The Skin Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  She processed the body, scraping nails (nothing obvious this time, as with Chloe), taking samples of the blood, the body fluids and presumably the poison oozing from the wounds. Then scanning her for prints, though he'd worn gloves again, of course.

  Sachs walked the grid, collecting trace near the body and distant samples of dirt and trace too, for control. She studied the ground. 'Booties again. No tread marks.'

  'He's wearing new shoes,' Rhyme said. 'He'll've pitched the others, the famous Bass size elevens. They're in the sewer in the Bronx by now.'

  As she walked the grid, she noticed something against one of the far walls. At first she thought it was a rat lying on its side. The lump wasn't moving so she speculated that the creature chewed a bit of Samantha's flesh, ingested the poison and crawled away to die.

  But as she got closer she noted that, no, it was a purse.

  'Got her handbag.'

  'Good. Maybe there'll be trace on that.'

  She collected it and dropped the leather purse into an evidence bag.

  This and all of the other samples of trace, also bagged in plastic or paper, she added to a milk crate.

  Sachs wanded with the alternative light source - Samantha's body, the ground of the octagon, the tunnels. Again, Unsub 11-5 had punched and probed her flesh. She noted from the bootie prints that the unsub had walked up and down the tunnel several times to and from the debris pile, which seemed curious, and she told Rhyme. Maybe because he'd heard intruders, he suggested. Or maybe he'd left some of his gear at the mouth. She took pictures and finally returned to the access door, muttering thanks once more to no one in particular that there was nothing claustrophobic about this search.

  Once on the outside again, she handed off to the other CS techs, who had finished with the secondary scenes. Detective Jean Eagleston reported the not-surprising news that any of the perp's movements around the train tracks and the entrance to the tunnel from the outside were obliterated by the rain and sleet.

  Aside from what presumably had been a brief struggle in the women's room, there were no signs that he'd touched anything. There were no tool marks in the screws he'd removed to gain access to the bathroom. And no footprints either, except those of dozens of street shoes - from the people who'd used the toilet.

  The sleet beat an irritating drum tap on the hood she wore and she told Rhyme she was disconnecting the video camera for fear the moisture would short out the expensive, high-def system.

  She returned to her car, where she filled out chain-of-custody cards for each item collected, working under the trunk lid to keep the cards and evidence bags dry. Stripping off the Tyvek suit, she slipped it into a burn bag in the crime scene van and returned to the street, pulling on her leather jacket.

  Sachs noticed Nancy Simpson, the detective, speaking to Bo Haumann. The other officers who'd gone off in pursuit of the fish were straggling back.

  Haumann rubbed his grizzled crew cut as Sachs walked up. 'Nothing. Nobody saw him. But--' He glanced up at the inhospitable skies. 'Not a lot of people out tonight.'

  She nodded then headed over to Lon Sellitto, who was talking to a group of people about Samantha's age. She told him about the pursuit - of the unsub or an innocent voyeur - the unsuccessful pursuit. He took the news with a grunt, then they both turned to the others, who were, the detective reported, Samantha's fellow diners. She'd deduced this earlier from their expressions.

  'I'm sorry for your loss,' Sachs said. One woman's face was streaked with tears - a co-worker. The other woman, a blonde, looked put out and uneasy. Sachs guessed she had coke in her purse. Let it go.

  The two men were angry and resolute. None of these had been Samantha's lover, it seemed. But one was her roommate; the greatest sorrow within the four resided in his eyes.

  She and Sellitto both asked questions, learning the unsurprising news that Samantha Levine had no enemies that they'd ever heard of. She was a businesswoman and had never been in trouble with the law. No problems with former boyfriends.

  Another random death. In some ways this was the most tragic of all crimes: the happenstance victim.

  And in many ways the most difficult to solve.

  It was then that a man in an expensive suit - no overcoat - came hurrying up to them, oblivious to the sleet and cold. He was in his fifties, tanned, hair carefully cut. He wasn't tall but was quite handsome and well proportioned.

  'Mr Clevenger!' one of the women cried and hugged him. Samantha's co-worker. He gripped her hard and greeted the others in Samantha's party with a somber nod.

