t 11:00 A.M. Amelia Sachs stood in a scruffy lot in Brooklyn. Choking back tears, she was gazing at the corpse.

The woman who had been shot at, who had killed in the line of duty, who talked her way onto point in dynamic hostage-rescue ops was now paralyzed with grief.

Rocking back and forth, her index finger digging into the quick of her thumb, nail against nail, until a minor stain of blood appeared. She glanced down at her fingers. Saw the crimson but didn’t stop the compulsion. She couldn’t.

Yes, they’d found her beloved 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS.

But what the police apparently hadn’t known was that the car had been sold for scrap, not just impounded for missed payments. She and Pam were standing in the car impound lot, which could have been a set in a Scorsese film, or The Sopranos, a junkyard stinking of old oil and smoke from a trash fire. Loud, mean gulls hovered nearby, white vultures. She wanted to draw her weapon and empty the clip into the air to send them fleeing in terror.

A crushed metal rectangle was all that remained of the car, which had been with her since her teenage days. The vehicle was one of her father’s three most important legacies to her, the others being his strength of character and his love of police work.

“I got the paperwork. It’s all, you know, in order.” The uneasy head of the scrap yard was brandishing the limp printouts that had turned her car into an unrecognizable cube of steel.

“Sold for the basket” was the expression; it meant selling a car for parts and, whatever was left, for scrap. Which was idiotic, of course; you’re not going to make any money selling forty-year-old pony car parts from a gray-market yard in the South Bronx. But as she’d learned all too well in the course of this case, when a computer in authority gives instruction, you do as you’re told.

“I’m sorry, lady.”

“She’s a police officer,” Pam Willoughby said harshly. “A detective.”

“Oh,” he said, considering the further implications of the situation and not liking them much. “Sorry, Detective.”

Still, he had his in-order paperwork shield. He wasn’t all that sorry. The man stood beside them for a few minutes, rocking from one foot to another. Then wandered away.

The pain within her was far worse than the greenish bruise from the 9-millimeter slug that had punched her belly last night.

“You okay?” Pam asked.

“Not really.”

“Like, you don’t get freaked much.”

No, I don’t, Sachs thought. But I’m freaked now.

The girl twined her red-streaked hair around her fingers, perhaps a tame version of Sachs’s own nervous touch. She looked once more at the ugly square of metal, about three by four feet, sitting amid a half dozen others.

Memories were reeling. Her father and teenage Amelia, sharing Saturday afternoons in their tiny garage, working on a carburetor or clutch. They’d escaped to the back for two reasons—for the pleasure of the mechanical work in each other’s company, and to escape the moody third party in the family: Sachs’s mother.

“Gaps?” he’d asked, playfully testing her.

“Plug,” teenage Amelia had replied, “is zero three five. Points, thirty to thirty-two dwell.”

“Good, Amie.”

Sachs recalled another time—a date, her first year in college. She and a boy who went by the name of C.T. had met at a burger place in Brooklyn. Their vehicles surprised each other. Sachs in the Camaro—yellow at the time, with tar black stripes for accent—and he atop a Honda 850.

The burgers and sodas vanished fast, since they were only a few miles from an abandoned airstrip and a race was inevitable.

He was off the line first, given that she was inside a ton and a half of vehicle, but her big block caught him before the half mile—he was cautious and she wasn’t—and she steered into the drift on the curves and kept ahead all the way to the finish.

Then her favorite drive of all time: After they’d concluded their first case together, Lincoln Rhyme, largely immobilized, strapped in beside her, windows down and wind howling. She rested his hand on the gearshift knob as she shifted and she remembered him shouting over the slipstream, “I think I can feel it. I think I can!”

And now the car was gone.!!!Sorry, lady…

Pam climbed down the embankment.

“Where are you going?”

“You shouldn’t go down there, miss.” The owner, outside the office shack, was waving the paperwork like a warning semaphore.

“Pam!”

But she wouldn’t be stopped. She walked up to the mass of metal and dug around inside. She tugged hard and pulled out something, then returned to Sachs.

“Here, Amelia.” It was the horn button emblem, with the Chevrolet logo.

Sachs felt the tears but continued to will them away. “Thanks, honey. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They drove back to the Upper West Side and stopped for recuperative ice cream; Sachs had arranged for Pam to take the day off from school. She didn’t want her to be around Stuart Everett, and the girl was only too happy to agree.

Sachs wondered if the teacher would take no for an answer. Thinking of the trashy flicks—à la Scream and Friday the 13th—that she and Pam sometimes watched late at night, fortified with Doritos and peanut butter, Sachs knew that old boyfriends, like horror movie killers, sometimes have a way of rising from the dead.!!!Love makes us weird…

Pam finished her ice cream and patted her stomach. “I so needed that.” Then she sighed. “How could I be so stupid?”

In the girl’s ensuing laugh—eerily adult—Amelia Sachs heard what she believed was the final shovel of earth on the grave of the hockey-masked killer.

They left Baskin-Robbins and walked toward Rhyme’s town house, several blocks away, planning a girls’ night out, along with another friend of Sachs’s, a policewoman she’d known for years. She asked the girl, “Movie or play?”

“Oh, a play… Amelia, when does an off-Broadway play become an off-off-Broadway play?”

“That’s a good question. We’ll Google it.”

“And why do they call them Broadway plays when there aren’t any theaters on Broadway?”

“Yeah. They should be ‘near Broadway’ plays. Or ‘right around the corner from Broadway’ plays.”

The pair walked along the east-west side street, approaching Central Park West. Sachs was suddenly aware of a pedestrian nearby. Somebody was crossing the street behind them, moving in their general direction, as if following them.

She felt no alarm, putting the breeze of concern down to the paranoia from the 522 case.

Relax. The perp’s dead and gone.

She didn’t bother to look back.

But Pam did.

And screamed shrilly, “It’s him, Amelia!”

“Who?”

“The guy who broke into your town house. That’s him!”

Sachs spun around. The man in the blue plaid jacket and baseball cap. He moved toward them fast.

She slapped her hip, going for her gun.

Which wasn’t there.

No, no, no…

Since Peter Gordon had fired the weapon, the Glock was now evidence—as was her knife—and both were at Crime Scene Unit in Queens. She hadn’t had the chance to go downtown and do the paperwork for a replacement.

Sachs now froze, recognizing him. It was Calvin Geddes, an employee of Privacy Now. She couldn’t make sense of this, and wondered if they’d been wrong. Were Geddes and 522 in on the murders together?

He was now just yards away. Sachs could do nothing but step between Geddes and Pam. She balled her fists up as the man stepped close and reached into his jacket.