The Bone Collector (5 page)

Rhyme shrugged. In his years as head of IRD he’d studied as much about the city as he had about forensics. Its history, politics, geology, sociology, infrastructure. He said, “Criminalistics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply—”

Just as he heard the enthusiasm creep into his voice he stopped abruptly.

Furious with himself that he’d been foxed so easily.

“Nice try, Dr. Berger,” Rhyme said stiffly.

“Ah, come on. Call me Bill. Please.”

Rhyme wasn’t going to be derailed. “I’ve heard it before. Take a big, clean, smooth piece of paper and write down all the reasons why I should kill myself. And then take another big, clean smooth piece of paper and write all the reasons why I shouldn’t. Words like
productive, useful, interesting, challenging
come to mind. Big words. Ten-dollar words. They don’t mean shit to me. Besides, I couldn’t pick up a fucking pencil to save my soul.”

“Lincoln,” Berger continued kindly, “I have to make sure you’re the appropriate candidate for the program.”

“ ‘Candidate’? ‘Program’? Ah, the tyranny of euphemism,” Rhyme said bitterly. “Doctor, I’ve made up my mind. I’d like to do it today. Now, as a matter of fact.”

“Why today?”

Rhyme’s eyes had returned to the bottles and the bag. He whispered, “Why not? What’s today? August twenty-third? That’s as good a day to die as any.”

The doctor tapped his narrow lips. “I
have
to spend some time talking to you, Lincoln. If I’m convinced that you really want to go ahead—”

“I do,” Rhyme said, noting as he often did how weak our words sound without the body gestures to accompany them. He wanted desperately to lay his hand on Berger’s arm or lift his palms beseechingly.

Without asking if he could, Berger pulled out a packet of Marlboros and lit a cigarette. He took a folding metal ashtray from his pocket and opened it up. Crossed his thin legs. He looked like a foppish frat boy at an Ivy League smoker. “Lincoln, you understand the problem here, don’t you?”

Sure, he understood. It was the very reason why Berger was here and why one of Rhyme’s own doctors hadn’t “done the deed.” Hastening an inevitable death was one thing; nearly one-third of practicing doctors who treated terminal patients had prescribed or administered fatal doses of drugs. Most prosecutors turned a blind eye toward them unless a doctor flaunted it—like Kevorkian.

But a quad? A hemi? A para? A crip? Oh, that was different. Lincoln Rhyme was forty years old. He’d been weaned off the ventilator. Barring some insidious gene in the Rhyme stock, there was no medical reason why he couldn’t live to eighty.

Berger added, “Let me be blunt, Lincoln. I also have to be sure this isn’t a setup.”

“Setup?”

“Prosecutors. I’ve been entrapped before.”

Rhyme laughed. “The New York attorney general’s a busy man. He’s not going to wire a crip to bag himself a euthanasist.”

Glancing absently at the crime scene report.

. . . ten feet southwest of victim, found in a cluster on a small pile of white sand: a ball of fiber, approximately six centimeters in diameter, off-white in color. The fiber was sampled in the energy-dispersive X-ray unit and found to consist of A
₂
B
₅
(Si, Al)
₈
O
₂₂
(OH)
₂
. No source was indicated and the fibers could not be individuated. Sample sent to FBI PERT office for analysis.

“I just have to be careful,” Berger continued. “This
is my whole professional life now. I gave up orthopedics completely. Anyway, it’s more than a job. I’ve decided to devote my life to helping others end theirs.”

Adjacent to this fiber, approximately three inches away were found two scraps of paper. One was common newsprint, with the words “three p.m.” printed in Times Roman type, in ink consistent with that used in commercial newspapers. The other scrap appeared to be the corner of a page from a book with the page number “823” printed on it. The typeface was Garamond and the paper was calendared. ALS and subsequent ninhydrin analysis reveal no latent friction-ridge prints on either. . . . Individuation was not possible.

