“No. Other than the pictures.”

“Tape them up,” he instructed while scanning the chart, regretting that he hadn’t searched the scene himself-vicariously, that was, with Amelia Sachs, as they often did, via a microphone/headset or a high-definition video camera she wore. It seemed like a competent CS job, but not stellar. No photos of the nonscene rooms. And the knife…He saw the picture of the bloody weapon, beneath the bed. An officer was lifting a flap of dust ruffle to get a good shot. Was it invisible with the cloth down (which meant the perp might logically have missed it in the frenzy of the moment) or was it visible, suggesting it had been left intentionally as planted evidence?

He studied the picture of packing material on the floor, apparently what the Prescott painting had been wrapped in.

“Something’s wrong,” he whispered.

Sachs, standing at the whiteboard, glanced his way.

“The painting,” Rhyme continued.

“What about it?”

“LaGrange suggested two motives. One, Arthur stole the Prescott as a cover because he wanted to kill Alice to get her out of his life.”

“Right.”

“But,” Rhyme went on, “to make a homicide seem incidental to a burglary, a smart perp wouldn’t steal the one thing in the apartment that could be connected to him. Remember, Art had owned a Prescott. And he had direct-mail flyers about them.”

“Sure, Rhyme, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“And say he really did want the painting and couldn’t afford it. Well, it’s a hell of a lot safer and easier to break in and cart it off during the day when the owner’s at work, rather than murder them for it.” His cousin’s demeanor too, though not high in Rhyme’s arsenal when he assessed guilt or innocence, nagged. “Maybe he wasn’t playing innocent. Maybe he was innocent… Pretty incriminating, you said? No. Too incriminating.”

He thought to himself: Let’s just postulate that he didn’t do it. If not, then the consequences were significant. Because this wasn’t simply a case of mistaken identity; the evidence matched too closely-including a conclusive connection between her blood and his car. No, if Art was innocent, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to set him up.

“I’m thinking he was framed.”

“Why?”

“Motive?” he muttered. “We don’t care at this point. The relevant question now is how. We answer that, it can point us to who. We might get why along the way, but that’s not our priority. So we start with a premise that someone else, Mr. X, murdered Alice Sanderson and stole the painting, then framed Arthur. Now, Sachs, how could he have done it?”

A wince-her arthritis again-and she sat. She thought for several moments, then said, “Mr. X followed Arthur and followed Alice. He saw they had an interest in art, put them together at the gallery and found their identities.”

“Mr. X knows she owns a Prescott. He wants one but can’t afford it.”

“Right.” Sachs nodded at the evidence chart. “Then he breaks into Arthur’s house, sees that he owns Pringles, Edge shave cream, TruGro fertilizer, and Chicago Cutlery knives. He steals some to plant. He knows what shoes Arthur wears, so he can leave the footprint, and he gets some of the dirt from the state park on Arthur’s shovel…

“Now, let’s think about May twelfth. Somehow Mr. X knows that Art always leaves work early on Thursdays and goes running in a deserted park-so he doesn’t have an alibi. He goes to the vic’s apartment, kills her, steals the painting and calls from a pay phone to report the screams and seeing a man take the painting to a car that looks a lot like Arthur’s, with a partial tag number. Then he heads out to Arthur’s house in New Jersey and leaves the traces of blood, the dirt, the washcloth, the shovel.”

The phone rang. The caller was Arthur’s defense lawyer. The man sounded harried as he reiterated everything that the assistant district attorney had explained. He offered nothing that might help them and, in fact, tried several times to talk them into pressuring Arthur to take a plea. “They’ll nail him up,” the man said. “Do him a favor. I’ll get him fifteen years.”

“That’ll destroy him,” Rhyme said.

“It won’t destroy him as much as a life sentence.”

Rhyme said a chilly good-bye and hung up. He stared again at the evidence board.

Then something else occurred to him.

“What is it, Rhyme?” Sachs had noticed that his eyes were rising to the ceiling.

“Think maybe he’s done this before?”

“How do you mean?”

“Assuming the goal-the motive-was to steal the painting, well, it’s not exactly a onetime score. Not like a Renoir you fence for ten million and disappear forever. The whole thing smells like an enterprise. The perp’s hit on a smart way to get away with a crime. And he’s going to keep at it until somebody stops him.”

“Yeah, good point. So we should look for thefts of other paintings.”

“No. Why should he steal just paintings? It could be anything. But there’s one common element.”

Sachs frowned then provided the answer. “Homicide.”

“Exactly. Since the perp frames somebody else, he has to murder the victims-because they could identify him. Call somebody at Homicide. At home if you need to. We’re looking for the same scenario: an underlying crime, maybe a theft, the vic murdered and strong circumstantial evidence.”

“And maybe a DNA link that might’ve been planted.”

“Good,” he said, excited at the thought they might be on to something here. “And if he’s sticking to his formula, there’ll be an anonymous witness who gave nine-one-one some specific identifying information.”

She walked to a desk in the corner of the lab, sat and placed the call.

Rhyme leaned his head back in his wheelchair and observed his partner on the phone. He noticed dried blood in her thumbnail. A mark was just visible above her ear, half hidden by her straight red hair. Sachs did this frequently, scratching her scalp, teasing her nails, damaging herself in small ways-both a habit and an indicator of the stress that drove her.

She was nodding, and her eyes took on a focused gaze, as she wrote. His own heart-though he couldn’t feel it directly-had speeded up. She’d learned something significant. Her pen dried up. She tossed it onto the floor and whipped out another as quickly as she drew her pistol in combat shooting competitions.

After ten minutes she hung up.

“Hey, Rhyme, get this.” She sat next to him, in a wicker chair. “I talked to Flintlock.”

“Ah, good choice.”

Joseph Flintick, his nickname intentionally or otherwise a reference to the old-time gun, had been a homicide detective when Rhyme was a rookie. The testy old guy was familiar with nearly every murder that had been committed in New York City-and many nearby-during his lengthy tenure. At an age when he should have been visiting his grandchildren, Flintlock was working Sundays. Rhyme wasn’t surprised.

“I laid it all out for him and he came back with two cases that might fit our profile right off the top of his head. One was a theft of rare coins, worth about fifty G. The other a rape.”

“Rape?” This added a deeper, and much more disturbing, element to the case.

“Yep. In both of them an anonymous witness called to report the crime and gave some information that was instrumental in ID’ing the perp-like the wit calling about your cousin’s car.”

“Both male callers, of course.”

“Right. And the city offered a reward but neither of them came forward.”

“What about the evidence?”

“Flintlock didn’t remember it too clearly. But he did say that the trace and circumstantial connections were right on. Just what happened to your cousin-five or six types of associated class evidence at the scene and in the perps’ houses. And in both cases the victims’ blood was found on a rag or article of clothing in the suspects’ residence.”