Even as she thought this, though, she pictured the construction worker lying in the tunnel at the first scene, his skin dissolving, blood bubbling. This image had replaced that of the gory rebar rods.

She scanned the team. They nodded. The breaching officer lifted the detonator pad, but refrained from a “Fire in the hole!” They didn’t want to give the Watchmaker the slightest indication of their presence.

Sachs nodded.

The packet exploded with a sharp crack, and she started forward.

53

Ron Pulaski unfolded the document Lyle Spencer had produced.

Spencer said, “I called in a marker, and got that. It’s a draft. They’re still working on it.”

Ron looked down at the sheet in his hand.

“Subject?” he whispered. “That’s what they’re calling me?”

On the goddamn phone call. That’s what I wasn’t concentrating on.

Because I was looking at the picture of Garner’s family and thinking about my dead daughter...

What the hell? Half a joint twenty years ago?

He was deceptive regarding injuries. Significantly he sustained a head injury on a case, which apparently required considerable rehabilitating work. The injury resulted in memory loss and confusion. There’s little in his NYPD personnel file on his condition. I suggest we locate the original medical report and append it to any recommendation by the full Officer Involved Accident board.

His rendering of a diagram of the scene was childlike. He could not even draw a straight line.

Because you intentionally sat me down in front of a cluttered desk. There was nothing else to write on but my lap. Christ...

Respectfully submitted,

Burdick.

Hell.

“It’s all out of fucking context,” he muttered, using a word that rarely escaped his lips, and had never done so in his family home. “For all I know, they doctored the tape to make me sound like a zombie.”

Spencer asked, “The injury they’re talking about?”

Eyes on the lawn, he paused and said, “It was a job. The first one I worked with Lincoln and Amelia.”

He explained how he’d turned a corner of a building while searching for an unsub, too close to the wall, and the perp, who’d been lying in wait, caught him in the forehead with a billy club.

The lump went away not too long after, but the brain injury remained. He’d lost memory, lost his ability to make decisions and to work out the simplest of problems.