The Bone Collector (36 page)

Another inhalation.

Where was he?
Where?

Sachs crouched further, sending the light sideways, up and down. . . . Nothing.

Where the fuck is he? Another tunnel? An exit to the street?

Looking at the floor again she spotted what she thought was a faint trail, leading into the shadows of the room. She moved along beside it.

Pause. Listen.

Breathing?

Yes. No.

Stupidly she spun around and looked at the dead woman once more.

Come
on!

Eyes back again.

Moving along the floor.

Nothing. How can I hear him and not see him?

The wall ahead of her was solid. No doors or windows. She backed up, toward the skeletons.

From somewhere, Lincoln Rhyme’s words came back. “
Crime scenes’re three-dimensional.
”

Sachs looked up suddenly, flashing the light in front of her. The huge Doberman’s teeth shone back—dangling bits of gray flesh. Two feet away on a high ledge. He was waiting, like a wildcat, for her.

Neither of them moved for a moment. Absolutely frozen.

Then Sachs instinctively dropped her head and, before she could bring her weapon up, he launched himself toward her face. His teeth connected with the helmet. Gripping the strap in his mouth, he shook furiously, trying to break her neck as they fell backwards, onto the edge of an acid-filled pit. The pistol flew from her hand.

The dog kept his grip on her helmet while his hind
legs galloped, his claws digging into her vest and belly and thighs. She hit him hard with her fists but it was like slugging wood; he didn’t feel the blows at all.

Releasing the helmet, he reared back then lunged for her face. She flung her left arm over her eyes and, as he grabbed her forearm and she felt his teeth clamp down on her skin, she slipped the switchblade from her pocket and shoved the blade between his ribs. There was a yelp, a high sound, and he rolled off her, kept moving, speeding straight for the doorway.

Sachs snagged her pistol and was after him in an instant, scrabbling through the tunnel. She burst out to see the wounded animal sprinting straight toward Pammy and the medic, who stood frozen as the Doberman leapt into the air.

Sachs dropped into a crouch and squeezed off two rounds. One hit the back of the animal’s head and the other streaked into the brick wall. The dog collapsed in a quivering pile at the medic’s feet.

“Shots fired,” she heard in her radio and a half-dozen troopers rushed down the stairs, pulled the dog away and deployed around the girl.

“It’s all right!” Sachs shouted. “It was me!”

The team rose from their defensive positions.

Pammy was screaming, “Doggie dead . . . She made the doggie dead!”

Sachs holstered her weapon and hefted the girl onto her hip.

“Mommy!”

“You’ll see your mommy soon,” Sachs said. “We’re going to call her right now.”

Upstairs she set Pammy on the floor and turned to a young ESU officer standing nearby, “I lost my cuff key. Could you take those off her please? Open them over a piece of clean newspaper, wrap ’em up in the paper and put the whole thing in a plastic bag.”

The officer rolled his eyes. “Listen, beautiful, go find yourself a rookie to order around.” He started to walk away.

“Trooper,” Bo Haumann barked, “you’ll do what she says.”

“Sir,” he protested, “I’m ESU.”

“Got news,” Sachs muttered, “you’re Crime Scene now.”

Carole Ganz was lying on her back in a very beige bedroom, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the time a few weeks ago when she and Pammy and a bunch of friends were sitting around a campfire in Wisconsin at Kate and Eddie’s place, talking, telling stories, singing songs.

Kate’s voice wasn’t so hot but Eddie could’ve been a pro. He could even play barre chords. He sang Carole King’s “Tapestry” just for her and Carole sang along softly through her tears. Thinking that maybe, just maybe, she really was putting Ron’s death behind her and getting on with her life.

She remembered Kate’s voice from that night: “When you’re angry, the only way to deal with it is to wrap up that anger and give it away. Give it to somebody else. Do you hear me? Don’t keep it inside you. Give it away.”

Well, she was angry now. Furious.

Some young kid—a mindless little shit—had taken her husband away, shot him in the back. And now some crazy man had taken her daughter. She wanted to explode. And it took all her willpower not to start flinging things against the wall and howling like a coyote.

She lay back on the bed and gingerly placed her shattered wrist on her belly. She’d taken a Demerol, which had eased the pain, but she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d done nothing but stay inside all day long, trying to get in touch with Kate and Eddie and waiting for news about Pammy.

She kept picturing Ron, kept picturing her anger, actually imagining herself packing it up in a box, wrapping it carefully, sealing it up . . .

And then the phone rang. She stared for a moment then yanked it off the cradle.

“Hello?”

Carole listened to the policewoman tell her that they’d found Pammy, that she was in the hospital but that she
was okay. A moment later Pammy herself came on the phone and they were both crying and laughing at the same time.

