"That's him. Charles Grady."

"What'm I supposed to do?" Reverend Swensen had asked, envisioning a letter-writing campaign or a fiery sermon.

"Kill him," Barnes had said simply.

"What?"

"I want you to go to New York and kill him."

"Oh, Lord. Well, I can't do that." Trying to put on a firm front although his hands were shaking so bad he spilled his coffee on a hymnal. "For one thing, what good'll it do? It won't help Andrew any. Hell, they'll know he was behind it and they'll make it even harder-"

"Constable's not part of this. He's out of the equation. There're bigger issues here. We need to make a statement. You know, do what all those assholes in Washington're always saying in their press conferences. 'Send a message.'"

"Well, just forget it, Jeddy. I can't do it. It's crazy."

"Oh, I think you can."

"But I'm a minister."

"You hunt every Sunday-that's murder, if you want to look at it one way. And you were in Nam. You got scalps-if your stories're true."

"That was thirty years ago." Whispering desperately, avoiding both the man's eyes and the admission that, no, the war stories weren't true. "I'm not killing anybody."

"I'll bet Clara Sampson'd like you to." Stony silence for a moment. "Chickens're coming back to roost, Ralph."

Lord, Lord, Lord . . .

Last year Jeddy Barnes had stopped Wayne Sampson from going to the police after the dairy farmer had found the minister with Sampson's thirteen-year-old daughter in the playground he'd built behind the church. It occurred to him now that Barnes had played mediator solely to get some leverage on him. "Please, look-"

"Clara wrote a nice letter, which I happen to have. D'I mention I asked her to do that last year? Anyway, she went and described your private parts in more detail than I personally wanna read about but I'm sure a jury'd appreciate it."

"You can't do this. No, no, no . . ."

"Don't wanta argue the matter with you, Ralph. Here's the situation. If you don't agree then come next month you'll be doin' the same thing to niggers in prison that you had Clara Sampson doin' to you. Now, what's it gonna be?"

"Shit."

"I'll take that as a yes. Now, lemme walk you through what we have planned."

And Barnes had given him a gun, the address of a hotel and the location of Grady's office then shipped him off to New York City.

When he'd first arrived, a few days ago, Reverend Swensen had spent several days doing recon work. He'd gone into the state government building late Thursday afternoon and, with his slightly baffled demeanor and wearing his minister's garb, had wandered the halls unchallenged until he found a broom closet in a deserted corridor, where he hid until midnight. Then he'd broken into Grady's secretary's office and found out that the prosecutor and his family would be attending the recital at the Neighborhood School tonight; his daughter was one of the young performers.

Now, armed and edgy with cat nerves, the reverend stood fidgeting in front of the school and watching Grady's bodyguards talking with the prosecutor in the backseat. The plan was to kill Grady and his guards with the silenced pistol then drop to the ground himself, screaming in panic that a man had just driven by and was shooting from a car. The minister should be able to escape in the confusion.

Should be . . .

He now tried to say a prayer but, even though Charles Grady was a tool of the devil, asking help from the Lord our God to kill an unarmed white Christian bothered Reverend Swensen considerably. So he settled for a silent Bible recitation.

I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lit up by his glory . . .

Reverend Swensen rocked on his feet, thinking that he couldn't bear to wait any longer. Cat-nerves, cat-nerves . . . He wanted to get back to his sheep, his farmland, his church, his ever-popular sermons.

Clara Sampson too, who was nearly fifteen now and for all intents and purposes fair game.

And the angel cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit . . .

He considered the matter of Grady's family. The prosecutor's wife hadn't done anything wrong. Being married to a sinner wasn't the same as being a sinner yourself or choosing to work for one. No, he'd spare Mrs. Grady.

Unless she noticed that he was the one shooting.

As for the daughter Barnes had told him about, Chrissy. . . . He wondered how old she was and what she looked like.

And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all. . . .

Now, he thought. Do it. Go, go, go.

And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. . . .

Thinking, the stone of retribution I've got, Grady, is a well-built Swiss gun and the messenger isn't an angel from Heaven but a representative of all right-thinking people in America. He started forward.

The bodyguards were still looking away.

Opening the attache case, he took out the Rand McNally and the heavy gun. Hiding the weapon inside the colorful map, he strolled casually toward the car. Grady's bodyguards were now standing together on the sidewalk, with their backs to him.

One reached down to open the door for the prosecutor.

Twenty feet away . . .

Reverend Swensen thought to Grady, God have mercy on your- And then the angel's millstone landed squarely on his shoulders. "On the ground, on the ground, now, now now now!" A half-dozen men and women, a hundred demons, grabbed Reverend Swensen's arms and flung him hard to the sidewalk. "Don't move don't move don't move don't move!"

