The Bone Collector

  "Amelia, relax."

  "I'll never find anything here."

  "I know it seems overwhelming. But just keep in mind that there're only three types of PE that we're concerned about. Objects, body materials and impressions. That's all. It's less daunting if you think of it that way."

  Easy for you to say.

  "And the scene isn't as big as it looks. Just concentrate on the places they walked. Go to the post."

  Sachs walked the path. Staring down.

  The ESU lights were brilliant but they also made the shadows starker, revealing a dozen places the kidnapper could hide. A chill trickled down her spine. Stay close, Lincoln, she thought reluctantly. I'm pissed, sure, but I wanna hear you. Breathe or something.

  She paused, shone the PoliLight over the ground.

  "Is it all swept?" he asked.

  "Yes. Just like before."

  The body armor chafed her breasts despite the sports bra and undershirt and as hot as it was outside it was unbearable down here. Her skin prickled and she felt a ravenous desire to scratch under her vest.

  "I'm at the post."

  "Vacuum the area for trace."

  Sachs ran the Dustbuster. Hating the noise. It covered up any sound of approaching footsteps, guns cocking, knives being drawn. Involuntarily she looked behind her once, twice. Nearly dropped the vacuum as her hand strayed to her gun.

  Sachs looked at the impression in the dust of where Monelle's body had lain. I'm him. I'm dragging her along. She kicks me. I stumble . . .

  Monelle could have kicked in only one direction, away from the ramp. The unsub didn't fall, she'd said. Which meant he must've landed on his feet. Sachs walked a yard or two into the gloom.

  "Bingo!" Sachs shouted.

  "What? Tell me?"

  "Footprints. He missed a spot sweeping up."

  "Not hers?"

  "No. She was wearing running shoes. These are smooth soles. Like dress shoes. Two good prints. We'll know what size feet he's got."

  "No, they won't tell us that. Soles can be larger or smaller than the uppers. But it may tell us something. In the CS bag there's an electrostatic printer. It's a small box with a wand on it. There'll be some sheets of acetate next to it. Separate the paper, lay the acetate on the print and run the wand over it."

  She found the device and made two images of the prints. Carefully slipped them into a paper envelope.

  Sachs returned to the post. "And here's a bit of straw from the broom."

  "From?--"

  "Sorry," Sachs said quickly. "We don't know where it's from. A bit of straw. I'm picking it up and bagging it."

  Getting good with these pencils. Hey, Lincoln, you son of a bitch, know what I'm doing to celebrate my permanent retirement from crime scene detail? I'm going out for Chinese.

  The ESU halogens didn't reach into the side tunnel where Monelle had run. Sachs paused at the day-night line then plunged forward into the shadows. The flashlight beam swept the floor in front of her.

  "Talk to me, Amelia."

  "There isn't much to see. He swept up here too. Jesus, he thinks of everything."

  "What do you see?"

  "Just marks in the dust."

  I tackle her, I bring her down. I'm mad. Furious. I try to strangle her.

  Sachs stared at the ground.

  "Here's something--knee prints! When he was strangling her he must have straddled her waist. He left knee prints and he missed them when he swept."

  "Electrostatic them."

  She did, quicker this time. Getting the hang of the equipment. She was slipping the print into the envelope when something caught her eye. Another mark in the dust.

  What is that?

  "Lincoln . . . I'm looking at the spot where . . . it looks like the glove fell here. When they were struggling."

  She clicked on the PoliLight. And couldn't believe what she saw.

  "A print. I've got a fingerprint!"

  "What?" Rhyme asked, incredulous. "It's not hers?"

  "Nope, couldn't be. I can see the dust where she was lying. Her hands were cuffed the whole time. It's where he picked up the glove. He probably thought he'd swept here but missed it. It's a big, fat beautiful one!"

  "Stain it, light it and shoot the son of a bitch on the one-to-one."

  It took her only two tries to get a crisp Polaroid. She felt like she'd found a hundred-dollar bill in the street.

  "Vacuum the area and then go back to the post. Walk the grid," he told her.

  She slowly walked the floor, back and forth. One foot at a time.

  "Don't forget to look up," he reminded her. "I once caught an unsub because of a single hair on the ceiling. He'd loaded a .357 round in a true .38 and the blowback pasted a hair from his hand on the crown molding."

