The Bone Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  The bone collector observed how her collarbone showed at her throat. And where some other man might glance over her breasts and dark areolae he stared at the indentation at the manubrium and the ribs blossoming from it like spider's legs.

  "What're you doing?" she asked, groggy from the blow to her head.

  The bone collector looked her over carefully but what he saw wasn't a young, anorectic woman, nose too broad, lips too full, with skin like dirty sand. He saw beneath those imperfections the perfect beauty of her structure.

  He caressed her temple, stroked it gently. Don't let it be cracked, please. . . .

  She coughed and her nostrils flared--the fumes were very strong down here though he hardly noticed them anymore.

  "Don't hurt me again," she whispered, her head lolling. "Just don't hurt me. Please."

  He took the knife from his pocket and bent down, cut her underwear off. She looked down at her naked body.

  "You want that?" she said breathlessly. "Okay, you can fuck me. Okay."

  The pleasure of the flesh, he thought . . . it just doesn't come close.

  He pulled her to her feet and madly she pushed away from him and began stumbling toward a small doorway in the corner of the basement. Not running, not really trying to escape. Just sobbing, reaching out a hand, weaving toward the door.

  The bone collector watched her, entranced by her slow, pathetic gait.

  The doorway, which had once opened onto a coal chute, now led to a narrow tunnel that connected to the basement of the abandoned building next door.

  Esther struggled to the metal door and pulled it open. She climbed inside.

  It was no more than a minute later that he heard the wailing scream. Followed by a breathless, wrenching, "God, no, no, no . . ." Other words too, lost in her boiling howls of terror.

  Then she was coming back through the tunnel, moving faster now, whipping her hands around her, as if she was trying to shake off what she'd just seen.

  Come to me, Esther.

  Stumbling over the dirt floor, sobbing.

  Come to me.

  Running straight into his patient, waiting arms, which wrapped around her. He squeezed the woman tight as a lover, felt that marvelous collarbone beneath his fingers, and slowly dragged the frantic woman back toward the tunnel doorway.

  TWENTY

  The phases of the moon, the leaf, the damp underwear, dirt. Their team was back in Rhyme's bedroom--all except Polling and Haumann; it was straining NYPD loyalty to bring captains in on what was, no two ways about it, an unauthorized operation.

  "You G-C'd the liquid in the underwear, right, Mel?"

  "Have to do it again. They shut us down before we got the results."

  He blotted out a sample and injected it into the chromatograph. As he ran the machine Sachs jockeyed to look at the peaks and valleys of the profile appearing on the screen. Like a stock index. Rhyme realized she was standing close to him, as if she'd edged near when he wasn't looking. She spoke in a low voice. "I was . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I was blunter than I meant to be. Before, I mean. I have a temper. I don't know where I got it from. But I have it."

  "You were right," Rhyme said.

  They easily held each other's eyes and Rhyme thought of the times he and Blaine had had serious discussions. As they talked they always focused on an object between them--one of the ceramic horses she collected, a book, a nearly empty bottle of Merlot or Chardonnay.

  He said, "I work scenes differently than most criminalists. I needed somebody without any preconceived ideas. But I also needed somebody with a mind of her own."

  The contradictory qualities we seek in that elusive perfect lover. Strength and vulnerability, in equal measures.

  "When I talked to Commissioner Eckert," she said, "it was just to get my transfer through. That's all I wanted. It never occurred to me that word'd get back to the feds and they'd take the case away."

  "I know that."

  "I still let my temper go. I'm sorry for that."

  "Don't backpedal, Sachs. I need somebody to tell me I'm a jerk when I act like one. Thom does. That's why I love him."

  "Don't get sentimental on me, Lincoln," Thom called from across the room.

  Rhyme continued, "Nobody else ever tells me to go to hell. They're always walking on eggshells. I hate it."

  "It doesn't seem like there've been many people around here to say much of anything to you lately."

  After a moment he said, "That's true."

  On the screen of the chromatograph-spectrometer the peaks and valleys stopped moving and became one of nature's infinite signatures. Mel Cooper tapped on the computer keys and read the results. "Water, diesel oil, phosphate, sodium, trace minerals . . . No idea what it means."

  What, Rhyme wondered, was the message? The underwear itself? The liquid? He said, "Let's move on. I want to see the dirt."

