The Bone Collector

  The streets were clear. The bone collector drove into the alley. He opened the warehouse door and drove down a wooden ramp into a long tunnel.

  After making sure the place was deserted, he walked to the back of the car. He opened the trunk and pulled Hanna out. She was fleshy, fat, like a bag of limp mulch. He grew angry again and he carried her roughly down another wide tunnel. Traffic from the West Side Highway sped over them. He listened to her wheezing and was just reaching out to loosen the gag when he felt her shudder and go completely limp. Gasping for breath with the effort of carrying her, he rested her on the floor of the tunnel and eased the tape off her mouth. Air dribbled in weakly. Had she just fainted? He listened to her heart. It seemed to be beating fine.

  He cut the clothesline binding her ankles, leaned forward and whispered, "Hanna, kommen Sie mit mir mit, Hanna Goldschmidt . . ."

  "Nein," she muttered, her voice trailing to silence.

  He leaned closer, lightly slapped her face. "Hanna, you must come with me."

  And she screamed: "Mein Name ist nicht Hanna." Then kicked him square in the jaw.

  A burst of yellow light flashed through his head and he leapt sideways two or three feet, trying to keep his balance. Hanna sprang up, raced blindly down a dark corridor. But he was after her fast. He tackled her before she'd gotten ten yards away. She fell hard; he did too, grunting as he lost his breath.

  He lay on his side for a minute, consumed with pain, struggling to breathe, gripping her T-shirts as she thrashed. Lying on her back, hands still cuffed, the girl used the only weapon she had--one of her feet, which she lifted in the air and brought down hard onto his hand. A spike of pain shot through him and his glove flew off. She lifted her strong leg again and only her bad aim saved him from her heel, which slammed so hard into the ground it would've broken bones if she'd connected.

  "So nicht!" he growled madly and grabbed her by the throat with his bare hand and squeezed until she squirmed and whined and then stopped squirming and whining. She trembled several times and went still.

  When he listened to her heart the beating was very faint. No tricks this time. He snatched up his glove, pulled it on and dragged her back through the tunnel to the post. Bound her feet once more and put a new piece of tape on her mouth. As she came to, his hand was straying over her body. She gasped at first and shrank away as he caressed the flesh behind her ear. Her elbow, her jaw. There weren't many other places he wanted to touch her. She was so padded . . . it disgusted him.

  Yet beneath the skin . . . He gripped her leg firmly. Her wide eyes stared as he fumbled in his pocket and the knife appeared. Without a moment's hesitation he cut through her skin down to the yellow-white bone. She screamed through the tape, a manic wail, and kicked hard but he held her tight. Enjoying this, Hanna? The girl sobbed and groaned loudly. So he had to lower his ear to her leg to hear the delicious sound of the tip of the blade scraping back and forth on the bone. Skrisssss.

  Then he took her arm.

  They locked eyes for a moment and she shook her head pathetically, begging in silence. His gaze dropped to her pudgy forearm and again the cut was deep. Her whole body went rigid with the pain. Another wild, muted scream. Again he lowered his head like a musician, listening to the sound of the blade scraping the ulna. Back and forth. Skrisssss, skrisssss . . . It was some moments later that he realized she'd fainted.

  Finally he pried himself away and returned to the car. He planted the next clues then took the broom from the trunk and carefully swept over their footsteps. He drove up the ramp, parked, left the engine running and climbed out once more, carefully sweeping away the tire tracks.

  He paused and looked back down the tunnel. Staring at her, just staring. Suddenly a rare smile crossed the bone collector's lips. He was surprised that the first of the guests had already shown up. A dozen pairs of tiny red eyes, two dozen, then three . . . It seemed they were gazing at Hanna's bloody flesh with curiosity . . . and what might have been hunger. Though that could have been his imagination; Lord knew, it was vivid enough.

  TWELVE

  Mel, go through the Colfax woman's clothes. Amelia, would you help him?"

  She offered him another pleasant nod, the sort meant for polite society. Rhyme realized he was really quite angry with her.

  At the tech's direction she pulled on latex gloves, gently opened the clothing and ran a horsehair brush through the garments, above large sheets of clean newsprint. Tiny flecks fell out. Cooper picked them up on tape and examined them through the compound 'scope.

