The Bone Collector

  The room was swimming, a black, starry night. Swirls of darkness and distant, jaundiced lights. Lord, don't let me faint!

  Maybe he--

  There! That's it. Sachs's eyes were following the steam pipe. She was looking at another access plate in a shadowy alcove of the room. It would have been a better hiding place for the girl--you couldn't see it from the doorway if you were walking past--and the second plate had only four bolts on it, not eight, like the one he chose.

  Why not that pipe?

  Then she understood.

  "He doesn't want . . . I don't want to leave just yet because I want to keep an eye on her."

  "Why do you think that?" he inquired, echoing her own words just moments before.

  "There's another pipe I could've chained her to but I picked the one that was in the open."

  "So you could see her?"

  "I think so."

  "Why?"

  "Maybe to make sure she can't get away. Maybe to make sure the gag's tight. . . . I don't know."

  "Good, Amelia. But what does it mean? How can we use that fact?"

  Sachs looked around the room for the place where he'd have the best view of the girl without being seen. It turned out to be a shadowy spot between two large heating-oil tanks.

  "Yes!" she said excitedly, looking at the floor. "He was here." Forgetting the role-playing. "He swept up."

  She scanned the area with the bile glow of the PoliLight wand.

  "No footprints," she said, disappointed. But as she lifted the light to shut it off, a smudge glowed on one of the tanks.

  "I've got a print!" she announced.

  "A print?"

  "You get a better view of the girl if you lean forward and support yourself on a tank. That's what he did, I'm sure. Only, it's weird, Lincoln. It's . . . deformed. His hand." She shivered looking at the monstrous palm.

  "In the suitcase there's an aerosol bottle labeled DFO. It's a fluorescent stain. Spray that on the print, hit the PoliLight and shoot the image with the one-to-one Polaroid."

  She told him when she'd finished this and he said, "Now Dustbust the floor between the tanks. If we're lucky he scratched off a hair or chewed a fingernail."

  My habits, Sachs thought. It was one of the things that had finally ruined her modeling career--the bloody nail, the worried eyebrow. She'd tried and tried and tried to stop. Finally gave up, discouraged, bewildered that a tiny habit could change the direction of your life so dramatically.

  "Bag the vacuum filter."

  "In paper?"

  "Yes, paper. Now, the body, Amelia."

  "What?"

  "Well, you've got to process the body."

  Her heart sank. Somebody else, please. Have somebody else do it. She said, "Not until the ME's finished. That's the rule."

  "No rules today, Amelia. We're making up our own. The medical examiner'll get her after us."

  Sachs approached the woman.

  "You know the routine?"

  "Yes." She stepped close to the destroyed body.

  Then froze. Hands inches from the victim's skin.

  I can't do it. She shuddered. Told herself to keep going. But she couldn't; the muscles weren't responding.

  "Sachs? You there?"

  She couldn't answer.

  I can't do this. . . . It was as simple as that. Impossible. I can't.

  "Sachs?"

  And then she looked into herself and, somehow, saw her father, in uniform, stooping low on the hot, pitted sidewalk of West Forty-second Street, sliding his arm around a scabby drunk to help him home. Then was seeing her Nick as he laughed and drank beer in a Bronx tavern with a hijacker who'd kill him in a second if he knew the young cop was working undercover. The two men in her life, doing what they had to do.

  "Amelia?"

  These two images bobbed in her thoughts, and why they calmed her, or where that calm came from, she couldn't begin to guess. "I'm here," she said to Lincoln Rhyme and went about her business as she'd been taught. Taking the nail scrapings, combing the hair--pubic and head. Telling Rhyme what she did as she did it.

  Ignoring the dull orbs of eyes . . .

  Ignoring the crimson flesh.

  Trying to ignore the smell.

  "Get her clothing," Rhyme said. "Cut off everything. Put a sheet of newsprint under them first to pick up any trace that falls off."

  "Should I check the pockets?"

  "No, we'll do that here. Wrap them up in the paper."

  Sachs cut the blouse and skirt off, the panties. She reached out for what she thought was the woman's bra, dangling from her chest. It felt curious, disintegrating in her fingers. Then, like a slap she realized what she held and she gave a short scream. It wasn't cloth, it was skin.

