The Bone Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  Let's do it.

  She waded into the sea of cars and trucks and stopped the northbound lanes cold. Several drivers tried end runs and she had to issue two citations and finally drag trash cans out into the middle of the street as a barricade to make sure the good residents did their civic duty.

  Sachs had finally remembered the next of the first officer's ADAPT rules.

  P is for Protect the crime scene.

  The sound of angry horns began to fill the hazy morning sky, soon supplemented by the drivers' angrier shouts. A short time later she heard the sirens join the cacophony as the first of the emergency vehicles arrived.

  Forty minutes later, the scene was swarming with uniforms and investigators, dozens of them--a lot more than a hit in Hell's Kitchen, however gruesome the cause of death, seemed to warrant. But, Sachs learned from another cop, this was a hot case, a media groper--the vic was one of two passengers who'd arrived at JFK last night, gotten into a cab and headed for the city. They'd never arrived at their homes.

  "CNN's watching," the uniform whispered.

  So Amelia Sachs wasn't surprised to see blond Vince Peretti, chief of the Central Investigation and Resource Division, which oversaw the crime scene unit, climb over the top of the embankment and pause as he brushed dust from his thousand-dollar suit.

  She was, however, surprised to see him notice her and gesture her over, a faint smile on his clean-cut face. It occurred to her she was about to receive a nod of gratitude for her Cliffhanger routine. Saved the fingerprints on that ladder, boys. Maybe even a commendation. In the last hour of the last day of Patrol. Going out in a blaze of glory.

  He looked her up and down. "Patrolwoman, you're no rookie, are you? I'm safe in making that assumption."

  "I'm sorry, sir?"

  "You're not a rookie, I assume."

  She wasn't, not technically, though she had only three years' service under her belt, unlike most of the other Patrol officers her age; they had nine or ten years in. Sachs had foundered for a few years before attending the academy. "I'm not sure what you're asking."

  He looked exasperated and the smile vanished. "You were first officer?"

  "Yessir."

  "Why'd you close down Eleventh Avenue? What were you thinking of?"

  She looked along the broad street, which was still blocked by her trash-can barricade. She'd gotten used to the honking but realized now it was really quite loud; the line of cars extended for miles.

  "Sir, the first officer's job is to arrest a perp, detain any witnesses, protect--"

  "I know the ADAPT rule, officer. You closed the street to protect the crime scene?"

  "Yessir. I didn't think the perp would park on the cross street. He could be seen too easily from those apartments. See, there? Eleventh seemed like a better choice."

  "Well, it was a wrong choice. There were no footprints on that side of the tracks, and two sets going to the ladder that leads up to Thirty-seven."

  "I closed Thirty-seven too."

  "That's my point. That's all that needed to be closed. And the train?" he asked. "Why'd you stop that?"

  "Well, sir. I thought that a train going through the scene might disturb evidence. Or something."

  "Or something, officer?"

  "I didn't express myself very well, sir. I meant--"

  "What about Newark Airport?"

  "Yessir." She looked around for help. There were officers nearby but they were busily ignoring the dressing-down. "What exactly about Newark?"

  "Why didn't you shut that down too?"

  Oh, wonderful. A schoolmarm. Her Julia Roberts lips grew taut but she said reasonably, "Sir, in my judgment, it seemed likely that--"

  "The New York Thruway would've been a good choice too. And the Jersey Pike and Long Island Expressway. I-70, all the way to St. Louis. Those are likely means of escape."

  She lowered her head slightly and stared back at Peretti. The two of them were exactly the same height, though his heels were higher.

  "I've gotten calls from the commissioner," he continued, "the head of the Port Authority, the UN secretary-general's office, the head of that expo--" He nodded toward the Javits Center. "We've fucked up the conference schedule, a U.S. senator's speech and traffic on the entire West Side. The train tracks were fifty feet from the vic and the street you closed was a good two hundred feet away and thirty above. I mean, even Hurricane Eva didn't fuck up Amtrak's Northeast Corridor like this."

  "I just thought--"

  Peretti smiled. Because Sachs was a beautiful woman--her "foundering" before attending the academy had involved steady assignments for the Chantelle Modeling Agency on Madison Avenue--the cop chose to forgive her.

