. There weren’t many.