The Watchmaker’s Hand

Rhyme’s phone hummed. It was Lyle Spencer, who’d been following up with the feds on the housing terrorists and the demands they’d made.

“Lyle.”

“Lincoln. I have something on the crane case. I can’t find anything about the Kommunalka Project. Not through NCIS, Homeland, the Bureau. I even checked with the CIA and NSA about traffic including the name. Zip. Even at their Russia desk.

“But there’s software now, websites, where professors can check to see if students have plagiarized papers or had an AI system, like ChatGPT, write the stuff for them. I plugged their letter to the mayor into the web, and some language from a few years ago got returned. The Kommunalkas lifted it verbatim from blog posts by somebody advocating for affordable housing. And this guy was arrested for political protests and vandalism.”

Good thinking on Spencer’s part. Now the equally important question: “Any chance we can find him?”

“Oh, a pretty good one.” Spencer sounded amused. “It’s Stephen Cody.”

“No shit,” Sellitto muttered.

“And that would be?” Rhyme asked impatiently.

A pause, probably suggesting a measure of disbelief. “The U.S. representative.”

Like sports, politics was irrelevant to Rhyme, unless the subject came up in an investigation, and it rarely did. “Never heard of him.”

“Really? He represents your district, Lincoln. In fact, his office is right around the corner from you.”

“I’m Amber Andrews with the midday business report. The stock market continued its slide into negative territory after terrorists claimed credit for the collapse of a construction crane on New York’s Upper East Side, resulting in two deaths and a half-dozen injuries. The real estate market as well is predicted to slump, with commercial and residential developers closing down jobsites, since more attacks are threatened. The group, the Kommunalka Project, is demanding the city create more affordable housing and approve fewer permits for luxury high-rises, like the one sabotaged today on Eighty-Ninth Street. The police and federal authorities are investigating. Residents are being asked to avoid any construction sites with cranes.”

12

He was backstage.

All two hundred and forty pounds of him.

Standing with arms crossed over his massive chest, he kept returning to the question: Was the man he was looking at a killer?

Lyle Spencer was listening, somewhat, to the words from the stage. The debate was within his range of vision, forty feet away, but he was experiencing the event on a monitor. You could see the expressions better this way. Lyle Spencer liked expressions, he liked angles of heads, enfolded or dangling arms, hands making fists, hands splayed. As for legs, he liked legs still and legs tapping.

He really liked tapping legs.

In this instance, the kinesic analysis — body language — was tricky. The truth, he suspected, was in camo, as the debate was between two politicians.

Spencer leaned toward the monitor. A man was debating a woman, who was giving her closing argument. Spencer paid no attention to her. He continued to study her opponent, who was on the right of the stage to the audience. Tall, with a build like the former football player that he was (Spencer had done his homework — always). He wore dark slacks and a blue business shirt with sleeves rolled up. No tie. Thick black hair, tousled intentionally, Spencer was sure. He seemed good at cultivating a Look.

Ah, looking earnest and thoughtful.

But was he a killer?

Unlikely, but hardly impossible. When Spencer was upstate, he’d collared murderous grandmothers and kindergarten teachers and a particularly bad minister. They were pictures of innocence. You never really knew until you started digging. And began checking out evasive eyes and, yes, tapping legs.

The site of this verbal fencing match was an august performing arts center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Onstage were the candidates for U.S. representative for a district that embraced parts of Manhattan and the Bronx: the incumbent, Stephen Cody — the man Lincoln Rhyme had never heard of — and the challenger, a Manhattan businesswoman in her fifties, Marie Whitman Leppert.

Cody jotted a note.

Killer? Not a killer?

Well...