“As important?” he asked wryly.

“Okay. No. But you have to pursue it anyway. Besides, I just had croissants on a private jet. So, I’m hardly complaining. You know, I don’t see any footprints or…well, anything. Where would he have stood?”

They both looked about, and Ercole walked in a careful perimeter around the clearing. He returned to Sachs. “No, I see nothing.”

“Why would the Composer come here? It was after the murder, the witness said.”

“To see who was after him?” The young officer shrugged. “Or to communicate with the gods or Satan or whoever might be directing him.”

“That makes as much sense as anything.”

Ercole shook his head. “He would have some cover behind those trees. I will look.”

“I’ll check out down there.” Sachs stepped off the crest of the hill and walked to a small clearing closer to the camp.

Wondering again: What was his point in coming here?

It would have been out of his way—would have taken ten minutes of precious time needed for his escape—to climb the path.

Then she stopped. Fast.

The path!

The only way to see the camp—and to be seen from it—was here, on the crest, after climbing from the road. Yet the emailer had said the suspect had been spotted standing “beside” a dark car as he looked over the camp.

Impossible.

There was no way to get a car up here; the vehicle would have had to remain in the valley, out of sight.

It’s a trap!

The Composer himself had sent the email—in bad Italian, a program translating it from English—to lure her or other officers here.

She turned and was just starting back to the crest, calling Ercole’s name, when she heard the shot. A powerful rifle shot, booming off the hills.

At the crest, Sachs dropped to a crouch in the brush that formed the perimeter of the clearing, drawing her Beretta. She glanced into the valley and saw Hill’s driver, panicked and crouching behind the fender of the Audi. He was on his mobile, apparently shouting as he summoned the police.

And then she looked over the fringe of dry, rustling weeds and saw Ercole Benelli sprawled facedown in the dust beside a regal magnolia. She started to rise and run toward him when a second bullet slammed into the ground right in front of her and, a moment later, the boom of the powerful gun’s report filled the air.

“One interview?”

The man on the other end of the line was speaking in his soft Southern (U.S. not Italian) drawl. This always seemed to make a request more persuasive.

Still Rhyme told Daryl Mulbry, “No.”

The pale fellow was nothing if not persistent.

Rhyme and Thom sat in the breakfast room of their hotel. Rhyme rarely had much interest in an early meal but in Europe the room rate included a full breakfast and, perhaps because of the travel, or the intensity of the cases, his appetite was stronger than normal.