The Bone Collector

doctor by the shoulder and led him to the door. “No,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.”
    As Sachs opened the door Rhyme called out, “Sachs, before you do that, answer me something.”
    She paused. One hand on the knob.
    “One question.”
    She looked back.
    “Have you ever wanted to? Kill yourself?”
    She unlocked the door with a loud snap.
    He said, “Answer me!”
    Sachs didn’t open the door. She stood with her back to him. “No. Never.”
    “Are you happy with your life?”
    “As much as anybody.”
    “You’re never depressed?”
    “I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”
    “You like to drive, you were telling me. People who like to drive like to drive fast. You do, don’t you?”
    “Yes. Sometimes.”
    “What’s the fastest you’ve done?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Over eighty?”
    A dismissing smile. “Yes.”
    “Over a hundred?”
    She gestured upward with her thumb.
    “One ten? One twenty?” he asked, smiling in astonishment.
    “Clocked at 168.”
    “My, Sachs, you are impressive. Well, driving that fast, didn’t you think that maybe, just maybe, something might happen. A rod or axle or something would break, a tire would blow, a spot of oil on the road?”
    “It was pretty safe. I’m not crazy.”
    “ Pretty safe. But driving as fast as a small plane, well, that’s not completely safe, now, is it?”
    “You’re leading the witness.”
    “No, I’m not. Stay with me. You drive that fast, you have to accept that you could have an accident and die, right?”
    “Maybe,” she conceded.
    Berger, cuffed hands in front of him, looked on nervously, as he kneaded the pale yellow disk of spinal column.
    “So you’ve moved close to that line, right? Ah, you know what I’m talking about. I know you do—the line between the risk of dying and the certainty of dying. See, Sachs, if you carry the dead around with you it’s a very short step over that line. A short step to joining them.”
    She lowered her head and her face went completely still, as the curtain of hair obscured her eyes.
    “Giving up the dead,” he whispered, praying she wouldn’t leave with Berger, knowing he was so very close to pushing her over the edge. “I touched a nerve there. How much of you wants to follow the dead? More than a little, Sachs. Oh, much more than a little.”
    She was hesitating. He knew he was near her heart.
    She turned angrily to Berger, gripped him by the cuffs. “Come on.” Pushed through the door.
    Rhyme called, “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”
    Again she stopped.
    “Sometimes . . . things happen, Sachs. Sometimes you just can’t be what you ought to be, you can’t have what you ought to have. And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point it just isn’t worth the fight to try to fix what went wrong.”
    He watched them standing, motionless, in the doorway. The room was utterly silent. She turned and looked back at him.
    “Death cures loneliness,” Rhyme continued. “It cures tension. It cures the itch.” Just like she’d glanced at his legs earlier he now gave a fast look at her torn fingers.
    She released Berger’s cuffs and walked to the window. Tears glistened on her cheeks in the yellow radiance from the streetlights outside.
    “Sachs, I’m tired,” he said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how tired I am. You know how hard life is to start with. Pile on a whole mountainful of . . . burdens. Washing, eating, crapping, making phone calls, buttoning shirts, scratching your nose . . . Then pile on a thousand more. And more after that.”
    He fell silent. After a long moment she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”
    “What’s that?”
    She nodded toward the poster. “Eight twenty-three’s got that mother and her little girl . . . Help us save them. Just them. If you do that I’ll give him an hour alone with you.” She glanced at Berger. “Provided he gets the hell out of town afterwards.”
    Rhyme shook his head. “Sachs, if I have a stroke, if I can’t communicate . . .”
    “If that happens,” she said evenly, “even if you can’t say a word, the deal still holds. I’ll make sure you have one hour together.” She crossed her arms, spread her feet again, in what was now Rhyme’s favorite image of Amelia Sachs. He wished he could’ve seen her on the railroad tracks that morning, stopping the train. She said, “That’s the best I’ll do.”
    A moment passed.