  "Not much," he reported. "The steam took care of most of the trace. I see a little soil. Not enough to D-G. Wait . . . Excellent. I've got a couple of fibers. Look at these. . . ."

  Well, I can't, Rhyme thought angrily.

  "Navy blue, acrylic-and-wool blend, I'd guess. It isn't coarse enough to be carpet and it's not lobed. So it's clothing."

  "In this heat he's not going to be wearing thick socks or a sweater. Ski mask?"

  "That'd be my bet," Cooper said.

  Rhyme reflected, "So he's serious about giving us a chance to save them. If he was bent on killing, it wouldn't matter if they saw him or not."

  Sellitto added, "Also means the asshole thinks he can get away. Doesn't have suicide on his mind. Might just give us some bargaining power if he's got hostages when we nail him."

  "I like that optimism of yours, Lon," Rhyme said.

  Thom answered the buzzer and a moment later Jim Polling climbed the stairs, looking disheveled and harried. Well, shuttling between press conferences, the mayor's office and the federal building would do that to you.

  "Too bad about the trout," Sellitto called to him. Then explained to Rhyme, "Jimmy here's one of those real fishermen. Ties his own flies and everything. Me, I go out on a party boat with a six-pack and I'm happy."

  "We'll nail this fucker then worry about the fish," Polling said, helping himself to the coffee Thom had left by the window. He looked outside and blinked in surprise to find two large birds staring at him. He turned back to Rhyme and explained that because of the kidnapping he'd had to postpone a fishing trip to Vermont. Rhyme had never fished--never had the time or inclination for any hobbies--but he found he envied Polling. The serenity of fishing appealed to him. It was a sport you could practice in solitude. Crip sports tended to be in-your-face athletics. Competitive. Proving things to the world . . . and to yourself. Wheelchair basketball, tennis, marathons. Rhyme decided if he had to have a sport it'd be fishing. Though casting a line with a single finger was probably beyond modern technology.

  Polling said, "The press is calling him a serial kidnapper."

  If the bootie fits, Rhyme reflected.

  "And the mayor's going nuts. Wants to call in the feds. I talked the chief into sitting tight on that one. But we can't lose another vic."

  "We'll do our best," Rhyme said caustically.

  Polling sipped the black coffee and stepped close to the bed. "You okay, Lincoln?"

  Rhyme said, "Fine."

  Polling appraised him for a moment longer then nodded to Sellitto. "Brief me. We got another press conference in a half hour. You see the last one? Hear what that reporter asked? What did we think the vic's family felt about her being scalded to death?"

  Banks shook his head. "Man."

  "I nearly decked the fucker," Polling said.

  Three and a half years ago, Rhyme recalled, during the cop-killer investigation, the captain had smashed a news crew's videocam when the reporter wondered if Polling was being too aggressive in his investigations just because the suspect, Dan Shepherd, was a member of the force.

  Polling and Sellitto retired to a corner of Rhyme's room and the detective filled him in. When the captain descended the stairs this time, Rhyme noticed, he wasn't half as buoyant as he had been.

  "Okay," Cooper announced. "We've got a hair. It was in her pocket."

  "The whole shaft?" Rhyme asked, without much hope, and was not surprised when Cooper sighed. "Sorry. No bulb."


  Without a bulb attached, hair isn't individuated evidence; it's merely class evidence. You can't run a DNA test and link it to a specific person. Still, it has good probative value. The famous Canadian Mounties study a few years ago concluded that if a hair found at the scene matches a suspect's hair the odds are around 4,500 to 1 that he's the one who left it. The problem with hair, though, is that you can't deduce much about the person it belonged to. Sex is almost impossible to determine, and race can't be reliably established. Age can be estimated only with infant hair. Color is deceptive because of wide pigmentation variations and cosmetic dyes, and since everybody loses dozens of hairs every day you can't even tell if the suspect is going bald.

  "Check it against the vic's. Do a scale count and medulla pigmentation comparison," Rhyme ordered.

  A moment later Cooper looked up from the 'scope. "It's not hers, the Colfax woman's."

  "Description?" asked Rhyme.

  "Light brown. No kink so I'd say not Negroid. Pigmentation suggests it's not Mongoloid."

  "So Caucasian," Rhyme said, nodding at the chart on the wall. "Confirms what the wit said. Head or body hair?"

