“Well, I just assumed somebody with an OC connection was the one who’d put them together.”

“Why?”

“Baker wants to have a cop killed, right? But he can’t do it in a way that’ll make him look suspicious so he has to hire somebody. He goes to some mob connection he has. The mob’s not going to clip a cop so he puts Baker in touch with somebody who might: the Watchmaker.”

When nobody said anything, Pulaski blushed and looked down. “I don’t know. Just a thought.”

“And a fucking good one, kid,” Sellitto said.

“Really?”

Rhyme nodded. “Not bad . . . Let’s call the OC task force downtown and see if their snitches can tell us anything. Call Dellray too . . . Now, let’s get back to the evidence.”

They’d located some friction ridges in the safe house in Brooklyn but none of the fingerprints came back positive from the Bureau’s IAFIS system and none matched prints from prior scenes. The lease for the house had been executed under yet another fake name and the man had given a phony prior address. It had been a cash transaction. An exhaustive search of Internet activity in the neighborhood revealed that the man had apparently logged on occasionally through several nearby wireless networks. There were no records of emails, only Web browsing. The site he’d visited most often was a bookstore that sold continuing-education course texts for certain medical specialties.

Sellitto said, “Shit, maybe somebody else’s hired him.”

You bet, Rhyme thought, nodding. “He’ll be targeting another victim—or victims. Probably coming up with his plan right now. Think of the damage he could do pretending to be a doctor.”

And I let him get away.

An examination of the trace evidence Sachs had collected revealed little more than shearling fibers and a few bits of a green vegetative material containing evaporated seawater—which didn’t, it turned out, match the seaweed and ocean water found around Robert Wallace’s boat on Long Island.

The deputy inspector at the Brooklyn precinct called to report that further canvassing of the neighborhood had been useless. A half dozen people remembered seeing the Watchmaker but nobody knew anything about him.

As for Charlotte and her late husband, Bud Allerton, the investigative efforts were much more successful. The couple had not been nearly as careful as the Watchmaker. Sachs had found a great deal of evidence about the underground militia groups they’d been harbored by, including a large one in Missouri and the infamous Patriot Assembly in upstate New York, which Rhyme and Sachs had tangled with in the past. Phone calls, fingerprints and emails would give the FBI and local police plenty of leads to pursue.