The Watchmaker’s Hand

Still, he was trespassing. Chung wouldn’t have thought of citing him, much less bringing him in. But he needed to get the guy out of the site before he got himself killed. The holes in the building floor that the counterweights had crashed through were merely marked with orange caution tape. There was no fence around them — which Chung would have done. One wrong step there, and it’d be a thirty-foot drop to concrete.

And there was rebar down there too.

“Hey, you!”

The man was fifty or sixty feet away, and with the sound of the electric saws grinding their way through steel, the officer guessed his voice didn’t make it to the fellow’s ears.

Chung thought: Oh, hell. He ducked under the tape and, after wagging a finger at a couple of tourists perilously close to an unstable piece of the mast, he started through the wreckage toward where the homeless guy was plodding along.

He called again, and this time his shout came during a pause in the screeching cry of the saws.

The man looked his way and froze.

Chung waved toward the street, but the man just stood there, staring blankly. Drunk, maybe.

When the man stayed put, Chung started for him. He had to duck under some of the fallen crane structures. They seemed sturdy, but each one weighed tons. An unlikely collapse could squash you just as dead as a probable one.

Because the officer had needed to duck, he momentarily lost sight of the homeless man. When he emerged and rose, he scanned in the direction he’d last seen him.

Nothing.

No, wait. There he was. He hadn’t exited, but was in a portion of the site where the operator’s cab had come crashing to the ground.

Goddamn it.

If I break a leg, you’re going to detention, asshole...

The man glanced back at him and now made his way north once more.

Then Chung noticed something else about him. When he’d seen him earlier, he was holding one of those blue-and-white deli coffee cups, begging for money. He still held this in his left hand, but in his right was something shiny, metallic. That’s what he was doing here — not taking an odd shortcut, but scavenging the grounds for items of value. Had he found something that had belonged to the dead operator? Chung could add larceny to the trespass count.

Scavenging from a disaster site. Didn’t get lower than that.

The homeless man now saw Chung coming his way, and he moved more quickly, surprisingly fast. In a few minutes he was climbing through a gap in the shattered fence.

Chung continued after him, but he slowed, minding the booby traps of the wreckage, and when he finally emerged from the site, the man was not to be seen.

One thing remained: the blue cup. He must have dropped it climbing through the fencing.

Had this been a real crime, Chung would, of course, have collected the cup in gloved fingers to preserve it until Crime Scene arrived.

But, while he was pissed at the guy, there was no way he was going to start a case.

He snagged the cup, and after taking the change — he’d give it to a Ronald McDonald House, or some other charity — he tossed it into the back of a garbage truck filling with debris.

Wondering: What had the guy found that was so valuable he didn’t care about what was in the cup?

Chung headed quickly back to his original station, where a group of teen girls had breached the yellow tape. The quartet was well within the site, doing — for God’s sake — a coordinated dance for TikTok, or whatever, in front of a cell phone they’d propped up on what must have been a convenient photo tripod: a porta-potty crushed into a small cube by the weight of the huge mast.

17

Ron Pulaski pulled up to the assembly of emergency vehicles, lights flashing — white and blue and red.

Blue, like patrol uniforms.

Red, like blood.

White, like a corpse.

He told himself to can the soft thinking. He climbed out, hitched up his gun and looked around the site where Andy Gilligan had been murdered.

A dozen vehicles, two dozen emergency workers.

All right, Mr. Locard, what do you have in store for us here?

Orienting himself, he happened to gaze up the street, blocked off by a squad car. On the other side of it, pausing in the middle of the north-south avenue, was a sedan. The windows of the dark-red vehicle were tinted and Pulaski couldn’t see the driver clearly. It might have been merely pausing, like many others, to check out the excitement.

Then again, the minute he squinted, focusing on it, the driver sped away.

Watch yourself...

He proceeded past the CS bus, calling, “A minute” to the pair of evidence collection techs from Queens Crime Scene.

On the street, near the yellow tape, was the gold shield Lon Sellitto had put on the case. He was directing two uniforms to storefronts nearby, for the canvass. Pulaski’d never worked with Al Sanchez, but he knew of him. Out of One PP, the stocky man, with thick, wavy hair, was senior in Homicide. Sellitto had picked a senior investigator, Pulaski supposed, rather than a gold out of the local house, because of the victim — NYPD detective.