“He’s sixteen,” Rhyme said. “It’d be unusual if he wasn’t. Bag one. We might need some DNA.”

Sachs found more under the bed: a cheap picture frame on which he’d painted crude drawings of insects—ants and hornets and beetles. Inside was mounted the cut-out yearbook photo of Mary Beth McConnell. There was also an album of a dozen other snapshots of Mary Beth. They were candids. Most of them were of the young woman on what seemed to be a college campus or walking down the street of a small town. Two were of her in her bikini at a lake. In both of these she was bending down and the picture focused on the girl’s cleavage. She told Rhyme what she’d found.

“His fantasy girl,” Rhyme muttered. “Keep going.”

“I think we should bag this and get on to the primary scene.”

“In a minute or two, Sachs. Remember—this was your idea, being Good Samaritans, not mine.”

A shudder of anger at this. “What do you want?” she asked heatedly. “You want me to dust for prints? Vacuum for hairs?”

“Of course not. We’re not after trial-quality evidence for the D.A.; you know that. All we need is something that’ll give us an idea where he might’ve taken the girls. He’s not going to bring them back home. He’s got a place he’s made just for them. And he’s been there earlier—to get it ready. He may be young and quirky but he still smells of an organized offender. Even if the girls’re dead I’ll bet he’s picked out nice, cozy graves for them.”

Despite all the time they’d worked together Sachs still had trouble with Rhyme’s callousness. She knew it was part of being a criminalist—the distancing one must do from the horror of crime—but it was hard for her. Perhaps because she recognized that she had the same capacity for this coldness within herself, that numbing detachment that the best crime scene searchers must turn on like a light switch, a detachment that Sachs sometimes feared would deaden her heart irreparably.

Nice, cozy graves …

Lincoln Rhyme, whose voice was never more seductive than when he was imagining a crime scene, said to her, “Go on, Sachs, get into him. Become Garrett Hanlon. What are you thinking? What’s your life like? What do you do minute by minute by minute in that little room? What are your most secret thoughts?”

The best criminalists, Rhyme had told her, were like talented novelists, who imagined themselves as their characters—and could disappear into someone else’s world.

Eyes scanning the room once more. I’m sixteen. I’m a troubled boy, I’m an orphan, kids at school pick on me, I’m sixteen, I’m sixteen, I’m—

A thought formed. She snagged it before it swam off.

“Rhyme, you know what’s weird?”