  Sachs brought him the bag. It contained pinkish sand, laced with chunks of clay and pebbles.

  "Bull's liver," he announced. "Rock-and-sand mixture. Found just above the bedrock in Manhattan. Sodium silicate mixed in?"

  Cooper ran the chromatograph. "Yep. Plenty of it."

  "Then we're looking for a downtown location within fifty yards of the water--" Rhyme laughed at the astonished gaze on Sachs's face. "It's not magic, Sachs. I've just done my homework, that's all. Contractors mix sodium silicate with bull's liver to stabilize the earth when they dig foundations in deep-bedrock areas near the water. That means it's got to be downtown. Now, let's take a look at the leaf."

  She held up the bag.

  "No clue what it is," Rhyme said. "I don't think I've ever seen one like that. Not in Manhattan."

  "I've got a list of horticulture web sites," Cooper said, staring at his computer screen. "I'll do some surfing."

  Rhyme himself had spent some time on-line, cruising the Internet. As it had with books, movies and posters, his interest in the cyberworld had eventually paled. Perhaps because so much of his own world was virtual, the net was, in the end, a forlorn place for Lincoln Rhyme.

  Cooper's screen flicked and danced as he clicked on hyperlinks and disappeared deeper into the web. "I'm downloading some files. Should take ten, twenty minutes."

  Rhyme said, "All right. The rest of the clues Sachs found . . . Not the planted ones. The others. They might tell us about where he's been. Let's look at our secret weapon, Mel."

  "Secret weapon?" Sachs asked.

  "The trace evidence."

  Special Agent Fred Dellray had put together a ten-man entry operation. Two teams plus search and surveillance. The flak-jacketed agents stood in the bushes, sweating madly. Across the street, upstairs in an abandoned brownstone, the S&S team had their Big Ears and video infrareds trained on the perp's house.

  The three snipers, with their big Remingtons strapped, loaded and locked, lay prone on rooftops. Their binoculared spotters crouched beside them like Lamaze coaches.

  Dellray--wearing an FBI windbreaker and jeans instead of his Leprechaun-green outfit--listened through his clip-on earphone.

  "Surveillance to Command. We've got infrared on the basement. Somebody moving down there."

  "What'sa view like?" Dellray asked.

  "No view. Windows're too dirty."

  "He all by his humble self? Maybe got a vic with him?" Knowing somehow that Officer Sachs was probably right; that he'd already 'napped somebody else now.

  "Can't tell. We've just got motion and heat."

  Dellray had sent other officers around to the sides of the house. They reported in. "No sign of anyone on the first or second floor. Garage is locked."

  "Snipers?" Dellray asked. "Report."

  "Shooter One to Command. I've acquired on front door. Over."

  The others were covering the hallway and a room on the first floor. "Loaded and locked," they radioed in.

  Dellray drew his large automatic.

  "Okay, we got paper," Dellray said. Meaning a warrant. They wouldn't have to kno
ck. "Lessgo! Teams one and two, deploy, deploy, deploy."

  The first team took out the front door with a battering ram while the second used the slightly more civilized approach of breaking in the back-door window and unlocking the dead bolt. They streamed inside, Dellray following the last of Team One's officers into the old, filthy house. The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming and Dellray, no stranger to crime scenes, swallowed hard, struggling to keep from vomiting.

  The second team secured the ground floor and then charged up the stairs toward the bedroom while the first sped down the basement stairs, boots thumping loudly on the old wood.

  Dellray raced down into the foul-smelling basement. He heard a door being kicked in somewhere below and the shout of, "Don't move! Federal agents. Freeze, freeze, freeze!"

  But when he reached the basement doorway he heard the same agent blurt in a very different tone, "What the hell's this? Oh, Jesus."

  "Fuck," another one called. "That's gross."

  "Shit in a flaming pile," Dellray spat out, choking, as he stepped inside. Swallowing hard at the vile smell.

  The man's body lay on the floor, leaching black fluid. Throat cut. His dead, glazed eyes stared at the ceiling but his torso seemed to be moving--swelling and shifting. Dellray shuddered; he'd never developed much immunity to the sight of insect infestation. The number of bugs and worms suggested the vic'd been dead for at least three days.

  "Why'd we get positive on the infrared?" one agent asked.

