hat is that?

From his squeaky chair in the warm office, the big man sipped coffee and squinted through the bright morning light toward the far end of the pier. He was the morning supervisor of the tugboat repair operation, located on the Hudson River north of Greenwich Village. There was a Moran with a bum diesel due to dock in forty minutes but at the moment the pier was empty and the supervisor was enjoying the warmth of the shed, where he sat with his feet up on the desk, coffee cradled against his chest. He wiped some condensation off the window and looked again.

What is it?

A small black box sat by the edge of the pier, the side that faced Jersey. It hadn't been there when the facility had closed at six yesterday, and nobody would have docked after that. Had to come from the land side. There was a chain-link fence to prevent pedestrians and passersby from getting into the facility, but, as the man knew from the missing tools and trash drums (go figure), if somebody wanted to break in, they would.

But why leave something?

He stared for a while, thinking, It's cold out, it's windy, the coffee's just right. Then he decided, Oh, hell, better check. He pulled on his thick gray jacket, gloves and hat and, taking a last slug of coffee, stepped outside into the breathtaking air.

The supervisor made his way through the wind along the pier, his watering eyes focused on the black box.

The hell is it? The thing was rectangular, less than a foot high, and the low sunlight sharply reflected off something on the front. He squinted against the glare. The whitecapped water of the Hudson slushed against the pilings below.

Ten feet away from the box he paused, realizing what it was.

A clock. An old-fashioned one, with those funny numbers — Roman numerals — and a moon face on the front. Looked expensive. He glanced at his watch and saw the clock was working; the time was accurate. Who'd leave a nice thing like that here? Well, all right, I got myself a present.

As he stepped forward to pick it up, though, his legs went out from under him and he had a moment of pure panic thinking he'd tumble into the river. But he went straight down, landing on the patch of ice he hadn't seen, and slid no further.

Wincing in pain, gasping, he pulled himself to his feet. The man glanced down and saw that this wasn't normal ice. It was reddish brown.

"Oh, Christ," he whispered as he stared at the large patch of blood, which had pooled near the clock and frozen slick. He leaned forward and his shock deepened when he realized how the blood had gotten there. He saw what looked like bloody fingernail marks on the wooden decking of the pier, as if someone with slashed fingers or wrists had been holding on to keep from falling into the churning waters of the river.

He crept to the edge and looked down. No one was floating in the choppy water. He wasn't surprised; if what he imagined was true, the frozen blood meant the poor bastard had been here a while ago and, if he hadn't been saved, his body'd be halfway to Liberty Island by now.

Fumbling for his cell phone, he backed away and pulled his glove off with his teeth. A final glance at the clock, then he hurried back to the shed, calling the police with a stubby, quaking finger.

Before and After.

The city was different now, after that morning in September, after the explosions, the huge tails of smoke, the buildings that disappeared.

You couldn't deny it. You could talk about the resilience, the mettle, the get-back-to-work attitude of New Yorkers, and that was true. But people still paused when planes made that final approach to LaGuardia and seemed a bit lower than normal. You crossed the street, wide, around an abandoned shopping bag. You weren't surprised to see soldiers or police dressed in dark uniforms carrying black, military-style machine guns.

The Thanksgiving Day parade had come and gone without incident and now Christmas was in full swing, crowds everywhere. But floating atop the festivities, like a reflection in a department store's holiday window, was the persistent image of the towers that no long were, the people no longer with us. And, of course, the big question: What would happen next?

Lincoln Rhyme had his own Before and After and he understood this concept very well. There was a time he could walk and function and then came the time when he could not. One moment he was as healthy as everyone else, searching a crime scene, and a minute later a beam had snapped his neck and left him a C-4 quadriplegic, almost completely paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Before and After...

There are moments that change you forever.

And yet, Lincoln Rhyme believed, if you make too grave an icon of them, then the events become more potent. And the bad guys win.

