Dance was staring at the still image of Duncan’s face as intently as Rhyme stared at his evidence charts. She mused, “What’s he really up to?”

A question they couldn’t begin to answer.

Riding the subway, Charles Vespasian Hale, the man who’d been masquerading as Gerald Duncan, the Watchmaker, checked his wristwatch (his Breguet pocket watch, which he’d grown fond of, wouldn’t fit the role he was about to assume).

Everything was right on schedule. He was taking the train from the Brooklyn neighborhood where he had his primary safe house, feeling anticipation and an edginess too, but nonetheless he was as close to harmony as he’d ever been in his life.

Very little of what he’d told Vincent Reynolds about his personal past had been true, of course. It couldn’t be. He planned a long career at his profession and he knew that the mealy rapist would spill everything to the cops at the first threat.

Born in Chicago, Hale was the son of a high school Latin teacher (hence the middle name, after a noble Roman emperor) and a woman who was the manager of the petites department at a suburban Sears store. The couple never talked much, didn’t do much. Every night after a quiet supper his father would gravitate to his books, his mother to her sewing machine. For familial activity they might settle in two separate chairs in front of the small television set and watch bad sitcoms and predictable cop dramas, which allowed them a unique medium of communication—by commenting on the shows, they expressed to each other the desires and resentments that they’d never have the courage to say directly.

Quiet . . .

The boy had been a loner for much of his life. He was a surprise child and his parents treated him with formal manners and apathy and a quizzical air, as if he were a species of plant whose watering and fertilizing schedule they were unsure of. The hours of boredom and solitude grew to be an open sore, and Charles felt a desperation to occupy his time, for fear the excruciating stillness in the household would strangle him.

He spent hours and hours outside—hiking and climbing trees. For some reason it was better to be alone when you were outside. There was always something to distract you, something you might find over the next hill, on the next branch up in the maple tree. He was in the field biology club at school. He went on Outward Bound expeditions and was always the first to cross the rope bridge, dive off the cliff, rappel down a mountainside.

If he was condemned to be inside, Charles developed a habit of filling his time by putting things in order. Arranging office supplies and books and toys could endlessly fill the painful hours. He wasn’t lonely when he did that, he didn’t ache with boredom, he wasn’t afraid of the silence.