Turned to Bell. “Detective.”

His eyes glanced at her once. “Hey.” Then he returned to scanning the airport. His easy southern demeanor was gone. He’d changed. Sachs realized that they shared something notorious now. They’d both had a shot at the Coffin Dancer and missed.

They both had also been in his kill zone and survived. Bell, though, with more glory than she. His body armor, she noticed, bore stigmata: the streaks from the two slugs that had glanced off him during the safe house attack. He’d stood his ground.

“Where’s Percey?” Sachs asked.

“Inside. Finishing up the repairs.”

“By herself?”

“Think so. She’s something, she is. You wouldn’t think a woman that wasn’t so, well, attractive’d have quite the draw she does. You know?”

Ugh. Don’t get me started.

“Anybody else here? From the Company?” She nodded toward the Hudson Air office. There was a light on inside.

“Percey sent ’most everybody home. Fellow’s going to be her copilot’s due here anytime. And somebody from Operations’s inside. Needs to be on duty when there’s a flight going on, I guess. I checked him out. He’s okay.”

“So she’s really going to fly?” Sachs asked.

“Looks that way.”

“The plane’s been guarded the whole time?”

“Yep, since yesterday. What’re you doing here?”

“Need some samples for analysis.”

“That Rhyme, he’s something too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“All two of you go back a ways?”

“We’ve worked a few cases,” she said dismissingly. “He saved me from Public Affairs.”

“That’s his good deed. Say, I hear you can really drive a nail.”

“I can . . . ?”

“Shoot. Sidearms. You’re on a team.”

And here I am at the site of my latest competition, she thought bitterly. “Just weekend sport,” she muttered.

“I do some pistol work myself, but I’ll tell you, even on a good day, with a nice, long barrel and firing single-action, fifty, sixty yards is all the far I can shoot.”

She appreciated his comments but recognized that they were just an attempt to reassure her about yesterday’s fiasco; the words meant nothing to her.

“Better talk to Percey now.”

“Right through there, Officer.”

Sachs pushed into the huge hangar. She walked slowly, looking at all the places the Dancer could hide. Sachs paused behind a tall row of boxes; Percey didn’t see her.

The woman was standing on a small scaffolding, hands on her hips, as she gazed at the complicated network of pipes and tubes of the open engine. She’d rolled her sleeves up and her hands were covered with grease. She nodded to herself then reached forward into the compartment.

Sachs was fascinated, watching the woman’s hands fly over the machinery, adjusting, probing, seating metal to metal, and tightening the fixtures down with judicious swipes of her thin arms. She mounted a large red cylinder, a fire extinguisher, Sachs guessed, in about ten seconds flat.

But one part—it looked like a big metal inner tube—wouldn’t fit correctly.