The Steel Kiss

Alicia shucks her jacket. Hangs it up herself. She’s not comfortable with people doing things for her. She’s around forty, some years older than me. She’s in a blue dress, which has a high neck and long sleeves. She rarely wears polish on her nails. She never does. She’s comfortable with that image: schoolteacherish. I don’t care. It’s not her fashion choices that draw me to her. She was a schoolteacher when she was married.

“Dinner?” I ask.

“No?” Again, a question, when what she means is: No. Worried that one wrong word, one wrong punctuation mark will ruin the evening.

“You’re not hungry?”

She glances toward the second bedroom. “Just…  Is it all right? Can we make love, please?”

And funny, even though this is actually a question, I know she isn’t asking at all. It’s a statement. From her, almost a demand.

I take her hand and we walk through the living room, toward the far wall. To the right is the Toy Room. The left, the back bedroom, the door open and the disheveled bed illuminated by a soft glow of night-light.

I pause for just a moment. She looks up at me, curious, but would never dream of asking, Is something wrong?

I make a decision and turn toward the left, leading her after me.

CHAPTER 5

What happened?” Lincoln Rhyme asked. “The scene in Brooklyn?”

This was his way of tapping the maple tree. Sachs was not normally forthcoming with details, or even clues, about what was troubling her—just like him. Nor was either of them inclined to say, “So what’s wrong?” But camouflaging the question about her state of mind under the netting of specifics concerning, say, a crime scene sometimes did the trick.

“Kind of a mess.” And fell silent.

Well, gave it a shot.

They were in the parlor of his town house on Central Park West. She dropped her purse and briefcase onto a rattan chair. “Going to wash up.” She strode up the hall to the ground-floor bathroom. He heard pleasantries exchanged between Sachs and Rhyme’s aide, Thom Reston, preparing dinner.

The smells of cooking wafted. Rhyme detected poaching fish, capers, carrots with thyme. A touch of cumin, probably in the rice. Yes, his olfactory senses—those clever ligands—were, he believed, enhanced following the crime scene accident years ago that had severed his spine and rendered him a C4 quad. However, this was an easy deduction; Thom tended to make this particular meal once a week. Not a foodie, by any means, Rhyme nonetheless enjoyed the dish. Provided it was accompanied by a crisp Chablis. Which it would be.

Sachs returned and Rhyme persisted. “Your unsub? How are you identifying him, again? I forgot.” He was sure she’d told him. But unless a fact directly touched a project Rhyme was involved with, it tended to dissipate like vapor.

“Unsub Forty. After that club near where he killed the vic.” She seemed surprised he hadn’t remembered.

“He rabbited.”

“Yep. Vanished. It was chaos, because of the escalator thing.”

He noted that Sachs didn’t unholster her Glock and place it on the shelf near the front doorway into the hall. This meant she wouldn’t be staying tonight. She had her own town house, in Brooklyn, and divided her time between there and here. Or she had until recently. For the past few weeks, she’d stayed here only twice.

Another observation: Her clothing was pristine, not evidencing the dirt and blood that had to have resulted from her descent into the pit to try to rescue the accident victim. Since the unsub’s escape—and the escalator incident—had been in Brooklyn, she would have gone home to bathe and change.

Therefore, since she was planning on leaving again, why had she driven back here from that borough to Manhattan?

Maybe for dinner? He was hoping so.

Thom stepped into the parlor from the hallway. “Here you go.” He handed her a glass of white wine.

“Thanks.” She sipped.

Rhyme’s aide was trim and as good looking as a Nautica model, today dressed in dark slacks, white shirt and subdued burgundy-and-pink tie. He dressed better than any other caregiver Rhyme had ever had, and if the outfit seemed a bit impractical, the important part was attended to: His shoes were solid and rubber-soled—to safely transfer the solidly built Rhyme between bed and wheelchair. And an accessory: Peeking from his rear pocket was a fringe of cornflower-blue latex gloves for the piss ’n’ shit detail.

He said to Sachs, “You sure you can’t stay for dinner?”

“No, thanks. I have other plans.”

Which answered that question, though the lack of elaboration only added to the mystery of her presence here now.

Rhyme cleared his throat. He glanced at his empty tumbler, sitting mouth level on the side of the wheelchair (the cup holder was its first accessory).

“You’ve had two,” Thom told him.