The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

He laughed as she lifted her left arm and gave a thumbs-up.

When they'd left Rhyme said, "I talked to your mom. She's in good spirits. When's the surgery?"

"Tomorrow afternoon."

He observed her wan face, peering out the window. "The other situation?" He was referring to Nick. The other night she'd told Rhyme everything about his reappearance--and her suspicion of him. About spending the night at Nick's to place a tracking app on his phone.

A preface like that, Sachs? Pray continue...

No reaction for a moment. She was immobile, looking out over Central Park.

"Turned out the way I was afraid it would. Worse, actually. He tried to order a hit on somebody."

Rhyme grimaced and shook his head. "I'm sorry."

"Fred'll run him for a while. We'll get a half-dozen others, high-ups in the OC chain. Then cut him loose."

"One thing you never told me, Sachs."

The rattan chair she sat in gave its unique caw as she turned his way. She tilted her head, brushed her hair back. Rhyme liked her wearing it down, rather than in a bun.

"What's that?"

"Why did you get suspicious of Nick? Everything he told you, how he acted... it sounded credible. To me, at least."

After a moment she said, "Intuition. How you hate that word, I know. But that's what it was. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Something was off about him. It was Mom who brought it into focus. Nick said he took the fall for his brother. But she said that if he'd really cared for me, he never would've done that. Nick was a decorated cop; he had cred all over downtown. His brother gets busted, he could've worked with the DA on sentencing, helped Donnie get into a program in prison. Organized an operation to nail Delgado--that was all a lie, by the way. But he wouldn't have taken the fall." She smiled, her full lips, free of color, forming a mild crescent. "Didn't have a splinter of evidence, just a gut feel."

"No," Rhyme said. "Not gut. Heart. Sometimes that's better than evidence."

She blinked.

"But you didn't hear me say that, Sachs. You never heard me say that."

"I better get to Mom." She kissed his mouth hard. "That woman's got to get well fast. I miss sleeping here."

"I miss that too, Sachs. I really do."

CHAPTER 60

Rhyme looked up from his monitor, on which he was engaged in a chess match against a smart, but largely unimaginative computer program.

He said to the visitor dawdling in the parlor doorway, "Come on in." And to the microprocessor: "White queen to e-seven. Check."

Rhyme let the software cogitate on that move and wheeled away from the work station, facing Ron Pulaski. "Where've you been, Rookie? You missed the climax, the crescendo, the denouement of the Griffith case. Here you are, arriving for the coda. How dull."

"Well, that other case. I was multitasking."

"Do you know how much I detest that word, Pulaski? Using 'task' as a verb is as mortifying as using 'ask' as a noun. Unacceptable. And tacking on the prefix 'multi' is unnecessary. 'Tasking,' if you're going to accept it as a predicate, includes a single endeavor or a dozen."

"Lincoln, we live in the era of the--"

"If you say 'sound bite,' I will not be happy."

"--the, uhm, era of the frequent use of a contracted phrase or single word to convey a complex concept. That's what I was going to say."

A stifled laugh and he reminded himself not to sell the kid short. Rhyme needed someone to ground him.

But through the repartee Rhyme could see he had something important on his mind. "You heard from Amelia? About Griffith?" Rhyme asked.