The Bone Collector (7 page)

“I—”

“Your first name?”

“Amelia.”

“Amelia. After the aviatrix?”

“Nosir. A family name.”

“Amelia, I don’t want an apology. You were right and Vince Peretti was wrong.”

Sellitto stirred at this indiscretion but Lincoln Rhyme didn’t care. He was, after all, one of the few people in the world who could stay flat on his ass when the president of the United States himself walked into the room. He continued, “Peretti worked the scene like the mayor was looking over his shoulder and that’s the A-number-one way to screw it up. He had too many people, he was dead wrong to let the trains and traffic move and he should never have released the scene as early as he did. If we’d kept the tracks secure, who knows, we might’ve just found a credit card receipt with a name on it. Or a big beautiful thumbprint.”

“That may be,” Sellitto said delicately. “But let’s just keep it to ourselves.” Giving silent orders, his eyes swiveling toward Sachs and Cooper and young Jerry Banks.

Rhyme snorted an irreverent laugh. Then turned back to Sachs, whom he caught, like Banks that morning, staring at his legs and body under the apricot-colored blanket. He said to her, “I asked you here to work the next crime scene for us.”

“What?” No speaking through interpreters this time.

“Work for us,” he said shortly. “The next crime scene.”

“But”—she laughed—“I’m not IRD. I’m Patrol. I’ve never done CS work.”

“This is an unusual case. As Detective Sellitto himself’ll tell you. It’s real
weird.
Right, Lon? True, if it was a classic scene, I wouldn’t want you. But we need a fresh pair of eyes on this one.”

She glanced at Sellitto, who said nothing. “I just . . . I’d be no good at it. I’m sure.”

“All right,” Rhyme said patiently. “The truth?”

She nodded.

“I need somebody who’s got the balls to stop a train
in its tracks to protect a scene and to put up with the heat afterwards.”

“Thank you for the opportunity, sir. Lincoln. But—”

Rhyme said shortly, “Lon.”

“Officer,” the detective grunted to Sachs, “you’re not being given any options here. You’ve been assigned to this case to assist at the crime scene.”

“Sir, I have to protest. I’m transferring out of Patrol. Today. I’ve got a medical transfer. Effective an hour ago.”

“Medical?” Rhyme inquired.

She hesitated, glancing unwilling at his legs again. “I have arthritis.”

“Do you?” Rhyme asked.

“Chronic arthritis.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She continued quickly, “I only took that call this morning because someone was home sick. I didn’t plan on it.”

“Yes, well, I had other plans too,” Lincoln Rhyme said. “Now, let’s look at some evidence.”

T
he bolt.”

Remembering the classic crime scene rule: Analyze the most unusual evidence first.

Thom turned the plastic bag over and over in his hands as Rhyme studied the metal rod, half rusted, half not. Dull. Worn.

“You’re sure about the prints? You tried small-particle reagent? That’s the best for PE exposed to the elements.”

“Yup,” Mel Cooper confirmed.

“Thom,” Rhyme ordered, “get this hair out of my eyes! Comb it back. I told you to comb it back this morning.”

The aide sighed and brushed at the tangled black strands. “Watch it,” he whispered ominously to his boss and Rhyme jerked his head dismissively, mussing his hair further. Amelia Sachs sat sullenly in the corner. Her legs rested under the chair in a sprinter’s starting position and, sure enough, she looked like she was just waiting for the gun.

Rhyme turned back to the bolt.

When he headed IRD, Rhyme had started assembling databases. Like the federal auto-paint-chip index or the BATF’s tobacco files. He’d set up a bullet-standards file, fibers, cloth, tires, shoes, tools, motor oil, transmission fluid. He’d spent hundreds of hours compiling lists, indexed and cross-referenced.

Even during Rhyme’s obsessive tenure, though, IRD had never gotten around to cataloging hardware. He wondered why not and he was angry at himself for not taking the time to do it and angrier still at Vince Peretti for not thinking of it either.

“We need to call every bolt manufacturer and jobber in the Northeast. No, in the
country.
Ask if they make a model like this and who they sell to. Fax a description and picture of the bolt to our dispatchers at Communications.”

“Hell, there could be a million of them,” Banks said. “Every Ace Hardware and Sears in the country.”

“I don’t think so,” Rhyme responded. “It’s got to be a viable clue. He wouldn’t have left it if it was useless. There’s a limited source of these bolts. I bet you.”

