Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

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 townhouse 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

"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

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.