The criminalist looked once into the sheriff’s eyes and gripped the sip-and-puff controller quickly between his teeth. He blew into it and the wheelchair started forward. But Bell stepped behind him and yanked the battery cable free. The Storm Arrow eased forward a few inches and stopped.

“Jim,” he whispered. “Not you too?”

“You got that right.”

Rhyme’s eyes closed. “No, no,” he whispered. His head dipped. But only a few millimeters. As with most great men Lincoln Rhyme’s gestures of defeat were very subtle.

V
The Town Without Children

… chapter forty-two

Mason Germain and the sullen black man moved slowly through the alley next to the Tanner’s County lockup.

The man was sweating and he slapped in irritation at a mosquito. He muttered something and wiped a long hand over his short kinky hair.

Mason felt an urge to needle him but resisted.

The man was tall and by stretching up on his toes he could look into the lockup window. Mason saw that he wore short black boots—shiny patent leather—which for some reason added to the deputy’s contempt for the out-of-towner. He wondered how many men he’d shot.

“She’s in there,” the man said. “She’s alone.”

“We’re keeping Garrett on the other side.”

“You go in the front. Can somebody get out through the back?”

“I’m a deputy, remember? I got a key. I can unlock it.” He said this in a snide tone, wondering again if this fellow was halfway bright.

He got snide in return. “I was only asking if there’s a door in the back. Which I don’t know, never having been in this swamp of a town before.”

“Oh. Yeah, there’s a door.”

“Well, let’s go then.”

Mason noticed that the man’s gun was in his hand and that he hadn’t seen him draw it.

Sachs sat on the bench in her cell, hypnotized by the motion of a fly.

What kind was it? she wondered. Garrett would know in an instant. He was a warehouse of knowledge. A thought occurred to her: There’d be that moment when a child’s knowledge of a subject surpasses his parents’. It must be a miraculous thing, exhilarating, to know that you’d produced this creation who’d outsoared you. Humbling too.

An experience that she now would never know.

She thought once again about her father. The man had diffused crime. Never fired his gun in all his years on duty. Proud as he was of his daughter, he’d worried about her fascination with firearms. “Shoot last,” he’d often remind her.

Oh, Jesse…. What can I say to you?

Nothing, of course. I can’t say a word. You’re gone.

She thought she saw a shadow outside the lockup window. But she ignored it, and her thoughts slipped to Rhyme.

You and me, she was thinking. You and me.