His eyes were on fire, stinging from the pollutants in the water, and he squinted but kept them open as he searched for the switch to the ventilator.

Finally, there. That’s it.

He clicked it on.

Lights glowed. The machine hummed and he inhaled a bit of wonderful, sweet oxygen.

Another.

But there was no third. Apparently the water had worked its way through the housing and short-circuited the unit.

The ventilator went dark. The air stopped.

At that moment he heard another sound, muffled through the water, but distinct: Two sounds, actually.

Gunshots.

Spelling the deaths of his friends: one he’d known seemingly forever and one he’d grown close to in just the past few hours.

Rhyme’s next breath was of water.

He thought of Amelia Sachs and his body relaxed.

Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

N O.

OH, NO.

At close to 5 p.m. she parked in front of Lydia Foster’s apartment building on Third Avenue.

Sachs couldn’t get too close; police cars and ambulances blocked the street.

Logic told her that the reason for the vehicles couldn’t be the death of the interpreter. Sachs had been following the sniper for the past hour and a half. He was still in his office downtown. She hadn’t left until Myers’s Special Services surveillance team showed up. Besides, how could the sniper have learned the interpreter’s name and address? She’d been careful to call from landlines and prepaid mobiles.

That’s what logic reported.

Yet instinct told her something very different, that Lydia was dead and Sachs was to blame. Because she’d never considered what she realized was the truth: They had two perps. One was the man she’d been following through the streets of downtown New York—the sniper, she knew, because of the voiceprint match—and the other, Lydia Foster’s killer, an unsub, unidentified subject. He was somebody else altogether, maybe the shooter’s partner, a spotter, as many snipers used. Or a separate contractor, a specialist, hired by Shreve Metzger to clean up after the assassination.

She parked fast, tossed the NYPD placard on the dash and stepped out of the car, hurrying toward the nondescript apartment building, the pale façade marred by off-white water stains as if the air-conditioning units had been crying.

Ducking under the police tape, she hurried up to a detective, who was prepping a canvass team. The slim African American recognized her, though she didn’t know him, and he nodded a greeting. “Detective.”

“Was it Lydia Foster?” Wondering why she bothered to ask.

“Right. This involves a case you’re running?”

“Yeah. Lon Sellitto’s the lead, Bill Myers’s overseeing it. I’m doing the legwork.”

“It’s all yours, then.”

“What happened?”

She noticed the man was shaken up, eyes twitching away from hers as he fiddled with a pen.