Ten minutes later she was on her way to Manhattan Hospital, in the back seat of a black police sedan.

Carole practically sprinted down the corridor to Pammy’s room and was surprised to be stopped by the police guard. So they hadn’t caught the fucker yet? But as soon as she saw her daughter she forgot about him, forgot the terror in the taxi and the fiery basement. She threw her arms around her little girl.

“Oh, honey, I missed you! Are you okay? Really okay?”

“That lady, she killed a doggie—”

Carole turned and saw the tall, red-haired policewoman standing nearby, the one who’d saved her from the church basement.

“—but it was all right because he was going to eat me.”

Carole hugged Sachs. “I don’t know what to say. . . . I just . . . Thank you, thank you.”

“Pammy’s fine,” Sachs assured her. “Some scratches—nothing serious—and she’s got a little cough.”

“Mrs. Ganz?” A young man walked into the room, carrying her suitcase and yellow knapsack. “I’m Detective Banks. We’ve got your things here.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“Is anything missing?” he asked her.

She looked through the knapsack carefully. It was all there. The money, Pammy’s doll, the package of clay, the Mr. Potato Head, the CDs, the clock radio . . . He hadn’t taken anything. Wait . . . “You know, I think there’s a picture missing. I’m not sure. I thought I had more than these. But everything important’s here.”

The detective gave her a receipt to sign.

A young resident stepped into the room. He joked with Pammy about her Pooh bear as he took her blood pressure.

Carole asked him, “When can she leave?”

“Well, we’d like to keep her in for a few days. Just to make sure—”

“A few
days?
But she’s fine.”

“She’s got a bit of bronchitis I want to keep an eye on. And . . .” He lowered his voice. “We’re also going to bring in an abuse specialist. Just to make sure.”

“But she was going to go with me tomorrow. To the UN ceremonies. I promised her.”

The policewoman added, “It’s easier to keep her guarded here. We don’t know where the unsub—the kidnapper—is. We’ll have an officer babysitting you too.”

“Well, I guess. Can I stay with her for a while?”

“You bet,” the resident said. “You can stay the night. We’ll have a cot brought in.”

Then Carole was alone with her daughter once more. She sat down on the bed and put her arm around the child’s narrow shoulders. She had a bad moment remembering how
he,
that crazy man, had touched Pammy. How his eyes had looked when he’d asked if he could cut her own skin off . . . Carole shivered and began to cry.

It was Pammy who brought her back. “Mommy, tell me a story. . . . No, no, sing me something. Sing me the friend song. Pleeeeease?”

Calming down, Carole asked, “You want to hear that one, hm?”

“Yes!”

Carole hoisted the girl onto her lap and, in a reedy voice, started to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.” Pammy sang snatches of it along with her.

It had been one of Ron’s favorites and, in the past couple years, after he was gone, she hadn’t been able to listen to more than a few bars without breaking into tears.

Today, she and Pammy finished it together, pretty much on key, dry-eyed and laughing.

A
melia Sachs finally went home to her apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Exactly six blocks from her parents’ house, where her mother still lived. As soon as she walked in she hit the first speed-dial button on the kitchen phone.

“Mom. Me. I’m taking you to brunch at the Plaza. Wednesday. That’s my day off.”

“What for? To celebrate your new assignment? How
is
Public Affairs? You didn’t call.”

A fast laugh. Sachs realized her mother had no idea what she’d been doing for the past day and a half.

“You been following the news, Mom?”

“Me? I’m Brokaw’s secret admirer, you know that.”

“You hear about this kidnapper the last few days?”

“Who hasn’t? . . . What’re you telling me, honey?”

“I’ve got the inside scoop.”

And she told her astonished mother the story—about saving the vics and about Lincoln Rhyme and, with some editing, about the crime scenes.

“Amie, your father’d be so proud.”

“So, call in sick on Wednesday. The Plaza. OK?”

“Forget it, sweetheart. Save your money. I’ve got waffles and Bob Evans in the freezer. You can come here.”

“It’s not that expensive, Mom.”

“Not that much? It’s a
fortune.
”

“Well, hey,” Sachs said, trying to sound spontaneous, “you like the Pink Teacup, don’t you?”

A little place in the West Village that served up platters of the best pancakes and eggs on the East Coast for next to nothing.

A pause.

“That might be nice.”

This was a strategy Sachs had used successfully over the years.

“I’ve gotta get some rest, Mom. I’ll call tomorrow.”

“You work too hard. Amie, this case of yours . . . it wasn’t dangerous, was it?”

“I was just doing the technical stuff, Mom. Crime scene. It doesn’t get any safer than that.”

“And they asked for
you
especially!” the woman said. Then repeated, “Your father’d be so proud.”

They hung up and Sachs wandered into the bedroom, flopped down on the bed.

