The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

V

REunion 




SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9

5:00 P.M.





CHAPTER 75





The stocky, balding man, in a short gray overcoat, strolled along the wide sidewalk with feet pointed outward. He carried a battered briefcase. Few people on the street noted his physique or gait. He was as nondescript as could be. Businessman, accountant, ad agency executive. He was a Muggle. He was a Prufrock.

He liked this place. Greenwich Village was less chic than, say, SoHo or TriBeCa but more of a neighborhood; Little Italy had come and gone but the Village remained a bastion for old-school Manhattanites, the quirky ones, the artistic, the descendants of European immigrants. The ’hood was populated by the families of, yes, stocky, balding husbands and stolid wives, ambitious yet modest sons, clever daughters. He blended here.

Which was good. Considering his mission.

The sun was down and the temperature low but at least the sky was clear and the sleet of the past few days had ended.

He walked to the window of the Café Artisan and perused the stained menu. It was a real coffeehouse. Italian. This place had been steaming milk before Starbucks was even a gleam in the eye of whatever Seattlian, not Sicilian, had created the franchise.

He gazed through the early deployment of Christmas decorations in the fudgy window and studied the scene at a table against the far wall: A redheaded woman in a burgundy sweater and tight black jeans sat across from a man in a suit. He was lean and looked like a lawyer on the verge of retirement. The woman was asking the man questions and jotting responses in a small notebook. The table, he noted, rocked a bit; the wedge under the north-by-northeast leg was not performing.

He studied the man and the woman carefully. Had he been interested in sex, which he was not, the woman would certainly have appealed.

Amelia Sachs, the woman he’d come here to kill, was quite beautiful.

Since the weather was cold, it wasn’t conspicuous for this man to be wearing gloves, which was fortunate. The ones covering his hands were black wool, since leather gives a print nearly as distinctive as one’s own friction ridges. Traceable, in other words. But cloth? No.

He was now noting where Amelia’s purse sat – on the back of her chair. How trusting were people here. Had this been S?o Paulo or Mexico City, the purse would have been fixed to the back of her chair with a nylon tie, like the sort used to bind garbage bags and prisoners’ wrists.

The purse was latched but this didn’t trouble him. Several days ago he’d bought a bag just like hers and practiced, practiced, practiced slipping something inside silently (he’d studied sleight of hand for years). Finally he’d honed the technique sufficiently so that it took all of three seconds to open the bag, slip a small object inside and refix the clasp. He’d done this a hundred times.

He now reached into his pocket and palmed a bottle of an over-the-counter painkiller. It was identical in brand to those that Amelia Sachs preferred. (He’d learned this from her medicine cabinet.) She’d had osteoarthritis problems in the past and though she didn’t seem to be too troubled recently, he’d observed, she still popped the pills from time to time.

Ah, the trials our bodies put us through.

The capsules in this bottle looked identical to the ones she bought. There was one difference, however: Each of his pills consisted of compressed antimony.

Like arsenic, antimony is a basic element, a metalloid. The name is from the Greek for ‘banishing solitude’. Antimony had been used in the past to darken the eyebrows and lids of promiscuous women, including Jezebel in the Bible.

It’s a ubiquitous and useful element, employed frequently even today in industry. But antimony, Sb, atomic number 51, has also been the cause of thousands of excruciatingly painful deaths throughout history. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was perhaps the most famous victim. (The question remains: intentional or not? We’d have to ask Antonio Salieri.)

At a jab of pain from her reconstructed knee, which she’d feel sooner or later, Sachs would pop two pills.

And instead of relief she’d be hit with a fierce headache, vomiting, diarrhea, numb extremities.

She’d be dead in a few days – according to the media, yet another victim of Billy Haven, who’d managed to slip the tainted drugs into her purse before he and his terrorist relatives were stopped.

Although in truth the Stantons had nothing to do with this impending murder.

The man outside the Café Artisan, preparing to kill Sachs, was Charles Vespasian Hale, his birth name, though he was known by many others too. Richard Logan was one. And most recently: David Weller, the indignant attorney who’d contacted the New York Bureau of Investigation about the upstart young officer Ron Pulaski.

The only name that he truly liked, however, was the one that described him best: the Watchmaker – echoing both his skill in crafting intricate criminal plots and his passion for clocks and watches.

He now regarded one of these, a Ventura SPARC Sigma MGS, a digital wristwatch that cost five thousand dollars. Hale owned 117 watches and clocks, the majority of which were analog, even if powered by electronics and batteries. He had Baume & Merciers, Rolexes and TAGs. He’d had a chance to steal a six-million-dollar Patek Philippe Calibre 89, the famed commemorative pocket watch created to honor the company’s 150th anniversary. It had more complications – those windows and dials giving information in addition to the present time – than any other watch ever created. The eighteen-karat masterpiece offered such data as the phase of the moon, power reserve, month, temperature, date of Easter, constellations, sunset and split second.

And yet Hale had chosen not to steal the masterpiece.

Why? Because the Patek was a relic. It was a new era now. The way of analog was gone. It had taken Hale some time to accept this but his arrest by Lincoln Rhyme some years ago had shown him that the world had changed.

And Hale had risen to greet the dawn.

The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face – so to speak – of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.

And counted down.

Four …

Three …

Two …

One …

A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the café.

Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee shop.

He was unseen by everybody – including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee – as they stared toward the kitchen, where he’d left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone smoke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn’t) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.


Amelia looked around – as did everyone – for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.

A new record: two seconds.

Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.

No. He’d go someplace else. The man rose and headed out into the chill.

The sound stopped – battery-plucking time. A glance back. Sachs returned to her coffee, to her notes. Oblivious to her impending death.

The Watchmaker turned toward the subway entrance at West Fourth Street. As he walked along the sidewalk in the brisk air an interesting thought occurred to him. Arsenic and antimony were metalloids – substances that shared qualities of both metals and non-metals – but were rigid enough to be crafted into enduring objects.

Would it be possible, he wondered, to make a timepiece out of these poisons?

What a fascinating thought!

And one that, he knew, would occupy his fertile mind for weeks and months to come.