Despite her lack of interest in forensics, Dance found herself intrigued by this choreography. Rhyme and Sachs were a particularly insightful team. She couldn’t help but be impressed when ten minutes later, the technical man, Mel Cooper, looked up from a computer screen and said, “With the wheelbase and those particular brown fibers, it’s probably a Ford Explorer, either two or three years old.”

“Odds are it’s the older one,” Rhyme said.

Why did he say that? Dance wondered.

Sachs saw the frown on her face and answered, “The brakes squealed.”

Ah.

Sellitto turned to Dance. “That was good, Kathryn. You nailed him.”

Sachs asked, “How’d you do it?”

She explained the process she’d used. “I went fishing. I reviewed everything he’d told us—the afterwork bar, the subway, the cash and money clip, the alleyway, the chronology of events and the geography. I checked out his kinesic reaction to each response. The cash was a particularly sensitive subject. What was he doing with the money that he shouldn’t’ve been? An extroverted, narcissistic businessman like him? I figured it was either drugs or sex. But a Wall Street broker’s not buying street drugs; he’d have a connection. That left hookers. Simple.”

“That’s slick, don’t you think, Lincoln?” Cooper asked.

Dance was surprised to see that the criminalist could shrug. He then said noncommitally, “Worked out well. We got some evidence it might’ve taken us a while to find.” His eyes went back to the board.

“Linc, come on. We got his vehicle make. We wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for her.” Sellitto said to Dance, “Don’t take it personal. He doesn’t trust witnesses.”

Rhyme frowned at the detective. “It’s not a contest, Lon. Our goal is the truth, and my experience has been that the reliability of witnesses is somewhat less than that of physical evidence. That’s all. Nothing personal about it.”

Dance nodded. “Funny you say that. I tell people in my lectures the same thing: that our main job as cops isn’t throwing bad guys in jail, it’s getting to the truth.” She too shrugged. “We just had a case in California—death row prisoner exonerated the day before his scheduled execution. A private eye friend of mine spent three years working for his lawyer to get to the bottom of what happened. He just wouldn’t accept that everything was what it seemed to be. The prisoner was thirteen hours away from dying and it turned out he was innocent. . . . If that PI hadn’t kept looking for the truth all those years, he’d be dead now.”

Rhyme said, “And I know what happened. The defendant was convicted because of a witness’s perjured testimony, and DNA analysis freed him, right?”

Dance turned. “No, actually there were no witnesses to the killing. The real killer planted fake physical evidence implicating him.”

“How ’bout that,” said Sellitto and he and Amelia Sachs shared a smile. Rhyme glanced at them both coolly. “Well,” he said to Dance, “it’s fortunate that things worked out for the best. . . . Now I better get back to work.” His eyes returned to the whiteboard.