“That’s good enough for me,” Rhyme announced. Thinking: The fish may still be out of water but it’s just grown lungs. He announced to Bell and Mason, “I made a mistake. A big one. I saw the yeast and I assumed it’d come from the mill, not the place where Garrett really has Mary Beth. But why would a mill have supplies of yeast? You’d only find those in a bakery … Or”—he lifted his eyebrow to Bell—“someplace they’re brewing that.” He nodded at the bottle that sat on the table. The liquid inside was what Rhyme had just asked Bell to collect from the basement of the Sheriff’s Department. It was 110-proof moonshine—from one of the juice bottles that Rhyme had seen a deputy clear away when he’d taken over the evidence room and turned it into a lab. This is what Ben had just sampled in the chromatograph.

“Sugar and yeast,” the criminalist continued. “Those’re ingredients in liquor. And the cellulose in that batch of moonshine,” Rhyme continued, looking at the computer screen, “is probably from the paper fibers—I assume when you make moonshine, you have to filter it.”

“Yep,” Bell confirmed. “And most ’shiners use off-the-shelf coffee filters.”

“Just like the fiber we found on Garrett’s clothes. And the dextrose and fructose—complex sugars found in fruit. That’s from the fruit juice left over in the jar. Ben said it was tart—like cranberry juice. And you told me, Jim, that’s the most popular container for moonshine. Right?”

“Ocean Spray.”

“So,” Rhyme summarized, “Garrett’s holding Mary Beth in a moonshiner’s cabin—presumably one that’s been abandoned since the raid.”

“What raid?” Mason asked.

“Well, it’s like the trailer,” Rhyme replied shortly, hating as always to have to explain the obvious. “If Garrett’s using the place to hide Mary Beth then it has to be abandoned. And what’s the only reason anybody’d abandon a working still?”

“Department of revenue busted it,” Bell said.

“Right,” Rhyme said. “Get on the phone and find out the location of any stills that’ve been raided in the past couple of years. It’ll be a nineteenth-century building in a stand of trees and painted brown—though it may not have been when it got raided. It’s four or five miles from where Frank Heller lives and it’ll be on a Carolina bay or you’ll have to go around a bay to get there from the Paquo.”

Bell left to call the revenue department.

“That’s pretty good, Lincoln,” Ben said. Even Mason Germain seemed impressed.