The Steel Kiss

He was particularly aware of her absence tonight. He could not, of course, feel much of her body beside him when she was here, but he found comfort in her regular breathing, the layered smells of shampoo and soap (she was not a perfumista). Now he sensed an edge to the silence in the room, somehow accentuated by the aroma of inanimate cleansers and furniture polish and paper from the rows of books against the wall nearby.

Thinking back to their harsh words earlier, his and Sachs’s.

They had always argued. But this had been different. He could tell from her tone. Yet he didn’t understand why. Cooper was his preferred tech, yes, and truly gifted. But the New York Police Department Crime Scene Unit was filled with brilliant evidence collection technicians and analysts, with expertise in hundreds of fields, from handwriting to ballistics to chemistry to remains reconstruction…  She could have had any one of them. And, hell, Sachs herself was an expert at forensic analysis. She might need somebody to man the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer or scanning electron microscope, but Rhyme himself didn’t run those. He left that to the technical people.

Maybe there was something else on her mind. Her mother, he supposed. Rose’s operation would be weighing on her. A triple heart bypass in an elderly woman? The medical world was nothing short of miraculous, of course. But considering the massively complex and vulnerable machine within our skin, well, you couldn’t help but think every one of our hours was borrowed.

Since Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance no longer existed, tomorrow Mel Cooper would be back in the CSU fold. And she could use him to her heart’s content.

Sleep crowded in, and Rhyme now found himself thinking of Juliette Archer, wondering about her life in the future. She seemed to have what it took to be a solid forensic scientist but at the moment his musings were about something else: her coping with disability. She still had not fully accepted her condition. She would have a long and dark way to go before she beat it. If, in fact, she chose to do so. Rhyme recalled his own early battle, which culminated in a fierce debate about assisted suicide. He’d faced that choice and chosen to remain among the living. Archer was nowhere near that confrontation yet.

How would she choose?

And what, Rhyme wondered, would he think about her decision? Would he support it or argue against finality?

But any debate within her was years off; most likely he wouldn’t even know her then. These ruminations, grim though they were, had the effect of lulling him to sleep.

It was perhaps ten minutes later that he started awake, his head rising as he heard, in his thoughts, Archer’s low, alto voice. What one thing do we find at the beginning of eternity and the end of time and space?

Rhyme laughed out loud.

The letter “e.”

THURSDAY III EXPLOIT

CHAPTER 16

Morning, a Chelsea morning. Chelsea light streams through the open shutters.

I’m in the Toy Room, transcribing the diary once again. Sister Mary Frances’s diligence is revealed in the perfectly scripted words I form on the thick paper.