The Broken Window

looking around.
    “You just missed him.”
    Stuart Everett was a student at the Manhattan high school Pam was attending. She’d been going out with him for several months. They’d met in class and immediately discovered a mutual love of books and music. They were in the school’s Poetry Club, which reassured Sachs; at least he wasn’t a biker or a knuckle-dragging jock.
    Pam tossed one of her bags, containing schoolbooks, into the backseat and opened the other one. A fuzzy-headed dog looked out.
    “Hey, Jackson,” Sachs said, petting his head.
    The tiny Havanese grabbed the Milk-Bone the detective offered from an add-on cup holder, whose sole purpose was as a reservoir of dog treats; Sachs’s acceleration and cornering habits weren’t conducive to keeping liquids contained.
    “Stuart couldn’t walk you here? What kind of gentleman is that?”
    “He’s got this soccer game. He’s way into sports. Are most guys like that?”
    Pulling into traffic, Sachs gave a wry laugh. “Yup.”
    It seemed an odd question from a girl this age, most of whom would know all about boys and sports. But Pam Willoughby wasn’t like most girls. When she was very young her father died on a U.N. peacekeepingmission and her unstable mother had flung herself into the political and religious right-wing underground, growing more and more militant. She was now serving a life sentence for murder (she was responsible for the U.N. bombing some years ago in which six people died). Amelia Sachs and Pam had met back then, when the detective had saved the girl from a serial kidnapper. She then disappeared but, by sheer coincidence, Sachs had rescued her again, not long ago.
    Liberated from her sociopath family, Pam had been placed with a foster family in Brooklyn—though not before Sachs had checked out the couple like a Secret Service agent planning a presidential visit. Pam enjoyed life with the family. But she and Sachs continued to hang out together and were close. With Pam’s foster mother often fully occupied with taking care of five younger children, Sachs took on the role of older sister.
    This worked for them both. Sachs had always wanted children. But complications existed. She’d planned on a family with her first serious live-in boyfriend, though he, a fellow cop, proved to be about the worst choice in the world (extortion, assault and eventually prison, for a start). After him she’d been alone until she’d met Lincoln Rhyme and had been with him ever since. Rhyme didn’t quite get children, but he was a good man, fair and smart, and could separate his stony professionalism from his home life; a lot of men couldn’t.
    But starting a family would be difficult at this point in their lives; they had to contend with the dangers and demands of policing and the restless energy they both felt—and the uncertainty about Rhyme’s futurehealth. They also had a certain physical barrier to be overcome, though the problem, they’d learned, was Sachs’s, not Rhyme’s (he was perfectly capable of fathering a family).
    So, for now, the relationship with Pam was enough. Sachs enjoyed her role and took it seriously; the girl was lowering her reticence to trust adults. And Rhyme genuinely enjoyed her company. Presently he was helping her outline a book about her experiences in the right-wing underground to be called Captivity . Thom had told her that she had a chance of getting on Oprah .
    Speeding around a taxi, Sachs now said, “You never answered. How was studying?”
    “Great.”
    “You set for that test on Thursday?”
    “Got it down. No problem.”
    Sachs gave a laugh. “You didn’t even crack a book today, did you?”
    “Amelia, come on. It was such a neat day! The weather’s been sucky all week. We had to get outside.”
    Sachs’s instinct was to remind her of the importance of getting good scores on her finals. Pam was smart, with a high IQ and a voracious appetite for books, but after her bizarre schooling she’d find it tough to get into a good college. The girl, though, looked so happy that Sachs relented. “So what’d you do?”
    “Just walked. All the way up to Harlem, around the reservoir. Oh, and there was this concert by the boathouse, just a cover band, you know, but they totally nailed Coldplay. . . .” Pam thought back. “Mostly, like, Stuart and I just talked. About nothing. That’s the best, you ask me.”
    Amelia Sachs couldn’t disagree. “Is he cute?”
    “Oh, yeah. Way cute.”
    “Have