“That’s all right,” Sachs said, glancing down at her shoes. “I’ve got some.”
Then Berger stepped close to the bed, put his arm on Rhyme’s shoulder. “I wish you a peaceful self-deliverance,” he said.
“Self-deliverance,” Rhyme said wryly as Berger left. Then, to Sachs: “Now. What’s this I have to do?”
She took the turn at fifty, skidded hard, and slipped smoothly up into fourth gear.
The wind blasted through the open windows and tossed their hair behind them. The gusts were brutal but Amelia Sachs wouldn’t hear of driving with the windows up.
“That’d be un-American,” she announced, and broke the 100-mph mark.
When you move…
Rhyme had suggested it might be wiser to take their spin on the NYPD training course but he wasn’t surprised when Sachs declared that that was a pussy run; she’d disposed of it the first week at the academy. So they were out on Long Island, their cover stories for the Nassau County police ready, rehearsed and marginally credible.
“The thing about five-speeds is, top gear isn’t the fastest. That’s a mileage gear, I don’t give a shit about mileage.” Then she took his left hand and placed it on the round black knob, encircled it with hers, downshifted.
The engine screamed and they shot up to 120, as trees and houses streaked past and the uneasy horses grazing in the fields stared at the black streak of Chevrolet.
“Isn’t this the best, Rhyme?” she shouted. “Man, better than sex. Better than anything.”
“I can feel the vibrations,” he said. “I think I can. In my finger.”
She smiled and he believed she squeezed his hand beneath hers. Finally, they ran out of deserted road, population loomed, and Sachs reluctantly slowed, turned around and pointed the nose of the car toward the hazy crescent of moon as it rose above the distant city, nearly invisible in the stew of hot August air.
“Let’s try for one-fifty,” she proposed. Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensation of wind and the perfume of freshly cut grass and the speed.
The night was the hottest of the month.
From Lincoln ’s Rhyme’s new vantage point he could look down into the park and see the weirdos on the benches, the exhausted joggers, the families reclining around the smoke of dwindling barbecue fires like the survivors of a medieval battle. A few dog walkers unable to wait for the night’s fever to break made their obligatory rounds, Baggies in hand.
Thom had put on a CD – Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio for Strings. But Rhyme had snorted a derisive laugh, declared it a sorry cliché and ordered him to replace it with Gershwin.
Amelia Sachs climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom, noticed him looking outside. “What do you see?” she asked.
“Hot people.”
“And the birds? The falcons?”
“Ah, yes, they’re there.”
“Hot too?”
He examined the male. “I don’t think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing.”
She set the bag on the foot of the bed and lifted out the contents, a bottle of expensive brandy. He’d reminded her of the Scotch but Sachs said she’d contribute the liquor. She set it next to the pills and the plastic bag. Looking like a breezy professional wife, home from Balducci’s with piles of vegetables and seafood and too little time to whip them into dinner.
She’d also bought some ice, at Rhyme’s request. He’d remembered what Berger had explained about the heat in the bag. She lifted the cap off the Courvoisier and poured herself a glass and filled his tumbler, arranged the straw toward his mouth.
“Where’s Thom?” she asked him.
“Out.”
“Does he know?”
“Yes.”
They sipped the brandy.
“Do you want me to say anything to your wife?”
Rhyme considered it for a long moment, thinking: We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets – and oh how we squander those moments. Here he’d known Amelia Sachs all of three days and they’d bared their hearts far more than he and Elaine had done in nearly a decade.
“No,” he said. “I’ve e-mailed her.” A chuckle. “That’s a comment on our times, I’d say.”
More brandy, the astringent bite on his palate was dissipating. Growing smoother, duller, lighter.
Sachs leaned over the bed and tapped her glass to his.
“I have some money,” Rhyme began. “I’m giving a lot of it to Blaine and to Thom. I -”
But she shushed him with a kiss to the forehead and shook her head.
A soft clatter of pebbles as she spilled the tiny Seconals into her hand.
Rhyme instinctively thought: The Dillie-Koppanyi color test reagent. Add 1 percent cobalt acetate in methanol to the suspect material followed by 5 percent isopropylamine in methanol. If the substance is a barbiturate the reagent turns a beautiful violet-blue color.
“How should we do it?” She asked, gazing at the pills. “I really don’t know.”
“Mix them in the booze,” he suggested.
She dropped them in his tumbler. They dissolved quickly.
How fragile they were. Like the dreams they induce.
She stirred the mixture with the straw. He glanced at her wounded nails but even that he couldn’t be sorrowful for. This was his night and it was a night of joy.
Lincoln Rhyme had a sudden recollection of childhood in suburban Illinois. He never drank his milk and to get him to do so his mother bought straws coated on the inside with flavoring. Strawberry, chocolate. He hadn’t thought about them until just this moment. It was a great invention, he remembered. He always looked forward to his afternoon milk.
Sachs pushed the straw close to his mouth. He took it between his lips. She put her hand on his arm.
Light or dark, music or silence, dreams or the meditation of dreamless sleep? What will I find?
He began to sip. The taste was really no different from straight liquor. A little more bitter maybe. It was like -
From downstairs came a huge pounding on the door. Hands and feet both, it seemed. Voices shouting too.
He lifted his lips away from the straw. Glanced into the dim stairwell.
She looked at him, frowning.
“Go see,” he said to her.
She disappeared down the stairs and a moment later returned, looking unhappy. Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks followed. Rhyme noticed that the young detective had done another butcher job on his face with a razor. He’d really have to get that under control.
Sellitto glanced at the bottle and the bag. His eyes swayed toward Sachs but she crossed her arms and held her own, silently ordering him to leave. This was not an issue of rank, the look told the detective, and what was happening here was none of his business. Sellitto’s eyes acknowledged the message but he wasn’t about to go anywhere just yet.
“Lincoln, I need to talk to you.”
“Talk. But talk fast, Lon. We’re busy.”
The detective sat heavily in the noisy rattan chair. “An hour ago a bomb went off at the United Nations. Right next to the banquet hall. During the welcome dinner for the peace conference delegates.”
“Six dead, fifty-four hurt,” Banks added. “Twenty of them serious.”
“My God,” Sachs whispered.
“Tell him,” Sellitto muttered.
Banks continued, “For the conference, the UN hired a bunch of temps. The perp was one of them – a receptionist. A half-dozen people saw her carrying a knapsack to work and putting it in a storeroom near the banquet hall. She left just before the bang. The bomb squad estimates we’re looking at about two pounds of C4 or Semtex.”
Sellitto said, “Linc, the bomb, it was a yellow knapsack, the wits said.”
“Yellow?” Why was that familiar?
“UN human resources ID’d the receptionist as Carole Ganz.”