The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

"Okay, Ron. But lean toward Unsub Forty. If our boy's got fertilizer bombs and poisons he's playing with, in addition to hammers, this's our priority. And answer your damn phone."

"Got it. Sure. I'll fit in Gutierrez best I can."

She explained what Charlotte and the manager at White Castle had said. Then added, "I've canvassed most of the stores around here and gotten to half of the streets he'd take to subways, buses or apartment complexes." She gave him the locations she'd been to and told him to keep going another few blocks. She told him too about the gypsy cab service where the unsub had possibly been spotted. "I want you to follow up with them. We need that driver. Keep up pressure."

"I'll handle it."

"I've got to get my mother to an appointment."

"How's she doing?"

"Hanging in there. Operation's in a few days."

"Give her my best."

A nod, then she returned to her Torino and fired up the big engine. In twenty minutes she was cruising along the streets of her neighborhood. She felt a comfort as she headed into the pleasant residential 'hood of Carroll Gardens. The place had been much scruffier when she'd grown up here. Now it was the bastion of PWSM. People With Some Money. Not enough to afford this kind of square footage in Manhattan and not willing to flee the city limits for suburbia. Gentrification didn't bother Amelia Sachs. She spent plenty of time in the bad parts of town and was glad to return home to a well-tended enclave with gardenias in unmolested flowerpots on the street, families bicycling through the parks and a high saturation of aromatic coffee shops (though she wouldn't mind banishing hipsters to SoHo and TriBeCa).

Well, look at this: a legitimate parking space. And only a block from her house. She could park practically anywhere if she left her NYPD placard on the dash. But she'd found this wasn't a wise practice. One morning she'd returned to her car to find Pig spray-painted on the windshield. She didn't think the word was much in use anymore and pictured the perpetrator as an unfortunate, aging anti-Vietnam-War protestor. Still, the cleaning had cost her four hundred bucks.

Sachs parked and walked along the tree-lined street to her town house, which was classic Brooklyn: brown brick, window frames painted dark green, fronted by a small verdant strip of grass. She let herself in, locked the door behind her and went into the front hallway, stripping off her jacket and unweaving the Glock holster embracing the weapon from her belt. She was a gun person, in her job and as a hobby, a champion in handgun competitions on police and private ranges, but at home, around family, she was discreet about displaying weapons.

She set the Glock in the closet, on a shelf near her jacket, then stepped into the living room. "Hi." She nodded a smile to her mother, who said goodbye to whomever she was speaking to on the phone and put the handset down.

"Honey."

Slim, unsmiling Rose Sachs was a contradiction.

This, the woman who would not speak to her daughter for months when she quit her fashion modeling job to go to the police academy.

This, the woman who would not speak to her husband for even longer for believing he'd encouraged that career change (he had not).

This, the woman whose moods would drive father and daughter out into the garage on Saturday mornings and afternoons to work on one of the muscle cars they both loved to soup up and drive.

This, the woman who was there every minute for her husband, Herman, as he faded to cancer and who made sure her daughter never wanted for a single thing, attended every parent-teacher conference, worked two jobs when necessary, overcame her uncertainty about Rhyme's and her daughter's relationship and quickly accepted then fully embraced him disability and all.

Rose made her decisions in life according to immutable rules of propriety and logic that were often beyond anyone else's comprehension. Yet you couldn't help but admire the steel within her.

Rose was contradictory in another way too. Her physical incarnation. On the one side, pale of skin from the weak stream of blood struggling through her damaged vessels, but fiery of eye. Weak yet with a powerful hug and vise grip of a handshake. If she approved of you.

"I was serious, Amie. You don't have to take me. I'm perfectly capable."

Yet she wasn't. And today she seemed particularly frail, short of breath and seemingly incapable of rising from the couch--a victim of the body's betrayal, which was how Sachs thought of her condition, since she was slim, rarely drank and had never smoked.

"Not a problem. After, we'll stop at Gristedes. I didn't have a chance on the way here."

"I think there are things in the freezer."

"I need to go anyway."

Then Rose was peering at her daughter with focused and--yes--piercing eyes. "Is everything all right?"

The woman's perceptive nature was undiminished by her physical malady.

"Tough case."

"Your Unsub Forty."

"That's right." And made tougher by the fact that her partner had goddamn stolen the best forensic man in the city out from underneath her--for a civil case, no less, which wasn't nearly as urgent as hers. It was true that Sandy Frommer's life and her son's would be drastically altered without some compensation from the company who'd changed their lives so tragically. But they wouldn't die, they wouldn't be living on the street, while Unsub 40 might be planning to kill again. Tonight. Five minutes from now.