The Bone Collector

marginally credible.
    “The thing about five-speeds is, top gear isn’t the fastest. That’s a mileage gear, I don’t give a shit aboutmileage.” Then she took his left hand and placed it on the round black knob, encircled it with hers, downshifted.
    The engine screamed and they shot up to 120, as trees and houses streaked past and the uneasy horses grazing in the fields stared at the black streak of Chevrolet.
    “Isn’t this the best, Rhyme?” she shouted. “Man, better than sex. Better than anything.”
    “I can feel the vibrations,” he said. “I think I can. In my finger.”
    She smiled and he believed she squeezed his hand beneath hers. Finally, they ran out of deserted road, population loomed, and Sachs reluctantly slowed, turned around and pointed the nose of the car toward the hazy crescent of moon as it rose above the distant city, nearly invisible in the stew of hot August air.
    “Let’s try for one-fifty,” she proposed. Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensation of wind and the perfume of freshly cut grass and the speed.
    * * *  
    The night was the hottest of the month.
    From Lincoln’s Rhyme’s new vantage point he could look down into the park and see the weirdos on the benches, the exhausted joggers, the families reclining around the smoke of dwindling barbecue fires like the survivors of a medieval battle. A few dog walkers unable to wait for the night’s fever to break made their obligatory rounds, Baggies in hand.
    Thom had put on a CD—Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio for Strings. But Rhyme had snorted a derisive laugh, declared it a sorry cliché and ordered him to replace it with Gershwin.
    Amelia Sachs climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom, noticed him looking outside. “What do you see?” she asked.
    “Hot people.”
    “And the birds? The falcons?”
    “Ah, yes, they’re there.”
    “Hot too?”
    He examined the male. “I don’t think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing.”
    She set the bag on the foot of the bed and lifted outthe contents, a bottle of expensive brandy. He’d reminded her of the Scotch but Sachs said she’d contribute the liquor. She set it next to the pills and the plastic bag. Looking like a breezy professional wife, home from Balducci’s with piles of vegetables and seafood and too little time to whip them into dinner.
    She’d also bought some ice, at Rhyme’s request. He’d remembered what Berger had explained about the heat in the bag. She lifted the cap off the Courvoisier and poured herself a glass and filled his tumbler, arranged the straw toward his mouth.
    “Where’s Thom?” she asked him.
    “Out.”
    “Does he know?”
    “Yes.”
    They sipped the brandy.
    “Do you want me to say anything to your wife?”
    Rhyme considered it for a long moment, thinking: We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets—and oh how we squander those moments. Here he’d known Amelia Sachs all of three days and they’d bared their hearts far more than he and Blaine had done in nearly a decade.
    “No,” he said. “I’ve e-mailed her.” A chuckle. “That’s a comment on our times, I’d say.”
    More brandy, the astringent bite on his palate was dissipating. Growing smoother, duller, lighter.
    Sachs leaned over the bed and tapped her glass to his.
    “I have some money,” Rhyme began. “I’m giving a lot of it to Blaine and to Thom. I—”
    But she shushed him with a kiss to the forehead and shook her head.
    A soft clatter of pebbles as she spilled the tiny Seconals into her hand.
    Rhyme instinctively thought: The Dillie-Koppanyi color test reagent. Add 1 percent cobalt acetate in methanol to the suspect material followed by 5 percent isopropylamine in methanol. If the substance is a barbiturate the reagent turns a beautiful violet-blue color.
    “How should we do it?” she asked, gazing at the pills. “I really don’t know.”
    “Mix them in the booze,” he suggested.
    She dropped them in his tumbler. They dissolved quickly.
    How fragile they were. Like the dreams they induce.
    She stirred the mixture with the straw. He glanced at her wounded nails but even that he couldn’t be sorrowful for. This was his night and it was a night of joy.
    Lincoln Rhyme had a sudden recollection of childhood in suburban Illinois. He never drank his milk and to get him to do so his mother bought straws coated on the inside with flavoring. Strawberry,