Kara thumped the carton she was holding. Almost out. She took the second cup gratefully. "Caffeine'll never go to waste around me." She started sipping.

"Thanks. You guys have fun?"

"Sure did. That woman's a scream. Jaynene. Thom's in love with her. And she actually made Lincoln laugh."

"She has that effect on people," Kara said. "A way good soul."

Amelia said, "Balzac dragged you away pretty fast at the end of the show. I just wanted to come by and thank you again. And to say that you should send us a bill for your time."

"I never thought about it. You introduced me to Cuban coffee. That's payment enough."

"No, invoice us something. Send it to me and I'll make sure it goes to the city."

"Playing G-woman," Kara said. "It'll be a story I'll tell my grandkids. . . . Hey, I'm free for the rest of the night-Mr. Balzac's off with his friend. I was going to see some people down in SoHo. You want to come?"

"Sure," the policewoman said. "We could-" She looked up, over Kara's shoulder. "Hello."

Kara glanced behind her and saw her mother, looking with curiosity at the policewoman, and sized up the gaze. "She's not really with us right now."

"It was during the summer," the elderly woman said. "June, I'm pretty sure." She closed her eyes and lay back.

"Is she okay?"

"Just a temporary thing. She'll come back soon. Her mind's a little funny sometimes." Kara stroked the old woman's arm then asked Sachs, "Your parents?"

"It'll sound familiar, I've got a feeling. Father's dead. My mother lives near me in Brooklyn. Little too close for comfort. But we've come to an . . . understanding."

Kara knew that understandings between mother and daughter were as complex as international treaties and she didn't ask Amelia to elaborate, not now. There'd be time for that in the future.

A piercing beep filled the room and both women reached for the pagers on their belts. Amelia won. "I shut my cell off when I got here. There was a sign in the lobby that said I couldn't use it. You mind?" She nodded toward the telephone on the table.

"No, go ahead."

She picked up the phone and dialed and Kara rose to straighten the blankets on her mother's bed. "Remember that bed-and-breakfast we stayed at in Warwick, Mum? Near the castle?"

Do you remember? Tell me you remember!

Amelia's voice: "Rhyme? Me."

Kara's unilateral conversation was interrupted a few seconds later, though, when she heard the officer's voice ask a sharp, "What? When?"

Turning to the policewoman, Kara frowned. Amelia was looking at her, shaking her head. "I'll get right down there. . . . I'm with her now. I'll tell her." She hung up.

"What's the matter?" Kara asked.

"Looks like I can't join you guys after all. We must've missed a lock pick or key. Weir got out of his cuffs at detention and went for somebody's gun. He was killed."

"Oh, my God."

Amelia walked to the doorway. "I've got to run the scene down there." She paused and glanced at Kara. "You know, I was worried about keeping him under guard during the trial. That man was just too slippery. But I guess sometimes there is justice. Oh, that bill? Whatever you were going to charge, double it."

"Constable's got some information," the man's voice came crisply through the phone.

"He's been playing detective, has he?" Charles Grady asked the lawyer wryly.

Wryly-but not sarcastically. The prosecutor had nothing against Joseph Roth, who-though he represented scum-was a defense lawyer who managed to step around the slime trail left by his clients and who treated D. A.'s and cops with honesty and respect. Grady reciprocated.

"Yeah, he has. Made some calls up to Canton Falls and put the fear of God into a couple of the Patriot Assembly folks. They checked things out. Looks like some of the former members've gone rogue."

"Who is it? Barnes? Stemple?"

"We didn't go into it in-depth. All I know is he's pretty upset. He kept saying, 'Judas, Judas, Judas.' Over and over."

Grady couldn't stir up much sympathy. You lie down with dogs. . . . He said to the lawyer, "He knows I'm not letting him off scot-free."

"He understands that, Charles."

"You know Weir's dead?"

"Yep. . . . I've got to tell you Andrew was happy to hear it. I really believe he didn't have anything to do with trying to hurt you, Charles."

Grady didn't have any use for opinions from defense counsel, even forthright ones like Roth. He asked, "And he's got solid information?"

"He does, yes."

Grady believed him. Roth was a man you simply could not fool; if he thought Constable was going to dime out some of his people then it was going to happen. How successful the resulting case would be was a different matter, of course.

But if Constable gave relatively hard information and if the troopers did a halfway decent job with their investigation and arrest he was confident he could put the perps away. Grady would also make sure that Lincoln Rhyme oversaw the forensics.

Grady had mixed feelings about Weir's death. While he'd publicly express his concern at the man's shooting and promise to look into it officially, he was privately delighted that the fucker'd been disposed of. He was still shocked and infuriated that a killer had walked right into the apartment where his wife and daughter lived, willing to murder them too.

Grady looked at the glass of wine he so dearly wanted a sip of, but realized that a consequence of this phone call was that it precluded alcohol for the time being. The Constable case was so important that he needed all his wits about him.

"He wants to meet you face-to-face," Roth said.

The wine was a Grgich Hills Cabernet Sauvignon. A 1997, no less. Great vineyard, great year.

Roth continued, "How soon can you get down to detention?"

"A half hour. I'll leave now."

Grady hung up and announced to his wife, "The good news is no trial."

Luis, the still-eyed bodyguard, said, "I'll go with you."

After Weir's death Lon Sellitto had cut back the protection team to one officer.

"No, you stay here with my family, Luis. I'd feel better."

His wife asked cautiously, "If that's the good news, honey, what's the bad news?"

"I have to miss dinner," the prosecutor said, tossing a handful of Goldfish crackers into his mouth and washing them down with a very large sip of very nice wine, thinking, hell with it, let's celebrate.

