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《The Burial Hour (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel)》作者：[美] Jeffery Deaver【完结】

Part I: The Hangman’s Waltz: Monday, September 20

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part II: In the Field of Truffles: Wednesday, September 22

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part III: The Aqueduct: Thursday, September 23

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part IV: The Land of No Hope: Friday, September 24

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part V: Skulls and Bones: Saturday, September 25

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Part VI: The House of Rats: Sunday, September 26

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Part VII: The Sound of Sense: Monday, September 27

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Part VIII: The Dragonfly and the Gargoyle: Tuesday, September 28

Chapter 72

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jeffery Deaver

Mistress of Justice

The Lesson of Her Death

Praying for Sleep

Speaking in Tongues

A Maiden’s Grave

The Devil’s Teardrop

The Blue Nowhere

Garden of Beasts

The Bodies Left Behind

Edge

The October List

THE RUNE SERIES

Manhattan is My Beat

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Hard News

THE LOCATION SCOUT SERIES

Shallow Graves

Bloody River Blues

Hell’s Kitchen

THE LINCOLN RHYME THRILLERS

The Bone Collector

The Coffin Dancer

The Empty Chair

The Stone Monkey

The Vanished Man

The Twelfth Card

The Cold Moon

The Broken Window

The Burning Wire

The Kill Room

The Skin Collector

The Steel Kiss

THE KATHRYN DANCE THRILLERS

The Sleeping Doll

Roadside Crosses

XO

Solitude Creek

A JAMES BOND NOVEL

Carte Blanche

SHORT STORIES

Twisted

More Twisted

Trouble in Mind

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grand Central Publishing

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Gunner Publications, LLC 2017

The right of Jeffery Deaver to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 473 66549 1

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

To the memory of my friend Giorgio Faletti.

The world misses you.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While the Italian law enforcement agencies I refer to in this novel are real, I do hope the fine members of these organizations, many of whom I’ve met and whose company I’ve enjoyed, will forgive the minor adjustments I’ve made to their procedures and locales, which have been necessary for the timing and plotting of the story.

And I wish to offer my particular thanks to musician and writer, translator and interpreter extraordinaire Seba Pezzani, without whose friendship, and diligence and devotion to the arts, this book could not have been written.

The winter wind blows and the night is dark;

Moans are heard in the linden-trees.

Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,

Running and leaping in their shrouds.

– Henri Cazalis, ‘Danse Macabre’

I

THE HANGMAN’S WALTZ

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20

CHAPTER 1

‘Mommy.’

‘In a minute.’

They trooped doggedly along the quiet street on the Upper East Side, the sun low this cool autumn morning. Red leaves, yellow leaves spiraled from sparse branches.

Mother and daughter, burdened with the baggage that children now carted to school.

In my day …

Claire was texting furiously. Her housekeeper had – wouldn’t you know it? – gotten sick, no, possibly gotten sick, on the day of the dinner party! The party. And Alan had to work late. Possibly had to work late.

As if I could ever count on him anyway.

Ding.

The response from her friend:

Sorry, Carmellas busy tnight.

Jesus. A tearful emoji accompanied the missive. Why not type the goddamn ‘o’ in ‘tonight’? Did it save you a precious millisecond? And remember apostrophes?

‘But, Mommy …’ A nine-year-old singsongy tone.

‘A minute, Morgynn. You heard me.’ Claire’s voice was a benign monotone. Not the least angry, not the least peeved or piqued. Thinking of the weekly sessions: Sitting in the chair, not lying back on the couch – the good doctor didn’t even have a couch in his office – Claire attacked her nemeses, the anger and impatience, and she had studiously worked to avoid snapping or shouting when her daughter was annoying (even when she behaved that way intentionally, which, Claire calculated, was easily one-quarter of the girl’s waking hours).

And I’m doing a damn good job of keeping a lid on it.

Reasonable. Mature. ‘A minute,’ she repeated, sensing the girl was about to speak.

