Last week at least three very clever perps had broken into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue after hours. Video cameras were disabled and alarms suspended – no easy matter – but an exhaustive crime scene search had revealed that the perps had spent time in two areas: the antique arms hall of the museum, which was open to the public – a schoolboy’s delight, filled with swords, battle-axes, armor and hundreds of other clever devices meant to excise body parts; and the museum’s basement archives, storage and restoration areas. They’d left after several hours and remotely reactivated the alarms. The intrusion had been pieced together by computer analysis of the security shutdowns and physical examinations of the rooms after discovering the alarm breaches.

It was almost as if the burglars were like many tourists who visit the museum: They’d seen enough, grown bored and headed for a nearby restaurant or bar.

A complete inventory revealed that while some items in both areas had been moved, the intruders hadn’t perped a single painting, collectible or packet of Post-it notes. Crime Scene investigators – Rhyme and Sachs hadn’t worked that one – had been overwhelmed by the amount of space to search; the arms and armor displays were bad enough but the network of archives and storage rooms extended underground, far east, well past Fifth Avenue.

The case had been demanding time-wise but Sellitto had admitted that wasn’t the worst of it. ‘Politics. Fucking politics.’ He’d gone on to explain, ‘Hizzoner thinks it looks bad his prize jewel got busted into. Which translates: My crew’s working overtime and hell with everything else. We’ve got terror threats in the city, Linc. Code red or orange or whatever color means we’re fucked. We got Tony Soprano wannabes. And what’m I doing? I’m looking through every dusty room, at every weird canvas and every naked statue in the basement. I mean, every. You wanna know my feeling about art, Linc?’

‘What, Lon?’ Rhyme had asked.

‘Fuck art. That’s my feeling.’

But now the new case – the poison tat artist – had derailed the old, to the detective’s apparent relief. ‘You got a killer like this, the papers ain’t gonna be happy we’re spending our time worried about paintings of water lilies and statues of Greek gods with little dicks. You see those statues, Linc? Some of those guys … Really, you’d think the model’d tell the sculptor to add an inch or two.’

He sat heavily in a chair, sipped more coffee. Still no interest in the pastry.

Rhyme then frowned. ‘One thing, Lon?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When did this tattoo killing happen exactly?’

‘TOD was about an hour ago. Ninety minutes maybe.’

Rhyme was confused. ‘You couldn’t get the tox screen back in that time.’

‘Naw, the ME said a couple hours.’

‘Then how’d they’d know she was poisoned?’