The Bone Collector (17 page)

“Yo boy dint tell you anything more?”

“No, man. Nothing more. Hey, I’m hungry. Can we eat somethin’?”

“Remember what I told you about dignity? Quit moaning.” Dellray stood up. “I gotta make a call.”

The RRV skidded to a stop on Sixtieth Street.

Sachs snagged the crime-scene suitcase, the PoliLight and the big twelve-volt flashlight.

“Did you get her in time?” Sachs called to an ESU trooper. “Is she all right?”

No one answered at first. Then she heard the screams.

“What’s going on?” she muttered, running breathless
up to the large door, which had been battered in by Emergency Services. It opened onto a wide driveway that descended underneath an abandoned brick building. “She’s still
there?
”

“That’s right.”

“Why?” demanded a shocked Amelia Sachs.

“They told us not to go in.”

“Not to go in? She’s screaming. Can’t you hear her?”

An ESU cop said, “They told us to wait for you.”

They.
No, not
they
at all. Lincoln Rhyme. That son of a bitch.

“We were supposed to find her,” the officer said. “
You’re
supposed to go in.”

She clicked the headset on. “Rhyme!” she barked. “Are you there?”

No answer . . . You goddamn coward.

Give up the dead
 . . . Sonofabitch! As furious as she’d been storming down the stairs in his townhouse a few minutes ago, she was twice as angry now.

Sachs glanced behind her and noticed a medic standing beside an EMS bus.

“You, come with me.”

He took a step forward and saw her draw her weapon. He stopped.

“Whoa, time out,” the medic said. “I don’t have to go in until the area’s secure.”

“Now! Move!” She spun around and he must have seen more muzzle than he wanted. He grimaced and hurried after her.

From underground they heard: “Aiiiii!
Hilfe!
” Then sobbing.

Jesus. Sachs started to run toward the looming doorway, twelve feet high, smoky blackness inside.

She heard in her head:
You’re him, Amelia. What are you thinking?

Go away, she said silently.

But Lincoln Rhyme didn’t go away.

You’re a killer and a kidnapper, Amelia. Where would you walk, what would you touch?

Forget it! I’m going to save her. Hell with the crime scene . . .

“
Mein Gott!
Pleece! Some-von, pleece help!”

Go, Sachs shouted to herself. Sprint! He’s not in here. You’re safe. Get her, go . . .

She picked up the pace, her utility belt clanking as she ran. Then, twenty feet down the tunnel, she pulled up. Debating. She didn’t like which side won.

“Oh, fuck,” she spat out. She set down the suitcase and opened it up. She blurted to the medic, “You, what’s your name?”

The uneasy young man answered, “Tad Walsh. I mean, what’s going on?” He glanced down into the murk.

“Oh . . .
Bitte, helfen Sie mir!
”

“Cover me,” Sachs whispered.

“Cover you? Wait a minute, I don’t do that.”

“Take the gun, all right?”

“What’m I supposed to cover you
from?
”

Thrusting the automatic into his hand, she dropped to her knees. “Safety’s off. Be careful.”

She grabbed two rubber bands and slipped them over her shoes. Taking the pistol back she ordered him to do the same.

With unsteady hands he slipped the bands on.

“I’m just thinking—”

“Quiet. He could still be here.”

“Wait a minute now, ma’am,” the medic whispered. “This ain’t in my job description.”

“It’s not in mine either. Hold the light.” She handed him the flashlight.

“But if he’s here he’s probably gonna shoot at the light. I mean, that’s what
I’d
shoot at.”

“Then hold it up high. Over my shoulder. I’ll go in front. If anybody gets shot it’ll be me.”

“Then whatta I do?” Tad sounded like a teenager.

“I myself’d run like hell,” Sachs muttered. “Now follow me. And keep that beam steady.”

Lugging the black CS suitcase in her left hand, holding her weapon in front of her, she gazed at the floor as they moved into the darkness. She saw the familiar broom marks again, just like at the other scene.

