Each file was digitized as well and Renard made that version available to any law enforcement officer who requested to view it.

When Rhyme heard that someone had put out a hit on him, his first thought was: preparedness.

Person Y. Who are you? How’re you coming at me? And when?

Whom better to call than Valentin Renard? What better solution than to ask him to imagine himself a brilliant assassin and devise the perfect plan for Rhyme’s murder? Just after Fred Dellray had delivered the news from England, Rhyme had contacted the student and he’d agreed, immediately intrigued at the assignment.

Now, sitting in Rhyme’s parlor with the others, Renard unbuttoned the jacket of his luxurious Italian suit. Beneath he wore an off-white shirt, monogrammed with royal blue stitching, VMR. He sipped coffee as Rhyme explained to Cooper and Sellitto what he’d done.

“And you didn’t goddamn tell us?” Sellitto blustered, looking at Rhyme.

“Only Amelia,” Rhyme said.

Renard set the cup down. “That was my idea. I thought it was best that everyone react the way they normally would to a threat—we let the chess match play out as it naturally would.”

Rhyme shrugged. “Anyway, Lon, I didn’t know myself what he was going to do. Once Valentin agreed, that was our last contact.”

Sachs said to Renard, “Tell us how you put the plan together.”

The man, handsome as a model, cocked his head. “First of all, I decided I needed to get into a killer’s mindset. I became an assassin. I did everything he would do. Paid cash, used my knuckles or wore gloves to avoid prints. Avoided security cameras.

“As for the plan itself, I thought back on some of the smarter assassinations in my collection. A likely model occurred to me. The murder of a Russian general in Warsaw in the nineteen seventies. It involved an initial attempt on the man’s life followed by a second one. Both were stopped by the general’s security team. That put them into a mode that I call ‘off-edge.’ By that I mean it wasn’t as though they thought there was no threat at all, but psychologically they grew less cautious.”

“So the second attempt was a diversion too.”

“That’s right.”

Sachs asked, “How did the assassin really get him?”

“A bomb in a bottle of wine brought to the general’s home by a friend—who didn’t know about the IED.

“My first quote ‘attempt’ was the drone. You’d think ‘bomb.’ But you’d also be thinking it was possibly a diversion. Am I right?”

“You are,” said Rhyme.

“So then there’d be the second attempt—the poison in the vegetables.”

Rhyme shook his head angrily. “But that was just a diversion too.”

Renard said, “You should’ve dismantled the phone. An X-ray alone wouldn’t show the packet of poison.”

“Damn, that call we got,” Sellitto muttered. “You were Carruthers, the detective out of Fraud.”

“That’s right. His name was on the NYPD website.”

“The hell you get my number?”

“I called Major Cases, said I was a detective in Fraud and I needed to talk to you about a case. They patched me through.”