They entered the lobby and Mychal Poitier greeted the pleasant desk clerk. She was more curious at the presence of a man in a wheelchair than the police officer; the hotel had surely had its share of those recently. The inn seemed accessible, being on one level, but Rhyme supposed the resort—primarily a beach club and golf course—didn’t get many disabled guests.

The manager was busy at the moment but the clerk didn’t hesitate to prepare a key card for suite 1200.

Pulaski, who’d met her yesterday, nodded a greeting and displayed the picture of Barry Shales that Sachs had emailed. Neither she nor anyone else had ever seen Shales.

Which just about confirmed what Rhyme believed: that it was Unsub 516 who was at the inn on May 8 as Shales’s backup man.

With Pulaski and Poitier carrying the collection equipment, the entourage headed down the corridor the clerk had indicated.

After a walk of several minutes—the inn was quite large—Thom nodded at a sign.

Suites 1200–1208 →

“Almost there.”

They turned the corner. And stopped abruptly.

“Wait,” Poitier muttered. “What’s this?”

Rhyme was looking at the double doors to suite 1200, the Kill Room—the crime scene that had presumably been marked with police tape and strident warnings not to trespass, duly sealed.

But was no longer.

The doors were wide open and a workman in stained white overalls stood in the middle of the room, with a paint roller, putting what seemed to be the final coat on the wall above the fireplace. The floors of the room were bare wood. The carpet had been removed. And everything else—the bloody sofa, the shards of glass—was gone.

Chapter 49

CHAPTER 49

JACOB SWANN WAS EATING a very well-crafted omelet at a diner on the Upper West Side, near Central Park West.

He was in jeans, a windbreaker (black, today), running shoes and white T-shirt. His backpack was at his side. This was a neighborhood in which many people worked jobs where suits and ties weren’t required and regular hours weren’t the norm—performing arts, museums, galleries. Food service too, of course. Swann blended right in.

The coffee he was sipping was hot and not bitter. The toast thick and buttered before meeting the heating element—the only way to do it. And the omelet? Better than well crafted, he decided. Damn good.

Eggs are the trickiest of ingredients and can make a dish sublime or turn it into a complete rout if you’re careless or conditions betray: toughening or curdling or collapsing. A bit of yolk in the whites you’re trying to meringue and your baked Alaska is fucked. And there’s always the chance of unpleasant bacteria reproducing eagerly in God’s perfect oval (gestating is what shells are made for, after all).