Around them couples and families, parents with children of all ages, bundled in winter sweaters and flannel, sat over coffee and cocoa and soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and chatted or laughed and whispered. It all seemed so normal. And so very far away from the drama of the table she and Pam sat at.
‘But I have to tell you, Amelia. Nothing’s changed. We’re leaving in a month.’
‘A month?’
‘The semester.’ Pam wasn’t going to be drawn into a debate beyond that. ‘Amelia. Please. This is good, what we’re doing. I’m happy.’
‘And I want to make sure you stay that way.’
‘Well, we’re doing it. We’re leaving. India first, we’ve decided.’
Sachs didn’t even know if Pam had a passport. ‘Look.’ She lifted her hands. The gesture smelled of desperation and she lowered them. ‘Are you sure you want to … disrupt your life like that? I really don’t think you should.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do.’
‘I’m not telling you what to do. But I can give advice to somebody I love.’
‘And I can reject it.’ A cool sigh. ‘I think it’s better if we don’t talk for a while. This is all … I’m upset. And it’s pretty clear that I’m pissing you off totally.’
‘No. Not at all.’ She started to reach for the girl’s hand but Pam had anticipated her and withdrew it. ‘I’m worried about you.’
‘You don’t need to be.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Because to you I’m a child.’
Well, if you’re fucking acting like one.
But Sachs held back for a moment. Then thought: Knuckle time.
‘You had a very hard time growing up. You’re … vulnerable. I don’t know how else to put it.’
‘Oh, that again. Naive?. A fool.’
‘Of course not. But it was a hard time.’
After they’d escaped from New York following the terrorist plot Pam’s mother had orchestrated, the two of them had gone underground in a small community of militiamen and ‘their women’ in Larchwood, Missouri, northwest of St Louis. The girl’s life had been hell — indoctrination into white supremacist politics and bare-butt whippings in public for being disrespectful. While militia homeschooled boys learned farming, real estate and construction, Pammy, as a girl, could look forward to mastering only cooking and sewing and homeschooling.
She’d spent her formative years there, miserable but also resolute in defying the ultra-right, fundamentalist militia community. At middle school age she’d sneak out of the enclave to buy ‘demonic’ Harry Potter books and Lord of the Rings and the New York Times. And she wouldn’t put up with what many of the other girls were expected to. (When one of the lay ministers tried to touch her chest to see if ‘yer heart’s beatin’ for Jesus’, Pam delivered a silent ‘hands off’ in the form of a deep slash to his forearm with a box cutter, which she still often carried.)
‘I told you, that’s in the past. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter, Pam. Those were very hard years for you. They affected you — in ways you don’t even know. It’ll take time to work through all that. And you need to tell Seth everything about your time underground.’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t need to do anything.’
Sachs said evenly, ‘I think you’re jumping at the first chance for a normal relationship that’s come along. And you’re hungry for that. I understand.’
‘You understand. That sounds condescending. And you make me sound desperate. I told you, I’m not getting married. I’m not having his baby. I want to travel with a guy I love. What’s the big fucking deal?’
This was going so wrong. How did I lose control? This was the same conversation they’d had the other day. Except that the tone was darker.
Pam pulled her hat back on. Started to rise.
‘Please. Just wait a minute.’ Sachs’s mind was racing. ‘Let me say one more thing. Please.’
Impatient, Pam dropped back into her seat. A waitress came by. She waved the woman away.
Sachs said, ‘Could we—?’
But she never got to finish her plea to the teenager, for just then her phone hummed. It was a text from Mel Cooper. He was asking her to get to Rhyme’s town house as soon as she could.
Actually, she noted, the message wasn’t a request at all.
It never really is when the word ‘emergency’ figures in the header.
CHAPTER 47
Upon examining the back door to Rhyme’s town house, a gowned and gloved Amelia Sachs decided: The son of a bitch sure can pick locks.
Unsub 11-5 hadn’t left more than a minute scratch when he’d broken into the town house to doctor a bottle of scotch on Rhyme’s shelf — insidiously leaving it within the wheelchair-bound criminalist’s reach. Sachs wasn’t surprised the unsub had some skill at breaking and entering; his talent at skin art attested to his dexterity.
The sleet spattered and the wind blew. By now any evidence in the cul-de-sac and around the back door had probably been obliterated. Inside the door, where footprints would have been visible, she discovered nothing other than marks left by his booties.
The strategy behind the assault was now clear: 11-5 had called in a false alarm — an attempted rape in Central Park, near the town house. When Rhyme and the others inside went to the front door to see what was going on, the unsub had snuck through the back and found an open bottle of whisky, poured some poison inside, then escaped silently.
Sachs walked the grid on the route from the back door up the stairs, through the hall from the kitchen to the parlor. Rhyme had an alarm system, which was turned off when the town house was occupied, as now. Video cameras covered the front and back doors but they were real-time monitoring only; the images weren’t recorded.
A sense of violation filled Sachs. Somebody had breached the castle, somebody stealthy and adroit. And deadly. Thom had already arranged for the locks to be changed and a drop bar put on both doors but once someone has intruded into your living area, you’re never completely free from the taint of desecration. And from worry that it might happen again.
Finally she arrived at the main floor and handed the bagged trace off to Mel Cooper.
Lincoln Rhyme turned his Merits wheelchair around from the table where he’d been reviewing evidence and asked, ‘Well? Anything?’
‘Not much,’ Sachs told him. ‘Not much at all.’
Rhyme wasn’t surprised.
Not with Unsub 11-5.
Sachs looked him over carefully, as if he’d actually sipped some of the poisoned whisky.
Or maybe she was just troubled that the unsub had gotten inside, spiked the bottle and gotten out without anybody’s knowing.
Lord knew Rhyme himself was. Actually more pissed off than troubled — because he hadn’t deduced that the whisky was tainted, even though, looking back, he should have. It was obvious that Thom would never leave a nearly full bottle of forty-proof liquor within his boss’s reach. Combine that with the facts that Lon Sellitto and Seth McGuinn had been attacked and that a police action had unfolded right outside his town house, a perfect diversion, and, yeah, Rhyme should have guessed.
But, on the contrary, the salvation had come from a call to 911. A passerby on the cross street had seen someone slip into the service area behind Rhyme’s and pocket a hypodermic. ‘Looking suspicious,’ the Good Samaritan had reported. ‘A drug thing, maybe going to break in, you know.’
The dispatcher had called Rhyme, who understood immediately that the mis-shelved Glenmorangie was Snow White’s apple.
He’d glanced at the glass in his hands and realized that he’d come an instant away from a very unpleasant demise, though less unpleasant to him than to others, given that most of his body would not have felt the excruciating pain the poison causes.