“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

Pliers out… unbolt the latch… twist the knob.

Glock up. Apply poundage. Now!

The door flew outward.

But there was no bomb or other trap. Just the pale, blood-slicked body of John Innelman, unconscious, tumbling to her feet.

She barked a soft scream. “He’s here. Need medics! He’s cut bad.”

Sachs bent over him. Two EMS techs and more agents ran up, Dellray with them, grim faced.

“What’d he do to you, John? Oh, man.” The lanky agent stood back while the medics went to work. They cut off much of his clothing and examined the stab wounds. Innelman’s eyes were half open, glazed.

“Is he…?” Dellray asked.

“Alive, just barely.”

The medics slapped pads on the slashes, put a tourniquet on his leg and arm, and then ran a plasma line. “Get him in the bus. We gotta move. I mean, move!”

They placed the agent on a gurney and hurried down the corridor, Dellray with him, head down, muttering to himself and squeezing his dead cigarette between his fingers.

“Could he talk?” Rhyme asked. “Any clue where the Dancer went?”

“No. He was unconscious. I don’t know if they can save him. Jesus.”

“Don’t get raided, Sachs. We’ve got a crime scene to analyze. We have to find out where the Dancer is, if he’s still around. Go back to the storeroom. See if there are exterior doors or windows.”

As she walked to it she asked, “How’d you know about the closet?”

“Because of the direction of the drops. He shoved Innelman inside and soaked a rag in the cop’s blood. He walked to the elevator, swinging the rag. The drops were moving in different directions when they fell. So they had a teardrop appearance. And since he tried leading us to the elevator, we should look in the opposite direction for his escape route. The storeroom. Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Describe it.”

“There’s a window looking out on the alley. Looks like he started to open it. But it’s puttied shut. No doors.” She looked out the window. “I can’t see any of the trooper’s positions, though. I don’t know what tipped him.”

“You can’t see any of the troopers,” Rhyme said cynically. “He could. Now, walk the grid and let’s see what we find.”

She searched the scene carefully, walking the grid, then vacuumed for trace and carefully bagged the filters.

“What do you see? Anything?”

She shone her light on the walls and she found two mismatched blocks. A tight squeeze, but someone limber could have fit through there.

“Got his exit route, Rhyme. He went through the wall. Some loose concrete blocks.”

“Don’t open it. Get SWAT there.”

She called several agents down to the room and they pulled the blocks out, sweeping the inner chamber with flashlights mounted on the barrels of their H &K submachine guns.

“Clear,” one agent called. Sachs drew her weapon and slipped into the cool, dank space.

It was a narrow declining ramp filled with rubble, leading through a hole in the foundation. Water dripped. She was careful to step on large chunks of concrete and leave the damp earth untouched.

“What do you see, Sachs? Tell me!”

She waved the PoliLight wand over the places where the Dancer would logically have gripped with his hands and stepped with his feet. “Whoa, Rhyme.”

“What?”

“Fingerprints. Fresh latents… Wait. But here’re the glove prints too. In blood. From holding the rag. I don’t get it. It’s like a cave… Maybe he took the gloves off for some reason. Maybe he thought he was safe in the tunnel.”

Then she looked down and shone the eerie glow of yellow-green light at her feet. “Oh.”

“What?”

“They’re not his prints. He’s with somebody else.”

“Somebody else? How do you know?”

“There’s another set of footprints too. They’re both fresh. One bigger than the other. They go off in the same direction, running. Jesus, Rhyme.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It means he’s got a partner.”

“Come on, Sachs. The glass is half full.” Rhyme added cheerfully, “It means we’ll have twice as much evidence to help us track him down.”

“I was thinking,” she said darkly, “that it meant he’d be twice as dangerous.”

“What’ve you got?” Lincoln Rhyme asked.

Sachs had returned to his town house and she and Mel Cooper were looking over the evidence collected at the scene. Sachs and SWAT had followed the footsteps into a Con Ed access tunnel, where they lost track of both the Dancer and his companion. It looked as if the men had climbed to the street and escaped through a manhole.

She gave Cooper the print she’d found in the entrance to the tunnel. He scanned it into the computer and sent it off to the feds for an AFIS search.

Then she held up two electrostatic prints for Rhyme to examine. “These’re the footprints in the tunnel. This one’s the Dancer’s.” She lifted one of the prints – transparent, like an X ray. “It matches a print in the shrink’s office he broke into on the first floor.”

“Wearing average ordinary factory shoes,” Rhyme said.

“You’d think he’d be in combat boots,” Sellitto muttered.

“No, those’d be too obvious. Work shoes have rubber soles for gripping and steel caps in the toes. They’re as good as boots if you don’t need ankle support Hold the other one closer, Sachs.”

The smaller shoes were very worn at the heel and the ball of the foot. There was a large hole in the right shoe and through it you could see a lattice of skin wrinkles.

“No socks. Could be his friend’s homeless.”

“Why’s he got somebody with him?” Cooper asked.

“Don’t know,” Sellitto said. “Word is he always works alone. He uses people but he doesn’t trust them.”

Just what I’ve been accused of, Rhyme thought. He said, “And leaving fingerprints at the scene? This guy’s no pro. He must have something the Dancer needs.”

“A way out of the building, for one thing,” Sachs suggested.

“That could be it.”

“And’s probably dead now,” she suggested.

Probably, Rhyme agreed silently.

“The prints,” Cooper said. “They’re pretty small. I’d guess size eight male.”

The size of the sole doesn’t necessarily correspond to shoe size and provides even less insight into the stature of the person wearing them, but it was reasonable to conclude the Dancer’s partner had a slight build.

Turning to the trace evidence, Cooper mounted samples onto a slide and slipped it under the compound ’scope. He patched the image through to Rhyme’s computer.

“Command mode, cursor left,” Rhyme ordered into his microphone. “Stop. Double click.” He examined the computer monitor. “More of the mortar from the cinder block. Dirt and dust… Where’d you get this, Sachs?”

“I scraped it from around the cinder blocks and vacuumed the floor of the tunnel. I also found a nest behind some boxes where it looked like somebody’d been hiding.”

“Good. Okay, Mel, gas it. There’s a lot of stuff here I don’t recognize.”

The chromatograph rumbled, separating the compounds, and sent the resulting vapors to the spectrometer for identification. Cooper examined the screen.

He exhaled a surprised breath. “I’m surprised his friend’s able to walk at all.”

“Little more specific there, Mel.”

“He’s a drugstore, Lincoln. We’ve got secobarbital, phenobarbital, Dexedrine, amobarbital, meprobamate, chlordiazepoxide, diazepam.”

“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Reds, dexies, blue devils…”

Cooper continued, “Lactose and sucrose too. Calcium, vitamins, enzymes consistent with dairy products.”

“Baby formula,” Rhyme muttered. “Dealers use it to cut drugs.”

“So the Dancer’s got himself a cluckhead for a sidekick. Go figure.”

Sachs said, “All those doctors’ offices there… This guy must’ve been boosting pills.”

“Log on to FINEST,” Rhyme said. “Get a list of every drugstore cowboy they’ve got.”