"Jim!" Rhyme cried. "No, oh, no . . ."
The captain's hands curled over his ruined chest. A repugnant gurgling from his throat filled the room, accompanied by the mad thudding of his shoes on the floor as he died. Finally he quivered once violently and lay still. His glazed eyes, dotted with blood, stared at the ceiling.
Turning to the bed he kept his eyes on Lincoln Rhyme as he walked around it. Slowly circling, the knife in his hand. His breathing was hard.
"Who are you?" Rhyme gasped.
Silently Taylor stepped forward, put his fingers around Rhyme's arm, squeezed the bone several times, perhaps hard, perhaps not. His hand strayed to Rhyme's left ring finger. He lifted it off the ECU and caressed it with the dripping blade of the knife. Slipped the sharp point up under the nail.
Rhyme felt faint pain, a queasy sensation. Then harder. He gasped.
Then Taylor noticed something and froze. He gasped. Leaned forward. Staring at the copy of Crime in Old New York on the turning frame.
"That's how . . . You actually found it. . . . Oh, the constables should be proud to have you in their ranks, Lincoln Rhyme. I thought it'd be days before you got to the house. I thought Maggie'd be stripped down by the dogs by then."
"Why're you doing this?" Rhyme asked.
But Taylor didn't answer; he was examining Rhyme carefully, muttering, half to himself, "You didn't used to be this good, you know. In the old days. You missed a lot back then, didn't you? In the old days."
The old days . . . What did he mean?
He shook his balding head, gray hair--not brown--and glanced at a copy of Rhyme's forensic textbook. There was recognition in his eyes and slowly Rhyme began to understand.
"You read my book," the criminalist said. "You studied it. At the library, right? The public library branch near you?"
Eight twenty-three was, after all, a reader.
So he knew Rhyme's CS procedures. That's why he'd swept up so carefully, why he'd worn gloves touching even surfaces most criminals wouldn't've thought would retain prints, why he'd sprayed the aftershave at the scene--he'd known exactly what Sachs would be looking for.
And of course the manual wasn't the only book he'd read.
Scenes of the Crime too. That's what had given him the idea for the planted clues--Old New York clues. Clues that only Lincoln Rhyme would be able to figure out.
Taylor picked up the disk of spinal column he'd given to Rhyme eight months ago. He kneaded it absently between his fingers. And Rhyme saw the gift, so touching back then, for the horrific preface that it was.
His eyes were unfocused, distant. Rhyme recalled he'd seen this before--when Taylor'd examined him over the past months. He'd put it down to a doctor's concentration but now knew it was madness. The control he'd been struggling to maintain was disappearing.
"Tell me," Rhyme asked. "Why?"
"Why?" Taylor whispered, moving his hand along Rhyme's leg, probing once more, knee, shin, ankle. "Because you were something remarkable, Rhyme. Unique. You were invulnerable."
"What do you mean?"
"How can you punish a man who wants to die? If you kill him you've done what he wants. So I had to make you want to live."
And the answer came to Rhyme finally.
The old days . . .
"It was fake, wasn't it?" he whispered. "That obituary from the Albany coroner. You wrote it yourself."
Colin Stanton. Dr. Taylor was Colin Stanton.
The man whose family had been butchered in front of him on the streets of Chinatown. The man who stood paralyzed in front of the bodies of his wife and two children as they bled to death, and could not make the obscene choice about which of them to save.
You missed things. In the old days.
Now, too late, the final pieces fell into place.