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 future health. 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 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.

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 and a 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 advanced physics 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 feet in the bleachers, whistling and bellowing for Lincoln to push, push, push, you can do it! Encouraging him over the finish line first (he often was).

Following the meet, Rhyme supposed he’d gone off with Arthur. The boys spent as much time together as they could, filling the sibling gap. Robert and Marie were considerably older than Arthur, and Lincoln was an only child.

So Lincoln and Art adopted each other. Most weekends and every summer the surrogate brothers would go off on their adventures, often in Arthur’s Corvette (Uncle Henry, even as a professor, made several times what Rhyme’s father did; Teddy was a scientist too, though he was more comfortable out of the spotlight). The boys’ outings were typical teenage venture-girls, ball games, movies, arguing, eating burgers and pizza, sneaking beer and explaining the world. And more girls.