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“That’s right.” Hale didn’t need to say the results had been good. If they hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be here now.
She sipped tea and sat back. “To let you know. Somebody saw me at the drop site.”
A dialectologist would situate her somewhere between the rust belt and cornfields.
“Yes?”
She went on to explain that the real estate agent who’d leased her the drop had lied or been mistaken. The buildings on eitherside of hers were supposed to be unoccupied, but the one to the west had been sold. A young stockbroker had seen her and insisted on helping her move some things into her space.
“Would have been too obvious to refuse. But it’s handled.” She added matter-of-factly, “I gave him a beer laced with thiopental and midazolam. My recipe. I know the dosage. He’ll be in a coma for four, five days. I drove to the South Bronx to get rid of the truck and dumped him on the way. Not a high-traffic area, but he’d be spotted. Wall Street boy buys drugs in a bad area, ODs. Nobody’ll think it’s more than that.”
“Are you sure he’ll wake up?”
“No.” Nothing followed that stark assessment but a sip of tea.
“What name are you using?” he asked. Pseudonyms were common in this line of work.
“With you, my real one. Simone.”
“And Charles.”
But they would stick to first names only.
He glanced at her ringless fingers and noticed that her right index pad seemed calloused. This happened occasionally when one practiced repetitively with handguns, firing hundreds of rounds a session.
“Did you build it yourself?”
“Some of it. Not the software. I can code, but I needed somebody special. I hired a good kid. He’s an expert at reverse engineering source codes. You need to know Assembly for that.”
Which told Hale nothing. He never burdened his mind with facts or skills that he didn’t use in his jobs. He had once read that Sherlock Holmes did not know the Copernican theory of the universe, and assumed that the sun revolved around the earth—and, why not? If a case could be solved by knowing that mornings saw the sun in the east, and evenings in the west, well, who needed more than that?
In this, Hale and Lincoln Rhyme were very similar.
He’d done a great deal of reading about his counterpart.
He set his coffee down and noted that she was studying him, and not obscuring the fact.
She knew his age and had probably seen pre-surgery pictures. He would have thought she’d be startled and put off by his aging and uglifying himself. But that did not appear to be the case.
Her head turned to her left, slightly.
“The plumbing van. Police or FBI?”
“NYPD.” The vehicle, which was on stakeout duty a block away, across from the Baker and Williams Building, had regular commercial plates, not government, but Hale had run them; it was registered to the city of New York. Confiscated.
“They’re there because of the clock?”
“That’s right. It means Lincoln knows I’m in town. That’s one reason I wanted to come here—to the clock. To find out.”
How this had happened, Hale couldn’t guess. The criminalist never failed to surprise him.
She handed him the bag she’d brought. Inside, there might be silk socks or a Brooks Brothers tie. Definitely there was an envelope, containing an address and a key.
He reached into his breast pocket and handed her an envelope. It was light, but contained a quarter million dollars in diamonds, those without microscopic registration numbers, which—people would be surprised to learn—nearly all retail gems contain.
A few clients accepted offshore wire transfer payments. Nobody in this business took crypto. If a client proposed it, Hale dropped them instantly.
She said, “That clock. The big one?”
