Kathryn Dance was alone with Rhyme in his town house. Well, Jackson, the Havanese, was present too. Dance was holding the dog.

"That was wonderful," she told Thom. The three of them had just finished a dinner of the aide's beef bourguignon, rice, salad and a Caymus Cabernet. "I'd ask for the recipe but I'd never do it justice."

"Ah, an appreciative audience," he said, glancing at Rhyme.

"I'm appreciative. Just not excessively."

Thom nodded at the bowl that had held the main course. "To him it's 'stew.' He doesn't even try the French. Tell her what you think of food, Lincoln."

The criminalist shrugged. "I'm not fussy about what I eat. That's all."

"He calls it 'fuel,'" the aide said and carted the dishes to the kitchen.

"You have dogs at home?" Rhyme asked Dance, nodding at Jackson.

"Two. They're a lot bigger than this guy. The kids and I take 'em to the beach a couple times a week. They chase seagulls and we chase them. Exercise all around. And if that sounds too healthy, don't worry. Afterward we go for waffles at First Watch in Monterey and replace any calories we've lost."

Rhyme glanced into the kitchen, where Thom was washing dishes and pans. He lowered his voice and asked if she'd engage in bit of subterfuge.

She frowned.

"I wouldn't mind if a bit of that"-he nodded toward a bottle of old Glenmorangie scotch-"ended up in there." The nod shifted toward his tumbler. "You might want to keep it quiet, though."

"Thom?"

A nod. "He enacts Prohibition from time to time. It's rather irritating."

Kathryn Dance knew the value of indulging. (Okay, maybe she'd gained six pounds in Tijuana; that had been a long, long week.) She set the dog down and poured him a good healthy dose. She fit the cup into the holder of his wheelchair, arranging the straw near his mouth.

"Thanks." He took a long sip. "Whatever you're billing the city for your time, I'll authorize double pay. And help yourself. Thom won't give you any grief."

"Maybe some caffeine." She poured a black coffee and allowed herself one of the oatmeal cookies that the aide had set out. He'd baked them himself.

Dance glanced at her watch. Three hours earlier in California. "Excuse me for a minute. Check in at home."

"Go right ahead."

She made a call on her mobile. Maggie answered.

"Hey, sweets."

"Mommy."

The girl was a talker and Dance got a ten-minute account of a Christmas shopping trip with her nana. Maggie concluded with: "And then we came back here and I read Harry Potter."

"The new one?"

"Uh-huh."

"How many times is that?"

"Six."

"Wouldn't you like to read something different? Expand your horizons?"

Maggie replied, "Gee, Mom, like, how many times've you listened to Bob Dylan? That Blonde on Blonde album. Or U2?"

Unassailable logic. "You got me there, sweets, only don't say like."

"Mom. When're you coming home?"

"Tomorrow probably. Love you. Put your brother on."

Wes came on the phone and they too chatted for a while, the conversation more halting and more serious in tone. He'd been dropping hints about taking karate lessons and now he asked her point-blank if he could. Dance, though, preferred he take up something less combative if he wanted a sport other than soccer and baseball. His muscular body would be perfect for tennis or gymnastics, she thought, but those didn't have much appeal to him.

As an interrogator, Kathryn Dance knew a great deal about the subject of anger; she saw it in the suspects as well as the victims she interviewed following crimes. She believed that Wes's recent interest in martial arts came from the occasional anger that settled like a cloud over him after his father's death. Competition was fine but she didn't think it would be healthy for him to engage in a fighting sport, not at this point in his life. Sanctioned fury can be a very dangerous thing, especially with youngsters.

She talked to him about the decision for some time.

Working on the Watchmaker case with Rhyme and Sachs had made Kathryn Dance very aware of time. She realized how much she used it in her work-and with her children. The passage of time, for instance, diffuses anger quickly (outbursts can rarely be sustained longer than three minutes) and weakens resistance to opposing positions-better than strident argument in most cases. Dance didn't now say no to karate but got him to agree to try a few tennis lessons. (She'd once overheard him say to a friend, "Yeah, it sucks when your mom's a cop." Dance had laughed hard to herself at that.)

Then his mood changed abruptly and he was talking happily about a movie he'd seen on HBO. Then his phone was beeping with a text message from a friend. He had to go, bye, Mom, love you, see you soon.

Click.

The millisecond of spontaneous "love you" made the whole negotiation worth it.

She hung up and glanced at Rhyme. "Kids?"

"Me? No. I don't know that they'd be my strong suit."

"They're nobody's strong suit until you have them."

He was looking at her ubiquitous iPod earphones, which dangled around her neck like a stethoscope on a doctor. "You like music, I gather… How's that for a clever deduction?"

Dance said, "It's my hobby."

"Really? You play?"

"I sing some. I used to be a folkie. But now, if I take time off, I throw the kids and the dogs into the back of a camper and go track down songs."

Rhyme frowned. "I've heard of that. It's called-"

"Song catching is the popular phrase."

"Sure. That's it."

This was a passion for Kathryn Dance. She was part of a long tradition of folklorists, people who would travel to out-of-the-way places to field-record traditional music. Alan Lomax was perhaps the most famous of these, hiking throughout the U.S. and Europe to capture old-time songs. Dance went to the East Coast from time to time but those tunes had been well documented, so most of her recent trips were to inner cities, Nova Scotia, Western Canada, the bayou and places with large Latino populations, like Southern and Central California. She'd record and catalog the songs.

She told this to Rhyme and explained too about a website she and a friend maintained with information on the musicians, the songs and the music itself. They helped the musicians copyright their original songs and distributed to them any fees listeners paid for downloads of the music. Several musicians had been contacted by record companies, which had bought their music for sound tracks of independent films.

Kathryn Dance didn't tell Rhyme, though, that there was more to her relationship with music.

Dance often found herself overloaded. To do her job well, she needed to hard-wire herself to the witnesses and criminals she interviewed. Sitting three feet from a psychotic killer, jousting with him for hours or days or weeks, was an exhilarating process, but exhausting and debilitating too. Dance was so empathic and so closely connected to her subjects that she felt their emotions long after the sessions ended. She heard their voices in her mind, endlessly looping through her thoughts.

SÃ, sÃ, okay, sÃ, I kill her. I cut her throat… Well, her son too, that boy. He there. He see me. I have to kill him, I mean, who wouldn't? But she deserve it, the way she look at me. It no my fault. Can I have that cigarette you talking about?

The music was a miracle cure. If Kathryn Dance was listening to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee or U2 or Dylan or David Byrne, she wasn't replaying the memory of an indignant Carlos Allende complaining that the victim's engagement ring cut his palm while he was slitting her throat.