Time is the fire in which we burn.

– DELMORE SCHWARTZ

Lincoln Rhyme had been awake for more than an hour.

A young officer from the Coast Guard had delivered a jacket found floating in New York Harbor, a man's size 44. It was, the captain of the boat deduced, probably the missing victim's; both sleeves were covered in blood, the cuffs slashed.

The jacket was a Macy's house brand and contained no other trace or evidence that could lead back to the owner.

He was now alone in the bedroom with Thom, who'd just finished Rhyme's morning routine-his physical therapy exercises and what the aide delicately called "hygienic duties." (Rhyme referred to them as the "piss 'n' shit detail," though usually only when easy-to-shock visitors were present.)

Amelia Sachs now walked up the stairs and joined him. She dropped her jacket in a chair, walked past him, opened the curtains. She looked out the window, into Central Park.

The slim young man sensed immediately that something was up. "I'll go make coffee. Or toast. Or something." He vanished, closing the door behind him.

So what was this? Rhyme wondered unhappily. He'd had more than enough personal issues recently than he wanted to deal with.

Her eyes were still looking over the painful brightness of the park. He asked, "So what was this errand that was so important?"

"I stopped by Argyle Security."

Rhyme blinked and looked at her face closely. "They're the ones that called after you got written up in the Times, when we closed that case about the illusionist."

"Right."

Argyle was an international company that specialized in safeguarding corporate executives and negotiating the release of kidnapped employees-a popular crime in some foreign countries. They'd offered Sachs a job making twice what she did as a cop. And promised her a carry permit-a license for a concealed weapon-in most jurisdictions, unusual for security companies. That and the promise to send her to exotic and dangerous locations caught her interest, though she'd turned them down immediately.

"What's this all about?"

"I'm quitting, Rhyme."

"Quitting the force? Are you serious?"

She nodded. "I've pretty much decided. I want to go in a different direction. I can do good things there too. Protecting families, guarding kids. They do a lot of antiterrorist work."

Now he too stared out the window at the stark, bald trees of Central Park. He thought about his conversation with Kathryn Dance the previous day, about his early days of therapy. One doctor, a sharp, young man with the NYPD, Terry Dobyns, had told him, "Nothing lasts forever." He'd meant this about the depression he'd been experiencing.

Now the sentence meant something very different and he couldn't get the words out of his mind.

Nothing lasts forever…

"Ah."

"I think I have to, Rhyme. I have to."

"Because of your father?"

She nodded, dug her finger into her hair, scratched. Winced at that pain, or at some other.

"This's crazy, Sachs."

"I don't think I can do it anymore. Be a cop."

"It's pretty fast, don't you think?"

"I've thought about it all night. I've never thought about anything so much in my life."

"Well, keep thinking. You can't make decisions like this after you get some bad news."

"Bad news? Everything I thought about Dad was a lie."

"Not everything," Rhyme countered. "One part of his life."

"But the most important part. That's who he was first, Rhyme. A cop."

"It was a long time ago. The Sixteenth Avenue Club was closed up when you were a baby."

"That makes him less corrupt?"

Rhyme said nothing.

"You want me to explain it, Rhyme? Like evidence? Add a few drops of reagent and look at the results? I can't. All I know is I have a really bad taste in my mouth. This's affected how I look at the whole job."

He said kindly, "It's gotta be tough. But whatever happened to him doesn't touch you. All that matters is you're a good cop, and a lot fewer cases'll be closed if you leave."

"I'll only close cases if my heart's in it. And it's not. Something's gone." She added, "Pulaski's coming along great. He's better now than I was when I started working with you."

"He's better because you've been training him."

"Don't do that."

"What?"

"Butter me up, drop those little comments. That's what my mother used to do with my father. You don't want me to leave, I understand, but don't play that kind of card."

But he had to play the card. And any other he could think of. After the accident Rhyme had wrestled with suicide on a number of occasions. And though he'd come close he always rejected the choice. What Amelia Sachs was now considering was psychic suicide. If she quit the force he knew that she'd be killing her soul.

"But Argyle? It's not for you." He shook his head. "Nobody takes corporate security seriously, even-especially-the clients."

"No, their assignments're good. And they send you back to school. You learn foreign languages… They even have a forensics department. And the money's good."

He laughed. "Since when has this ever been about money?…Give it some time, Sachs. What's the hurry?"

She shook her head. "I'm going to close the St. James case. And I'll do whatever you need to nail the Watchmaker. But after that…"

"You know, if you quit, a lot of buttons get pushed. It'll affect you for a long time, if you ever wanted to come back." He looked away, blood pounding in his temple.

"Rhyme." She pulled a chair up, sat and closed her hand around his-the right one, the fingers of which had some sensation and movement. She squeezed. "Whatever I do, it won't affect us, our life." She smiled.

You and me, Rhyme…

You and me, Sachs…

He looked off. Lincoln Rhyme was a scientist, a man of the brain, not the heart. Some years ago Rhyme and Sachs had met on a hard case-a series of kidnappings by a killer obsessed with human bones. No one could stop him, except these two misfits-Rhyme, the quadriplegic in retirement, and Sachs, the disillusioned rookie betrayed by her cop lover. Yet, somehow, together, they had forged a wholeness, filling the ragged gaps within each of them, and they'd stopped the killer.

Deny it as much as he wanted to, those words, you and me, had been his compass in the precarious world they'd created together. He wasn't at all convinced that she was right that they wouldn't be altered by her decision. Would removing their common purpose change them?

Was he witnessing the transition from Before to After?

"Have you already quit?"

"No." She pulled a white envelope from her jacket pocket. "I wrote the resignation letter. But I wanted to tell you first."

"Give it a couple of days before you decide. You don't owe it to me. But I'm asking. A couple of days."

She stared at the envelope for a long moment. Finally she said, "Okay."

Rhyme was thinking: Here we are working on a case involving a man obsessed with clocks and watches, and the most important thing to me at this moment is buying a little time from Sachs. "Thanks." Then: "Now, let's get to work."

"I want you to understand… "

"There's nothing to understand," he said with what he felt was miraculous detachment. "There's a killer to catch. That's all we should be thinking about."

He left her alone in the bedroom and took the tiny elevator downstairs to the lab, where Mel Cooper was at work.

"Blood on the jacket's AB positive. Matches what was on the pier."

Rhyme nodded. Then he had the tech call the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about the ASTER information-the thermal scans to find possible locations of roof tarring.