“You mean his other persona did,” Rhyme said. “I wonder who the characters are in his little play.”

“I’m going to vacuum around the door too,” she announced. Rhyme watched her – face cut and hair uneven, singed short in spots. She vacuumed the base of the door and just as he was about to remind her that crime scenes were three-dimensional she ran the vacuum up and around the jamb.

“He probably looked inside before he took her in,” she said and began vacuuming the windowsills too.

Which would have been Rhyme’s next order.

He listened to the whine of the Dustbuster. But second by second he was fading away. Into the past, some hours before.

“I’m -” Sachs began.

“Shhh,” he said.

Like the walks he now took, like the concerts he now attended, like so many of the conversations he had, Rhyme was slipping deeper and deeper into his consciousness. And when he got to a particular place – even he had no idea where – he found he wasn’t alone. He was picturing a short man wearing gloves, dark sports clothes, a ski mask. Climbing out of the silver Ford Taurus sedan, which smelled of cleanser and new car. The woman – Carole Ganz – was in the trunk, her child captive in an old building made of pink marble and expensive brick. He saw the man dragging the woman from the car.

Almost a memory, it was that clear.

Popping the hinges, pulling open the door, dragging her inside, tying her up. He started to leave but paused. He walked to a place where he could look back and see Carole clearly. Just like he’d stared down at the man he’d buried at the railroad tracks yesterday morning.

Just like he’d chained Tammie Jean Colfax to the pipe in the center of the room. So he could get a good look at her.

But why? Rhyme wondered. Why does he look? To make sure the vics can’t escape? To make sure he hasn’t left anything behind? To -

His eyes sprang open; the indistinct apparition of Unsub 823 vanished. “Sachs! Remember the Colfax scene? When you found the glove print?”

“Sure.”

“You said he was watching her, that’s the reason he chained her out in the open. But you didn’t know why. Well, I figured it out. He watches the vics because he has to.” Because it’s his nature.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on!”

Rhyme sipped twice into the straw control, which turned the Arrow wheelchair around. Then puffed hard and he started forward.

He wheeled to the sidewalk, sipped hard into the straw to stop. He squinted as he looked all around him. “He wants to see his victims. And I’m betting he wanted to see the parishioners too. From someplace he thought was safe. Where he didn’t bother to sweep up afterwards.”

He was gazing across the street at the only secluded vantage point on the block: the outdoor patio of a restaurant opposite the church.

“There! Sweep it clean, Sachs.”

She nodded, slipped a new clip into her Glock, grabbed evidence bags, a pair of pencils and the Dust-buster. He saw her run across the street and work her way up the steps carefully, examining them. “He was here,” she shouted. “There’s a glove print. And the shoeprint – it’s worn just like the other ones.”

Yes! Rhyme thought. Oh, this felt good. The warm sun, the air, the spectators. And the excitement of the chase.

When you move they can’t getcha.

Well, if we move faster, maybe we can.

Rhyme happened to glance at the crowd and saw that some people were staring at him. But far more were watching Amelia Sachs.

For fifteen minutes she pored over the scene and when she returned she held up a small evidence bag.

“What did you find, Sachs? His driver’s license? His birth certificate?”

“Gold,” she said, smiling. “I found some gold.”

“COME ON, PEOPLE,” Rhyme called. “We’ve got to move on this one. Before he gets the girl to the next scene. I mean move!”

Thom did a sitting transfer to get Rhyme from the Storm Arrow back into bed, perching him momentarily on a sliding board and then easing him back into the Clinitron. Sachs glanced at the wheelchair elevator that had been built into one of the bedroom closets – it was the one he hadn’t wanted her to open when he was directing her to the stereo and CDs.

Rhyme lay still for a moment, breathing deeply from the exertion.

“The clues’re gone,” he reminded them. “There’s no way we can figure out where the next scene is. So we’re going for the big one – his safe house.”

“You think you can find it?” Sellitto asked.

Do we have a choice? Rhyme thought, and said nothing.

Banks hurried up the stairs. He hadn’t even stepped into the bedroom before Rhyme blurted, “What did they say? Tell me. Tell me.”

Rhyme knew that the tiny fleck of gold that Sachs had found was beyond the capabilities of Mel Cooper’s impromptu lab. He’d asked the young detective to speed it down to the FBI’s regional PERT office and have it analyzed.

“They’ll call us in the next half hour.”

“Half hour?” Rhyme muttered. “Didn’t they give it priority?”

“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should’ve seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if the metallurgy report wasn’t in your hands ASAP there’d be one mean mother – you get the picture – reaming their – you get the rest of the picture.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs said, “there’s something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he’d let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot.”

“Flail?”

“Cut the skin off it.”

“Flay,” Rhyme corrected.

“Oh. Anyway, he didn’t do anything. She said it was – in the end – like he couldn’t bring himself to cut her.”

“Just like the first scene – the man by the railroad tracks,” Sellitto offered.

“Interesting…” Rhyme reflected. “I thought he’d cut the vic’s finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl’s arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett ’s finger… There’s something about the way he sees his victims. Something…”

“Anatomical?”

“Exactly, Sachs.”

“Except the Ganz woman,” Sellitto said.

“My point,” Rhyme said. “He could’ve cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?”

Sellitto said, “What’s different about her? Can’t be that she’s a woman. Or she’s from out of town. So was the German girl.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her in front of her daughter,” Banks said.

“No,” Rhyme said, laughing grimly, “compassion isn’t his thing.”

Sachs said suddenly, “But that is one thing different about her – she’s a mother.”

Rhyme considered this, “That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn’t carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark.” He then asked Sachs, “Did she say anything else about the way he looked?”

Sachs flipped through her notebook.

“Same as before.” She read. “Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he -”

“Black gloves?” Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. “Not red?”

“She said black. I asked her if she was sure.”

“And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn’t it, Mel? Maybe that was from the gloves. So what’s the red leather from?”

Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it’s something close to him.”

Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. “What else did we find?”

“The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway.” Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. “Plenty o’ nothin’,” he announced. “Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar.”