Now, early on a cold Tuesday morning, these were Rhyme's thoughts as he listened to a National Public Radio announcer, in her unshakable FM voice, report about a parade planned for the day after tomorrow, followed by some ceremonies and meetings of government officials, all of which logically should have been held in the nation's capital. But the up-with-New-York attitude had prevailed and spectators, as well as protesters, would be present in force and clogging the streets, making the life of security-sensitive police around Wall Street far more difficult. As with politics, so with sports: Play-offs that should occur in New Jersey were now scheduled for Madison Square Garden — as a display, for some reason, of patriotism. Rhyme wondered cynically if next year's Boston Marathon would be held in New York City.

Before and After...

Rhyme had come to believe that he himself really wasn't much different in the After. His physical condition, his skyline, you could say, had changed. But he was essentially the same person as in the Before: a cop and a scientist who was impatient, temperamental (okay, sometimes obnoxious), relentless and intolerant of incompetence and laziness. He didn't play the gimp card, didn't whine, didn't make an issue of his condition (though good luck to any building owners who didn't meet the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for door width and ramps when he was at a crime scene in their buildings).

As he listened to the report now, the fact that certain people in the city seemed to be giving in to self-pity irritated him. "I'm going to write a letter," he announced to Thom.

The slim young aide, in dark slacks, white shirt and thick sweater (Rhyme's Central Park West town house suffered from a bad heating system and ancient insulation), glanced up from where he was overdecorating for Christmas. Rhyme enjoyed the irony of his placing a miniature evergreen tree on a table below which a present, though an unwrapped one, already waited: a box of adult disposable diapers.

"Letter?"

He explained his theory that it was more patriotic to go about business as usual. "I'm going to give 'em hell. The Times, I think."

"Why don't you?" asked the aide, whose profession was known as "caregiver" (though Thom said that, being in the employ of Lincoln Rhyme, his job description was really "saint").

"I'm going to," Rhyme said adamantly.

"Good for you... though, one thing?"

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. The criminalist could — and did — get great expression out of his extant body parts: shoulders, face and head.

"Most of the people who say they're going to write a letter don't. People who do write letters just go ahead and write them. They don't announce it. Ever notice that?"

"Thank you for the brilliant insight into psychology, Thom. You know that nothing's going to stop me now."

"Good," repeated the aide.

Using the touchpad controller, the criminalist drove his red Storm Arrow wheelchair closer to one of the half dozen large, flat-screen monitors in the room.

"Command," he said into the voice-recognition system, via a microphone attached to the chair. "Word processor."

WordPerfect dutifully opened on the screen.

"Command, type. 'Dear sirs.' Command, colon. Command, paragraph. Command, type, 'It has come to my attention — '"

The doorbell rang and Thom went to see who the visitor was.

Rhyme closed his eyes and was composing his rant to the world when a voice intruded. "Hey, Linc. Merry Christmas."

"Uhm, ditto," Rhyme grumbled to paunchy, disheveled Lon Sellitto, walking through the doorway. The big detective had to maneuver carefully; the room had been a quaint parlor in the Victorian era but now was chockablock with forensic science gear: optical microscopes, an electron microscope, a gas chromatograph, laboratory beakers and racks, pipettes, petri dishes, centrifuges, chemicals, books and magazines, computers — and thick wires, which ran everywhere. (When Rhyme began doing forensic consulting out of his town house, the power-hungry equipment frequently would blow circuit breakers. The juice running into the place probably equaled the combined usage by everyone else on the block.)

"Command, volume, level three." The environmental control unit obediently turned down NPR.

"Not in the spirit of the season, are we?" the detective asked.

Rhyme didn't answer. He looked back at the monitor.

"Hey, Jackson." Sellitto bent down and petted a small, longhaired dog curled up in an NYPD evidence box. He was temporarily living here; his former owner, Thom's elderly aunt, had passed away recently in Westport, Connecticut, after a long illness. Among the young man's inheritances was Jackson, a Havanese. The breed, related to the bichon frise, originated in Cuba. Jackson was staying here until Thom could find a good home for him.

"We got a bad one, Linc," Sellitto said, standing up. He started to take off his overcoat but changed his mind. "Jesus, it's cold. Is this a record?"

"Don't know. Don't spend much time on the Weather Channel." He thought of a good opening paragraph of his letter to the editor.

