Jeffery Deaver: The Steel Kiss

“What do you want?”

“He told me about you. I want to pick up with you where he left off.”

A click from the other side of the door.

A gun cocking? Or de-cocking?

But the sound turned out to be one of several locks snapping open.

Ron tensed, his hand slipping toward his pistol. Tony had already drawn his Glock.

The door opened and Ron looked inside, scanning the man who stood before him, backlit in light from a cheap lamp with a torn shade.

Ron’s shoulders slumped. All he could think: Oh, man... What do I do now?

Lincoln Rhyme heard the front door of his town house open and close. Footsteps approached.

“It’s Amelia,” Juliette Archer said. They were in the parlor.

“You can tell from the sound. Good. Yes, your hearing, vision, smell will improve. Some doctors dispute it but I’ve run experiments and I’m convinced it’s true. Taste too, if you don’t kill off your sapictive cells with excessive whisky.”

“The what? Sapictive?”

“Taste receptor cells.”

“Oh. Well, life’s a balance, isn’t it?”

Amelia Sachs walked inside, nodding greetings.

“A confession from Griffith?” he asked.

“More or less.” She sat down and told him a story of two brothers bullied — the younger one to death — and his sibling’s growing instability and desire for revenge. Griffith’s account aligned perfectly with what Alicia Morgan had told them.

“ ‘Shoppers,’ ” Archer mused after hearing the story. “Well, didn’t see that one coming.”

While the mental makeup of a perp was largely irrelevant to Rhyme, he now had to admit to himself that Vernon Griffith was one of the more complex suspects he’d ever been up against.

“Not unsympathetic,” Sachs offered.

Stealing the very words Rhyme had been about to offer.

She explained that there would probably be a plea deal. “He admitted we got him dead to rights. He doesn’t want to fight it.” A smile. “He asked if I thought they’d let him make furniture in prison.”

Rhyme wondered if that was a possibility. It seemed that felons incarcerated for murder might not be allowed access to saws and knives and ball-peen hammers. The man might have to settle for making license plates.

Then he was gazing at the evidence boards, reflecting how the two cases that had seemed so different were in fact as genetically linked as twins. Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance and The People of the State of New York v. Griffith and, now, v. Alicia Morgan .

Sachs “deweaponed” herself (the verb had been in an NYPD memo on firearm safety that she’d shared with Rhyme; they’d had a good laugh). She poured coffee from a service Thom had set up in the corner. She sat. Just as she took her first sip her phone sang out. She read the text and gave a laugh. “CSU in Queens found the missing napkins. The White Castle napkins.”

“I’d forgotten about those,” Archer said.

Rhyme: “I hadn’t, though I had given up on them. And?”

Sachs read: “ ‘Negative for friction ridges, negative for DNA. Positive for confectionary beverage in proportions that suggest source was White Castle restaurant chain.’ ”

“But didn’t the—” Archer began.

“—napkins have White Castle printed on them? Yep, they did.”

Rhyme said, “Nature of our profession — yours now too, Archer. Every day we deal with missing evidence, evidence never properly identified, evidence contaminated. Deductions botched completely. And deductions made that don’t need to be. Missed clues. Happens in epidemiology, I would imagine.”

“Oh, yes. Myopic children, remember?” She told Amelia Sachs the story of the study that incorrectly asserted causation between children’s sleeping with lights on and vision problem.

Nodding, Sachs said, “Heard this story on the radio — people used to believe that maggots spontaneously generated from meat. Don’t remember the details.”

Archer said, “Sure, famous story. Francesco Redi, seventeenth-century scientist, was the one who disproved that. It was because fly eggs were too small to be seen. Father of experimental biology.”

Sachs glanced at the evidence boards, apparently at the section about the civil suit. She asked, “Your case, the original one, Mrs. Frommer’s? Can she recover anything?”

“Very doubtful.” Rhyme explained that the only cause of action would be against Alicia and Griffith for the wrongful death of Greg Frommer. Whitmore was looking into their finances, but neither of them seemed very wealthy.

Archer’s phone rang. She commanded, “Answer.”

“Hey, Jule. Me.”

“Randy. You’re on with Lincoln and Amelia.”

Her brother.

Greetings shot back and forth.

“Be there in ten.”

She said, “We closed the case.”

“Seriously? Well, I’m impressed. Billy’ll love to hear all about it. Between you and me, he loves the idea of Cop Mom. He’s doing a graphic novel. You’re the heroine. But you didn’t hear me say that. It’s going to be a surprise. Okay. I’m in traffic without a hands-free. Don’t tell the police. Ha!”

They disconnected.

Archer was looking not at Rhyme but toward Sachs. “When I signed up for Lincoln’s course, I knew about you, of course, Amelia. Anybody who follows New York crime knows about you. You’re epic, as my son would say. I’d go with ‘famous’ but, well, ‘epic’ seems to fit better. And I knew you worked with Lincoln and that you were his partner but I didn’t know you were that kind of partner too. Seeing you the past few days, I found out.”

“We’ve been together for a long time. Both ways,” Sachs said with a smile.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. But you’re just like any other couple. Happy, sad, irritated.”

Rhyme chuckled. “We fight, sure. We’ve been having one for the past few weeks.”

Sachs wasn’t smiling when she said, “I’m mad he resigned.”

“And I’m mad she’s mad that I resigned.”

She added, “And mad he stole my lab tech.”

“You got him back in the end,” Rhyme groused.

Archer said, “When I was diagnosed I decided that I’d live alone. Oh, with Billy part of the time, under the custody agreement, and with a caregiver, of course — somebody like Thom. Though I don’t know if I can find somebody like him. He’s a gem.”

Rhyme glanced at the doorway. “None better. But that goes no farther than this room.”

Archer gave a coy smile. “As if he doesn’t know.” She continued, “I decided that I’d never be in a relationship, never even think about that. Get my new profession, one that was fulfilling, challenging. Raise my son as best I could. Have friends who could deal with quadriplegia. Not the life I’d planned on or wanted but a decent life. Then — don’t you love the way fate works? — then I met somebody. It was about three months ago, just after the neurologist confirmed that the disability would probably be as severe as they’d thought. Brad. That was his name. Met him at my son’s birthday party. Single father. An MD. It really clicked between us. I told him right up front about the tumor, the surgery. He’s cardio but knew generally about the condition. He didn’t seem to care and we went out for a while.”

Sachs said, “But you broke it off.”

“I did, yes. I was probably going stone-cold gimp in a year. He was a jogger and a sailor. Now, that is a combination you don’t really find in the same column on Match Dot Com or eHarmony, do you? Brad was pretty upset when I told him. But I knew it was best. For both of us.” She gave a wisp of a laugh. “Can you see where this is going?”