She had assured him that the bed was indescribably comfortable, an assessment for which he would have to take her word, since his only sensation was the smooth pillowcase. Which in fact was quite luxurious.
“Look,” she whispered.
Immediately outside the window of Rhyme’s second-story bedroom, on the ledge, was a flurry of movement, hard to discern in the dusk.
Then a feather rose and drifted out of sight. Another.
Dinnertime.
Peregrine falcons had lived on this sill, or one of the others outside the town house, ever since Rhyme had been a resident. He was particularly pleased they’d chosen his abode for nesting. As a scientist, he emphatically did not believe in signs or omens or the supernatural, but he saw nothing wrong with the idea of emblems. He viewed the birds metaphorically, thinking in particular of a fact that most people didn’t know about them: that when they attack they are essentially immobile. Falling bundles of muscle with legs fixed outward and wings tucked, streamlined. They dive at over two hundred miles per hour and kill prey by impact, not rending or biting.
Immobile, yet predatory.
Another feather floated away as the avian couple bent to their main course. The entrée was what had until recently been a fat, and careless, pigeon. Falcons are generally diurnal and hunt until dusk but in the city they are often nocturnal.
“Yum,” said Sachs.
Rhyme laughed.
She moved closer to him and he smelled her hair, the rich scent. A bit of shampoo, floral. Amelia Sachs was not a perfume girl. His right arm rose and he cradled her head closer.
“Are you going to follow up?” she asked. “With Poitier?”
“I’ll try. He seemed pretty adamant that he wouldn’t help us anymore. But I know he’s frustrated he hasn’t been allowed to go further.”
“What a case this is,” she said.
He whispered, “So how does it feel to be repurposed into a granular-level player, Sachs? Are you pivoting to it or not?”
She laughed hard. “And what exactly is that outfit he’s working for, Captain Myers: Special Services?”
“You’re the cop. I thought you’d know.”
“Never heard of it.”
They fell silent and then, in his shoulder, normal as anyone’s, he could feel her stiffen.
“Tell me,” he said.
“You know, Rhyme, I’m not feeling any better about this case.”
“You’re talking about what you said before, to Nance? That you’re not sure if Metzger and our sniper are the kinds of perps we want to go after?”
“Exactly.”
Rhyme nodded. “I can’t disagree, Sachs. I’ve never questioned an investigation before, in all these years. They haven’t been gray. This one’s real gray.
“There’s one thing, though, to keep in mind, Sachs. About us.”
“We’re volunteers.”
“Yep. We can walk away if we want. Let Myers and Laurel find somebody else.”
She was silent and she was motionless, at least according to those places where Rhyme could sense motion.
He continued, “You weren’t happy with the case in the first place.”
“No, I wasn’t. And part of me does want to bail, yeah. There’s too much we don’t know about the players and what they have in mind, what their motives are.”
“My motive queen.”
“And when I say players, I mean Nance Laurel and Bill Myers, as much as Metzger and Bruns — or whatever the hell his name is.” After a moment: “I have a bad feeling about this one, Rhyme. I know, you don’t believe in that. But you were crime scene most of your career. I was street. There are hunches.”
This sat between them for a minute or two as they both watched the male falcon rise and lift his wings in a minor flourish. They’re not large animals but, seen from so close, the preening was regally impressive, as was the bird’s momentary but intense gaze into the room. Their eyesight is astonishing; they can spot prey miles away.
Emblems…
“You want to keep at it, don’t you?” she asked.
He said, “I get what you’re saying, Sachs. But for me it’s a knot that needs unraveling. I can’t let it go. You don’t need to, though.”
There was no delay as she whispered, “No, I’m with you, Rhyme. You and me. It’s you and me.”
“Good, now I was—”
And his words stopped abruptly because Sachs’s mouth covered his and she was kissing him hungrily, almost desperately, flinging blankets back. She rolled on top of him, gripping his head. He felt her fingers on the back of his head, his ears, his cheek, fingers firm one moment, soft the next. Strong again. Stroking his neck, stroking his temple. Rhyme’s lips moved from hers to her hair and then a spot behind her ear, then down to her chin and seated on her mouth again. Lingering.
Rhyme had used his newly working arm on the controls of a Bausch + Lomb comparison microscope, with phones, with the computer and with a density gradient device. He had not used it yet for this: drawing Sachs closer, closer, gripping the top of her silk pajama top and smoothly drawing it over her head.
He supposed he could have finessed the buttons, if he’d tried, but urgency dictated otherwise.
III
CHAMELEONS
TUESDAY, MAY 16
CHAPTER 24
Rhyme wheeled from the front sitting room of his town house into the marble entryway near the front door.
Dr. Vic Barrington, Rhyme’s spinal cord injury specialist, followed him out, and Thom closed the doors to the room and joined them. The idea of physicians’ making house calls was from another era, if not a different dimension, but when the essence of the injury makes it far easier to come to the mountain, that’s what many of the better doctors did.
But Barrington was untraditional in many ways. His black bag was a Nike backpack and he’d bicycled here from the hospital.
“Appreciate your coming in this early,” Rhyme said to the doctor.
The time was six thirty in the morning.
Rhyme liked the man and had decided to give him a pass and resist asking how the “emergency” or the “something” had gone yesterday when he’d had to postpone their appointment. With any other doc he would have grilled.
Barrington had just completed a final set of tests in anticipation of the surgery scheduled for May 26.
“I’ll get the blood work in and look over the results but I don’t have any indication that anything’s changed over the past week. Blood pressure is very good.”
This was the nemesis of severely disabled spinal cord patients; an attack of autonomic dysreflexia could spike the pressure in minutes and lead to a stroke and death if a doctor or caregiver didn’t react instantly.
“Lung capacity gets better every time I see you and I swear you’re stronger than I am.”
Barrington was no-bullshit all the way and when Rhyme asked the next question, he knew he’d get an honest response. “What’re my odds?”
“Of getting your left arm and hand working again? Close to one hundred percent. Tendon grafts and electrodes’re pretty surefire—”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about surviving the operation or not having some kind of cataclysmic setback.”
“Ah, that’s a little different. I’ll give you ninety percent on that one.”
Rhyme considered this. Surgery couldn’t do anything about his legs; nothing ever would fix that, at least not for the next five or ten years. But he’d come to believe that with disabilities hands and arms were the key to normal. Nobody pays much attention to people in wheelchairs if they can pick up a knife and fork or shake your hand. When someone has to feed you and wipe your chin, your very presence spreads discomfort like spattered mud.