“Bitte nicht, bitte nicht, bitte . . .”
There was a brief scream, then silence.

“What the hell’s going on down there?” Tad whispered.

“Shhhh,” Sachs hissed.

They walked slowly. Sachs blew on her fingers gripping the Glock—to dry the slick sweat—and carefully eyed the random targets of wooden pillars, shadows and discarded machinery picked out by the flashlight held unsteadily in Tad’s hand.

She found no footprints.

Of course not. He’s smart.

But we’re smart too,
she heard Lincoln Rhyme say in her thoughts. And she told him to shut up.

Slower now.

Five more feet. A pause. Then moving slowly forward. Trying to ignore the girl’s moans. She felt it again—that sensation of being watched, the slippery crawl of the iron sights tracking you. The body armor, she reflected, wouldn’t stop a full-metal jacket. Half the bad guys used Black Talons anyway—so a leg or arm shot would kill you just as efficiently as a chest hit. And a lot more painfully. Nick had told her how one of those bullets could open up a human body; one of his partners, hit by two of the vicious slugs, had died in his arms.

Above and behind
 . . .

Thinking of him, she remembered one night, lying against Nick’s solid chest, gazing at the silhouette of his handsome Italian face on her pillow as he told her about hostage-rescue entry—“Somebody inside wants to nail you when you go in they’ll do it from above and behind . . .”

“Shit.” She dropped to a crouch, spinning around and aiming the Glock toward the ceiling, ready to empty the entire clip.

“What?” Tad whispered, cowering.
“What?”

The emptiness gaped at her.

“Nothing.” And breathed deeply, stood up.

“Don’t
do
that.”

There was a gurgling noise ahead of them.

“Jesus,” came Tad’s high voice again. “I hate this.”

This guy’s a pussy, she thought. I know that ’cause he’s saying everything
I
want to.

She stopped. “Shine the light up there. Ahead.”

“Oh, my everloving . . .”

Sachs finally understood the hairs she’d found at the last scene. She remembered the look that had passed between Sellitto and Rhyme. He’d known then what the unsub had planned. He’d known this was what was happening to her—and
still
he’d told ESU to wait. She hated him that much more.

In front of them a pudgy girl lolled on the floor, in a pool of blood. She glanced toward the light with glazed eyes and passed out. Just as a huge black rat—big as a housecat—crawled up onto her belly and moved toward the girl’s fleshy throat. It bared its dingy teeth to take a bite from the girl’s chin.

Sachs smoothly lifted the chunky black Glock, her left palm circling under the butt for support. She aimed carefully.

Shooting is breathing.

Inhale, out. Squeeze.

Sachs fired her weapon for the first time in the line of duty. Four shots. The huge black rat standing on the girl’s chest exploded. She hit one more on the floor behind and another one that, panicking, raced toward Sachs and the medic. The others vanished silently, fast as water on sand.

“Jesus,” the medic said. “You could’ve hit the girl.”

“From thirty feet?” Sachs snorted. “Not hardly.”

The radio burst to life and Haumann asked if they were under fire.

“Negative,” Sachs replied. “Just shooing a few rats.”

“Roger, K.”

She took the flashlight from the medic and shining it low, started forward.

“It’s all right, miss,” Sachs called. “You’ll be all right.”

The girl’s eyes opened, head flipping from side to side.

“Bitte, bitte . . .”

She was very pale. Her blue eyes clung to Sachs, as if she was afraid to look away. “
Bitte, bitte
 . . . Pleece . . .”
Her voice rose to a wild keening and she began to sob and thrash in terror as the medic pressed bandages on her wounds.

Sachs cradled her bloody blond head, whispering, “You’ll be all right, honey, you’ll be all right, you’ll be all right. . . .”

T
he office, high above downtown Manhattan, looked out over Jersey. The crap in the air made the sunset absolutely beautiful.

