"Scotch for me," Rhyme said. When Thom glanced at the clock, the criminalist added, "A small shot for medicinal purposes."

"Coffee all around," the aide said and disappeared.

After he'd gone Rhyme and Jaynene made small talk about spinal cord injury patients and the exercises he was now pursuing fanatically. Then, impatient as ever, Rhyme decided he'd been the polite host long enough and lowered his voice to say, "There's a problem, something bothering me. I think you can help. I'm hoping you can."

She eyed him cautiously. "Maybe."

"Could you close the door?"

The large woman glanced at it, rose and then did as he asked. She returned to her seat.

"How long have you known Kara?" he asked.

"Kara? Little over a year. Ever since her mother came to Stuyvesant."

"That's an expensive place, isn't it?"

"Painfully," Jaynene said. "Terrible what they charge. But all of the places like ours, the fees're pretty much the same."

"Does her mother have insurance?"

"Medicare is all. Kara pays for most of it herself." She added, "As best she can. She's current now but she's in arrears a lot of the time."

Rhyme nodded slowly. "I'm going to ask you one more question. Think about it before you answer. And I need you to be completely honest."

"Well," the nurse said uncertainly, looking down at the newly varnished floor. "I'll do the best I can."

That afternoon Roland Bell was in Rhyme's living room. To the soundtrack of some enticing Dave Brubeck jazz piano they were talking about the evidence in the Andrew Constable case.

Charles Grady and the state's attorney general himself had decided to delay the man's trial in order to include additional charges against the bigot-attempted murder of his own lawyer, conspiracy to commit murder and felony murder. It wouldn't be an easy case-linking Constable to Barnes and the other conspirators in the Patriot Assembly-but if anyone could bring in convictions Grady was the man to do it. He was also going for the death penalty against Arthur Loesser for the murder of Patrol Officer Larry Burke, whose body had been found in an alley on the Upper West Side. Lon Sellitto was presently at the officer's full-dress funeral in Queens.

Amelia Sachs now walked through the doorway, looking frazzled after an all-day meeting with lawyers arranged through the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association about her possible suspension. She was supposed to have been back hours ago and, glancing at her face, Rhyme deduced that the results of the session were not good.

He himself had some news-about his meeting with Jaynene and what had happened after that-and had tried to reach her but had been unable to. Now, though, there was no time to brief her because another visitor appeared.

Thom ushered Edward Kadesky into the room. "Mr. Rhyme," he said, nodding. He'd forgotten Sachs's name but he gave her a second nod in greeting. He shook Roland Bell's hand. "I got your message. It said there's something more about the case."

Rhyme nodded. "This morning I did some digging, looking into a few loose ends."

"What loose ends?" Sachs asked.

"Ends I didn't know were loose. Unknown loose ends."

She frowned. The producer too looked troubled. "Weir's assistant-Loesser. He hasn't escaped, has he?"

"No, no. He's still in detention."

The doorbell rang. Thom vanished and a moment later Kara stepped through the doorway into the room. She looked around, ruffling her short hair, which had lost its purple sheen and was now ruddy as a freckle. "Hi," she said to the group, blinking in surprise when she saw Kadesky.

"Can I get anybody anything?" Thom asked.

"Maybe if you could leave us for a minute, Thom. Please."

The aide glanced at Rhyme and, hearing the firm, troubled tone in his voice, nodded and left the room. The criminalist said to Kara, "Thanks for coming by. I just need to follow up on a few things about the case."

"Sure," she said.

Loose ends . . .

Rhyme explained, "I want to know a few more details about the night that the Conjurer drove the ambulance bomb into the circus."

The young woman nodded, flicking her black fingernails against one another. "Anything I can do to help, I'd be glad to."

"The show was scheduled to start at eight, wasn't it?" Rhyme asked Kadesky.

"That's right."

"You weren't back from your dinner and radio interview yet when Loesser parked the ambulance in the doorway?"

"No, I wasn't."

Rhyme turned to Kara. "But you were there?"

"Yeah. I saw the ambulance drive in. I didn't think anything about it at the time."

"Where did Loesser park, exactly?"

"It was under the box seat scaffolding," she said.

"Not under the expensive seats though?" Rhyme asked Kadesky.

"No," the man said.

"So it was near the main fire exit-the one most people would use in an evacuation."

"That's right."

Bell asked, "Lincoln, what're you getting at?"

"What I'm getting at is Loesser parked the ambulance so that it would do the most damage and yet still give a few people in the box seats a chance to escape. How did he know exactly where to park it?"

"I don't know," the producer responded. "He probably checked it out ahead of time and saw it was the best location-I mean, best from his point of view. Worst for us."

"He might've checked it out earlier," Rhyme mused. "But he also would be reluctant to be seen doing reconnaissance around the circus-since we had officers stationed there."