Claire slowed to a stop, flipping through her phone’s address book, lost in the maelstrom of approaching disaster. It was early but the day would vanish fast and the party would be on her like a nearby Uber. Wasn’t there someone, anyone, in the borough of Manhattan who might have decent help she could borrow to wait a party? A party for ten friggin’ people! That was nothing. How hard could it be?

She debated. Her sister?

Nope. She wasn’t invited.

Sally from the club?

Nope. Out of town. And a bitch, to boot.

Morgynn had slowed and Claire was aware of her daughter turning around. Had she dropped something? Apparently so. She ran back to pick it up.

Better not be her phone. She’d already broken one. The screen had cost $187 to fix.

Honestly. Children.

Then Claire was back to scrolling, praying for waitperson salvation. Look at all these names. Need to clean out this damn contact list. Don’t know half these people. Don’t like a good chunk of the rest. Off went another beseeching message.

The child returned to her side and said firmly, ‘Mommy, look—’

‘Ssssh.’ Hissing now. But there was nothing wrong with an edge occasionally, of course, she told herself. It was a form of education. Children had to learn. Even the cutest of puppies needed collar-jerk correction from time to time.

Another ding of iPhone.

Another no.

Goddamn it.

Well, what about that woman that Terri from the office had used? Hispanic, or Latino … Latina. Whatever those people called themselves now. The cheerful woman had been the star of Terri’s daughter’s graduation party.

Claire found Terri’s number and dialed a voice call.

‘Hello?’

‘Terri! It’s Claire. How are you?’

A hesitation then Terri said, ‘Hi, there. How’re you doing?’

‘I’m—’

At which point Morgynn interrupted yet again. ‘Mommy!’

Snap. Claire spun around and glared down at the petite blonde, hair in braids, wearing a snug pink leather Armani Junior jacket. She raged, ‘I am on the phone! Are you blind? What have I told you about that? When I’m on the phone? What is so f—’ Okay, watch the language, she told herself. Claire offered a labored smile. ‘What’s so … important, dear?’

‘I’m trying to tell you. This man back there?’ The girl nodded up the street. ‘He came up to another man and hit him or something and pushed him in the trunk.’

‘What?’

Morgynn tossed a braid, which ended in a tiny bunny clip, off her shoulder. ‘He left this on the ground and then drove away.’ She held up a cord or thin rope. What was it?

Claire gasped. In her daughter’s petite hand was a miniature hangman’s noose.

Morgynn replied, ‘That’s what’s so—’ She paused and her tiny lips curled into a smile of their own. ‘Important.’

CHAPTER 2

‘Greenland.’

Lincoln Rhyme was staring out the parlor window of his Central Park West town house. Two objects were in his immediate field of vision: a complicated Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph and, outside the large nineteenth-century window, a peregrine falcon. The predatory birds were not uncommon in the city, where prey was plentiful. It was rare, however, for them to nest so low. Rhyme, as unsentimental as any scientist could be – especially the criminal forensic scientist that he was – nonetheless took a curious comfort in the creatures’ presence. Over the years, he’d shared his abode with a number of generations of peregrines. Mom was here at the moment, a glorious thing, sumptuously feathered in brown and gray, with beak and claws that glistened like gunmetal.

A man’s calm, humorous voice filled the silence. ‘No. You and Amelia cannot go to Greenland.’

‘Why not?’ Rhyme asked Thom Reston, an edge to his tone. The slim but sturdy man had been his caregiver for about as long as the line of falcons had resided outside the old structure. A quadriplegic, Rhyme was largely paralyzed south of his shoulders, and Thom was his arms and legs and considerably more. He had been fired as often as he’d quit but here he was and, both knew in their hearts, here he would remain.

‘Because you need to go someplace romantic. Florida, California.’

‘Cliché, cliché, cliché. Might as well go to Niagara Falls.’ Rhyme scowled.

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘I’m not even responding.’

