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Dellray's phone chirped and made him jump. He flipped it open, listened for a minute. "She did what? Oh, like I really need this too. . . . No, we don't have the fucking perp in fucking custody."
He jammed the OFF button, pointed an angry finger at two SWAT agents. "You're coming with me."
"What's up, Dellray?"
"We gonna pay ourselves a visit. And what ain't we gonna be when we do it?" The agents looked at each other, frowning. But Dellray supplied the answer. "We ain't gonna be very nice at all."
Mel Cooper shook the contents of the envelopes out onto newsprint. Examined the dust with an eye loupe. "Well, there's the brick dust. And some other kind of stone. Marble, I think."
He put a sample on the slide and examined it under the compound 'scope. "Yep, marble. Rose-colored."
"Was there any marble at the stockyard tunnel? Where you found the German girl?"
"None," Sachs responded.
Cooper suggested it might have come from Monelle's residence hall when Unsub 823 grabbed her.
"No, I know the block the Deutsche Haus is in. It's just a converted East Village tenement. The best stone you'd find there'd be polished granite. Maybe, just maybe, it's a fleck of his hidey-hole. Anything notable about it?"
"Chisel marks," Cooper said, bending over the 'scope.
"Ah, good. How clean?"
"Not very. Ragged."
"So an old steam stonecutter?"
"Yes, I'd guess."
"Write, Thom," Rhyme instructed, nodding at the poster. "There's marble in his safe house. And it's old."
"But why do we care about his safe house?" Banks asked, looking at his watch. "The feds'll be there by now."
"You can never have too much information, Banks. Remember that. Now, what else've we got?"
"Another bit of the glove. That red leather. And what's this?" he asked Sachs, holding up a plastic bag containing a plug of wood.
"The sample of the aftershave. Where he brushed up against a post."
"Should I run an olfactory profile?" Cooper wondered.
"Let me smell it first," Rhyme said.
Sachs brought the bag over to him. Inside was a tiny disk of wood. She opened it up and he inhaled the air.
"Brut. How could you miss it? Thom, add that our man uses drugstore cologne."
Cooper announced, "Here's that other hair." The technician mounted it in a comparison 'scope. "Very similar to the one we found earlier. Probably the same source. Oh, hell, Lincoln, for you, I'll say it is the same. Brown."
"Are the ends cut or fractured naturally?"
"Cut."
"Good, we're closing in on hair color," Rhyme said.
Thom wrote brown just as Sellitto said, "Don't write that!"
"What?"