  'Louise! Is it true? I just heard. I just got a call. Is she, Samantha? Is she gone?' He stepped back and the woman he'd been embracing said, 'Yes, I can't believe it. She's ... I mean, she's dead.'

  The newcomer turned to Sachs, who asked, 'So you knew Ms Levine?'

  'Yes, yes. She works for me. She was ... I was talking to her a few hours ago. We had a meeting ... just a few hours ago.' He nodded at the glossy building beside the restaurant. 'There. I'm Todd Clevenger.' He handed her a card. International Fiber Optic Networks. He was the company's president and CEO.

  Sellitto asked, 'Was there any reason anybody would want to hurt her? Anything about her job that was sensitive? That might've exposed her to threats?'

  'Can't imagine it. All we do is lay fiber optic for broadband Internet ... just communications. Anyway, she never said anything, like she was in danger. I can't imagine. She was the sweetest person in the world. Smart. Really smart.'

  The woman named Louise said to Sachs, 'I was thinking about something. There was that woman killed the other day. In SoHo. Is this the same psycho?'

  'I can't really comment. It's an ongoing investigation.'

  'But that woman was killed underground too. Right? In a tunnel. It was on the news.'

  The scrawny young artistic-looking man, who'd identified himself as Raoul, Samantha's roommate, said, 'That's right. It was the same thing. The, you know, MO.'

  Sachs again demurred. She and Sellitto asked a few more questions but it was soon clear there was nothing more these people could help them with.

  Wrong place, wrong time.

  A happenstance victim ...

  Ultimately, in cases where the victim had been alone with the perpetrator, no witnesses, the truth would have to be revealed through the evidence.

  And this was what Sachs and the other Crime Scene officers now packed carefully into the trunk of her Torino.

  In five minutes she was racing up the West Side Highway, blue light on the dash pulsing madly, as she skidded around cars and trucks - the slaloming more a function of her powerful engine and her comfort in high revs than the inclement weather.

  CHAPTER 31

  At close to eleven p.m. Rhyme heard Sachs enter the hallway, her arrival announced by the modulating hiss of sleet-filled wind.

  'Ah, finally.'

  She stepped into the parlor a moment later, holding a large milk crate containing a dozen plastic and paper bags. She nodded a greeting to Mel Cooper, who sagged with fatigue but seemed game to start on the analysis.

  Rhyme asked quickly, 'Sachs, you said you thought he might be around the scene?'

  'That's right.'

  'What came of that?'

  'Nothing. Bo sent a half-dozen ESU boys and girls after him. But he was gone. And I didn't get a good look at him. It was maybe nothing. But my gut told me it was him.' She called up a map of Hell's Kitchen on the main computer monitor and pointed out the restaurant, Provence2, and on the corner an office building. 'He went down there but, see? It's only a few blocks from Times Square. He got lost in the crowd. Not sure it was him but it's too much of a coincidence to ignore completely. He seems curious about the investigation; after all, the perp did come back to Elizabeth Street and spied on me through the manhole cover.'

  Eye-to-eye ...

  'Well, let's get to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?'

  Thom Reston said firmly, 'Find out - what she has, that is - but find out quickly. Y
ou're going to bed soon, Lincoln. It's been a long day.'

  Rhyme scowled. But he also accepted that the caregiver's job was to keep him healthy and alive. Quadriplegics were susceptible to a number of troublesome conditions, the most dangerous of which was autonomic dysreflexia - a spike in blood pressure brought on by physical stress. It wasn't clear that exhaustion was a precipitating factor but Thom had never been one to take anything for granted.

  'Yes, yes, yes. Just a few minutes.'

  'Nothing spectacular,' Sachs said, nodding at the evidence.

  But then, Rhyme reflected, there rarely were any smoking guns. Crime scene work was incremental. And obvious finds, he felt, were automatically suspect; they might be planted evidence. Which happened more than one might suspect.

  First, Sachs displayed the photographs of the tattoo.

  Surrounded by the scalloped border that, according to TT Gordon, was in some way significant.

  Which made its cryptic nature all the more infuriating.

  'First "the second" and now "forty". No article preceding this one but, again, no punctuation.'

