“But you could get better. Next year, they might find a cure.”

“No. Not next year. Not in ten years.”

“You don’t know that. They must be doing research -”

“Sure they are. Want to know what? I’m an expert. Transplanting embryonic nerve tissue onto damaged tissue to promote axonal regeneration.” These words tripped easily from his handsome lips. “No significant effect. Some doctors are chemically treating the affected areas to create an environment where cells can regenerate. No significant effect – not in advanced species. Lower forms of life show pretty good success. If I were a frog I’d be walking again. Well, hopping.”

“So there are people working on it?” Sachs asked.

“Sure. But no one expects any breakthroughs for twenty, thirty years.”

“If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?”

Rhyme laughed. She was good.

Sachs tossed the veil of red hair from her eyes and said, “Your career was law enforcement, remember. Suicide’s illegal.”

“It’s a sin too,” he responded. “The Dakota Indians believed that the ghosts of those who committed suicide had to drag around the tree they’d hanged themselves from for all eternity. Did that stop suicide? Nope. They just used small trees.”

“Tell you what, Rhyme. Here’s my last argument.” She nodded at Berger, grabbed the cuff chain. “I’m taking him in and booking him. Refute that one.”

“Lincoln,” Berger said uneasily, panic in his eyes.

Sachs took the doctor by the shoulder and led him to the door. “No,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.”

As Sachs opened the door Rhyme called out, “Sachs, before you do that, answer me something.”

She paused. One hand on the knob.

“One question.”

She looked back.

“Have you ever wanted to? Kill yourself?”

She unlocked the door with a loud snap.

He said, “Answer me!”

Sachs didn’t open the door. She stood with her back to him. “No. Never.”

“Are you happy with your life?”

“As much as anybody.”

“You’re never depressed?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”

“You like to drive, you were telling me. People who like to drive like to drive fast. You do, don’t you?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“What’s the fastest you’ve done?”

“I don’t know.”

“Over eighty?”

A dismissing smile. “Yes.”

“Over a hundred?”

She gestured upward with her thumb.

“One ten? One twenty?” he asked, smiling in astonishment.

“Clocked at 168.”

“My, Sachs, you are impressive. Well, driving that fast, didn’t you think that maybe, just maybe, something might happen. A rod or axle or something would break, a tire would blow, a spot of oil on the road?”

“It was pretty safe. I’m not crazy.”

“Pretty safe. But driving as fast as a small plane, well, that’s not completely safe, now, is it?”

“You’re leading the witness.”

“No, I’m not. Stay with me. You drive that fast, you have to accept that you could have an accident and die, right?”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

Berger, cuffed hands in front of him, looked on nervously, as he kneaded the pale yellow disk of spinal column.

“So you’ve moved close to that line, right? Ah, you know what I’m talking about. I know you do – the line between the risk of dying and the certainty of dying. See, Sachs, if you carry the dead around with you it’s a very short step over that line. A short step to joining them.”

She lowered her head and her face went completely still, as the curtain of hair obscured her eyes.

“Giving up the dead,” he whispered, praying she wouldn’t leave with Berger, knowing he was so very close to pushing her over the edge. “I touched a nerve there. How much of you wants to follow the dead? More than a little, Sachs. Oh, much more than a little.”

She was hesitating. He knew he was near her heart.

She turned angrily to Berger, gripped him by the cuffs. “Come on.” Pushed through the door.

Rhyme called, “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Again she stopped.

“Sometimes… things happen, Sachs. Sometimes you just can’t be what you ought to be, you can’t have what you ought to have. And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point it just isn’t worth the fight to try to fix what went wrong.”

He watched them standing, motionless, in the doorway. The room was utterly silent. She turned and looked back at him.

“Death cures loneliness,” Rhyme continued. “It cures tension. It cures the itch.” Just like she’d glanced at his legs earlier he now gave a fast look at her torn fingers.

She released Berger’s cuffs and walked to the window. Tears glistened on her cheeks in the yellow radiance from the streetlights outside.

“Sachs, I’m tired,” he said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how tired I am. You know how hard life is to start with. Pile on a whole mountainful of… burdens. Washing, eating, crapping, making phone calls, buttoning shirts, scratching your nose… Then pile on a thousand more. And more after that.”

He fell silent. After a long moment she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

“What’s that?”

She nodded toward the poster. “Eight twenty-three’s got that mother and her little girl… Help us save them. Just them. If you do that I’ll give him an hour alone with you.” She glanced at Berger. “Provided he gets the hell out of town afterwards.”

Rhyme shook his head. “Sachs, if I have a stroke, if I can’t communicate…”

“If that happens,” she said evenly, “even if you can’t say a word, the deal still holds. I’ll make sure you have one hour together.” She crossed her arms, spread her feet again, in what was now Rhyme’s favorite image of Amelia Sachs. He wished he could’ve seen her on the railroad tracks that morning, stopping the train. She said, “That’s the best I’ll do.”

A moment passed. Rhyme nodded. “Okay. It’s a deal.” To Berger he said, “Monday?”

“Okay, Lincoln. Fair enough.” Berger, still shaken, watched Sachs cautiously as she unlocked the cuffs. Afraid, it seemed, that she might change her mind. When he was free he walked quickly to the door. He realized he was still holding the vertebra and returned, set it – almost reverently – next to Rhyme on the crime scene report for the first murder that morning.

“Happier’n hogs in red Virginia mud,” Sachs remarked, slouching in the squeaky rattan chair. Meaning Sellitto and Polling, after she’d told them that Rhyme had agreed to remain on the case for another day.

“Polling particularly,” she said. “I thought the little guy was going to hug me. Don’t tell him I called him that. How are you feeling? You look better.” She sipped some Scotch and set the glass back on the bedside table, beside Rhyme’s tumbler.

“Not bad.”

Thom was changing the bedclothes. “You were sweating like a fountain,” he said.

“But only above my neck,” Rhyme pointed out. “Sweating, I mean.”

“That right?” Sachs asked.

“Yep. That’s how it works. Thermostat’s busted below that. I never need any axial deodorant.”

“Axial?”

“Pit,” Rhyme snorted. “Armpit. My first aide never said armpit. He’d say, ‘I’m going to elevate you by your axials, Lincoln.’ Oh, and: ‘If you feel like regurgitating go right ahead, Lincoln.’ He called himself a ‘caregiver.’ The word was actually on his résumé. I have no idea why I hired him. We’re very superstitious, Sachs. We think calling something by a different name is going to change it. Unsub. Perpetrator. But that aide, he was just a nurse who was up to his own armpits in piss ’n’ puke. Right, Thom? Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s an honorable profession. Messy but honorable.”

“I thrive on mess. That’s why I work for you.”

“What’re you, Thom? An aide or a caregiver?”

“I’m a saint.”