The Skin Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  Hell, this undercover stuff, you really had to think ahead.

  Pulaski joined Weller in front of the pet store, out of the sleet. In the window, just behind them, was a murky aquarium.

  A beach, any beach ...

  Weller said, 'Thought this'd be safer.' That faint Southern accent again.

  But, of course, Stan Walesa might be wondering why safety was an issue. He said, 'Safer?'

  But Weller said nothing in reply. He didn't wear a hat, and his bald head was dotted with moisture.

  Pulaski gave a shrug. 'You were saying you have a client who might want to meet with me.'

  'Maybe.'

  'I'm into import-export. Is that what your client needs?'

  'Could be.'

  'And what specifically you have in mind?'

  'Exactly' would've been better than 'specifically'. Tough guys wouldn't use the S word.

  Weller's voice dipped, hard to hear over the wind. 'You know that project that Richard put together down in Mexico?'

  Pulaski's gut thudded. Getting even better. The man was referring to an attempted hit of a Mexican anti-drug officer a few years ago. Logan had orchestrated an elaborate plan to kill the federale. This was great. If Weller knew about that, he wasn't quite who he claimed to be.

  My theory ...

  'Sure. I know it. He told me that that asshole fucked it up, Rhyme.'

  So the lawyer did know about the criminalist, after all.

  Pulaski offered, 'But Richard came up with a good plan.'

  'Yeah, it was.' Weller seemed more comfortable now that Pulaski had given him some details not known in public about Richard Logan. He eased closer. 'Well, my client might be interested in talking to you about that situation.'

  Your client or you? Pulaski wondered. He kept his eyes locked on Weller's. This was hard but he didn't waver.

  'What's there to talk about?'

  Weller said evasively: 'Could be renewed interest in an alternative approach to the situation. In Mexico. Mr Logan had been working on it when he died.'

  'I'm not sure what we're talking about,' Pulaski said.

  'A new approach.'

  'Oh.'

  'If it's to everybody's advantage.'

  'What kind of advantage?' Pulaski inquired. This seemed like a good question.

  'Significant.'

  That didn't seem like a particularly good answer. But he knew you had to play games like these - well, he supposed you did, since what he'd learned about undercover work was mostly from Blue Bloods and movies.

  'My client is looking for people he can trust. You might be one of those people. But we'd need to check you out more.'

  'I'll have to do some checking too.'

  'We'd expect that. And,' Weller said slowly, 'my client would need something from you. To show your commitment. Can you bring something to the table?'

  'What sort of "something"?'

  'You have to spend money to make money,' Weller said.

  So, he was being asked to invest. Cash. Good. Much better than having to bring them the head of a rival drug dealer to prove his loyalty.

  'That's not a problem,' Pulaski said dismissively, as if he could jump in his private jet, fly to Switzerland and pluck stacks of hundreds from his private bank.

  'What would you be willing to cough up?'

  This was a stumper. It was tough to get buy-money for sting operations. The brass knew there was always a chance of losing it. But he had no idea what the limits were. What would they do on Blue Bloods? He shrugged. 'A hundred K.'

  Weller nodded. 'That's a good figure.'

  And it was then that Pulaski thought: How did he know I'd come this way? There were three or four possible approaches to the hotel. And, hell, for that matter, how did he know I'd be on foot and not take a cab or drive? Earlier Weller had referred to parking in front of the Huntington Arms.

  One answer was that Weller, or somebody, had been following Pulaski.

  And there was only one reason for that. To set him up. Maybe he'd seen him come out of Rhyme's and looked up the owner of the townhouse.

  And here I am without a fucking wire and two blocks from the backup team and a gun on my ankle, a thousand miles away.

  'So. Glad this is moving along. Let me see about that money and--'

  But Weller wasn't listening. His eyes flickered past Pulaski, who spun around.

  Two unsmiling men in leather jackets approached. One with shaggy hair, one with a shaved head.

  When they noted Pulaski's gaze, they drew pistols and lunged.

  The young officer turned and started to sprint. He made it all of two yards before the third killer stepped out from behind the truck where he'd been waiting, wrapped his massive arm around the patrolman's throat and slammed the officer against the window of the pet shop.

