The Bone Collector (32 page)

F
ive shots, a star pattern, and even then the honest General Motors glass held firm.

Three more blasts, deafening her in the confines of the wagon. But at least the gas didn’t explode.

She began to kick again. Finally the window burst outward in a cascade of blue-green ice. Just as she rolled out the interior of the wagon exploded with a breathless
woosh.

Stripping down to her T-shirt, she flung away her gas-soaked uniform blouse and bulletproof vest and tossed aside the headset mike. Felt her ankle wobble but sprinted to the front door of the church, past the fleeing churchgoers and choir. The ground floor was filled with bubbling smoke. Nearby, a section of the floor rippled and steamed and then burst into flames.

The minister appeared suddenly, choking, tears streaming down his face. He was dragging an unconscious woman behind him. Sachs helped him get her to the door.

“Where’s the basement?” she asked.

He coughed hard, shook his head.

“Where?” she cried, thinking of Carole Ganz and her little daughter. “The
basement?
”

“There. But . . .”

On the other side of the patch of burning floor.

Sachs could barely see it, the smoke was so thick. A wall collapsed in front of them, the old joists and posts behind it snapping and firing sparks and jets of hot gas, which hissed into the cloudy room. She hesitated, then started for the basement door.

The minister took her arm. “Wait.” He opened a
closet and grabbed a fire extinguisher, yanked the arming pin. “Let’s go.”

Sachs shook her head. “Not you. Keep checking up here. Tell the fire department there’s a police officer and another victim in the basement.”

Sachs was sprinting now.

When you move
 . . .

She jumped over the fiery patch of floor. But because of the smoke she misjudged the distance to the wall; it was closer than she’d thought and she slammed into the wood paneling then fell backwards, rolling as her hair brushed the fire, some strands igniting. Gagging on the stink, she crushed the flames out and started to push herself to her feet. The floor, weakened by the flames beneath, broke under her weight and her face crashed into the oak. She felt the blaze in the basement lick her hands and arms as she yanked her hands back.

Rolling away from the edge she climbed to her feet and reached for the knob to the basement door. She stopped suddenly.

Come on, girl, think better! Feel a door before opening it. If it’s too hot and you let oxygen into a superheated room it’ll ignite and the backdraft’ll fry your ass good. She touched the wood. It was scorching hot.

Then thought: But what the hell else can I do?

Spitting on her hand, she gripped the knob fast, twisting it open and releasing it just before the burn seared her palm.

The door burst open and a cloud of smoke and sparks shot outward.

“Anybody down there?” she called and started down.

The lower stairs were burning. She blasted them with a short burst of carbon dioxide and leapt into the murky basement. She broke through the second-to-last step, pitching forward. The extinguisher clattered to the floor as she grabbed the railing just in time to save her leg from snapping.

Pulling herself out of the broken step, Sachs squinted through the haze. The smoke wasn’t as bad down here—it was rising—but the flames were raging all around her.
The extinguisher had rolled under a burning table. Forget it! She ran through the smoke.

“Hello?” she shouted.

No answer.

Then remembered that Unsub 823 used duct tape; he liked his vics silent.

She kicked in a small doorway and looked inside the boiler room. There was a door leading outside but burning debris blocked it completely. Beside it stood the fuel tank, which was now surrounded by flames.

It won’t explode, Sachs remembered from the academy—the lecture on arson. Fuel oil doesn’t explode. Kick aside the debris and push the door open. Clear your escape route.
Then
go look for the woman and the girl.

She hesitated, watching the flames roll over the side of the oil tank.

It won’t explode, it won’t explode.

She started forward, edging toward the door.

It won’t—

The tank suddenly puffed out like a heated soda can and split down the middle. The oil squirted into the air, igniting in a huge orange spume. A fiery pool formed on the floor and flowed toward Sachs.

Won’t explode. Okay. But it burns pretty fucking well. She leapt back through the door, slammed it shut. So much for her escape route.

Backing toward the stairs, choking now, keeping low, looking for any signs of Carole and Pammy. Could 823 have changed the rules? Could he have given up on basements and put these vics in the church attic?

Crack.

A fast look upward. She saw a large oak beam, rippling with flames, start to fall.

With a scream Sachs leapt aside, but tripped and landed hard on her back, staring at the huge falling bar of wood streaking directly at her face and chest. Instinctively she held her hands up.

A huge bang as the beam landed on a child’s Sunday-school chair. It stopped inches from Sachs’s head. She crawled out from underneath and rolled to her feet.

