“Well, that’s something…” Freedom of the press was all very well and good but there were times when Roland Bell wouldn’t mind a certain amount of censorship – when it came to revealing witnesses’ identities and addresses. “Now, y’all wait in the hall. I want to check out the inside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bell stepped into the apartment and looked it over. The front door was secured by two deadbolts and a steel police lock rod. The front windows looked out on the town houses across the street. He pulled the shades down. The side windows opened onto an alley and the building across the way. The facing wall, though, was solid brick and there were no windows that presented a vantage point for a sniper. Still, he closed the windows and locked them, then pulled the blinds shut.

The place was large – there were two doors to the hallway, one in the front, at the living room, and a second in the back, off a laundry room. He made sure the locks were secured and returned to the hallway. “Okay,” he called. Geneva and her uncle returned. “It’s looking pretty good. Just keep the doors and windows locked and the blinds drawn.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. “I be sure to do that.”

“I’ll get the letters,” Geneva said. She disappeared toward the bedrooms.

Now that Bell had examined the place for security, he looked at the room as a living space. It struck him as cold. Spotless white furniture, leather and linen, all covered with plastic protectors. Tons of books, African and Caribbean sculptures and paintings, a china cabinet filled with what seemed like expensive dishes and wineglasses. African masks. Very little that was sentimental, personal. Hardly any pictures of family.

Bell ’s own house was chockablock with snaps of kin – especially his two boys, as well as all their cousins back in North Carolina. Also a few pictures of his late wife, but out of deference to his new belle – Lucy Kerr, who was a sheriff down in the Tarheel State – there were none of his wife and Bell together, only of mother and sons. (Lucy, who was herself well represented on his walls, had seen the pictures of the late Mrs. Bell and her children and announced she respected him for keeping those up. And one thing about Lucy: She meant what she said.)

Bell asked Geneva’s uncle if he’d seen anybody he hadn’t recognized around the town house lately.

“No, sir. Not a soul.”

“When will her parents be back?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. Was Geneva talked to ’em.”

Five minutes later the girl returned. She handed Bell an envelope containing two yellow, crisp pieces of paper. “Here they are.” She hesitated. “Be careful with them. I don’t have copies.”

“Oh, you don’t know Mr. Rhyme, miss. He treats evidence like it was the holy grail.”

“I’ll be back after school,” Geneva said to her uncle. Then to Bell, “I’m ready to go.”

“Listen up, girl,” the man said. “I want you t’be polite, the way I told you. You say ‘sir’ when you talking to the police.”

She looked at her uncle and said evenly, “Don’t you remember what my father said? That people have to earn the right to be called ‘sir’? That’s what I believe.”

The uncle laughed. “That’s my niece fo’ you. Got a mind of her own. Why we love her. Give yo’ uncle a hug, girl.”

Embarrassed, like Bell’s sons when he’d put his arm around them in public, the girl stiffly tolerated the embrace.

In the hallway Bell handed the uniformed officer the letters. “Get these over to Lincoln’s town house ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.”

After he’d left, Bell called Martinez and Lynch on his radio. They reported that the street was clear. He hurried the girl downstairs and into the Crown Vic. Pulaski trotted up and jumped in after them.

As he started the engine Bell glanced at her. “Oh, say, miss, when you got a minute, how ’bout you look in that knapsack of yours and pick me out a book you won’t be needing today.”

“Book?”

“Like a schoolbook.”

She found one. “Social studies? It’s kind of boring.”

“Oh, it’s not for reading. It’s for pretending to be a substitute teacher.”

She nodded. “Fronting you’re a teacher. Hey, that’s def.”

“I thought so too. Now, you wanta slip that seat belt on? It’d be much appreciated. You too, rookie.”

Unsub 109 might or might not have been a sex offender but in any event his DNA sequence wasn’t in the CODIS file.

The negative result was typical of the absence of leads in the case, Rhyme reflected with frustration. They’d received the rest of the bullet fragments, recovered from Dr. Barry’s body by the medical examiner, but they were even more badly shattered than the one removed from the woman bystander and were of no better use in an IBIS or DRUGFIRE check than the earlier pieces.

They’d also heard from several people at the African-American museum. Dr. Barry hadn’t mentioned to any employees that another patron was interested in the 1868 Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. Nor had the museum phone records revealed anything; all calls went into a main switchboard and were directed to extensions, with no details kept. The incoming and outgoing calls on his cell phone offered no leads either.

Cooper told them what he’d learned from the owner of Trenton Plastics, one of the country’s largest makers of plastic shopping bags. The tech related the history of the smiley-face icon, as told to him by the company’s owner. “They think the face was originally printed on buttons by a subsidiary of State Mutual Insurance in the sixties to boost company morale and as a promotional gimmick. In the seventies, two brothers drew a face like it with the slogan Be happy. Sort of an alternative to the peace symbol. By then it was being printed on fifty million items every year by dozens of companies.”

“The point of this pop culture lecture?” Rhyme murmured.

“That even if it’s copyrighted, which no one seems to know, there are dozens of companies making smiley-face bags. And it’d be impossible to trace.”

Dead end…

Of the dozens of museums and libraries that Cooper, Sachs and Sellitto had queried, two reported that a man had called in the past several weeks asking about an issue of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated from July 1868. This was encouraging because it supported Rhyme’s theory that the magazine might be the reason Geneva was attacked. But neither of the institutions had the issue and no one could remember the name of the caller – if he’d even given it to them. Nobody else seemed to have a copy of the magazine for them to look at. The Museum of African-American Journalism in New Haven reported that they had had a full set on microfiche but it had disappeared.

Rhyme was scowling at this news when a computer chimed and Cooper announced, “We’ve got a response from VICAP.”

He hit a button and sent the email to all the monitors in Rhyme’s lab. Sellitto and Sachs huddled around one, Rhyme looked at his own flatscreen. It was a secure email from a detective in the crime scene lab in Queens.

Detective Cooper:

Per your request we ran the crime profile you provided through both VICAP and HITS, and have two matches.

Incident One: Homicide in Amarillo, Texas. Case No. 3451-01 (Texas Rangers): Five years ago, sixty-seven-year-old Charles T. Tucker, a retired state worker, was found dead behind a strip mall near his home. He had been struck in the back of the head with a blunt object, presumably to subdue him, then lynched. A cotton-fiber rope with a slipknot was placed around his neck and thrown over a tree limb then pulled tight by the assailant. Scratch marks at the neck indicated victim was conscious for some minutes before death occurred.

Elements of similarity with Unsub 109 case: