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Sun setting, sky going darker and darker. But isn’t it morning? Moreno had images of his wife, his teenage son and daughter. His thoughts dissolved until he was aware of only one thing: the tree.

Poison and strength, poison and strength.

The fire within him was easing, vanishing. Tearful relief.

Darkness becoming darker.

The poisonwood tree.

Poisonwood…

Poison…

II
THE QUEUE
MONDAY, MAY 15

CHAPTER 2

Is he on his way or not?” Lincoln Rhyme asked, not trying to curb the irritation.

“Something at the hospital,” came Thom’s voice from the hallway or kitchen or wherever he was. “He’ll be delayed. He’ll call when he’s free.”

“‘Something.’ Well, that’s specific. ‘Something at the hospital.’”

“That’s what he told me.”

“He’s a doctor. He should be precise. And he should be on time.”

“He’s a doctor,” Thom replied, “which means he has emergencies to deal with.”

“But he didn’t say ‘emergency.’ He said, ‘something.’ The operation is scheduled for May twenty-six. I don’t want it delayed. That’s too far in the future anyway. I don’t see why he couldn’t do it sooner.”

Rhyme motored his red Storm Arrow wheelchair to a computer monitor. He parked next to the rattan chair in which sat Amelia Sachs, in black jeans and sleeveless black shell. A gold pendant of one diamond and one pearl dangled from a thin chain around her neck. The day was early and spring sunlight fired through the east-facing windows, glancing alluringly off her red hair tied in a bun, tucked carefully up with pewter pins. Rhyme turned his attention back to the screen, scanning a crime scene report for a homicide he’d just helped the NYPD close.

“About done,” she said.

They sat in the parlor of his town house on Central Park West in Manhattan. What presumably had once been a subdued, quiet chamber for visitors and suitors in Boss Tweed’s day was now a functioning crime scene lab. It was filled with evidence examination gear and instrumentation, computers and wires, everywhere wires, which made the transit of Rhyme’s wheelchair forever bumpy, a sensation that he experienced only from his shoulders up.

“The doctor’s late,” Rhyme muttered to Sachs. Unnecessarily since she’d been ten feet away from his exchange with Thom. But he was still irritated and felt better laying on a bit more censure. He carefully moved his right arm forward to the touchpad and scrolled through the last paragraphs of the report. “Good.”

“I’ll send it?”

He nodded and she hit a key. The encrypted sixty-five pages headed off into the ether to arrive ultimately six miles away at the NYPD’s crime scene facility in Queens, where they would become the backbone of the case of People v. Williams.

“Done.”

Done…except for testifying at the trial of the drug lord, who had sent twelve- and thirteen-year-olds out into the streets of East New York and Harlem to do his killing for him. Rhyme and Sachs had managed to locate and analyze minute bits of trace and impression evidence that led from one of the youngster’s shoes to the floor of a storefront in Manhattan to the carpet of a Lexus sedan to a restaurant in Brooklyn and finally to the house of Tye Williams himself.

The gang leader hadn’t been present at the murder of the witness, he hadn’t touched the gun, there was no record of him ordering the hit and the young shooter was too terrified to testify against him. But those hurdles for the prosecution didn’t matter; Rhyme and Sachs had spun a filament of evidence that stretched from the crime scene directly to Williams’s crib.

He’d be in jail for the rest of his life.

Sachs now closed her hand on Rhyme’s left arm, strapped to the wheelchair, immobile. He could see from the tendons faintly visible beneath her pale skin that she squeezed. The tall woman rose and stretched. They’d been working to finish the report since early morning. She’d awakened at five. He, a bit later.

Rhyme noticed that she winced as she walked to the table where her coffee cup sat. The arthritis in her hip and knee had been bad lately. Rhyme’s spinal cord injury, which rendered him a quadriplegic, was described as devastating. Yet it never gave him a moment’s pain.

All of our bodies, whoever we are, fail us to some degree, he reflected. Even those who at present were healthy and more or less content were troubled by clouds on the horizon. He pitied the athletes, the beautiful people, the young who were already anticipating decline with dread.

And yet, ironically, the opposite was true for Lincoln Rhyme. From the ninth circle of injury, he had been improving, thanks to new spinal cord surgical techniques and his own take-no-prisoners attitude about exercise and risky experimental procedures.

