‘There was a problem.’

Rhyme fell silent. ‘And?’

‘I kind of got arrested.’

Rhyme wasn’t sure he’d heard. ‘Say again.’

‘Arrested.’

‘Explain.’

‘I didn’t get to the hotel. I got stopped before.’

‘I said explain. Not confuse.’

Mel Cooper looked his way. Rhyme shrugged.

‘There’s an agent with the NYBI here. He wants to talk to you.’

The New York Bureau of Investigation?

‘Put him on.’

‘Hello, Detective Rhyme?’

He didn’t bother to correct the title.

‘Yes.’

‘This’s Agent Tom Abner, NYBI.’

‘And what’s going on, Agent Abner?’ Rhyme was trying to be patient, though he had a feeling that Pulaski had screwed up the undercover set and ruined whatever chance they had to learn more about the associates of the late Watchmaker. And given the ‘I got arrested’ part, the screwup must’ve been pretty bad.

‘We’ve found out that Ron is an NYPD patrol officer in good standing, active duty. But nobody at headquarters knew about any undercover set he was running. Can you confirm that Ron was working for you on an operation?’

‘I’m civilian, Agent Abner. A consultant. But, yes, he was running an op under the direction of Detective Amelia Sachs, Major Cases. An opportunity presented itself very fast. We didn’t have time to go through channels. Ron was just making initial contact with some possible perps this morning.’

‘Hm. I see.’

‘What happened?’

‘Yesterday, an attorney named David Weller, based in LA, contacted us. He was retained by the family of a decedent, Richard Logan – the convict who died?’

‘Yes.’ Rhyme sighed. And the whole fiasco began to unfold before him.

‘Well, Mr Weller said that somebody had come to the funeral home and was asking a lot of questions about Mr Logan. He seemed to want to meet the family or associates and suggested that he might want to participate in some of the illegal deals that Logan had started before he died. I suggested a sting to see what this fellow had in mind. Mr Weller agreed to help. We wired him up and he mentioned some crime in Mexico that Mr Logan had been involved in. Ron offered money to participate in another attempt to kill same official. As soon as he mentioned a figure we moved in.’

Jesus. Like the most common prostitution sting.

Rhyme said, ‘Richard Logan had orchestrated some pretty complicated crimes when he was alive. He couldn’t have been operating alone. We were trying to find some of his associates.’

‘Got it. But your officer was really pushing the bounds of undercover ops.’

‘He hasn’t done that kind of thing before.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. Attorney Weller wasn’t too happy about the whole thing, as you can imagine. But he’s not going to pursue any complaint.’

‘Tell him we appreciate that. Can you have Ron call me?’

‘Yessir.’

They disconnected and a moment later the parlor phone rang once more. It was Pulaski’s undercover phone.

‘Rookie.’

‘I’m sorry, Lincoln. I–’

‘Don’t apologize.’

‘I didn’t handle it very well.’

‘I’m not so sure it worked out badly.’

There was a pause. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We learned one thing: Weller and his clients – the Logan family – don’t  have any connection with any of the Watchmaker’s associates or any planned crimes. Otherwise, they wouldn’t’ve dimed you out.’

‘I guess.’

‘You’re free to go?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, the good news is we can let the Watchmaker rest in peace. No more distractions. We’ve got an unsub to catch. Get your ass back here. Now.’

He disconnected before the young officer said anything more.

It was then that Rhyme’s phone rang and he received the news that there’d been a fourth attack.

And when he heard that the killing had been in a tattoo parlor in downtown Manhattan, he asked immediately which one.

Upon hearing that – not surprisingly – it was TT Gordon’s shop, Rhyme sighed and lowered his head. ‘No, no,’ he whispered. For a moment Views of Death No. One and Two vied. Then the first prevailed and Rhyme called Sachs to tell her she had yet another scene to run.

Amelia Sachs returned from the most recent crime scene in the Unsub 11 5 case. TT Gordon’s tattoo parlor in the East Village.

It turned out, though, that Gordon himself was not the victim. He’d been out of the parlor when the unsub snuck inside, locked the door and proceeded into the back room for the lethal tattooing session. The body was that of one of the artists who worked in the parlor, a man named Eddie Beaufort. He was a transplant from South Carolina who’d moved to New York a few years ago and was, Sachs had learned from Gordon, making a name for himself in the inking world.

‘We should’ve had somebody on the tattoo parlor, Rhyme,’ she said.

‘Who would’ve thought he’d be at risk?’ Rhyme was truly surprised that the unsub had tracked the artist down. How? It seemed unlikely but possible that he’d followed Gordon from Rhyme’s. But the tat community would be a small one and word must’ve gotten back to the killer that Gordon was helping with the case. The unsub would have heard and gone to the parlor to kill him. Finding he wasn’t there, maybe he had just decided to make clear that it was a bad idea to assist the police and picked for a victim the first employee he found.

It was also time to send another message.

Sachs described the scene: Beaufort, lying on his back. His shirt was off and the unsub had tattooed another part of the puzzle on his abdomen. She slid the SD card from her camera and displayed the pictures on the screen.

Ron Pulaski, back from his car wreck of an undercover assignment, stood in front of the display with his arms crossed. ‘They’re not numerical order: the second, forty, seventeenth and the six hundredth.’

Rhyme said, ‘Good point. He could have gone numerically if he’d wanted to. Either the order is significant – or he wanted to scramble them for some reason. And we’re ordinal again, not cardinal. “Fort”Y is the only cardinal number.’

Mel Cooper now suggested, ‘An encryption?’

That was a possibility. But there were far too many combinations and no common reference point. In breaking a simple code in which letters are converted to numbers, you can start with the knowledge that the letter ‘e’ appears most frequently in the English language and preliminarily assign that value to the most commonly occurring numbers in the code. But here, they had far too few numbers – and they were combined with words, which suggested that the numbers did not mean anything other than what they appeared to be, cryptic though that meaning was.

It could still be a location, but this number eliminated longitude or latitude. One or more addresses?

Pulaski said, ‘Beaufort wasn’t killed underground.’

Rhyme pointed out, ‘No, the unsub’s motive was different here: to kill TT Gordon specifically or at least somebody in the parlor. He didn’t need to follow his standard MO. Now, let’s look at what else you collected, Sachs.’

She and Cooper walked to the examination table. Both donned gloves and face masks.

‘No prints, finger or footwear,’ she said. ‘ME has the blood workup. I told him we needed the results yesterday. He said it was all hands on deck.’

‘Other trace?’ Rhyme asked.

Sachs nodded at several bags.

The criminalist barked, ‘Mel, get on that.’

As Cooper picked up and examined each one, then analyzed the contents, Sachs ran through the other pictures of the scene. Eddie Beaufort, hands cuffed behind him and lying on his back, like the others. It was obvious he’d suffered gastrointestinal symptoms and severe vomiting.

The phone rang with a familiar number.

Sachs gave a laugh. ‘That’s as ASAP as it gets.’

‘Doctor, it’s Lincoln Rhyme,’ he said to the medical examiner. ‘What do you have?’