  Dellray pointed out the rat and mouse teeth marks along the vic's bloated leg and side. "They're around here someplace. We interrupted dinner hour."

  "So what happened? One of the vics get him?"

  "Watcha talkin' about?" Dellray snapped.

  "Isn't that him?"

  "No, it's not him," Dellray exploded, gazing at one particular wound on the corpse.

  One of the team was frowning. "Naw, Dellray. This's the guy. We got mug shots. That's Pietrs."

  "Of course it's fucking Pietrs. But he ain't the unsub. Don'tcha get it?"

  "No? What do you mean?"

  It was all clear to him now. "Sumvabitch."

  Dellray's phone chirped and made him jump. He flipped it open, listened for a minute. "She did what? Oh, like I really need this too. . . . No, we don't have the fucking perp in fucking custody."

  He jammed the OFF button, pointed an angry finger at two SWAT agents. "You're coming with me."

  "What's up, Dellray?"

  "We gonna pay ourselves a visit. And what ain't we gonna be when we do it?" The agents looked at each other, frowning. But Dellray supplied the answer. "We ain't gonna be very nice at all."

  Mel Cooper shook the contents of the envelopes out onto newsprint. Examined the dust with an eye loupe. "Well, there's the brick dust. And some other kind of stone. Marble, I think."

  He put a sample on the slide and examined it under the compound 'scope. "Yep, marble. Rose-colored."

  "Was there any marble at the stockyard tunnel? Where you found the German girl?"

  "None," Sachs responded.

  Cooper suggested it might have come from Monelle's residence hall when Unsub 823 grabbed her.

  "No, I know the block the Deutsche Haus is in. It's just a converted East Village tenement. The best stone you'd find there'd be polished granite. Maybe, just maybe, it's a fleck of his hidey-hole. Anything notable about it?"

  "Chisel marks," Cooper said, bending over the 'scope.

  "Ah, good. How clean?"

  "Not very. Ragged."

  "So an old steam stonecutter?"

  "Yes, I'd guess."

  "Write, Thom," Rhyme instructed, nodding at the poster. "There's marble in his safe house. And it's old."

  "But why do we care about his safe house?" Banks asked, looking at his watch. "The feds'll be there by now."

  "You can never have too much information, Banks. Remember that. Now, what else've we got?"

  "Another bit of the glove. That red leather. And what's this?" he asked Sachs, holding up a plastic bag containing a plug of wood.

  "The sample of the aftershave. Where he brushed up against a post."

  "Should I run an olfactory profile?" Cooper wondered.

  "Let me smell it first," Rhyme said.

  Sachs brought the bag over to him. Inside was a tiny disk of wood. She opened it up and he inhaled the air.

  "Brut. How could you miss it? Thom, add that our man uses drugstore cologne."

  Cooper announced, "Here's that other hair." The technician mounted it in a comparison 'scope. "Very similar to the one we found earlier. Probably the same source. Oh, hell, Lincoln, for you, I'll say it is the same. Brown."

  "Are the ends cut or fractured naturally?"

  "Cut."

  "Good, we're closing in on hair color," Rhyme said.

  Thom wrote brown just as Sellitto said, "Don't write that!"

  "What?"

  "Obviously it's not brown," Rhyme continued.

  "I thought--"

  "It's anything but brown. Blond, sandy, black, red . . ."

  The detective explained, " 'S'an old trick. You go into an alley behind a barbershop, cop some hairs from the garbage. Drop 'em around the scene."

  "Oh." Banks filed this somewhere in his enthusiastic brain.

  Rhyme said, "Okay. The fiber."

  Cooper mounted it in the polarizing 'scope. As he adjusted knobs he said, "Birefringence of .053."

  Rhyme blurted, "Nylon 6. What's it look like, Mel?"

  "Very coarse. Lobed cross-section. Light gray."

  "Carpet."

  "Right. I'll check the database." A moment later he looked up from the computer. "It's a Hampstead Textile 118B fiber."

  Rhyme exhaled a disgusted sigh.

  "What?" Sachs asked.

  "The most common trunk liner used by U.S. automakers. Found in over two hundred different makes going back fifteen years. Hopeless . . . Mel, is there anything on the fiber? Use the SEM."

  The tech cranked up the scanning electron microscope. The screen burst to life with an eerie blue-green glow. The strand of fiber looked like a huge rope.

