Claire found Terri’s number and dialed a voice call.

“Hello?”

“Terri! It’s Claire. How are you?”

A hesitation then Terri said, “Hi, there. How’re you doing?”

“I’m—”

At which point Morgynn interrupted yet again. “Mommy!”

Snap. Claire spun around and glared down at the petite blonde, hair in braids, wearing a snug pink leather Armani Junior jacket. She raged, “I am on the phone! Are you blind? What have I told you about that? When I’m on the phone? What is so f—” Okay, watch the language, she told herself. Claire offered a labored smile. “What’s so…important, dear?”

“I’m trying to tell you. This man back there?” The girl nodded up the street. “He came up to another man and hit him or something and pushed him in the trunk.”

“What?”

Morgynn tossed a braid, which ended in a tiny bunny clip, off her shoulder. “He left this on the ground and then drove away.” She held up a cord or thin rope. What was it?

Claire gasped. In her daughter’s petite hand was a miniature hangman’s noose.

Morgynn replied, “That’s what’s so—” She paused and her tiny lips curled into a smile of their own. “Important.”

Chapter 2

Greenland.”

Lincoln Rhyme was staring out the parlor window of his Central Park West town house. Two objects were in his immediate field of vision: a complicated Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph and, outside the large nineteenth-century window, a peregrine falcon. The predatory birds were not uncommon in the city, where prey was plentiful. It was rare, however, for them to nest so low. Rhyme, as unsentimental as any scientist could be—especially the criminal forensic scientist that he was—nonetheless took a curious comfort in the creatures’ presence. Over the years, he’d shared his abode with a number of generations of peregrines. Mom was here at the moment, a glorious thing, sumptuously feathered in brown and gray, with beak and claws that glistened like gunmetal.

A man’s calm, humorous voice filled the silence. “No. You and Amelia cannot go to Greenland.”

“Why not?” Rhyme asked Thom Reston, an edge to his tone. The slim but sturdy man had been his caregiver for about as long as the line of falcons had resided outside the old structure. A quadriplegic, Rhyme was largely paralyzed south of his shoulders, and Thom was his arms and legs and considerably more. He had been fired as often as he’d quit but here he was and, both knew in their hearts, here he would remain.

“Because you need to go someplace romantic. Florida, California.”

“Cliché, cliché, cliché. Might as well go to Niagara Falls.” Rhyme scowled.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m not even responding.”

“What does Amelia say?”

“She left it up to me. Which was irritating. Doesn’t she know I have better things to think about?”

“You mentioned the Bahamas recently. You wanted to go back, you said.”

“That was true at the time. It’s not true any longer. Can’t one change one’s mind? Hardly a crime.”

“What’s the real reason for Greenland?”