“Officer Sachs…” He’d forgotten about her momentarily. “You were first officer this morning? At that homicide by the railroad tracks.”

“That’s right, I took the call.” When she spoke, she spoke to Thom.

“I’m here, officer,” Rhyme reminded sternly, barely controlling his temper. “Over here.” It infuriated him when people talked to him through others, through healthy people.

Her head swiveled quickly and he saw the lesson had been learned. “Yessir,” she said, a soft tone in her voice but ice in her eyes.

“I’m decommissioned. Just call me Lincoln.”

“Would you just get it over with, please?”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“The reason why you brought me here. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. If you want a written apology I’ll do it. Only, I’m late for my new assignment and I haven’t had a chance to call my commander.”

“Apology?” Rhyme asked.

“The thing is, I didn’t have any real crime scene experience. I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stopping the trains and closing Eleventh Avenue. It was my fault the senator missed his speech in New Jersey and that some of the senior UN people didn’t make it in from Newark Airport in time for their meetings.”

Rhyme was chuckling. “Do you know who I am?”

“Well, I’ve heard of you of course. I thought you…”

“Were dead?” Rhyme asked.

“No. I didn’t mean that.” Though she had. She continued quickly, “We all used your book in the academy. But we don’t hear about you. Personally, I mean…” She looked up at the wall and said stiffly, “In my judgment, as first officer, I thought it was best to stop the train and close the street to protect the scene. And that’s what I did. Sir.”

“Call me Lincoln. And you’re…”

“I -”

“Your first name?”

“Amelia.”

“Amelia. After the aviatrix?”

“Nosir. A family name.”

“Amelia, I don’t want an apology. You were right and Vince Peretti was wrong.”

Sellitto stirred at this indiscretion but Lincoln Rhyme didn’t care. He was, after all, one of the few people in the world who could stay flat on his ass when the president of the United States himself walked into the room. He continued, “Peretti worked the scene like the mayor was looking over his shoulder and that’s the A-number-one way to screw it up. He had too many people, he was dead wrong to let the trains and traffic move and he should never have released the scene as early as he did. If we’d kept the tracks secure, who knows, we might’ve just found a credit card receipt with a name on it. Or a big beautiful thumbprint.”

“That may be,” Sellitto said delicately. “But let’s just keep it to ourselves.” Giving silent orders, his eyes swiveling toward Sachs and Cooper and young Jerry Banks.

Rhyme snorted an irreverent laugh. Then turned back to Sachs, whom he caught, like Banks that morning, staring at his legs and body under the apricot-colored blanket. He said to her, “I asked you here to work the next crime scene for us.”

“What?” No speaking through interpreters this time.

“Work for us,” he said shortly. “The next crime scene.”

“But” – she laughed – “I’m not IRD. I’m Patrol. I’ve never done CS work.”

“This is an unusual case. As Detective Sellitto himself’ll tell you. It’s real weird. Right, Lon? True, if it was a classic scene, I wouldn’t want you. But we need a fresh pair of eyes on this one.”

She glanced at Sellitto, who said nothing. “I just… I’d be no good at it. I’m sure.”

“All right,” Rhyme said patiently. “The truth?”

She nodded.

“I need somebody who’s got the balls to stop a train in its tracks to protect a scene and to put up with the heat afterwards.”

“Thank you for the opportunity, sir. Lincoln. But -”

Rhyme said shortly, “Lon.”

“Officer,” the detective grunted to Sachs, “you’re not being given any options here. You’ve been assigned to this case to assist at the crime scene.”

“Sir, I have to protest. I’m transferring out of Patrol. Today. I’ve got a medical transfer. Effective an hour ago.”

“Medical?” Rhyme inquired.

She hesitated, glancing unwilling at his legs again. “I have arthritis.”

“Do you?” Rhyme asked.

“Chronic arthritis.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She continued quickly, “I only took that call this morning because someone was home sick. I didn’t plan on it.”

“Yes, well, I had other plans too,” Lincoln Rhyme said. “Now, let’s look at some evidence.”

“THE BOLT.”

Remembering the classic crime scene rule: Analyze the most unusual evidence first.

Thom turned the plastic bag over and over in his hands as Rhyme studied the metal rod, half rusted, half not. Dull. Worn.

“You’re sure about the prints? You tried small-particle reagent? That’s the best for PE exposed to the elements.”

“Yup,” Mel Cooper confirmed.

“Thom,” Rhyme ordered, “get this hair out of my eyes! Comb it back. I told you to comb it back this morning.”

The aide sighed and brushed at the tangled black strands. “Watch it,” he whispered ominously to his boss and Rhyme jerked his head dismissively, mussing his hair further. Amelia Sachs sat sullenly in the corner. Her legs rested under the chair in a sprinter’s starting position and, sure enough, she looked like she was just waiting for the gun.

Rhyme turned back to the bolt.

When he headed IRD, Rhyme had started assembling databases. Like the federal auto-paint-chip index or the BATF’s tobacco files. He’d set up a bullet-standards file, fibers, cloth, tires, shoes, tools, motor oil, transmission fluid. He’d spent hundreds of hours compiling lists, indexed and cross-referenced.

Even during Rhyme’s obsessive tenure, though, IRD had never gotten around to cataloging hardware. He wondered why not and he was angry at himself for not taking the time to do it and angrier still at Vince Peretti for not thinking of it either.

“We need to call every bolt manufacturer and jobber in the Northeast. No, in the country. Ask if they make a model like this and who they sell to. Fax a description and picture of the bolt to our dispatchers at Communications.”

“Hell, there could be a million of them,” Banks said. “Every Ace Hardware and Sears in the country.”

“I don’t think so,” Rhyme responded. “It’s got to be a viable clue. He wouldn’t have left it if it was useless. There’s a limited source of these bolts. I bet you.”

Sellitto made a call and looked up a few minutes later. “I’ve got you dispatchers, Lincoln. Four of them. Where do we get a list of manufacturers?”

“Get a patrolman down to Forty-second Street,” Rhyme replied. “Public Library. They have corporate directories there. Until we get one, have the dispatchers start working through the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages.”

Sellitto repeated this into the phone.

Rhyme glanced at the clock. It was one-thirty.

“Now, the asbestos.”

For an instant, the word glowed in his mind. He felt a jolt – in places where no jolts could be felt. What was familiar about asbestos? Something he’d read or heard about – recently, it seemed, though Lincoln Rhyme no longer trusted his sense of time. When you lie on your back frozen in place month after month after month, time slows to near-death. He might be thinking of something he’d read two years ago.

“What do we know about asbestos?” he mused. No one answered but that didn’t matter; he answered himself. As he preferred to do anyway. Asbestos was a complex molecule, silicate polymer. It doesn’t burn because, like glass, it’s already oxidized.

When he’d run crime scenes of old murders – working with forensic anthropologists and odontologists – Rhyme often found himself in asbestos-insulated buildings. He remembered the peculiar taste of the face masks they’d had to wear during the excavation. In fact, he now recalled, it’d been during an asbestos-removal cleanup at the City Hall subway stop three and a half years ago that crews found the body of one of the policemen murdered by Dan Shepherd dumped in a generator room. As Rhyme had bent down over it slowly to lift a fiber from the officer’s light-blue blouse, he’d heard the crack and groan of the oak beam. The mask had probably saved him from choking to death on the dust and dirt that caved in around him.