Several things nagged Rhyme. The fiber, for one. Why hadn’t Peretti caught on as to what it was? It was so obvious. And why was this PE—the newspaper scraps and the fiber—all clustered together? Something was wrong here.

“Lincoln?”

“Sorry.”

“I was saying . . . You’re not a burn victim in unbearable pain. You’re not homeless. You’ve got money, you’ve got talent. Your police consulting . . . that helps a lot of people. If you want one, you could have a, yes,
productive
life ahead of you. A long life.”

“Long, yes. That’s the problem. A long life.” He was tired of being on good behavior. He snapped, “But I don’t
want
a long life. It’s as simple as that.”

Berger said slowly, “If there’s the slightest chance you might’ve regretted your decision, well, see,
I’m
the one who’d have to live with it. Not you.”

“Who’s ever certain about something like this?”

Eyes slipping back to the report.

An iron bolt was found on top of the scraps of paper. It was a hex bolt, head-stamped with the letters “CE.” Two inches long, clockwise twist,
¹⁵
⁄
16
" in diameter.

“I’ve got a busy schedule for the next few days,”
Berger said, looking at his watch. It was a Rolex; well, death has always been lucrative. “Let’s take an hour or so now. Talk for a while, then have a cooling-off day and I’ll come back.”

Something was nagging at Rhyme. An infuriating itch—the curse of all quads—though in this case it was an intellectual itch. The kind that had plagued Rhyme all his life.

“Say, doctor, I wonder if you could do me a favor. That report there. Could you flip through it? See if you could find a picture of a bolt.”

Berger hesitated. “A picture?”

“A Polaroid. It’ll be glued in somewhere toward the back. The turning frame takes too long.”

Berger lifted the report out of the frame and turned the pages for Rhyme.

“There. Stop.”

As he gazed at the photo a twinge of urgency pricked at him. Oh, not here, not now.
Please, no.

“I’m sorry, could you flip back to the page where we were?”

Berger did.

Rhyme said nothing and read carefully.

The paper scraps . . .

Three p.m.
 . . .
page 823.

Rhyme’s heart was pounding, sweat popped out on his head. He heard a frantic buzzing in his ears.

Here’s a headline for the tabloids.
MAN DIES DURING TALK WITH DEATH DOC
. . . .

Berger blinked. “Lincoln? Are you all right?” The man’s canny eyes examined Rhyme carefully.

As casually as he could, Rhyme said, “You know, doctor, I’m sorry. But there’s something I’ve got to take care of.”

Berger nodded slowly, uncertainly. “Affairs aren’t in order after all?”

Smiling. Nonchalant. “I’m just wondering if I could ask you to come back in a few hours.”

Careful here. If he senses
purpose
he’ll mark you down non-suicidal, take his bottles and his plastic bag and fly back to Starbucks land.

Opening a date book, Berger said, “The rest of the day isn’t good. Then tomorrow . . . No. I’m afraid Monday’s the earliest. Day after tomorrow.”

Rhyme hesitated. Lord . . . His soul’s desire was finally within his grasp, what he’d dreamed of every day for the past year. Yes or no?

Decide.

Finally, Rhyme heard himself say, “All right. Monday.” Plastering a hopeless smile on his face.

“What exactly’s the problem?”

“A man I used to work with. He asked for some advice. I wasn’t paying as much attention to it as I should have. I have to call him.”

No, it wasn’t dysreflexia at all—or an anxiety attack.

Lincoln Rhyme was feeling something he hadn’t felt in years. He was in one big fucking hurry.

“Could I ask you to send Thom up here? I think he’s downstairs in the kitchen.”

“Yes, of course. I’d be happy to.”

Rhyme could see something odd in Berger’s eyes. What was it? Caution? Maybe. It almost seemed like disappointment. But there was no time to think about it now. As the doctor’s footsteps receded down the stairs Rhyme shouted in a booming baritone, “Thom? Thom!”

“What?” the young man’s voice called.

“Call Lon. Get him back here. Now!”

Rhyme glanced at the clock. It was after noon. They had less than three hours.

