The Bone Collector

too perfect (Add a scar, she’d once joked and during one of their fights she nearly had). And why, he wondered, does her voluptuous apparition keep rising today? He’d wakened thinking about his ex and had felt compelled to write her a letter, which was on the computer screen at that moment. He now saved thedocument on the disk. Silence filled the room as he entered the commands with a single finger.
    “Lincoln?” Sellitto asked.
    “Yessir. Some help. From me. I heard.”
    Banks kept an inappropriate smile on his face while he shuffled his butt uneasily in the chair.
    “I’ve got an appointment in, well, any minute now,” Rhyme said.
    “An appointment.”
    “A doctor.”
    “Really?” Banks asked, probably to murder the silence that loomed again.
    Sellitto, not sure where the conversation was going, asked, “And how’ve you been?”
    Banks and Sellitto hadn’t asked about his health when they’d arrived. It was a question people tended to avoid when they saw Lincoln Rhyme. The answer risked being a very complicated, and almost certainly an unpleasant, one.
    He said simply, “I’ve been fine, thanks. And you? Betty?”
    “We’re divorced,” Sellitto said quickly.
    “Really?”
    “She got the house and I got half a kid.” The chunky cop said this with forced cheer, as if he’d used the line before, and Rhyme supposed there was a painful story behind the breakup. One he had no desire to hear. Still, he wasn’t surprised that the marriage had tanked. Sellitto was a workhorse. He was one of the hundred or so first-grade detectives on the force and had been for years—he got the grade when they were handed out for merit not just time served. He’d worked close to eighty hours a week. Rhyme hadn’t even known he was married for the first few months they’d worked together.
    “Where you living now?” Rhyme asked, hoping a nice social conversation would tucker them out and send them on their way.
    “Brooklyn. The Heights. I walk to work sometimes. You know those diets I was always on? The trick’s not dieting. It’s exercise.”
    He didn’t look any fatter or thinner than the LonSellitto of three and a half years ago. Or the Sellitto of fifteen years ago for that matter.
    “So,” collegiate Banks said, “a doctor, you were saying. For a . . .”
    “A new form of treatment?” Rhyme finished the dwindling question. “Exactly.”
    “Good luck.”
    “Thank you so much.”
    It was 11:36 a.m. Well past midmorning. Tardiness is inexcusable in a man of medicine.
    He watched Banks’s eyes twice scan his legs. He caught the pimply boy a second time and wasn’t surprised to see the detective blush.
    “So,” Rhyme said. “I’m afraid I don’t really have time to help you.”
    “But he’s not here yet, right, the doctor?” asked Lon Sellitto in the same bulletproof tone he’d used to puncture homicide suspects’ cover stories.
    Thom appeared at the doorway with a coffeepot.
    Prick, Rhyme mouthed.
    “Lincoln forgot to offer you gentlemen something.”
    “Thom treats me like a child.”
    “If the bootie fits,” the aide retorted.
    “All right,” Rhyme snapped. “Have some coffee. I’ll have some mother’s milk.”
    “Too early,” Thom said. “The bar isn’t open.” And weathered Rhyme’s glowering face quite well.
    Again Banks’s eyes browsed Rhyme’s body. Maybe he’d been expecting just skin and bones. But the atrophying had stopped not long after the accident and his first physical therapists had exhausted him with exercise. Thom too, who may have been a prick at times and an old mother hen at others, was a damn good PT. He put Rhyme through passive ROM exercises every day. Taking meticulous notes on the goniometry—measurements of the range of motion that he applied to each joint in Rhyme’s body. Carefully checking the spasticity as he kept the arms and legs in a constant cycle of abduction and adduction. ROM work wasn’t a miracle but it built up some tone, cut down on debilitating contractures and kept the blood flowing. For someone whose muscularactivities had been limited to his shoulders, head and left ring finger for three and a half years, Lincoln Rhyme wasn’t in such bad shape.
    The young detective looked away from the complicated black ECU control sitting by Rhyme’s finger, hard-wired to another controller, sprouting conduit and cables, which ran to the computer and a wall panel.
    A quad’s life is wires, a therapist had told Rhyme a long time