The Coffin Dancer

up.”
    “Come on, Sachs. We’ve got secrets, you and me? I don’t think so.”
    Eyes on the floor, she said, “I remember once I was telling you about Nick. How I felt about him and so on. How what happened between us was so hard.”
    He nodded.
    “And I asked you if you’d felt that way about anyone, maybe your wife. And you said yes, but not Blaine.” She looked up at him.
    He recovered fast, though not fast enough. And she realized she’d blown cold air on an exposed nerve.
    “I remember,” he answered.
    “Who was she? Look, if you don’t want to talk about it . . . ”
    “I don’t mind. Her name was Claire. Claire Trilling. How’s that for a last name?”
    “Probably put up with the same crap in school I had to. Amelia Sex. Amelia Sucks . . . How’d you meet her?”
    “Well . . . ” He laughed at his own reluctance to continue. “In the department.”
    “She was a cop?” Sachs was surprised.
    “Yep.”
    “What happened?”
    “It was a . . . difficult relationship.” Rhyme shook his head ruefully. “I was married, she was married. Just not to each other.”
    “Kids?”
    “She had a daughter.”
    “So you broke up?”
    “It wouldn’t have worked, Sachs. Oh, Blaine and I were destined to get divorced—or kill each other. It was only a matter of time. But Claire . . . she was worried about her daughter—about her husband taking the little girl if she got divorced. She didn’t love him, but he was a good man. Loved the girl a lot.”
    “You meet her?”
    “The daughter? Yes.”
    “You ever see her now? Claire?”
    “No. That was the past. She’s not on the force anymore.”
    “You broke up after your accident?”
    “No, no, before.”
    “She knows you were hurt, though, right?”
    “No,” Rhyme said after another hesitation.
    “Why didn’t you tell her?”
    A pause. “There were reasons . . . Funny you bring her up. Haven’t thought about her for years.”
    He offered a casual smile and Sachs felt the pain course through her—actual pain like the blow that left the bruise in the shape of the Show Me State. Because what he was saying was a lie. Oh, he’d been thinking about this woman. Sachs didn’t believe in woman’s intuition but she did believe in cop’s intuition; she’d walked a beat for far too long to discountinsights like these. She knew Rhyme’d been thinking about Ms. Trilling.
    Her feelings were ridiculous, of course. She had no patience for jealousy. Hadn’t been jealous of Nick’s job—he was undercover and spent weeks on the street. Hadn’t been jealous of the hookers and blond ornaments he’d drink with on assignments.
    And beyond jealousy, what could she possibly hope for with Rhyme? She’d talked about him to her mother many times. And the cagey old woman would usually say something like “It’s good to be nice to a cripple like that.”
    Which just about summed up all that their relationship should be. All that it could be.
    It was more than ridiculous.
    But jealous she was. And it wasn’t of Claire.
    It was of Percey Clay.
    Sachs couldn’t forget how they’d looked together when she’d seen them sitting next to each other in his room, earlier today.
    More scotch. Thinking of the nights she and Rhyme had spent here, talking about cases, drinking this very good liquor.
    Oh, great. Now I’m maudlin. That’s a mature feeling. I’m gonna group a cluster right in its chest and kill it dead.
    But instead she offered the sentiment a little more liquor.
    Percey wasn’t an attractive woman, but that meant nothing; it had taken Sachs all of one week at Chantelle, the modeling agency on Madison Avenue where she’d worked for several years, to understandthe fallacy of the beautiful. Men love to look at gorgeous women, but nothing intimidates them more.
    “You want another hit?” she asked.
    “No,” he said.
    Without thinking now, she reclined, laid her head on his pillow. It was funny how we adjust to things, she thought. Rhyme couldn’t, of course, pull her to his chest and slip his arm around her. But the comparable gesture was his tilting his head to hers. In this way they’d fallen asleep a number of times.
    Tonight, though, she sensed a stiffness, a caution.
    She felt she was losing him. And all she could think about was trying to be closer. As close as possible.
    Sachs had once confided with her friend Amy, her goddaughter’s mother, about Rhyme, about her feelings for him. The woman had wondered what the