The only response was: ‘What are you doing here, Mr Walesa?’

‘Paying respects.’ He stepped closer to the box. ‘No urn?’

‘Not much point,’ Weller said. ‘Richard wanted his ashes scattered.’

‘Where?’

‘Did you send those?’

Pulaski looked at the bouquet, which Weller was nodding at. The officer tried to looks somewhat, but not overly, confused. ‘No.’ He stepped to the vase and read at the card. He gave a bitter laugh.

Inscrutable.

He said, ‘That’s pretty low.’

Weller asked, ‘How do you mean?’

‘You know who that is, who sent them?’

‘I read the card when I got here. But I don’t know the name. Lincoln Rhyme?’

‘You don’t know Rhyme?’ Lowering his voice: ‘He’s the son of a bitch who put my friend in prison.’

Weller asked, ‘Police?’

‘Works with the police.’

‘Why would he send flowers?’

‘I think he’s gloating.’

‘Well, that was a waste of money. Richard’s hardly going to be offended now, is he?’ A glance at the box of ashes.

Silence.

How to behave now? Man, this acting stuff was exhausting. He decided to shake his head at the unfairness of the world. He looked down. ‘Such a shame, really. When I talked to him last, he was fine. Or at least he didn’t mention anything, like chest pains.’

Weller now focused. ‘Talked to him?’

‘Right.’

‘This was recently?’

‘Yeah. In prison.’

‘You’re here alone?’ Weller asked.

A nod. Pulaski asked the same question.

‘That’s right.’

‘So there’s no funeral?’

‘The family hasn’t decided.’ Weller looked Pulaski up and down carefully.

Okay, time to go with the less …

‘Well, so long, Mr Weller. Tell his family, or whoever your clients are, I’m sorry for their loss. I’ll miss him too. He was an … interesting man.’

‘Like I said, I never met him.’

Pulaski pulled on dark cotton gloves. ‘So long.’

Weller nodded.

Pulaski was at the door when the lawyer said, ‘Why did you really come here, Mr Walesa?’

The young officer stopped. He turned back. ‘“Reall”Y? What’s that supposed to mean?’

De Niro tough. Tony Soprano tough.

‘There was never going to be a memorial service. If you’d called to see when I was picking up the remains – which you did, since here you are – you would have learned there was no service. So. What do I make of that?’

Pulaski debated – and made a show of debating. He dug into his pocket and produced a business card. Offered it to the man with a gloved hand. He said, ‘Give that to your clients.’

‘Why?’

‘Just give it to them. Or throw it out.’ A shrug. ‘Up to you.’

The lawyer looked at him coolly, then took the card. It had only the fake name and the prepaid mobile number on it.

‘What exactly do you do, Mr Walesa?’

Pulaski’s gaze began at the lawyer’s bald head and ended at his shoes, which were nearly as shiny. ‘Have a good day, Mr Weller.’

And, with an oblique glance at the box containing the Watchmaker’s ashes, Pulaski headed for the door.

Pulaski, thinking: Yes, nailed it!

The unsub, however, had not left as much evidence in the town house as Rhyme had hoped.

And there were no other solid leads.The phone call about the intruder had come from an anonymous source. A canvass of the area, to find witnesses who’d seen the intruder, had yielded nothing. Security video cameras in two nearby stores had recorded a thin man in dark coveralls, walking with his head down and carrying a briefcase. He’d diverted suddenly into the cul de sac. No image of his face, of course.

Mel Cooper had run an analysis on the bottle and found, naturally, only Rhyme’s and Thom’s fingerprints, not even those of a liquor store stocker or a Scottish distiller.

No other trace was on the bottle.

Sachs was now telling him, ‘Nothing significant, Rhyme. Except he’s an ace lock picker. No tool marks. Used a pick gun, I’m sure.’

Cooper was checking the contents of the evidence collection bags. ‘Not much, not much.’ A moment later, though, he did make a discovery. ‘Hair.’

‘Excellent,’ Rhyme said. ‘Where?’

Cooper examined Sachs’s notes. ‘It was by the shelf where he spiked the whisky.’

‘And very good whisky it used to be,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘But a hair. Good. Only: Is it his, yours, mine, Thom’s, a deliveryman’s?’

‘Let’s take a look.’ The tech lifted the hair from the tape roller and prepared a slide for visual observation in the optical microscope.

‘There a bulb?’ Rhyme asked.

Hair can yield DNA but generally only if the bulb is attached.

But this sample, no.

Still, hair can reveal other facts about the perp. Tox and drug profiles, for instance (hair retains drug use info for months). And true hair color, of course.

Cooper focused the microscope and hit the button that put the image on the high def monitor nearby. The fiber was short, just a bit of stubble.

‘Hell,’ Rhyme said.

‘What?’ Sachs asked.

‘Look familiar, anyone?’

Cooper shook his head. But Sachs gave a soft laugh. ‘Last week.’

‘Exactly.’

The hair hadn’t come from the unsub but from the City Hall murder case of the week before, the worker killed fighting with the mugger. The beard stubble. The victim had shaved just before he’d left the office.

This happened sometimes. However careful you were with evidence, tiny samples escaped. Oh, well.

The mass spectrum computer screen came alive. Cooper focused and said, ‘Got the toxin profile: tremetol. A form of alcohol. Comes from snakeroot. There wasn’t enough to kill you, unless you drank the whole bottle at once.’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Rhyme said.

‘But it would have made you very, very sick. Severe dementia. Possibly permanent.’

‘Maybe he didn’t have time to inject the whole dosage into the bottle. You know, it’s the dosage that’s deadly, not the substance itself. We all ingest antimony and mercury and arsenic every day. But not in quantities that do us any harm. Hell, water can kill you. Drink enough too quickly and the sodium imbalance can stop your heart.’

That was it, Sachs reported. No fingerprints, no footprints, no other trace.

Nor had any leads been discovered at or near the Belvedere apartment building. No one had seen a man impersonating a fireman, handing out poisoned coffee. A team sent to check the trash cans in the area had found no other containers of tainted beverage. Security videos were not helpful.

Lon Sellitto was still in critical condition and unconscious – and therefore unable to give them any more information about the unsub, though Rhyme doubted that he’d have been so careless as to reveal anything about himself, as he’d handed out the tainted coffee.

Mel Cooper checked with the research team that Lon Sellitto had put together and learned they had not been able to find anything having to do with the numeric message. They did receive something, though. A memorandum had come in from other Major Cases officers Sellitto had ‘tasked’, his verb, with researching the centipede tattoo.

From: Unsub 11 5 Task Force

To: Det. Lon Sellitto, Capt. Lincoln Rhyme

Re: Centipede

We have not had much luck in finding connections between specific perpetrators in the past and the unsub in this case, regarding centipede tattoos. We have learned this:

Centipedes are arthropods in the class Chilopoda of the subphylum Myriapoda. They have one pair of legs per body segment but don’t necessarily have one hundred legs. They can have as few as two dozen, as many as three hundred. The largest are about a foot long.

Only centipedes have ‘forcipules,’ which are modified front legs, just behind the head. These legs grab prey and through needle like openings deliver venom that paralyzes or kills. They have venom glands on the first pair of legs, forming a pincer like appendage always found just behind the head. Forcipules are not true mouthparts, although they are used in the capture of prey items, injecting venom and holding on to captured prey. Venom glands run through a tube almost to the tip of each forcipule.