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Banks asked, "Could it've come from the stockyard tunnel? There was a lotta brick there, right?"
"All that came from Annie Oakley here," Rhyme said, nodding ruefully at Sachs. "No, remember, the unsub'd left before she pulled out her six-gun." Then he frowned, found himself straining forward. "Mel, I want to see that brick. In the 'scope. Is there any way?"
Cooper looked over Rhyme's computer. "I think we can rig something up." He ran a cable from the video-output port on the compound 'scope to his own computer and then dug into a large suitcase. He pulled out a long, thick gray wire. "This's a serial cable." He connected the two computers and transferred some software to Rhyme's Compaq. In five minutes, Rhyme, delighted, was seeing exactly what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece.
The criminalist's eyes scanned the chunk of brick--hugely magnified. He laughed out loud. "He outfoxed himself. See those white blobs attached to the brick?"
"What are they?" Sellitto asked.
"Looks like glue," Cooper offered.
"Exactly. From a pet-hair roller. Perps who're real cautious use them to clean trace off themselves. But it backfired. Some bits of adhesive must've come off the roller and stuck to his clothes. So we know it's from his safe house. Held the brick in place until Everett picked it up under his fingernails."
"Does the brick tell us anything?" Sachs asked.
"It's old. And it's expensive--cheap brick was very porous because they mixed in filler. I'd guess his place is either institutio
nal or built by someone wealthy. At least a hundred years old. Maybe older."
"Ah, here we go," Cooper said. "Another bit of glove, it looks like. If the damn things keep disintegrating we'll be down to his friction ridges before too long."
Rhyme's screen flashed and a moment later what he recognized as a tiny fleck of leather came on the screen. "Something's funny here," Cooper said.
"It's not red," Rhyme observed. "Like the other particle. This fleck's black. Run it through the microspectrophotometer."
Cooper ran the test and then tapped his computer screen. "It's leather. But the dye is different. Maybe it's stained or faded."
Rhyme was leaning forward, straining, looking closely at the fleck on the screen when he realized he was in trouble. Serious trouble.
"Hey, you okay?" It was Sachs who'd spoken.
Rhyme didn't answer. His neck and jaw began to shiver violently. A feeling like panic rose from the crest of his shattered spine and moved up into his scalp. Then, as if a thermostat had clicked on, the chills and goose bumps vanished and he began to sweat. Perspiration poured from his face and tickled frantically.
"Thom!" he whispered. "Thom, it's happening."
Then he gasped as the headache seared through his face and spread along the walls of his skull. He jammed his teeth together, swayed his head, anything to stop the unbearable agony. But nothing worked. The light in the room flickered. The pain was so bad his reaction was to flee from it, to run flat-out on legs that hadn't moved in years.
"Lincoln!" Sellitto was shouting.
"His face," Sachs gasped, "it's bright red."
And his hands were pale as ivory. All of his body below the magic latitude at C4 was turning white. Rhyme's blood, on its phony, desperate mission to get to where it thought it was needed, surged into the tiny capillaries of his brain, expanding them, threatening to burst the delicate filaments.
As the attack grew worse Rhyme was aware of Thom over him, ripping the blankets off the Clinitron. He was aware of Sachs stepping forward, her radiant blue eyes narrowed in concern. The last thing he saw before the blackness was the falcon pushing off the ledge on his huge wings, startled by the sudden flurry of activity in the room, seeking easy oblivion in the hot air over the empty streets of the city.
TWENTY-FOUR
When Rhyme passed out, Sellitto got to the phone first.
"Call 911 for EMS," Thom instructed. "Then hit that number there. Speed dial. It's Pete Taylor, our spinal cord specialist."
Sellitto made the calls.
Thom was shouting, "I'll need some help here. Somebody!"
Sachs was closest. She nodded, stepped up to Rhyme. The aide had grabbed the unconscious man under the arms and pulled him higher up in bed. He ripped open the shirt and prodded the pale chest, saying, "Everybody else, if you could just leave us."
Sellitto, Banks and Cooper hesitated for a moment then stepped through the doorway. Sellitto closed the door behind them.
