Sellitto, Baker and Sachs debated for a few minutes and decided to release the businessman without charging him. The skittish man left, with a look at Dance that she was very familiar with: part awe, part disgust, part pure hatred.

After he'd left, Rhyme, who was looking at a diagram of the scene of the killing in the alley, said, "This's curious. For some reason the perp decided he didn't want the vic at the end of the alley, so he backed up and picked the spot about fifteen feet from the sidewalk… Interesting fact. But is it useful?"

Sachs nodded. "You know, it might be. The far end of the alley didn't get any snow, it looked like. They might not've used salt there. We could lift some footprints or tire treads."

Rhyme made a call-with an impressive voice recognition program-and sent some officers back to the scene. They called back a short time later and reported that they had found fresh tire treads at the end of the alley, along with a brown fiber, which seemed to match the ones on the victim's shoe and wristwatch. They uploaded the digital pictures of the fiber and treads and gave the wheelbase dimensions.

Despite her lack of interest in forensics, Dance found herself intrigued by this choreography. Rhyme and Sachs were a particularly insightful team. She couldn't help but be impressed when ten minutes later, the technical man, Mel Cooper, looked up from a computer screen and said, "With the wheelbase and those particular brown fibers, it's probably a Ford Explorer, either two or three years old."

"Odds are it's the older one," Rhyme said.

Why did he say that? Dance wondered.

Sachs saw the frown on her face and answered, "The brakes squealed."

Ah.

Sellitto turned to Dance. "That was good, Kathryn. You nailed him."

Sachs asked, "How'd you do it?"

She explained the process she'd used. "I went fishing. I reviewed everything he'd told us-the afterwork bar, the subway, the cash and money clip, the alleyway, the chronology of events and the geography. I checked out his kinesic reaction to each response. The cash was a particularly sensitive subject. What was he doing with the money that he shouldn't've been? An extroverted, narcissistic businessman like him? I figured it was either drugs or sex. But a Wall Street broker's not buying street drugs; he'd have a connection. That left hookers. Simple."

"That's slick, don't you think, Lincoln?" Cooper asked.

Dance was surprised to see that the criminalist could shrug. He then said noncommitally, "Worked out well. We got some evidence it might've taken us a while to find." His eyes went back to the board.

"Linc, come on. We got his vehicle make. We wouldn't have if it hadn't been for her." Sellitto said to Dance, "Don't take it personal. He doesn't trust witnesses."

Rhyme frowned at the detective. "It's not a contest, Lon. Our goal is the truth, and my experience has been that the reliability of witnesses is somewhat less than that of physical evidence. That's all. Nothing personal about it."

Dance nodded. "Funny you say that. I tell people in my lectures the same thing: that our main job as cops isn't throwing bad guys in jail, it's getting to the truth." She too shrugged. "We just had a case in California-death row prisoner exonerated the day before his scheduled execution. A private eye friend of mine spent three years working for his lawyer to get to the bottom of what happened. He just wouldn't accept that everything was what it seemed to be. The prisoner was thirteen hours away from dying and it turned out he was innocent… If that PI hadn't kept looking for the truth all those years, he'd be dead now."

Rhyme said, "And I know what happened. The defendant was convicted because of a witness's perjured testimony, and DNA analysis freed him, right?"

Dance turned. "No, actually there were no witnesses to the killing. The real killer planted fake physical evidence implicating him."

"How 'bout that," said Sellitto and he and Amelia Sachs shared a smile. Rhyme glanced at them both coolly. "Well," he said to Dance, "it's fortunate that things worked out for the best… Now I better get back to work." His eyes returned to the whiteboard.

Dance said good-bye to them all and pulled on her coat as Lon Sellitto showed her out. On the street Dance walked to the curb, where she plugged the iPod earbuds back in and clicked the unit on. This particular playlist contained folk rock, Irish and some kick-ass Rolling Stones (once at a concert she'd done a kinesic analysis of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for her friends' benefit).

She was waving down a cab when she realized there was an odd, unsettled feeling within her. A moment passed before she recognized it. She was feeling a nagging sense of regret that her brief involvement in the Watchmaker case was now over.

Joanne Harper was feeling good.

The trim thirty-two-year-old was in the workshop a few blocks east of her retail flower store in SoHo. She was among her friends.

That is to say, roses, cymbidium orchids, birds-of-paradise, lilies, heliconia, anthurium and red ginger.

The workshop was a large ground-floor area in what had been a warehouse. It was drafty and cold and she kept most of the rooms dark to protect the flowers. Still, she loved it here, the coolness, the dim light, the smells of lilac and fertilizer. She was in the middle of Manhattan, yes, but it seemed more like a quiet forest.

The woman added some more florist's foam to the huge ceramic vase in front of her.

Feeling good.

For a couple of reasons: because she was working on a lucrative project that she had complete discretion to design.

And because of the buzz from her date the previous night.

With Kevin, who knew that angel trumpets needed exceptionally good drainage to thrive, and that creeping red sedum flowered in brilliant crimson all the way through September, and that Donn Clendenon whacked three over the wall to help the Mets beat Baltimore in 1969 (her father had captured two of the homers with his Kodak).

Kevin the cute guy, Kevin with the dimple and grin. Sans present or past wives.

Did it get any better than that?

A shadow crossed the front window. She glanced up, but saw no one. This was a deserted stretch of east Spring Street and pedestrians were rare. She scanned the windows. Really ought to have Ramon clean them. Well, she'd wait till warmer weather.

She continued assembling the vase, thinking again about Kevin. Would something work out between them?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Didn't really matter (okay, sure it did, but a thirty-two-year-old SUW-single urban woman-had to take the didn't-really-matter approach). But the important thing was she had fun with him. Having played the post-divorce dating game in Manhattan for a few years, she felt entitled to have some fun with another man.

Joanne Harper, who bore a resemblance to the redhead on Sex and the City, had come here ten years earlier to become a famous artist, live in a storefront studio in the East Village and sell her paintings out of a Tribeca gallery. But the art world had other ideas. It was too harsh, too petty, too, well, un artistic. It was about being shocking or troubled or fuckable or rich. Joanne gave up on fine arts and tried graphic design for a while but was dissatisfied with that too. On a whim she took a job in an interior landscaping company in Tribeca and fell in love with the business. She decided that if she was going to starve at least she'd be hungry doing what she was passionate about.

The joke, though, was that she became a success. She managed to open her own company a few years ago. It now included both the Broadway retail store and this-the Spring Street commercial operation, which serviced companies and organizations, providing daily flowers for offices and large arrangements for meetings, ceremonies and special events.