  "I'm looking. It's a tile ceiling. Dirty. Nothing else. Nowhere to stash anything. No ledges or doorways."

  "Where're the staged clues?" he asked.

  "I don't see anything."

  Back and forth. Five minutes passed. Six, seven.

  "Maybe he didn't leave any this time," Sachs suggested. "Maybe Monelle's the last."

  "No," Rhyme said with certainty.

  Then behind one of the wooden pillars a flash caught her eye.

  "Here's something in the corner . . . Yep. Here they are."

  "Shoot it 'fore you touch it."

  She took a photograph and then picked up a wad of white cloth with the pencils. "Women's underwear. Wet."

  "Semen?"

  "I don't know," she said. Wondering if he was going to ask her to smell it.

  Rhyme ordered, "Try the PoliLight. Proteins will fluoresce."

  She fetched the light, turned it on. It illuminated the cloth but the liquid didn't glow. "No."

  "Bag it. In plastic. What else?" he asked eagerly.

  "A leaf. Long, thin, pointed at one end."

  It had been cut sometime ago and was dry and turning brown.

  She heard Rhyme sigh in frustration. "There're about eight thousand varieties of deciduous vegetation in Manhattan," he explained. "Not very helpful. What's underneath the leaf?"

  Why does he think there's anything there?

  But there was. A scrap of newsprint. Blank on one side, the other was printed with a drawing of the phases of the moon.

  "The moon?" Rhyme mused. "Any prints? Spray it with ninhydrin and scan it fast with the light."

  A blast of the PoliLight revealed nothing.

  "That's all."

  Silence for a moment. "What're the clues sitting on?"

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "You have to know."

  "Well, the ground," she answered testily. "Dirt." What else would they be sitting on?

  "Is it like all the rest of the dirt around there?"

  "Yes." Then she looked closely. Hell, it was different. "Well, not exactly. It's a different color."

  Was he always right?

  Rhyme instructed, "Bag it. In paper."

  As she scooped up the grains he said, "Amelia?"

  "Yeah?"

  "He's not there," Rhyme said reassuringly.

  "I guess."

  "I heard something in your voice."

  "I'm fine," she said shortly. "I'm smelling the air. I smell blood. Mold and mildew. And the aftershave again."

  "The same as before?"

  "Yes."

  "Where's it coming from?"

  Sniffing the air, Sachs walked in a spiral, the Maypole again, until she came to another wooden post.

  "Here. It's strongest right here."

  "What's 'here,' Amelia? You're my legs and my eyes, remember."

  "One of these wooden columns. Like the kind she was tied to. About fifteen feet away."

  "So he might have rested against it. Any prints?"

  She sprayed it with ninhydrin and shone the light on it.

  "No. But the smell's very strong."

  "Sample a portion of the post where it's the strongest. There's a MotoTool in the case. Black. A portable dr
ill. Take a sampling bit--it's like a hollow drill bit--and mount it in the tool. There's something called a chuck. It's a--"

  "I own a drill press," she said tersely.

  "Oh," Rhyme said.

  She drilled a piece of the post out, then flicked sweat from her forehead. "Bag it in plastic?" she asked. He told her yes. She felt faint, lowered her head and caught her breath. No fucking air in here.

  "Anything else?" Rhyme asked.

  "Nothing that I can see."

  "I'm proud of you, Amelia. Come on back and bring your treasures with you."

  SIXTEEN

  Careful," Rhyme barked.

  "I'm an expert at this."

  "Is it new or old?"

  "Shhh," Thom said.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake. The blade, is it old or new?"

  "Don't breathe. . . . Ah, there we go. Smooth as a baby's butt."

  The procedure was not forensic but cosmetic.

  Thom was giving Rhyme his first shave in a week. He had also washed his hair and combed it straight back.

  A half hour before, waiting for Sachs and the evidence to arrive, Rhyme had sent Cooper out of the room while Thom slicked up a catheter with K-Y and wielded the tube. After that business had been completed Thom had looked at him and said, "You look like shit. You realize that?"

  "I don't care. Why would I care?"

  Realizing suddenly that he did.

  "How 'bout a shave?" the young man had asked.

  "We don't have time."

