"You can tell that just by looking at them?" Sachs asked, incredulous.
"Naw, I was reading," he answered, pointing at the label.
"Oh."
The cops laughed.
"He's telling us he's got another woman then?" Sachs asked.
"Probably," Rhyme said.
Cooper opened the bag. "Don't know what the liquid is. I'll do a chromatograph."
Rhyme asked Thom to hold up the scrap of paper with the phases of the moon on it. He studied it closely. A scrap like this was wonderful individuated evidence. You could fit it to the sheet it'd been torn from and link the two as closely as fingerprints. The problem here of course was that they had no original piece of paper. He wondered if they'd ever find it. The unsub might have destroyed it once he'd torn this bit out. Yet Lincoln Rhyme preferred to think not. He liked to picture it somewhere. Just waiting to be found. The way he always pictured source evidence: the automobile the paint chip had scraped off of, the finger that had lost the nail, the gun barrel that had discharged the rifled slug found in the victim's body. These sources--always close to the unsub--took on personalities of their own in Rhyme's mind. They could be imperious or cruel.
Or mysterious.
Phases of the moon.
Rhyme asked Dobyns if their unsub could be driven to act cyclically.
"No. The moon isn't in a major phase right now. We're four days past new."
"So the moons mean something else."
"If they're even moons in the first place," Sachs said. Pleased with herself, and rightly so, Rhyme thought. He said, "Good point, Amelia. Maybe he's talking about circles. About ink. About paper. About geometry. The planetarium . . ."
Rhyme realized that she was staring at him. Maybe just realizing now that he'd shaved and his hair was combed, his clothes changed.
And what was her mood now? he wondered. Angry at him, or disengaged? He couldn't tell. At the moment Amelia Sachs was as cryptic as Unsub 823.
The beeping of the fax machine sounded in the hallway. Thom went to get it and returned a moment later with two sheets of paper.
"It's from Emma Rollins," he announced. He held the sheets up for Rhyme to see.
"Our grocery scanner survey. Eleven stores in Manhattan sold veal shanks to customers buying fewer than five items in the last two days." He started to write on the poster then glanced at Rhyme. "The names of the stores?"
"Of course. We'll need them for cross-referencing later."
Thom wrote them down on the profile chart.
B'way & 82nd,
ShopRite
B'way & 96th,
Anderson Foods
Greenwich & Bank,
ShopRite
2nd Ave., 72nd-73rd,
Grocery World
Battery Park City,