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Pam nodded and rubbed compulsively again. 'He was telling me all these terrible things. He was, it sounded like he was planning to be a new Hitler. He was going to kill his aunt and uncle and start his own militia movement. You know, Mom wasn't really all that smart. She'd ramble on and on and you couldn't take her seriously. But Billy, he was in a different league. He'd been to college. He was going to start schools and indoctrinate kids. He talked about the Rule of Skin. I could see he was obsessed with it. Racism, pure and simple.'
'Rule of Skin,' Rhyme mused. It certainly jibed with the manifesto they planned to leave at the site of poisoning at the water pipe. He thought back to what Terry Dobyns had told them.
If you can find out why he's so fascinated with skin, that's key to understanding the case ...
Pam continued, 'And he'd been obsessing about me all these years.' She explained about the betrothal, about Billy's coming here a year ago to start planning his attack on the city - and his seduction of her. Pam shivered.
'Do you want to get in the van?' Rhyme asked, nodding toward the accessible vehicle Thom had driven here. Her place was sealed for the crime scene search and Pam was clearly cold; her nose and eyes red, fingertips too.
'No,' Pam said quickly. She seemed more comfortable with the sunlight, despite the frigid air. 'You caught them all?'
'Everybody who was here in New York, it seems,' Rhyme explained. 'Matthew and Harriet Stanton. Their son, Joshua.'
The search team had found a real ID on the unsub's body. William Haven, twenty-five. A tattoo artist who lived in South Lakes, Illinois.
Rhyme continued, 'We have people going through all of their documents now, notes, phones, computers. We've got a few conspirators in Southern Illinois but there'll be others. The bombs weren't set to detonate but they were real: gunpowder, detonato
rs and cell phone triggers. Somebody who knew what they were doing put the IEDs together.'
'If they were anything like my mother's underground group, the Patriot Frontier, there'd be dozens of people involved. They were always meeting late at night, sitting in kitchens, drinking coffee, making their fucking little plans ...
Lincoln?' Pam asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
'How did you know? About Seth? To send the police here?'
'I didn't know. But I suspected it when it occurred to me: How did the unsub know about TT Gordon?'
'Who?'
'The tattoo artist that you and Seth met in my lab.'
'Oh, the guy with the weird beard and the piercings.'
'That's him. Billy broke into his shop, killed one of his associates. I think he wanted to kill TT but he was out. He might've found out about the tattoo artist some other way but that was the simplest explanation - seeing TT in my town house.
'Since we learned that the motive for the group was domestic terrorism and that there was a tentative connection with you and your mother - the Bone Collector - I just wondered if it wasn't too much of a coincidence that Seth had appeared in your life.
'Of course, the unsub had the tattoo of the centipede. Seth didn't seem to have any inkings; I'd seen him in a short-sleeve shirt. What to make of that? And then I remembered the waterproof ink - red ink - on one of the evidence bags. TT told us that some artists use washable pens like that to outline a tattoo first. Maybe that's what he'd done - a temporary tattoo on his arm to trick us.'
Pam nodded. 'Yes, exactly. He told me he'd draw it to make people think he was somebody else. Then wash it off when he was playing the role of Seth. It was a homeless man he tattooed with the centipede and paid to drill the hole. He was the one who died in the tunnel. He said he didn't trust you to turn off the water pressure. He wanted to be cautious.'
'Ah, so that's who it was.' Rhyme continued, 'Then he broke into my town house and tried to poison me. We thought he was an expert with lock picks; there was no sign of jimmying the lock. But of course--'
'He took the key to your town house off my keychain,' Pam said, grimacing. 'Had a copy made.'
'That's what I was thinking, yes. Was he the unsub? I couldn't say for sure, of course, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I called Dispatch and had some patrolmen get over here right away.'
Sachs said, 'And the attack here yesterday. He faked it.'
'Injected himself with a bit of propofol, then cuffed himself. He dropped the bottle of poison and the syringe on the floor and lay down to take a nap until the police showed up.'
'Why?' Pam asked.
Sachs added, 'Wanted to keep suspicion off him. What better way than becoming a victim himself?'
Rhyme said, 'And, I have to admit, our profilers contributed. Did some research that said centipedes in art and fiction represent an invasion of a safe, comfortable space. They lie in wait, invisible. That was Seth. Well, Billy.'