  "Got something here. Crystals. A lot of 'em. They use titanium dioxide to deluster shiny carpet. That might be it."

  "Gas it. It's important."

  "There's not enough here, Lincoln. I'd have to burn the whole fiber."

  "So, burn it."

  Sellitto said delicately, "Borrowing federal evidence is one thing. Destroying it? I don't know 'bout that, Lincoln. If there's a trial . . ."

  "We have to."

  "Oh, man," Banks said.

  Sellitto nodded reluctantly and Cooper mounted the sample. The machine hissed. A moment later the screen flickered and columns appeared. "There, that's the long-chained polymer molecule. The nylon. But that small wave, that's something else. Chlorine, detergent . . . It's cleanser."

  "Remember," Rhyme said, "the German girl said the car smelled clean. Find out what kind it is."

  Cooper ran the information through a brand-name database. "Pfizer Chemicals makes it. It's sold under the name Tidi-Kleen by Baer Automotive Products in Teterboro."

  "Perfect!" cried Lincoln Rhyme. "I know the company. They sell in bulk to fleets. Mostly rental-car companies. Our unsub's driving a rental."

  "He wouldn't be crazy enough to drive a rental car to crime scenes, would he?" Banks asked.

  "It's stolen," Rhyme muttered, as if the young man had asked what was two plus two. "And it'll have stolen tags on it. Is Emma still with us?"

  "She's probably home by now."

  "Wake her up and have her start canvassing Hertz, Avis, National, Budget for thefts."

  "Will do," Sellitto said, though uneasily, perhaps smelling the faint stench of burned federal evidence wafting through the air.

  "The footprints?" Sachs asked.

  Rhyme looked over the electrostatic impressions she'd lifted.

  "Unusual wear on the soles. See the rubbed-down portion on the outsides of each shoe at the b
all of the foot?"

  "Pigeon-toed?" Thom wondered aloud.

  "Possibly but there's no corresponding heel wear, which you'd expect to see." Rhyme studied the prints. "What I think is, he's a reader."

  "A reader?"

  "Sit in a chair there," Rhyme said to Sachs. "And hunch over the table, pretend you're reading."

  She sat, then looked up. "And?"

  "Pretend you're turning pages."

  She did, several times. Looked up again.

  "Keep going. You're reading War and Peace."

  The pages kept turning, her head was bowed. After a moment, without thinking, she crossed her ankles. The outside edges of her shoes were the only part that met the floor.

  Rhyme pointed this out. "Put that in the profile, Thom. But add a question mark.

  "Now let's look at the friction ridges."

  Sachs said she didn't have the good fingerprint, the one they'd ID'd the unsub with. "It's still at the federal building."

  But Rhyme wasn't interested in that print. It was the other one, the Kromekote Sachs had lifted from the German girl's skin, he wanted to look at.

  "Not scannable," Cooper announced. "Isn't even C grade. I wouldn't give an opinion about this if I had to."

  Rhyme said, "I'm not interested in identity. I'm interested in that line there." It was crescent-shaped and sat right in the middle of the pad of the finger.

  "What is it?" Sachs asked.

  "A scar, I think," Cooper said. "From an old cut. A bad one. Looks like it went all the way to the bone."

  Rhyme thought back to other markings and defects he'd seen on skin over the years. In the days before jobs became mostly paper shuffling and computer keyboarding it was far easier to tell people's jobs by examining their hands: distorted finger pads from manual typewriters, punctures from sewing machines and cobbler's needles, indentations and ink stains from stenographers' and accountants' pens, paper cuts from printing presses, scars from die cutters, distinctive calluses from various types of manual labor. . . .

  But a scar like this told them nothing.

  Not yet at any rate. Not until they had a suspect whose hands they might examine.

  "What else? The knee print. This is good. Give us an idea of what he's wearing. Hold it up, Sachs. Higher! Baggy slacks. It retained that deep crease there so it's natural fiber. In this weather, I'll bet cotton. Not wool. You don't see silk slacks much nowadays."

  "Lightweight, not denim," Cooper said.

  "Sports clothes," Rhyme concluded. "Add that to our profile, Thom."

  Cooper looked back at the computer screen and typed some more. "No luck with the leaf. Doesn't match anything at the Smithsonian."