  "Patrolwoman Sachs"--he glanced at the name tag on her chest, flattened chastely by the American Body Armor vest--"an object lesson. Crime scene work is a balance. It'd be nice if we could cordon off the whole city after every homicide and detain about three million people. But we can't do that. I say this constructively. For your edification."

  "Actually, sir," she said brusquely, "I'm transferring out of Patrol. Effective as of noon today."

  He nodded, smiled cheerfully. "Then, enough said. But for the record, it was your decision to stop the train and close the street."

  "Yessir, it was," she said smartly. "No mistake about that."

  He jotted this into a black watchbook with slashing strokes of his sweaty pen.

  Oh, please . . .

  "Now, remove those garbage cans. You direct traffic until the street's clear again. You hear me?"

  Without a yessir or nosir or any other acknowledgment she wandered to Eleventh Avenue and slowly began removing the garbage cans. Every single driver who passed her scowled or muttered something. Sachs glanced at her watch.

  An hour to go.

  I can live with it.

  TWO

  With a terse flutter of wings the peregrine dropped onto the window ledge. The light outside, midmorning, was brilliant and the air looked fiercely hot.

  "There you are," the man whispered. Then cocked his head at the sound of the buzzer of the door downstairs.

  "Is that him?" he shouted toward the stairs. "Is it?"

  Lincoln Rhyme heard nothing in response and turned back to the window. The bird's head swiveled, a fast, jerky movement that the falcon nevertheless made elegant. Rhyme observed that its talons were bloody. A piece of yellow flesh dangled from the black nutshell beak. It extended a short neck and eased to the nest in movements reminiscent not of a bird's but a snake's. The falcon dropped the meat into the upturned mouth of the fuzzy blue hatchling. I'm looking, Rhyme thought, at the only living creature in New York City with no predator. Except maybe God Himself.

  He heard the footsteps come up the stairs slowly.

  "Was that him?" he asked Thom.

  The young man answered, "No."

  "Who was it? The doorbell rang, didn't it?"

  Thom's eyes went to the window. "The bird's back. Look, bloodstains on your windowsill. Can you see them?"

  The female falcon inched into view. Blue-gray like a fish, iridescent. Her head scanned the sky.

  "They're always together. Do they mate for life?" Thom wondered aloud. "Like geese?"

  Rhyme's eyes returned to Thom, who was bent forward at his trim, youthful waist, gazing at the nest through the spattered window.

  "Who was it?" Rhyme repeated. The young man was stalling now and it irritated Rhyme.

  "A visitor."

  "A visitor? Ha." Rhyme snorted. He tried to recall when his last visitor had been here. It must have been three months ago. Who'd it been? That reporter maybe or some distant cousin. Well, Peter Taylor, one of Rhyme's spinal cord specialists. And Blaine had been here several times. But she of course was not a vis-i-tor.

  "It's freezing," Thom complained. His reaction was to open the window. Immediate gratification. Youth.

  "Don't open the window," Rhyme ordered. "And tell me who the hell's here."

  "It's freezing."
<
br />   "You'll disturb the bird. You can turn the air conditioner down. I'll turn it down."

  "We were here first," Thom said, further lifting the huge pane of window. "The birds moved in with full knowledge of you." The falcons glanced toward the noise, glaring. But then they always glared. They remained on the ledge, lording over their domain of anemic ginkgo trees and alternate-side-of-the-street parkers.

  Rhyme repeated. "Who is it?"

  "Lon Sellitto."

  "Lon?"

  What was he doing here?

  Thom examined the room. "The place is a mess."

  Rhyme didn't like the fuss of cleaning. He didn't like the bustle, the noise of the vacuum--which he found particularly irritating. He was content here, as it was. This room, which he called his office, was on the second floor of his gothic townhouse on the Upper West Side of the city, overlooking Central Park. The room was large, twenty-by-twenty, and virtually every one of those feet was occupied. Sometimes he closed his eyes, playing a game, and tried to detect the smell of the different objects in the room here. The thousands of books and magazines, the Tower of Pisa stacks of photocopies, the hot transistors of the TV, the dust-frosted lightbulbs, the cork bulletin boards. Vinyl, peroxide, latex, upholstery.