Sellitto made a call and looked up a few minutes later. “I’ve got you dispatchers, Lincoln. Four of them. Where do we get a list of manufacturers?”

“Get a patrolman down to Forty-second Street,” Rhyme replied. “Public Library. They have corporate directories there. Until we get one, have the dispatchers start working through the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages.”

Sellitto repeated this into the phone.

Rhyme glanced at the clock. It was one-thirty.

“Now, the asbestos.”

For an instant, the word glowed in his mind. He felt a jolt—in places where no jolts could be felt. What was familiar about asbestos? Something he’d read or heard about—recently, it seemed, though Lincoln Rhyme no longer trusted his sense of time. When you lie on your back frozen in place month after month after month, time slows to near-death. He might be thinking of something he’d read two years ago.

“What do we know about asbestos?” he mused. No one answered but that didn’t matter; he answered himself. As he preferred to do anyway. Asbestos was a complex molecule, silicate polymer. It doesn’t burn because, like glass, it’s already oxidized.

When he’d run crime scenes of old murders—working with forensic anthropologists and odontologists—Rhyme often found himself in asbestos-insulated buildings. He remembered the peculiar taste of the face masks they’d had to wear during the excavation. In fact, he now recalled, it’d been during an asbestos-removal cleanup at the City Hall subway stop three and a half years ago
that crews found the body of one of the policemen murdered by Dan Shepherd dumped in a generator room. As Rhyme had bent down over it slowly to lift a fiber from the officer’s light-blue blouse, he’d heard the crack and groan of the oak beam. The mask had probably saved him from choking to death on the dust and dirt that caved in around him.

“Maybe he’s got her at a cleanup site,” Sellitto said.

“Could be,” Rhyme agreed.

Sellitto ordered his young assistant, “Call EPA and city Environmental. Find out if there’re any sites where cleanup’s going on right now.”

The detective made the call.

“Bo,” Rhyme asked Haumann, “you have teams to deploy?”

“Ready to roll,” the ESU commander confirmed. “Though I gotta tell you, we’ve got over half the force tied up with this UN thing. They’re on loan to the Secret Service and UN security.”

“Got some EPA info here.” Banks gestured to Haumann and they retired to a corner of the room. They moved aside several stacks of books. As Haumann unfurled one of ESU’s tactical maps of New York something clattered to the floor.

Banks jumped. “Jesus.”

From the angle where he lay, Rhyme couldn’t see what had fallen. Haumann hesitated then bent down and retrieved the bleached piece of spinal column and replaced it on the table.

Rhyme felt several pairs of eyes on him but he said nothing about the bone. Haumann leaned over the map, as Banks, on the phone, fed him information about asbestos-cleanup sites. The commander marked them in grease pencil. There appeared to be a lot of them, scattered all over the five boroughs of the city. It was discouraging.

“We have to narrow it down more. Let’s see, the sand,” Rhyme said to Cooper. “’Scope it. Tell me what you think.”

Sellitto handed the evidence envelope to the tech, who poured the contents out onto an enamel examination
tray. The glistening powder left a small cloud of dust. There was also a stone, worn smooth, which slid into the center of the pile.

Lincoln Rhyme’s throat caught. Not at what he saw—he didn’t yet know
what
he was looking at—but at the flawed nerve impulse that shot from his brain and died halfway to his useless right arm, urging it to grab a pencil and to probe. The first time in a year or so he’d felt that urge. It nearly brought tears into his eyes and his only solace was the memory of the tiny bottle of Seconal and the plastic bag that Dr. Berger carried with him—images that hovered like a saving angel over the room.

He cleared his throat. “Print it!”

“What?” Cooper asked.

“The stone.”

Sellitto looked at him inquiringly.

“The rock doesn’t belong there,” Rhyme said. “Apples and oranges. I want to know why. Print it.”

Using porcelain-tipped forceps, Cooper picked up the stone and examined it. He slipped on goggles and hit the rock with a beam from a PoliLight—a power pack the size of a car battery with a light wand attached.

“Nothing,” Cooper said.

“VMD?”

Vacuum metal deposition is the Cadillac of techniques for raising latent prints on nonporous surfaces. It evaporates gold or zinc in a vacuum chamber containing the object to be tested; the metal coats the latent print, making the whorls and peaks very visible.

But Cooper didn’t have a VMD with him.

“What
do
you have?” asked Rhyme, not pleased.

“Sudan black, stabilized physical developer, iodine, amido black, DFO and gentian violet, Magna-Brush.”

