Duncan continued to stare at the light glistening off the metal. "In a way. Does it do anything supernatural? Of course not. But it does something important: It unifies time. It helps us understand that it's an endless river. The Mechanism doesn't treat
a second any differently than it does a millennium. And somehow it was able to measure all of those intervals with nearly one hundred percent accuracy." He pointed at the box. "The ancients thought of time as a separate force, sort of a god itself, with powers of its own. The Mechanism is an emblem of that view, you could say. I think we'd all be better off looking at time that way: how a single second can be as powerful as a bullet or knife or bomb. It can affect events a thousand years in the future. Can change them completely."
The great scheme of things . . .
"That's something."
Though Vincent's tone must have revealed that he didn't share Duncan's enthusiasm.
But this was apparently all right. The killer looked at his pocket watch. He gave a rare laugh. "You've had enough of my crazy rambling. Let's go visit our flower girl."
Patrolman Ron Pulaski's life was this: his wife and children, his parents and twin brother, his three-bedroom detached house in Queens and the small pleasures of cookouts with buddies and their wives (he made his own barbecue sauce and salad dressings), jogging, scraping together babysitter money and sneaking off with his wife to the movies, working in a backyard so small that his twin brother called it a grass throw rug.
Simple stuff. So Pulaski was pretty uneasy meeting Jordan Kessler, Benjamin Creeley's partner. When the coin toss in Sachs's Camaro earned him the businessman, rather than the bartender, he'd called and arranged to see Kessler, who'd just returned from a business trip. (His jet, meaning really his, not a, jet, had just landed, and his driver was bringing him into the city.) He now wished he'd picked the bartender. Big money made him uneasy.
Kessler was at a client's office in lower Manhattan and wanted to postpone seeing Pulaski. But Sachs had told him to be insistent and he had been. Kessler agreed to meet him in the Starbucks on the ground floor of his client's building.
The rookie walked into the lobby of Penn Energy Transfer, quite a place--glass and chrome and filled with marble sculptures. On the wall were huge photographs of the company's pipelines, painted different colors. For factory accessories they were pretty artistic. Pulaski really liked those pictures.
In the Starbucks a man squinted the cop's way and waved him over. Pulaski bought himself a coffee--the businessman already had some--and they shook hands. Kessler was a solid man, whose thin hair was distractingly combed over a shiny crown of scalp. He wore a dark blue shirt, starched smooth as balsa wood. The collar and cuffs were white and the cuff links rich gold knots.
"Thanks for meeting down here," Kessler said. "Not sure what a client would think about a policeman visiting me on the executive floor."
"What do you do for them?"
"Ah, the life of an accountant. Never rests." Kessler sipped his coffee, crossed his legs and said in a low voice, "It's terrible, Ben's death. Just terrible. I couldn't believe it when I heard. . . . How're his wife and son taking it?" Then he shook his head and answered his own question. "How would they be taking it? They're devastated, I'm sure. Well, what can I do for you, Officer?"
"Like I explained, we're just following up on his death."
"Sure, whatever I can do to help."
Kessler didn't seem nervous to be talking to a police officer. And there was nothing condescending in the way he talked to a man who made a thousand times less money than he did.
"Did Mr. Creeley have a drug problem?"
"Drugs? Not that I ever saw. I know he took pain pills for his back at one time. But that was a while ago. And I don't think I ever saw him, what would you say? I never saw him impaired. But one thing: We didn't socialize much. Kind of had different personalities. We ran our business together and we've known each other for six years but we kept our private lives, well, private. Unless it was with clients we'd have dinner maybe once, twice a year."
Pulaski steered the conversation back on track. "What about illegal drugs?"
"Ben? No." Kessler laughed.
Pulaski thought back to his questions. Sachs had told him to memorize them. If you kept looking at your notes, she said, it made you seem unprofessional.
"Did he ever meet with anybody who you'd describe as dangerous, maybe someone who gave you the impression they were criminals?"
"Never."
"You told Detective Sachs that he was depressed."
"That's right."
"You know what he was depressed about?"
"Nope. Again, we didn't talk much about personal things." The man rested his arm on the table and the massive cuff link tapped loudly. Its cost was probably equal to Pulaski's monthly salary.
In Pulaski's mind, he heard his wife telling him, Relax, honey. You're doing fine.
His brother chimed in with: He may have gold links but you've got a big fucking gun.