"True."

"So, isn't it possible that someone on the inside might've told him to park there?"

"Inside?" Kadesky asked, frowning. "Are you saying somebody was helping him? No, none of my people would do that."

"Rhyme," Sachs said, "what are you getting at?"

He ignored her and turned again to Kara. "I asked you to go to the tent to find Mr. Kadesky about when?"

"I guess it was about seven-fifteen."

"And you were in the box seat area?" She nodded and he continued, "Near the exit row?"

The woman looked around the room awkwardly. "I guess. Yeah, I was." She looked at Sachs. "Why's he asking me all this? What's going on?"

Rhyme answered, "I'm asking because I remembered something you told us, Kara. About people who're involved in an illusionists act. There's the assistant-the person that we know is working with the illusionist. Then there's the volunteer from the audience. Then there's someone else: the confederate. Those're people who are actually working with the magician but seem to have nothing to do with him. They pretend to be stagehands or volunteers."

Kadesky said, "Right, lots of magicians use confederates."

Rhyme turned to Kara and said sharply, "Which is what you've been all along, haven't you?"

"What's that?" Bell asked, his drawl more pronounced in his surprise.

The young woman gasped, shaking her head.

"She's been working with Loesser from the beginning," Rhyme said to Sachs.

"No!" Kadesky said. "Her?"

Rhyme continued, "She needs money badly and Loesser paid her fifty thousand to help him."

Desperate, Kara said, "But Loesser and I never even met before today!"

"You didn't need to see him in person. Balzac was the intermediary. He was in on it too."

"Kara?" Sachs whispered. "No. I don't believe it. She wouldn't do that!"

"Wouldn't she? What do you know about her? Do you even know her real name?"

"I . . ." Sachs's troubled eyes turned toward the young woman. "No," she whispered. "She never told me."

Tearfully the young woman shook her head. Finally she said, "Amelia, I'm so sorry. . . . But you don't understand. . . . Mr. Balzac and Weir were friends. They performed together for years and he was devastated when Weir died in the fire. Loesser told Mr. Balzac what he was going to do and they forced me to help him. But, you have to believe me, I didn't know they were going to hurt anybody. Mr. Balzac said it was just an extortion thing-to get even with Mr. Kadesky. By the time I realized Loesser was killing people it was too late. They said if I didn't keep helping him he was going to give my name to the police. I'd go to jail forever. Mr. Balzac would too. . . ." She wiped her face. "I couldn't do that to him."

"To your revered mentor," Rhyme said bitterly.

With a look of panic in her brilliant blue eyes the young woman shoved her way through Sachs and Kadesky and leaped for the door.

"Stop her, Roland!" Rhyme shouted.

Bell sprinted forward and tackled her. They tumbled into the corner of the room. She was strong but Bell managed to cuff her. He rose, panting from the effort, and pulled his Motorola off his belt, calling in for a prisoner transfer down to detention.

Looking disgusted, he put the radio away and read Kara her rights.

Rhyme sighed. "I tried to tell you earlier, Sachs. I couldn't get through on the phone. I wish it weren't true. But there you have it. She and Balzac were with Loesser all along. They gulled us like we were their audience."

Chapter Fifty-one.

Whispering, the policewoman said, "I just . . . I don't see how she did it."

Rhyme said to Bell, "She manipulated the evidence, lied to us, planted fake clues. . . . Roland, go over to the whiteboards. I'll show you."

"Kara planted evidence?" Sachs asked, astonished.

"Oh, you bet she did. And she did a damn good job too. From the first scene, even before you found her. You told me that she gave you that sign to meet her in the coffee shop. They set it up from the beginning."

Bell was at the whiteboards and as he pointed out items of evidence Rhyme would explain how Kara had tricked them.

A moment later Thom called, "There's an officer here."

"Show 'em in," Rhyme said.

A policewoman walked through the doorway and joined Sachs, Bell and Kadesky, surveying them through stylish glasses with a look of curiosity on her face. She nodded to Rhyme, and in a Hispanic accent, asked Bell, "You called for prisoner transport, Detective?"

Bell nodded to the corner of the room. "She's over there. I Mirandized her."

The woman glanced toward the corner of the room at Kara's prone form and said, "Okay, I'll take her downtown." She hesitated. "But I got a question first."

"Question?" Rhyme asked, frowning.

"What're you talking about, Officer?" Bell asked.

Ignoring the detective, the officer sized up Kadesky. "Could I see some identification, sir?"

"Me?" the producer asked.

"Yessir. I'll need to see your driver's license."

"You want my ID again? I did that the other day."

"Sir, please."

Huffily the man reached into his hip pocket and withdrew his wallet.

Except that it wasn't his.

He stared at a battered zebra-skin billfold. "Wait, I . . . I don't know what this is."