The Burning Wire (42 page)

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."

--T
HOMAS
A
LVA
E
DISON

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 never 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.

The aide had gotten him up early today, as Rhyme had instructed, dressed and deposited him into the wheelchair. The criminalist had then said, "I'm meeting somebody for breakfast."

"Where are we going?" Thom had asked.

" 'I' is singular first person, Thom. 'We' is plural. Also first person and a pronoun, but other than that they have very little in common. You're not invited and it's for your own sake. You'd be bored."

"It's never boring around you, Lincoln."

"Ha. I'll be back soon."

The criminalist had been in such a good mood that Thom had agreed.

But then Rhyme simply hadn't returned.

Another hour had gone by after Sachs had arrived. And curiosity became concern. But at that very instant they'd both received an email, dinging on computers and BlackBerrys. It was as clipped and functional as one would expect from Lincoln Rhyme.

Thom, Sachs--

After a great deal of deliberation I've concluded that I don't want to continue to live in my current condition.

"No," Thom had gasped.

"Keep reading."

Recent events have made clear that certain inabilities are no longer acceptable to me. I've been motivated to act by two things. The visit by Kopeski, which told me that while I would never kill myself, nonetheless there are times when the risk of death should not deter one from making a decision.

The second was meeting Susan Stringer. She said there were no coincidences and that she felt she was fated to tell me about Pembroke Spinal Cord Center. (You know how much I believe in THAT--and if this is the point where I'm supposed to type LOL, it's not going to happen.)

I've been in regular discussions with the center and have made four appointments for various procedures over the next eight months. The first of these is about to begin.

Of course, there's the possibility that I might not make the other three appointments, but one can only wait and see. If things turn out as I hope I'll be giving you all the gory details of the surgery in a day or two. If not, Thom, you know where all the paperwork is kept. Oh, and one thing I forgot to put into the will, give all my scotch to my cousin Arthur. He'll appreciate it.

Sachs, there's another letter for you. Thom will hand it over.

Sorry I handled it this way, but you both have better things to do on this fine day than shepherd a bad patient like me to a hospital and waste time. Besides, you know me. Some things I'd just rather do on my own. Haven't had much of a chance to do that in the past few years.

Somebody will call with information late this afternoon or early evening.

As for our last case, Sachs, I expect to testify at the Watchmaker's trial in person. But if things don't go quite right, I've filed my depositions with the attorney general. You and Mel and Ron can take up the slack. Make sure Mr. Logan spends the rest of his life in jail.

This thought, from someone I've been close to, describes what I'm feeling perfectly: "Times change. We have to change too. Whatever the risks. Whatever we have to leave behind."

--LR

And now, in the abhorrent hospital, they waited.

Finally, an official. A tall man in green scrubs, with graying hair, slim, walked into the room.

"You're Amelia Sachs."

"That's right."

"And Thom?"

A nod.

The man turned out to be the chief surgeon of the Pembroke Spinal Cord Center. He said, "He's come through the surgery, but he's still unconscious."

He continued, explaining technical things to them. Sachs nodded, taking in the details. Some seemed good, some seemed less so. But mostly she noted that he wasn't answering the one question that mattered--not about the success of the surgery in technical terms, but when, or if, Lincoln Rhyme would swim back to consciousness.

When she bluntly posed that question, the best the doctor could say was: "We just don't know. We'll have to wait."

Chapter 87

THE 3D SWIRLS
of fingerprints evolved not to help forensic scientists identify and convict criminals but simply to give our digits sure purchase, so that whatever we were holding that was precious or necessary or unrecognized wouldn't slip from our frail human grasp.

We are, after all, bereft of claws, and our muscle tone--sorry, ardent health club devotees--is truly pathetic compared with that of any wild animal of comparable weight.

The official title of the patterns on the fingers (feet too) is, in fact,
friction
ridge, revealing their true purpose.

Lincoln Rhyme glanced briefly at Amelia Sachs, who was ten feet away, curled up, sleeping in a chair, in an oddly content and demure pose. Her red hair fell straight and thick, bisecting her face.

Nearly midnight.

He returned to his contemplation of friction ridges. They occur on digits, which word includes both fingers and toes, and on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. You can be convicted as easily by an incriminating sole print as by a fingerprint, though the circumstances of the crime in which one was involved would surely be a bit unusual.

People have known about the individuality of friction ridges for a long time--they were used to mark official documents eight hundred years ago--but it wasn't until the 1890s that prints became recognized as a way to link criminal and crime. The world's first fingerprint department within a law enforcement agency was in Calcutta, India, formed under the direction of Sir Edward Richard Henry, who gave his name to the classification system of fingerprinting used by police for the next hundred years.

The reason for Rhyme's meditation on fingerprints was that he was presently looking at his own. For the first time in years.

For the first time since the accident in the subway.

His right arm was raised, flexed at the elbow, the wrist and palm twisted so that it was facing him and he was gazing intently at the patterns. He was thoroughly exhilarated, filled with the same sensation as when he'd find the tiny fiber, the bit of trace evidence, the faint impression in the mud that allowed him to make a connection between suspect and crime scene.

The surgery had worked: the implantation of the wires, the computer, controlled by movements of his head and shoulders above the site of his injury. He'd begun tightening muscles in his neck and shoulder to levitate the arm carefully and rotate the wrist. Seeing his own fingerprints had long been a dream of his, and he'd decided that if he could ever regain arm movement, gazing at the whorls and ridges would be the first thing he'd do.

There'd be much therapy ahead of him, of course. And he'd have the other operations too. Nerve rerouting, which would have little effect on mobility but might improve some bodily functions. Then stem cell therapy. And physical rehabilitation too: the treadmill and bicycle and range-of-motion exercises.

There would be limitations too, of course--Thom's job wasn't in any danger. Even if his arms and hands moved, even if his lungs were working better than ever and the business below the waist was approaching that of the nondisabled, he still had no sensation, was still subject to sepsis, would not walk--probably never would, or at least not for many years. But this didn't bother Lincoln Rhyme. He'd learned from his work in forensics that you rarely got 100 percent of what you sought. But usually, with hard work and the alignment of circumstance--never, in Rhyme's view, "luck," of course--what you did achieve was enough . . . for the identification, the arrest, the conviction. Besides, Lincoln Rhyme was a man who needed goals. He lived to fill gaps, to--as Sachs knew well--scratch the itch. His life would be useless without having someplace to go, constantly someplace to go.

Now, carefully, using faint movements of the muscles in his neck, he rotated his palm and lowered it to the bed, with all the coordination of a newborn foal finding its legs.

Then exhaustion and the residue of the drugs were all over him. Rhyme was certainly prepared to sleep, but he chose instead to postpone oblivion for a few minutes, resting his eyes on Amelia Sachs's face, pale and half visible through her hair, like the midpoint of a lunar eclipse.