“I won’t touch a thing. Cross my heart. Just be a pleasure to watch you work, honey.”

“Sachs,” Rhyme whispered, “tell him to get the fuck out of your crime scene.”

“Jim, get the fuck out of my crime scene.”

“Or you’ll report him.”

“Or I’ll report you.”

“Oooo, gonna be that way, is it?” He held his hands up in surrender. The last of the flirt drained from his slick grin.

“Get going, Sachs.”

The trooper ambled away slowly enough to drag some of his pride with him. He looked back once but a scathing retort eluded him.

Amelia Sachs began to walk the grid.

There were several different ways to search crime scenes. A strip search – walking in a serpentine pattern – was usually used for outdoor scenes because it covered the most ground quickly. But Rhyme wouldn’t hear of that. He used the grid pattern – covering the entire area back and forth in one direction, walking one foot at a time, then turning perpendicular and walking back and forth the other way. When he was running IRD, “walking the grid” became synonymous with searching a crime scene, and heaven help any cops Rhyme caught taking shortcuts or daydreaming when they were on the grid.

Sachs now spent an hour moving back and forth. While the spray truck might’ve eliminated prints and trace evidence, it wouldn’t destroy anything larger that the Dancer might’ve dropped, nor would it ruin footprints or body impressions left in the mud beside the taxiway.

But she found nothing.

“Hell, Rhyme, not a thing.”

“Ah, Sachs, I’ll bet there is. I’ll bet there’s plenty. Just takes a little bit more effort than most scenes. The Dancer’s not like other perps, remember.”

Oh, that again.

“Sachs.” His voice low and seductive. She felt a shiver. “Get into him,” Rhyme whispered. “You know what I mean.”

She knew exactly what he meant. Hated the thought. But, oh, yes, Sachs knew. The best criminalists were able to find a place in their minds where the line between hunter and hunted was virtually nonexistent. They moved through the crime scene not as cops tracking down clues but as the perp himself, feeling his desires, lusts, fears. Rhyme had this talent. And though she tried to deny it, Sachs did too. (She’d searched a scene a month ago – a father had murdered his wife and child – and managed to find the murder weapon when no one else had. After the case she hadn’t been able to work for a week and had been plagued by flashbacks that she’d been the one who stabbed the victims to death. Saw their faces, heard their screams.)

Another pause. “Talk to me,” he said. And finally the edginess in his voice was gone. “You’re him. You’re walking where he’s walked, you’re thinking the way he thinks…”

He’d said words like these to her before, of course. But now – as with everything else about the Dancer – it seemed to her that Rhyme had more in mind than just finding obscure evidence. No, she sensed that he was desperate to know about this perp. Who he was, what made him kill.

Another shiver. An image in her thoughts: back to the other night. The lights of the airfield, the sound of airplane engines, the smell of jet exhaust.

“Come on, Amelia… You’re him. You’re the Coffin Dancer. You know Ed Carney’s on the plane; you know you have to get the bomb on board. Just think about it for a minute or two.”

And she did, summoning up from somewhere a need to kill.

He continued, speaking in an eerie, melodic voice. “You’re brilliant,” he said. “You have no morals whatsoever. You’ll kill anyone, you’ll do anything to get to your goal. You divert attention, you use people… Your deadliest weapon is deception.”

I lay in wait.

My deadliest weapon…

She closed her eyes.

…is deception.

Sachs felt a dark hope, a vigilance, a hunt lust.

“I -”

He continued softly. “Is there any distraction, any diversion you can try?”

Eyes open now. “The whole area’s empty. Nothing to distract the pilots with.”

“Where are you hiding?”

“The hangars’re all boarded up. The grass is too short for cover. There’re no trucks or oil drums. No alleys. No nooks.”

In her gut: desperation. What’m I going to do? I’ve got to plant the bomb. I don’t have any time. Lights… there’re lights everywhere. What? What should I do?

She said, “I can’t hide around the other side of the hangars. There’re lots of workers. It’s too exposed. They’ll see me.”

For a moment, Sachs herself floated back into her mind and she wondered, as she often did, why Lincoln Rhyme had the power to conjure her into someone else. Sometimes it angered her. Sometimes it thrilled.

Dropping into a crouch, ignoring the pain in her knees from the arthritis that had tormented her off and on for the past ten of her thirty-three years. “It’s all too open here. I feel exposed.”

“What’re you thinking?”

There’re people looking for me. I can’t let them find me. I can’t!

This is risky. Stay hidden. Stay down.

Nowhere to hide.

If I’m seen, everything’s ruined. They’ll find the bomb; they’ll know I’m after all three witnesses. They’ll put them in protective custody. I’ll never get them then. I can’t let that happen.

Feeling his panic she turned back to the only possible place to hide. The hangar beside the taxiway. In the wall facing her was a single broken window, about three by four feet. She’d ignored it because it was covered with a sheet of rotting plywood, nailed to the frame on the inside.

She approached it slowly. The ground in front was gravel; there were no footprints.

“There’s a boarded-up window, Rhyme. Plywood on the inside. The glass is broken.”

“Is it dirty, the glass that’s still in the window?”

“Filthy.”

“And the edges?”

“No, they’re clean.” She understood why he’d asked the question. “The glass was broken recently!”

“Right. Push the board. Hard.”

It fell inward without any resistance and hit the floor with a huge bang.

“What was that?” Rhyme shouted. “Sachs, are you all right?”

“Just the plywood,” she answered, once more spooked by his uneasiness.

She shone her halogen flashlight through the hangar. It was deserted.

“What do you see, Sachs?”

“It’s empty. A few dusty boxes. There’s gravel on the floor -”

“That was him!” Rhyme answered. “He broke in the window and threw gravel inside, so he could stand on the floor and not leave footprints. It’s an old trick. Any footprints in front of the window? Bet it’s more gravel,” he added sourly.

“Is.”

“Okay. Search the window. Then climb inside. But be sure to look for booby traps first. Remember the trash can a few years ago.”

Stop it, Rhyme! Stop it.

Sachs shined the light around the space again. “It’s clean, Rhyme. No traps. I’m examining the window frame.”

The PoliLight showed nothing other than a faint mark left by a finger in a cotton glove. “No fiber, just the cotton pattern.”

“Anything in the hangar? Anything worth stealing?”

“No. It’s empty.”

“Good,” Rhyme said.

“Why good?” she asked. “I said there’s no print.”

“Ah, but it means it’s him, Sachs. It’s not logical for someone to break in wearing cotton gloves when there’s nothing to steal.”

She searched carefully. No footprints, no fingerprints, no visible evidence. She ran the Dustbuster and bagged the trace.

“The glass and gravel?” she asked. “Paper bag?”

“Yes.”

Moisture often destroyed trace and though it looked unprofessional certain evidence was best transported in brown paper bags rather than in plastic.

“Okay, Rhyme. I’ll have it back to you in forty minutes.”

They disconnected.

As she packed the bags carefully into the RRV, Sachs felt edgy, as she often did just after searching a scene where she’d found no obvious evidence – guns or knives or the perp’s wallet. The trace she’d collected might have a clue as to who the Dancer was and where he was hiding. But the whole effort could have been a bust too. She was anxious to get back to Rhyme’s lab and see what he could find.