  "Amelia? Are you all right?"

  "Yes!" she gasped. "I'm fine."

  "Describe the restraints."

  "Duct tape for the gag, two inches wide. Standard-issue cuffs for hands, clothesline for the feet."

  "PoliLight her body. He might've touched her with his bare hands. Look for prints."

  She did. "Nothing."

  "Okay. Now cut the clothesline--but not through the knot. Bag it. In plastic."

  Sachs did. Then Rhyme said, "We need the cuffs."

  "Okay. I've got a cuff key."

  "No, Amelia. Don't open them."

  "What?"

  "The cuff lock mechanism is one of the best ways to pick up trace from the perp."

  "Well, how'm I supposed to get them off without a key?" She laughed.

  "There's a razor saw in the suitcase."

  "You want me to cut off the cuffs?"

  There was a pause. Rhyme said, "No, not the cuffs, Amelia."

  "Well, what do you want me to . . . Oh, you can't be serious. Her hands?"

  "You have to." He was irritated at her reluctance.

  Okay, that's it. Sellitto and Polling've picked a nutcase for a partner. Maybe their careers're tanking but I'm not going down with them.

  "Forget it."

  "Amelia, it's just another way to collect evidence."

  Why did he sound so reasonable? She thought desperately for excuses. "They'll get blood all over them if I cut--"

  "Her heart's not beating. Besides," he added like a TV chef, "the blood'll be cooked into a solid."

  The gorge rising again.

  "Go on, Amelia. Go to the suitcase. Get the saw. In the lid." He added a frosty, "Please."

  "Why'd you have me scrape under her nails? I could've just brought you back her hands!"

  "Amelia, we need the cuffs. We have to open them here and we can't wait for the ME. It has to be done."

  She walked back to the doorway. Unsnapped the thongs, lifted the wicked-looking saw from the case. She stared at the woman, frozen in her tortured pose in the center of the vile room.

  "Amelia? Amelia?"

  Outside, the sky was still clogged with stagnant, yellow air and the buildings nearby were covered with soot like charred bones. But Sachs had never been so glad to be out in the city air as now. The CU suitcase in one hand, the razor saw in the other, the headset dangling dead around her neck. Sachs ignored the huge crowd of cops and spectators staring at her and walked straight toward the station wagon.

  As she passed Sellitto she handed him the saw without pausing, practically tossed it to him. "If he wants it done that badly tell him he can damn well walk down here and do it himself."

  II

  LOCARD'S

  PRINCIPLE

  In real life, you only get one shot at the homicide crime scene.

  --VERNON J. GEBERTH,

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER (RET.)

  NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT

  NINE

  Saturday, 4:00 p.m., to Saturday, 10:15 p.m.

  I've got myself into a situation here, sir."

  The man across the desk looked like a TV show's idea of a big-city deputy police commissioner. Which happened to be his rank. White hair, a temperate jowl, gold-rimmed glasses, posture to die for. />
  "Now what's the problem, officer?"

  Dep Com Randolph C. Eckert looked down his long nose with a gaze that Sachs recognized immediately; his nod to equality was to be as stern with the female officers as with the male ones.

  "I've got a complaint, sir," she said stiffly. "You heard about that taxi kidnapping case?"

  He nodded. "Ah, has that got the city in double dutch."

  She believed that was a schoolchild's game of jump rope but wouldn't presume to correct a deputy commissioner.

  "That damn UN conference," he continued, "and the whole world's watching. It's unfair. People don't talk about crime in Washington. Or Detroit. Well, Detroit they do. Say, Chicago. Never. No, it's New York that people thump on. Richmond, Virginia, had more murders per capita than we did last year. I looked it up. And I'd rather parachute unarmed into Central Harlem than drive windows-up through South East D.C. any day."

  "Yessir."

  "Understand they found that girl dead. It was on all the news. Those reporters."

  "Downtown. Just now."

  "Now that's a pity."

  "Yessir."

  "They just killed her? Like that? No ransom demand or anything?"

  "I didn't hear about any ransom."

