The pickings were sparse. Rhyme knew this, as he’d been “with” Sachs, via video feed, as she’d walked the grid at the scene. All she’d found was the noose, random trace from where the abduction had occurred and shoe print and tire mark evidence.

But even the tiniest of substances can, in theory, lead directly to your perp’s front door.

“So?” Sellitto asked. “What’d the munchkin say?”

Sachs: “I’d trade the girl—Morgynn—for two of her mothers. She’ll be in politics someday. Maybe a cop. She wanted to hold my gun. Anyway, the unsub was a heavyset white male, long dark hair, full beard, wearing dark casual clothes and dark baseball cap, long bill. A little taller than me. Same age as her tennis coach, Mr. Billings, who is—I checked—thirty-one. She didn’t know the kind of car except it wasn’t a Tesla, which her father drives—and tells everybody he drives. Morgynn didn’t catch any distinguishings, but he was wearing blue gloves.”

“Damn,” Rhyme muttered. “Anything else?”

“No, but this was a first. Her mother, Claire, asked if I—or somebody I knew on the force—would want to moonlight as a waitperson at a party tonight.”

“What’s she paying?” Sellitto asked.

In no mood for humor, Rhyme said, “First, the noose. Any prints?”

Cooper tested the cord in the fuming tent to raise invisible fingerprints and said, “A few slivers. Nothing to work with.”

“What’s it made out of?” Dellray asked.

“I’m checking now.” Cooper looked at the material closely under a microscope—set on relatively low magnification. He then consulted a visual database.

“I can run the chromatograph but I’m sure it’s proteins—collagen, keratin and fibroin. I’d say catgut.”

Sellitto wrinkled his nose. “That’s disgusting.”

Thom was laughing. “No cats involved.”

Cooper said, “That’s right. It’s called catgut but it’s from sheep or goat intestines.”

Sellitto said, “Why’s that any less disgusting?”

The tech was online. He continued, “Gut was used as surgical sutures. Now the only use is musical-instrument strings. Steel and synthetic materials’re more frequent nowadays, but”—he gave a shrug—“catgut is still common. Could’ve come from a hundred stores, concert halls and schools around the area. The length of this one? Probably from a cello.”

“And the noose?” Dellray asked. “Isn’t it s’posed to have thirteen coils? For bad luck?”

Rhyme didn’t know about catgut, and little about musical instruments, but he was familiar with nooses. It was properly called a hangman’s knot. It was not meant to tighten, like a slipknot, and choke. Death was from a snapped neck, which led to suffocation, yes, though not because the throat was closed but because signals from brain to lungs shut down. The wide knot, expertly positioned behind the left ear of the condemned, cracked the spine not far above where Rhyme’s had broken.

Answering Dellray, he said, “Some had thirteen coils. Most hangmen used eight back in the day. That worked just as well. Okay, what else?”

Sachs had used a gelatin lifter and an electrostatic device to capture the shoe prints that were probably the unsub’s, based on the girl’s account of where he had stood and walked.