The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 77





‘I’ve seen the news,’ the Watchmaker said to Rhyme. ‘You released my picture. Or the artist’s renderings of me as Dave Weller. Not a bad job. An Identi-Kit, I assume. Both fat and slim, hair, no hair, mustache, clean-shaven. Aren’t you so impressed with the confluence of art and computer science, Lincoln?’

The reference to the press release Rhyme had pressured the NYPD brass into going with. ‘It was accurate then?’ the criminalist asked. ‘My officer wasn’t sure when he worked with the artist if he had the cheek structure right.’

‘That young man. Pulaski.’ The Watchmaker seemed amused. ‘He observes two-dimensionally and draws conclusions from the preliminary. You and I both know the risks of that. He’s a better forensic cop than undercover, I’d imagine. Less improvisation in crime scene work. I deduce a brain injury?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

The Watchmaker continued, ‘He’s lucky that when I set him up, it was with the Bureau of Investigation, not some of my real associates. He’d be dead otherwise.’

‘Possibly,’ Rhyme said slowly. ‘His instincts are good. And he’s quite the shot apparently. Anyway, he’s all I could spare under the circumstances. I was busy trying to stop a psychotic tattoo artist.’

Now that he knew the Watchmaker had escaped from prison and was alive, Rhyme thought back to the man’s appearance from several years ago, when he’d last seen him face-to-face. Yes, there were similarities, he now reflected, between the lawyer Pulaski had described to the Identi-Kit operator and the Watchmaker from several years ago – attributes that Rhyme could now recall, though some key factors were different. He now said, ‘You had non-surgical work done. Like packing silicone or cotton into your cheeks. And the hair – thinning shears and a razor – a good job duplicating male-pattern baldness. Makeup too. Most movie studios get it wrong. The weight – your size – that was a body suit, right? Nobody could gain fifty pounds in four days. The tan would be from a bottle.’

‘That’s right.’ A chuckle. ‘Maybe. Or a tanning salon. There are about four hundred in the metropolitan area. You might want to start canvassing. If you’re lucky, by Christmas you could find the one I went to.’

Rhyme said, ‘But you’ve changed – modded, if you will – again, right? Since we’ve run the picture.’


‘Of course. Now, Lincoln, I’m curious why you released my information to the media. You ran the risk that I’d go to ground. Which I have.’

‘The chance that somebody might’ve spotted you. They’d call it in. We were ready to move fast.’

‘All-points bulletin.’

The press announcement Rhyme had just coerced the brass into releasing reported that a man known as Richard Logan, aka the Watchmaker, aka Dave Weller, had escaped several days ago from federal prison in Westchester. The Identi-Kit pictures were given, along with the hint that he might be feigning a Southern accent.

‘But no takers,’ the Watchmaker pointed out. ‘No one dimed me out. Since I’m still … wherever I am.’

‘Oh, and by the way, I’m not bothering to trace this call. You’re using cutouts and forward proxies.’

This wasn’t a question.

‘And we’ve raided Weller’s law firm.’

A chuckle. ‘The answering service, post office box and website?’

‘Clever,’ Rhyme said. ‘The wrongful death specialty seemed a bit cruel.’

‘Pure coincidence. First thing I thought of.’

Rhyme asked, ‘Oh, a point of curiosity? You’re not really Richard Logan, are you? That’s one of your pseudonyms.’

‘Yes.’

The man didn’t offer his real name and Rhyme didn’t bother to push.

‘So how did you figure out that I’d escaped?’

‘Like so much about what I do – what we both do – there was a postulate.’

‘A hunch,’ the Watchmaker said.

Rhyme thought of Sachs, who often chided his derision of the word, and he smiled. ‘If you will.’

‘Which you then verified empirically. And what gave rise to that postulate?’

‘In Billy Haven’s backpack we found a notebook, The Modification, a how-to guide for getting botulinum toxin into the New York City water supply. Elegant in the extreme. It was like an engineering schematic, every step outlined, timed down to the minute. I doubted the Stantons and Billy would’ve been able to come up with something that elaborate: a serial killer to misdirect from a plot to target the water supply with bombs, which was in turn meant to cover up the real plot to poison the water. And you learned how to weaponize the toxin. Resistant to chlorine. Quite a coup, that was.’

‘You found the notebook?’ The man sounded displeased. ‘I told Billy to transcribe it into an encrypted digital file on a computer with no Internet access. Then destroy the original.’ A pause. ‘But I’m not surprised. That whole gang from Southern Illinois seemed rather analog. And, yes, not particularly brilliant. Like the toxins Billy decided to use? I recommended commercial chemicals but Billy had this affection for plants. He spent a lot of time by himself in the woods, I gathered, sketching them when he was young. Tough childhood when your parents are killed by the federal government and your moral compass is a neo-Nazi militia.’

‘The Modification? You coined the word?’

‘That was mine, yes. Though I was inspired by Billy’s avocation. Body modifying. It suited their apocalyptic views. I was embarrassed actually. Too on the nose. But they liked the sound.

‘You dictated it to Billy, the whole plan?’