"Bad," Sellitto repeated.

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto with a cocked eyebrow.

"Two homicides, same M.O. More or less."

"Lots of 'bad ones' out there, Lon. Why're these any badder?" As often happened in the tedious days between cases Rhyme was in a bad mood; of all the perps he'd come across, the worst was boredom.

But Sellitto had worked with Rhyme for years and was immune to the criminalist's attitudes. "Got a call from the Big Building. Brass want you and Amelia on this one. They said they're insisting."

"Oh, insisting?"

"I promised I wouldn't tell you they said that. You don't like to be insisted."

"Can we get to the 'bad' part, Lon? Or is that too much to ask?"

"Where's Amelia?"

"Westchester, on a case. Should be back soon."

The detective held up a wait-a-minute finger as his cell phone rang. He had a conversation, nodding and jotting notes. He disconnected and glanced at Rhyme. "Okay, here we have it. Sometime last night our perp, he grabs —"

"He?" Rhyme asked pointedly.

"Okay. We don't know the gender for sure."

"Sex."

"What?"

Rhyme said, "Gender's a linguistic concept. It refers to designating words male or female in certain languages. Sex is a biological concept differentiating male and female organisms."

"Thanks for the grammar lesson," the detective muttered. "Maybe it'll help if I'm ever on Jeopardy! Anyway, he grabs some poor schmuck and takes 'em to that boat repair pier on the Hudson. We're not exactly sure how he does it, but he forces the guy, or woman, to hang on over the river and then cuts their wrists. The vic holds on for a while, looks like — long enough to lose a shitload of blood — but then just lets go."

"Body?"

"Not yet. Coast Guard and ESU're searching."

"I heard plural."

"Okay. Then we get another call a few minutes later. To check out an alley downtown, off Cedar, near Broadway. The perp's got another vic. A uniform finds this guy duct-taped and on his back. The perp rigged this iron bar — weighs maybe seventy-five pounds — above his neck. The vic has to hold it up to keep from getting his throat crushed."

"Seventy-five pounds? Okay, given the strength issues, I'll grant you the perp's sex probably is male."

Thom came into the room with coffee and pastries. Sellitto, his weight a constant issue, went for the Danish first, his diet hibernated during the holidays. He finished half and, wiping his mouth, continued. "So the vic's holding up the bar. Which maybe he does for a while — but he doesn't make it."

"Who's the vic?"

"Name's Theodore Adams. Lived near Battery Park. A nine-one-one came in last night from a woman said her brother was supposed to meet her for dinner and never showed. That's the name she gave. Sergeant from the precinct was going to call her this morning."

Lincoln Rhyme generally didn't find soft descriptions helpful. But he conceded that "bad" fit the situation.

So did the word "intriguing." He asked, "Why do you say it's the same M.O.?"

"Perp left a calling card at both scenes. Clocks."

"As in tick-tock?"

"Yup. The first one was by the pool of blood on the pier. The other was next to the vic's head. It was like the doer wanted them to see it. And, I guess, hear it."

"Describe them. The clocks."

"Looked old-fashioned. That's all I know."

"Not a bomb?" Nowadays — in the time of the After — every item of evidence that ticked was routinely checked for explosives.

"Nope. Won't go bang. But the squad sent 'em up to Rodman's Neck to check for bio or chemical agents. Same brand of clock, looks like. Spooky, one of the respondings said. Has this face of a moon on it. Oh, and just in case we were slow, he left a note under the clocks. Computer printout. No handwriting."

"And they said...?"

Sellitto glanced down at his notebook, not relying on memory. Rhyme appreciated this in the detective. He wasn't brilliant but he was a bulldog and did everything slowly and with perfection. He read, "'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.'" He looked up at Rhyme. "It was signed 'the Watchmaker.'"

"We've got two vics and a lunar motif." Often, an astronomical reference meant that the killer was planning to strike multiple times. "He's got more on the agenda."

"Hey, why d'you think I'm here, Linc?"

Rhyme glanced at the beginning of his missive to the Times. He closed his word-processing program. The essay about Before and After would have to wait.