T
he crime scene was staged,” Lincoln Rhyme said.

Lon Sellitto had tossed his jacket off, revealing a savagely wrinkled shirt. He now leaned back, arms crossed, against a table strewn with papers and books.

Jerry Banks was back too and his pale-blue eyes were on Rhyme’s; the bed and its control panel no longer interested him.

Sellitto frowned. “But what story’s the unsub tryin’ to sell us?”

At crime scenes, especially homicides, perps often monkeyed with PE to lead investigators astray. Some were clever about it but most weren’t. Like the husband who beat his wife to death then tried to make it look like a robbery—though he only thought to steal
her
jewelry, leaving his gold bracelets and diamond pinkie ring on his dresser.

“That’s what’s so interesting,” Rhyme continued. “It’s not about what happened, Lon. It’s what’s
going
to happen.”

Sellitto the skeptic asked, “What makes you think so?”

“The scraps of paper. They mean three o’clock today.”

“Today?”

“Look!” Nodding toward the report, an impatient jerk of his head.

“That one scrap says three p.m.,” Banks pointed out. “But the other’s a page number. Why do you think it means today?”

“It’s
not
a page number.” Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. They still didn’t get it. “Logic! The only reason to leave
clues was to tell us something. If that’s the case then 823 has to be something more than just a page number because there’s no clue as to what book it’s from. Well, if it’s not a page number what is it?”

Silence.

Exasperated, Rhyme snapped, “It’s a
date!
Eight twenty-three. August twenty-third. Something’s going to happen at three p.m. today. Now, the ball of fiber? It’s asbestos.”

“Asbestos?” Sellitto asked.

“In the report? The formula? It’s hornblende. Silicon dioxide. That
is
asbestos. Why Peretti sent it to the FBI is beyond me. So. We have asbestos on a railbed where there shouldn’t be any. And we’ve got an iron bolt with decaying oxidation on the head but none on the threads. That means it’s been bolted someplace for a long time and just recently removed.”

“Maybe it was overturned in the dirt,” Banks offered. “When he was digging the grave?”

Rhyme said, “No. In Midtown the bedrock’s close to the surface, which means so are the aquifers. All the soil from Thirty-fourth Street up to Harlem contains enough moisture to oxidize iron within a few days. It’d be completely rusted, not just the head, if it’d been buried. No, it was unbolted from someplace, carried to the scene and left there. And that sand . . . Come on, what’s white sand doing on a train roadbed in Midtown Manhattan? The soil composition there is loam, silt, granite, hardpan and soft clay.”

Banks started to speak but Rhyme cut him off abruptly. “And what were these things doing all clustered together? Oh, he’s telling us something, our unsub. You bet he is. Banks, what about the access door?”

“You were right,” the young man said. “They found one about a hundred feet north of the grave. Broken open from the inside. You were also right about the prints. Zip. And no tire tracks or trace evidence either.”

A lock of dirty asbestos, a bolt, a torn newspaper . . .

“The scene?” Rhyme asked. “Intact?”

“Released.”

Lincoln Rhyme, the crip with the killer lungs, exhaled a loud hiss of air, disgusted. “Who made
that
mistake?”

“I don’t know,” Sellitto said lamely. “Watch commander probably.”

It was Peretti, Rhyme understood. “Then you’re stuck with what you’ve got.”

Whatever clues as to who the kidnapper was and what he had in mind were either in the report or gone forever, trampled under the feet of cops and spectators and railroad workers. Spadework—canvassing the neighborhood around the scene, interviewing witnesses, cultivating leads, traditional
detective
work—was done leisurely. But crime scenes themselves had to be worked “like mad lightning,” Rhyme would command his officers in IRD. And he’d fired more than a few CSU techs who hadn’t moved fast enough for his taste.

“Peretti ran the scene himself?” he asked.

“Peretti and a full complement.”

“Full complement?” Rhyme asked wryly. “What’s a
full complement?
”

Sellitto looked at Banks, who said, “Four techs from Photo, four from Latents. Eight searchers. ME tour doctor.”