Looking around the room, peering through the darkening smoke.

Hell no, she thought suddenly. I’m not losing another one. Choking, Sachs turned back to the fire and staggered toward the one corner she hadn’t checked.

As she jogged forward a leg shot out from behind a file cabinet and tripped her.

Hands flying outward, Sachs landed face down inches from a pool of burning oil. She rolled to her side, drawing her weapon and swinging it into the panicked face of a blond woman struggling to sit up.

Sachs pulled the gag off her mouth and the woman spit black mucus. She gagged for a moment, a deep, dying sound.

“Carole Ganz?”

She nodded.

“Your daughter?” Sachs cried.

“Not . . . here. My hands! The cuffs.”

“No time. Come on.” Sachs cut Carole’s ankles free with her switchblade.

It was then that she saw, against the wall by the window, a melting plastic bag.

The planted clues! The ones that told where the little girl would be. She stepped toward it. But with a deafening bang the door to the boiler room cracked in half, spewing a six-inch tidal wave of burning oil over the floor, surrounding the bag, which disintegrated instantly.

Sachs stared for a moment and then heard the woman’s scream. All the stairs were blazing now. Sachs knocked the fire extinguisher out from under the smoldering table. The handle and nozzle had melted away and the metal canister was too hot to grasp. With her knife she cut a patch off her uniform blouse and lifted the crackling extinguisher by its neck, flung it to the top of the burning stairs. It staggered for a moment, like an uncertain bowling pin, and then started down.

Sachs drew her Glock and when the red cylinder was halfway down, fired one round.

The extinguisher erupted in a huge booming explosion; pieces of red shrapnel from the casing hissed over their heads. The mushroom cloud of carbon dioxide and
powder settled over the stairs and momentarily dampened most of the flames.

“Now, move!” Sachs shouted.

Together they took the steps two at a time, Sachs carrying her own weight and half the woman’s, and pushed through the doorway into the inferno on the first floor. They hugged the wall as they stumbled toward the exit, while above them stained-glass windows burst and rained hot shards—the colorful bodies of Jesus and Matthew and Mary and God Himself—down upon the bent backs of the escaping women.

F
orty minutes later, Sachs had been salved and bandaged and stitched and had sucked so much pure oxygen she felt like she was tripping. She sat beside Carole Ganz. They stared at what was left of the church. Which was virtually nothing. Only two walls remained and, curiously, a portion of the third floor, jutting into space above a lunar landscape of ash and debris piled in the basement.

“Pammy, Pammy . . .” Carole moaned, then retched and spit. She took her own oxygen mask to her face, leaned back, weary and in pain.

Sachs examined another alcohol-soaked rag with which she was wiping the blood from her face. The rags had started out brown and were now merely pink. The wounds weren’t serious—a cut on her forehead, swatches of second-degree burns on her arm and hand. Her lips were no longer flawless, however; the lower one had been cut deeply in the crash, the tear requiring three stitches.

Carole was suffering from smoke inhalation and a broken wrist. An impromptu cast covered her left wrist and she cradled it, head down, speaking through clenched teeth. Every breath was an alarming wheeze. “That son of a bitch.” Coughing. “Why . . . Pammy? Why on earth? A three-year-old child!” She wiped angry tears with the back of her uninjured arm.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt her. So he just brought you to the church.”

“No,” she spat out angrily. “He doesn’t care about her. He’s sick! I saw the way he looked at her. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.” The harsh words dissolved into a harsher bout of coughing.

Sachs winced in pain. She’d unconsciously dug a nail into a burned fingertip. She pulled out her watchbook. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Between bouts of sobbing and throaty coughs, Carole told her the story of the kidnapping.

“You want me to call anybody?” Sachs asked. “Your husband?”

Carole didn’t answer. She drew her knees up to her chin, hugged herself, wheezing roughly.

With her scalded right hand Sachs squeezed the woman’s biceps and repeated the question.

“My husband . . .” She stared at Sachs with an eerie look. “My husband’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Carole was getting groggy from the sedative and a woman medic helped her into the ambulance to rest.

Sachs looked up and saw Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks running toward her from the burned-out church.

“Jesus, officer.” Sellitto was surveying the carnage in the street. “What about the girl?”

Sachs nodded. “He’s still got her.”

Banks said, “You okay?”

“Nothing serious.” Sachs glanced toward the ambulance. “The vic, Carole, she doesn’t have any money, no place to stay. She’s in town to work for the UN. Think you could make some calls, detective? See if they could set her up for a while?”