  Weller stepped back. The hit man touched the gun muzzle to Pulaski's temple while, inside the store, a colorful toucan in a flamboyant Polynesian cage ruffled its feathers and watched with scant interest the goings-on outside.

  CHAPTER 54

  Rhyme phoned Rachel Parker and happened to get Lon Sellitto's son.

  The young man had come to town from upstate New York, where he was working after graduating from SUNY in Albany. Rhyme remembered the boy as being quiet and pleasant enough, though he'd had some anger issues and mood problems - common among the children of law enforcers. But that was years ago and now he seemed mature and steady. In a voice missing any of Lon's Brooklyn twang, Richard Sellitto told Rhyme that his father's condition was largely unchanged. He was still categorized as critical. Rhyme was pleased that the young man was doing everything he could to support Rachel and Sellitto's ex, Richard's mother.

  After he disconnected, Rhyme gave Cooper the update - which was really no update at all. He reflected that this was one of the most horrific aspects of poisoning: The substance wormed its way into your cells, destroying delicate tissues for days and weeks afterward. Bullets could be removed and wounds stitched. But poisons hid, residing, and killed at their leisure.

  Rhyme now returned to the chart containing the pictures of the tattoos.

  What on earth are you trying to say? he wondered yet again.

  A puzzle, a quotation, a code? He kept returning to the theory that the clues referred to a location. But where?

  His phone buzzed once more. He frowned looking at the caller ID. He didn't recognize it.

  He answered. 'Rhyme here.'

  'Lincoln.'

  'Rookie? Is that you? What's wrong?'

  'Yes, I--'

  'Where the hell have you been? The team's at the hotel, where you're meeting Weller. Or were supposed to be meeting. They've been in place for an hour. You never showed up.' He added sternly, 'We were, you can imagine, a little concerned.'

  'There was a problem.'

  Rhyme fell silent. 'And?'

  'I kind of got arrested.'

  Rhyme wasn't sure he'd heard. 'Say again.'

  'Arrested.'

  'Explain.'

  'I didn't get to the hotel. I got stopped before.'

  'I said explain. Not confuse.'

  Mel Cooper looked his way. Rhyme shrugged.

  'There's an agent with the NYBI here. He wants to talk to you.'

  The New York Bureau of Investigation?

  'Put him on.'

  'Hello, Detective Rhyme?'

  He didn't bother to correct the title.

  'Yes.'

  'This's Agent Tom Abner, NYBI.'

  'And what's going on, Agent Abner?' Rhyme was trying to be patient, though he had a feeling that Pulaski had screwed up the undercover set and ruined whatever chance they had to learn more about the associates of the late Watchmaker. And given the 'I got arrested' part, the screwup must've been pretty bad.

  'We've found out that Ron is an NYPD patrol officer in good standing, active duty. But nobody at headquarters knew about any undercover set he was running. Can you confirm that Ron was working for you on an operation?'

  'I'
m civilian, Agent Abner. A consultant. But, yes, he was running an op under the direction of Detective Amelia Sachs, Major Cases. An opportunity presented itself very fast. We didn't have time to go through channels. Ron was just making initial contact with some possible perps this morning.'

  'Hm. I see.'

  'What happened?'

  'Yesterday, an attorney named David Weller, based in LA, contacted us. He was retained by the family of a decedent, Richard Logan - the convict who died?'

  'Yes.' Rhyme sighed. And the whole fiasco began to unfold before him.

  'Well, Mr Weller said that somebody had come to the funeral home and was asking a lot of questions about Mr Logan. He seemed to want to meet the family or associates and suggested that he might want to participate in some of the illegal deals that Logan had started before he died. I suggested a sting to see what this fellow had in mind. Mr Weller agreed to help. We wired him up and he mentioned some crime in Mexico that Mr Logan had been involved in. Ron offered money to participate in another attempt to kill same official. As soon as he mentioned a figure we moved in.'

  Jesus. Like the most common prostitution sting.

  Rhyme said, 'Richard Logan had orchestrated some pretty complicated crimes when he was alive. He couldn't have been operating alone. We were trying to find some of his associates.'

  'Got it. But your officer was really pushing the bounds of undercover ops.'

  'He hasn't done that kind of thing before.'

