But Billy had some hypodermics, to sedate his victims. He now reached into his gear bag and withdrew a plastic medicine bottle with a locking cap. He opened the lid carefully and set the brown cylinder on the ground. He selected a surgeon’s hemostat, long tweezers, from his stash of stolen medical equipment. With this instrument he reached into the plastic bottle and picked up the three-quarter-inch tip of a thirty-gauge hypodermic – one of the smallest diameters. He’d carefully fatigued this tip off the syringe and packed it with poison.

He now picked up the woman’s purse and worked the dull end of the needle into the leather under the clasp so that when the crime scene cop opened the bag, the business end of the nearly microscopic needle would pierce the glove and the skin. The tip was so thin, it was unlikely that the person pricked would feel a thing.

Until, of course, about an hour later, when the symptoms hit them like a fireball. And those symptoms were delicious: Strychnine produces some of the most extreme and painful reactions of any toxin. You can count on nausea, convulsion of muscles, hypertension, grotesque flexing of the body, raw sensitivity and finally asphyxiation.

Strychnine, in effect, spasms you to death.

Though in this case, the dosage would, in an adult, lead to severe brain damage rather than death.

Visit pestilence upon your pursuers.

A moan from behind him.

She was swimming to consciousness.

Billy turned toward her, the beam of the halogen whipsawing around the room, fast, leveraged by the motion of his head.

He carefully set the purse on the ground in a spot that looked as if he’d tossed it aside casually – they’d think it contained all sorts of good trace evidence and fingerprints. He hoped it would be Amelia Sachs who picked it up. He was angry at her for finding him at the hospital, even if Lincoln Rhyme was the one responsible. He’d hoped someday to go back to the specimens room but, thanks to her, he never could.

Of course, even if she didn’t get jabbed, maybe one of Lincoln Rhyme’s assistants would.

And Rhyme himself? He supposed it was possible; he’d learned that the man had regained some use of his arm and hand. Maybe he’d don a glove and pick up the purse. He definitely wouldn’t feel the sting.

‘Oh …’

He turned to look at the art gallery of beautiful skin stretched out before him. Ivory. He taped a flashlight in place over his canvas, flicked it on. Looked at her eyes, squinting first in confusion, then in pain.

His wristwatch hummed.

Then the other.

And it was time to leave.

CHAPTER 29

Lights flashed off the falling sleet, off the encrusted piles of old snow, off the wet asphalt.

Blue glows, white, red. Pulsing. Urgent.