Not a problem . . .

Noting the location of each of his victims. Considering the possibility that they might have moved in the past fifteen minutes.

. . . just a factor.

Now his eyes opened. He nodded to himself, slipped the knife in his pocket, and stepped to the door.

Silently he eased into the kitchen, stole a slotted spoon from a rack over the sink. Walked to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. Then he walked into the common room and meandered from bookshelf to bookshelf, pretending to look for something to read. As he passed each of the video surveillance cameras he reached up with the spoon and slapped the lens. Then he set the milk and spoon on a table and headed into the security room.

“Hey, check out the monitors,” one marshal muttered, turning a knob on the TV screen in front of him.

“Yeah?” the other asked, not really interested.

Jodie walked past the first marshal, who looked up and started to ask, “Hey, sir, how you doing?” when swish, swish, Jodie tidily opened the man’s throat in a V, spraying his copious velvet blood in a high arc. His partner’s eyes flashed wide and he reached for his gun, but Jodie pulled it from his hand and stabbed him once in the throat and once in the chest. He dropped to the floor and thrashed for a moment. It was a noisy death—as Jodie’d known it would be. But he couldn’t do more knife work on the man; he needed the uniform and had to kill him with a minimum of blood.

As the marshal lay on the floor, shaking and dying, he gazed up at Jodie, who was stripping off his own blood-soaked clothes. The marshal’s eyes flickered to Jodie’s biceps. They focused on the tattoo.

As Jodie bent down and began to undress the marshal he noticed the man’s gaze and said, “It’s called ‘Dance Macabre.’ See? Death’s dancing with his next victim. That’s her coffin behind them. Do you like it?”

He asked this with genuine curiosity, though he expected no answer. And received none.

. . . Chapter Thirty-six

Hour 43 of 45

Mel Cooper, clad in latex gloves, was standing over the body of the young man they’d found in Central Park.

“I could try the plantars,” he suggested, discouraged.

The friction ridge prints on the feet were as unique as fingerprints, but they were of marginal value until you had samples from a suspect; they weren’t cataloged in AFIS databases.

“Don’t bother,” Rhyme muttered.

Who the hell is this? Rhyme wondered, looking at the savaged body in front of him. He’s the key to the Dancer’s next move. Oh, this was the worst feeling in the world: an unreachable itch. To have a piece of evidence in front of you, to know it was the key to the case, and yet to be unable to decipher it.

Rhyme’s eyes strayed to the evidence chart on the wall. The body was like the green fibers they’d found at the hangar—significant, Rhyme felt, but its meaning unknown.