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“Why don’t you just head on home now?”
“All right, all right.” He made his way back to the sidewalk and turned in the direction where Maple had seen that detective disappear just a few moments ago, moving quickly.
Amelia Sachs. Long red hair.
Tall.
Ah …
The homeless man stopped and turned back. “What do you think they did with it?”
“What’s that, sir?” Maple asked, weariness in her voice.
“Two million pounds a day.”
He continued down the sidewalk.
He had to be completely nuts. A businessman glanced at him and tried to slip a bill into his cup. He missed and it fluttered to the ground.
The homeless man glanced back—it looked like it was a ten or twenty—and just let it lie there as he continued down the sidewalk once more, walking with what almost seemed to be an intense purpose.
44.
SACHS WAS BREATHLESSas she strode along the sidewalk to where the license plate number recognition system had placed the Mercedes owned by Willis Tamblyn, the developer who had possibly—likely?—hired the Watchmaker to create chaos in the New York real estate market.
She called, “Rhyme, you there? I’m on my way.”
“How far?”
“Three, four minutes. Odds that Tamblyn came here to meet the Watchmaker?”
“Don’t know. And I’m thinking,” Rhyme added slowly. “It might be a setup. Maybe Hale’s one step ahead of us. Or thinks he is.”
“And the car’s a trap?”
“Possibly.”
“The flash-bangs and breaching charges that Gilligan stole? An IED in the Merc.”
Rhyme said, “Or more HF acid. If there’s nobody in it, stand down and wait for Bomb Squad.”
“K. I’m almost there.”
She signed off and changed to the tactical frequency.
“Detective Five Eight Eight Five. ESU. Further to the attempted incident at Twenty-Third. Over.” The words came out between gasps. She might have been fine, but her lungs didn’t completely believe the assessment.
A clatter then: “Amelia. Bo Haumann. K.”
This time the operation warranted the chief of the Emergency Service Unit himself, not just a captain commander.
“Bo.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Three minutes out. On foot. And you?”
“Six or seven.” The man’s voice was raspy, and she’d always wondered why. As far as she knew, he didn’t smoke. At any rate, the lean, grizzled man certainly looked the part of someone with a voice like this. “What’s the scenario?”