  Three different kinds of single-malt Scotch.

  Falcon shit.

  "I don't want to see him. Tell him I'm busy."

  "And a young cop. Ernie Banks. No, he was a baseball player, right? You really should let me clean. You never notice how filthy someplace is till people come to call."

  "Come to call? My, that sounds quaint. Victorian. How does this sound? Tell 'em to get the hell out. How's that for fin-de-siecle etiquette?"

  A mess. . .

  Thom was speaking of the room but Rhyme supposed he meant his boss too.

  Rhyme's hair was black and thick as a twenty-year-old's--though he was twice that age--but the strands were wild and bushy, desperately in need of a wash and cut. His face sprouted a dirty-looking three days' growth of black beard and he'd wakened with an incessant tickle in his ear, which meant that those hairs needed trimming as well. Rhyme's nails were long, finger and toe, and he'd been wearing the same clothes for a week--polka-dotted pajamas, god-awful ugly. His eyes were narrow, deep brown, and set in a face that Blaine had told him on a number of occasions, passionate and otherwise, was handsome.

  "They want to talk to you," Thom continued. "They say it's very important."

  "Well, bully for them."

  "You haven't seen Lon for nearly a year."

  "Why does that mean I want to see him now? Have you scared off the bird? I'll be pissed if you have."

  "It's important, Lincoln."

  "Very important, I recall you saying. Where's that doctor? He might've called. I was dozing earlier. And you were out."

  "You've been awake since six a.m."

  "No." He paused. "I woke up, yes. But then I dozed off. I was sound asleep. Did you check messages?"

  Thom said, "Yes. Nothing from him."

  "He said he'd be here midmorning."

  "And it's just past eleven. Maybe we'll hold off notifying air-sea rescue. What do you say?"

  "Have you been on the phone?" Rhyme asked abruptly. "Maybe he tried to call while you were on."

  "I was talking to--"

  "Did I say anything?" Rhyme asked. "Now you're angry. I didn't say you shouldn't be making phone calls. You can do that. You've always been able to do that. My point is just that he might've called while you were on the line."

  "No, your point this morning is to be a shit."

  "There you go. You know, they have this thing--call waiting. You can get two calls at once. I wish we had that. What does my old friend Lon want? And his friend the baseball player?"

  "Ask them."

  "I'm asking you."

  "They want to see you. That's all I know."

  "About something vay-ree im-por-tant."

  "Lincoln." Thom sighed. The good-looking young man ran his hand through his blond hair. He wore tan slacks and a white shirt, with a blue floral tie, immaculately knotted. When he'd hired Thom a year ago Rhyme had said he could wear jeans and T-shirts if he wanted. But he'd been dressed impeccably every day since. Rhyme didn't know why it contributed to the decision to keep the young man on, but it had. None of Thom's predecessors had lasted more than six weeks. The number of those who quit was exactly equal to the firees.

  "All right, what did you tell them?"

  "I told them to give me a few minutes to make sure you were decent then they could come up. Briefly."

  "You did that. Without asking me. Thank you very much."

  Thom retreated a few steps and called down the narrow stairway to the first floor, "Come on, gentlemen."

  "They told you something, didn't they?" Rhyme said. "You're holding out on me."

  Thom didn't answer and Rhyme watched the two men approach. As they entered the room Rhyme spoke first. He said to Thom, "Close the curtain. You've already upset the birds way too much."

  Which really meant only that he'd had enough of the sputtering sunlight.

  Mute.

  With the foul, sticky tape on her mouth she couldn't speak a word and that made her feel more helpless than the metal handcuffs tight on her wrists. Than the grip of his short, strong fingers on her biceps.

  The taxi driver, still in his ski mask, led her down the grimy, wet corridor, past rows of ducts and piping. They were in the basement of an office building. She had no idea where.

  If I could talk to him . . .

  T.J. Colfax was a player, the bitch of Morgan Stanley's third floor. A negotiator.

  Money? You want money? I'll get you money, lots of it, boy. Bushels. She thought this a dozen times, trying to catch his eye, as if she could actually force the words into his thoughts.

  Pleeeeeeeease, she begged silently, and began thinking about the mechanics of cashing in her 401(k) and giving him her retirement fund. Oh, please . . .

