“Sure, I’ll fucking explain it,” Sellitto grumbled. “The Dancer knows you dimed him. He didn’t have to target you back there at the safe house, right? Am I right?”

Always get the mutts to talk. To participate. Sellitto had often explained the ways of interrogation to Lincoln Rhyme.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Sellitto motioned Jodie closer with a crooked finger. “It woulda been the smart thing for him just to take off. But he went to the trouble to take up a sniper position and try to cap your ass. Now, what’s that tell us?”

“I—”

“It tells us that he ain’t gonna rest till he clips you.”

Dellray, happy to play straight man for a change, said, “And he’s the sort I don’t think you wanna have knocking on yo’ door at three in the morning—this week, next month, or next year. We all together on that?”

“So,” Sellitto resumed snappily, “agreed that it’s in your interest to help us?”

“But you’ll give me, like, witness protection?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Yes and no.”

“Huh?”

“If you help us, yes. If you don’t, no.”

Jodie’s eyes were red and watery. He seemed so afraid. In the years since his accident Rhyme had been fearful for others—Amelia and Thom and Lon Sellitto. But he himself didn’t believe he’d ever been afraid to die, certainly not since the accident. He wondered what it must be like to live so timidly. A mouse’s life.

Too many ways to die . . .

Sellitto, slipping into his good-cop persona, offered a faint smile to Jodie. “You were there when he killed that agent, in the basement, right?”

“I was there, yeah.”

“That man could be alive now. And Brit Hale could be alive now. A lot of other people could too . . . if somebody’d helped us stop this asshole a coupla years ago. Well, you can help us stop him now. You can keep Percey alive, maybe dozens of others. You can do that.”

This was Sellitto’s genius at work. Rhyme would have bullied and coerced and, in a pinch, bribed the little man. But it never occurred to him to appeal to the splinter of decency that the detective, at least, could see within him.

Jodie absently riffled the pages in his book with a filthy thumb. Finally he looked up and—with surprising sobriety—said, “When I was taking him to my place, in the subway, a couple times I thought I’d maybe push him into a sewer interceptor pipe. The water goes real fast there. Wash him right down to the Hudson. Or I know where they have these piles of tie spikes in the subway. I could grab one and hit him over the head when he wasn’t looking. I really, really thought about doing that. But I got scared.” He held up the book. “ ‘Chapter Three. Confronting your Demons.’ I’ve always run, you know. I never stood up to anything. I thought maybe I could stand up to him, but I couldn’t.”