Roland Bell recalled a time he'd gone hunting with his daddy up in the Great Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia. They'd been charged by a wild boar and his father'd winged the animal. It had disappeared into the brush. The man had sighed and said, "We gotta go git him. Can't ever leave a wounded animal."

"But he tried to attack us," the boy had protested.

"Well now, son, we walked into his world. He didn't walk into ours. But that's neither here nor there. It's not a question of fairness. It's a question of we got to find him if it takes all day. Not humane to him and now he's twice as dangerous to anybody else comes along."

Looking around them at the impossible tangle of brush and reeds and swamp grass and loblolly, stretching for miles, young Roland said, "But he could be anywhere, Dad."

His father laughed grimly. "Oh, don't worry 'bout finding him. He'll find us. Keep your thumb on that safety, son. You may have to shoot fast. You comfortable with that?"

"Yessir, I am."

Bell now made another visual circuit of the vans, the alleyways nearby, the buildings next to and across the street from the courthouse.

Nothing.

No Charles Grady.

No Erick Weir, no sign of any of the killer's confederates.

Bell tapped the butt of his gun.

Don't worry 'bout finding him. He'll find us. . . .

Chapter Thirty-nine

"I'm doing a door-to-door, Rhyme. The last wing of the basement."

"Let ESU handle it." He found his head craning forward tensely as he spoke into the microphone.

"We need everybody," Sachs whispered. "It's a damn big building." She was in the Tombs now, working her way through the corridors. "Eerie too. Like the music school."

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser . . .

"Someday you oughta add a chapter to your book about running crime scenes in spooky locations," she joked out of nervousness. "Okay, I'm going silent now, Rhyme. I'll call you back."

Rhyme and Cooper returned to the evidence. In the corridor on the way to intake in the Tombs Sachs had recovered the blade from the razor knife and fragments of beef bone and gray sponge—to simulate skull and brain matter—as well as samples of the fake blood: sugar syrup with red food coloring. He'd used his jacket or shirt to wipe up as much of his real blood as he could from the floor and the cuffs but Sachs had run the scene as methodically as ever and she'd recovered enough of a sample for analysis. He'd taken with him the key or lock picks he'd used to undo the cuffs. There was no other helpful evidence in the corridor scene.