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destroy him,” Rhyme said.
    “It won’t destroy him as much as a life sentence.”
    Rhyme said a chilly good-bye and hung up. He stared again at the evidence board.
    Then something else occurred to him.
    “What is it, Rhyme?” Sachs had noticed that his eyes were rising to the ceiling.
    “Think maybe he’s done this before?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Assuming the goal—the motive— was to steal the painting, well, it’s not exactly a onetime score. Not like a Renoir you fence for ten million and disappear forever. The whole thing smells like an enterprise. The perp’s hit on a smart way to get away with a crime. And he’s going to keep at it until somebody stops him.”
    “Yeah, good point. So we should look for thefts of other paintings.”
    “No. Why should he steal just paintings? It could be anything. But there’s one common element.”
    Sachs frowned then provided the answer. “Homicide.”
    “Exactly. Since the perp frames somebody else, he has to murder the victims—because they could identify him. Call somebody at Homicide. At home if you need to. We’re looking for the same scenario: an underlying crime, maybe a theft, the vic murdered and strong circumstantial evidence.”
    “And maybe a DNA link that might’ve been planted.”
    “Good,” he said, excited at the thought they might be on to something here. “And if he’s sticking to his formula, there’ll be an anonymous witness who gave nine-one-one some specific identifying information.”
    She walked to a desk in the corner of the lab, sat and placed the call.
    Rhyme leaned his head back in his wheelchair and observed his partner on the phone. He noticed dried blood in her thumbnail. A mark was just visible above her ear, half hidden by her straight red hair. Sachs did this frequently, scratching her scalp, teasing her nails, damaging herself in small ways—both a habit and an indicator of the stress that drove her.
    She was nodding, and her eyes took on a focused gaze, as she wrote. His own heart—though he couldn’t feel it directly—had speeded up. She’d learned something significant. Her pen dried up. She tossed it onto the floor and whipped out another as quickly as she drew her pistol in combat shooting competitions.
    After ten minutes she hung up.
    “Hey, Rhyme, get this.” She sat next to him, in a wicker chair. “I talked to Flintlock.”
    “Ah, good choice.”
    Joseph Flintick, his nickname intentionally or otherwise a reference to the old-time gun, had been a homicide detective when Rhyme was a rookie. The testy old guy was familiar with nearly every murder that had been committed in New York City—and many nearby—during his lengthy tenure. At an age when he should have been visiting his grandchildren, Flintlock was working Sundays. Rhyme wasn’t surprised.
    “I laid it all out for him and he came back with two cases that might fit our profile right off the top of his head. One was a theft of rare coins, worth about fifty G. The other a rape.”
    “Rape?” This added a deeper, and much more disturbing, element to the case.
    “Yep. In both of them an anonymous witness called to report the crime and gave some information that was instrumental in ID’ing the perp—like the wit calling about your cousin’s car.”
    “Both male callers, of course.”
    “Right. And the city offered a reward but neither of them came forward.”
    “What about the evidence?”
    “Flintlock didn’t remember it too clearly. But he did say that the trace and circumstantial connections were right on. Just what happened to your cousin—five or six types of associated class evidence at the scene and in the perps’ houses. And in both cases the victims’ blood was found on a rag or article of clothing in the suspects’ residence.”
    “And I’ll bet there weren’t any fluid matches in the rape case.” Most rapists are convicted because they leave behind traces of the Three S’s—semen, saliva or sweat.
    “Nope.