“We gotta.”

“We can’t.”

“Gotta,” Fred Dellray repeated and sipped his coffee—even worse than in the restaurant where the Scruff and he’d been sitting not long before. “Take it away from ’em. They’ll live with it.”

“It’s a local case,” responded the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office. The ASAC was a meticulous man who could never work undercover—because when you saw him you thought, Oh, look, an FBI agent.

“It’s not local. They’re
treating
it local. But it’s a big case.”

“We’re down eighty men because of the UN thing.”

“And this’s related to it,” Dellray said. “I’m positive.”

“Then we’ll tell UN Security. Let everybody . . . Oh, don’t give me that look.”

“UN Security? UN
Security?
Say, you ever heara the words oxy-moron? . . . Billy, you see that picture? Of the scene this morning? The hand comin’ outa the dirt, and all the skin cut offa that finger? That’s a sick fuck out there.”

“NYPD’s keeping us informed,” the ASAC said smartly. “We’ve got Behavioral on call if they want.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ on the merry cross. ‘Behavioral on call’? We gotta catch this ripper, Billy.
Catch
him. Not figger out his tick-tocky workings.”

“Tell me what your snitch said again.”

Dellray knew a crack in a rock when he saw one. Wasn’t going to let it seal up again. Rapid fire now: about the Scruff and Jackie in Johannesburg or Monrovia and the hushed word throughout the illicit arms trade that something was going down at a New York airport this week so stay clear. “It’s
him,
” Dellray said. “Gotta be.”

“NYPD’s got a task force together.”

“Not Anti-Terror. I made calls. Nobody at A-T there knows zippo about it. To NYPD it’s ‘dead tourists equal bad public relations.’ I want this case, Billy.” And Fred Dellray said the one word he’d never uttered in his eight years of undercover work. “Please.”

“What grounds’re you talking?”

“Oh-oh, bullshit question,” Dellray said, stroking his index finger like a scolding teacher. “Lessee. We got ourselves that spiffy new anti-terrorism bill. But that’s not enough for you, you want jurisdiction? I’ll give you jurisdiction. A Port Authority felony. Kidnapping. I can fucking argue that this prick’s driving a taxi so he’s affecting interstate commerce. We don’t want to play
those
games, do we, Billy?”

“You’re not listening, Dellray. I can recite the U.S. Code in my sleep, thank you. I want to know if we’re going to take over, what we tell people and make
everybody
happy. ’Cause remember, after this unsub’s bagged and tagged we’re going to have to keep working with NYPD. I’m not going to send my big brother to beat up their big brother even though I can. Anytime I want. Lon Sellitto’s running the case and he’s a good man.”

“A lieutenant?” Dellray snorted. He tugged the cigarette out from behind his ear and held it under his nostrils for a moment.

“Jim Polling’s in charge.”

Dellray reared back with mock horror. “Polling? Little Adolph? The ‘You-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-’cause-I’ma-hit-you-upside-the-motherfuckin’-head’ Polling?
Him?
”

The ASAC had no response for that. He said, “Sellitto’s good. A real workhorse. I’ve been with him on two OC task forces.”

“That unsub’s grabbing bodies right and left and this here boy’s betting he’s going to work his way up.”

“Meaning?”

“We got senators in town. We got congressmen, we got heads of state. I think these folk he’s grabbing now’re just for practice.”

“
You
been talking to Behavioral and not telling me?”

“It’s what I smell.” Dellray couldn’t resist touching his lean nose.

The ASAC blew air from his clean-shaven-federal-agent cheeks. “Who’s the CI?”

Dellray had trouble thinking of the Scruff as a confidential informant, which sounded like something out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. Most
CI
s were skels, short for skeletons, meaning scrawny, disgusting little hustlers. Which fit the Scruff to a T.

“He’s a tick,” Dellray admitted. “But Jackie, this guy he heard it from’s solid.”

