The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  "I've kind of made a decision. I wanted to tell you first."

  "Kind of?" Rhyme chided once again.

  "I mean, I have made a decision."

  Rhyme raised his eyebrow. He didn't want to be too encouraging. What was coming next? he wondered, though he believed he had an idea. Rhyme's life might have been devoted to science but he'd also been in charge of hundreds of employees and cops. And despite his impatience, his gruffness, his fits of temper, he'd been a reasonable and fair boss.

  As long as you didn't screw up.

  "Go on, Rookie."

  "I'm leaving."

  "The area?"

  "The force."

  "Ah."

  Rhyme had become aware of body language since he'd known Kathryn Dance. He sensed that Pulaski was now delivering lines he'd rehearsed. Many times.

  The cop rubbed his hand through his short blond hair. "William Brent."

  "Dellray's CI?"

  "Right, yessir."

  Rhyme thought once more about reminding the young man that he didn't need to use such deferential appellations. But he said only, "Go on, Pulaski."

  His face grim, eyes turbulent, Pulaski sat down in the creaking wicker chair near Rhyme's Storm Arrow. "At Galt's place, I was spooked. I panicked. I didn't exercise good judgment. I wasn't aware enough of procedures." As if in summary, he added, "I didn't assess the situation properly and adjust my behavior accordingly."

  Like a schoolboy who wasn't sure of the test answers and was rattling them off quickly, hoping one would stick.

  "He's out of his coma."

  "But he might've died."

  "And that's why you're quitting?"

  "I made a mistake. It nearly cost somebody his life. . . . I just don't feel I can keep functioning at full capacity."

  Jesus, where did he get these lines?

  "It was an accident, Rookie."

  "And one that shouldn't've happened."

  "Are there any other kinds of accidents?"

  "You know what I mean, Lincoln. It's not like I haven't thought this through."

  "I can prove that you have to stay, that it'd be wrong for you to quit."

  "What, say that I'm talented, I have a lot to contribute?" The cop's face was skeptical. He was young but he looked a lot older than when Rhyme had met him. Policing will do that.

  So will working with me, Lincoln Rhyme reflected.

  "You know why you can't quit? You'd be a hypocrite."

  Pulaski blinked.

  Rhyme continued, an edge to his voice. "You missed your window of opportunity."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Okay, you fucked up and somebody was injured badly. But then when it looked like Brent was a perp with outstanding paper, you thought you'd been given a reprieve, right?"

  "Well . . . I guess."

  "You suddenly didn't care that you'd hit him. Since he was, what, less than human?"

  "No, I just--"

  "Let me finish. The minute after you backed into that guy, you had a choice to make: Either you should've decided that the risk of collateral damage and accidents isn't acceptable to you and quit on the spot. Or you should've put the whole thing behind you and learned to live with what happened. It doesn't make any difference if that guy was a serial killer or a deacon at his church. And it's intellectually dishonest for you to whine about it now."

  The rookie's eyes narrowed with anger and he was about to offer a defense of some sort, but Rhyme continued, "You made a mistake. You didn't commit a crime. . . . Well, mistakes happen in this business. The problem is that when they do it's not like accounting or making shoes. When we fuck up, there's a chance somebody's going to get killed. But if we stopped and worried about that, we'd never get anything done. We'd be looking over our shoulders all the time and that would mean more people would die because we weren't doing our jobs."

  "Easy for you to say," Pulaski snapped angrily.

  Good for him, Rhyme thought, but kept his face solemn.

  "Have you ever been in a situation like this?" Pulaski muttered.

  Of course he had. Rhyme had made mistakes. Dozens, if not hundreds, of them. It was a mistake years ago, one that indeed resulted in the deaths of innocent people, that led to the case that brought Rhyme and Sachs together for the first time. But he didn't want a band-of-brothers argument at the moment. "That's not the point, Pulaski. The point is you've already made your decision. Coming back here with the evidence from Galt's, after you'd run over Brent, you lost the right to quit. So it's a nonissue."

  "This is eating me up."

  "Well, it's time to tell it--whatever the hell it is--to stop eating. Part of being a cop is putting that wall up."

  "Lincoln, you're not listening to me."

  "I did listen. I considered your arguments and I rejected them. They're invalid."

  "They're valid to me."

  "No, they're not. And I'll tell you why." Rhyme hesitated. "Because they're not valid to me . . . and you and I are a lot alike, Pulaski. I myself hate to goddamn admit it, but it's true."

  This brought the young man up short.

  "Now, forget all this crap you've been boring me with. I'm glad you're here because I need you to do some follow-up work. At the--"

  Pulaski stared at the criminalist and gave a cold laugh. "I'm not doing anything. I'm quitting. I'm not listening to you."

  "Well, you're not going to quit now. You can do it in a few days. I need you. The case--your case as much as mine--isn't over with yet. We have to make absolutely sure Logan's convicted. You agree?"

  A sigh. "I agree."

  "Before McDaniel got removed from command and sent to the cloud zone, or wherever he went, he had his men search Bob Cavanaugh's office. He didn't call us to do it. The Bureau's Evidence Response Team is good--I helped set it up. But we should've walked the grid too. I want you to do that now. Logan was saying there's a cartel involved and I want to make sure every one of them gets nailed."

  A resigned grimace. "I'll do it. But that's my last assignment." Shaking his head, the young man stormed from the room.

  Lincoln Rhyme struggled to keep the smile from his face as he sought the straw sprouting from his tumbler of whisky.

  Chapter 85

  LINCOLN RHYME WAS now alone.

  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.

