The Burning Wire

happen if she were to go on in life alone. Dispassionately he pictured the scenario. And he concluded that Amelia Sachs would be just fine. Once again he had an image of Ron Pulaski and Sachs running Crime Scene in a few years.
    Now, in the quiet den across from the lab, surrounded by pictures of his family, Rhyme glanced down at something that sat on the table nearby. Colorful and glossy. It was the brochure that the assisted-suicide advocate Arlen Kopeski had left.
    Choices . .  .
    Rhyme was amused to note that the brochure had been designed, cleverly, with the disabled in mind. You didn’t need to pick it up and flip through it. The phone number of the euthanasia organization wasprinted on the front and in large type—in the event that the condition spurring someone to kill himself involved deteriorating vision.
    As he gazed at the brochure, his mind spun. The plan that was formulating itself would take some organizing.
    It would take some secrecy.
    It would take some conspiracy. And bribery.
    But such was the life of a quadriplegic, a life where thinking was free and easy but where acting required complicity.
    The plan would take some time too. But nothing that was important in life ever happened quickly. Rhyme was filled with the thrill that comes with making a firm decision.
    His big concern was making sure that his testimony against the Watchmaker regarding the evidence could be heard by the jury without Rhyme’s presence. There’s a procedure for this: sworn depositions. Besides, Sachs and Mel Cooper were seasoned witnesses for the prosecution. He believed that Ron Pulaski would be too.
    He’d talk to the prosecutor tomorrow, a private conversation, and have a court reporter come to the town house and take his testimony. Thom would think nothing of it.
    Smiling, Lincoln Rhyme wheeled back into the empty lab with its electronics and software and—ah, yes—the wires that would allow him to make the phone call he’d been thinking of, no, obsessing over, from virtually the moment the Watchmaker was arrested.

Ten days after Earth Day
    IV
    THE LAST CASE

    “Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking all day from one laboratory table to another. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.”
    —T HOMAS A LVA E DISON

Chapter 86
    AMELIA SACHS AND Thom Reston hurried through the door of the hospital. Neither spoke.
    The lobby and hallways were calm, odd for places like this on a Saturday evening in New York City. Usually chaos ruled in the houses of healing, chaos from accidents, alcohol poisoning, overdoses and, of course, the occasional gunshot or knife wound.
    Here, though, the atmosphere was oddly, eerily, sedate.
    Grim-faced, Sachs paused and regarded signs. She pointed and they started down an even dimmer corridor in the basement of the hospital.
    They paused again.
    “That way?” Sachs whispered.
    “It’s not well marked. It should be better marked.”
    Sachs heard the exasperation in Thom’s voice but she knew the tone was grounded mostly in dismay.
    “There.”
    They continued on, past a station where nurses sat, leisurely chatting behind the high counter. There were plenty of official accoutrements of the job, papers and files, but also coffee cups, some makeup and a book of puzzles. A lot of Sudoku, Sachs noted,wondering why the game had caught on. She didn’t have the patience.
    She supposed that down here, in this department, the staff wasn’t required to leap into action very often, à la TV medicos in emergency rooms.
    At a second counter Sachs approached a solitary nurse, a middle-aged woman, and said one word: “Rhyme.”
    “Ah, yes,” the nurse said, looking up. Not needing to consult a chart or any other document. “And you are?”
    “His partner,” she said. She’d used the term a number of times regarding the man in both the professional and personal sense, but had never realized until now how completely inadequate it was. She didn’t like it. Hated it.
    Thom identified himself as “caregiver.”
    Which too clunked like tin.
    “I’m afraid I don’t know any details,” the nurse said, echoing what would have been Sachs’s question. “Come with me.”
    The staunch woman led them down another corridor, even more grim than the first. Spotless, pleasingly designed, ordered. And abhorrent.
    What better word to describe hospitals anyway?
    As they approached a room with an open