Sachs and Sellitto ascended the stairs slowly. The air in the dim stairwell smelled of pine cleanser and oil furnace heat.
"How'd he get in?" Sachs mused.
"This guy's a ghost. He gets in however he fucking wants to."
She looked up the stairwell. They paused outside the door. A nameplate said, Richter/Dobbs.
It won't be pretty. . . .
"Let's do it."
Sachs opened the door and walked into Lucy Richter's apartment.
Where they were met by a muscular young woman in sweats, hair pinned up. She turned away from the uniformed officer she'd been talking to. Her face darkened as she glanced at Sachs and Sellitto and noticed the gold badges around their necks.
"You're in charge?" asked Lucy Richter angrily, stepping forward, right in Lon Sellitto's face.
"I'm one of the detectives on the case." He identified himself. Sachs did too.
Lucy Richter put her hands on her hips. "What the hell do you people think you're doing?" the soldier barked. "You know there's some psycho leaving these goddamn clocks when he kills people. And you don't tell anybody? I didn't survive all these months of combat in the goddamn desert just to come home and get killed by some motherfucker because you don't bother to share that information with the public."
It took some time to calm her down.
"Ma'am," Sachs explained, "his M.O. isn't that he's delivering these clocks ahead of time to let people know he's on his way. He was here. In your apartment. You were lucky."
Lucy Richter was indeed fortunate.
About a half hour ago a passerby happened to see a man climb onto her fire escape and head for the roof. He'd called 911 to report it. The Watchmaker had apparently glanced down, realized he'd been spotted and fled.
A search of the neighborhood could find no trace of him and no witnesses had seen anyone matching the Watchmaker's image on the computer composite.
Sachs glanced toward Sellitto, who said, "We're very sorry for the incident, Ms. Richter."
"Sorry," she scoffed. "You need to go public with it."
The detectives glanced at each other. Sellitto nodded. "We will. I'll have Public Affairs make an announcement on the local news."
Sachs said, "I'd like to search your apartment for evidence he might've left. And ask you a few questions about what happened."
"In a minute. I have to make some calls. My family'll hear about this on the news. I don't want them to worry."
"This is pretty important," Sellitto said.
The soldier opened her cell phone. In a firm voice she added, "Like I said, in a minute."
"Rhyme, you there?"
"Go ahead, Sachs." The criminalist was in his laboratory, connected to Sachs via radio. He recalled that in the next month or so they'd planned to try a high-definition video camera mounted to her head or shoulder, broadcasting to Rhyme's lab, which would let him see everything that she saw. They'd joked and called it a James Bond toy. He felt a pang that it would not be Sachs inaugurating this device with him.
Then he forced the sentiment away. What he often told those working for him he now told himself: There's a perp out there; nothing matters but catching him and you can't do that if you're not concentrating 100 percent.
"We showed Lucy the composite of the Watchmaker. She didn't recognize him."
"How'd he get inside today?"
"Not sure. If he's sticking to his M.O. he picked the front door lock. But then I think he went up to the roof and climbed down the fire escape to the vic's window. He got inside, left the clock and was waiting for her. But for some reason he climbed back outside. That's when the wit outside saw him and the Watchmaker booked on out of here. Went back up the fire escape."
"Where was he inside her apartment?"