The Broken Window (Lincoln Rhyme 8)

The woman who had been shot at, who had killed in the line of duty, who talked her way onto point in dynamic hostage-rescue ops was now paralyzed with grief.

Rocking back and forth, her index finger digging into the quick of her thumb, nail against nail, until a minor stain of blood appeared. She glanced down at her fingers. Saw the crimson but didn't stop the compulsion. She couldn't.

Yes, they'd found her beloved 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS.

But what the police apparently hadn't known was that the car had been sold for scrap, not just impounded for missed payments. She and Pam were standing in the car impound lot, which could have been a set in a Scorsese film, or The Sopranos, a junkyard stinking of old oil and smoke from a trash fire. Loud, mean gulls hovered nearby, white vultures. She wanted to draw her weapon and empty the clip into the air to send them fleeing in terror.

A crushed metal rectangle was all that remained of the car, which had been with her since her teenage days. The vehicle was one of her father's three most important legacies to her, the others being his strength of character and his love of police work.

"I got the paperwork. It's all, you know, in order." The uneasy head of the scrap yard was brandishing the limp printouts that had turned her car into an unrecognizable cube of steel.

"Sold for the basket" was the expression; it meant selling a car for parts and, whatever was left, for scrap. Which was idiotic, of course; you're not going to make any money selling forty-year-old pony car parts from a gray-market yard in the South Bronx. But as she'd learned all too well in the course of this case, when a computer in authority gives instruction, you do as you're told.

"I'm sorry, lady."

"She's a police officer," Pam Willoughby said harshly. "A detective."

"Oh," he said, considering the further implications of the situation and not liking them much. "Sorry, Detective."

Still, he had his in-order paperwork shield. He wasn't all that sorry. The man stood beside them for a few minutes, rocking from one foot to another. Then wandered away.

The pain within her was far worse than the greenish bruise from the 9-millimeter slug that had punched her belly last night.

"You okay?" Pam asked.

"Not really."

"Like, you don't get freaked much."

No, I don't, Sachs thought. But I'm freaked now.

The girl twined her red-streaked hair around her fingers, perhaps a tame version of Sachs's own nervous touch. She looked once more at the ugly square of metal, about three by four feet, sitting amid a half dozen others.

Memories were reeling. Her father and teenage Amelia, sharing Saturday afternoons in their tiny garage, working on a carburetor or clutch. They'd escaped to the back for two reasons--for the pleasure of the mechanical work in each other's company, and to escape the moody third party in the family: Sachs's mother.

"Gaps?" he'd asked, playfully testing her.

"Plug," teenage Amelia had replied, "is zero three five. Points, thirty to thirty-two dwell."

"Good, Amie."

Sachs recalled another time--a date, her first year in college. She and a boy who went by the name of C.T. had met at a burger place in Brooklyn. Their vehicles surprised each other. Sachs in the Camaro--yellow at the time, with tar black stripes for accent--and he atop a Honda 850.

The burgers and sodas vanished fast, since they were only a few miles from an abandoned airstrip and a race was inevitable.

He was off the line first, given that she was inside a ton and a half of vehicle, but her big block caught him before the half mile--he was cautious and she wasn't--and she steered into the drift on the curves and kept ahead all the way to the finish.

Then her favorite drive of all time: After they'd concluded their first case together, Lincoln Rhyme, largely immobilized, strapped in beside her, windows down and wind howling. She rested his hand on the gearshift knob as she shifted and she remembered him shouting over the slipstream, "I think I can feel it. I think I can!"

And now the car was gone.

Sorry, lady . . .

Pam climbed down the embankment.

"Where are you going?"

"You shouldn't go down there, miss." The owner, outside the office shack, was waving the paperwork like a warning semaphore.