Sellitto continued, "And since we had squad cars headed to the area anyway, we got there before he killed her. But just before."

Dance added that the florist had no clue why anyone would want to hurt her. She'd been through a divorce a long time ago but hadn't heard from her ex in years. She had no enemies that she could think of.

Joanne also told Dance that she'd seen someone watching her through the window earlier that day, a heavyset white man in a cream-colored parka, old-style sunglasses and baseball cap. She hadn't seen much else because of the dirty windows. Dance wondered if there was a connection with Adams, the first victim, but Joanne had never heard of him.

Sachs asked, "How's she doing?"

"Shook up. But going back to work. Not in the workshop, though. At her store on Broadway."

Sellitto said, "Until we get this guy or figure out a motive I'll order a car outside the store." He pulled out his radio and arranged for it.

Nancy Simpson and Frank Rettig, the CS officers, walked up to Sachs. Between them was a young man in a stocking cap and baggy jacket. He was skinny and looked freezing cold. "Gentleman here wants to help," Simpson said. "Came up to us at the RRV."

With a glance at Sachs, who nodded, Dance turned to him and asked what he'd seen. There was no need for a kinesics expert, though. The kid was happy to play good citizen. He explained that he'd been walking down the street and saw somebody jump out the florist's workshop. He was a middle-aged man in a dark jacket. Glancing at the EFIT composite Sellitto and Dance had made at the clock store, he said, "Yeah, could be him."

He'd run to a tan SUV, driven by a white guy with a round face and wearing sunglasses. But he hadn't seen anything more specific about the driver.

"There're two of them?" Baker sighed. "He's got a partner."

Probably the one Joanne had seen at her workshop earlier.

"Was it an Explorer?"

"I don't know an Explorer from a…any other kind of SUV."

Sellitto asked about the license number. The witness hadn't seen it.

"Well, we've got the color at least." Sellitto put out an Emergency Vehicle Locator. An EVL would alert all Radio Mobile Patrol cars as well as most other law enforcers and traffic cops in the area to look for a tan Explorer with two white men inside.

"Okay, let's move on this," Sellitto called.

Simpson and Rettig helped Sachs assemble equipment to run the scenes. There were several of them: the store itself, the alley, the sidewalk area where he'd escaped, as well as where the Explorer had been parked.

Kathryn Dance and Sellitto returned to Rhyme's, while Baker kept canvassing for witnesses, showing pictures of the Watchmaker's composite to people on the street and workers in the warehouses and businesses along Spring.

Sachs collected what evidence she could locate. Since the first clock hadn't been an explosive device, there was no need to get the bomb squad involved; a simple field test for nitrates was sufficient to make sure. She packed it up, along with the remaining evidence, then stripped off the Tyvek and pulled on her leather jacket. She hurried up the street and dropped into the front seat of the Camaro, fired the car up and turned on the heater full blast.

She reached behind the passenger seat for her purse to get her gloves. But when she picked up the leather bag, the contents spilled out.

Sachs frowned. She was very careful always to keep the purse latched. She couldn't afford to lose the contents, which included two extra ammunition clips for her Glock, as well as a can of tear gas. She clearly remembered twisting the latch when she'd arrived.

She looked at the passenger-side window. Smears on the glass made by gloves were consistent with somebody using a slimjim to pop the door lock. And some of the insulating fuzz around the window was pushed aside.

Burglarized while doing a crime scene. This's a first.

She looked through the bag, item by item. Nothing was gone. The money and charge cards were all there-though she'd have to call the credit card companies in case the thief had jotted down the numbers. The ammunition and CS tear-gas spray were intact. Hand straying to her Glock, she looked around. There was a small crowd gathered nearby, curious about the police activity. She climbed out and approached them, asking if anybody had seen the break-in. Nobody had.

Returning to the Chevy, Sachs got her bare-bones crime scene kit from the trunk and ran the car just like any other crime scene-checking for footprints, fingerprints and trace inside and out. She found nothing. She replaced the equipment and dropped into the front seat once again.

Then she saw, a half block away, a big black car edge out of an alleyway. She thought of the Mercedes she'd seen earlier, when she'd picked up Pulaski. She couldn't see the make, though, and the car disappeared in traffic before she could turn her vehicle around and head after it.

Coincidence or not? she wondered.

The big Chevy engine began to push heat into the car and she strapped in. She pushed the transmission into first. Easing forward, she thought to herself, Well, no harm done.

She was halfway up the block, shoving the shifter into third, though, when the thought hit her: What was he looking for? The fact that her money and plastic were still there suggested that the perp was after something else.

Amelia Sachs knew that it's the people with motives you can't figure out who are always the most dangerous.

At Rhyme's, Sachs delivered the evidence to Mel Cooper.

Before she put on her latex gloves, she walked to a canister and pulled out a few dog biscuits, fed them to Jackson. He ate them down fast.

"You ever think about getting a helper dog?" Kathryn Dance asked Rhyme.

"He is a helper dog."

"Jackson?" Sachs frowned.

"Yep. He helps plenty. He distracts people so I don't have to entertain them."

The women laughed. "I mean a real one."

One of his therapists had suggested a dog. Many paraplegics and quadriplegics had helper animals. Not long after the accident, when the counselor had first brought it up, he'd resisted the idea. He couldn't explain why, exactly, but believed it had to do with his reluctance to depend on something, or someone, else. Now, the idea didn't seem so bad.

He frowned. "Can you train them to pour whiskey?" The criminalist looked from the dog to Sachs. "Oh, you got a call when you were at the scene. Someone named Jordan Kessler."

"Who?

"He said you'd know."

"Oh, wait-sure, Creeley's partner."

"He wanted to talk to you. I told him you weren't here so he left a message. He said that he talked to the rest of the company employees and that Creeley definitely had been depressed lately. And Kessler's still putting together a client list. But it'll take a day or two."

"A couple of days?"

"What he said."

Rhyme's eyes were on the evidence she was assembling on an examination table next to Cooper. His mind drifted away from the St. James situation-what he was calling the "Other Case." As opposed to "His Case," the Watchmaker. "Let's get to the evidence," he announced.

Sachs pulled on latex gloves and began unpacking the boxes and bag.

The clock was the same as the first two, ticking and showing the correct time. The moon face just slightly past full.

Together, Cooper and Sachs dismantled it but found no trace of any significance.

No footprints, friction ridge prints, weapons or anything else had been left behind in the florist's shop. Rhyme wondered if there was some special tool the killer had used to cut the florist's wire or some technique that might reveal a past or present career or training. But, no, he'd used Joanne's own clippers. Like the duct tape, though, the wire had been cut in precise lengths. Each one was exactly six feet long. Rhyme wondered whether he was going to bind her with the wire or whether it was the intended murder weapon.