Rhyme had glanced back at the doctor skeptically but the placid, gray-haired medico was an old hand at SCI patients and he said kindly, “Don’t tune me out, Lincoln.”

Taylor had held the disk up close to Rhyme’s face. “You’re thinking it’s unfair this little thing causing you so much grief. But forget that. Forget it. I want you to remember what it was like before the accident. The good and bad in your life. Happiness, sadness… You can feel that again.” The doctor’s face had grown still. “But frankly all I see now is somebody who’s given up.”

Taylor had left the vertebra on the bedside table. Accidentally, it seemed. But then Rhyme realized the act was calculated. Over the past months while Rhyme was trying to decide whether or not to kill himself he’d stared at the tiny disk. It became an emblem for Taylor ’s argument – the pro-living argument. But in the end that side lost; the doctor’s words, as valid as they might be, couldn’t overcome the burden of pain and heartache and exhaustion Lincoln Rhyme felt day after day after day.

He now looked away from the disk – to Amelia Sachs – and said, “I want you to think about the scene again.”

“I told you everything I saw.”

“Not saw, I want to know what you felt.”

Rhyme remembered the thousands of times he’d run crime scenes. Sometimes a miracle would happen. He’d be looking around and somehow ideas about the unsub would come to him. He couldn’t explain how. The behaviorists talked about profiling as if they’d invented it. But criminalists had been profiling for hundreds of years. Walk the grid, walk where he’s walked, find what he’s left behind, figure out what he’s taken with him – and you’ll come away from the scene with a profile as clear as a portrait.

“Tell me,” he prodded. “What did you feel?”

“Uneasy. Tense. Hot.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Sorry.”

If he’d been mobile Rhyme would have leapt from the bed, grabbed her shoulders and shaken her. Shouted: But you know what I’m talking about! I know you do. Why won’t you work with me?… Why are you ignoring me?

Then he understood something… That she was there, in the steamy basement. Hovering over T.J.’s ruined body. Smelling the vile smell. He saw it in the way her thumb flicked a bloody cuticle, he saw it in the way she maintained the no-man’s-land of politeness between the two of them. She detested being in that vile basement, and she hated him for reminding her that part of her was still there.

“You’re walking through the room,” he said.

“I really don’t think I can be any more help.”

“Play along,” he said, forcing his temper down. He smiled. “Tell me what you thought.”

Her face went still and she said, “It’s… just thoughts. Impressions everybody’d have.”

“But you were there. Everybody wasn’t. Tell us.”

“It was scary or something…” She seemed to regret the clumsy word.

Unprofessional.

“I felt -”

“Somebody watching you?” he asked.

This surprised her. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

Rhyme had felt it himself. Many times. He’d felt it three and a half years ago, bending down over the decomposing body of the young policeman, picking a fiber off the uniform. He’d been positive that someone was nearby. But there was no one – just a large oak beam that chose that moment to groan and splinter and come crashing down on the fulcrum of Lincoln Rhyme’s fourth cervical vertebra with the weight of the earth.

“What else did you think, Amelia?”

She wasn’t resisting anymore. Her lips were relaxed, her eyes drifting over the curled Nighthawks poster – the diners, lonely or contentedly alone. She said, “Well, I remember saying to myself, ‘Man, this place is old.’ It was like those pictures you see of turn-of-the-century factories and things. And I -”

“Wait,” Rhyme barked. “Let’s think about that. Old…”

His eyes strayed to the Randel Survey map. He’d commented before on the unsub’s interest in historical New York. The building where T.J. Colfax had died was old too. And so was the tunnel for the railroad where they’d found the first body. The New York Central trains used to run aboveground. There’d been so many crossing fatalities that Eleventh Avenue had earned the name Death Avenue and the railroad had finally been forced to move the tracks belowground.

“And Pearl Street,” he mused to himself, “was a major byway in early New York. Why’s he so interested in old things?” He asked Sellitto, “Is Terry Dobyns still with us?”

“Oh, the shrink? Yeah. We worked a case last year. Come to think of it, he asked about you. Said he called you a couple times and you never -”

“Right, right, right,” Rhyme said. “Get him over here. I want his thoughts on 823’s patterns. Now, Amelia, what else did you think?”

She shrugged but far too nonchalantly. “Nothing.”

“No?”

And where did she keep her feelings? he wondered, recalling something Blaine had said once, seeing a gorgeous woman walking down Fifth Avenue: The more beautiful the package, the harder it is to unwrap.

“I don’t know… All right, I remember one thing I thought. But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not, like a professional observation.”

Professional…

It’s a bitch when you set your own standards, ain’t it, Amelia?

“Let’s hear it,” he said to her.

“When you were having me pretend to be him? And I found where he stood to look back at her?”

“Keep going.”

“Well, I thought…” For a moment it seemed that tears threatened to fill her beautiful eyes. They were iridescent blue, he noticed. Instantly she controlled herself. “I wondered, did she have a dog. The Colfax woman.”

“A dog? Why’d you wonder that?”

She hesitated a moment then said, “This friend of mine… a few years ago. We were talking about getting a dog when, well, if we moved in together. I always wanted one. A collie. It was funny. That was the kind my friend wanted too. Even before we knew each other.”

“A dog.” Rhyme’s heart popped like beetles on a summer screen door. “And?”

“I thought that woman -”

“T.J.,” Rhyme said.

“T.J.,” Sachs continued. “I just thought how sad it was – if she had any pets she wouldn’t be coming home to them and playing with them anymore. I didn’t think about her boyfriends or husbands. I thought about pets.”

“But why that thought? Dogs, pets. Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

Silence.

Finally she said, “I suppose seeing her tied up there… And I was thinking how he stood to the side to watch her. Just standing between the oil tanks. It was like he was watching an animal in a pen.”

Rhyme glanced at the sine waves on the GC-MS computer screen.

Animals…

Nitrogen…

“Shit!” Rhyme blurted.

Heads turned toward him.

“It’s shit.” Staring at the screen.

“Yes, of course!” Cooper said, replastering his strands of hair. “All the nitrogen. It’s manure. And it’s old manure at that.”

Suddenly Lincoln Rhyme had one of those moments he’d reflected on earlier. The thought just burst into his mind. The image was of lambs.

Sellitto asked, “Lincoln, you okay?”

A lamb, sauntering down the street.

It was like he was watching an animal…

“Thom,” Sellitto was saying, “is he all right?”

… in a pen.

Rhyme could picture the carefree animal. A bell around its neck, a dozen others behind.

“ Lincoln,” Thom said urgently. “You’re sweating. Are you all right?”

“Shhhhh,” the criminalist ordered.

He felt the tickle running down his face. Inspiration and heart failure; the symptoms are oddly similar. Think, think…

Bones, wooden posts and manure…

“Yes!” he whispered. A Judas lamb, leading the flock to slaughter.

“Stockyards,” Rhyme announced to the room. “She’s being held in a stockyard.”