Green-lighted to kill…

Lincoln the Worm had decided he’d die. Stephen was furious.

“Wait there,” he ordered Jodie.

Stephen plugged the headset back into the man’s transceiver and listened. They were on the Special Operations channel and there must have been a dozen or so cops and agents, calling in as they searched different parts of the building.

He didn’t have much time, but he had to slow them up.

Stephen led the dazed agent out into the yellow hallway.

He pulled out his knife again.

Hour 23 of 45

“DAMN. DAMN!” Rhyme snapped, flecking his chin with spittle. Thom stepped up to the chair and wiped it, but Rhyme angrily shook him away.

“Bo?” he called into his microphone.

“Go ahead,” Haumann said from the command van.

“I think somehow he made us and’s going to fight his way out. Tell your agents to form defensive teams. I don’t want anybody alone. Move everybody into the building. I think – ”

“Hold on… Hold on. Oh, no…”

“Bo? Sachs?… Anybody?”

But nobody answered.

Rhyme heard shouting voices through the radio. The transmission was cut off. Then staccato bursts: “…assistance. We’ve got a blood trail… In the office building. Right, right… no… downstairs… Basement. Innelman’s not reporting in. He was… basement. All units move, move. Come on, move!…”

Rhyme called, “Bell, you hear me? Double up on the principals. Do not, repeat, do not leave them unguarded. The Dancer’s loose and we don’t know where he is.”

Roland Bell’s calm voice came over the line. “Got ’em under our wing. Nobody’s getting in here.”

An infuriating wait. Unbearable. Rhyme wanted to scream with frustration.

Where was he?

A snake in a dark room…

Then one by one the troopers and agents called in, telling Haumann and Dellray that they’d secured one floor after another.

Finally, Rhyme heard: “Basement’s secure. But Jesus Lord there’s a lot of blood down here. And Innelman’s gone. We can’t find him! Jesus, all this blood!”

“Rhyme, can you hear me?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m in the basement of the office building,” Amelia Sachs said into her stalk mike, looking around her.

The walls were filthy yellow concrete and the floors were painted battleship gray. But you hardly noticed the decor of the dank place; blood spatter was everywhere, like a horrific Jackson Pollock painting.

The poor agent, she thought. Innelman. Better find him fast. Someone bleeding this much couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.

“You have the kit?” Rhyme asked her.

“We don’t have time! All the blood, we’ve got to find him!”

“Steady, Sachs. The kit. Open the kit.”

She sighed. “All right! Got it.”

The crime scene blood kit contained a ruler, protractor with string attached, tape measure, the Kastle-Meyer Reagent presumptive field test. Luminol too – which detects iron oxide residue of blood even when a perp scrubs away all visual trace.

“It’s just a mess, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to figure out anything.”

“Oh, the scene’ll tell us more than you think, Sachs. It’ll tell us plenty.”

Well, if anybody could make sense of this macabre setting, it would be Rhyme; she knew that he and Mel Cooper were long-standing members of the International Association of Blood Pattern Analysts. (She didn’t know which was more disturbing – the gruesome blood spatter at crime scenes or the fact that there was a group of people who specialized in the subject.) But this seemed hopeless.

“We’ve got to find him…”

“Sachs, calm down… You with me?”

After a moment she said, “Okay.”

“All you need for now is the ruler,” he said. “First, tell me what you see.”

“There’re drips all over the place here.”

“Blood spatter’s very revealing. But it’s meaningless unless the surface it’s on is uniform. What’s the floor like?”

“Smooth concrete.”

“Good. How big are the drops? Measure them.”

“He’s dying, Rhyme.”

“How big?” he snapped.

“All different sizes. There’re hundreds of them about three-quarters of an inch. Some are bigger. About an inch and a quarter. Thousands of very little ones. Like a spray.”

“Forget the little ones. They’re ‘overcast’ drops, satellites of the others. Describe the biggest ones. Shape?”

“Mostly round.”

“Scalloped edges?”

“Yes,” she muttered. “But there are some that just have smooth edges. Here’re some in front of me. They’re a little smaller, though.”

Where is he? she wondered. Innelman. A man she’d never met. Missing and bleeding like a fountain.

“Sachs?”

“What?” she snapped.

“What about the smaller drops? Tell me about them.”

“We don’t have time to do this!”

“We don’t have time not to,” he said calmly.

God damn you, Rhyme, she thought, then said, “All right.” She measured. “They’re about a half inch. Perfectly round. No scalloped edges.”

“Where are those?” he asked urgently. “At one end of the corridor, or the other?”

“Mostly in the middle. There’s a storeroom at the end of the hall. Inside there and near it they’re bigger and have ragged or scalloped edges. At the other end of the corridor, they’re smaller.”

“Okay, okay,” Rhyme said absently, then he announced, “here’s the story… What’s the agent’s name?”

“Innelman. John Innelman. He’s a friend of Dellray’s.”

“The Dancer got Innelman in the storeroom, stabbed him once, high. Debilitated him, probably arm or neck. Those are the big, uneven drops. Then he led him down the corridor, stabbing him again, lower. Those are the smaller, rounder ones. The shorter the distance blood falls, the more even the edges.”

“Why’d he do that?” she gasped.

“To slow us down. He knows we’ll look for a wounded agent before we start after him.”

He’s right, she thought, but we’re not looking fast enough!

“How long’s the corridor?”

She sighed, looked down it. “About fifty feet, give or take, and the blood trail covers the whole thing.”

“Any footprints in the blood?”

“Dozens. They go everywhere. Wait… There’s a service elevator. I didn’t see it at first. That’s where the trail leads! He must be inside. We have to -”

“No, Sachs, wait. That’s too obvious.”

“We have to get the elevator door open. I’m calling the Fire Department for somebody with a Halligan tool or an elevator key. They can -”

Calmly Rhyme said, “Listen to me. Do the drops leading to the elevator look like teardrops? With the tails pointing in different directions?”

“He’s got to be in the elevator! There’re smears on the door. He’s dying, Rhyme! Will you listen to me!”

“Teardrops, Sachs?” he asked soothingly. “Do they look like tadpoles?”

She looked down. They did. Perfect tadpoles, with the tails pointing in a dozen different directions.

“Yeah, Rhyme. They do.”

“Backtrack until those stop.”

This was crazy. Innelman was bleeding out in the elevator shaft. She gazed at the metal door for a moment, thought about ignoring Rhyme, but then trotted back down the corridor.

To the place where they stopped.

“Here, Rhyme. They stop here.”

“It’s at a closet or door?”

“Yes, how’d you know?”

“And it’s bolted from the outside?”

“That’s right.”

How the hell does he do it?

“So the search team’d see the bolt and pass it by – the Dancer couldn’t very well bolt himself inside. Well, Innelman’s in there. Open the door, Sachs. Use the pliers on the handle, not the knob itself. There’s a chance we can lift a print. And Sachs?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he left a bomb. He hardly had time. But whatever shape the agent’s in, and it won’t be good, ignore him for a minute and look for any traps first.”