She turned and, eager to get the hell back to Ruffles and her apartment, took one step toward the stairs.

She felt two things in serial. First, a faint chill as the door leading to the storeroom and, eventually, to the alley, opened.

And then a searing explosion of pain as the rock, the bottle, the weight of the world slammed into the back of her head.

4

Amelia Sachs skidded her maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, to a stop at the curb in this idyllic section of Greenwich Village.

There were six blue-and-whites, mostly from the nearby Sixth Precinct, and about fifteen uniforms canvassing house to house.

In the long-odds search for Unsub 26’s next victim.

She leaped out, wincing slightly at the arthritic pang. “Hi, how’re we doing?” she asked one of the detectives she knew, a tall African-American named Ronald Simpson, just ending a radio transmission.

“Amelia. We’re deploying. We make it forty-eight locations in the perimeter that you and Detective Rhyme gave us. If we don’t find anything, we’ll expand it.”

“Sachs!” Rhyme’s voice burst through her headset. No video camera—just a standard-issue Motorola with an earpiece and stalk mike. It was voice activated. Sachs needed both hands free to drive; she’d hit close to eighty on the way down here from Rhyme’s townhouse. The Torino boasted 405 bhp and with an impressive 447 foot pounds of torque. And Amelia Sachs made use of every bit of those specs.

“I’m here, Rhyme. With Ron Simpson from the Sixth.” She relayed the information the man had given her.

“Forty-eight? Hell.”

They’d hoped the two-block area would include a lot fewer apartment buildings to search than that.

But at least it was something. And it could be a lot worse. In looking for a way to narrow down the hunt for Unsub 26 or his next victim, Rhyme had come up with an interesting strategy.

Theorizing that the soil/vegetation and cleaning materials evidence held valuable leads, the question became how to analyze them quickly, given the sheer number of samples?

Hence, the call to Marko.

Who had connections in the forensic science department at the police academy. Rhyme had asked the young man to get his professors’ okay to enlist the rookies to help, with Marko supervising. Although there were hundreds of samples, because so many students were helping, each one had no more than five or ten. They were to look for the smallest samples, on the assumption that the largest quantities were materials that the unsub had intentionally flooded the scene with.

For hours there’d been no discoveries. But an hour ago Marko had called the townhouse.

“Detective Rhyme, sir?”

Rhyme didn’t bother to correct him on the appellation. “Go on.”

“We might’ve found something. We did what you said and prioritized everything according to quantity, then concentrated on the smallest trace. The least common was some vegetation that contained traces of urushiol.”

“The toxin in poison ivy or sumac,” Rhyme had blurted.