Which reminded him again that he was irritated the doctor was late for today’s assessment appointment, in anticipation of the upcoming surgery.

The two-tone doorbell chime sounded.

“I’ll get that,” Thom called.

The town house was disability-modified, of course, and Rhyme could have used a computer to view and converse with whoever was at the door and let them in. Or not. (He didn’t like folks to come-a-callin’ and tended to send them away — sometimes rudely — if Thom didn’t act fast.)

“Who is it? Check first.”

This couldn’t be Dr. Barrington, since he was going to call once he’d disposed of the “something” that had delayed him. Rhyme wasn’t in the mood for other visitors.

But whether his caregiver checked first or not didn’t matter apparently. Lon Sellitto appeared in the parlor.

“Linc, you’re home.”

Safe bet.

The squat detective beelined to a tray with coffee and pastry.

“You want fresh?” Thom asked. The slim aide was dressed in a crisp white shirt, floral blue tie and dark slacks. Cuff links today, ebony or onyx.

“Naw, thanks, Thom. Hey, Amelia.”

“Hi, Lon. How’s Rachel?”

“Good. She’s taken up Pilates. That’s a weird word. It’s exercise or something.” Sellitto was decked out in a typically rumpled suit, brown, and a typically rumpled powder-blue shirt. He sported a striped crimson tie that was atypically smooth as a piece of planed wood. A recent present, Rhyme deduced. From girlfriend Rachel? The month was May — no holidays. Maybe it was a birthday present. Rhyme didn’t know the date of Sellitto’s. Or, for that matter, most other people’s.

Sellitto sipped coffee and pestered a Danish, two bites only. He was perpetually dieting.

Rhyme and the detective had worked together years ago, as partners, and it had largely been Lon Sellitto who’d pushed Rhyme back to work after the accident, not by coddling or cajoling but by forcing him to get off his ass and start solving crimes again. (More accurately, in Rhyme’s case, to stay on his ass and get back to work.) But despite their history Sellitto never came by just to hang out. The detective first-class was assigned to Major Cases, working out of the Big Building — One Police Plaza — and he was usually the lead detective on the cases for which Rhyme was hired to consult. His presence now was a harbinger.

“So.” Rhyme looked him over. “Do you have something good for me, Lon? An engaging crime? Intriguing?”

Sellitto sipped and nibbled. “All I know is I got a call from on top asking if you were free. I told ’em you were finishing up Williams. Then I was told to get here ASAP, meet somebody. They’re on their way.”

“‘Somebody’? ‘They’?” Rhyme asked acidly. “That’s as specific as the ‘something’ detaining my doctor. Seems infectious. Like the flu.”

“Hey, Linc. All I know.”

Rhyme cast a wry look toward Sachs. “I notice that no one called me about this. Did anybody call you, Sachs?”

“Not a jingle.”

Sellitto said, “Oh, that’s ’causa the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“Whatever’s going on, it’s a secret. And it’s gotta stay that way.”

Which was, Rhyme decided, at least a step toward intriguing.

CHAPTER 3

Rhyme was looking up at the two visitors, as different as could be, now stepping into his parlor.

One was a man in his fifties, with a military bearing, wearing an untailored suit — the shoulders were the giveaway — in navy blue, bordering on black. He had a jowly, clean-shaven face, tanned skin and trim hair, marine-style. Has to be brass, Rhyme thought.

The other was a woman hovering around the early thirties. She was approaching stocky, though not overweight, not yet. Her blond, lusterless hair was in an anachronistic flip, stiffly sprayed, and Rhyme noted that her pale complexion derived from a mask of liberally applied flesh-toned makeup. He didn’t see any acne or other pocks and assumed the pancake was a fashion choice. There was no shadow or liner around her gun-muzzle black eyes, all the more stark given the cream shade of the face in which they were set. Her thin lips were colorless too and dry. Rhyme assessed that this was not a mouth that broke into a smile very often.

She would pick something to look at — equipment, the window, Rhyme — and turn a sandblast gaze on it until she had stripped it down to understanding or rendered it irrelevant. Her suit was dark gray, also not expensive, and all three plastic buttons were snugly fixed. The dark disks seemed slightly uneven and he wondered if she’d found a perfect-fitting suit with unfortunate accents and replaced them herself. The low black shoes were unevenly worn and had been doctored recently with liquid scuff cover-up.

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

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