One grabbed the gun, one snatched away the briefcase, one pressed the reverend's neck down into the sidewalk like the weight of the city's sin. His face scraped against the concrete and pain shot through his wrists and shoulder sockets as handcuffs were ratcheted on him and his pockets turned inside-out.

Crushed to the concrete Reverend Swensen saw Grady's car door open and three policemen leap out, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests.

"Stay down, head down down down!"

Jesus our Lord in Heaven. . . .

He watched a man's feet walk closer to him. In contrast to the fierceness of the other officers this man was quite polite. In a southern-accented voice he said, "Now, sir, we're going to roll you over and then I'm going to read you your rights. And you let me know if you understand 'em."

Several cops turned him over and pulled him to his feet.

The reverend started in shock.

The man speaking was the one in the dark sports coat he'd thought was following him in Washington Square. Next to him was the blond man in glasses who'd apparently taken over the surveillance. The third, the swarthy man who'd asked about the time the concert began, stood nearby.

"Sir, my name's Detective Bell. And I'm going to read those rights now. You ready? Good. Here we go."

Bell looked over the contents of Swensen's attache case.

Extra ammunition for the H&K pistol. A yellow pad inscribed with what looked to be a very bad sermon scrawled on it. A guidebook, New York on Fifty Dollars a Day. There was also a beat-up Gideon Bible stamped with the name and address: THE ADELPHI HOTEL, 232 BOWERY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK.

Hmmm, Bell thought wryly, looks like we can add a count of Bible larceny to the charges.

He found nothing, though, that suggested a direct connection between this attempt on Grady's life and Andrew Constable. Discouraged, he handed off the evidence to be logged in and called Rhyme to tell him that the impromptu operation by the Saving Asses team had been successful.

Back at Rhyme's an hour earlier the criminalist had continued to pore over the revised crime scene report while Mel Cooper had researched the fibers the CS team had found in Grady's office. Finally Rhyme had made some troubling deductions. The analysis of the footprints in the office revealed that the intruder had stood for some minutes in one spot-the right front corner of the secretary's desk. The inventory of the office showed only one item in this portion of the desk: the woman's daily calendar. And the only entry for this weekend was Chrissy Grady's recital at the Neighborhood School.

Which meant that the person who broke in undoubtedly noted this. As for the attacker himself, Rhyme had ventured that he might be disguised as a minister or priest. With the help of an FBI database Cooper managed to trace the black fibers and dye to a cloth manufacturer in Minnesota, which-Cooper and Rhyme learned from its website-specialized in black gabardine for clerical-clothing makers. Rhyme also noted that several of the white fibers CS had found were polyester bonded with starched cotton, which suggested a white lightweight shirt with a stiff clerical collar attached.

The single red satin fiber was the sort that could've come from a ribbon bookmark in an old book, as could the gold leaf. A Bible, for instance. Rhyme had run a case years ago in which a smuggler had hidden drugs in a hollowed-out Bible; that CS search team had found similar trace in the man's office.

Bell had ordered Grady and his family not to attend their daughter's recital. In their place a team of ESU troopers would drive to the school in Grady's city car. Teams stationed themselves north of the school on Fifth Avenue, on cross streets west at Sixth Avenue and east at University Place and south in Washington Square Park.

Sure enough, Bell, who'd taken the park, had spotted a minister walking nervously toward the school. Bell had started to tail him but was spotted so he'd peeled off. Another SWAT officer picked up and tracked him to the school. A third detective from Bell's SWAT group approached and asked about the concert, checking visually for signs of weapons, but not finding any obvious ones-and hence having no probable cause to detain and search him.

But the suspect remained under close surveillance and as soon as he was seen pulling the gun from his attache case and starting for the decoys he was taken down.

Expecting a fake priest, they'd been surprised to find that they'd caught a real one, which the contents of Swensen's wallet confirmed-despite the contrary testimony of the embarrassingly bad sermon. Bell nodded at the H&K automatic.

"Pretty big gun for a priest," he said.

"I'm a minister."

"Meant to say."

"Ordained."

"Good for you. Now I'm wondering: I read you those rights. You want to waive your right to remain silent? Tell you, sir, you bow up to what you just did and things'll go a lot easier for you. Tell us who wanted you to kill Mr. Grady."

"God."

"Hmm," Bell said. "Okay. How 'bout anybody else?"

"That's all I'm saying to you or to anybody. That's my answer. God."

"Well, all right, let's getcha downtown now and see if He's inclined to throw bail for you."

Chapter Twenty-four.

They call that music?

