Page 167 of The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

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 ag

o 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, Rene 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.

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