melia Sachs collected Ron Pulaski from Rhyme's, a kidnapping she gathered the criminalist wasn't too pleased about, though the rookie didn't seem very busy at the moment.

"How fast've you had her up to?" Pulaski touched the dashboard of her 1969 Camaro SS. Then he said quickly, "I mean 'it,' not 'her.'"

"You don't need to be so politically correct, Ron. I've been clocked at one eighty-seven."

"Whoa."

"You like cars?"

"More, I like cycles, you know. My brother and I had two of 'em when we were in high school."

"Matching?"

"What?"

"The cycles."

"Oh, because we're twins, you mean. Naw, we never did that. Dress alike and stuff. Mom wanted us to but we were dorky enough as it was. She laughs now, of course — 'cause of our uniforms. Anyway, when we were riding, it wasn't like we could just go out and buy whatever we wanted, two matching Hondas 850s or whatever. We got whatever we could, second-or third-hand." He gave a sly grin. "One night, Tony was asleep, I snuck into the garage and swapped out the engines. He never caught on."

"You still ride?"

"God gives you a choice: children or motorcycles. The week after Jenny got pregnant, some lucky dude in Queens got himself a real fine Moto Guzzi at a good price." He grinned. "With a particularly sweet engine."

Sachs laughed. Then she explained their mission. There were several leads she wanted to follow up on: The other bartender at the St. James — Gerte was her name — would be arriving at work soon and Sachs needed to talk to her. She also wanted to talk to Creeley's partner, Jordan Kessler, who was returning from his Pittsburgh business trip.

But first there was one other task.

"How'd you like to go undercover?" she asked.

"Well, okay, I guess."

"Some of the crew from the One One Eight might've gotten a look at me at the St. James. So this one's up to you. But you won't be wearing any wires, anything like that. We're not getting evidence, just information."

"What do I do?"

"In my briefcase. On the backseat." She downshifted hard, skidded through a turn, straightened the powerful car. Pulaski picked up the briefcase from the floor. "Got it."

"The papers on top."

He nodded, looking them over. The heading on an official-looking form was Hazardous Evidence Inventory Control. Accompanying it was a memo that explained about a new procedure for doing periodic spot checks of dangerous evidence, like firearms and chemicals, to make sure they were properly accounted for.

"Never heard about that."

"No, because I made it up." She explained that the point was to give them a credible excuse to go into the bowels of the 118th Precinct and compare the evidence logs with the evidence actually present.

"You tell them you're checking all the evidence but what I want you to look at is the logs of the narcotics that've been seized in the past year. Write down the perp, date, quantity and the arrests. We'll compare it with the district attorney's disposition report on the same cases."

Pulaski was nodding. "So we'll know if any drugs disappeared between the time they were logged in and when the perp went to trial or got pled out... Okay, that's good."

"I hope so. We won't necessarily know who took them but it's a start. Now, go play spy." She stopped a block away from the 118th, on a shabby street of tenements in the East Village. "You comfortable with this?"

"Never done anything quite like it, gotta say. But, sure, I'll give it a shot." He hesitated, looking over the form, then took a deep breath and climbed out of the car.

When he was gone, Sachs made some calls to trusted, and discreet, colleagues in the NYPD, the FBI and the DEA to see if any organized crime, homicide or narcotics cases at the 118th had been dropped or were stalled under circumstances that might be suspicious. No one had heard of anything like that but the statistics revealed that despite its shining conviction record, there'd been very few organized crime investigations out of the house. Which suggested that detectives might be protecting local gangs. One FBI agent told her that some of the traditional mob had been making forays into the East Village once again, now that it was becoming gentrified.

Sachs then called a friend of hers running a gang task force in Midtown. He told her that there were two main posses in the East Village — one Jamaican, one Anglo. Both dealt in meth and coke and wouldn't hesitate to kill a witness or take out somebody who'd tried to cheat them or wasn't paying on time. Still, the detective said, staging a death to look like a suicide by hanging just wasn't the style of either gang. They'd cap him on the spot with a Mac-10 or an Uzi and head off for a Red Stripe or a Jameson.