Sachs's war-torn yellow Camaro SS pulled to a stop outside 100 Center Street.

She tossed the NYPD placard onto the dash then climbed out. She nodded to a crime-scene crew standing beside their RRV. "Where's the scene?"

"First floor in the back. The corridor to intake."

"Sealed?"

"Yep."

"Whose weapon?"

"Linda Welles'. DOC. She's pretty shook up. Asshole broke her nose."

Sachs grabbed one of the suitcases and, hooking it up to a wheelie luggage carrier, started for the front door of the Criminal Courts building. The other CS techs did the same and followed.

This scene'd be a grounder, of course. An accidental shooting involving an officer and a suspect who'd tried to escape? Pro forma. Still, the event was a homicide and required a complete crime scene report for the Shooting Incident Board and any subsequent investigation and lawsuits. Amelia Sachs would run the scene as carefully as any other.

A guard checked their IDs and led the team through a maze of corridors into the basement. Finally they came to a yellow police-line tape across a closed door.

Here she found a detective talking to a uniformed officer, her nose stuffed with tissue and bandaged.

Sachs introduced herself and explained that she was going to be running the scene. The detective stepped aside and Sachs asked Linda Welles what had happened.

In a halting, nasal voice the guard explained that on the way from fingerprinting to intake the suspect had somehow undone his handcuffs. "It took him two, three seconds. All the cuffs. Just like that, they were open. He didn't get my key." She pointed to her blouse pocket, where presumably it resided. "He had a pick or key or something on his hip."

"His pocket?" Sachs asked, frowning. She remembered they'd searched him carefully.

"No, his leg. You'll see." She nodded toward the corridor where Weir's body lay. "There's a cut in his skin. Under a bandage. Everything happened so fast."

Sachs supposed that he'd cut himself to create a hiding space. A queasy thought.

"Then he grabbed my weapon and we were struggling for it. It just discharged. I didn't mean to pull the trigger. I didn't, really. But . . . I tried to keep control and I couldn't. It just discharged."

Control . . . Discharge. The words, official copspeak, were perhaps an attempt to insulate her from the guilt she'd be feeling. This had nothing to do with the fact that a killer was dead, or that her life had been endangered, or that a dozen other officers had been taken in by this man; no, it was that this woman had stumbled. Women in the NYPD set the bar high; the falls are always harder than for men.

"We collared and searched him at the takedown," Sachs said kindly. "And we missed the key too."

"Yeah," the officer muttered. "But it's still gonna come up."

At the shooting inquiry, she meant. And, yeah, it would.

Well, Sachs'd do a particularly thorough job on her report to give this officer as much support as possible.

Welles touched her nose gently. "Oh, that hurts." Tears were streaming from her eyes. "What're my kids going to say? They always ask me if I do anything dangerous. And I tell 'em no. Look at this. . . ."

Pulling on latex gloves, Sachs asked for the woman's Glock. She took it, dropped the clip and ejected the round in the chamber. Everything went into a plastic evidence bag.

Slipping into her sergeant mode, Sachs said, "You can take an LOA, you know."

Welles didn't even hear her. "It just discharged," the woman said in a hollow voice. "I didn't want it to. I didn't want to kill anybody."

"Linda?" Sachs said. "You can take an LOA. A week, ten days."

"I can?"

"Talk to your supervisor."

"Sure. Yeah. I could do that." Welles rose and wandered over to the medic treating her partner, who had a nasty bruise on his neck but who otherwise seemed all right.

The CS team set up shop outside the door to the corridor where the shooting had occurred, opening the suitcases and arranging evidence collection equipment, friction ridge supplies and video and still cameras. Sachs dressed in the white Tyvek suit and accessorized with rubber bands around her feet.

She fitted the microphone over her head and asked for a radio patch to Lincoln Rhyme's phone. Ripping down the police tape, she opened the door, thinking: A slit in the skin to hide lock picks and cuff keys? Of all the perps she and Lincoln had been up against, the Conjurer was- "Oh, goddamn," she spat out.

"Hello to you too, Sachs," Rhyme said acerbically through her headset. "At least I think it's you. Hell of a lot of static."

"I don't believe it, Rhyme. The M. E. took the body before I could process it."

Sachs was looking into the corridor, bloody but empty.

"What?" he snapped. "Who approved that?"

The rule in crime scene work was that emergency medical personnel could enter a scene to save an injured person but, in the case of homicide, the body had to remain untouched by everyone, including the tour doctor from the Medical Examiner's office, until it'd been processed by someone from forensics. This was fundamental police work and the career of whoever'd released the Conjurer's corpse was now in jeopardy.

"There a problem, Amelia?" one of the techs called from the doorway.

"Look," she said angrily, nodding into the corridor. "The M. E. got the body before we processed it. What happened?"

The crew-cut young tech frowned. He glanced at his partner then said, "Uhm, well, the tour doc's outside. He was the guy we were talking to when you showed up. The one feeding the pigeons. He was waiting to move the body till we were finished."

"What's going on?" Rhyme growled. "I hear voices, Sachs."

To him she said, "There's a crew from the M. E.'s office outside, Rhyme. Sounds like they haven't picked up the body. What's-"

"Oh, Jesus Christ. No!"

The chill went straight to her soul. "Rhyme, you don't think-?"

He barked out, "What do you see, Sachs? What's the blood spatter look like?"

She ran to where the shooting had happened and studied the bloodstain on the wall. "Oh, no. It doesn't look normal for a gunshot, Rhyme."

"Brain matter, bone?"

"Gray matter, yeah. But it doesn't look right either. There is some bone. Not much, though, for a close-range shot."