  "What's this complaint?"

  "I was first officer in a related homicide this morning."

  "You're Patrol?" Eckert asked.

  "I was Patrol. I was supposed to be transferring to Public Affairs today at noon. For a training session." She lifted her hands, tipped with flesh-colored Band-Aids, and dropped them in her lap. "But they shanghaied me."

  "Who?"

  "Detective Lon Sellitto, sir. And Captain Haumann. And Lincoln Rhyme."

  "Rhyme?"

  "Yessir."

  "Not the fellow was in charge of IRD a few years ago?"

  "Yessir. That's him."

  "I thought he was dead."

  Egos like that will never die.

  "Very much alive, sir."

  The dep com was looking out his window. "He's not on the force anymore. What's he doing involved in this?"

  "Consultant, I guess. It's Lon Sellitto's case. Captain Polling's overseeing it. I've been waiting for this reassignment for eight months. But they've got me working crime scene. I've never done crime scene. It doesn't make any sense and frankly I resent being assigned to a job I've had no training for."

  "Crime scene?"

  "Rhyme ordered me to run the whole scene. By myself."

  Eckert didn't understand this. The words weren't registering. "Why is a civilian ordering uniformed officers to do anything?"

  "My point, sir." She set the hook. "I mean, I'll help up to a point. But I'm just not prepared to dismember victims . . ."

  "What?"

  She blinked as if surprised he hadn't heard. She explained about the handcuffs.

  "Lord in heaven, what the hell're they thinking of? Pardon my French. Don't they know the whole country's watching? It's been on CNN all day, this kidnapping. Cutting off her hands? Say, you're Herman Sachs's daughter."

  "That's right."

  "Good officer. Excellent officer. I gave him one of his commendations. The man was what a beat cop ought to be. Midtown South, right?"

  "Hell's Kitchen. My beat."

  My former beat.

  "Herman Sachs probably prevented more crime than the entire detective division solves in a year. Just calming everything down, you know."

  "That was Pop. Sure."

  "Her hands?" Eckert snorted. "The girl's family'll sue us. As soon as they find out about it. They sue us for everything. There's a rapist suing us now 'cause he got shot in the leg coming at an officer with a knife. His lawyer's got this theory he's calling the 'least deadly alternative.' Instead of shooting, we're supposed to taze them or use Mace. Or ask them politely, I don't know. I better give the chief and the mayor a heads-up on this one. I'll make some calls, officer." He looked at a wall clock. It was a little after four. "Your watch over for the day?"

  "I have to report back to Lincoln Rhyme's house. That's where we're working out of." She thought of the hacksaw. She said coolly, "His bedroom really. That's our CP."

  "A civilian's bedroom is your command post?"

  "I'd appreciate anything you can do, sir. I've waited a long time for that transfer."

  "Cut her hands off. My good Lord."

  She stood and walked to the door and out into one of the corridors that would soon be her new assignment. The feeling of relief took only a little longer to arrive than she'd expected.

  He stood at the bottle-glass window, watching a pack of wild dogs prowl though the lot across the street.

  He was on the first floor of this old building, a marble-clad Federal dating to the early 1800s. Surrounded by vacant lots and tenements--some abandoned, some occupied by paying tenants though most by squatters--this old mansion had been empty for years.

  The bone collector took the piece of emery paper in his hand once more and continued to rub. He looked down at his handiwork. Then out the window again.

  His hands, in their circular motion, precise. The tiny scrap of sandpaper whispering, shhhhh, shhhhh . . . Like a mother hushing her child.

  A decade ago, the days of promise in New York, some crazy artist had moved in here. He'd filled the dank, two-story place with broken and rusting antiques. Wrought-iron grilles, hunks of crown molding and framed squares of spidered stained glass, scabby columns. Some of the artist's work remained on the walls. Frescoes on the old plaster: murals, never completed, of workers, children, angst-ridden lovers. Round, emotionless faces--the man's motif--stared blankly, as if the souls had been nipped out of their smooth bodies.

  The painter was never very successful, even after the most ironclad of marketing ideas--his own suicide--and the bank foreclosed on the building several years ago.

