The Watchmaker’s Hand

And of their child, soon to be born.

Kierkegaard or Bashilda...

2

At some point, an open investigation slips over an unseen border and becomes a cold case.

Who knows what the time frame is? Some cops might say a year, some might say a decade.

Lincoln Rhyme didn’t like the phrase. It suggested that the offense had been seized on by podcasters and documentary TV show producers to sell the ever-popular tale of an evildoer escaping justice.

The unsolved cases that drew the most attention were murders, of course. The spouse that went missing, the mafioso snitch, the abusive father who has “no idea” where his young son wandered off to. No one paid much attention to unsolved larcenies — other than the spectacular: the diamond heist, the armored truck stickup, the parachuting from a Boeing 727 with $200K in ransom (and where are you, D. B. Cooper?).

To Rhyme, an unsolved case was merely an unsolved case, whether twenty-four hours or one hundred years old, and it absolutely needed to be closed, larcenies included. Which was what was presently occupying much of his time.

This one was a few months old and the inability to solve it was giving Rhyme — and the NYPD and Homeland Security — more than a little concern.

A person they’d designated “Unknown Subject” — Unsub 212 — had on February 12 (hence, the moniker) broken into the NYC Department of Structures and Engineering and downloaded a trove of infrastructure documents: blueprints, engineering diagrams, underground maps, plats, permit requests — all the bits and bytes of material involved in the gargantuan process of helping the organism of New York City grow and morph. To be safe, maybe, the unsub had also copped hundreds of hard copies of the same and other documents, maybe in case some of the digital files were encrypted.

At the time of the theft, everyone thought: Terrorism. Always a good default motive for a crime of this sort. Bombs would be planted, subways hijacked, buildings targeted with missiles or airplanes.

Rhyme and his wife and professional forensic partner, Amelia Sachs, had been brought in to try to identify the unsub via forensics. Despite the man’s accidentally setting off an alarm and fleeing, leaving his burglar tools behind, they could come up with no leads. The city remained on high alert for a while, but no terrorist attacks ensued.

And so, Unsub 212’s theft remained an active case, and his nickname was atop the evidence whiteboard in the corner of the parlor of Rhyme’s nineteenth-century town house, the war room for the cases he and Sachs ran — she, as an NYPD detective, and he, a consulting forensic scientist. The boards were known throughout law enforcement as “murder boards,” though this one offered details of a theft instead; there’d been no loss of life or injury in the incident. Rhyme and Sachs had turned their attention away from the case temporarily — to a couple of urgent organized crime prosecutions, but those were now finished. There was nothing more to do than wait to testify at trial as an expert witness — either at one or the other, of course, never together; defense lawyers would have a field day inquiring about the relationship status of the two. There was not, legally, any reason they could not testify jointly, but criminal trials are about four things: optics, optics, optics... and then the law.

So now it was back to the open — not “cold” — Unsub 212 case.

Rhyme aimed his motorized wheelchair toward the board. Injured on a crime scene years ago, rendered a quadriplegic, the former head of NYPD forensics was always searching out any medical treatments that might improve his condition. While there was no way, yet, to restore sensation below his neck, complicated procedures involving surgery and prosthetics had restored most movement to his right arm, which he exercised regularly. The chair, quite the “miracle of mobility,” the literature declared, could also be deftly operated by his left ring finger, the one appendage that had escaped the consequences of the catastrophic accident.

The human body is nothing if not an assembly of marvels and flukes.

Sachs was reading out loud a report from the Major Cases detective in charge of the 212 case. “No persons of interest on the city payroll,” she announced. She went on to explain that the officer had been interviewing employees of the DSE, thinking that it might be an inside job, as intangible property thefts often were when hackers were not involved. There was a video of the thief physically breaking into the server room, where he downloaded the files on a hard drive. It was clever: these days everyone protected against those sharp and bored Eastern European and Chinese hackers, but physically guarding data on-site lagged.

There was a video too of the unsub leaving the building. It came to Rhyme and the investigators via the city’s Domain Awareness System.

Aka, according to some civil libertarians, Big Brother.