  What the hell was he saying? A gap of thirty-eight from two to forty. And why the switch from ordinal to cardinal? Rhyme mused, 'Smells like a place to me, an address. GPS or longitude and latitude coordinates. But not enough to go on yet.'

  He gave up speculating and turned back to the evidence she'd collected. Sachs selected a bag and gave it to Cooper. He extracted the cotton ball inside.

  'The poison,' Sachs said. 'One sample's gone to the ME's Office but I want a head start. Burn it, Mel.'

  He ran the materials through the chromatograph and a few minutes later had the mass spectrum. 'It's a combination of atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.'

  Rhyme was staring at the ceiling. 'That comes from some plant ... yes, yes ... Hell, I can't remember what.'

  Cooper typed the cocktail of ingredients into the toxin database and reported a moment later, 'Angel's trumpet: Brugmansia.'

  'Yes,' Rhyme called. 'Of course that's it. But I don't know the details.'

  Cooper explained that it was a South American plant, particularly popular among criminals in Colombia, who called it devil's breath. They blew it into the faces of their victims and the paralyzing, amnesiac drug rendered them unconscious or, if they remained awake, unable to fight their assailants.

  And with the right dose, as with Samantha Levine, the drug could induce death in a matter of minutes.

  Coincidentally, at that moment, the parlor landline rang: the medical examiner's office.

  Cooper lifted an eyebrow, looking toward Sachs. 'Must be a slow night. Or you scared them into prioritizing us, Amelia.'

  Rhyme knew which.

  The ME official on call confirmed that devil's breath was the poison that had been used on Samantha Levine's abdomen in the tattooed message. He added that it was a highly concentrated version of the toxin. And there was residue of propofol in her bloodstream. Cooper thanked him.

  Sachs and the tech continued to examine the trace she'd collected. This time, though, they found no variation from the control samples, which meant the residues found on her body and where the unsub had walked in the crime scene had not been tracked in by him; they were all indigenous to the underground stockyard pen.

  That, in turn, meant the substances wouldn't lead to anywhere the perp might have been.

  'Ergo,' Rhyme muttered, 'fucking useless.'

  Finally, Sachs used tongs to pick up a plastic bag containing what seemed to Rhyme to be a purse. 'Thought it was a rat at first. Brown, you know. And the strap seemed to be the tail. Be careful. There's a booby trap inside.' A glance at Cooper.

  'What?' Rhyme asked.

  She explained, 'It was sitting by itself about ten feet from Samantha's body. It just felt wrong being there. I looked at it closely and saw a needle sticking up. Very small. I used forceps to collect the bag.' Sachs added that she'd been on the lookout for traps because the NYPD psychologist, Terry Dobyns, had told them the perp might start targeting his pursuers.

  'That's sneaky,' Cooper said, donning an eye loupe to examine the needle. 'Hypodermic. I'd say thirty-gauge. Very small. White substance inside.'

  Rhyme wheeled close and looked; his keen eyes could make out a tiny glint near the clasp.

  Cooper selected a hemostat and then cautiously lifted the purse from the bag.

  'Check for explosives,' Rhyme said. This wasn't the unsub's MO but you could never be too careful.

  The scan came back negative. Still, Cooper decided to put the purse in a containment vessel and used remote arms to open the bag, given the possibility that it was also rigged with some trap that might spray with toxin whoever opened it.

  But, no, the needle was the only trap. The contents were mundane, if wrenching, clues to a life now abruptly ended: a health club membership card, a breast cancer donation thank-you note, a discount certificate to a Midtown restaurant. Pictures of children - nieces and nephews, it seemed.

  As for the booby trap, Cooper extracted the needle carefully.

  'It's small,' Rhyme said. 'What do we make of that?'

  Cooper said, 'Can be used for insulin but this type is mostly used by plastic surgeons.'

  Rhyme reminded, 'He's got propofol too. A general anesthetic. Could be that he's planning some cosmetic surgery as part of his escape plan. Though maybe he just broke into a medical supply house and stole what he wanted. Sachs, check if there've been any reports of that in the past month or so in the area.' She stepped away to make a call downtown, requesting an NCIC search. Rhyme continued, 'But more to the point - excuse the expression - that needle in particular: What's inside his little present to us? Is it more of the angel's trumpet?'

