The Watchmaker’s Hand

“Don’t think so.”

What about Garry’s sighting bothered the unsub enough to try to kill him?

Gripping his wife’s hand, Garry asked, “When can we go back inside?”

“You can’t go back. I want you to leave town until he’s caught. Disappear. I want him to think you’re dead.”

The man nodded. “So he won’t know I told you what I saw.”

“Exactly.”

“Just leave?” his wife whispered. “No clothes? No money, nothing?”

“Whatever’s in your wallet or purse. That’s it.”

They looked at each other. She said, “Benji can pick us up. We can stay with them in Syosset.”

Garry was staring out the window. He said in a low, angry voice, “He killed her.”

Sachs lifted an eyebrow.

“Big Blue. That’s what I named her. After Paul Bunyan’s ox. We put up thirty-four buildings together.”

Sachs said, “Come on, let’s get you inside.”

Inside the precinct house, Sachs handed the couple off to the community relations officer, a kind-eyed woman of about fifty. She led them to the watch room.

The wife embraced Sachs hard — if awkwardly, because of the woman’s near-bursting physique.

The detective returned to the car and sat with her head back — which seemed to help the coughing. Some oxygen. A new sensation — stinging — in her chest.

The ER?

X-ray?

No.

She sat up, cranked the engine and texted Rhyme.

Unsub was at witness’s house. Queens. He got their name. Set an IED. They’re safe. Will canvass neighbors to see if anybody saw him.

Sixty seconds after she sent the message, she received a reply.

She felt a blow in her gut as she stared at the words.

Get statement but we have an ID. Unsub 89 is the Watchmaker. Gilligan working for him but dead now. Evidence at scene where you are? We need it. You okay to search?

The Watchmaker... Well, this changed everything.

Her response was simple:

Yes.

A fast hit of oxygen, then she rolled the canister onto the passenger-side floor and slammed the transmission into first.

25

While he was never uneasy, as anyone else might use the word, anyone normal, an intense hum of edgy anticipation now pulsed within him.

Charles Hale’s entire plan hinged upon what was about to happen.

He wasn’t concerned about security; the associate he was meeting had been vetted multiple times and there were precautions in place. It was simply that, as with a timepiece, the slightest deviation from tolerances would make the difference between functional and useless. And he needed this person’s role in his plan to work out perfectly.

Like when he was making watches he had to depend on a metalworker in Germany to make the springs — an art in itself.

A third-party expert.

Just like now.

The traffic here in Harlem was thick and swam along the streets like a school of fish that were simultaneously uncertain and assertive. He pulled the Pathfinder into a slot near the City College of New York and walked west through St. Nicholas Park, along a winding pathway glistening from a recent sprinkling. He smelled earth, car exhaust, a floral scent from a row of yellow flowers that were nonlethal and, as he’d reflected not long before, of little practical use to him. They were, however, pleasant to look at. Hale had little time for aesthetics, but he was human, after all, and could be moved, provided the emotion wasn’t a distraction or dilutant.

He broke from the park and started along 139th Street, part of Strivers’ Row, a nineteenth-century residential real estate project by David H. King Jr., the man responsible for constructing the 1889 New York Times building, the base of the Statue of Liberty and the second Madison Square Garden. The brownstone, yellow-brick and limestone town houses here, many of them trimmed with terra-cotta, were gems. They had been marketed to middle-class whites, the predominant demographic in Harlem when they were built. The project failed and the foreclosing financiers let the units sit empty for twenty years before reluctantly agreeing to sell to Black purchasers.

Hale knew this fact about the neighborhood because there was something else here that appealed to him, and he saw it now: an outdoor clock, jutting over the sidewalk.

Six feet in diameter, dating to just after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, the timepiece was affixed to the façade of the Baker and Williams Building. The structure had at that time housed a musical instrument manufacturer, brass their specialty. Proud of their neighborhood — and more than a little aware of publicity — the owners decided to commission the clock.