“It’s still available?”

“Yeah.” He pulled out his iPhone and fished in his pocket, pulling out a credit card reader.

“I’ll pay cash.”

“We don’t take cash. It’s not, you know, part of system, how it works.”

The man was in a network like Airbnb.

“You have it listed for five hundred for the week.”

“Yeah.”

Renard reached into his inner jacket pocket and extracted a letter-size envelope. He opened it. The man looked at the twenty hundred-dollar bills, which had been handled in such a way by Renard that there were no fingerprints on them.

“Here. And I don’t want any paperwork.”

The man continued to stare. He then lifted his head and looked his potential tenant over carefully.

A handsome man with a thick coif of hair in a politician’s trim cut, Renard offered a smile. “Nothing to be suspicious of. I’m a journalist writing a story about the dangers of credit cards and debit cards. I’m going to live the entire week in New York paying cash only.”

“Yeah? Like for newspaper?”

“It’s a podcast. Do you want to be interviewed for it?”

“No” was the fast response. The owner of the building took the bills and handed over a key. “I show you the place.”

“Not necessary.”

When the man returned to his living quarters, Renard stepped down the stairs, pulled on clear latex gloves then unlocked first the wrought-iron outer door and then the inner wooden one.

The rooms—with separate bathroom and kitchenette—were as he expected: they smelled of mold and damp concrete, and the walls displayed slapdash paint jobs (in ugly salmon). There was an uncomfortable bed, a small kitchen featuring battered, stained and chipped appliances. Limp towels, Target house brand soap and shampoo. A TV that had to be one of the smallest flat screens on the market.

Renard doffed his jacket and slacks, hanging them in the closet. He grimaced at the hangers: they were wire and they would leave horizontal creases in the trousers. He stripped off his dress shirt, revealing taut muscles; he worked out daily, using free weights and a pull-up bar in the doorway of his bedroom closet. He then opened the duffel bag and set out some of the contents: personal items, clothing, papers, a computer, several burner phones.

He dressed in jeans, an undershirt and a black sweatshirt. He exchanged his twelve-hundred-dollar brown leather dress Kitons for running shoes.

Taking a notebook from the bag, he sat at the desk and turned on a wobbly light, which cast a pale circle in front of him. He opened the book, on the first page of which was taped a map of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Circled, in the center, was one particular address, on Central Park West.

The residence of Lincoln Rhyme.

—

“Nada, nothing, nup.”

Fred Dellray was once again in Rhyme’s town house. “They tried but, fact is, ran smack into a dead end.”

“Our best forever friends.”

“Best friends forever,” Dellray corrected.