Tall, red-haired Amelia Sachs stood in the corner, beside frumpy Lon Sellitto. They both wore black suits.

Her eyes gazed down at Lincoln Rhyme’s obituary.

Sellitto glanced down at it. “Weird, hm?”

She gave a faint, unhappy laugh, then shook her head.

“I felt exactly the same way. Hard enough to think about the idea, you know, without seeing it in black-and-white.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

Sellitto looked at his watch. “Well, it’s about time.”

The hour was close to seven p.m., Monday, when the obit announced the memorial service was about to start.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The two shared a glance, left the town house. Sachs locked the door. She glanced up at Lincoln Rhyme’s darkened bedroom, outside of which falcons nested on the ledge. She and Sellitto started down the street toward the Society for Ethical Culture, which was just a short walk away.

Amelia Sachs returned to the town house, accompanied by a group of other officers.

Casual observers might have thought that the cops were returning from the memorial service for a reception at the home of the deceased.

But they’d have been wrong. The hour was merely 7:20, which wouldn’t have allowed nearly enough time for a proper service, even for someone as unspiritual as Lincoln Rhyme. And a closer look at the officers would have revealed that they had their weapons drawn and were whispering into microphones held in hands or protruding from headsets.

The dozen officers split into two groups, and on word from Lon Sellitto at a nearby command post, one sped through the front door, another jogged around back.

Amelia Sachs, not surprisingly, was the first one through the front door.

The lights flashed on and she crouched in the doorway, ignoring the painful griping of arthritic joints as she trained her Glock on an astonished man in a suit and dark blue shirt, bending over an evidence table. He was surprised in the act of picking up a plastic bag in his latex-gloved fingers.

“Freeze,” Sachs barked, and he did, noting undoubtedly the steadiness of her hand holding the pistol and the look in her eye that explained she was more than prepared to fire it.

“I-”

“Hands on your head.”

The solidly built middle-aged man sighed in disgust, dropped the bag, and complied. “Look, I can explain.”

Sachs wondered how often she’d heard that in her years as a cop, at moments just like this.

“Cuff him, search him,” she barked to young, spiky-haired Ron Pulaski and the other officers on the takedown team. “He’s a cop. Remember, he might have two weapons.”

They relieved the man of his service Glock and, yep, a backup in an ankle holster, then cuffed him.

“You don’t understand.”

Sachs had heard that quite a bit too.

“Detective Peter Antonini, you’re under arrest for murder.” She offered up the mantra of the Miranda warning, then asked, “Do you wish to waive your right to remain silent?”

“No, I sure as hell don’t.”

“There’s not much he needs to say anyway,” said a new voice in the room. Lincoln Rhyme wheeled his TDX wheelchair out of the small elevator that connected the lab with the upstairs bedroom. He nodded at the examination table. “Looks like the evidence tells it all.”

“You?” Antonini gasped. “You’re… you were dead.”

“I thought you wanted to remain silent,” Rhyme reminded him, enjoying the look of absolute astonishment on the guilty man’s face.

The criminalist wheeled to the evidence table and looked over what the officers had pulled from Antonini’s pocket-Baggies of hair and dirt and other trace evidence, which he had intended to substitute for the evidence sitting on the table, evidence the officer believed would convict him of murder.

“You son of a bitch.”

“He keeps talking,” Rhyme said, amused. “What’s the point of Miranda?”

At which point detective second-class Peter Antonini, attached to Major Cases, did indeed fall silent as Sachs called Sellitto in the command van and told him about the successful takedown. Sellitto would in turn relay the news to the brass at One Police Plaza.

You were dead.…

Rhyme’s phony death and the obituary had been a last-ditch effort to solve a series of crimes that cut to the heart of the NYPD, crimes that might have gone unnoticed if not for an offhand observation made by Ron Pulaski a week before.

The young officer was in the lab helping Sellitto and Rhyme on a murder investigation in Lower Manhattan, when a supervisor called with the news that the suspect had shot himself. Rhyme found the death troubling; he wanted closure in his cases, sure, but resolution by suicide was inelegant. It didn’t allow for complete explanations, and Lincoln Rhyme detested unanswered questions.

It was then that Pulaski had frowned and said, “Another one?”

“Whatta you mean?” Sellitto had barked.

“One of our suspects dying before he gets collared. That’s happened before. Those two others. Remember, sir?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Tell us, Pulaski,” Rhyme had encouraged.

“About two months, that Hidalgo woman, she was killed in a mugging.”

Rhyme remembered. A woman being investigated for attempted murder-beating her young child nearly to death-was found dead, killed during an apparent robbery. The evidence had initially suggested that Maria Hidalgo was guilty of beating the child, but after her death it was found that she was innocent. Her ex-husband had had some kind of psychotic break and attacked the child. Sadly, she’d died before she could be vindicated.

The other case, Pulaski had reminded them, involved an Arab American who’d gotten into a fight with some non-Muslim men and killed one of them. Rhyme and Sellitto were looking into the politically charged case, when the suspect had fallen in his bathtub and drowned. Rhyme later determined that the Muslim had killed the victim, but under circumstances that suggested manslaughter or even negligent homicide, not murder.

He, too, died before the facts had come out.

“Kinda strange,” Sellitto had said, then nodded at Pulaski. “Good thinking, kid.”

Rhyme had said, “Yeah, too strange. Pulaski, do me favor and check out if there’re any other cases like those-where suspects under investigation got offed or committed suicide.”

A few days later, Pulaski came back with the results: There were seven cases in which suspects had died while out on bail or before they’d been officially arrested. The means of death were suicide, accident, and random mugging.

Sellitto and Rhyme wondered if maybe a rogue cop was taking justice into his own hands-getting details on the progress of cases, deciding the suspects were guilty, and executing them himself, avoiding the risk that the suspects might get off at trial.

The detective and Rhyme understood the terrible damage this could cause the department if true-a murderer in their midst using NYPD resources to facilitate his crimes. They talked to Chief of Department McNulty and were given carte blanche to get to the truth.

Amelia Sachs, Pulaski, and Sellitto interviewed friends and family of the suspects and witnesses nearby at the time they had died. From these accounts, it appeared that a middle-aged white man had been seen with many of the suspects just before their deaths. Several witnesses thought the man had displayed a gold shield; he was therefore a detective. The killer clearly knew Rhyme, since three of the victims were apparently murdered while the criminalist was running their cases. He and Sachs came up with a list of white detectives, aged thirty-five to fifty-five, he’d worked with over the past six months.

They surreptitiously checked the detectives’ whereabouts at the times of the killings, eventually clearing all but twelve.