The Watchmaker’s Hand

Outside, Pulaski quickly stripped off the Tyvek, told the collection techs to get the evidence to the lab in Queens, and released the body to the Medical Examiner’s tour doctor.

He then walked from the site of the murder to the subway station that Dalton — who had a MetroCard in his pocket — most likely would have exited from on his way home the night he died, three and a half blocks away (one did not bus one’s way from Wall Street to the Upper East Side).

And here, along a stretch of warehouses and commercial buildings, he found what he was hoping for.

A Domain Awareness System camera mounted on a lamppost.

He placed a call to Central and was patched through to one of the DAS operators — dozens of them sat before banks upon banks of video screens, as they and their algorithmic partners scanned for bad guys and bad deeds.

Pulaski identified himself and gave the location of the camera, and the date and time Dalton would likely have passed by here.

“Okay,” the man said. “You want it now?”

“Yeah, this number.”

They disconnected. Soon his phone hummed and he called up the clip. Stepping out of the sun to see the screen better, he watched the video.

Ah, there.

A slim man, white, with a fastidious mustache appeared. He wore black slacks and jacket and his head was covered with a dark blue stocking cap, of exactly the same shade as the fiber Pulaski had just found.

As he walked east, his eyes were across the street, perhaps on Dalton; that side was not visible to the camera.

The man’s hand was at his side — and once, he tapped his pocket. This he might have done for any number of reasons, but one would have been to make sure his gun was there, safely tucked away.

He was then out of sight. Fifteen minutes later he returned, quickly, and Pulaski formulated a theory of what had happened: somewhere along this street Dalton had witnessed something. It could not have been a recognizable crime; had it been, the trader would have called 911. Pulaski had checked: the only calls from this neighborhood that day had been reports of two heart attacks and a bad fall.

Whatever the crime was, Blue Hat could not afford to let Dalton live.

Pulaski called the DAS people back and asked if there were other cameras in the vicinity.

No, none.

Then he had an idea. He’d try something that he was sure would not work.

But he did it anyway.

He gave the DAS officer the time stamp of the tape where one could see Blue Hat’s face the most clearly, and told him to take a screen capture and send it to another alphabet operation of the NYPD.

The department’s FIS — Facial Identification Section — is not nearly the invasive operation that people believe it is. Its mission is to match pictures of possible suspects taken from security cameras in the field — or occasional bad-idea selfies — with mug shots or wanted-poster pictures in order to establish identities.

Pulaski had submitted about sixty images over his career, and no matches had been returned.

This one was different.

The officer he was on the line with said, “Well, guess what, Ron. That picture? FIS returned a ninety-two percent likely match.”

“Is that good?”

“Ninety-two’s pretty much gold.” He laughed. “And I’ll give you gold for another reason too. You’re not going to believe who your suspect is. You sitting down?”