“So you bake?” A nod at the big box.

“Hobby.”

“An attractive neighbor who bakes. Jackpot!” He looked around, taking in the scabby walls, the soot-covered ceilings, a rusty metal pillar. “You got some work ahead of you.” Pointing to a patch of green on the floor. “Watch the mold.”

“I have somebody coming. First call I made.”

“I can picture it now. You totally have to put your bed there.” He pointed to a corner.

“That could work.”

Did he give her a slightly coy smile?

She locked up and they returned to the van.

“You heard about those attacks?” he asked, looking up at the crane.

And what did it remind her of?

“Yeah. Scary. Terrorists or something?”

“Assholes.”

She frowned. “If it was going to fall, would it come this way?”

He studied it. “I don’t think so. But, you know, the next attack’s supposed to be tomorrow morning.”

“I heard. Ten o’clock.”

“They might have some other shit planned too.” As he gazed upward, he was doing some fast calculations. “You want, just going to throw this out. You want, maybe we could maybe get out of town for the day. I’ve got a BMW. M8. Ragtop. It’s sweet.” His eyes glowed.

She smiled at the nice try. “Rain check?”

“Deal.”

Simone said, “Beer?”

He blinked.

“Sure.”

She supposed he was thinking bar, but she walked to the back of the van and climbed in. He followed into the dim space. They were both ducking. A cooler was behind the driver’s seat, bungee-corded down. She dug through it and handed him one.

“Woman after my own heart.”

They twisted the tops off and they drank.

He downed half of his right away, which was good. It took only seconds for the drugs to hit him. He dropped the bottle to the bed of the truck, convulsed for a few minutes and then lay still. Pulling on latex gloves she slipped his bottle into a trash bag and mopped up the laced beer with paper towels. This went inside too, along with her open but still full bottle.

Simone never drank on a job.

She climbed out. Before drugging him, she’d scanned to make sure no one was present. That was still true.

Ah. She gave a fast smile.

She had her answer.

A praying mantis.

That’s what the crane reminded her of. One summer, she’d discovered a creature on a railing of her family’s back porch. It was largely motionless, but swayed ever so slightly when ants wandered past filled with their driven but unknowable ant purpose.

She then closed the door of the van and walked to the driver’s side, climbed in. A look at her watch. She had a flirtatious neighbor to dispose of, and a vehicle to burn down to the rims. She’d have to leave now to get to the meeting on time.

15

Explosives, gasoline, poisons, and gunpowder are like fingerprints. Unique. Each sample discovered at a crime scene has characteristics that can lead directly back to a place of manufacture or sale, wholesale if not retail. And at that location, you might just find a portal to your unsub...

A passage from a chapter in Rhyme’s book on forensic analysis in which he discussed tracing substances by studying chemical composition. He went on to give an example. Gasoline.

It is around five percent alkanes; three percent alkenes; twenty-five percent isoalkanes; four percent cycloalkenes; twenty to fifty percent total aromatics. Then there are the additives: blending agents — anti-knock substances, antioxidants, metal deactivators, lead scavengers, upper-cylinder lubricants, detergents and dyes — there are literally a thousand different substances in any particular brand of gasoline.

Unique...

Not so with the substance that Unsub 89 was using to bring down the city’s cranes.

Hydrofluoric acid contains hydrogen and fluoride. And, when diluted, water. No garnish.

If there was anything that might guide their search for a source, it was the concentration.

Yet even that qualifier was not paying off.

The canvassers in Queens, along with Cooper and Sachs, had found eighteen companies in the tri-state area that sold the chemical in the rich concentration of the substance their unsub had used.