  She remembered last night: The man turning back from the fireworks, dragging them from the cab, handcuffing them. He'd thrown them into the trunk and they'd begun driving again. First over rough cobblestones and broken asphalt then smooth roads then rough again. She heard the whir of wheels on a bridge. More turns, more rough roads. Finally, the cab stopped and the driver got out and seemed to open a gate or some doors. He drove into a garage, she thought. All the sounds of the city were cut off and the car's bubbling exhaust rose in volume, reverberating off close walls.

  Then the cab trunk opened and the man pulled her out. He yanked the diamond ring off her finger and pocketed it. Then he led her past walls of spooky faces, faded paintings of blank eyes staring at her, a butcher, a devil, three sorrowful children--painted on the crumbling plaster. Dragged her down into a moldy basement and dumped her on the floor. He clopped upstairs, leaving her in the dark, surrounded by a sickening smell--rotting flesh, garbage. There she'd lain for hours, sleeping a little, crying a lot. She'd wakened abruptly at a loud sound. A sharp explosion. Nearby. Then more troubled sleep.

  A half hour ago he'd come for her again. Led her to the trunk and they'd driven for another twenty minutes. Here. Wherever here was.

  They now walked into a dim basement room. In the center was a thick black pipe; he handcuffed her to it then gripped her feet and pulled them out straight in front of her, propping her in a sitting position. He crouched and tied her legs together with thin rope--it took several minutes; he was wearing leather gloves. Then he rose and gazed at her for a long moment, bent down and tore her blouse open. He walked around behind her and she gasped, feeling his hands on her shoulders, probing, squeezing her shoulder blades.

  Crying, pleading through the tape.

  Knowing what was coming.

  The hands moved down, along her arms, and then under them and around the front of her body. But he didn't touch her breasts. No, as the hands spidered across her skin they seemed to be searching for her ribs. He prodded them and stroked. T.J. shivered
and tried to pull away. He gripped her tight and caressed some more, pressing hard, feeling the give of the bone.

  He stood. She heard receding footsteps. For a long moment there was silence except for the groans of air conditioners and elevators. Then she barked a frightened grunt at a sound right behind her. A repetitive noise. Wsssh. Wsssh. Very familiar but something she couldn't place. She tried to turn to see what he was doing but couldn't. What was it? Listening to the rhythmic sound, over and over and over. It took her right back to her mother's house.

  Wsssh. Wsssh.

  Saturday morning in the small bungalow in Bedford, Tennessee. It was the only day her mother didn't work and she devoted most of it to housecleaning. T.J. would wake up to a hot sun and stumble downstairs to help her. Wsssh. As she cried at this memory she listened to the sound and wondered why on earth he was sweeping the floor and with such careful, precise strokes of the broom.

  He saw surprise and discomfort on their faces.

  Something you don't find very often with New York City homicide cops.

  Lon Sellitto and young Banks (Jerry, not Ernie) sat where Rhyme gestured with his bush-crowned head: twin dusty, uncomfortable rattan chairs.

  Rhyme had changed considerably since Sellitto had last been here and the detective didn't hide his shock very well. Banks had no benchmark against which to judge what he was seeing but he was shocked nonetheless. The sloppy room, the vagrant gazing at them suspiciously. The smell too certainly--the visceral aroma surrounding the creature Lincoln Rhyme now was.

  He immensely regretted letting them up.

  "Why didn't you call first, Lon?"

  "You would've told us not to come."

  True.

  Thom crested the stairs and Rhyme preempted him. "No, Thom, we won't be needing you." He'd remembered that the young man always asked guests if they wanted something to drink or eat.

  Such a goddamn Martha Stewart.

  Silence for a moment. Large, rumpled Sellitto--a twenty-year vet--glanced down into a box beside the bed and started to speak. Whatever he'd been about to say was cut off by the sight of disposable adult diapers.

  Jerry Banks said, "I read your book, sir." The young cop had a bad hand when it came to shaving, lots of nicks. And what a charming cowlick in his hair! My good Lord, he can't be more than twelve. The more worn the world gets, Rhyme reflected, the younger its inhabitants seem to be.