‘You understand. That sounds condescending. And you make me sound desperate. I told you, I’m not getting married. I’m not having his baby. I want to travel with a guy I love. What’s the big fucking deal?’

This was going so wrong. How did I lose control? This was the same conversation they’d had the other day. Except that the tone was darker.

Pam pulled her hat back on. Started to rise.

‘Please. Just wait a minute.’ Sachs’s mind was racing. ‘Let me say one more thing. Please.’

Impatient, Pam dropped back into her seat. A waitress came by. She waved the woman away.

Sachs said, ‘Could we—?’

But she never got to finish her plea to the teenager, for just then her phone hummed. It was a text from Mel Cooper. He was asking her to get to Rhyme’s town house as soon as she could.

Actually, she noted, the message wasn’t a request at all.

It never really is when the word ‘emergency’ figures in the header.

CHAPTER 47

Upon examining the back door to Rhyme’s town house, a gowned and gloved Amelia Sachs decided: The son of a bitch sure can pick locks.

Unsub 11-5 hadn’t left more than a minute scratch when he’d broken into the town house to doctor a bottle of scotch on Rhyme’s shelf – insidiously leaving it within the wheelchair-bound criminalist’s reach. Sachs wasn’t surprised the unsub had some skill at breaking and entering; his talent at skin art attested to his dexterity.

The sleet spattered and the wind blew. By now any evidence in the cul-de-sac and around the back door had probably been obliterated. Inside the door, where footprints would have been visible, she discovered nothing other than marks left by his booties.

The strategy behind the assault was now clear: 11-5 had called in a false alarm – an attempted rape in Central Park, near the town house. When Rhyme and the others inside went to the front door to see what was going on, the unsub had snuck through the back and found an open bottle of whisky, poured some poison inside, then escaped silently.

Sachs walked the grid on the route from the back door up the stairs, through the hall from the kitchen to the parlor. Rhyme had an alarm system, which was turned off when the town house was occupied, as now. Video cameras covered the front and back doors but they were real-time monitoring only; the images weren’t recorded.

A sense of violation filled Sachs. Somebody had breached the castle, somebody stealthy and adroit. And deadly. Thom had already arranged for the locks to be changed and a drop bar put on both doors but once someone has intruded into your living area, you’re never completely free from the taint of desecration. And from worry that it might happen again.