Roberto Moreno rose and stepped to the window.

Crowning the garden was a poisonwood tree, about forty feet tall. He stayed in this suite often and he liked the tree very much. Indeed, he felt a camaraderie with it. Poisonwoods are formidable, resourceful and starkly beautiful. They are also, as the name suggests, toxic. The pollen or smoke from burning the wood and leaves could slip into the lungs, searing with agony. And yet the tree nourishes the beautiful Bahamian swallowtail butterfly, and white crowned pigeons live off the fruit.

I am like this tree, Moreno thought. A good image for the article perhaps. I’ll mention this too–

The glint again.

In a tiny splinter of a second: A flicker of movement disturbed the tree’s sparse leaves, and the tall window in front of him exploded. Glass turned to a million crystals of blowing snow, fire blossomed in his chest.

Moreno found himself lying on the couch, which had been five feet behind him.

But…but what happened here? What is this? I’m fainting, I’m fainting.

I can’t breathe.

He stared at the tree, now clearer, so much clearer, without the window glass filtering the view. The branches waved in the sweet wind off the water. Leaves swelling, receding. It was breathing for him. Because he couldn’t, not with his chest on fire. Not with the pain.

Shouts, cries for help around him.

Blood, blood everywhere.

Sun setting, sky going darker and darker. But isn’t it morning? Moreno had images of his wife, his teenage son and daughter. His thoughts dissolved until he was aware of only one thing: the tree.

Poison and strength, poison and strength.

The fire within him was easing, vanishing. Tearful relief.

Darkness becoming darker.

The poisonwood tree.

Poisonwood…

Poison…

Is he on his way or not?” Lincoln Rhyme asked, not trying to curb the irritation.

“Something at the hospital,” came Thom’s voice from the hallway or kitchen or wherever he was. “He’ll be delayed. He’ll call when he’s free.”

“‘Something.’ Well, that’s  specific. ‘Something at the hospital.’”

“That’s what he told me.”

“He’s a doctor. He should be precise. And he should be on time.”

“He’s a doctor,” Thom replied, “which means he has emergencies to deal with.”

“But he didn’t say ‘emergency.’ He said, ‘something.’ The operation is scheduled for May twenty six. I don’t want it delayed. That’s too far in the future anyway. I don’t see why he couldn’t do it sooner.”

Rhyme motored his red Storm Arrow wheelchair to a computer monitor. He parked next to the rattan chair in which sat Amelia Sachs, in black jeans and sleeveless black shell. A gold pendant of one diamond and one pearl dangled from a thin chain around her neck. The day was early and spring sunlight fired through the east facing windows, glancing alluringly off her red hair tied in a bun, tucked carefully up with pewter pins. Rhyme turned his attention back to the screen, scanning a crime scene report for a homicide he’d just helped the NYPD close.

“About done,” she said.

They sat in the parlor of his town house on Central Park West in Manhattan. What presumably had once been a subdued, quiet chamber for visitors and suitors in Boss Tweed’s day was now a functioning crime scene lab. It was filled with evidence examination gear and instrumentation, computers and wires, everywhere wires, which made the transit of Rhyme’s wheelchair forever bumpy, a sensation that he experienced only from his shoulders up.

“The doctor’s late,” Rhyme muttered to Sachs. Unnecessarily since she’d been ten feet away from his exchange with Thom. But he was still irritated and felt better laying on a bit more censure. He carefully moved his right arm forward to the touchpad and scrolled through the last paragraphs of the report. “Good.”

“I’ll send it?”

He nodded and she hit a key. The encrypted sixty five pages headed off into the ether to arrive ultimately six miles away at the NYPD’s crime scene facility in Queens, where they would become the backbone of the case of People v. Williams.

“Done.”

Done…except for testifying at the trial of the drug lord, who had sent twelve  and thirteen year olds out into the streets of East New York and Harlem to do his killing for him. Rhyme and Sachs had managed to locate and analyze minute bits of trace and impression evidence that led from one of the youngster’s shoes to the floor of a storefront in Manhattan to the carpet of a Lexus sedan to a restaurant in Brooklyn and finally to the house of Tye Williams himself.

The gang leader hadn’t been present at the murder of the witness, he hadn’t touched the gun, there was no record of him ordering the hit and the young shooter was too terrified to testify against him. But those hurdles for the prosecution didn’t matter; Rhyme and Sachs had spun a filament of evidence that stretched from the crime scene directly to Williams’s crib.

He’d be in jail for the rest of his life.

Sachs now closed her hand on Rhyme’s left arm, strapped to the wheelchair, immobile. He could see from the tendons faintly visible beneath her pale skin that she squeezed. The tall woman rose and stretched. They’d been working to finish the report since early morning. She’d awakened at five. He, a bit later.

Rhyme noticed that she winced as she walked to the table where her coffee cup sat. The arthritis in her hip and knee had been bad lately. Rhyme’s spinal cord injury, which rendered him a quadriplegic, was described as devastating. Yet it never gave him a moment’s pain.

All of our bodies, whoever we are, fail us to some degree, he reflected. Even those who at present were healthy and more or less content were troubled by clouds on the horizon. He pitied the athletes, the beautiful people, the young who were already anticipating decline with dread.

And yet, ironically, the opposite was true for Lincoln Rhyme. From the ninth circle of injury, he had been improving, thanks to new spinal cord surgical techniques and his own take no prisoners attitude about exercise and risky experimental procedures.

Which reminded him again that he was irritated the doctor was late for today’s assessment appointment, in anticipation of the upcoming surgery.

The two tone doorbell chime sounded.

“I’ll get that,” Thom called.

The town house was disability modified, of course, and Rhyme could have used a computer to view and converse with whoever was at the door and let them in. Or not. (He didn’t like folks to come a callin’ and tended to send them away – sometimes rudely – if Thom didn’t act fast.)

“Who is it? Check first.”

This couldn’t be Dr. Barrington, since he was going to call once he’d disposed of the “something” that had delayed him. Rhyme wasn’t in the mood for other visitors.

But whether his caregiver checked first or not didn’t matter apparently. Lon Sellitto appeared in the parlor.

“Linc, you’re home.”

Safe bet.

The squat detective beelined to a tray with coffee and pastry.

“You want fresh?” Thom asked. The slim aide was dressed in a crisp white shirt, floral blue tie and dark slacks. Cuff links today, ebony or onyx.

“Naw, thanks, Thom. Hey, Amelia.”

“Hi, Lon. How’s Rachel?”

“Good. She’s taken up Pilates. That’s a weird word. It’s exercise or something.” Sellitto was decked out in a typically rumpled suit, brown, and a typically rumpled powder blue shirt. He sported a striped crimson tie that was atypically smooth as a piece of planed wood. A recent present, Rhyme deduced. From girlfriend Rachel? The month was May – no holidays. Maybe it was a birthday present. Rhyme didn’t know the date of Sellitto’s. Or, for that matter, most other people’s.