  Rhyme's real concern was that if Dr. Berger saw him groomed he'd be less inclined to go ahead with the suicide. A disheveled patient is a despondent patient.

  "And a wash."

  "No."

  "We've got company now, Lincoln."

  Finally Rhyme had grumbled, "All right."

  "And let's lose those pajamas, what do you say?"

  "There's nothing wrong with them."

  But that meant all right too.

  Now, scrubbed and shaved, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, Rhyme ignored the mirror his aide held in front of him.

  "Take that away."

  "Remarkable improvement."

  Lincoln Rhyme snorted derisively. "I'm going for a walk until they get back," he announced and settled his head back into the pillow. Mel Cooper turned to him with a perplexed expression.

  "In his head," Thom explained.

  "Your head?"

  "I imagine it," Rhyme continued.

  "That's quite a trick," Cooper said.

  "I can walk through any neighborhood I want and never get mugged. Hike in the mountains and never get tired. Climb a mountain if I want. Go window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. Of course the things I see aren't necessarily there. But so what? Neither are the stars."

  "How's that?" Cooper asked.

  "The starlight we see is thousands or millions of years old. By the time it gets to Earth the stars themselves've moved. They're not where we see them." Rhyme sighed as the exhaustion flooded over him. "I suppose some of them have already burned out and disappeared." He closed his eyes.

  "He's making it harder."

  "Not necessarily," Rhyme answered Lon Sellitto.

  Sellitto, Banks and Sachs had just returned from the stockyard scene.

  "Underwear, the moon and a plant," cheerfully pessimistic Jerry Banks said. "That's not exactly a road map."

  "Dirt too," Rhyme reminded, ever appreciative of soil.

  "Have any idea what they mean?" Sellitto asked.

  "Not yet," Rhyme said.

  "Where's Polling?" Sellitto muttered. "He still hasn't answered his page."

  "Haven't seen him," Rhyme said.

  A figure appeared in the doorway.

  "As I live and breathe," rumbled the stranger's smooth baritone.

  Rhyme nodded the lanky man inside. He was somber-looking but his lean face suddenly cracked into a warm smile, as it tended to do at odd moments. Terry Dobyns was the sum total of the NYPD's behavioral science department. He'd studied with the FBI behaviorists down at Quantico and had degrees in forensic science and psychology.

  The psychologist loved opera and touch football and when Lincoln Rhyme had awakened in the hospital after the accident three and a half years ago Dobyns had been sitting beside him listening to Aida on a Walkman. He'd then spent the next three hours conducting what turned out to be the first of many counseling sessions about Rhyme's injury.

  "Now what's this I recall the textbooks sayin' 'bout people who don't return phone calls?"

  "Analyze me later, Terry. You hear about our unsub?"

  "A bit," Dobyns said, looking Rhyme over. He wasn't an M.D. but he knew physiology. "You all right, Lincoln? Looking a little peaked."

  "I'm getting a bit of a workout today," Rhyme admitted. "And I could use a nap. You know what a lazy SOB I am."

  "Yeah, right. You're the man'd call me at three in the morning with some question about a perp and couldn't understand why I was in the sack. So what's up? You fishin' for a profile?"

  "Whatever you can tell us'll help."

  Sellitto briefed Dobyns, who--as Rhyme recalled from the days they worked together--never took notes but managed to retain everything he heard inside a head crowned with dark-red hair.

  The psychologist paced in front of the wall chart, glancing up at it occasionally as he listened to the detective's rumbling voice.

  He held up a finger, interrupting Sellitto. "The victims, the victims . . . They've all been found underground. Buried, in a basement, in the stockyard tunnel."

  "Right," Rhyme confirmed.

  "Go on."

  Sellitto continued, explaining about the rescue of Monelle Gerger.

  "Fine, all right," Dobyns said absently. Then braked to a halt and turned to the wall again. He spread his legs and, hands on hips, gazed at the sparse facts about Unsub 823. "Tell me more about this idea of yours, Lincoln. That he likes old things."

  "I don't know what to make of it. So far his clues have something to do with historical New York. Building materials from the turn of the century, the stockyards, the steam system."

  Dobyns stepped forward suddenly and tapped the profile. "Hanna. Tell me about Hanna."

  "Amelia?" Rhyme asked.

