“Talk to me, Sachs,” he said softly, encouraging.

“He’s a teenager, right? Well, I remember Tommy Briscoe—I dated him when I was sixteen. You know what he had all over his walls in his room?”

“In my day and age it was that damn Farrah Fawcett poster.”

“That’s it exactly. Garrett doesn’t have a single pinup, a single Playboy or Penthouse poster. No Magic cards, no Pokémon, no toys. No Alanis or Celine. No rock-musician posters…. And—hey, get this: no VCR, TV, stereo, radio. No Nintendo. My God, he’s sixteen and he doesn’t even have a computer.” Her goddaughter was twelve and the girl’s room was virtually an electronics showroom.

“Maybe it’s a money thing—the foster parents.”

“Hell, Rhyme, if I were his age and wanted to listen to music I’d build a radio. Nothing stops teenagers. But those aren’t the things that excite him.”

“Excellent, Sachs.”

Maybe, she reflected, but what did it mean? Recording observations is only half of the job of a forensic scientist; the other half, the far more important half, is drawing helpful conclusions from those observations.

“Sachs—”

“Shhhh.”

She struggled to put aside the person she really was: the cop from Brooklyn, the lover of taut General Motors vehicles, former fashion model for the Chantelle agency on Madison Avenue, champion pistol shot, the woman who wore her straight red hair long and her fingernails short lest the habit of digging into her scalp and skin mar her otherwise perfect flesh with yet more stigmata of the tension that drove her.

Trying to turn that person into smoke and emerge as a troubled, scary sixteen-year-old boy. Someone who needed, or wanted, to take women by force. Who needed, or wanted, to kill.

What do I feel?

“I don’t care about normal pleasures, music, TV, computers. I don’t care about normal sex,” she said, half to herself. “I don’t care about normal relationships. People are like insects—things to be caged. In fact, all I care about are insects. They’re my only source of comfort. My only amusement.” She said this as she paced in front of the jars. Then she looked down at the floor at her feet. “The tracks of the chair!”

“What?”

“Garrett’s chair … it’s on rollers. It’s facing the insect jars. All he does is roll back and forth and stare at them and draw them. Hell, he probably talks to them too. His whole life is these bugs.” But the tracks in the wood stopped before they got to the jar on the end of the row—the largest of them and one set slightly apart from the others. It contained yellow jackets. The tiny yellow-and-black crescents zipped about angrily as if they were aware of her intrusion.