“And you think somebody was pretending to be Joey? It wasn’t him?”

“Positive. He left the force last year and moved to Montana.”

“Maybe he came back to visit, wanted to look you up.”

“If he did, it was his ghost. He was killed in a motorcycle accident last spring. . . . And both Ron and I’ve been tailed. And earlier today somebody went through my purse. It was in my car, locked up. They broke in.”

“Where?”

“At the scene on Spring Street, near the florist’s shop.”

It was then that something in the back of Kathryn Dance’s mind began to nag. She finally seized the memory. “There’s one thing I ought to say. . . . Might be nothing but it’s worth mentioning.”

The hour was late but Rhyme had called everyone together. Sellitto, Cooper, Pulaski and Baker.

Amelia Sachs was now looking them over.

She said, “We have a problem I want you to know about. Somebody’s been tailing me and Ron. And Kathryn just told me that she thought she’d seen someone too.”

The kinesics expert nodded.

Sachs then glanced at Pulaski. “You told me you thought you’d seen that Mercedes. Have you seen it again?”

“Nope. Not since this afternoon.”

“How about you, Mel? Anything unusual?”

“I don’t think so.” The slim man pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “But I never pay attention. Lab techs aren’t used to being tailed.”

Sellitto said he thought he might’ve seen someone but wasn’t sure.

“When you were in Brooklyn today, Dennis,” Sachs asked Baker, “you get the feeling that somebody was watching you?”

He paused. “Me? I wasn’t in Brooklyn.”

She frowned. “But . . . you weren’t?”

Baker shook his head. “No.”

Sachs turned to Dance, who’d been studying Baker. The California agent nodded.

Sachs’s hand strayed to her Glock and she turned toward Baker. “Dennis, keep your hands where we can see them.”

His eyes went wide. “What?”

“We need to have a little talk.”

None of the others in the room—who’d been briefed beforehand—gave any reaction, though Pulaski kept his hand near his own piece. Lon Sellitto stepped behind Baker.

“Hey, hey, hey,” the man said, frowning and looking over his shoulder at the heavyset detective. “What is this?”

Rhyme said, “We want to ask you a few questions, Dennis.”

What Kathryn Dance had felt worth mentioning was something very subtle and it wasn’t that somebody’d been following her; Sachs had simply said that to keep Dennis Baker at ease. Dance recalled that earlier, when Baker had mentioned that he’d been at the scene in front of the florist’s workshop, she’d observed him crossing his legs, avoiding eye contact and sitting in a position that suggested possible deception. His exact comment at that moment was that he’d just left the scene and couldn’t recall if Spring Street had been reopened or not. Since he’d have no reason to lie about where he was, she didn’t think anything of it at the time.