I start to reach for her jacket, then remember, and let her hang it up. Tonight she's in her thick schoolteacher blouse, high neck. She looks at the darting fish.
Red and black and silver.
The question is a knob, throbbing prominently in my brain, right where I would crack the bone of someone I wanted to kill.
Do I really want to do this?
My anger at Red oozes out to my skin and burns.
Yes, I do.
"What?" Alicia asks, looking at me with that wariness in her eyes. Must have said the word aloud.
"Come with me."
"Uhm. Are you all right, Vernon?"
"Fine," I whisper. "This way."
We walk to the door of the Toy Room. She looks at the complicated lock. I know she's seen it. And is curious. What would he want to hide? she'd be wondering. What's in the den, the lair, the crypt? Of course she doesn't say a word.
"Close your eyes."
A hesitation now.
I ask, "Do you trust me?"
She doesn't. But what can she do? She closes her eyes. I grip her hand. Mine is trembling. She hesitates and then grips back. Sweat mixes.
Then I'm guiding her through the door, the halogens shooting off the steel blades and blinding me. Not her. True to her word, Alicia keeps her eyes closed.
Lincoln Rhyme, lying in bed, near midnight, hoping for sleep.
He'd spent the last hour reflecting on Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance. Whitmore had called and in his somber, well, dull, cadence reported that he'd discovered no other potential defendants. Attorney Holbrook was right. The cleaning crews could not possibly have done anything to cause the access panel to open, and the attorney's private eye had tracked down the crew that had dismantled the escalator for the Department of Investigations. The worker had confirmed that the door covering the access panel switch had indeed been closed and locked, confirming what Sachs had said: that no one could, accidentally or on purpose, have opened the panel and caused the accident.
So the case was officially dead.
Now Rhyme's thoughts eased to Amelia Sachs.
He was particularly aware of her absence tonight. He could not, of course, feel much of her body beside him when she was here, but he found comfort in her regular breathing, the layered smells of shampoo and soap (she was not a perfumista). Now he sensed an edge to the silence in the room, somehow accentuated by the aroma of inanimate cleansers and furniture polish and paper from the rows of books against the wall nearby.
Thinking back to their harsh words earlier, his and Sachs's.
They had always argued. But this had been different. He could tell from her tone. Yet he didn't understand why. Cooper was truly gifted. But the New York Police Department Crime Scene Unit was filled with brilliant evidence collection technicians and analysts, with expertise in hundreds of fields, from handwriting to ballistics to chemistry to remains reconstruction... She could have had any one of them. And, hell, Sachs herself was an expert at forensic analysis. She might prefer somebody to man the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer or scanning electron microscope, but Rhyme himself didn't run those. He left that to the technical people.
Maybe there was something else on her mind. Her mother, he supposed. Rose's operation would be weighing on her. A triple heart bypass in an elderly woman? The medical world was nothing short of miraculous, of course. But considering the massively complex and vulnerable machine within our skin, well, you couldn't help but think every one of our hours was borrowed.
Since Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance no longer existed, tomorrow Mel Cooper would be back in the CSU fold. And she could use him to her heart's content.
Sleep crowded in, and Rhyme now found himself thinking of Juliette Archer, wondering about her life in the future. She seemed to have what it took to be a solid forensic scientist but at the moment his musings were about something else: her coping with disability. She still had not fully accepted her condition. She would have a long and dark way to go before she did. If, in fact, she chose to do so. Rhyme recalled his own early battle, which culminated in a fierce debate about assisted suicide. He'd faced that choice and chosen to remain among the living. Archer was nowhere near that confrontation yet.
How would she choose?
And what, Rhyme wondered, would he think about her decision? Would he support it or argue against finality?
But any debate within her was years off; most likely he wouldn't even know her then. These ruminations, grim though they were, had the effect of lulling him to sleep.
It was perhaps ten minutes later that he started awake, his head rising as he heard, in his thoughts, Archer's low, alto voice. What one thing do we find at the beginning of eternity and the end of time and space?