“You testified on direct that no fingerprints of my client were left at the crime scene where Leon Murphy was murdered, correct?”

“No, I did not.”

Coughlin frowned, looking at a yellow pad that might have contained perceptive notes or might have contained doodles or a recipe for beef brisket. Rhyme happened to be hungry. It was ten a.m. and he’d missed breakfast.

Coughlin glanced at his client. Viktor Antony Buryak, fifty-two. Dark-haired like his mouthpiece but bulkier, with Slavic features and pale skin. He wore a tailored charcoal gray suit and a burgundy vest. Buryak’s face was oddly unthreatening. Rhyme could picture him serving up pancakes at a church basement fundraiser and remembering every parent by name and giving the kids an extra splash of syrup.

“Do you want me to read you back your testimony?” Coughlin, who’d been hovering close to Rhyme, like a shark near chum, lifted a palm.

“No need. I remember it. I stated—under oath, I’ll just reassure you—that of the fingerprints collected at the scene of Leon Murphy’s murder, none could be identified as your client’s.”

“What exactly is the difference?”

“You said I testified that your client left no fingerprints at the scene. He might very well have left a million of them. The evidence collection team simply didn’t recover any.”

Coughlin rolled his eyes. “Move to strike.”

Judge Williams told the jury, “You’ll disregard Mr. Rhyme’s response. But try again, Mr. Coughlin.”

Looking put out, Coughlin said, “Mr. Rhyme, no fingerprints of my client were discovered at the crime scene where the convicted felon Leon Murphy was shot, correct?”

“I can’t answer because I can’t speak to whether the victim was a convicted felon or not.”

Coughlin sighed.

The judge stirred.

Rhyme said, “I agree with your ‘were discovered’ part of that sentence.”

Coughlin and Buryak shared a look. The client was taking this better than his attorney. The lawyer returned to his table and glanced down.

Rhyme regarded the jury and found more than a few looking his way. They’d be curious about his condition. Some defense attorneys, he’d heard, privately complained about his presence, given that he was a quadriplegic, testifying from a wheelchair—which, they believed, generated sympathy for the prosecution.

But what could he do? Wheelchair bound he was. Criminalist he was.

Rhyme’s eyes circled to the defendant. Buryak was a unique figure in the history of organized crime in the region. He owned a number of businesses in the city, but that wasn’t how he made most of his money. He offered a unique service in the underworld, one that had probably cost more lives than any other organized crime outfit in New York’s exceedingly criminal history.

The People of the State of New York v. Viktor Buryak, however, had nothing to do with that. This was about a single incident, a single crime, a single murder.

Leon Murphy had been shot to death a week or so after a meeting with the manager of a warehouse that Buryak owned. Murphy was a psychotic wannabe gangbanger who fancied himself a descendant of the Westies, the brutal Irish gang that had once ruled Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. Murphy had made a sales pitch offering protection to the warehouse manager.