  'That doesn't surprise me. Attorney Weller wasn't too happy about the whole thing, as you can imagine. But he's not going to pursue any complaint.'

  'Tell him we appreciate that. Can you have Ron call me?'

  'Yessir.'

  They disconnected and a moment later the parlor phone rang once more. It was Pulaski's undercover phone.

  'Rookie.'

  'I'm sorry, Lincoln. I--'

  'Don't apologize.'

  'I didn't handle it very well.'

  'I'm not so sure it worked out badly.'

  There was a pause. 'What do you mean?'

  'We learned one thing: Weller and his clients - the Logan family - don't have any connection with any of the Watchmaker's associates or any planned crimes. Otherwise, they wouldn't've dimed you out.'

  'I guess.'

  'You're free to go?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Well, the good news is we can let the Watchmaker rest in peace. No more distractions. We've got an unsub to catch. Get your ass back here. Now.'

  He disconnected before the young officer said anything more.

  It was then that Rhyme's phone rang and he received the news that there'd been a fourth attack.

  And when he heard that the killing had been in a tattoo parlor in downtown Manhattan, he asked immediately which one.

  Upon hearing that - not surprisingly - it was TT Gordon's shop, Rhyme sighed and lowered his head. 'No, no,' he whispered. For a moment Views of Death No. One and Two vied. Then the first prevailed and Rhyme called Sachs to tell her she had yet another scene to run.

  CHAPTER 55

  Amelia Sachs returned from the most recent crime scene in the Unsub 11-5 case. TT Gordon's tattoo parlor in the East Village.

  It turned out, though, that Gordon himself was not the victim. He'd been out of the parlor when the unsub snuck inside, locked the door and proceeded into the back room for the lethal tattooing session. The body was that of one of the artists who worked in the parlor, a man named Eddie Beaufort. He was a transplant from South Carolina who'd moved to New York a few years ago and was, Sachs had learned from Gordon, making a name for himself in the inking world.

  'We should've had somebody on the tattoo parlor, Rhyme,' she said.

  'Who would've thought he'd be at risk?' Rhyme was truly surprised that the unsub had tracked the artist down. How? It seemed unlikely but possible that he'd followed Gordon from Rhyme's. But the tat community would be a small one and word must've gotten back to the killer that Gordon was helping with the case. The unsub would have heard and gone to the parlor to kill him. Finding he wasn't there, maybe he had just decided to make clear that it was a bad idea to assist the police and picked for a victim the first employee he found.

  It was also time to send another message.

  Sachs described the scene: Beaufort, lying on his back. His shirt was off and the unsub had tattooed another part of the puzzle on his abdomen. She slid the SD card from her camera and displayed the pictures on the screen.

  Ron Pulaski, back from his car wreck of an undercover assignment, stood in front of the display with his arms crossed. 'They're not numerical order: the second, forty, seventeenth and the six hundredth.'

  Rhyme said, 'Good point. He could have gone numerically if he'd wanted to. Either the order is significant - or he wanted to scramble them for some reason. And we're ordinal again, not cardinal. "Fort"Y is the only cardinal number.'

  Mel Cooper now suggested, 'An encryption?'

  That was a possibility. But there were far too many combinations and no common reference point. In breaking a simple code in which letters are converted to numbers, you can start with the knowledge that the letter 'e' appears most frequently in the English language and preliminarily assign that value to the most commonly occurring numbers in the code. But here, they had far too few numbers - and they were combined with words, which suggested that the numbers did not mean anything other than what they appeared to be, cryptic though that meaning was.

  It could still be a location, but this number eliminated longitude or latitude. One or more addresses?

  Pulaski said, 'Beaufort wasn't killed underground.'

  Rhyme pointed out, 'No, the unsub's motive was different here: to kill TT Gordon specifically or at least somebody in the parlor. He didn't need to follow his standard MO. Now, let's look at what else you collected, Sachs.'

  She and Cooper walked to the examination table. Both donned gloves and face masks.

  'No prints, finger or footwear,' she said. 'ME has the blood workup. I told him we needed the results yesterday. He said it was all hands on deck.'

  'Other trace?' Rhyme asked.

  Sachs nodded at several bags.

  The criminalist barked, 'Mel, get on that.'