“I know you want it, Fred. I understand.” The ASAC said this with some sympathy. Because he knew exactly what was behind Dellray’s request.

Even as a boy in Brooklyn, Dellray had wanted to be a cop. It hadn’t mattered much to him what kind of cop as long as he could spend twenty-four hours a day doing it. But soon after joining the Bureau he found his calling—undercover work.

Teamed with his straight man and guardian angel Toby Dolittle, Dellray was responsible for sending a large number of perps away for a very long time—the sentences totaled close to a thousand years. (“They kin call us the Millennium Team, Toby-o,” he declared to his partner once.) The clue to Dellray’s success was his nickname: “the Chameleon.” Bestowed after—in the space of twenty-four hours—he played a brain-dead cluckhead in a Harlem crack house and a Haitian dignitary at a dinner in the Panamanian consulate, complete with diagonal red ribbon on his chest and impenetrable accent. The two of them were regularly loaned out to ATF or DEA and, occasionally, city police departments. Drugs and guns were their specialty though they had a minor in ’jacked merchandise.

The irony of undercover work is that the better you are, the earlier the retirement. Word gets around and the big boys, the perps worth going after, become harder to fox. Dolittle and Dellray found themselves working less in the field and more as handlers of informants and other undercover agents. And while it wasn’t Dellray’s first choice—nothing excited him like the street—it still got him out of the office more often than most SAs in the Bureau. It had never occurred to him to request a transfer.

Until two years ago—a warm April morning in New York. Dellray was just about to leave the office to catch a plane at La Guardia when he got a phone call from the assistant director of the Bureau in Washington. The FBI is a nest of hierarchy and Dellray couldn’t imagine why the big man himself was calling. Until he heard the AD’s somber voice break the news that Toby Dolittle, along with an assistant U.S. attorney from Manhattan, had been on the ground floor of the Oklahoma City federal building that morning, preparing for the deposition session that Dellray himself was just about to depart for.

Their bodies were being flown back to New York the next day.

Which was the same day that Dellray put in the first of his RFT-2230 forms, requesting a transfer to the Bureau’s Anti-Terror Division.

The bombing had been the crime of crimes to Fred Dellray, who, when no one was looking, devoured books on politics and philosophy. He believed there was nothing essentially unAmerican about greed or lust—hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. And if people making a business of greed or lust sometimes stepped over the border of legality, Dellray was pleased to track them down—but he never did so with personal animosity. But to murder people for their beliefs—hell, to murder children before they even knew
what
they believed—my God, that was a stab at the heart of the country. Sitting in his two-room, sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment after
Toby’s funeral, Dellray decided that this was the kind of crime he wanted a crack at.

But unfortunately the Chameleon’s reputation preceded him. The Bureau’s best undercover agent was now their best handler, running agents and CIs throughout the East Coast. His bosses simply couldn’t afford to let him go to one of the more quiescent departments of the FBI. Dellray was a minor legend, personally responsible for some of the Bureau’s greatest recent successes. So it was with considerable regret that his persistent requests were turned down.

The ASAC was well aware of this history and he now added a sincere, “I wish I could help out, Fred. I’m sorry.”

But all Dellray heard in these words was the rock cracking a little further. And so the Chameleon pulled a persona off the rack and stared down his boss. He wished he still had his fake gold tooth. Street man Dellray was a tough hombre with one mother-fucker of a mean stare. And in that look was the unmistakable message anybody on the street would know instinctively: I done for you, now you do for me.

Finally the smarmy ASAC said lamely, “It’s just that we need
something.
”

“Somethin’?”

“A hook,” the ASAC said. “We don’t have a hook.”

A reason to take the case away from NYPD, he meant.

Politics, politics, polifuckingtics.

Dellray lowered his head but the eyes, brown as polish, didn’t waver a millimeter from the ASAC. “He cut the skin off that vic’s finger this morning, Billy. Clean down to the bone. Then buried him alive.”

