Thom said, ‘I feel better now, Lincoln. For a minute I really did think I was seeing a soft side. It was disorienting. But knowing that you’re just setting up a sting to spy on the family of a corpse? It’s restored my faith in you.’

Rhyme grumbled, ‘It’s simply logical. You know, I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.’

Though ironically Rhyme did want to send the flowers in part for a sentimental reason: to pay his respects to a worthy adversary. He suspected the Watchmaker would have done the same for him.

Views of Death Number One and Number Two were not, of course, mutually exclusive.

Rhyme then cocked his head.

‘What?’ Sachs asked.

‘What’s the temperature?’

‘Right around freezing.’

‘So there’s ice on the steps outside?’ Rhyme’s town house sported both stairs and a disabled-accessible ramp.

‘There was in the back,’ she said. ‘Front too, I assume.’

‘We’re about to have a visitor, I think.’

Though the evidence was largely anecdotal, Rhyme had come to believe that, after the accident that deprived him of so many sensations, those that survived grew more discerning. Hearing in particular. He’d detected someone crunching up the front steps.

A moment later the buzzer sounded and Thom went to answer it.

The sound and pacing of the footsteps as the visitor entered the hallway and made for the parlor revealed who’d come a-callin’.

‘Lon.’

Detective First-Grade Lon Sellitto turned the corner and strode through the archway, pulling off his Burberry overcoat. It was tan and vivid with the creases that characterized most of Sellitto’s garb, thanks to his portly physique and careless posture. Rhyme wondered why he didn’t stick with dark clothing, which wouldn’t show the rumpling so much. Though once the overcoat was off and tossed over a rattan chair, Rhyme noted that the navy-blue suit displayed its own troubled texture.

‘Bad out there,’ Sellitto muttered. He dusted his thinning gray-black hair, and a few dots of sleet bailed. His eyes followed them down. He’d tracked in muck and ice. ‘Sorry about that.’

Thom said not to worry and brought him a cup of coffee.

‘Bad,’ the detective repeated, toasting his hands on the mug the way Sachs had. Eyes toward the window, on the other side of which, beyond the falcons, you could see sleet and mist and black branches. And little else of Central Park.

Rhyme didn’t get out much and in any event weather meant nothing to him, unless it was a factor in a crime scene.

Or it helped his early warning system detect visitors.

‘It’s pretty much finished,’ Rhyme said, nodding at the City Hall mugging/murder crime scene report.

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s not why I’m here.’ Spoken nearly as one word.