After a moment of silence Rhyme said to Thom, “You don’t happen to have one of those miniatures of whiskey, do you? From the flight to Nassau.”

He’d insisted the aide smuggle some scotch on board, though he’d learned that in first class you get as much liquor as you like—or, more accurately, as much as your caregiver is willing to let you have.

“No, and I wouldn’t give you any if I did have some. It’s nine in the morning.”

Rhyme scowled.

He looked once more at the doors through which Sachs had vanished.

We don’t want to lose her; she’s too good. But the department can’t keep her if she insists on being in the field…

Yes, he’d had a conversation with Sachs, as Bill Myers had insisted.

Though the message was a bit different from what the captain had wanted.

Neither a desk job at the NYPD and early retirement and security consulting were options for Amelia Sachs. There was only one solution to avoid those nightmares. Rhyme had contacted Dr. Vic Barrington and gotten the name of the best surgeon in the city specializing in treating severe arthritis.

The man had said he might be able to help; Rhyme’s conversation with Sachs on Saturday outside NIOS headquarters was about the possibility of her undergoing a procedure to improve the situation…and keeping her in the field. Not desking her, to use one of Myers’s more pernicious verbs.

Because she wasn’t afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis—an immune system malady that affects all the joints—but more common osteoarthritis, she was young enough so that a procedure in her hip and knee could give her a dozen years or more of normal life before a joint replacement would be required.

She’d debated and finally agreed.

In the waiting room now, Rhyme was looking around at the ten or so others here, the couples, the solitary men or women, the families. Some motionless, some lost in intense dialogue not quite discernible, some jittery, some engaging in rituals of distraction: stirring coffee, opening crisp wrappers of snack food, studying limp magazines, texting or playing video games on phones.

Rhyme noted that, unlike the streets of New York, not a soul paid him more than a millisecond of uninterested attention. He was in a wheelchair; this was a hospital. Here, he was normal.

Thom asked, “You’ve told Dr. Barrington you’ve canceled your surgery?”

“I’ve told him.”

The aide was quiet for a moment. The Times in his hands dipped ever so slightly. For two people joined by circumstance and profession so inextricably and, in a way, intimately, these two had never been comfortable with discussions personal in nature. Lincoln Rhyme least of all. Yet he was surprised to find himself at ease as he confessed to Thom, “Something happened when I was down in the Bahamas.”