You say, “It’ll always be you and me, Sachs.” But the you and me is based on who we are now. Me and my bloody nails and my itchy need to move, move, move… You and your damaged body and elegant mind that roams faster and further than I ever could in my stripped and rigged Camaro.

That mind of yours that holds me tighter than the most passionate lover ever could.

And if you become normal again? When you’re your own arms and legs, Rhyme, then why would you want me? Why would you need me? I’d become just another portable, a beat cop with some talent for forensics. You’ll meet another one of the treacherous women who’ve derailed your life in the past—another selfish wife, another married lover—and you’ll fade away from me the way Lucy Kerr’s husband left after her surgery.

I want you the way you are…

She actually shuddered at how appallingly selfish this thought was. Yet she couldn’t deny it.

Stay in your chair, Rhyme! I don’t want it empty…. I want a life with you, a life the way it’s always been. I want children with you, children who’ll grow up to know you exactly the way you are.

Amelia Sachs found she was staring at the black ceiling. She closed her eyes. But it was an hour later before the sound of the wind and the cicadas, their thoracic plates singing like monotonous violins, finally seduced her to sleep.

… chapter thirty-three

Sachs woke just after dawn to the droning noise—which in her dream had been placid locusts but turned out to be her Casio wristwatch’s alarm. She clicked it off.

Her body was in agony, an arthritic’s response to sleeping on a thin pad over a riveted, metal floor.

But she felt oddly buoyant. Low sunlight streamed through the windows of the trailer and she took this as a good omen. Today they were going to find Mary Beth McConnell and return to Tanner’s Corner with her. She’d confirm Garrett’s story and Jim Bell and Lucy Kerr could start the search for the real killer—the man in the tan overalls.