Assumptions, Rhyme thought.
There was one glaring assumption that had been present in this case from the beginning. They'd based their entire investigation on the belief that Kall was the Coffin Dancer. But what if he wasn't? What if he was the pawn and the Dancer'd been using him as a weapon?
Deception . . .
If so, there'd be some evidence that didn't fit. Something that pointed to the real Dancer.
He pored over the charts carefully.
But there was nothing unaccounted for except the green fiber. And that told him nothing.
"We don't have any of Kall's clothes, right?"
"No, he was buck naked when we found him," the tour doctor said.
"We have anything he came in contact with?"
Sellitto shrugged. "Well, Jodie."
Rhyme asked, "He changed clothes here, didn't he?"
"Right," Sellitto said.
"Bring 'em here. Jodie's clothes. I want to look at them."
"Uck," Dellray said. "They're excessively unpleasant."
Cooper found and produced them. He brushed them out over sheets of clean newsprint. He mounted samples of the trace on slides and set them in the compound 'scope.
"What do we have?" Rhyme asked, looking over the computer screen, a copycat image of what Cooper was seeing in his microscope.
"What's that white stuff?" Cooper asked. "Those grains. There's a lot of it. It was in the seams of his pants."
Rhyme felt his face flush. Some of it was his erratic blood pressure from exhaustion, some of it was the phantom pain that still plagued him every now and then. But mostly it was the heat of the chase.
"Oh, my God," he whispered.
"What, Lincoln?"
"It's oolite," he announced.
"The fuck's that?" Sellitto asked.
"Eggstone. It's a wind-borne sand. You find it in the Bahamas."
"Bahamas?" Cooper asked, frowning. "What else did we just hear about the Bahamas?" He looked around the lab. "I don't remember."
But Rhyme did. His eyes were seated on the bulletin board, where was pinned the FBI analyst's report on the sand Amelia Sachs had found last week in Tony Panelli's car, the missing agent downtown.
He read:
"Substance submitted for analysis is not technically sand. It is coral rubble from reef formations and contains spicules, cross sections of marine worm tubes, gastropod shells, and foraminifers. Most likely source is the northern Caribbean: Cuba, the Bahamas."
Dellray's agent, Rhyme reflected . . . A man who'd know where the most secure federal safe house in Manhattan was. Who'd tell whoever was torturing him the address.
So that the Dancer could wait there, wait for Stephen Kall to show up, befriend him, and then arrange to get captured and get close to the victims.
"The drugs!" Rhyme cried.