How? Rhyme wondered.
She and the criminalist were in the downstairs lab of his town house, waiting for Amelia Sachs and Roland Bell. As Mel Cooper was setting the evidence out on examination tables and a CD pumped jazz piano into the room Rhyme was being treated to his own sleight-of-hand show.
Kara stood in front of a window, wearing one of Sachs's black T-shirts from the closet upstairs. Thom was currently washing her tank top, removing the Heinz 57 bloodstain from her improvised illusion at the crafts fair.
"Where'd you get those?" Rhyme asked, nodding at the balls. He hadn't seen her take them out of her purse or pocket.
She said with a smile that she'd "materialized" them (another trick magicians enjoyed, Rhyme had wryly observed, was transforming intransitive verbs into transitive ones).
"Where do you live?" he asked.
"The Village."
Rhyme nodded at some memories. "When my wife and I were together most of our friends lived down there. And SoHo, TriBeCa."
"I don't get north of Twenty-third much," she said.
A laugh from the criminalist. "In my day Fourteenth was the start of the demilitarized zone."
"Our side's winning, looks like," she joked as the red balls appeared and disappeared, moved from one hand to the other, then circulated in the air in an impromptu juggling act.
"Your accent?" he asked.
"I have an accent?" she asked.
"Intonation then, inflection . . . tone."
"Ohio probably. Midwest."
"Me too," Rhyme told her. "Illinois."
"But I've been here since I was eighteen. Went to school in Bronxville."
"Sarah Lawrence, drama," Rhyme deduced.
"English."
"And you liked it here and stayed."
"Well, I liked it once I got out of the 'burbs and into the city. Then after my father died my mother moved out here to be closer to me."
Daughter of a widowed mother . . . like Sachs, Rhyme reflected. He wondered if Kara had the same problems with her mother as Sachs'd had with hers. A peace treaty had been negotiated in recent years but in Sachs's youth her mother had been tempestuous, moody, unpredictable. Rose didn't understand why her husband wanted to be nothing more than a cop and why her daughter wanted to be anything other than what her mother wanted her to be. This naturally drove father and daughter into an alliance, which made matters worse. Sachs had told him that their refuge on bad days was the garage, where they found a comfortably predictable universe: when a carburetor didn't seat it was because a simple and just rule of the physical world had been broken--machine tolerances were off or a gasket had been cut wrong. Engines and suspensions and transmissions didn't subject you to melodramatic moods or cryptic diatribes and even at the worst they never blamed you for their own failings.
Rhyme had met Rose Sachs on several occasions and found her charming, chatty, eccentric and proud of her daughter. But the past, he knew, is nowhere as present as it is between parents and children.
"And how does it work out, her being nearby?" Rhyme asked skeptically.
"Sounds like the sitcom from hell, huh? But, nope, Mum's great, my mom. She's . . . hey, you know, a mother. They're just a certain way. They never outgrow that."
"Where does she live?"
"She's in a care facility, Upper East Side."
"Is she very sick?"
"Nothing serious. She'll be fine." Kara absently rolled the balls over her knuckles and into her palm. "As soon as she's better we're going to England, just the two of us. London, Stratford, the Cotswolds. My parents and I went there once. It was our best vacation ever. This time I'm going to drive on the left-hand side of the road and drink warm beer. They wouldn't let me the last time. Of course, I was thirteen. You ever been there?"
"Sure. I used to work with Scotland Yard from time to time. And I'd lecture there. I haven't been back since . . . well, not for a few years."