The Cold Moon (Lincoln Rhyme 7)

Before and After . . .

Rhyme had come to believe that he himself really wasn't much different in the After. His physical condition, his skyline, you could say, had changed. But he was essentially the same person as in the Before: a cop and a scientist who was impatient, temperamental (okay, sometimes obnoxious), relentless and intolerant of incompetence and laziness. He didn't play the gimp card, didn't whine, didn't make an issue of his condition (though good luck to any building owners who didn't meet the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for door width and ramps when he was at a crime scene in their buildings).

As he listened to the report now, the fact that certain people in the city seemed to be giving in to self-pity irritated him. "I'm going to write a letter," he announced to Thom.

The slim young aide, in dark slacks, white shirt and thick sweater (Rhyme's Central Park West town house suffered from a bad heating system and ancient insulation), glanced up from where he was overdecorating for Christmas. Rhyme enjoyed the irony of his placing a miniature evergreen tree on a table below which a present, though an unwrapped one, already waited: a box of adult disposable diapers.

"Letter?"

He explained his theory that it was more patriotic to go about business as usual. "I'm going to give 'em hell. The Times, I think."

"Why don't you?" asked the aide, whose profession was known as "caregiver" (though Thom said that, being in the employ of Lincoln Rhyme, his job description was really "saint").

"I'm going to," Rhyme said adamantly.

"Good for you . . . though, one thing?"

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. The criminalist could--and did--get great expression out of his extant body parts: shoulders, face and head.

"Most of the people who say they're going to write a letter don't. People who do write letters just go ahead and write them. They don't announce it. Ever notice that?"

"Thank you for the brilliant insight into psychology, Thom. You know that nothing's going to stop me now."

"Good," repeated the aide.

Using the touchpad controller, the criminalist drove his red Storm Arrow wheelchair closer to one of the half dozen large, flat-screen monitors in the room.

"Command," he said into the voice-recognition system, via a microphone attached to the chair. "Word processor."

WordPerfect dutifully opened on the screen.

"Command, type. 'Dear sirs.' Command, colon. Command, paragraph. Command, type, 'It has come to my attention--'"

The doorbell rang and Thom went to see who the visitor was.

Rhyme closed his eyes and was composing his rant to the world when a voice intruded. "Hey, Linc. Merry Christmas."

"Uhm, ditto," Rhyme grumbled to paunchy, disheveled Lon Sellitto, walking through the doorway. The big detective had to maneuver carefully; the room had been a quaint parlor in the Victorian era but now was chockablock with forensic science gear: optical microscopes, an electron microscope, a gas chromatograph, laboratory beakers and racks, pipettes, petri dishes, centrifuges, chemicals, books and magazines, computers--and thick wires, which ran everywhere. (When Rhyme began doing forensic consulting out of his town house, the power-hungry equipment frequently would blow circuit breakers. The juice running into the place probably equaled the combined usage by everyone else on the block.)

"Command, volume, level three." The environmental control unit obediently turned down NPR.

"Not in the spirit of the season, are we?" the detective asked.

Rhyme didn't answer. He looked back at the monitor.

"Hey, Jackson." Sellitto bent down and petted a small, longhaired dog curled up in an NYPD evidence box. He was temporarily living here; his former owner, Thom's elderly aunt, had passed away recently in Westport, Connecticut, after a long illness. Among the young man's inheritances was Jackson, a Havanese. The breed, related to the bichon frise, originated in Cuba. Jackson was staying here until Thom could find a good home for him.

"We got a bad one, Linc," Sellitto said, standing up. He started to take off his overcoat but changed his mind. "Jesus, it's cold. Is this a record?"

"Don't know. Don't spend much time on the Weather Channel." He thought of a good opening paragraph of his letter to the editor.

"Bad," Sellitto repeated.

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto with a cocked eyebrow.

"Two homicides, same M.O. More or less."