“Sure,” Sellitto said.

“And the planted clues?” Banks asked. He winced as he touched a bandage over his right eyebrow.

“Gone,” Sachs said. “I saw them. In the basement. Couldn’t get to them in time. Burned up and buried.”

“Oh, man,” Banks muttered. “What’s going to happen to the little girl?”

What does he
think’s
going to happen to her?

She walked back toward the wreck of the IRD wagon, found the headset. She pulled it on and was about to call in a patch request to Rhyme but hesitated then lifted off the mike. What could he tell her anyway? She looked at the church. How can you work a crime scene when there
is
no scene?

She was standing with her hands on her hips, staring out onto the smoldering hulk of the building, when she heard a sound she couldn’t place. A whining, mechanical sound. She paid no attention to it until she was aware of Lon Sellitto pausing as he dusted ash off his wrinkled shirt. He said, “I don’t believe it.”

She turned toward the street.

A large black van was parked a block away. A hydraulic ramp was protruding off the side and something sat on it. She squinted. One of those bomb squad robots, it seemed. The ramp lowered to the sidewalk and the robot rolled off.

Then she laughed out loud.

The contraption turned toward them and started to move. The wheelchair reminded her of a Pontiac Firebird, candy-apple red. It was one of those electric models, small rear wheels, a large battery and motor mounted underneath.

Thom walked along beside it but Lincoln Rhyme himself was driving—in control, she observed wryly—via a straw that he held in his mouth. His movements were oddly graceful. Rhyme pulled up to her and stopped.

“All right, I lied,” he said abruptly.

She exhaled a sigh. “About your back? When you said you couldn’t use a wheelchair.”

“I’m confessing I lied. You’re going to be mad, Amelia. So be mad and get it over with.”

“You ever notice when you’re in a good mood you call me Sachs, when you’re in a bad mood, you call me Amelia?”

“I’m not in a bad mood,” he snapped.

“He really isn’t,” Thom agreed. “He just hates to get caught at anything.” The aide nodded toward the impressive wheelchair. She glanced at the side. It was made by the Action Company, a Storm Arrow model. “He had this in the closet downstairs all the while he spun his pathetic little tale of woe. Oh, I let him have it for that.”

“No annotations, Thom, thank you. I’m apologizing, all right? I. Am. Sorry.”

“He’s had it for years,” Thom continued. “Learned the sip-’n’-puff cold. That’s the straw control. He’s really
very good at it. By the way, he always calls
me
Thom. I
never
get preferential last-name treatment.”

“I got tired of being stared at,” Rhyme said matter-of-factly. “So I stopped going for joyrides.” Then glanced at her torn lip. “Hurt?”

She touched her mouth, which was bent into a grin. “Stings like hell.”

Rhyme glanced sideways. “And what happened to you, Banks? Shaving your forehead now?”

“Walked into a fire truck.” The young man grinned and touched the bandage again.

“Rhyme,” Sachs began, smiling no longer. “There’s nothing here. He’s got the little girl and I couldn’t get to the planted PE in time.”

“Ah, Sachs, there’s always
something.
Have faith in the teachings of Monsieur Locard.”

“I saw them burn up, the clues. And if there was anything left at all, it’s all buried under tons of debris.”

“Then we’ll look for the clues he didn’t mean to leave. We’ll do this scene together, Sachs. You and me. Come on.”

He gave two short breaths into the straw and started forward. They’d got ten feet nearer the church when she said suddenly, “Wait.”

He braked to a stop.

“You’re getting careless, Rhyme. Get some rubber bands on those wheels. Wouldn’t want to confuse your prints with the unsub’s.”

“Where do we start?”

“We need a sample of the ash,” Rhyme said. “There were some clean paint cans in the back of the wagon. See if you can find one.”

She collected a can from the remains of the RRV.

“You know where the fire started?” Rhyme asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Take a sample of ash—a pint or two—as close to the point of origin as you can get.”

“Right,” she said, climbing up on a five-foot-high wall of brick—all that remained of the north side of the church. She peered down into the smoky pit at her feet.

A fire marshal called, “Hey, officer, we haven’t secured the area yet. It’s dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as the last time I was there,” she answered. And holding the handle of the can in her teeth started down the wall.

Lincoln Rhyme watched her but he was really seeing himself, three and a half years ago, pull his suit jacket off and climb down into the construction site at the subway entrance near City Hall. “Sachs,” Rhyme called. She turned. “Be careful. I saw what was left of the RRV. I don’t want to lose you twice in one day.”

