“Look out!” she called, gripping her pistol in her hand. “He’s—”

“Where is he?” the A Team leader asked. The man was crouching at the top of the stairs. He hadn’t heard her—or hadn’t listened—and had sped up the ladder, followed by two other officers. They were scanning the room—including the area behind Sachs.

Her heart pounding furiously, she struggled to look over her shoulder. She asked, “You don’t see him? He’s gotta be there.”

“Zip.”

He and another officer bent down, gripped her body armor and pulled her out of the Sheetrock. Crouching, she spun around.

The room was empty.

“How’d he get out?” the ESU officer muttered. “No doors or windows.”

Sachs noticed something across the room. She gave a sour laugh. “He was never here at all. Not up here, not downstairs. He probably took off hours ago.”

“But the lights. Somebody was turning them on and off.”

“Nope. Take a look.” She pointed to a small beige box connected to the fusebox. “He wanted to make us think he was still here. Give him a better chance to get away.”

“What is it?”

“What else? It’s a timer.”

Chapter 41

Sachs finished searching the scene at the house in Brooklyn and sent what little evidence she could find to Rhyme’s.

She stripped off her Tyvek outfit and pulled her jacket on, then hurried through the cutting chill to Sellitto’s car. In the back sat Pam Willoughby, clutching her Harry Potter book and sipping hot chocolate, which the big detective had scrounged for her. He was still in the perp’s safe house, finishing up the paperwork. Sachs climbed in, sat beside her. At Kathryn Dance’s suggestion, they’d brought the girl here to examine the place and the Watchmaker’s possessions in hopes that something might trigger a memory. But the man hadn’t left much behind and in any event nothing Pammy saw gave her any more insights about him.

Smiling, Sachs looked the girl over, remembering that strange expression of hope when she’d seen her in the rental car at the first scene. The policewoman said, “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years.”

“Me too,” the girl said, looking down into her cup.

“Where did you go after New York?”

“We went back to Missouri and hid out in the woods. Mom left me with other people a lot. Mostly I just stayed by myself and read. I didn’t get along very good with anybody. They were crappy to me. If you didn’t think the way they did—which was pretty messed up—they totally dissed you.

“A lot of them were home-schooling people. But I really wanted to go to public school and I made a big deal out of it. Bud didn’t want me to but Mom finally agreed. But she said if I told anybody about her, what she’d done, I’d go to jail too as an assistant . . . no, an accomplice. And men would do stuff to me there. You know what I’m talking about.”