After she’d left Pammy’s room Sachs had paid visits to the other two surviving victims of Unsub 823. Monelle Gerger, dotted with bandages and pumped full of anti-rabies serum, had been released and was returning to her family in Frankfurt “but just for rest of summer,” she explained adamantly. “Not, you know, for good.” And she’d pointed to her stereo and CD collection in the decrepit apartment in the Deutsche Haus by way of proving that no New World psycho was driving her permanently out of town.

William Everett was still in the hospital. The shattered finger was not a serious problem of course but his heart had been acting up again. Sachs was astonished to find that he’d owned a shop in Hell’s Kitchen years ago and thought he might have known her father. “I knew all the beat cops,” he said. She showed him her wallet picture of the man in his dress uniform. “I think so. Not sure. But I think so.”

The calls had been social but Sachs had gone armed with her watchbook. Neither of the vics, though, had been able to tell her anything more about Unsub 823.

In her apartment now Sachs glanced out her window. She saw the ginkgoes and maples shiver in the sharp wind. She stripped off her uniform, scratched under her boobs—where it always itched like mad from being squooshed under the body armor. She pulled on a bathrobe.

Unsub 823 hadn’t had much warning but it had been enough. The safe house on Van Brevoort had been
hosed completely. Even though the landlord said he’d moved in a long time ago—last January (with a phony ID, no one was very surprised to learn)—823 had left with everything he’d brought, trash included. After Sachs had worked the scene, NYPD Latents had descended and was dusting every surface in the place. So far the preliminary reports weren’t encouraging.

“Looks like he even wore gloves when he crapped,” young Banks had reported to her.

A Mobile unit had found the taxi and the sedan. Unsub 823’d cleverly parked them near Avenue D and Ninth Street. Sellitto guessed it probably took a local gang seven or eight minutes to strip them down to their chassis. Any physical evidence the vehicles might’ve yielded was now in a dozen chop shops around the city.

Sachs turned on the tube and found the news. Nothing about the kidnappings. All the stories were about the opening ceremonies of the UN peace conference.

She stared at Bryant Gumbel, stared at the UN secretary-general, stared at some ambassador from the Middle East, stared far more intently than her interest warranted. She even studied the ads as if she were memorizing them.

Because there was something she definitely
didn’t
want to think about: her bargain with Lincoln Rhyme.

The deal was clear. Now that Carole and Pammy were safe, it was her turn to come through. To let him have his hour alone with Dr. Berger.

Now
him,
Berger . . . She hadn’t liked the look of the doctor at all. You could see one big fucking ego in his compact, athletic frame, his evasive eyes. His black hair perfectly combed. Expensive clothes. Why couldn’t Rhyme have found someone like Kevorkian? He may have been quirky but at least seemed like a wise old grandfather.

Her lids closed.

Giving up the dead
 . . .

A bargain was a bargain. But goddammit, Rhyme . . .

Well, she couldn’t let him go without one last try. He’d caught her off guard in his bedroom. She was flustered. Hadn’t thought of any really good arguments.
Monday. She had until tomorrow to try to convince him not to do it. Or at least to wait awhile. A month. Hell, a day.

What could she say to him? She’d jot down her arguments. Write a little speech.

Opening her eyes, she climbed out of bed to find a pen and some paper. I could—

Sachs froze, her breath whistling into her lungs like the wind outside.

He wore dark clothes, the ski mask and gloves black as oil.

Unsub 823 stood in the middle of her bedroom.

Her hand instinctively went toward the bedside table—her Glock and knife. But he was ready. The shovel swung fast and caught her on the side of her head. A yellow light exploded in her eyes.

She was on her hands and knees when the foot slammed into her rib cage and she collapsed to her stomach, struggling for breath. She felt her hands being cuffed behind her, a strip of duct tape slapped onto her mouth. Moving fast, efficiently. He rolled her onto her back; her robe fell open.

Kicking furiously, struggling madly to pull the cuffs apart.

Another blow to her stomach. She gagged and fell still as he reached for her. Gripped her at the armpits, dragged her out the back door and into the large private garden behind the apartment.

His eyes remained on her face, not even looking at her tits, her flat belly, her mound with its few red curls. She could easily have given that up to him if it would have saved her life.

But, no, Rhyme’s diagnosis was right. It wasn’t lust that drove 823. He had something else in mind. He dropped her willowy figure, face up, into a patch of black-eyed Susans and pachysandra, out of sight of the neighbors. He looked around, catching his breath. He picked up the shovel and plunged the blade into the dirt.

Amelia Sachs began to cry.

* * *

Rubbing the back of his head into the pillow.

