The Detective and The Clockmaker – Chapter 6
Officer Cole’s Theory
Mara didn’t make it to Victor Lamont’s estate because Officer Ryan Cole stopped her in the parking garage.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t even supposed to be on duty. But he was leaning against her car, arms crossed, looking like a man who hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours.
“You’re going to Lamont’s,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Get out of my way, Cole.”
“Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
Mara checked her watch. The rational part of her brain—the part that had kept her alive for twenty-three years on the force—said to push past him. But something in his face made her pause. He wasn’t challenging her. He was scared.
“Three minutes,” she said. “Talk.”
Cole pulled out his phone and held up a waveform diagram. “I’ve been analyzing the audio from the vault footage. Pendel’s death. There’s a sound at 9:47:23 PM. Two seconds before he cuts his throat.”
Mara took the phone. The waveform showed a sharp spike—brief, almost imperceptible. “What frequency?”
“17.4 kilohertz. Just above the range of human hearing for most adults. But Pendel was fifty-two. His high-frequency hearing was probably diminished. He might not have heard it at all.”
“But the machine heard it,” Mara said. “Or it was the machine.”
Cole shook his head. “That’s the thing. The sound didn’t come from inside the vault. I had the audio team triangulate. The source was the museum’s public address system. The speakers in the hallway outside Vault Four.”
Mara’s blood went cold. “Someone broadcast the trigger through the museum’s own speakers.”
“Someone who knew the system. Someone who had access to the control room. Someone who—” Cole hesitated.
“Say it.”
“Someone who could have been there the night Pendel died. Watching. Waiting. The security logs show the control room was accessed at 9:46 PM. The user ID belonged to Harold Finch. The head of security.”
Mara remembered Finch. The sweating man in the hallway. The one who had talked too much, offered too many details, seemed too eager to help.
“Where is Finch now?” she asked.
Cole’s face went pale. “That’s why I came to find you. He didn’t show up for his shift this morning. His apartment is empty. His phone is off. And his car was found at the airport long-term parking.”
“Terminal?”
“No ticket. No flight. No passport check. He just… vanished.”
Mara closed her eyes. Finch wasn’t the watchmaker. He was too nervous, too obvious. But he was a pawn. A key. Someone had used him to broadcast the trigger frequency, then discarded him.
“Finch is dead,” Mara said. “Or he will be. The watchmaker doesn’t leave loose threads.”
She looked at Cole. Really looked at him. He was young. Too young for this. But he was smart. He’d found something she’d missed.
“You’re not a patrol officer anymore,” she said. “As of now, you’re my temporary partner. No paperwork. No announcement. We keep this between us. Understand?”
Cole nodded. “Understood.”
“Good. Now here’s what we do. You go to the museum. Get me everything on Finch. Background, bank accounts, lovers, enemies, favorite breakfast cereal. I don’t care. Find me the connection to Lamont.”
“And you?”
Mara opened her car door. “I’m still going to see the billionaire. But not to arrest him. To watch him. Because if I’m right, Lamont isn’t the watchmaker. He’s the next target.”
Cole frowned. “Why would the watchmaker kill his own donor?”
Mara got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“Because the watchmaker doesn’t want money. He wants believers. And Victor Lamont stopped believing two days ago. He canceled a ten-million-dollar donation to the museum. He pulled funding from a biotech lab working on neural implants. He’s trying to bury the Suicide Proof.”
She looked up at Cole.
“And you don’t bury a god and expect to live.”
The engine roared. Cole stepped back.
Mara drove out of the garage, into the gray morning, toward a man who was probably already dead and just didn’t know it yet.