The Bone Collector (33 page)

He wheeled to the sidewalk, sipped hard into the straw to stop. He squinted as he looked all around him. “He wants to see his victims. And I’m betting he wanted to see the parishioners too. From someplace he thought was safe. Where he didn’t bother to sweep up afterwards.”

He was gazing across the street at the only secluded vantage point on the block: the outdoor patio of a restaurant opposite the church.

“There! Sweep it clean, Sachs.”

She nodded, slipped a new clip into her Glock, grabbed evidence bags, a pair of pencils and the Dustbuster. He saw her run across the street and work her way up the steps carefully, examining them. “He was here,” she shouted. “There’s a glove print. And the shoeprint—it’s worn just like the other ones.”

Yes! Rhyme thought. Oh, this felt good. The warm sun, the air, the spectators. And the excitement of the chase.

When you move they can’t getcha.

Well, if
we
move faster, maybe we can.

Rhyme happened to glance at the crowd and saw that some people were staring at him. But far more were watching Amelia Sachs.

For fifteen minutes she pored over the scene and when she returned she held up a small evidence bag.

“What did you find, Sachs? His driver’s license? His birth certificate?”

“Gold,” she said, smiling. “I found some gold.”

C
ome on, people,” Rhyme called. “We’ve got to move on this one. Before he gets the girl to the next scene. I mean
move!
”

Thom did a sitting transfer to get Rhyme from the Storm Arrow back into bed, perching him momentarily on a sliding board and then easing him back into the Clinitron. Sachs glanced at the wheelchair elevator that had been built into one of the bedroom closets—it was the one he hadn’t wanted her to open when he was directing her to the stereo and CDs.

Rhyme lay still for a moment, breathing deeply from the exertion.

“The clues’re gone,” he reminded them. “There’s no way we can figure out where the next scene is. So we’re going for the big one—his safe house.”

“You think you can find it?” Sellitto asked.

Do we have a choice? Rhyme thought, and said nothing.

Banks hurried up the stairs. He hadn’t even stepped into the bedroom before Rhyme blurted, “What did they say? Tell me.
Tell
me.”

Rhyme knew that the tiny fleck of gold that Sachs had found was beyond the capabilities of Mel Cooper’s impromptu lab. He’d asked the young detective to speed it down to the FBI’s regional PERT office and have it analyzed.

“They’ll call us in the next half hour.”

“Half
hour?
” Rhyme muttered. “Didn’t they give it priority?”

“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should’ve seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and
said if the metallurgy report wasn’t in your hands ASAP there’d be one mean mother—you get the picture—reaming their—you get the rest of the picture.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs said, “there’s something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he’d let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot.”

“Flail?”

“Cut the skin off it.”

“
Flay,
” Rhyme corrected.

“Oh. Anyway, he didn’t do anything. She said it was—in the end—like he couldn’t bring himself to cut her.”

“Just like the first scene—the man by the railroad tracks,” Sellitto offered.

“Interesting . . .” Rhyme reflected. “I thought he’d cut the vic’s finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl’s arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett’s finger . . . There’s something about the way he sees his victims. Something . . .”

“Anatomical?”

“Exactly, Sachs.”

“Except the Ganz woman,” Sellitto said.

“My point,” Rhyme said. “He could’ve cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?”

Sellitto said, “What’s different about her? Can’t be that she’s a woman. Or she’s from out of town. So was the German girl.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her in front of her daughter,” Banks said.

“No,” Rhyme said, laughing grimly, “compassion isn’t his thing.”

Sachs said suddenly, “But that
is
one thing different about her—she’s a mother.”

Rhyme considered this. “That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn’t carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark.” He then asked
Sachs, “Did she say anything else about the way he looked?”

Sachs flipped through her notebook.

“Same as before.” She read. “Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he—”

“
Black
gloves?” Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. “Not red?”

“She said black. I asked her if she was sure.”