  Shhhhh. . . .

  The bone collector had stumbled across the place last year and he'd known immediately that this was home. The desolation of the neighborhood was certainly important to him--it was obviously practical. But there was another appeal, more personal: the lot across the street. During some excavation several years ago a backhoe had unearthed a load of human bones. It turned out this had been one of the city's old cemeteries. Newspaper articles about it suggested the graves might contain the remains not only of Federal and Colonial New Yorkers but Manate and Lenape Indians as well.

  He now set aside what he'd been smoothing with the emery paper--a carpal, the delicate palm bone--and picked up the wrist, which he'd carefully detached from the radius and ulna last night just before leaving for Kennedy Airport to collect the first victims. It had been drying for over a week and most of the flesh was gone but it still took some effort to separate the elaborate cluster of bones. They snapped apart with faint plops, like fish breaking the surface of a lake.

  Oh, the constables, they were a lot better than he'd anticipated. He'd been watching them search along Pearl Street, wondering if they'd ever figure out where he'd left the woman from the airport. Astonished when they suddenly ran toward the right building. He'd guessed it would take two or three victims until they got a feel for the clues. They hadn't saved her of course. But they might have. A minute or two earlier would have made all the difference.

  As with so much in life.

  The navicular, the lunate, the hamate, the capitate . . . the bones, intertwined like a Greek puzzle ring, came apart under his strong fingers. He picked bits of flesh and tendon off them. He selected the greater multangulum--at the base of where the thumb had once been--and began to sand once more.

  Shhhhh, shhhhhhh.

  The bone collector squinted as he looked outside and imagined he saw a man standing beside one of the old graves. It must have been his imagination because the man wore a bowler hat and was dressed in mustard-colored gabardine. He rested some dark roses beside the tombstone and then turned away from it, dodging the horses and carriages on his way to the elegantly arched bridge over the Collect Pond out
let at Canal Street. Who'd he been visiting? Parents? A brother? Family who'd died of consumption or in one of the terrible influenza epidemics that'd been ravaging the city recently--

  Recently?

  No, not recently of course. A hundred years ago--that's what he meant.

  He squinted and looked again. No sign of the carriages or the horses. Or the man with the bowler hat. Though they'd seemed as real as flesh and blood.

  However real they are.

  Shhhhh, shhhhhh.

  It was intruding again, the past. He was seeing things that'd happened before, that had happened then, as if they were now. He could control it. He knew he could.

  But as he gazed out the window he realized that of course there was no before or after. Not for him. He drifted back and forth through time, a day, five years, a hundred years or two, like a dried leaf on a windy day.

  He looked at his watch. It was time to leave.

  Setting the bone on the mantel, he washed his hands carefully--like a surgeon. Then for five minutes he ran a pet-hair roller over his clothes to pick up any bone dust or dirt or body hairs that might lead the constables to him.

  He walked into the carriage house past the half-finished painting of a moon-faced butcher in a bloody white apron. The bone collector started to get into the taxi but then changed his mind. Unpredictability is the best defense. This time he'd take the carriage . . . the sedan, the Ford. He started it, he drove into the street, closed and locked the garage door behind him.

  No before or after . . .

  As he passed the cemetery the pack of dogs glanced up at the Ford then returned to scuffling through the brush, looking for rats and nosing madly for water in the unbearable heat.

  No then or now . . .

  He took the ski mask and gloves from his pocket, set them on the seat beside him as he sped out of the old neighborhood. The bone collector was going hunting.

  TEN

  Something had changed about the room but she couldn't quite decide what.

  Lincoln Rhyme saw it in her eyes.

  "We missed you, Amelia," he said coyly. "Errands?"

  She looked away from him. "Apparently nobody'd told my new commander I wouldn't be showing up for work today. I thought somebody ought to."

  "Ah, yes."

  She was gazing at the wall, slowly figuring it out. In addition to the basic instruments that Mel Cooper had brought with him, there was now a scanning electron microscope fitted with the X-ray unit, flotation and hot-stage 'scope setups for testing glass, a comparison microscope, a density-gradient tube for soil testing and a hundred beakers, jars and bottles of chemicals.