  Cooper ran the sample. And a moment later he read the results. 'Nope. It's worse. Well, I shouldn't say worse. That's a qualitative judgment. I'll just say it's more efficient.'

  'Meaning deadlier?' Rhyme asked.

  'A lot. Strychnine.' Cooper explained: The toxin came from Strychnos, a genus of trees and climbing shrubs. The substance was popular as a rodenticide. It had been a common murder weapon a century ago though it was less so now since it was easily traced. Strychnine was the most pain-inducing of any toxin.

  'Not enough to kill an adult,' Cooper said. 'But it would keep the victim out of commission for weeks and might cause brain damage.'

  On the positive side, though, from the investigators' perspective, the poison was still sold commercially as a pesticide. Rhyme mentioned this to Sachs and Cooper.

  'I'll see if we can find any commercial suppliers,' the tech said. 'They have to keep records of poison sales.'

  Cooper was looking at his computer, though, and frowning. 'Dozens of sources. Brick-and-mortar stores. And all he'd need is a fake ID to buy some. Pay cash. No trace.'

  In the world of forensic science too many options were as bad as too few.

  Sachs got a phone call and listened for a moment, then thanked the person on the other end of the line and disconnected. 'No reported thefts of drugs or other medical equipment or supplies in the area, the last thirty days, except a few stoners or crack-heads knocking over pharmacies; they all got busted. No propofol missing.'

  Thom appeared in the doorway.

  'Ah, my, what a stern expression.'

  'Close to midnight, Lincoln You're going to bed.'

  'Yes, dear, yes, dear.' Then Rhyme said to Cooper, 'Be careful, Mel. No reason for him to know you're working this case but still, be careful. Sachs, text Lon and Pulaski and tell them the same thing.' A glance at the mass spectrum of the strychnine. 'We're targets now. He's declared war.'

  She sent messages to the two officers, then stepped to a clean whiteboard and wrote down the evidence, as well as the information she and Lon Sellitto had learned about the victim.

  * * *

  614 W. 54th Street

  Victim: Samantha Levine, 32 - Worked for International Fiber Optic Networks

  - Probably no connection to Unsub
>
  - No sexual assault, but touching of skin

  Unsub 11-5 - See details from prior scene

  - Might have returned to the scene

  No sightings

  - No friction ridges

  - No footprints

  COD: Poisoning with Brugmansia, introduced via tattooing - Angel's trumpet, devil's breath

  - Atropine, hyoscyamine, scopolamine

  Tattoo - 'forty' surrounded by scarring scallops

  - Why cardinal number?

  Sedated with propofol - How obtained? Access to medical supplies? (No local thefts)

  Location - Abducted from restroom of Provence2 restaurant, basement

  - Kill site was underneath restroom, in 19th-century slaughterhouse culling area underground

  - Similar infrastructure to earlier scene:

  IFON

  ConEd router

  Metropolitan Transit Authority DC current feed

  Department of Environmental Protection pipe

  Flashlight - Generic, cannot be sourced

  Handcuffs - Generic, cannot be sourced

  Duct tape - Generic, cannot be sourced

  No trace

  Purse left as booby trap - Plastic surgeon's hypodermic needle

  - Strychnine loaded into needle

  Can't locate source

  Probably not enough to kill

  * * *

  Rhyme gazed at the entries and then shrugged. 'It's as mysterious as the message he's trying to send.'

  Thom said, 'Witching hour.'

  'Okay, you win.'

  Cooper pulled his jacket on and said good night.

  'Sachs?' Rhyme asked. 'You coming upstairs?'

  She'd turned from the board and was staring out the window at the stark, ice-coated branches bending in the persistent wind.

  'What?' She hadn't heard, it seemed.

  'You coming to bed?'

  'I'll be a few more minutes.'

  Thom climbed the stairs and Rhyme wheeled to the elevator that would take him to the second floor. Once there, he rolled toward the bedroom. He paused, though, cocked his head, listening. Sachs was on the phone, speaking softly, but he could still make out the words.