She tried the driver once more and shook her head. She placed another call—to Elite Limos, Rhyme deduced. She asked if they had heard from their employee. A brief conversation and she hung up.

“Never called in after he went to see a sick relative.”

“Don’t trust it. We may have a third victim of our unsub. Find out where he lives, Pulaski. Get a team from the closest precinct to his house and see what’s there.”

The young officer pulled out his mobile and called Dispatch.

Rhyme wheeled back and forth in front of the charts. He didn’t believe he’d ever had a case like this, where the evidence was so fragmentary and sparse.

Bits, scraps, observations, 180-degree changes in direction.

Nothing else…

Hell.

Rhyme steered toward the shelf with the whiskey bottles. He lifted the Glenmorangie and awkwardly poured another hit, then seated the cap on his tumbler and sipped.

“What’re you doing?” Thom asked from the doorway.

“What am I doing, what am I doing? Now, that’s an odd question. Usually the interrogatory ‘what’ introduces a sentence in which the inquirer is unable to make any deductions about a situation.” A substantial sip. “I think you’ve wasted a perfectly good sentence, Thom. It’s pretty clear what I’m doing.”

“You’ve already had too much.”

“That’s a declarative sentence and it makes much more sense. It’s valid. I disagree with it but it’s logically valid.”

“Lincoln!” Thom strode forward.

Rhyme glared. “Don’t even think—”

“Wait,” Sachs said.

Rhyme assumed she was taking Thom’s side in the alcohol dispute but when he wheeled around he found her eyes were not on him or the aide but on the whiteboards. She walked forward and Rhyme noticed that she wasn’t wincing or limping. She was spry and balanced. Her eyes narrowed. This was her predatory gaze. It made the tall woman frightening and, to Rhyme, appealing.

He set the whiskey down. His eyes rose to the boards and scanned like radar. Were there some facts he’d missed? Had she made a deduction that had eluded him? “Do you see something about Five Sixteen?”

“No, Rhyme,” she whispered. “It’s something else. Something else entirely.”

Chapter 74

CHAPTER 74

NANCYANN OLIVIA LAUREL was sitting on a couch in her Brooklyn Heights apartment, a brown JCPenney slipcover over blue upholstery that had been worn smooth by her family and their friends years and years ago.

Hand-me-downs. A lot of those here. Laurel was tapped by a memory: Her father surreptitiously fishing in the sofa’s crevices for coins that had fallen from the pockets of visitors. She’d been eight or so and he’d made a joke of it, a game, when she’d walked into the room unexpectedly.

Except it wasn’t a game, and she knew it. Even children can be ashamed of their parents.