A light flashed on the washer and it moved to a different portion of the cycle. Harriet looked at the machine with a critical eye. Billy recalled that at home she let clothing dry naturally on lines. He pictured them now, slumped body parts, swaying in the breeze. Sometimes she would bring lengths of clothesline to the Oleander Room.

He now saw that Harriet’s hands were at her hair and the pins were coming out. She was smiling at him again. Smiling a certain way.

Now? Was she serious?

But why did he even bother to wonder? Aunt Harriet never kidded. She walked to the laundry room door and closed it.

The hypnotic rhythm of water sloshing was the only sound in the room.

Harriet locked the laundry room door. Then snapped out the overhead light.

CHAPTER 60

‘Bomb Squads are rolling,’ Pulaski called.

‘Good. So, did you find it, Mel?’

Cooper had a Bible pulled up on the main monitor. He was reading. ‘Just like you said, Lincoln. In the book of Genesis.’

‘Read it.’

‘“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”’ Cooper looked up. ‘We’ve got “the six hundredth”, “the second”, “seventeenth” and “forty”. They’re all there.’

‘The other book! I need the other book!’

‘Serial Cities?’ Cooper asked.

‘What else, Mel? I’m hardly in the mood for Proust, Anna Karenina or Fifteen Shades of Grey.’

‘It’s Fifty,’ Pulaski said and received a withering glance in exchange. ‘I’m just saying. It’s not like I read it or anything.’

Amelia Sachs found the true crime book and flipped the slim volume open. ‘What should I look up, Rhyme?’

Rhyme said, ‘The footnote. I’m interested in the footnote about our investigation of Charlotte, Pam’s mother, and her right-wing militia cell.’

The bombing in New York that Charlotte had planned out.

Sachs read the lengthy passage. It detailed how Rhyme, the NYPD and the FBI had investigated the case.

Rhyme blurted, ‘Okay, our unsub maybe does have some affection, if you will, for the Bone Collector. But that’s not why Eleven-Five was looking for the book – he wanted to see our techniques in tracking down domestic terror cells. Not psychotics. That was an assumption I made,’ Rhyme said, spitting out the noun as if it were an obscenity.

‘A cell hired him to do this?’ Pulaski asked.

‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s part of the group himself. And the target?’ Rhyme gestured at the pictures of the underground crime scenes: ‘See the pipes. The ones stamped with DEP. Environmental Protection. Water pipes.’

Sachs said, ‘Waves, the biblical flood. Of course. They want to blow the city’s water mains.’