“No. It was on the clothes of the guard he beat up.”

Ammonia? Rhyme wondered. He asked Cooper to look at one of the fibers through the scanning electron microscope. “High magnification. How’s the ammonia attached?”

The screen clicked on. The strand of fiber appeared like a tree trunk.

“Heat fused, I’d guess.”

Another mystery. Paper and ammonia . . .

Rhyme looked at the clock. It was 2:40 A.M.

Suddenly he realized Sellitto had asked him a question. He cocked his head.

“I said,” the detective repeated, “should we start evacuating everybody around the precinct? I mean, better now than wait till it’s closer to the time he might attack.”

For a long moment Rhyme gazed at the bluish tree trunk of fiber on the screen of the SEM. Then he said abruptly, “Yes. We have to get everybody out. Evacuate the buildings around the station house. Let’s think—the four apartments on either side and across the street.”

“That many?” Sellitto asked, giving a faint laugh. “You think we really gotta do that?”

Rhyme looked up at the detective and said, “No, I’ve changed my mind. The whole block. We’ve got to evacuate the whole block. Immediately. And get Haumann and Dellray over here. I don’t care where they are. I want them now.”

. . . Chapter Seventeen

Hour 22 of 45

Some of them had slept.

Sellitto in an armchair, waking more rumpled than ever, his hair askew. Cooper downstairs.

Sachs had apparently spent the night on a couch downstairs or in the other bedroom on the first floor. No interest in the Clinitron anymore.

Thom, himself bleary, was hovering, a dear busybody, taking Rhyme’s blood pressure. The smell of coffee filled the town house.

It was just after dawn and Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts. They’d been up till four, planning their strategy for snagging the Dancer—and responding to the legion of complaints about the evacuation.

Would this work? Would the Dancer step into their trap? Rhyme believed so. But there was another question, one that Rhyme didn’t like to think about but couldn’t avoid. How bad would springing the trap be? The Dancer was deadly enough on his own territory. What would he be like when he was cornered?

Thom brought coffee around and they looked over Dellray’s tactical map. Rhyme, back in the Storm Arrow, rolled into position and studied it too.

“Everybody in place?” he asked Sellitto and Dellray.

Both Haumann’s 32-E teams and Dellray’s federal pickup band of Southern and Eastern District FBI SWAT officers were ready. They’d moved in under cover of night, through sewers and basements and over rooftops, in full urban camouflage; Rhyme was convinced that the Dancer was surveilling his target.

“He won’t be sleeping tonight,” Rhyme had said.

“You sure he’s going in this way, Linc?” Sellitto’d asked uncertainly.

Sure? he thought testily. Who can be sure about anything with the Coffin Dancer?

His deadliest weapon is deception . . .

Rhyme said wryly, “Ninety-two point seven percent sure.”