‘That’s right. And his aunt. But Billy wrote it down. They came to visit me in prison. The cover was that Billy was writing a book about my life.’ He paused. ‘There’s a story I’ve been dying to tell but haven’t found the appropriate listener. I think you’ll appreciate it, Lincoln. When I was finished giving him the plan and he’d written it all down, I said, “It’s all yours, Moses. Go forth.” Billy and Harriet didn’t get it. I know you’re familiar with the theological concept of God as a watchmaker.’

When contemplating the origin of the universe, Isaac Newton, René Descartes and others of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that design requires a designer. If something as complex as a watch could not exist without a watchmaker, by analogy human life in the universe – far more complicated than a timepiece – surely could not exist without a God.

‘I had to explain that, given my nickname, dictating The Modification was as if I were God, handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses. I meant it as a joke. But they took it seriously. They started to refer to the plan as the Modification Commandments.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘I feel sorry for those who don’t appreciate irony. But to get back to the issue: how you found out about me … If you’re willing to share.’

‘Of course.’

‘You had the notebook. But it wasn’t in my handwriting; that was Billy’s. No fingerprints or DNA. I never touched it. And, yes, there were a lot of references to critical timing – when to administer the poison and where, the diversionary attacks, when to have Joshua, Billy’s cousin, get the batteries and lights in the underground passages where the crimes occurred, how many minutes after someone had called nine one one could the police be counted on to arrive. It’s all in the timing, of course. But leaping from that to my escape from prison?’

Rhyme wondered where the man was standing, what his posture was. Was he outside, cold? Or outside, hot, in balmy weather? ‘Nemesis’ was an imprecise term, not to mention melodramatic. But Rhyme allowed himself to think of the Watchmaker this way. He said, ‘Evidence.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, Lincoln. But what?’

‘The tetrodotoxin. We found traces.’ The super poison from the fugu fish.

‘Oh, my …’ A sigh from the other end of the line. ‘I told Billy to destroy any residue.’

‘I’m sure he tried. There was just a minuscule amount of trace at one of the scenes.’ Rhyme, of all people, knew how difficult it was to banish all whispers of a substance. ‘We didn’t find any in his safe house, so where had it come from? I checked VICAP and nobody had used it in any crimes that had been reported in the last few years. So what could Billy have been doing with tetrodotoxin? Then it occurred to me: A clue was its nickname, the zombie drug. To induce the appearance of cardiac arrest and death.’

‘That’s right,’ the Watchmaker admitted. ‘Billy delivered some, smuggled in the pages of a book. In prison they check for shivs and heroin, not milligrams of fish ovary. I used it to fake the heart attack and get transferred to the hospital in White Plains.’

Was that a seagull cawing in the background? And then, a ship’s horn? No, a foghorn. Interesting. They were little used in this day of radar and GPS. Rhyme took note. A flare on his computer screen. It was a message from Rodney Szarnek, the computer crimes expert. It reported that the analysis of the Watchmaker’s call to Rhyme had been unsuccessful; it had skidded to a stop at an anonymous proxy switch in Kazakhstan.

Rhyme had lied about the phone trace.

He gave a mental shrug – nothing ventured, nothing gained – and returned to the conversation. ‘What finally convinced me, though, was a mistake you made.’

‘Really?’

‘When you were on the street with Ron Pulaski, you referred to the attempted hit in Mexico on the federal police official. The project you’d put together a few years ago.’

‘Right. I wanted to mention something specific. For credibility.’


‘Ah, but that case was sealed. If you were a legitimate lawyer who’d never met Richard Logan, like you claimed, you’d have had no idea about the Mexico City job.’

A pause. Then: ‘Sealed?’

‘Apparently the State Department and the Mexican Gabinete Legal were not happy that you – an American – had come minutes away from killing a high-ranking Mexican law enforcer. They preferred to act as if the incident had never happened. There was no press about it.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded bitter.

Rhyme said, ‘Now answer me a question.’

‘All right.’

‘How did you get the gig? For the Stantons and their AFFC?’

‘It was time to get out of prison. I got in touch with the people who’d been involved in the domestic terror incident a few years ago when you and I went head-to-head. Remember?’

‘Of course.’

‘They set me up with the AFFC – another white supremacist militia. I told them I could put them on the map. Harriet and Billy came to visit me in prison and I laid out a plan. By the way, did you ever see them together, those two, aunt and nephew? Uneasy dynamic there. Gives a whole new meaning to the name American Families First.’

Rhyme demurred. The observation, true or not, didn’t interest him.

The Watchmaker continued, ‘They wanted to make a name for themselves. So we brainstormed. I came up with the idea of botulism in the drinking water. I learned that Billy was a tattoo artist. We’d tattoo victims with an Old Testament message. Apocalypse, I was saying. They just love that kind of rhetoric. Striking a blow for their idiotic values. They loved it too when I suggested they use poisons as the murder weapons. Justice for the minority and socialist values that were poisoning society, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, they just lapped that up. Well, Matthew did. Billy and Harriet seemed a bit more tempered. You know, Lincoln, the small-minded are the most dangerous.’

Not necessarily, the criminalist reflected, considering the man he was conversing with at the moment.