The burning wire

"You're Amelia Sachs."

"That's right."

"And Thom?"

A nod.

The man turned out to be the chief surgeon of the Pembroke Spinal Cord Center. He said, "He's come through the surgery, but he's still unconscious."

He continued, explaining technical things to them. Sachs nodded, taking in the details. Some seemed good, some seemed less so. But mostly she noted that he wasn't answering the one question that mattered-not about the success of the surgery in technical terms, but when, or if, Lincoln Rhyme would swim back to consciousness.

When she bluntly posed that question, the best the doctor could say was: "We just don't know. We'll have to wait."

Chapter 87

THE 3D SWIRLS of fingerprints evolved not to help forensic scientists identify and convict criminals but simply to give our digits sure purchase, so that whatever we were holding that was precious or necessary or unrecognized wouldn't slip from our frail human grasp.

We are, after all, bereft of claws, and our muscle tone-sorry, ardent health club devotees-is truly pathetic compared with that of any wild animal of comparable weight.

The official title of the patterns on the fingers (feet too) is, in fact, friction ridge, revealing their true purpose.

Lincoln Rhyme glanced briefly at Amelia Sachs, who was ten feet away, curled up, sleeping in a chair, in an oddly content and demure pose. Her red hair fell straight and thick, bisecting her face.

Nearly midnight.

He returned to his contemplation of friction ridges. They occur on digits, which word includes both fingers and toes, and on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. You can be convicted as easily by an incriminating sole print as by a fingerprint, though the circumstances of the crime in which one was involved would surely be a bit unusual.

People have known about the individuality of friction ridges for a long time-they were used to mark official documents eight hundred years ago-but it wasn't until the 1890s that prints became recognized as a way to link criminal and crime. The world's first fingerprint department within a law enforcement agency was in Calcutta, India, formed under the direction of Sir Edward Richard Henry, who gave his name to the classification system of fingerprinting used by police for the next hundred years.

The reason for Rhyme's meditation on fingerprints was that he was presently looking at his own. For the first time in years.

For the first time since the accident in the subway.

His right arm was raised, flexed at the elbow, the wrist and palm twisted so that it was facing him and he was gazing intently at the patterns. He was thoroughly exhilarated, filled with the same sensation as when he'd find the tiny fiber, the bit of trace evidence, the faint impression in the mud that allowed him to make a co

The surgery had worked: the implantation of the wires, the computer, controlled by movements of his head and shoulders above the site of his injury. He'd begun tightening muscles in his neck and shoulder to levitate the arm carefully and rotate the wrist. Seeing his own fingerprints had long been a dream of his, and he'd decided that if he could ever regain arm movement, gazing at the whorls and ridges would be the first thing he'd do.

There'd be much therapy ahead of him, of course. And he'd have the other operations too. Nerve rerouting, which would have little effect on mobility but might improve some bodily functions. Then stem cell therapy. And physical rehabilitation too: the treadmill and bicycle and range-of-motion exercises.

There would be limitations too, of course-Thom's job wasn't in any danger. Even if his arms and hands moved, even if his lungs were working better than ever and the business below the waist was approaching that of the nondisabled, he still had no sensation, was still subject to sepsis, would not walk-probably never would, or at least not for many years. But this didn't bother Lincoln Rhyme. He'd learned from his work in forensics that you rarely got 100 percent of what you sought. But usually, with hard work and the alignment of circumstance-never, in Rhyme's view, "luck," of course-what you did achieve was enough… for the identification, the arrest, the conviction. Besides, Lincoln Rhyme was a man who needed goals. He lived to fill gaps, to-as Sachs knew well-scratch the itch. His life would be useless without having someplace to go, constantly someplace to go.

Now, carefully, using faint movements of the muscles in his neck, he rotated his palm and lowered it to the bed, with all the coordination of a newborn foal finding its legs.

Then exhaustion and the residue of the drugs were all over him. Rhyme was certainly prepared to sleep, but he chose instead to postpone oblivion for a few minutes, resting his eyes on Amelia Sachs's face, pale and half visible through her hair, like the midpoint of a lunar eclipse.