“
Eight
crime scene searchers?”

There’s a bell curve in processing a crime scene. Two officers are considered the most efficient for a single homicide. By yourself you can miss things; three and up you tend to miss more things. Lincoln Rhyme had always searched scenes alone. He let the Latents people do the print work and Photo do the snap-shooting and videoing. But he always walked the grid by himself.

Peretti. Rhyme had hired the young man, son of a wealthy politico, six, seven years ago and he’d proved a good, by-the-book CS detective. Crime Scene is considered a plum and there’s always a long waiting list to get into the unit. Rhyme took perverse pleasure in thinning the ranks of applicants by offering them a look at the family album—a collection of particularly gruesome crime-scene photos. Some officers would blanch, some would snicker. Some handed the book back, eyebrows raised, as if asking, So what? And those were the ones
that Lincoln Rhyme would hire. Peretti’d been one of them.

Sellitto had asked a question. Rhyme found the detective looking at him. He repeated, “You’ll work with us on this, won’t you, Lincoln?”

“Work with you?” He coughed a laugh. “I can’t, Lon. No. I’m just spitting out a few ideas for you. You’ve got it. Run with it. Thom, get me Berger.” He was now regretting the decision to postpone his tête-à-tête with the death doctor. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He couldn’t bear the thought of waiting another day or two for his
passing.
And Monday . . . He didn’t want to die on Monday. It seemed common.

“Say please.”

“Thom!”

“All right,” the young aide said, hands raised in surrender.

Rhyme glanced at the spot on his bedside table where the bottle, the pills and the plastic bag had sat—so very close, but like everything else in this life wholly out of Lincoln Rhyme’s reach.

Sellitto made a phone call, cocked his head as the call was answered. He identified himself. The clock on the wall clicked to twelve-thirty.

“Yessir.” The detective’s voice sank into a respectful whisper. The mayor, Rhyme guessed. “About the kidnapping at Kennedy. I’ve been talking to Lincoln Rhyme. . . . Yessir, he has some thoughts on it.” The detective wandered to the window, staring blankly at the falcon and trying to explain the inexplicable to the man running the most mysterious city on earth. He hung up and turned to Rhyme.

“He and the chief both want you, Linc. They asked specifically. Wilson himself.”

Rhyme laughed. “Lon, look around the room. Look at
me!
Does it seem like I could run a case?”

“Not a normal case, no. But this isn’t a very normal one now, is it?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t have time. That doctor. The treatment. Thom, did you call him?”

“Haven’t yet. Will in just a minute.”

“Now! Do it now!”

Thom looked at Sellitto. Walked to the door, stepped outside. Rhyme knew he wasn’t going to call. Bugger the world.

Banks touched a dot of razor scar and blurted, “Just give us some thoughts. Please. This unsub, you said he—”

Sellitto waved him silent. He kept his eyes on Rhyme.

Oh, you prick, Rhyme thought. The old silence. How we hate it and hurry to fill it. How many witnesses and suspects had caved under hot, thick silences just like this. Well, he and Sellitto
had
been a good team. Rhyme knew evidence and Lon Sellitto knew people.

The two musketeers. And if there was a third it was the purity of unsmiling science.

The detective’s eyes dipped to the crime scene report. “Lincoln. What do you think’s going to happen today at three?”

“I don’t have any idea,” Rhyme pronounced.

“Don’tcha?”

Cheap, Lon. I’ll get you for that.

Finally, Rhyme said. “He’s going to kill her—the woman in the taxi. And in some real bad way, I guarantee you. Something that’ll rival getting buried alive.”

“Jesus,” Thom whispered from the doorway.

Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? Would it do any good to tell them about the agony he felt in his neck and shoulders? Or about the phantom pain—far weaker and far eerier—roaming through his alien body? About the exhaustion he felt from the daily struggle to do, well, everything? About the most overwhelming fatigue of all—from having to rely on someone else?