“And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn’t it, Mel? Maybe
that
was from the gloves. So what’s the red leather from?”

Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it’s something close to him.”

Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. “What else did we find?”

“The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway.” Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. “Plenty o’ nothin’,” he announced. “Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar.”

Which was found throughout the city.

“Keep going.”

“Decomposed leaves. That’s about it.”

“How about the Ganz woman’s clothes?”

Cooper and Sachs opened the newspaper and examined the trace.

“Mostly soil,” Cooper said. “And a few bits of what look like stone.”

“Where did he keep her at his safe house? Exactly?”

“On the floor in the basement. She said it was a dirt floor.”

“Excellent!” Rhyme shouted. To Cooper: “Burn it. The soil.”

Cooper placed a sample in the GC-MS. They waited impatiently for the results. Finally the computer screen blinked. The grid resembled a lunar landscape.

“All right, Lincoln. Interesting. I’m reading off-the-charts for tannin and—”

“Sodium carbonate?”

“Ain’t he amazin’?” Cooper laughed. “How’d you know?”

“They were used in tanneries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tannic acid cures the hide and the alkaline fixes it. So, his safe house is near the site of an old tannery.”

He smiled. Couldn’t help himself. He thought: You hear footsteps, 823? That’s us behind you.

His eyes slipped to the Randel Survey map. “Because of the smell no one wanted tanneries in their neighborhoods so the commissioners restricted them. I know there were some on the Lower East Side. And in West Greenwich Village—when it literally
was
a village, a suburb of the city. And then on the far West Side in the Fifties—near the stockyard tunnel where we found the German girl. Oh, and in Harlem in the early 1900s.”

Rhyme glanced at the list of grocery stores—the locations of the ShopRites that sold veal shanks. “Chelsea’s out. No tanning there. Harlem too—no
ShopRites
there. So, it’s the West Village, Lower East Side or Midtown West Side—Hell’s Kitchen again. Which he seems to like.”

Only about ten square miles, Rhyme estimated cynically. He’d figured out on his first day on the job that it was easier to hide in Manhattan than in the North Woods.

“Let’s keep going. What about the stone in Carole’s clothes?”

Cooper was bent over the microscope. “Okay. Got it.”

“Patch it in to me, Mel.”

Rhyme’s computer screen burst to life and he watched the flecks of stone and crystal, like brilliant asteroids.

“Move it around,” Rhyme instructed. Three substances were bonded together.

“The one on the left is marble, pinkish,” Cooper said. “Like what we found before. And in between, that gray stuff . . .”

“It’s mortar. And the other is brownstone,” Rhyme announced. “It’s from a Federal-style building, like the 1812 City Hall. Only the front facade was marble; the rest was brownstone. They did it to save money. Well, they
did
it so the money appropriated for marble could
find its way into various pockets. Now, what else do we have? The ash. Let’s find the arson accelerant.”

Cooper ran the ash sample through the GC-MS. He stared at the curve that appeared on the screen.

Newly refined gasoline, containing its manufacturer’s dyes and additives, was unique and could be traced back to a single source, as long as different batches of gas weren’t mixed together at the service station where the perp bought it. Cooper announced that the gasoline matched perfectly the brand sold by the Gas Exchange service stations.

Banks grabbed the Yellow Pages and flipped them open. “We’ve got six stations in Manhattan. Three downtown. One at Sixth Avenue and Houston. One on Delancey, 503 East. And one at Nineteenth and Eighth.”

“Nineteenth’s too far north,” Rhyme said. He stared at the profile chart. “East Side or West. Which is it?”

Grocery stores, gasoline . . .

A lanky figure suddenly filled the doorway.

“I still invited to this here party?” Frederick Dellray asked.

“Depends,” Rhyme countered. “You bearing gifts?”

“Ah got presents galore,” the agent said, waving a folder emblazoned with the familiar disk of the FBI emblem.

“You
ever
knock, Dellray?” Sellitto asked.

