“Rhyme,” she whispered.

“I know what—”

“Let me finish.”

He grunted.

“I have to follow up on this.”

“Priorities. Your case is colder than the Watchmaker, Sachs. Whatever happened to Creeley, even if he was murdered, the perp’s probably not a multiple doer. The Watchmaker is. He has to be our priority. Whatever evidence there is about Creeley’ll still be there after we nail our boy.”

She was shaking her head. “I don’t think so, Rhyme. I’ve pushed the button. I’ve started asking questions. You know how that works. Word’s starting to spread about the case. Evidence and suspects could be disappearing right now.”

“And the Watchmaker’s probably targeting somebody else right now too. He could be killing somebody else right now. . . . And, believe me, if there’s another murder and we drop the ball there’ll be hell to pay. Baker told me the request for us came from the top floor.”

Insisted . . .

“I won’t drop the ball. You get another scene, I’ll run it. If Bo Haumann stages a tactical op, I’ll be there.”

Rhyme gave an exaggerated frown. “Tactical? You don’t get dessert until you finish your vegetables.”

She laughed, and now he felt the pressure of her hand. “Come on, Rhyme, we’re in cop land. Nobody runs just one case at a time. Most Major Cases desks’re littered with a dozen files. I can handle two.”

Troubled by a foreboding he couldn’t articulate, Rhyme hesitated then said, “Let’s hope, Sachs. Let’s hope.”

It was the best blessing he could give.

Chapter 8

He came here?

Amelia Sachs, standing beside a planter that smelled of urine and sported a dead yellow stalk, glanced through the grimy window.

She suspected the place would be bad, knowing the address, but not this bad. Sachs was standing outside the St. James Tavern, on a wedge of broken concrete rising from the sidewalk. The bar was on East Ninth Street, in Alphabet City, the nickname referring to the north-south avenues that ran through it: A, B, C and D. The place had been a terror some years ago, a remnant of the gang wastelands on the Lower East Side. It had improved somewhat (crack houses were morphing into expensive fix-’em-uppers w/ vu) but it was still a rough-and-tumble ’hood; sitting in the snow at Sachs’s feet was a discarded hypodermic needle, and a spent 9-millimeter shell casing rested on the window ledge six inches from her face.

What the hell had accountant/venture capitalist, two-home-owning, Beemer-driving Benjamin Creeley been doing in a place like this the day before he died?

At the moment, the large, shabby tavern wasn’t too crowded. Through the greasy window she spotted aging locals at the bar or tables: spongy women and scrawny men who’d get a lot, or most, of their daily calories from the bottle. In a small room in the back were some white men in jeans, dungarees, work shirts. Four of them, all loud—even through the window she could hear their crude voices and laughter. She thought immediately of the punks who’d spend hour after hour in the Mafia social clubs, some slow, some lazy—but all of them dangerous. One glance told her these were men who’d hurt people.