His headset crinkled.

“Rhyme, you there?” Sachs’s voice snapped.

“Yes! Where are you, Sachs? What do you have?”

“We’re outside an old subway station near City Hall. All boarded up. S&S says there’s somebody inside. At least one, maybe two.”

“Okay, Sachs,” he said, heart racing at the thought they might be close to the Dancer. “Report back.” Then he looked up at Sellitto and Perkins. “Looks like we may not have to decide about moving them from the safe house after all.”

“They found him?” the detective asked.

But the criminalist—a scientist foremost—refused to give voice to his hopes. Afraid he might jinx the operation—well, jinx Sachs, he was thinking. He muttered, “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

Silently the ESU troops surrounded the subway station.

This was probably the place where the Dancer’s new partner lived, Amelia Sachs concluded. S&S had found several locals who’d reported a druggie selling pills out of the place. He was a slightly built man—in line with a size-eight shoe.

The station was, almost literally, a hole in the wall, supplanted years ago by the fancier City Hall stop a few blocks away.

The 32-E team went into position, while S&S began to set up their microphones and infrareds, and other officers cleared the street of traffic and the homeless men sitting on curbs or in doorways.

The commander moved Sachs away from the main entrance, out of the line of fire. They gave her the demeaning job of guarding a subway exit that had been barred and padlocked for years. She actually wondered if Rhyme had cut a deal with Haumann to keep her safe. Her anger from last night, in abeyance in their search for the Dancer, now bubbled up again.

Sachs nodded toward the rusty lock. “Hmm. He probably won’t be getting out this way,” she offered brightly.

“Gotta guard all entrances,” the masked ESU officer muttered, missing or ignoring her sarcasm, and returned to his comrades.

Rain fell around her, a chill rain, dropping straight down from a dirty gray sky, tapping loudly on the refuse banked in front of the bars.

Was the Dancer inside? If so, there’d be a firefight. Absolutely. She couldn’t imagine he’d give it up without a violent struggle.

And it infuriated her that she wouldn’t be part of it.

You’re a slick dick when you’ve got a rifle and a quarter mile of protection, she thought to the killer. But tell me, asshole, how’re you with a handgun at close range? How’d you like to face me down? On her mantel at home were a dozen trophies of gold-plated shooters aiming pistols. (The gilt figures were all men, which for some reason tickled Amelia Sachs immensely.)

She stepped farther down the stairs, to the iron bars, then flattened against the wall.

Sachs, the criminalist, examined the squalid spot carefully, smelling garbage, rot, urine, the salty smell of the subway. She examined the bars and the chain and padlock. She peered inside the dim tunnel and could see nothing, hear nothing.