A short time later, Pulaski returned, with his typical voluminous notes. This boy writes down everything, Sachs reflected.

"So how'd it go?"

Pulaski was struggling to keep from grinning. "Okay, I guess."

"You nailed it, hm?"

A shrug. "Well, the desk sergeant wasn't going to let me in but I gave him this look, like what the hell're you doing, stopping me. You want to call Police Plaza and tell 'em they're not getting the form thanks to you? He backed right down. Surprised me."

"Good job." She tapped her fist to his, and she could see how pleased the young man was at his performance.

Sachs pulled away from the curb and they headed out of the East Village. When she thought they were far enough away from the house, she pulled over and they started comparing the two sets of figures.

After ten minutes they had the results. The quantities noted in the precinct log and the DA's report were very close. Only about six or seven ounces of pot and four of cocaine were unaccounted for, over the entire year.

Pulaski said, "And none of the evidence logs looked doctored. I figured that might be something to look for too."

So one motive — that the St. James crew and Creeley were selling drugs boosted from the 118th's evidence locker — wasn't in play. This small amount missing could've been lost because of crime scene testing or spillage or inaccurate logging at the scene.

But even if the cops weren't stealing from the locker, they might still have been dealing, of course. Maybe the cops scored the drugs directly from a source. Or they were perped at a bust before they were logged into evidence. Or Creeley himself might've been the supplier.

Pulaski's first undercover operation answered one question but others remained.

"Okay, onward and upward, Ron. Now, tell me, you want a bartender or a businessman?"

"I don't really care. How 'bout we flip a coin?"

"The Watchmaker probably bought the clocks at Hallerstein's Timepieces," Mel Cooper announced to Rhyme and Sellitto, hanging up the phone. "The Flatiron District."

Before he'd been dragged off by Sachs on the Creeley case, Pulaski had tracked down the Northeast wholesaler for Arnold Products. The head of the distribution company had just returned the rookie's call.

Cooper reported that the distributor didn't keep records by serial number, but that if the clocks had been sold in the New York area, it would have been at Hallerstein's, the only outlet there. The store was located south of Midtown in the neighborhood named after the historic triangular building on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, which resembled an old-time flatiron.

"Check out the store," Rhyme instructed.

Cooper searched online. Hallerstein's didn't have its own website but was listed in several sites that sold antique clocks and watches. It had been in operation for years. The owner was a man named Victor Hallerstein. A check on him revealed no record. Sellitto punched in caller ID block and called, not identifying himself, just to check on the store hours. He pretended he'd been in before and asked if he was speaking to Hallerstein himself. The man said he was. Sellitto thanked him and hung up.

"I'll go talk to him, see what he has to say." Sellitto pulled on his coat. It was always better to drop in on witnesses unexpectedly. Phoning ahead gave them a chance to think up lies, whether or not they had anything to hide.

"Wait, Lon," Rhyme said.

The big detective glanced his way.

"What if he didn't sell the clock to the Watchmaker?"

Sellitto nodded. "Yeah, I thought of that — what if he is the Watchmaker or a partner or buddy of his?"

"Or maybe he's behind the whole thing and the Watchmaker's working for him."

"Thought of that too. But, hey, not to worry. I've got it covered."

With a sound track of Irish harp music pulsing in her ears, California Bureau of Investigation agent Kathryn Dance was absently watching the streets of lower Manhattan stream past, en route to Kennedy Airport.

Christmas decorations, tiny lights and tacky cardboard.

Lovers too. Arm in arm, gloved hands in gloved hands. Out shopping. On vacation.

She was thinking of Bill. Wondered if he would've liked it here.

Funny, the small things you remember so perfectly — even after two and a half years, which is such a huge gulf of time under other circumstances.!!!Mrs. Swenson?!!!This is Kathryn Dance. My husband's name is Swenson.!!!Oh. Well, this is Sergeant Wilkins. CHP.

