“Sure.”

Jodie laughed dopily, eyelids half closed. “Well, some people’d say that’s not exactly how you, you know, figure out what’s good or bad.”

“Okay, what is good and bad?” Stephen responded. “I don’t do anything different than God does. Good people die and bad people die in a train wreck and nobody gets on God’s case because of it. Some professional killers call their victims ‘targets’ or ‘subjects.’ One guy I heard about calls them ‘corpses.’ Even before he kills them. Like, ‘The corpse is leaving his car. I’m targeting him.’ It’s easier for him to think of the victims that way, I guess. Me, I don’t care. I call ’em what they are. Who I’m after now are the Wife and the Friend. I already killed the Husband. That’s how I think of them. They’re people I kill, is all. No big deal.”

Jodie considered what he’d heard and said, “You know something? I don’t think you’re evil. You know why?”

“Why’s that?”

“Because evil is something that looks innocent but turns out to be bad. The thing about you is you’re exactly what you are. I think that’s good.”

Stephen flicked his scrubbed fingernails with a click. He felt himself blushing again. Finally, he asked, “I scare you, don’t I?”

“No,” Jodie said. “I wouldn’t want to have you against me. No sir, I wouldn’t want that. But I feel like we’re friends. I don’t think you’d hurt me.”

“No,” Stephen said. “We’re partners.”

“You talked about your stepfather. He still alive?”

“No, he died.”

“I’m sorry. When you mentioned him I was thinking about my father – he’s dead too. He said the thing he respected most in the world was craftsmanship. He liked watching a talented man do what he did best. That’s kind of like you.”

“Craftsmanship,” Stephen repeated, feeling swollen with inexplicable feelings. He watched Jodie hide the cash in a slit in his filthy mattress. “What’re you going to do with the money?”

Jodie sat up and looked at Stephen with dumb but earnest eyes. “Can I show you something?” The drugs made his voice slurred.

“Sure.”

He lifted a book out of his pocket. The title was Dependent No More.

“I stole it from this bookstore on Saint Marks Place. It’s for people who don’t want to be, you know, alcoholics or drug addicts anymore. It’s pretty good. It mentions these clinics you can go to. I found this place in New Jersey. You go in there and you spend a month – a whole month – but you come out and you’re clean. They say it really works.”

“That’s good of you,” Stephen said. “I approve of that.”

“Yeah, well,” Jodie curled up his face. “It costs fourteen thousand.”

“No shit.”

“For one month. Can you believe that?”

“Somebody’s making some bucks there.” Stephen made $150,000 for a hit, but he didn’t share this information with Jodie, his newfound friend and partner.

Jodie sighed, wiped his eyes. The drugs had made him weepy, it seemed. Like Stephen’s stepfather when he drank. “My whole life’s been so messed up,” he said. “I went to college. Oh, yeah. Didn’t do too bad either. I taught for a while. Worked for a company. Then I lost my job. Everything went bad. Lost my apartment… I’d always had a pill problem. Started stealing… Oh, hell…”

Stephen sat down next to him. “You’ll get your money and go into that clinic there. Get your life turned around.”

Jodie smiled blearily at him. “My father had this thing he said, you know? When there was something you had to do that was hard. He said don’t think about the hard part as a problem, just think about it as a factor. Like something to consider. He’d look me in the eye and say, ‘It’s not a problem, it’s just a factor.’ I keep trying to remember that.”

“Not a problem, just a factor,” Stephen repeated. “I like that.”

Stephen put his hand on Jodie’s leg to prove that he really did like it.

Soldier, what the fuck are you doing?

Sir, busy at the moment, sir. Will report in later.

Soldier -

Later, sir!

“Here’s to you,” Jodie said.

“No, to you,” Stephen said.

And they toasted, spring water and orange juice, to their strange alliance.

Hour 24 of 45

A LABYRINTH.

The New York City subway system extends for over 250 miles and incorporates more than a dozen separate tunnels that crisscross four of the five boroughs (Staten Island only being excluded, though the islanders, of course, have a famous ferry of their very own).

A satellite could find a sailboat adrift in the North Atlantic quicker than Lincoln Rhyme’s team could locate two men hiding in the New York subway.

The criminalist, Sellitto, Sachs, and Cooper were poring over a map of the system taped inelegantly to Lincoln Rhyme’s wall. Rhyme’s eyes scanned the different-colored lines representing the various routes, blue for Eighth Avenue, green for Lex, red for Broadway.

Rhyme had a special relationship with the cantankerous system. It was in the pit of a subway construction site that an oak beam had split and crushed Rhyme’s spine – just as he’d said, “Ah,” and leaned forward to lift a fiber, golden as an angel’s hair, from the body of a murder victim.

Yet even before the accident, subways played an important role in NYPD forensics. Rhyme studied them diligently when he was running IRD: because they covered so much terrain and incorporated so many different kinds of building materials over the years, you could often link a perp to a particular subway line, if not his neighborhood and station, on the basis of good trace evidence alone. Rhyme had collected subway exemplars for years – some of the samples dating to the prior century. (It had been in the 1860s that Alfred Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun and Scientific American, decided to adapt his idea of transmitting mail via small pneumatic tubes to moving people in large ones.)

Rhyme now ordered his computer to dial a number and in a few moments was connected with Sam Hoddleston, chief of the Transit Authority Police. Like the Housing Police, they were regular New York City cops, no different from NYPD, merely assigned to the transportation system. Hoddleston knew Rhyme from the old days and the criminalist could hear in the silence after he identified himself some fast mental tap-dancing; Hoddleston, like many of Rhyme’s former colleagues, didn’t know that Rhyme had returned from the near dead.

“Should we power-off any of the lines?” Hoddleston asked after Rhyme briefed him about the Dancer and his partner. “Do a field search?”

Sellitto heard the question on the speakerphone and shook his head.

Rhyme agreed. “No, we don’t want to tip our hand. Anyway, I think he’s in an abandoned area.”

“There aren’t many empty stations,” Hoddleston said. “But there’re a hundred deserted spurs and yards, work areas. Say, Lincoln, how’re you doing? I-”

“Fine, Sam. I’m fine,” Rhyme said briskly, deflecting the question as he always did. Then added, “We were talking – we think they’re probably going to stick to foot. Stay off the trains themselves. So we’re guessing they’re in Manhattan. We’ve got a map here and we’re going to need your help in narrowing it down some.”

“Whatever I can do,” the chief said. Rhyme couldn’t remember what he looked like. From his voice he sounded fit and athletic, but then Rhyme supposed he himself might seem like an Olympian to someone who couldn’t see his destroyed body.

Rhyme now considered the rest of the evidence that Sachs had found in the building next to the safe house – the evidence left by the Dancer’s partner.

He said to Hoddleston, “The dirt has a high moisture content and’s loaded with feldspar and quartz sand.”

“I remember you always like your dirt, Lincoln.”

“Useful, soil is,” he said, then continued. “Very little rock and none of it blasted or chipped, no limestone or Manhattan mica schist. So we’re looking at downtown. And from the amount of old wood particles, probably closer to Canal Street.”