“Aren’t we in a sunny mood today?” the aide spat back.

“Hold it up higher. I’m getting glare.”

He read for a minute. Then looked up.

Sellitto was on the phone but Rhyme interrupted him. “Whatever happens at three today, if we can find where he’s talking about, it’s going to be a crime scene. I’ll need someone to work it.”

“Good,” Sellitto said. “I’ll call Peretti. Toss him a bone. I know his nose’ll be out of joint ’cause we’re tiptoeing around him.”

Rhyme grunted. “Did I ask for Peretti?”

“But he’s the IRD golden boy,” Banks said.

“I don’t want him,” Rhyme muttered. “There’s somebody else I want.”

Sellitto and Banks exchanged glances. The older detective smiled, brushing pointlessly at his wrinkled shirt. “Whoever you want, Linc, you got him. Remember, you’re king for a day.”

Staring at the dim eye.

T.J. Colfax, dark-haired refugee from the hills of Eastern Tennessee, NYU Business School grad, quick-as-a-whip currency trader, had just swum out of a deep dream. Her tangled hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat crawling in veins down her face and neck and chest.

She found herself looking into the black eye – a hole in a rusty pipe, about six inches across, from which a small access plate had been removed.

She sucked mildewy air through her nose – her mouth was still taped shut. Tasting plastic, the hot adhesive. Bitter.

And John? she wondered. Where was he? Refusing to think about the loud crack she’d heard last night in the basement. She’d grown up in Eastern Tennessee and knew what gunshots sounded like.

Please, she prayed for her boss. Let him be all right.

Stay calm, she raged to herself. You fucking start to cry again, you remember what happened. In the basement, after the gunshot, she’d lost it completely, breaking down, sobbing in panic, and had nearly suffocated.

Right. Calm.

Look at the black eye in the pipe. Pretend it’s winking at you. The eye of your guardian angel.

T.J. sat on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pipes and ducts and snakes of conduit and wires. Hotter than her brother’s diner, hotter than the back seat of Jule Whelan’s Nova ten years ago. Water dripped, stalactites drooped from the ancient girders above her head. A half-dozen tiny yellow bulbs were the only illumination. Above her head – directly above – was a sign. She couldn’t read it clearly, though she caught the red border. At the end of whatever the message might have been was a fat exclamation point.

She struggled once more but the cuffs held her tight, pinching against the bone. From her throat rose a desperate cry, an animal’s cry. But the thick tape on her mouth and the insistent churning of machinery swallowed up the sound; no one could’ve heard her.

The black eye continued to stare. You’ll save me, won’t you? she thought.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a clanging slam, an iron bell, far away. Like a ship’s door slamming shut. The noise came from the hole in the pipe. From her friendly eye.

She jerked the cuffs against the pipe and tried to stand. But she couldn’t move more than a few inches.

Okay, don’t panic. Just relax. You’ll be all right.

It was then that she happened to see the sign above her head. In her jockeying for slack she’d straightened up slightly and moved her head to the side. This gave her an oblique view of the words.

Oh, no. Oh, Jesus in my heart…

The tears began again.

She imagined her mother, her hair pulled back from her round face, wearing her cornflower-blue housedress, whispering, “Be all raht, honey love. Doan’ you worry.”

But she didn’t believe the words.

She believed what the sign said.

Extreme Danger! Superheated steam under High Pressure. Do not remove plate from pipe. Call Consolidated Edison for access. Extreme danger!

The black eye gaped at her, the eye that opened into the heart of the steam pipe. It stared directly at the pink flesh of her chest. From somewhere deep inside the pipe came another clink of metal on metal, workers hammering, tightening old joints.

As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.

“HERE’S THE SITUATION,” Lincoln Rhyme announced. “We’ve got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline.”

“No ransom demands” – Sellitto supplemented Rhyme’s synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. “Jerry,” Rhyme said to Banks, “brief them about the scene this morning.”

There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme’s dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme’d be home of course) but he’d discouraged that. And he’d stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He’d spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he’d given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.

Solitude.

It was all he craved, and oh how he missed it now.

Pacing, looking tense, was compact Jim Polling. Lon Sellitto was the case officer but an incident like this needed a captain on board and Polling had volunteered for the job. The case was a time bomb and could nuke careers in a heartbeat so the chief and the dep coms were happy to have him intercept the flak. They’d be practicing the fine art of distancing and when the Beta-cams rolled their press conferences would be peppered with words like delegated and assigned and taking the advice of and they’d be fast to glance at Polling when it came time to field the hardball questions. Rhyme couldn’t imagine why any cop in the world would volunteer to head up a case like this one.

Polling was an odd one. The little man had pummeled his way through Midtown North Precinct as one of the city’s most successful, and notorious, homicide detectives. Known for his bad temper, he’d gotten into serious trouble when he’d killed an unarmed suspect. But he’d managed, amazingly, to pull his career together by getting a conviction in the Shepherd case – the cop-serial-killer case, the one in which Rhyme’d been injured. Promoted to captain after that very public collar, Polling went through one of those embarrassing midlife changes – giving up blue jeans and Sears suits for Brooks Brothers (today he wore navy-blue Calvin Klein casual) – and began his dogged climb toward a plush corner office high in One Police Plaza.

Another officer leaned against a nearby table. Crew-cut, rangy Bo Haumann was a captain and head of the Emergency Services Unit. NYPD’s SWAT team.

Banks finished his synopsis just as Sellitto pushed disconnect and folded his phone. “The Hardy Boys.”

“Anything more on the cab?” Polling asked.

“Nothing. They’re still beating bushes.”

“Any sign she was fucking somebody she shouldn’t’ve been?” Polling asked. “Maybe a psycho boyfriend?”

“Naw, no boyfriends. Just dated a few guys casually. No stalkers, it looks like.”

“And still no ransom calls?” Rhyme asked.

“No.”

The doorbell rang. Thom went to answer it.

Rhyme looked toward the approaching voices.

A moment later the aide escorted a uniformed police officer up the stairs. She appeared very young from a distance but as she drew closer he could see she was probably thirty or so. She was tall and had that sullen, equine beauty of women gazing out from the pages of fashion magazines.