  "There's little diameter variation and a uniform pigment distribution. It's head hair."

  "Length?"

  "Three centimeters."

  Thom asked if he should add to the profile that the kidnapper had brown hair.

  Rhyme said no. "We'll wait for some corroboration. Just write down that we know he wears a ski mask, navy blue. Fingernail scrapings, Mel?"

  Cooper examined the trace but found nothing useful.

  "The print you found. The one on the wall. Let's take a look at it. Could you show it to me, Amelia?"

  Sachs hesitated then carried the Polaroid over to him.

  "Your monster," Rhyme said. It was a large deformed palm, indeed grotesque, not with the elegant swirls and bifurcations of friction ridges but a mottled pattern of tiny lines.

  "It's a wonderful picture--you're a virtual Edward Weston, Amelia. But unfortunately it's not a hand. Those aren't ridges. It's a glove. Leather. Old. Right, Mel?"

  The technician nodded.

  "Thom, write down that he has an old pair of gloves." Rhyme said to the others, "We're starting to get some ideas about him. He's not leaving his FR prints at the scene. But he is leaving glove prints. If we find the glove in his possession we can still place him at the scene. He's smart. But not brilliant."

  Sachs asked, "And what do brilliant criminals wear?"

  "Cotton-lined suede," Rhyme said. Then asked, "Where's the filter? From the vacuum?"

  The technician emptied the cone filter--like one from a coffee-maker--onto a sheet of white paper.

  Trace evidence . . .

  DAs and reporters and juries loved obvious clues. Bloody gloves, knives, recently fired guns, love letters, semen and fingerprints. But Lincoln Rhyme's favorite evidence was trace--the dust and effluence at crime scenes, so easily overlooked by perps.

  But the vacuum had captured nothing helpful.

  "All right," Rhyme said, "let's move on. Let's look at the handcuffs."

  Sachs stiffened as Cooper opened the plastic bag and slid the cuffs out onto a sheet of newsprint. There was, as Rhyme had predicted, minimal blood. The tour doctor from the medical examiner's office had done the honors with the razor saw, after an NYPD lawyer had faxed a release to the ME.

  Cooper examined the cuffs carefully. "Boyd & Keller. Bottom of the line. No serial number." He sprayed the chrome with DFO and hit the PoliLight. "No prints, just a smudge from the glove."

  "Let's open them up."

  Cooper used a generic cuff key to click them open. With a lens-cleaning air puffer he blew into the mechanism.

  "You're still mad at me, Amelia," Rhyme said. "About the hands."

  The question caught her off guard. "I wasn't mad," she said after a moment. "I thought it was unprofessional. What you were suggesting."

  "Do you know who Edmond Locard was?"

  She shook her head.

  "A Frenchman. Born in 1877. He founded the University of Lyons' Institute of Criminalistics. He came up with the one rule I lived by when I ran IRD. Locard's Exchange Principle. He thought that whenever two human beings come into contact, something from one is exchanged to the other, and vice versa. Maybe dust, blood, skin cells, dirt, fibers, metallic residue. It might be tough to find exactly what's been exchanged, and even harder to figure out what it means. But an exchange does occur--and because of that we can catch our unsubs."

  This bit of history didn't interest her in the least.

  "You're lucky," Mel Cooper said to Sachs, not looking up. "He was going to have you and the medic do a spot autopsy and examine the contents of her stomach."

  "It would've been helpful," Rhyme said, avoiding her eyes.

  "I talked him out of it," Cooper said.

  "Autopsy," Sachs said, sighing, as if nothing about Rhyme could surprise her.

  Why, she isn't even here, he thought angrily. Her mind's a thousand miles away.

  "Ah," Cooper said. "Found something. I think it's a bit of the glove."

  Cooper mounted a fleck on the compound microscope. Examined it.

  "Leather. Reddish-colored. Polished on one side."

  "Red, that's good," Sellitto said. To Sachs he explained, "The wilder their clothes, the easier it is to find the perp. They don't teach you that at the academy, bet. Sometime I'll tell you 'bout the time we collared Jimmy Plaid, from the Gambino crew. You remember that, Jerry?"

  "You could spot those pants a mile away," the young detective said.