  He considered what would happen if she were to go on in life alone. Dispassionately he pictured the scenario. And he concluded that Amelia Sachs would be just fine. Once again he had an image of Ron Pulaski and Sachs running Crime Scene in a few years.

  Now, in the quiet den across from the lab, surrounded by pictures of his family, Rhyme glanced down at something that sat on the table nearby. Colorful and glossy. It was the brochure that the assisted-suicide advocate Arlen Kopeski had left.

  Choices . . .

  Rhyme was amused to note that the brochure had been designed, cleverly, with the disabled in mind. You didn't need to pick it up and flip through it. The phone number of the euthanasia organization was printed on the front and in large type--in the event that the condition spurring someone to kill himself involved deteriorating vision.

  As he gazed at the brochure, his mind spun. The plan that was formulating itself would take some organizing.

  It would take some secrecy.

  It would take some conspiracy. And bribery.

  But such was the life of a quadriplegic, a life where thinking was free and easy but where acting required complicity.

  The plan would take some time too. But nothing that was important in life ever happened quickly. Rhyme was filled with the thrill that comes with making a firm decision.

  His big concern was making sure that his testimony against the Watchmaker regarding the evidence could be heard by the jury without Rhyme's presence. There's a procedure for this: sworn depositions. Besides, Sachs and Mel Cooper were seasoned witnesses for the prosecution. He believed that Ron Pulaski would be too.

  He'd talk to the prosecutor tomorrow, a private conversation, and have a court reporter come to the town house and take his testimony. Thom would think nothing of it.

  Smiling, Lincoln Rhyme wheeled back into the empty lab with its electronics and software and--ah, yes--the wires that would allow him to make the phone call he'd been thinking of, no, obsessing over, from virtually the moment the Watchmaker was arrested.

  Ten days after Earth Day

  IV

  THE LAST CASE

  "Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking all day from one laboratory table to another. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf."

  --THOMAS ALVA EDISON

  Chapter 86

  AMELIA SACHS AND Thom Reston hurried through the door of the hospital. Neither spoke.

  The lobby and hallways were calm, odd for places like this on a Saturday evening in New York City. Usually chaos ruled in the houses of healing, chaos from accidents, alcohol poisoning, overdoses and, of course, the occasional gunshot or knife wound.

  Here, though, the atmosphere was oddly, eerily, sedate.

  Grim-faced, Sachs paused and regarded signs. She pointed and they started down an even dimmer corridor in the basement of the hospital.

  They paused again.

  "That way?" Sachs whispered.

  "It's not well marked. It should be better marked."

  Sachs heard the exasperation in Thom's voice but she knew the tone was grounded mostly in dismay.

  "There."

  They continued on, past a station where nurses sat, leisurely chatting behind the high counter. There were plenty of official accoutrements of the job, papers and files, but also coffee cups, some makeup and a book of puzzles. A lot of Sudoku, Sachs noted, wondering why the game had caught on. She didn't have the patience.

  She supposed that down here, in this department, the staff wasn't required to leap into action very often, a la TV medicos in emergency rooms.

  At a second counter Sachs approached a solitary nurse, a middle-aged woman, and said one word: "Rhyme."

  "Ah, yes," the nurse said, looking up. Not needing to consult a chart or any other document. "And you are?"

  "His partner," she said. She'd used the term a number of times regarding the man in both the professional and personal sense, but had nev
er realized until now how completely inadequate it was. She didn't like it. Hated it.

  Thom identified himself as "caregiver."

  Which too clunked like tin.

  "I'm afraid I don't know any details," the nurse said, echoing what would have been Sachs's question. "Come with me."

  The staunch woman led them down another corridor, even more grim than the first. Spotless, pleasingly designed, ordered. And abhorrent.

  What better word to describe hospitals anyway?

  As they approached a room with an open door, the nurse said not unsympathetically, "Wait in there, please. Somebody will be in soon."

  The woman was instantly gone, as if afraid one of them might shove her into a chair and interrogate her. Which Sachs was half inclined to do.

  She and Thom turned the corner and stepped into the waiting room. It was empty. Lon Sellitto and Rhyme's cousin Arthur and his wife, Judy, were on their way. Sachs's mother too, Rose. The woman had been going to take the subway here; Sachs had insisted on a car service.

  They sat in silence. Sachs picked up yet another Sudoku book, looked through it. Thom glanced toward her. He squeezed her arm and slumped back. It was curious to see him abdicate his usually perfect posture.

  The man said, "He never said anything. Not a word."

  "That surprises you?"

  He began to say that it did. But then he slumped even more. "No."

  A man in a business suit, tie askew, came into the room, looked at the faces of the two already there and decided to wait elsewhere. Sachs could hardly blame him.

  At times like this, you don't want to share a public space with strangers.

  Sachs leaned her head against Thom, who hugged her hard. She'd forgotten how strong the man was.

  This evening was the culmination of perhaps the strangest, and most tense, twelve hours in all the years she'd known Rhyme. That morning, when she'd arrived from spending the night in Brooklyn, she'd found Thom gazing at the door expectantly. The aide had then glanced behind her and frowned.

  "What?" she'd asked, also glancing back.

  "Wasn't he with you?"

  "Who?"

  "Lincoln."

  "No."

  "Goddamn it. He's disappeared."

  Thanks to the speedy and reliable Storm Arrow wheelchair, Rhyme was as mobile as any quad and it was not unheard of for him to drive out to Central Park on his own. Though it was also true that the out-of-doors held little interest to him, Rhyme preferring to be in the lab, surrounded by his equipment and mentally wrestling with a case.