“Got outa the habit, you know.”

“Come on in,” Rhyme said. “What’ve you got?”

“Dunno for sure. Doesn’t make any sense to this boy. But then, whatta I know?”

Dellray read from the report for a moment then said, “We had Tony Farco at PERT—said ‘Hey’ to you by the way, Lincoln—analyze that bit of PE you found. Turns out it’s gold leaf. Probably sixty to eighty years old. He found a few cellulose fibers attached so he thinks it’s from a book.”

“Of
course!
Gold topstain from a page,” Rhyme said.

“Now he also found some particles of ink on it. He said, I’m quotin’ the boy now: ‘It’s not inconsistent with the type of ink the New York Public Library uses to stamp the ends of their books.’ Don’t he talk funny?”

“A library book,” Rhyme mused.

Amelia Sachs said, “A
red-leather-bound
library book.”

Rhyme stared at her. “Right!” he shouted. “
That’s
what the bits of red leather’re from. Not the glove. It’s a book he carries around with him. Could be his bible.”

“Bible?” Dellray asked. “You thinkin’ he’s some kinda religious nutzo?”

“Not
the
Bible, Fred. Call the library again, Banks. Maybe that’s how he wore down his shoes—in the reading room. I know, it’s a long shot. But we don’t have a lot of options here. I want a list of all the antiquarian books stolen from Manhattan locations in the past year.”

“Will do.” The young man rubbed a shaving scar as he called the mayor at home and bluntly asked hizzoner to contact the director of the public library and tell them what they needed.

A half hour later the fax machine buzzed and spewed out two pages. Thom ripped the transmission out of the machine. “Whoa, readers sure have sticky fingers in this city,” he said as he brought it to Rhyme.

Eighty-four books fifty years old or older had disappeared from the public library branches in the past twelve months, thirty-five of them in Manhattan.

Rhyme scanned the list. Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Dreiser . . . Books about music, philosophy, wine, literary criticism, fairy tales. Their value was surprisingly low. Twenty, thirty dollars. He supposed that none of them were first editions but perhaps the thieves hadn’t known that.

He continued to scan the list.

Nothing, nothing. Maybe—

And then he saw it.

Crime in Old New York,
by Richard Wille Stephans, published by Bountiful Press in 1919. Its value was listed at sixty-five dollars, and it had been stolen from the Delancey Street branch of the New York Public Library nine months earlier. It was described as five by seven inches in size, bound in red kidskin, with marbleized endpapers, gilded edges.

“I want a copy of it. I don’t care how. Get somebody to the Library of Congress if you have to.”

Dellray said, “I’ll take care of that one.”

Grocery stores, gasoline, the library
 . . .

Rhyme had to make a decision. There were three hundred searchers available—cops and state troopers and federal agents—but they’d be spread microscopically thin if they had to search both the West and East sides of downtown New York.

Gazing at the profile chart.

Is your house in the West Village? Rhyme silently asked 823. Did you buy the gas and steal the book on the East Side to fox us? Or is that your real neighborhood? How clever are you? No, no, the question’s not how clever you are but how clever you
think
you are. How confident were you that we’d never find those minuscule bits of yourself that M. Locard assures us you’d leave behind?

Finally Rhyme ordered, “Go with the Lower East. Forget the Village. Get everybody down there. All of Bo’s troops, all of yours, Fred. Here’s what you’re looking for: A large Federal-style building, close to two hundred years old, rose-colored marble front, brownstone sides and back. May have been a mansion or a public building at one time. With a garage or carriage house attached. A Taurus sedan and a Yellow Cab coming and going for the past few weeks. More often in the last few days.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs.

Giving up the dead
 . . .

Sellitto and Dellray made their calls.

Sachs said to Rhyme, “I’m going too.”

“I hadn’t expected anything else.”

When the door had closed downstairs he whispered, “Godspeed, Sachs. Godspeed.”