  Cooper continued, "The leather's desiccated. Not much oil in the grain. You were right too about them being old."

  "What kind of animal?"

  "I'd say kidskin. High quality."

  "If they were new it might mean he was rich," Rhyme grumbled. "But since they're old he might've found them on the street or bought them secondhand. No snappy deductions from 823's accessorizing, looks like. Okay. Thom, just add to the profile that the gloves are reddish kidskin. What else do we have?"

  "He wears aftershave," Sachs reminded him.

  "Forgot that. Good. Maybe to cover up another scent. Unsubs do that sometimes. Write it down, Thom. What did it smell like again, Amelia? You described it."

  "Dry. Like gin."

  "What about the clothesline?" Rhyme asked.

  Cooper examined it. "I've seen this before. Plastic. Several dozen interior filaments composed of six to ten different plastic types and one--no, two--metallic filaments."

  "I want a manufacturer and source."

  Cooper shook his head. "Impossible. Too generic."

  "Damn," Rhyme muttered. "And the knot?"

  "Now that's unusual. Very efficient. See how it loops around twice? PVC is the hardest cord to tie and this knot ain't going anywhere."

  "They have a knot file downtown?"

  "No."

  Inexcusable, he thought.

  "Sir?"

  Rhyme turned to Banks.

  "I do some sailing . . ."

  "Out of Westport," Rhyme said.

  "Well, as a matter of fact, yeah. How'd you know?"

  If there were a forensic test for location of origin Jerry Banks would turn up positive for Connecticut. "Lucky guess."

  "It isn't nautical. I don't recognize it."

  "That's good to know. Hang it up there." Rhyme nodded toward the wall, next to the Polaroid of the cellophane and the Monet poster. "We'll get to it later."

  The doorbell rang and Thom disappeared to answer it. Rhyme had a bad moment thinking that perhaps it was Dr. Berger returning to tell him he was no longer interested in helping him with their "project."

  But the heavy thud of boots told Rhyme who had come a-calling.

  The Emergency Services officers, all large, all somber, dressed in combat gear, entered the room politely and nodded to Sellitto and Banks. They were men of action and Rhyme bet that behind the twenty still eyes were ten very bad reactions to the
sight of a man laid up forever on his back.

  "Gentlemen, you've heard about the kidnapping last night and the death of the victim this afternoon." He continued through the affirmative muttering, "Our unsub has another victim. We have a lead in the case and I need you to hit locations around the city and secure evidence. Immediately and simultaneously. One man, one location."

  "You mean," one mustachioed officer asked uncertainly, "no backup."

  "You won't need it."

  "All due respect, sir, I'm not inclined to go into any tactical situation without backup. A partner at least."

  "I don't think there'll be any firefights. The targets are the major chain grocery stores in town."

  "Grocery stores?"

  "Not every store. Just one of every chain. J&G's, ShopRite, Food Warehouse . . ."

  "What exactly are we going to do?"

  "Buy veal shanks."

  "What?"

  "One package at each store. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to pay from your own pocket, gentlemen. But the city'll reimburse you. Oh, and we need them ASAP."

  She lay on her side, immobile.

  Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness of the old tunnel and she could see the little fuckers moving closer. One in particular she kept her eye on.

  Monelle's leg stung like a bitch but most of the pain was in her arm, from where he'd cut deep into her skin. Because it was cuffed behind her she couldn't see the wound, didn't know how much she'd bled. But it must have been a lot; she was very faint and could feel the sticky ooze all over her arms and side.

  The sound of scratching--needlish claws on concrete. The gray-brown lumps rustling in the shadows. The rats continued to twitch their way toward her. There must have been a hundred of them.

  She forced herself to stay completely still and kept her eyes on the big black one. Schwarzie, she called him. He was in the front, moving back and forth, studying her.

  Monelle Gerger had been around the world twice by the time she was nineteen. She'd hitched through Sri Lanka and Cambodia and Pakistan. Through Nebraska, where women stared at her eyebrow rings and braless boobs with contempt. Through Iran, where men stared at her bare arms like dogs in heat. She'd slept in city parks in Guatemala City and spent three days with rebel forces in Nicaragua after getting lost on the way to a wildlife refuge.

  But she'd never been so scared as now.

  Mein Gott.

  And what scared her the most was what she was about to do to herself.