The Broken Window

a picture?”
    “Amelia! That’d be so uncool.”
    “After this case is over, how ’bout we have dinner, the three of us?”
    “Yeah? You really want to meet him?”
    “Any boy going out with you better know that you’ve got somebody watching your back. Somebody who carries a gun and handcuffs. Okay, hold on to the dog; I’m in the mood to drive.”
    Sachs downshifted hard, pumped the gas and left two exclamation points of rubber on the dull black asphalt.

Chapter Eight
    Since Amelia Sachs had begun spending occasional nights and weekends here at Rhyme’s, certain changes had occurred around the Victorian town house. When he’d lived here alone, after the accident and before Sachs, the place had been more or less neat—depending on whether or not he’d been firing aides and housekeepers—but “homey” wasn’t a word that described it. Nothing personal had graced the walls—none of the certificates, degrees, commendations and medals he’d received during his celebrated tenure as head of the NYPD crime-scene operation. Nor any pictures of his parents, Teddy and Anne, or his uncle Henry’s family.
    Sachs hadn’t approved. “It’s important,” she lectured, “your past, your family. You’re purging your history, Rhyme.”
    He’d never seen her apartment—the place wasn’t disabled accessible—but he knew that the rooms were chockablock with evidence of her history. He’d seen many of the pictures, of course: Amelia Sachs as a pretty young girl (with freckles that had long since vanished) who didn’t smile a lot; as a high school student with mechanics tools in hand; as a college-age daughter flanked on holidays by a grinning cop father anda stern mother; as a magazine and advertising model, her eyes offering the chic frigidity that was au courant (but which Rhyme knew was contempt for the way models were considered mere coat hangers).
    Hundreds of other pix too, shot mostly by her father, the man with a quick-draw Kodak.
    Sachs had studied Rhyme’s bare walls and had gone where the aides—even Thom—did not: the boxes in the basement, scores of cartons containing evidence of Rhyme’s prior life, his life in the Before, artifacts hidden away and as unmentioned as first wife to second. Many of these certificates and diplomas and family pictures now filled the walls and mantelpiece.
    Including the one he was presently studying—of himself as a lean teenager, in a track uniform, taken after he’d just competed in a varsity meet. It depicted him with unruly hair and a prominent Tom Cruise nose, bending forward with his hands on his knees, having just finished what was probably a mile run. Rhyme was never a sprinter; he liked the lyricism, the elegance of the longer distances. He considered running “a process.” Sometimes he would not stop running even after crossing the finish line.
    His family would have been in the stands. Both father and uncle resided in suburbs of Chicago, though some distance apart. Lincoln’s home was to the west, in the flat, balding sprawl that was then still partly farmland, a target of both thoughtless developers and frightening tornados. Henry Rhyme and his family were somewhat immune to both, being on the lakefront in Evanston.
    Henry commuted twice a week to teach his advancedphysics courses at the University of Chicago, a long, two-train trek through the city’s many social divides. His wife, Paula, taught at Northwestern. The couple had three children, Robert, Marie and Arthur, all named after scientists, Oppenheimer and Curie being the most famous. Art was named after Arthur Compton, who in 1942 ran the famed Metallurgic Lab at the University of Chicago, the cover for the project to create the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction. All the children had attended good schools. Robert, Northwestern Medical. Marie, UC-Berkeley. Arthur went to M.I.T.
    Robert had died years earlier in an industrial accident in Europe. Marie was working in China on environmental issues. As for the Rhyme parents, only one remained of the four: Aunt Paula now lived in an assisted-care facility, amid vivid, coherent memories of sixty years ago, while experiencing the present in bewildering fragments.
    Rhyme now continued to stare at the picture of himself. He was unable to look away, recalling the track meet. . . . In his college classes Professor Henry Rhyme signified approval with a subtle, raised eyebrow. But on the playing field, he was always leaping to his