The Watchmaker’s Hand

“How hard is it, Lon? Open the lid, put the package in, close the lid.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

With his back to Rhyme, Sellitto placed the package into the unit. Rhyme motored close and watched him work the paper off and, with a razor knife, cut the tape. Slowly. Very slowly.

“Don’t make me nervous, Linc.”

“What’m I doing?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“Where else am I going to stare?”

“What’s that poison again?”

“Botulinum,” he answered cheerfully. “The most deadly tox on earth. Eight ounces could kill the population of the world.”

“Funny, Linc. Hilarious.” A pause. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

Rhyme gazed down into the large container as the detective removed the contents.

The standard technique for determining the presence of deadly botulinum — the Lethal Mouse Assay, which pretty much said it all — had been replaced by more humane techniques. But in this case no analysis was necessary. The objects, poisoned or not, could remain inside.

Sellitto extracted them now. The envelope and the rectangular thing: a billfold, which he opened, pulling out several cards.

“Well.” A whisper.

He displayed them to Rhyme.

The card on top was Ron Pulaski’s driver’s license.

63

Gets confusing.

A homophone is a word that is pronounced like another word but is spelled differently and has a different meaning: flour and flower.

A homograph, a close cousin, is a word that is spelled the same as another but has a different meaning and might or might not be pronounced differently: bass and bass.

Homonym, most textbooks preach, is the umbrella descriptor that embraces both, though some purists — newspaper editors and nineteen-year-old English majors passionate about the subject, for instance — will occasionally take exception.

Charles Vespasian Hale was in Central Park once more, reflecting on these grammatical novelties, as he gazed at Lincoln Rhyme’s town house through his bird-watching binoculars.

He was thinking of the word: “watch.”

Here was Hale now, an expert at watches, pretending to watch birds while actually watching the abode of the man he was about to kill, all the while the police, whose shift is called a watch, are watching for him.

Some homonyms derive from very different roots: bass the fish is from the Proto-Germanic bars, meaning “sharp,” because of the creature’s dorsal fin. Bass, the musical tone and instrument, come from Anglo-Norman baas, meaning “low.”

“Watch” is the more common variety, with all modern meanings deriving from the same root: the Saxon, waecce. The noun means “wakefulness,” the adjective “observant,” both in the context of guard duty.

After he swapped vehicles once again, at a garage on West 46th Street, Hale had paid a thousand dollars to a deliveryman to take the package to Rhyme’s, then had driven here. He cast his heavy Nikon binoculars about, as if in search of a bird that had zipped to an accommodating stop on a nearby branch, but Hale always returned focus to the blunt, brown structure, where so many of his plans had been destroyed.

By the grain of sand.

Through the unshaded windows he caught the occasional flash of motion.

The cause of the activity would be the package.

Now he looked around for threats.

None. He knew the town house was well guarded, by nondescript humans and very obvious security cameras. But here, at some distance, he was safe. However important Rhyme was, the NYPD could not deploy a regiment of officers, fanned out through the park, to guard him.

He scanned again and stopped, noting someone to the east.

Far across the park was a man looking in his direction.

And was it the stranger he believed he’d seen twice before — at Hamilton Court and, not long ago, behind the SUV where he’d sat with Simone?

Too far away to tell.

If so, what organization was he with, if any?

Clearly not NYPD or FBI. They would have moved in by now.

A foreign operative would want him back in the jurisdiction where charges had been filed against him, and there were a lot of those. But extradition would also involve local authorities.

More likely this person had rendition — kidnapping — in mind.

Then too there were the enemies who would dole out justice quickly and extrajudicially.

Or, forget justice, just call it what it was: revenge.

But maybe, nothing at all.

Just another birdwatcher...

And indeed when he looked once more, the person was gone.

He turned his binoculars away from where they were trained — on a small jittery bird of brown and black plumage — back to Rhyme’s town house.

Now there was a flurry of motion as Lon Sellitto hurried out the door. He spoke briefly to the pair of uniformed officers outside, who nodded, and the round detective walked quickly to a car and sped away.

The present had been opened.

64

His headache was brutal.

As his vision returned, Ron Pulaski inhaled deeply, like that might make the pain recede.

Curiously, the effort worked, a bit.

Or maybe headaches from being knocked out with horse tranquilizer just naturally diminished upon waking.