Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at this. “Ah, a definitive link between Unsub Five Sixteen and the Bahamas. We know he was in Annette’s apartment and I’m ninety-nine percent sure he was the one in the South Cove on May eighth. Now, anything linking him to Lydia Foster?”

Pulaski pointed out, “The brown hair, which is what Corporal Poitier said the man in the South Cove Inn had, the one who was there just before Moreno was killed.”

“It suggests; it doesn’t prove. Keep going, Mel.”

The tech was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. “Something odd here. Some membrane, orange. I’ll run part of it through the GC/MS.”

Some minutes later he had the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.

Cooper read, “DHA, C22:6n-3—docosahexaenoic acid.”

“Fish oil,” Rhyme said, looking at the screen on which the microscopic image was being projected. “And with that membrane, see in the upper right corner? I’d say fish eggs: Roe. Or caviar.”

“Also some C8H8O3,” Cooper said.

“You’ve got me,” Rhyme muttered.

The lookup took thirty seconds. “Vanillin.”

“As in vanilla extract?”

“That’s right.”

“Thom! Thom, get in here. Where the hell are you?”

The aide’s voice drifted into the room. “What do you need?”

“You. Present. Here. In the room.”

Rolling down his sleeves, the aide joined them. “How could I resist such a polite summons?”

Sachs laughed.

Rhyme frowned. “Look over those charts, Thom. Put your culinary skills to work. Tell me what you think about those entries, knowing that the docosahexaenoic acid and the C8H8O3 are, respectively, caviar and vanilla.”

The aide stood for a moment, looking over the charts. His face shifted into a smile. “Familiar…Hold on a minute.” He went to a nearby computer and pulled up the New York Times. He did some browsing. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he was looking at. “Well, that’s interesting.”

“Ah, could you share the interesting part?”

“The other two scenes—Lydia Foster and the Java Hut—have traces of artichoke and licorice, right?”

“Right,” Cooper confirmed.

He spun the computer for them to look at. “Well, combine those ingredients with caviar and vanilla and you have a real expensive dish that’s served at the Patchwork Goose. There was just an article about it in the Food section recently.”

“Patchwork…the fuck is that?” Sellitto muttered.

Sachs said, “It’s one of the fanciest restaurants in town. They serve seven or eight courses over four hours and pair the wine. They do weird things like cook with liquid nitrogen and butane torches. Not that I’ve ever been, of course.”

“That’s right,” Thom said, nodding at the screen. It appeared to be a recipe. “And that’s one of the dishes: trout served with artichoke cooked in licorice broth and garnished with roe and vanilla mayonnaise. Your perp left traces of those ingredients?”

“That’s right,” Sachs said.