A thud of a drum and then the raw sound of a brass instrument rehearsing short passages penetrated Rhyme's parlor. It was coming from the Cirque Fantastique, across the street in the park. The notes were jarring and the tone gaudy and brash. He tried to ignore it and returned to his phone conversation with Charles Grady, who was thanking him for his efforts in collaring the minister who'd come to town to kill him.

Bell had just interrogated Constable, down at the Detention Center. The prisoner said he knew Swensen but had drummed him out of the Patriot Assembly over a year ago because of an "unhealthy interest" in the daughters of some parishioners.

Constable had had nothing to do with the man after that and he'd fallen in with some backwoods militiamen, according to local gossip. The prisoner adamantly denied that he knew anything about the attempted killing.

Still, Grady had arranged to have delivered to Rhyme a box of evidence from the crime scene at the Neighborhood School and one from the Reverend Swensen's hotel room. Rhyme had looked through it quickly but found no obvious connection to Constable. He explained this to Grady and added, "We need to get it to some forensic people upstate, in-what's the town?"

"Canton Falls."

"They can do some soil or trace comparisons. There might be something linking Swensen to Constable but I don't have any samples from up there."

"Thanks for checking, Lincoln. I'll have somebody get it up there ASAP."

"If you want me to write an expert's opinion on the results I'd be happy to," the criminalist said then had to repeat the offer; the last half was drowned out by a particularly raucous horn solo.

Hell, yes, I could write better music than that, he thought.

Thom called time-out and took Rhyme's blood pressure. He found the results high.

"I don't like it," he said.

"Well, for the record, I don't like a lot of things," Rhyme responded petulantly, frustrated with their slow progress with the case: a tech at the FBI lab in D.C. had called and said that it would be morning before they'd have any report on the bits of metal found in the Conjurer's bag. Redding and Saul had called more than fifty hotels in Manhattan, but had found none that used APC key cards that matched the one found in the Conjurer's running jacket. Sellitto had also called the relief watch outside the Cirque Fantastique-fresh officers had replaced the two who'd been there since that morning-and they'd reported nothing suspicious.

And, most troubling of all, there'd been no luck in finding Larry Burke, the missing patrol officer who'd collared the Conjurer near the crafts fair. Dozens of officers were searching the West Side but had turned up no witnesses or evidence as to where he might be. One encouraging note, though: his body wasn't in the stolen Mazda. The car hadn't yet been raised but a diver who'd braved the currents reported that there were no bodies inside the car itself or the trunk.

"Where's the food?" Sellitto asked, looking out the window. Sachs and Kara had gone up the street to pick up some takeout from a nearby Cuban restaurant (the young illusionist was less excited about dinner than the prospect of her first Cuban coffee, which Thom described as "one-half espresso, one-half condensed milk, and one-half sugar," the concept of which, despite the impossible proportions, had instantly intrigued her).

The bulky detective turned to Rhyme and Thom and asked, "You ever have those Cubano sandwiches? They're the best."

But neither the food nor the case meant anything to the aide. "Time for bed."

"It's nine thirty-eight," Rhyme pointed out. "Practically afternoon. So it's not. Time. For. Bed." He managed to make his singsong voice sound both juvenile and threatening at the same time. "We have a fucking killer on the loose who keeps changing his mind about how often he wants to kill people. Every four hours, every two hours." A glance at the clock. "And he might just now be perpetrating his nine thirty-eight killing. I appreciate that you don't like it. But I have work to do."

"No, you don't. If you don't want to call it a night, all right. But we're going upstairs to take care of some things and then you're taking a nap for a couple of hours."

"Ha. You're just hoping I'll fall asleep till morning. Well, I won't. I'll stay awake all night."

The aide rolled his eyes. He announced in a firm voice, "Lincoln'll be upstairs for a few hours."

"How'd you like to be out of work," Rhyme snapped.

"How'd you like to be in a coma?" Thom shot back.

"This is fucking crip abuse," he muttered. But he was giving in. He understood the danger. When a quad sits too long in one position or is constricted in the extremities or, as Rhyme loved to put it so indelicately in front of strangers, needs to piss or shit and hasn't for a while-there was a risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a soaring of the blood pressure that could result in a stroke, leading to more paralysis or death. Dysreflexia's rare but it'll send you to the hospital, or a grave, pretty damn fast, and so Rhyme acquiesced to a trip upstairs for the personal business and then a rest. It was moments like this-disruptions of "normal" life-that infuriated him most about his disability.

Infuriated and, though he refused to let on, deeply depressed him.

In the bedroom upstairs Thom took care of the necessary bodily details. "Okay. Two hours' rest. Get some sleep."