The Cold Moon (Lincoln Rhyme 7)

"Where is 'oh'?"

"Inside the victim's jacket."

"So whom does the evidence tell us something about?"

"The victim, not the perp."

"Exactly! Is it helpful to know that he has it in his jacket, not on? Who knows? Maybe it will be. But the important point is to not blindly send the troops to every fishmonger in the city too fast. You comfortable with that theory, Ron?"

"Real comfortable."

"I'm so pleased. Write down the fishy soil under the victim's profile and let's get on with it, shall we? When's the medical examiner sending us a report?"

Cooper said, "Could be a while. Coming up on Christmastime."

Sellitto sang, "'Tis the season to be killing . . ."

Pulaski gave a frown. Rhyme explained to him, "The deadliest times of the year are hot spells and holidays. Remember, Ron: Stress doesn't kill people; people kill people--but stress makes 'em do it."

"Got fibers here, brown," Cooper announced. He glanced at the notes attached to the bag. "Back heel of the victim's shoe and his wristwatch band."

"What kind of fibers?"

Cooper examined them closely and ran the profile through the FBI's fiber database. "Automotive, it looks like."

"Makes sense he'd have a car--you can't really carry an eighty-one-pound iron bar around on the subway. So our Watchmaker parked in the front part of the alley and dragged the vic to his resting place. What can we tell about the vehicle?"

Not much, as it turned out. The fiber was from carpet used in more than forty models of cars, trucks and SUVs. As for tread marks, the part of the alley where he'd parked was covered with salt, which had interfered with the tires' contact with the cobblestones and prevented the transfer of tread marks.

"A big zero in the vehicle department. Well, let's look at his love note."

Cooper slipped the white sheet of paper out of a plastic envelope.

The full Cold Moon is in the sky,

shining on the corpse of earth,

signifying the hour to die

and end the journey begun at birth.

--THE WATCHMAKER

"Is it?" Rhyme asked.

"Is it what?" Pulaski asked, as if he'd missed something.

"The full moon. Obviously. Today."

Pulaski flipped through Rhyme's New York Times. "Yep. Full."

"What's he mean by the Cold Moon in caps?" Dennis Baker asked.

Cooper did some searching on the Internet. "Okay, it's a month in the lunar calendar. . . . We use the solar calendar, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, based on the sun. The lunar calendar marks time from new moon to new moon. The names of the months describe the cycle of our lives from birth to death. They're named according to milestones in the year: the Strawberry Moon in the spring, the Harvest Moon and Hunter Moon in the fall. The Cold Moon is in December, the month of hibernation and death."

As Rhyme had noted earlier, killers referencing the moon or astrological themes tended to be serial perps. There was some literature suggesting that people were actually motivated by the moon to commit crimes but Rhyme believed that was simply the influence of suggestion--like the increase in alien abduction reports just after Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.

"Run the name Watchmaker through the databases, along with 'Cold Moon.' Oh, and the other lunar months too."