Maybe he could tell them about the mosquito that’d gotten into the room last night and strafed his head for an hour; Rhyme grew dizzy with fatigue nodding it away until the insect finally landed on his ear, where Rhyme let it stab him—since that was a place he could rub against the pillow for relief from the itch.

Sellitto lifted an eyebrow.

“Today,” Rhyme sighed. “One day. That’s it.”

“Thanks, Linc. We owe you.” Sellitto pulled up a
chair next to the bed. Nodded Banks to do the same. “Now. Gimme your thoughts. What’s this asshole’s game?”

Rhyme said, “Not so fast. I don’t work alone.”

“Fair enough. Who d’you want on board?”

“A tech from IRD. Whoever’s the best in the lab. I want him here with the basic equipment. And we better get some tactical boys. Emergency Services. Oh, and I want some phones,” Rhyme instructed, glancing at the Scotch on his dresser. He remembered the brandy Berger had in his kit. No way was he going out on cheap crap like that. His
Final Exit
number would be courtesy of either sixteen-year-old Lagavulin or opulent Macallan aged for decades. Or—why not?—both.

Banks pulled out his own cellular phone. “What kind of lines? Just—”

“Landlines.”

“In here?”

“Of course not,” Rhyme barked.

Sellitto said, “He means he wants people to make calls. From the Big Building.”

“Oh.”

“Call downtown,” Sellitto ordered. “Have ’em give us three or four dispatchers.”

“Lon,” Rhyme asked, “who’s doing the spadework on the death this morning?”

Banks stifled a laugh. “The Hardy Boys.”

A glare from Rhyme took the smile off his face. “Detectives Bedding and Saul, sir,” the boy added quickly.

But then Sellitto grinned too. “The Hardy Boys. Everybody calls ’em that. You don’t know ’em, Linc. They’re from the Homicide Task Force downtown.”

“They look kind of alike is the thing,” Banks explained. “And, well, their delivery is a little funny.”

“I don’t want comedians.”

“No, they’re good,” Sellitto said. “The best canvassers we got. You know that beast ’napped that eight-year-old girl in Queens last year? Bedding and Saul did the canvass. Interviewed the entire ’hood—took twenty-two
hundred
statements. It was ’causa them we saved her.
When we heard the vic this morning was the passenger from JFK, Chief Wilson himself put ’em on board.”

“What’re they doing now?”

“Witnesses mostly. Around the train tracks. And sniffing around about the driver and the cab.”

Rhyme yelled to Thom in the hallway, “Did you call Berger? No, of course you didn’t. The word ‘insubordination’ mean anything to you? At least make yourself useful. Bring that crime scene report closer and start turning the pages.” He nodded toward the turning frame. “That damn thing’s an Edsel.”

“Aren’t we in a sunny mood today?” the aide spat back.

“Hold it up
higher.
I’m getting glare.”

He read for a minute. Then looked up.

Sellitto was on the phone but Rhyme interrupted him. “Whatever happens at three today, if we can find where he’s talking about, it’s going to be a crime scene. I’ll need someone to work it.”

“Good,” Sellitto said. “I’ll call Peretti. Toss him a bone. I know his nose’ll be out of joint ’cause we’re tiptoeing around him.”

Rhyme grunted. “Did I ask for Peretti?”

“But he’s the IRD golden boy,” Banks said.

“I don’t want him,” Rhyme muttered. “There’s somebody else I want.”

Sellitto and Banks exchanged glances. The older detective smiled, brushing pointlessly at his wrinkled shirt. “Whoever you want, Linc, you got him. Remember, you’re king for a day.”

Staring at the dim eye.

T.J. Colfax, dark-haired refugee from the hills of Eastern Tennessee, NYU Business School grad, quick-as-a-whip currency trader, had just swum out of a deep dream. Her tangled hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat crawling in veins down her face and neck and chest.

She found herself looking into the black eye—a hole in a rusty pipe, about six inches across, from which a small access plate had been removed.

She sucked mildewy air through her nose—her mouth
was still taped shut. Tasting plastic, the hot adhesive. Bitter.