Why would the Highway Patrol call her at home and not refer to her as Agent Dance?

Forever challenged in the kitchen, Dance had been making dinner, singing a Roberta Flack song, sotto voce, and trying to figure out a food processor attachment. She was making split pea soup.!!!I'm afraid I have to tell you something, Mrs. Dance. It's about your husband.

Holding the phone in one hand, the cookbook in the other, she'd stopped moving and stared at the recipe as she took in his words. Dance could still picture the page in the cookbook perfectly, though she'd read it only that one time. She even remembered the caption under the picture. A hearty, tasty soup that you can whip up in no time. And it's nutritious too.

She could make the soup from memory.

Though she never had.

Kathryn Dance knew it would still be some time before she healed — well, "heal" was the word her grief counselor used. But that wasn't right, because you never did heal, she'd come to realize. A scar that replaces slashed skin is still a scar. In time a numbness replaces the pain. But the flesh is forever changed.

Dance smiled to herself now, in the cab, as she noted that she'd crossed her arms and curled up her feet. A kinesics expert knows what those gestures are all about.

The streets seemed identical to her — dark canyons, gray and dim brown, punctuated with bright neon: ATM. Salad Bar. Nails $9.95. Such a contrast to the Monterey Peninsula, with the pine and oak and eucalyptus and sandy patches dotted with succulent groundcover. The passage of the smelly Chevy taxi was slow. The town she lived in, Pacific Grove, was a Victorian village 120 miles south of San Francisco. Populated with eighteen thousand souls and nestled between chic Carmel and hardworking Monterey, of Steinbeck's Cannery Row fame, Pacific Grove could be traversed in the time it had taken the cab to drive four blocks.

Gazing at the city streets, she was thinking, dark and congested, chaotic, utterly frantic, yes... Still, she loved New York City. (She was, after all, a people addict, and she'd never seen so many of them in one place.) Dance wondered how the children would respond to the city.

Maggie would go for it, Dance knew without doubt. She could easily picture the ten-year-old, her pigtail sweeping back and forth as she stood in the middle of Times Square and glanced from billboards to passersby to hawkers to traffic to Broadway theaters, enthralled.

Wes? He'd be different. He was twelve and had had a tough time since his father died. But finally his humor and confidence seemed to be returning. At last Dance had been comfortable enough to leave him with his grandparents while she went to Mexico on the kidnapper extradition, her first international trip since Bill's death. According to Dance's mother, he'd seemed fine when she was away and so she'd scheduled a seminar here; the NYPD and state police had been after her for a year to present one in the area.

Still, though, she knew she'd have to keep an eye on the lean, handsome boy with curly hair and Dance's green eyes. He continued to grow sullen at times, detached and angry. Some of it typical male adolescence, some of it the residue of losing his father at a young age. Typical behavior, her counselor had explained, nothing to worry about. But Dance felt that it might take a little time before he'd be ready for the chaos of New York, and she'd never push him. When she got home she'd ask him whether he wanted to visit. Dance couldn't understand parents who seemed to believe they needed magic incantations or psychotherapy to find out what their children wanted. All you really needed to do was ask and listen carefully to their answers.

Yep, Dance decided that, if he was comfortable, she'd bring them here on vacation next year, before Christmas. A Boston girl, born and bred, Dance's main objection to the central California coast was the lack of seasons. The weather was lovely — but for the holidays you longed for the bite of the cold in your nose and mouth, the snowstorms, the glowing logs in the fireplace, the frost spiderwebbing the windows.

Dance was now pulled from her reverie by her cell phone's musical chirp, which changed frequently — a joke by the children (though the number-one rule — Never program a cop's phone to SILENT — was adhered to).

She looked at caller ID.

Hm. Interesting. Yes or no?

Kathryn Dance gave in to impulse and hit the ANSWER button.