Stunned, Carney instinctively grabbed the unresponsive yoke with his left hand; he no longer had a right one. He turned toward Tim just as the man’s bloody, rag-doll body disappeared out of the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.

“Oh, God. No, no . . . ”

Then the entire cockpit broke away from the disintegrating plane and rose into the air, leaving the fuselage and wings and engines of the Lear behind, engulfed in a ball of gassy fire.

“Oh, Percey,” he whispered, “Percey . . . ” Though there was no longer a microphone to speak into.

. . . Chapter Two

Big as asteroids, bone yellow.

The grains of sand glowed on the computer screen. The man was sitting forward, neck aching, eyes in a hard squint—from concentration, not from any flaw in vision.

In the distance, thunder. The early morning sky was yellow and green and a storm was due at any moment. This had been the wettest spring on record.

Grains of sand . . .

“Enlarge,” he commanded, and dutifully the image on the computer doubled in size.

Strange, he thought.

“Cursor down . . . stop.”

Leaning forward again, straining, studying the screen.

Sand, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, is a criminalist’s delight: bits of rock, sometimes mixed with other material, ranging from .05 to 2 millimeters (larger than that is gravel, smaller is silt). It adheres to a perp’s clothing like sticky paint and conveniently leaps off at crime scenes and hideouts to link murderer and murdered. It also can tell a great deal about where a suspect has been. Opaque sand means he’s been in the desert. Clear means beaches. Hornblende means Canada. Obsidian, Hawaii. Quartz and opaque igneous rock, New England. Smooth gray magnetite, the western Great Lakes.

But where this particular sand had come from, Rhyme didn’t have a clue. Most of the sand in the New York area was quartz and feldspar. Rocky on Long Island Sound, dusty on the Atlantic, muddy on the Hudson. But this was white, glistening, ragged, mixed with tiny red spheres. And what are those rings? White stone rings like microscopic slices of calamari. He’d never seen anything like this.

The puzzle had kept Rhyme up till 4 A.M. He’d just sent a sample of the sand to a colleague at the FBI’s crime lab in Washington. He’d had it shipped off with great reluctance—Lincoln Rhyme hated someone else’s answering his own questions.

Motion at the window beside his bed. He glanced toward it. His neighbors—two compact peregrine falcons—were awake and about to go hunting. Pigeons beware, Rhyme thought. Then he cocked his head, muttering, “Damn,” though he was referring not to his frustration with this uncooperative evidence but at the impending interruption.

Urgent footsteps were on the stairs. Thom had let visitors in and Rhyme didn’t want visitors. He glanced toward the hallway angrily. “Oh, not now, for God’s sake.”

But they didn’t hear, of course, and wouldn’t have paused even if they had.