Two scrubbed, federal-agent hands met beneath a crisp jaw. The ASAC said slowly, “Here’s a thought. There’s a deputy commissioner at NYPD. Name’s Eckert. You know him? He’s a friend of mine.”

The girl lay on her back on a stretcher, eyes closed, conscious but groggy. Still pale. An IV of glucose ran
into her arm. Now that she’d been rehydrated she was coherent and surprisingly calm, all things considered.

Sachs walked back to the gates of hell and stood looking down into the black doorway. She clicked on the radio and called Lincoln Rhyme. This time he answered.

“How’s the scene look?” Rhyme asked casually.

Her answer was a curt: “We got her out. If you’re interested.”

“Ah, good. How is she?”

“Not good.”

“But alive, right.”

“Barely.”

“You’re upset because of the rats, aren’t you, Amelia?”

She didn’t answer.

“Because I didn’t let Bo’s men get her right away. Are you there, Amelia?”

“I’m here.”

“There are five contaminants of crime scenes,” Rhyme explained. She noticed he’d gone into his low, seductive tone again. “The weather, the victim’s family, the suspect, souvenir hunters. The last is the worst. Guess what it is?”

“You tell me.”

“Other cops. If I’d let ESU in they could’ve destroyed all the trace. You know how to handle a scene now. And I’ll bet you preserved everything just fine.”

Sachs needed to say, “I don’t think she’ll ever be the same after this. The rats were all over her.”

“Yes, I imagine they were. That’s their nature.”

Their nature
 . . .

“But five minutes or ten wasn’t going to make any difference. She—”

Click.

She shut off the radio and walked to Walsh, the medic.

“I want to interview her. Is she too groggy?”

“Not yet. We gave her locals—to stitch the lacerations and the bites. She’ll want some Demerol in a half hour or so.”

Sachs smiled and crouched down beside her. “Hi, how you doing?”

The girl, fat but very pretty, nodded.

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“Yes, pleece. I want you get him.”

Sellitto arrived and ambled up to them. He smiled down at the girl, who gazed at him blankly. He proffered a badge she had no interest in and identified himself.

“You all right, miss?”

The girl shrugged.

Sweating fiercely in the muggy heat, Sellitto nodded Sachs aside. “Polling been here?”

“Haven’t seen him. Maybe he’s at Lincoln’s.”

“No, I just called there. He’s gotta get to City Hall pronto.”

“What’s the problem?”

Sellitto lowered his voice, his doughy face twisted up. “A fuckup—our transmissions’re supposed to be secure. But those fucking reporters, somebody’s got an unscrambler or something. They heard we didn’t go in right away to get her.” He nodded toward the girl.

“Well, we
didn’t,
” Sachs said harshly. “Rhyme told ESU to wait until I got here.”

The detective winced. “Man, I hope they don’t have
that
on tape. We need Polling for damage control.” He nodded to the girl. “Interviewed her yet?”

“No. Just about to.” With some regret Sachs clicked on the radio and heard Rhyme’s urgent voice.

“. . . you there? This goddamn thing doesn’t—”

“I’m here,” Sachs said coolly.

“What happened?”

“Interference, I guess. I’m with the vic.”

The girl blinked at the exchange and Sachs smiled. “I’m not talking to myself.” Gestured toward the mike. “Police headquarters. What’s your name?”

“Monelle. Monelle Gerger.” She looked at her bitten arm, pulled up a dressing and examined a wound.

“Interview her fast,” Rhyme instructed, “then work the scene.”

Hand covering the microphone stalk, Sachs whispered fiercely to Sellitto, “This man is a pain in the ass to work for. Sir.”

“Humor him, officer.”

“Amelia!” Rhyme barked. “Answer me!”

“We’re interviewing her, all right?” she snapped.

Sellitto asked, “Can you tell us what happened?”