  As Cooper picked up and examined each one, then analyzed the contents, Sachs ran through the other pictures of the scene. Eddie Beaufort, hands cuffed behind him and lying on his back, like the others. It was obvious he'd suffered gastrointestinal symptoms and severe vomiting.

  The phone rang with a familiar number.

  Sachs gave a laugh. 'That's as ASAP as it gets.'

  'Doctor, it's Lincoln Rhyme,' he said to the medical examiner. 'What do you have?'

  'Odd, Captain.' Using Rhyme's old title. It never failed to be both jarring and familiar.

  'How? Exactly.'

  'The victim was killed by amatoxin alpha-amanitin.'

  'Death cap mushroom,' Cooper said. 'Amanita phalloides.'

  'That's it,' the medical examiner said.

  Rhyme knew them well. Amanitas are known for three things: a smell like honey, a very pleasant taste and the ability to kill more efficiently than any other fungus on earth.

  'And the odd part?'

  'The dosage. I've never seen a concentration this high. Usually it takes days to die, but he lasted about an hour I'd guess.'

  'And a pretty bad hour,' Sachs said.

  'Well, that's right,' said the medical examiner, as if this had never occurred to him.

  'Any other substances?'

  'More propofol. Just like the others.'

  'Anything else?'

  'Nope.'

  Rhyme grimaced and began to hit disconnect. Sachs called, 'Thanks.'

  'You're--'

  Click.

  'Keep going, Mel,' Rhyme said.

  Cooper ran another sample of trace through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. 'This is--'

  'Don't say "odd",' Rhyme snapped. 'I've had enough odd.'

  'Troubling. That was t
he word.'

  'Go on.'

  'Nitrocellulose, di-ethylene glycol dinitrate, dibutyl phthalate, diphenylamine, potassium chloride, graphite.'

  Rhyme frowned. 'How much?'

  'A lot.'

  'What is it, Lincoln?' Pulaski asked.

  'Explosives. Gunpowder, specifically. Smokeless - modern formulation.'

  Sachs asked the tech, 'From a discharged weapon?'

  'No. Some actual grains. Pre-burn.'

  Pulaski asked, 'He reloads his own ammunition?'

  It was a reasonable suggestion. But Rhyme considered this for a moment and then said, 'No, I don't think so. Usually it's only snipers and hunters who reload. And our unsub hasn't left any evidence that he's either. Not much interest in firearms at all.' Rhyme stared at the computer printout of the GC/MS. 'No, I think he's using the raw powder for an improvised explosive device.' He sighed. 'Poison's not enough. Now he wants to blow something up.'

  * * *

  537 St. Marks Street

  Victim: Eddie Beaufort, 38 - Employee at TT Gordon's tattoo parlor - Probably not intended victim

  Perpetrator: Presumably Unsub 11-5

  COD: Poisoning with amatoxin alpha-amanitin (from Amanita phalloides, death cap mushroom), introduced via tattooing

  Tattoo reads: 'the six hundredth'

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

  Handcuffs - Generic, unable to source

  Trace - Nitrocellulose, di-ethylene glycol dinitrate, dibutyl phthalate, diphenylamine, potassium chloride, graphite: smokeless gunpowder Planning to use improvised explosive device?

  * * *

  CHAPTER 56

  'You know how skeptical I am of motives.'

  Sachs said nothing, but a cresting smile told her reaction.

  Easing his wheelchair up to the evidence boards, Rhyme continued, 'But there's a time when it's appropriate to ask about them - particularly when we've built up a solid evidentiary base. Which we have. The possibility of a bomb - possibility, mind you - may take this out of psychotic-perp world. There's a rational motive at work possibly. Our unsub's not necessarily satisfying deep-seated yearnings to do the Bone Collector one better. I think he may have something more calculated in mind. Yes, yes, this could be good,' he added enthusiastically. 'I want to look at the victims again.'

  The team perused the charts. Rhyme said, 'We can take Eddie Beaufort out of the equation. He was killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lon and Seth and I were attacked to slow us down. There were four intended attacks as part of his plan: We ruined two of them - Harriet Stanton at the hospital and Braden Alexander at the Belvedere Apartments. And two were successful. Chloe and Samantha. Why those four?' Rhyme whispered, 'What about them beckoned?'