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“You want to make a call?” He was thinking of Woman X.
Hale debated, but whether it was from the slim chance that someone might trace it or for some other reason, he shook his head. “No. I think not.” He sounded wistful.
Hale looked at the monitor depicting the street in front of the town house. Two police cruisers waited there, each with officers inside. No one was on the sidewalk.
His eyes met Rhyme’s.
The criminalist nodded.
Hale walked into the lobby, disappearing from Rhyme’s view. A moment later there was a click of the door latch. A patch of illumination grew into a trapezoid on the marble of the hallway as the door hinge squeaked softly. The man’s stark, elongated shadow ran from the door to the security scanner.
There was silence.
Then Rhyme blinked at two sounds, a second apart.
The first was the thud of a bullet striking the Watchmaker’s chest. The second was the resounding boom of a rifle shot from Central Park.
Hale was flung backward into the hallway, both he and the floor spattered with blood.
Rhyme heard shouts from outside as officers leapt from the cars and crouched on the side closest to the town house, scanning for a target, though Rhyme knew that the shooter was speeding away.
Almost immediately came the distant bleat of sirens, growing closer.
Rhyme concentrated on the man who lay on his back. Moving slowly, trying to draw his legs up, gripping air with long fingers as if reaching for a safety rope.
Or for a set of watchmaking tools.
Would he turn his head so that they might share a last gaze? Rhyme wondered.
He did not.
70.
“TELL ME, CAPTAIN RHYME.The details.”
Detective Lawrence Hylton and his Caribbean-inflected voice were back again—the officer who glanced off all things Internal Affairs. The time was 9 a.m., the morning after Hale had died.
“The deceased and I have a history. I thought I could get him to tell me about what he was doing here, why he was behind the cranes collapsing, the assassination plot, the sabotage of the cybersecurity company. Who his accomplice was. We had a conversation. I think he looked at the monitor and thought he could make it past the officers outside. He got to the hall and opened the door, and he was shot before I could hit the panic button.”
He nodded his head toward the control pad of his chair.
“Sometimes signals from my brain are a bit delayed.” Rhyme rarely played this card. He decided this situation, though, warranted doing so, even though his words were not in the least true. “Where was the shooter?”
“We aren’t sure, but we think that high-rise—Seventy-SecondStreet. The middle of the park. Two hundred fifty, three hundred yards. Small caliber. Two twenty-three probably.”
An assault rifle. The weapons had short barrels, but shot flat and fast, and with a good scope they were—obviously—accurate enough to kill at a distance. They also fit quite well into a guitar case.
“Who else was in the town house?”
Rhyme was hardly in the mood for any debriefing. But under the circumstances he decided to stay blandly cooperative.
“No one. I was alone.”
“When did your wife, Detective Sachs, leave?”
“About forty minutes before the incident. The exact time’ll be on the security cam time stamp. Lon Sellitto left then too. Amelia has alibi witnesses at the Ron Pulaski crime scene. And Lon went to One PP. If you were suggesting they might have been the shooter.”
“I wasn’t.” The reply was flat. Hylton looked over his notebook. “And your assistant …”
