The room was pale blue and green—the paint still wet on several walls—and measured about twenty by thirty feet, with two doors leading to what appeared to be bedrooms to the right. These too were empty and were primed for painting. To the left upon entering was a full kitchen.

Rhyme looked out one of the remaining windows. There was a trim garden outside the room, dominated by a smooth-trunked tree that rose about forty feet into the air. He noted that the lower branches had all been trimmed back; the leaves didn’t start until about twenty or more feet off the ground. Looking straight over the garden, under the canopy of leaves, he could clearly see the infamous spit of land where Barry Shales had fired from, and where the men in the room now had nearly died.

He squinted up at the tree.

Well, we may just have a crime scene after all.

“Rookie!” Rhyme called.

“Sure, Lincoln.”

Pulaski joined him. Mychal Poitier did too.

“Notice anything odd about this scene?”

“One hell of a shot. That’s an awfully long way away. And look at that pollution he had to fire through.”

“It’s the same shooting scenario we saw yesterday from the other side of the water,” he grumbled. “Nothing’s changed about it. Obviously I’m not talking about that. I’m saying: Don’t you see something strange about the horticulture?”

The young officer examined the scene for a moment. “The shooter had help. The branches.”

“That’s right.” Rhyme explained to Poitier, “Somebody cut those lower branches so the sniper would have a clear shot. We should search the garden.”

But the corporal shook his head. “It is a good theory, Captain. But no. That tree? It’s a poisonwood. Are you familiar with it?”

“No.”

“It’s just like the name suggests, like poison oak or sumac. If you burn it, for instance, the smoke will be like tear gas. If you touch the leaves you can end up in the hospital from the irritation. They are flowering trees and very pretty so the resorts here don’t cut them down but they do trim all but the highest branches so people don’t touch them.”

“Ah, well, nice try,” Rhyme muttered. He absolutely hated it when a solid theory crashed. And, with it, any hope of a proper crime scene to search.

He told Pulaski, “Get some pictures, take samples of the carpet right outside the door, soil samples from the beds around the front sidewalk, dust the knobs here for prints. Probably useless but as long as we’re here…”

Rhyme watched the young man collect the evidence and slip it into plastic bags, documenting where it had been found. Pulaski then took perhaps a hundred pictures of the scene. He lifted three latent prints. He finished and deposited what he’d collected in a large paper bag. “Anything else, Lincoln?”

“No,” the criminalist grumbled.