The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme 2)

She sighed. "All right! Got it."

The crime scene blood kit contained a ruler, protractor with string attached, tape measure, the Kastle-Meyer Reagent presumptive field test. Luminol too--which detects iron oxide residue of blood even when a perp scrubs away all visual trace.

"It's just a mess, Rhyme," she said. "I'm not going to be able to figure out anything."

"Oh, the scene'll tell us more than you think, Sachs. It'll tell us plenty."

Well, if anybody could make sense of this macabre setting, it would be Rhyme; she knew that he and Mel Cooper were long-standing members of the International Association of Blood Pattern Analysts.

(She didn't know which was more disturbing--the gruesome blood spatter at crime scenes or the fact that there was a group of people who specialized in the subject.) But this seemed hopeless.

"We've got to find him . . . "

"Sachs, calm down . . . You with me?"

After a moment she said, "Okay."

"All you need for now is the ruler," he said. "First, tell me what you see."

"There're drips all over the place here."

"Blood spatter's very revealing. But it's meaningless unless the surface it's on is uniform. What's the floor like?"

"Smooth concrete."

"Good. How big are the drops? Measure them."

"He's dying, Rhyme."

"How big?" he snapped.

"All different sizes. There're hundreds of them about three-quarters of an inch. Some are bigger. About an inch and a quarter. Thousands of very little ones. Like a spray."

"Forget the little ones. They're 'overcast' drops, satellites of the others. Describe the biggest ones. Shape?"

"Mostly round."

"Scalloped edges?"

"Yes," she muttered. "But there are some that just have smooth edges. Here're some in front of me. They're a little smaller, though."

Where is he? she wondered. Innelman. A man she'd never met. Missing and bleeding like a fountain.

"Sachs?"

"What?" she snapped.

"What about the smaller drops? Tell me about them."

"We don't have time to do this!"

"We don't have time not to," he said calmly.

God damn you, Rhyme, she thought, then said, "All right." She measured. "They're about a half inch. Perfectly round. No scalloped edges."

"Where are those?" he asked urgently. "At one end of the corridor, or the other?"

"Mostly in the middle. There's a storeroom at the end of the hall. Inside there and near it they're bigger and have ragged or scalloped edges. At the other end of the corridor, they're smaller."