How was it set up? she wondered. Was there someone else outside the door to do the actual shooting? Probably. Farr bangs himself on the head and calls for help. Fires a shot into the ceiling. Outside, somebody—maybe a “concerned” citizen—claims he heard the gun and assumes Sachs is armed, shoots her.

She didn’t move.

“Now stand up and git your ass outside.” Farr pulled the pistol from his holster.

Slowly she stood.

You and me, Rhyme …

“You were pretty close, Lincoln,” Jim Bell said.

After a moment he added, “Ninety percent right. My experience in law enforcement is that’s a good percentage. Too bad for you I’m the ten percent you missed.”

Bell shut off the air conditioner. With the window closed the room heated up immediately. Rhyme felt sweat on his forehead. His breathing grew labored.

The sheriff continued, “Two families along Blackwater Canal wouldn’t grant Mr. Davett easements to run his barges.”

A respectful Mister Davett, Rhyme noted.

“So his security chief hired a few of us to take care of the problem. We had a long talk with the Conklins and they decided to grant the easement. But Garrett’s father never would agree. We were going to make it look like a car crash and we got a can of that shit”—he nodded to the jar on the table—“to knock them out. We knew the family went out to dinner every Wednesday. We poured the poison into the car’s vent and hid in the woods. They got in and Garrett’s father turned on the air conditioner. The stuff sprayed out all over them. But we used too much—”

He glanced again at the jar. “That there’s enough to kill a man twice over.” He continued, frowning at the memory. “The family started twitching and convulsing…. Was a hard thing to see. Garrett wasn’t in the car but he ran up and saw what was going on. He tried to get inside but couldn’t. He got a good whiff of the stuff, though, and it was like he became this zombie. He just stumbled off into the woods ’fore we could catch him. And by the time he surfaced—a week or two later—he didn’t remember what’d happened. That MCS thing you were mentioning, I guess. So we just let him be for the time being—too suspicious if he was to die right after his family did.

“Then we did just what you figured. Set fire to the bodies and buried them at Blackwater Landing. Pushed the car into the inlet by Canal Road. Paid the coroner a hundred thousand for some ginned-up reports. Whenever we heard that somebody else’d got a funny kind of cancer and was asking questions why, Culbeau and the others took care of them.”

“That funeral we saw on the way into town. You killed that boy, didn’t you?”