The Deliveryman

Начало книги

What’s the story, Sachs? How was the scene? Complicated? Difficult? Impossible?”

Lincoln Rhyme turned his motorized wheelchair from his computer, where he’d been reading an email, toward the arched doorway of his parlor.

Amelia Sachs was walking into his parlor-cum-laboratory on Central Park West. She deposited on a nearby evidence table the large gray milk crate she was lugging, then pulled off her black 511 tactical jacket. She was clothed in blue jeans and a T-shirt — off-white today — that were typical of what she wore beneath the Tyvek overalls when she walked the grid at a crime scene. Her pretty face, her former fashion model face, eased into a smile. “The scene? Challenging, let’s say. You’re in a good mood.”

“He is. It’s pretty disorienting.” This came from Rhyme’s aide just entering the room behind Sachs. Thom Reston, a slim young man, was impeccably dressed in dark gray Italian slacks and a solid taupe shirt. Rhyme was a quadriplegic — his spine damaged at the C4 level — and largely paralyzed from the neck down. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, he was given to swings of temperament that could be quite dramatic. (Of course, even before the accident that rendered him disabled, as head of the NYPD crime scene operation, he’d been dour to insufferable quite often, he’d been fast to admit.) Thom was in a good position to voice an opinion on the matter; after years of caregiving, he knew his charge’s emotional gravity quite well, the way one half of a long-married couple knows the other’s by instinct.

Читать дальше →