‘What does Amelia say?’

‘She left it up to me. Which was irritating. Doesn’t she know I have better things to think about?’

‘You mentioned the Bahamas recently. You wanted to go back, you said.’

‘That was true at the time. It’s not true any longer. Can’t one change one’s mind? Hardly a crime.’

‘What’s the real reason for Greenland?’

Rhyme’s face – with its prominent nose and eyes like pistol muzzles – was predatory in its own right, much like the bird’s. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Could it be that there’s a practical reason you want to go to Greenland, a professional reason? A useful reason?’

Rhyme glanced at the single-malt scotch bottle sitting just out of reach. He was largely paralyzed, yes. But surgery and daily exercise had returned to him some ability to move his right arm and hand. Fate had helped too. The beam that had tumbled upon his neck from a crime scene many years ago and severed and crushed many nerves had left a few outlying strands intact, if injured and confused. He could grasp objects – like single-malt scotch bottles, to pick a random example – but he could not rise from his complex wheelchair to fetch them if Thom, playing nursemaid, kept them out of goddamn reach.

‘Not cocktail hour yet,’ the aide announced, noting the arc of his boss’s vision. ‘So, Greenland? ’Fess up.’

‘It’s underrated. Named “Greenland” while much of it’s barren. Not the least verdant. Compare Iceland. Quite green. I like the irony.’

‘You’re not answering.’

Rhyme sighed. He disliked being transparent and hugely disliked being caught being transparent. He would appeal to truth. ‘It seems that the Rigspolitiet, the Danish police, have been doing rather important research into a new system of horticultural spectrographic analysis in Greenland. A lab in Nuuk. That’s the capital, by the way. You can situate a sample in a much narrower geographic area than with standard systems.’ Rhyme’s brows rose involuntarily. ‘Nearly the cellular level. Imagine! We think all plants are the same—’

‘Not a sin of mine.’

Rhyme groused, ‘You know what I mean. This new technique can narrow down a target area to three meters!’ He repeated, ‘Imagine.’

‘I’m trying to. Greenland – no. And has Amelia actually deferred to you?’

‘She will. When I tell her about the spectrograph.’

‘How about England? She’d love that. Is that show on still, the one she likes? Top Gear? I think the original is off the air but I heard there’s a new version. She’d be great on it. They let people go out on the racetrack. She’s always talking about driving a hundred and eighty miles an hour on the wrong side of the road.’

‘England?’ Rhyme mocked. ‘You’ve just lost your argument. Greenland and England offer the same degree of romance.’

‘You’ll find some disagreement there.’

‘Not from the Greenlanders.’

Lincoln Rhyme did not travel much. The practical consequences of his disability added a layer of complication to journeys but physically, his doctors reported, there was no reason not to hit the road. His lungs were fine – he’d weaned himself off a ventilator years ago, the chest scar present but not prominent – and as long as such matters as the piss ’n’ shit details – his words – and low-chafing clothing were attended to, there was little chance of being afflicted by the quad’s bane: autonomic dysreflexia. A good portion of the world was disabled-accessible now – with most enterprises, from restaurants to bars to museums, offering ramps and special restrooms. (Rhyme and Sachs had shared a smile when Thom pointed out an article in the paper about a school that had recently installed a disabled ramp and bathroom; the place taught only one thing: tap dancing.)

No, much of Rhyme’s reluctance to travel and his reclusiveness were simply because he was, well, a recluse. By nature. Working in his laboratory – the parlor here, filled with equipment – and teaching and writing for scientific journals appealed to him far more than tired sights polished for tourists.

But, given what was on his and Sachs’s agenda in the next few weeks, a trip outside Manhattan was necessary; even he admitted that one could not honeymoon in one’s own hometown.

Plans for trips to labs specializing in horticultural spectrometry, or locales of wooing romance, were, though, put on hold for the moment; the door buzzer sounded. Rhyme glanced at the security video and thought: Well.