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she wore. It seemed like a competent CS job, but not stellar. No photos of the nonscene rooms. And the knife . . . He saw the picture of the bloody weapon, beneath the bed. An officer was lifting a flap of dust ruffle to get a good shot. Was it invisible with the cloth down (which meant the perp might logically have missed it in the frenzy of the moment) or was it visible, suggesting it had been left intentionally as planted evidence?
    He studied the picture of packing material on the floor, apparently what the Prescott painting had been wrapped in.
    “Something’s wrong,” he whispered.
    Sachs, standing at the whiteboard, glanced his way.
    “The painting,” Rhyme continued.
    “What about it?”
    “LaGrange suggested two motives. One, Arthur stole the Prescott as a cover because he wanted to kill Alice to get her out of his life.”
    “Right.”
    “But,” Rhyme went on, “to make a homicide seem incidental to a burglary, a smart perp wouldn’t steal theone thing in the apartment that could be connected to him. Remember, Art had owned a Prescott. And he had direct-mail flyers about them.”
    “Sure, Rhyme, that doesn’t make any sense.”
    “And say he really did want the painting and couldn’t afford it. Well, it’s a hell of a lot safer and easier to break in and cart it off during the day when the owner’s at work, rather than murder them for it.” His cousin’s demeanor too, though not high in Rhyme’s arsenal when he assessed guilt or innocence, nagged. “Maybe he wasn’t playing innocent. Maybe he was innocent. . . . Pretty incriminating, you said? No. Too incriminating.”
    He thought to himself: Let’s just postulate that he didn’t do it. If not, then the consequences were significant. Because this wasn’t simply a case of mistaken identity; the evidence matched too closely—including a conclusive connection between her blood and his car. No, if Art was innocent, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to set him up.
    “I’m thinking he was framed.”
    “Why?”
    “Motive?” he muttered. “We don’t care at this point. The relevant question now is how . We answer that, it can point us to who . We might get why along the way, but that’s not our priority. So we start with a premise that someone else, Mr. X, murdered Alice Sanderson and stole the painting, then framed Arthur. Now, Sachs, how could he have done it?”
    A wince—her arthritis again—and she sat. She thought for several moments, then said, “Mr. X followed Arthur and followed Alice. He saw they had aninterest in art, put them together at the gallery and found their identities.”
    “Mr. X knows she owns a Prescott. He wants one but can’t afford it.”
    “Right.” Sachs nodded at the evidence chart. “Then he breaks into Arthur’s house, sees that he owns Pringles, Edge shave cream, TruGro fertilizer, and Chicago Cutlery knives. He steals some to plant. He knows what shoes Arthur wears, so he can leave the footprint, and he gets some of the dirt from the state park on Arthur’s shovel. . . .
    “Now, let’s think about May twelfth. Somehow Mr. X knows that Art always leaves work early on Thursdays and goes running in a deserted park—so he doesn’t have an alibi. He goes to the vic’s apartment, kills her, steals the painting and calls from a pay phone to report the screams and seeing a man take the painting to a car that looks a lot like Arthur’s, with a partial tag number. Then he heads out to Arthur’s house in New Jersey and leaves the traces of blood, the dirt, the washcloth, the shovel.”
    The phone rang. The caller was Arthur’s defense lawyer. The man sounded harried as he reiterated everything that the assistant district attorney had explained. He offered nothing that might help them and, in fact, tried several times to talk them into pressuring Arthur to take a plea. “They’ll nail him up,” the man said. “Do him a favor. I’ll get him fifteen years.”
    “That’ll