The Watchmaker’s Hand

Hamilton Court was lined by partially demolished buildings or those scheduled to come down. New condos were planned, but construction was on hiatus for at least three months, according to court filings.

And Hale needed the place for only a day or two longer.

As he walked to the trailer, he stayed on the cobblestoned street itself; the sidewalks had been broken up with jackhammers, but the shattered concrete had not been removed. The paths looked like miniature rivers filled with jagged beige icebergs.

At the trailer, he opened the door’s two electronic deadbolts and an unpickable chain key lock. He stepped inside and disarmed the security system. He doffed his jacket and put away the birdwatching gear.

The interior was sparse. Hale considered most decorations to be distractions and wastes of time. This prejudice did not apply to timepieces, of course, of which there were a half dozen: clocks and a reproduction of a clepsydra — the predecessor to the hourglass. But these weren’t really adornments; they were associates. Friends. He had not brought them with him; the travel accommodations wouldn’t have allowed for that. He kept them in a storage space downtown, but now he’d cleaned that out. He would not need it after this job.

Several of these timepieces he had constructed himself. His nickname, the Watchmaker, was not purely figurative.

Built-in fiberboard tables and metal shelves held paperwork, electronic and mechanical tools, instruments, several computers, a router, a coffeemaker, food and drinks. It was all arranged in perfect rows, as if Hale had used a ruler to place the objects. Any misalignment set him on edge.

The workings of a watch are order personified.

As is time itself.

No deviation is acceptable.

Two chairs sat in the center area. He’d also bought a TV, a terrestrial model with antenna, so he didn’t need to subscribe to a cable service. While he had not seen an entertainment show for six years and three months, he needed the unit to collect news about any investigations against him. At the CIA and other spy outfits, the vast majority of the intel they gathered came not from disguised operatives or clever hacking, but from the media. Hale harvested information in the same way. The police, afraid of being seen as less than candid in the public’s eye, always spilled too much.

On the shelves were a few books. Most were relevant to his projects here in the city, and several were devoted to Lincoln Rhyme. Some dealt with the topic of horology, the study of timepieces, but few about the physics of time. Despite Hale’s obsession with the topic, lofty theory didn’t interest him — the space-time continuum, black holes, wormholes, Stephen Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture...

All of that was best described in TV’s Doctor Who: “People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”

Hale caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and the image gave him a jolt, even all these months after the surgery. Unlike every other cosmetic surgical patient on earth, Hale had paid, and paid a great deal, to turn his original self — handsome by most standards — into an older man, with a bunched-up and baggy face. This was necessary because his prior appearance was known (he’d even had a mug shot taken — thank you so much, Lincoln Rhyme), and anyone suspecting that he would go for plastic surgery would assume he would remove years, not add them. He’d given himself a balding pate too, which came from meticulous, painful plucking, not telltale shaving.

He made himself a cup of strong coffee. As he took the first sip, he received a text alert, accompanied by a flashing red background on the screen.

His security app — sensors at the chained-off opening of the cul-de-sac — had picked up a presence.

The slim figure was walking toward the trailer, keeping to the shadows on the east side of Hamilton, looking about cautiously. His hand was at his side, but it was easy to see that he was holding a gun. That metal did not reflect sunlight — it was flat black — but the gold NYPD detective badge on his belt certainly did.

Hale walked to the door and from a compartment hidden behind a framed certificate of inspection removed a similar gun — a Glock, though his was mounted with a silencer.

Just as the cop arrived at the door, Hale opened it and, glancing across the site to make sure he hadn’t been followed, ushered in Andy Gilligan. This was the man Hale — as birdwatcher — had seen an hour before, walking through Lincoln Rhyme’s front door.

The detective was well connected in the NYPD and smart and gutsy — and without his assistance, murdering the criminalist would be infinitely more difficult.

9

Rhyme had called her twice, but Amelia Sachs hadn’t answered.

Probably because she was concentrating on walking the grid at the crane collapse site.