"Ha. You're just hoping I'll fall asleep till morning. Well, I won't. I'll stay awake all night."

The aide rolled his eyes. He announced in a firm voice, "Lincoln'll be upstairs for a few hours."

"How'd you like to be out of work," Rhyme snapped.

"How'd you like to be in a coma?" Thom shot back.

"This is fucking crip abuse," he muttered. But he was giving in. He understood the danger. When a quad sits too long in one position or is constricted in the extremities or, as Rhyme loved to put it so indelicately in front of strangers, needs to piss or shit and hasn't for a while—there was a risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a soaring of the blood pressure that could result in a stroke, leading to more paralysis or death. Dysreflexia's rare but it'll send you to the hospital, or a grave, pretty damn fast, and so Rhyme acquiesced to a trip upstairs for the personal business and then a rest. It was moments like this—disruptions of "normal" life—that infuriated him most about his disability.

Infuriated and, though he refused to let on, deeply depressed him.

In the bedroom upstairs Thom took care of the necessary bodily details. "Okay. Two hours' rest. Get some sleep."

"One hour," Rhyme grumbled.

The aide was going to argue but then he glanced at Rhyme's face and, while he probably saw anger and don't-fuck-with-me eyes, which wouldn't have affected him one bit, he observed too the criminalist's heartfelt concern for the next victims on the Conjurer's list. Thom conceded, "One hour. If you sleep."

"An hour it is," Rhyme said. Then added wryly, "And I'll have the sweetest of dreams. . . . A drink would help, you know."

The aide tugged at the subtle purple tie—a gesture of weakening that Rhyme seized on like a shark lapping a molecule of blood. "Just one," the criminalist said.

"All right." He poured a little ancient Macallan into one of Rhyme's tumblers and arranged the straw next to his mouth.

The criminalist sipped long. "Ah, heaven . . ." Then he glanced at the empty glass. "Someday I'll teach you how to pour a real drink."

"I'll be back in an hour," Thom said.

"Command, alarm clock," Rhyme said sternly. On the flat-screen monitor a clock face appeared and he orally set the alarm to sound in one hour.

"I would've gotten you up," the aide said.

"Ah, well, just in case you were occupied and somehow forgot," Rhyme said coyly, "now I'll be sure to be awake, won't I?"