She nodded and then disappeared over the edge of the wall.

After a few minutes Rhyme barked to Banks, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“What I’m saying is, could you go check on her?”

“Oh, sure.” He walked to the wall, looked over.

“Well?” Rhyme asked.

“It’s a mess.”

“Of
course
it’s a mess. Do you see her?”

“No.”

“Sachs?” Rhyme shouted.

There was a long groan of wood then a crash. Dust rose.

“Sachs? Amelia?”

No answer.

Just as he was about to send ESU in after her they heard her voice. “Incoming.”

“Jerry?” Rhyme called.

“Ready,” the young detective called.

The can came flying up out of the basement. Banks caught it one-handed. Sachs climbed out of the basement, wiping her hands on her slacks, wincing.

“Okay?”

She nodded.

“Now, let’s work the alley,” Rhyme ordered. “There’s traffic at all hours around here so he’d want the car off the street while he got her inside. That’s where he parked. Used that door right there.”

“How do you know?”

“There’re two ways to open locked doors—without explosives, that is. Locks and hinges. This one’d be dead-bolted from the inside so he took the pins out of the hinges. See, he didn’t bother to put them in very far again when he left.”

They started at the door and worked their way to the back of the grim canyon, the smoldering building on their right. They moved a foot at a time, Sachs training the PoliLight on the cobblestones. “I want tire treads,” Rhyme announced. “I want to know where his trunk was.”

“Here,” she said, examining the ground. “Treads. But I don’t know whether these’re the front or the rear tires. He might’ve backed in.”

“Are they clear or fuzzy? The treadmarks?”

“A little fuzzy.”

“Then those’re the front.” He laughed at her bewildered expression. “You’re the automotive expert, Sachs. Next time you get in a car and start it see if you don’t spin the wheel a little before you start moving. To see if the tires are pointed straight. The front treads’re always fuzzier than the rear. Now, the stolen car was a ’97 Ford Taurus. It measures 197.5 stem to stern, wheelbase 108.5. Approximately 45 inches from the center of the rear tire to the trunk. Measure that and vacuum.”

“Come on, Rhyme. How’d you know that?”

“Looked it up this morning. You do the vic’s clothing?”

“Yep. Nails and hair too. And, Rhyme, get this: the little girl’s name is Pam but he called her Maggie. Just like he did with the German girl—he called her Hanna, remember?”

“You mean his other persona did,” Rhyme said. “I wonder who the characters are in his little play.”

“I’m going to vacuum around the door too,” she announced. Rhyme watched her—face cut and hair uneven, singed short in spots. She vacuumed the base of the door and just as he was about to remind her that crime scenes were three-dimensional she ran the vacuum up and around the jamb.

“He probably looked inside before he took her in,” she said and began vacuuming the windowsills too.

Which would have been Rhyme’s next order.

He listened to the whine of the Dustbuster. But second by second he was fading away. Into the past, some hours before.

“I’m—” Sachs began.

“Shhh,” he said.

Like the walks he now took, like the concerts he now attended, like so many of the conversations he had, Rhyme was slipping deeper and deeper into his consciousness. And when he got to a particular place—even he had no idea where—he found he wasn’t alone. He was picturing a short man wearing gloves, dark sports clothes, a ski mask. Climbing out of the silver Ford Taurus sedan, which smelled of cleanser and new car. The woman—Carole Ganz—was in the trunk, her child captive in an old building made of pink marble and expensive brick. He saw the man dragging the woman from the car.

Almost a memory, it was that clear.

Popping the hinges, pulling open the door, dragging her inside, tying her up. He started to leave but paused. He walked to a place where he could look back and see Carole clearly. Just like he’d stared down at the man he’d buried at the railroad tracks yesterday morning.

Just like he’d chained Tammie Jean Colfax to the pipe in the center of the room. So he could get a good look at her.

But why? Rhyme wondered. Why does he look? To make sure the vics can’t escape? To make sure he hasn’t left anything behind? To—

His eyes sprang open; the indistinct apparition of Unsub 823 vanished. “Sachs! Remember the Colfax scene? When you found the glove print?”

“Sure.”

“You said he was watching her, that’s the reason he chained her out in the open. But you didn’t know why. Well, I figured it out. He watches the vics because he
has to.
”

Because it’s his nature.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on!”

Rhyme sipped twice into the straw control, which turned the Arrow wheelchair around. Then puffed hard and he started forward.