Ed . . .

All the stars of evening . . .

Tears again filling her eyes, she glanced up into the gray sky. Ominous. She estimated the ceiling at one five hundred feet, winds 090 at fifteen knots. Wind shear conditions. She shifted in the seat. Brit Hale’s strong fingers were encircling her forearm. Jerry Banks was chatting about something. She wasn’t listening.

Percey Clay came to a decision. She unfolded the cell phone again.

. . . Chapter Eight

Hour 3 of 45

The siren wailed.

Lincoln Rhyme expected to hear the Doppler effect as the emergency vehicle cruised past. But right outside his front door the siren gave a brief chirrup and went silent. A moment later Thom let a young man into the first-floor lab. Crowned with a spiffy crew cut, the Illinois state trooper wore a blue uniform, which had probably been immaculate when he put it on yesterday but was now wrinkled and streaked with soot and dirt. He’d run an electric razor over his face but had made only faint inroads into the dark beard that contrasted with his thin yellow hair. He was carrying two large canvas satchels and a brown folder, and Rhyme was happier to see him than he’d been to see anybody in the past week.

“The bomb!” he shouted. “Here’s the bomb!”

The officer, surprised at the odd collection of law enforcers, must have wondered what hit him as Cooper scooped the bags away from him and Sellitto scrawled a signature on the receipt and chain-of-custody card and shoved them back into his hand. “Thanks so long see ya,” the detective exhaled, turning back to the evidence table.

Thom smiled politely to the trooper and let him out of the room.

Rhyme called, “Let’s go, Sachs. You’re just standing around! What’ve we got?”

She offered a cold smile and walked over to Cooper’s table, where the tech was carefully laying out the contents of the bags.

What was her problem today? An hour was plenty of time to search a scene, if that’s what she was upset about. Well, he liked her feisty. He himself was always at his best that way. “Okay, Thom, help us out here. The blackboard. We need to list the evidence. Make us some charts. ‘CS-One.’ The first heading.”

“C, uhm, S?”

“‘Crime scene,’” the criminalist snapped. “What else would it be? ‘CS-One, Chicago.’”

In a recent case, Rhyme had used the back of a limp Metropolitan Museum poster as an evidence profiling chart. He now was state of the art—several large chalkboards were mounted to the wall, redolent with scents that took him back to humid spring school days in the Midwest, living for science class and despising spelling and English.

The aide, casting an exasperated glance toward his boss, picked up the chalk, brushed some dust from his perfect tie and knife-crease slacks, and wrote.

“What do we have, Mel? Sachs, help him.”

They began unloading the plastic bags and plastic jars of ash and bits of metal and fiber and wads of plastic. They assembled contents in porcelain trays. The crash site searchers—if they were on a par with the men and women Rhyme had trained—would have used roller-mounted magnets, large vacuum cleaners, and a series of fine mesh screens to locate debris from the blast.