Rhyme said, “I’ve called Mel Cooper in. He’ll be working the lab downstairs. The Hansen case is task-forced so we’re getting Fred Dellray to represent the feds. He’ll have agents for us if we need them and’s clearing one of U.S. Marshal’s wit-protection safe houses for the Clay woman and Hale.”

Lincoln Rhyme’s opulent memory intruded momentarily and he lost track of what the detective was saying. An image of the office where the Dancer had left the bomb five years ago came to mind again.

Remembering: The trash can, blown open like a black rose. The smell of the explosive – the choking chemical scent, nothing at all like wood-fire smoke. The silky alligatoring on the charred wood. The seared bodies of his techs, drawn into the pugilistic attitude by the flames.

He was saved from this horrid reverie by the buzz of the fax machine. Jerry Banks snagged the first sheet. “Crime scene report from the crash,” he announced.

Rhyme’s head snapped toward the machine eagerly. “Time to go to work, boys and girls!”

Wash ’em. Wash ’em off.

Soldier, are those hands clean?

Sir, they’re getting there, sir.

The solid man, in his mid-thirties, stood in the washroom of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, lost in his task.

Scrub, scrub, scrub…

He paused and looked out the men’s room door. Nobody seemed interested that he’d been in here for nearly ten minutes.

Back to scrubbing.

Stephen Kall examined his cuticles and big red knuckles.

Lookin’ clean, lookin’ clean. No worms. Not a single one.

He’d been feeling fine as he moved the black van off the street and parked it deep in an underground garage. Stephen had taken what tools he needed from the back of the vehicle and climbed the ramp, slipping out onto the busy street. He’d worked in New York several times before but he could never get used to all the people, a thousand people on this block alone.

Makes me feel cringey.

Makes me feel wormy.

And so he stopped here in the men’s room for a little scrub.

Soldier, aren’t you through with that yet? You’ve got two targets left to eliminate.

Sir, almost, sir. Have to remove the risk of any trace evidence prior to proceeding with the operation, sir.

Oh, for the luva Christ…

The hot water pouring over his hands. Scrubbing with a brush he carried with him in a plastic Baggie. Squirting the pink soap from the dispenser. And scrubbing some more.

Finally he examined the ruddy hands and dried them under the hot air of the blower. No towels, no telltale fibers.

No worms either.

Stephen wore camouflage today though not military olive drab or Desert Storm beige. He was in jeans, Reeboks, a work shirt, a gray windbreaker speckled with paint drips. On his belt was his cell phone and a large tape measure. He looked like any other contractor in Manhattan and was wearing this outfit today because no one would think twice about a workman wearing cloth gloves on a spring day.

Walking outside.

Still lots of people. But his hands were clean and he wasn’t cringey anymore.

He paused at the corner and looked down the street at the building that had been the Husband’s and Wife’s town house but was the Wife’s alone now because the Husband had been neatly blown into a million small pieces over the Land of Lincoln.

So, two witnesses were still alive and they both had to be dead before the grand jury convened on Monday. He glanced at his bulky stainless-steel watch. It was nine-thirty Saturday morning.

Soldier, is that enough time to get them both?

Sir, I may not get them both now but I still have nearly forty-eight hours, sir. That is more than sufficient time to locate and neutralize both targets, sir.

But, Soldier, do you mind challenges?

Sir, I live for challenges, sir.

There was a single squad car in front of the town house. Which he’d expected.

All right, we have a known kill zone in front of the house, an unknown one inside…

He looked up and down the street, then started along the sidewalk, his scrubbed hands tingling. The backpack weighed close to sixty pounds but he hardly felt it. Crew-cut Stephen was mostly muscle.

As he walked he pictured himself as a local. Anonymous. He didn’t think of himself as Stephen or as Mr. Kall or Todd Johnson or Stan Bledsoe or any of the dozens of other aliases he’d used over the past ten years. His real name was like a rusty gym set in the backyard, something you were aware of but didn’t really see.

He turned suddenly and stepped into the doorway of the building opposite the Wife’s town house. Stephen pushed open the front door and looked out at the large glass windows in front, partially obscured by a flowering dogwood tree. He put on a pair of expensive yellow-tinted shooting glasses and the glare from the window vanished. He could see figures moving around inside. One cop… no, two cops. A man with his back to the window. Maybe the Friend, the other witness he’d been hired to kill. And… yes! There was the Wife. Short. Homely. Boyish. She was wearing a white blouse. It made a good target.

She stepped out of view.

Stephen bent down and unzipped his backpack.

A SITTING TRANSFER into the Storm Arrow wheelchair.

Then Rhyme took over, gripping the plastic straw of the sip-and-puff controller in his mouth, and he drove into the tiny elevator, formerly a closet, that carried him unceremoniously down to the first floor of his town house.

In the 1890s, when the place had been built, the room into which Lincoln Rhyme now wheeled had been a parlor off the dining room. Plaster-and-lath construction, fleur-de-lis crown molding, domed icon recesses, and solid oak floorboards joined as tight as welded steel. An architect, though, would have been horrified to see that Rhyme had had the wall separating the two rooms demolished and large holes dug into the remaining walls to run additional electrical lines. The combined rooms were now a messy space filled not with Tiffany’s stained glass or moody landscapes by George Inness but with very different objets d’art: density-gradient tubes, computers, compound microscopes, comparison ’scopes, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a PoliLight alternative light source, fuming frames for raising friction ridge prints. A very expensive scanning electron microscope hooked to an energy dispersive X-ray unit sat prominently in the corner. Here too were the mundane tools of the criminalist’s trade: goggles, latex and cut-resistant gloves, beakers, screwdrivers and pliers, postmortem finger spoons, tongs, scalpels, tongue depressors, cotton swabs, jars, plastic bags, examining trays, probes. A dozen pairs of chopsticks (Rhyme ordered his assistants to lift evidence the way they picked up dim sum at Ming Wa ’s).

Rhyme steered the sleek, candy-apple red Storm Arrow into position beside the worktable. Thom placed the microphone over his head and booted up the computer.

A moment later Sellitto and Banks appeared in the doorway, joined by another man who’d just arrived. He was tall and rangy, with skin as dark as tires. He was wearing a green suit and an unearthly yellow shirt.

“Hello, Fred.”

“ Lincoln.”

“Hey.” Sachs nodded to Fred Dellray as she entered the room. She’d forgiven him for arresting her not long ago – an interagency squabble – and they now had a curious affinity, this tall, beautiful cop and the tall, quirky agent. They were both, Rhyme had decisively concluded, people cops (he himself being an evidence cop). Dellray trusted forensics as little as Rhyme trusted the testimony of witnesses. As for former beat cop Sachs, well, there was nothing Rhyme could do about her natural proclivities but he was determined that she push those talents aside and become the best criminalist in New York, if not the country. A goal that was easily within her grasp, even if she herself didn’t know it.