Rhyme and Sellitto were deep in bureaucratic debt by the time the fax of the DNA profile arrived. The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.

“Somebody killed him?” Sellitto muttered. His shirt was so wrinkled it looked like a fiber sample under five-hundred-times magnification. “Why?”

But why was not a criminalist’s question.

Evidence . . . Rhyme thought. Evidence was his only concern.

He glanced at the crime scene charts on his wall, scanning all the clues of the case. The fibers, the bullets, the broken glass . . .

Analyze! Think!

You know the procedure. You’ve done it a million times.

You identify the facts. You quantify and categorize them. You state your assumptions. And you draw your conclusions. Then you test—

Assumptions, Rhyme thought.

There was one glaring assumption that had been present in this case from the beginning. They’d based their entire investigation on the belief that Kall was the Coffin Dancer. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was the pawn and the Dancer’d been using him as a weapon?

Deception . . .

If so, there’d be some evidence that didn’t fit. Something that pointed to the real Dancer.

He pored over the charts carefully.

But there was nothing unaccounted for except the green fiber. And that told him nothing.

“We don’t have any of Kall’s clothes, right?”

“No, he was buck naked when we found him,” the tour doctor said.

“We have anything he came in contact with?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Well, Jodie.”

Rhyme asked, “He changed clothes here, didn’t he?”

“Right,” Sellitto said.

“Bring ’em here. Jodie’s clothes. I want to look at them.”

“Uck,” Dellray said. “They’re excessively unpleasant.”

Cooper found and produced them. He brushed them out over sheets of clean newsprint. He mounted samples of the trace on slides and set them in the compound ’scope.

“What do we have?” Rhyme asked, looking over the computer screen, a copycat image of what Cooper was seeing in his microscope.

“What’s that white stuff?” Cooper asked. “Those grains. There’s a lot of it. It was in the seams of his pants.”

Rhyme felt his face flush. Some of it was his erratic blood pressure from exhaustion, some of it was the phantom pain that still plagued him every now and then. But mostly it was the heat of the chase.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

“What, Lincoln?”

“It’s oolite,” he announced.

“The fuck’s that?” Sellitto asked.

“Eggstone. It’s a wind-borne sand. You find it in the Bahamas.”

“Bahamas?” Cooper asked, frowning. “What else did we just hear about the Bahamas?” He looked around the lab. “I don’t remember.”

But Rhyme did. His eyes were seated on the bulletin board, where was pinned the FBI analyst’s report on the sand Amelia Sachs had found last week in Tony Panelli’s car, the missing agent downtown.