  She told Dobyns how the unsub had referred to Monelle Gerger as Hanna for no apparent reason. "She said he seemed to like saying the name. And speaking to her in German."

  "And he took a bit of a chance to 'nap her, didn't he?" Dobyns noted. "The cab, at the airport--that was safe for him. But hiding in a laundry room . . . He must've been real motivated to snatch somebody German."

  Dobyns twined some ruddy hair around a lengthy finger and flopped down in one of the squeaky rattan chairs, stretched his feet out in front of him.

  "Okay, try this on for size. The underground . . . that's the key. It tells me he's somebody who's hiding something and when I hear that I start thinking hysteria."

  "He's not acting hysterical," Sellitto said. "He's pretty damn calm and calculating."

  "Not hysteria in that sense. It's a category of mental disorders. The condition manifests when something traumatic happens in a patient's life and the subconscious converts that trauma into something else. It's an attempt to protect the patient. With traditional conversion hysteria you see physical symptoms--nausea, pain, paralysis. But I think here we're dealing with a related problem. Dissociation--that's what we call it when the reaction to the trauma affects the mind, not the physical body. Hysterical amnesia, fugue states. And multiple personalities."

  "Jekyll and Hyde?" Mel Cooper played straight man this time, beating Banks to the punch.

  "Well, I don't think he's got true multiple personalities," Dobyns continued. "That's a very rare diagnosis and the classic mult pers is young and has a lower IQ than your boy." He nodded at the profile chart. "He's slick and he's smart. Clearly an organized offender." Dobyns stared out the window for a moment. "This is interesting, Lincoln. I think your unsub pulls on his other personality when it suits him--when he
wants to kill--and that's important."

  "Why?"

  "Two reasons. First, it tells us something about his main personality. He's someone who's been trained--maybe at his job, maybe his upbringing--to help people, not hurt them. A priest, a counselor, politician, social worker. And, two, I think it means he's found himself a blueprint. If you can find out what it is, maybe you can get a lead to him."

  "What kind of blueprint?"

  "He may have wanted to kill for a long time. But he didn't act until he found himself a role model. Maybe from a book or movie. Or somebody he actually knows. It's someone he can identify with, someone whose own crimes in effect give him permission to kill. Now, I'm going out on a limb here--"

  "Climb," Rhyme said. "Climb."

  "His obsession with history tells me that his personality is a character from the past."

  "Real life?"

  "That I couldn't say. Maybe fictional, maybe not. Hanna, whoever she is, figures in the story somewhere. Germany too. Or German Americans."

  "Any idea what might've set him off?"

  "Freud felt it was caused by--what else?--sexual conflict at the Oedipal stage. Nowadays, the consensus is that developmental glitches're only one cause--any trauma can trigger it. And it doesn't have to be a single event. It could be a personality flaw, a long series of personal or professional disappointments. Hard to say." His eyes glowed as they gazed at the profile. "But I sure hope you bag him alive, Lincoln. I'd love the chance to get him on the couch for a few hours."

  "Thom, are you writing this down?"

  "Yes, bwana."

  "But one question," Rhyme began.

  Dobyns whirled around. "I'd say it's the question, Lincoln: Why is he leaving the clues? Right?"

  "Yep. Why the clues?"

  "Think about what he's done. . . . He's talking to you. Not rambling incoherently like Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer. He's not schizophrenic. He's communicating--in your language. The language of forensics. Why?" More pacing, eyes flipping over the chart. "All I can think of is that he wants to share the guilt. See, it's hard for him to kill. It becomes easier if he makes us accomplices. If we don't save the vics in time their deaths are partly our fault."

  "But that's good, isn't it?" Rhyme asked. "It means he'll keep giving us clues that are solvable. Otherwise, if the puzzle's too hard, he's not sharing the burden."

  "Well, that's true," Dobyns said, smiling no longer. "But there's another factor at work too."

  Sellitto supplied the answer. "Serial activity escalates."

  "Right," Dobyns confirmed.

  "How can he strike more often?" Banks muttered. "Every three hours isn't fast enough?"

  "Oh, he'll find a way," the psychologist continued. "Most likely, he'll start targeting multiple victims." The psychologist's eyes narrowed. "Say, you all right, Lincoln?"