Compulsive, a doctor had once told him after observing this behavior—an opinion Rhyme hadn’t asked for. Or wanted. His nestling, Rhyme reflected, was just a variation on Amelia Sachs’s tearing her flesh with her own nails.

He stretched his neck muscles, rolling his head around, as he stared at the profile chart on the wall. Rhyme believed that the full story of the man’s madness was here in front of him. In the black, swoopy handwriting—and the gaps between the words. But he couldn’t see the story’s ending. Not yet.

He looked over the clues again. There were only a few left unexplained.

The scar on the finger.

The knot.

The aftershave.

The scar was useless to them unless they had a suspect whose fingers they could examine. And there’d been no luck in identifying the knot—only preppy Banks’s opinion that it wasn’t nautical.

What about the cheap aftershave? Assuming that most unsubs wouldn’t spritz themselves to go on a kidnapping spree, why had he worn it? Rhyme could only conclude again that he was trying to obscure another, a telltale scent. He ran through the possibilities: Food, liquor, chemicals, tobacco . . .

He felt eyes on him and looked to his right.

The black dots of the bony rattlesnake’s eye sockets gazed toward the Clinitron. This was the one clue that was out of place. It had no purpose, except to taunt them.

Something occurred to him. Using the painstaking turning frame Rhyme slowly flipped back through
Crime in Old New York.
To the chapter on James Schneider. He found the paragraphs he’d remembered.

It has been suggested by a well-known physician of the mind (a practitioner of the discipline of “psyche-logy,” which has been much in the news of late) that James Schneider’s ultimate intent had little to do with
harming his victims. Rather—this learnéd doctor has suggested—the villain was seeking revenge against those that did him what he perceived to be harm: the city’s constabulary, if not Society as a whole.

Who can say where the source of this hate lay? Perhaps, like the Nile of old, its wellsprings were hidden to the world;—and possibly even to the villain himself. Yet one reason may be found in a little-known fact: Young James Schneider, at the tender age of ten, saw his father dragged away by constables only to die in prison for a robbery which, it was later ascertained, he did not commit. Following this unfortunate arrest, the boy’s mother fell into life on the street and abandoned her son, who grew up a ward of the state.

Did the madman perchance commit these crimes to fling derision into the face of the very constabulary which had inadvertently destroyed his family?

We will undoubtedly never know.

Yet what does seem clear is that by mocking the ineffectualness of the protectors of its citizenry, James Schneider—the “bone collector”—was wreaking his vengeance upon the city itself as much as upon his innocent victims.

Lincoln Rhyme lay back in his pillow and looked at the profile chart again.

Dirt is heavier than anything.

It’s the earth itself, the dust of an iron core, and it doesn’t kill by strangling the air from the lungs but by compressing the cells until they die from the panic of immobility.

Sachs wished that she
had
died. She prayed that she would. Fast. From fear or a heart attack. Before the first shovelful hit her face. She prayed for this harder than Lincoln Rhyme had prayed for his pills and liquor.

Lying in the grave the unsub had dug in her own backyard Sachs felt the progress of the rich earth, dense and wormy, moving along her body.

Sadistically, he was burying her slowly, casting only a shallow scoop at a time, scattering it carefully around
her. He’d started with her feet. He was now up to her chest, the dirt slipping into her robe and around her breasts like a lover’s fingers.

Heavier and heavier, compressing, binding her lungs; she could suck only an ounce or two of air at a time. He paused once or twice to look at her then continued.

He likes to watch
 . . .

Hands beneath her, neck straining to keep her head above the tide.

Then her chest was buried completely. Her shoulders, her throat. The cold earth rose to the hot skin of her face, packing around her head so she couldn’t move. Finally he bent down and ripped the tape off her mouth. As Sachs tried to scream he spilled a handful of dirt into her face. She shivered, choked on the black earth. Ears ringing, hearing for some reason an old song from her infancy—“The Green Leaves of Summer,” a song her father played over and over again on the hi-fi. Sorrowful, haunting. She closed her eyes. Everything was going black. Opened her mouth once and got another cup’s worth of soil.

Giving up the dead
 . . .

And then she was under.

Completely quiet. Not choking or gasping—the earth was a perfect seal. She had no air in her lungs, couldn’t make any sounds. Silence, except for the haunting melody and the growing roar in her ears.

Then the pressure on her face ceased as her body went numb, as numb as Lincoln Rhyme’s. Her mind began to shut down.

Blackness, blackness. No words from her father. Nothing from Nick . . . No dreams of downshifting from five to four to goose the speedometer into three digits.

Blackness.

Giving up the
 . . .

The mass sinking down onto her, pushing, pushing. Seeing only one image: The hand rising out of the grave yesterday morning, waving for mercy. When no mercy would be given.

Waving for her to follow.

Rhyme, I’ll miss you.

Giving up
 . . .