Finally she arrived at the main floor and handed the bagged trace off to Mel Cooper.

Lincoln Rhyme turned his Merits wheelchair around from the table where he’d been reviewing evidence and asked, ‘Well? Anything?’

‘Not much,’ Sachs told him. ‘Not much at all.’

Rhyme wasn’t surprised.

Not with Unsub 11-5.

Sachs looked him over carefully, as if he’d actually sipped some of the poisoned whisky.

Or maybe she was just troubled that the unsub had gotten inside, spiked the bottle and gotten out without anybody’s knowing.

Lord knew Rhyme himself was. Actually more pissed off than troubled – because he hadn’t deduced that the whisky was tainted, even though, looking back, he should have. It was obvious that Thom would never leave a nearly full bottle of forty-proof liquor within his boss’s reach. Combine that with the facts that Lon Sellitto and Seth McGuinn had been attacked and that a police action had unfolded right outside his town house, a perfect diversion, and, yeah, Rhyme should have guessed.

But, on the contrary, the salvation had come from a call to 911. A passerby on the cross street had seen someone slip into the service area behind Rhyme’s and pocket a hypodermic. ‘Looking suspicious,’ the Good Samaritan had reported. ‘A drug thing, maybe going to break in, you know.’

The dispatcher had called Rhyme, who understood immediately that the mis-shelved Glenmorangie was Snow White’s apple.

He’d glanced at the glass in his hands and realized that he’d come an instant away from a very unpleasant demise, though less unpleasant to him than to others, given that most of his body would not have felt the excruciating pain the poison causes.

But he’d tucked this shadow of mortality away because he was a man for whom death had been an easy option – voluntary and otherwise – for years. His condition, quadriplegia, brought with it many accessories that could dump him into a coffin at a moment’s notice: dysreflexia and sepsis, for instance.

So, an attempted poisoning? Good news, as far as he was concerned. It might reveal new evidence to lead them a bit closer to the man who was the spiritual heir to the Bone Collector.

CHAPTER 48

Something was up.

Ron Pulaski had been told that there was no memorial service planned for Richard Logan.

But apparently that had changed.

Six people stood in the room he’d been directed to in the Berkowitz Funeral Home, Broadway and 96th.

He hadn’t gone inside yet. The patrol officer stood in the hallway, off to the side, peering in. He was thinking: Tough to blend comfortably when you’re a stranger facing a half-dozen people who know each other – one or all of whom might have a very good incentive to suspect you’re an intruder and shoot you dead.

And the name of the place! Wasn’t Berkowitz the Son of Sam? That serial killer from the 1970s or ’80s?