The Burning Wire (Lincoln Rhyme 9)

Ron Pulaski was walking the grid at Algonquin Consolidated. Mel Cooper and Lon Sellitto were back in their respective homes. Roland Bell had reported that Richard Logan was tucked away safely in a special high-security wing of downtown detention.

Amelia Sachs had been downtown too, helping with the paperwork, but was now back in Brooklyn. Rhyme hoped she might be taking a little time to herself, maybe to sneak a drive in her Cobra Torino. She occasionally took Pammy out on the road. The girl reported that the drives were "untotallybelievable," which he interpreted as meaning "exhilarating."

He knew, though, that the girl was never in any danger. Unlike when Sachs was by herself, she knew the right moment to pull back when her nature tried to assert itself.

Thom was out too, with his partner, a reporter for The New York Times. He'd wanted to stay at home and keep an eye on his boss, watching for horrific side effects from the dysreflexia attack or for who knew what? But the criminalist had insisted he go out for the night.

"You've got a curfew," he'd snapped. "Midnight."

"Lincoln, I'll be back before--"

"No. You'll be back after midnight. It's a negative curfew."

"That's crazy. I'm not leaving--"

"I'll fucking fire you if you come back before then."

The aide examined him carefully and said, "Okay. Thanks."

Rhyme had no patience for the gratitude and proceeded to ignore the aide as he busied himself on the computer, organizing the lists of evidence that would be turned over to the prosecutor for the trial, at the end of which the Watchmaker would go to jail for an impressive assortment of crimes, including capital murder. He would surely be convicted but New York, unlike California and Texas, treated the death pen

alty like an embarrassing birthmark in the middle of its forehead. As he'd told Rodolfo Luna, he doubted the man would die.

Other jurisdictions would be vying for him too. But he'd been caught in New York; they'd have to wait in line.

Rhyme secretly was not troubled by a life sentence. Had Logan been killed during the confrontation here--say, going after a gun to hurt Sachs or Sellitto--that would have been a fair end, an honest end. That Rhyme had captured him and that he'd spend the rest of his life in prison was justice enough. Lethal injection seemed cheap. Insulting. And Rhyme wouldn't want to be part of the case that sent the man on that final stroll to the gurney.

Enjoying the solitude, Rhyme now dictated several pages of crime scene reports. Some forensic officers wrote lyrical ones, dramatic or poetic. This wasn't Rhyme's way. The language was lean and hard--cast metal, not carved wood. He reviewed it and was pleased, though irritated at the gaps. He was waiting for some analytical results to come in. Still, he reminded himself that impatience was a sin too, though not one as grave as carelessness, and that the case would not suffer if the final report were delayed for a day or two.

Good, he allowed. More to do--always more to do--but good.

Rhyme looked over the lab, left in pristine shape by Mel Cooper, presently at his mother's home in Queens, where he lived, or perhaps, after a quick check-in on Mom, with his Scandinavian girlfriend; they might be dancing up a storm by now in some ballroom in Midtown.

Aware of a slight headache, like the one he'd experienced earlier, he glanced at a nearby shelf of his medications. And noticed a bottle of clonidine, the vasodilator, that had possibly saved his life earlier. It occurred to him that if he had an attack at this moment he might very well not survive. The bottle was inches away from his hands. But it might as well have been miles.

Rhyme looked over the familiar evidence boards, filled with Sachs's and Mel Cooper's writing. There were smears and cross-outs, erasures of false starts, misspellings and downright errors.

An emblem for the way criminal cases always unfolded.

He then gazed at the equipment: the density gradient device, the forceps and vials, the gloves, the flasks, the collection gear and the battleships of the line: the scanning electron microscope and the chromatograph/mass spectrometer, silent and bulky. He thought back on the many, many hours he'd spent on these machines and their predecessors, recalled the sound of the units, the smell as he sacrificed a sample in the fiery heart of the chromatograph to learn what a mysterious compound really was. Often, the debate: If you destroyed your sole sample to find the identity and whereabouts of the perp, you risked jeopardizing the case at trial because the sample had disappeared.

Lincoln Rhyme always voted to burn.

He recalled the rumble of the machine under his hand when his hand could still feel rumbles.

He now looked too at the snaky wires crisscrossing the parquet floor, remembered feeling--in his jaw and head only, of course--the bumps as the wheelchair thumped over them on the way from one examining table to another or to the computer monitor.

Wires . . .

He then wheeled into the den, looking at family pictures. Thinking of his cousin Arthur. His uncle Henry. Thinking too of his parents.

And of Amelia Sachs, of course. Always of Amelia.

Then the good memories faded and he couldn't help thinking about how his failings had nearly cost her her life today. Because his rebellious body had betrayed them all. Rhyme and Sachs and Ron Pulaski. And who knew how many ESU officers who might have been electrocuted storming the rigged school in Chinatown?

From there his thoughts continued to spiral and he realized that the incident was a symbol of their relationship. The love was there, of course, but he couldn't deny that he was holding her back. That she was only partly the person she could be, if she were with somebody else, or even on her own.

This wasn't self-pity, and, in fact, Rhyme was feeling oddly exhilarated by where his thoughts were going.