He’d also brought ninhydrin for raising prints on porous surfaces and a Super Glue frame for smooth surfaces. Rhyme recalled the stunning news that had swept the forensic community some years ago: A technician working in a U.S. Army forensic lab in Japan had used Super Glue to fix a broken camera and found to his amazement that the fumes from the adhesive raised
latent fingerprints better than most chemicals made for that purpose.

This was the method Cooper now used. With forceps he set the rock in a small glass box and put a dab of glue on the hot plate inside. A few minutes later he lifted the rock out.

“We’ve got something,” he said. He dusted it with long-wavelength UV powder and hit it with the beam from the PoliLight wand. A print was clearly visible. Dead center. Cooper photographed it with Polaroid CU-5, a 1:1 camera. He showed the picture to Rhyme.

“Hold it closer.” Rhyme squinted as he examined it. “Yes! He rolled it.”

Rolling prints—rocking a finger onto a surface—produced an impression different from one made by picking up an object. It was a subtle difference—in the width of the friction ridges at various points on the pattern—but one that Rhyme now recognized clearly.

“And look, what’s that?” he mused. “That line.” There was a faint crescent mark above the print itself.

“It looks almost like—”

“Yep,” Rhyme said, “her fingernail. You wouldn’t normally get that. But I’ll bet he tipped the stone just to make sure it got picked up. It left an oil impression. Like a friction ridge.”

“Why would he do that?” Sachs asked.

Once more miffed that nobody seemed to be picking up these points as fast as he was, Rhyme explained tersely, “He’s telling us two things. First, he’s making sure we know the victim’s a woman. In case we didn’t make the connection between her and the body this morning.”

“Why do that?” Banks asked.

“To up the ante,” Rhyme said. “Make us sweat more. He’s let us know there’s a woman at risk. He’s valuated the victims—just like we all do—even though we claim we don’t.” Rhyme happened to glance at Sachs’s hands. He was surprised to see that, for such a beautiful woman,
her
fingers were a mess. Four ended in fleshy Band-Aids and several others were chewed to the quick. The cuticle of one was caked with brown blood. He
noticed too the red inflammation of the skin beneath her eyebrows, from plucking them, he assumed. And a scratch mark beside her ear. All self-destructive habits. There’re a million ways to do yourself in besides pills and Armagnac.

Rhyme announced, “The other thing he’s telling us I already warned you about. He knows evidence. He’s saying, Don’t bother with regular forensic PE. I won’t be leaving any. That’s what
he
thinks of course. But we’ll find something. You bet we will.” Suddenly Rhyme frowned. “The map! We need the map. Thom!”

The aide blurted, “What map?”

“You
know
what map I mean.”

Thom sighed. “Not a clue, Lincoln.”

Glancing out the window and speaking half to himself, Rhyme mused, “The railroad underpass, the bootleg tunnels and access doors, the asbestos—those’re all old. He likes
historical
New York. I want the Randel map.”

“Which is where?”

“The research files for my book. Where else?”

Thom dug through folders and pulled out a photocopy of a long, horizontal map of Manhattan. “This?”

“That, yes!”

It was the Randel Survey, drawn in 1811 for the commissioners of the city to plan out the grid of streets in Manhattan. The map had been printed horizontally, with Battery Park, south, to the left and Harlem, north, to the right. Laid out this way, the island resembled the body of a dog leaping, its narrow head lifted for an attack.

“Pin it up there. Good.”

As the aide did, Rhyme blurted, “Thom, we’re going to deputize you. Give him a shiny badge or something, Lon.”

“Lincoln,” he muttered.

“We need you. Come on. Haven’t you always wanted to be Sam Spade or Kojak?”

“Only Judy Garland,” the aide replied.

“Jessica Fletcher then! You’ll be writing the profile. Come on now, get out that Mont Blanc you’re always letting stick vainly out of your shirt pocket.”

The young man rolled his eyes as he lifted his Parker pen and took a dusty yellow pad from a stack under one of the tables.

“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Rhyme announced. “Put up one of those posters. Those art posters. Tape it up backwards and write on the back in marker. Write big now. So I can see it.”

Thom selected a Monet lily pads and mounted it to the wall.

“On the top,” the criminalist ordered, “write ‘Unsub 823.’ Then four columns. ‘Appearance. Residence. Vehicle. Other.’ Beautiful. Now, let’s start. What do we know about him?”

Sellitto said, “Vehicle . . . He’s got a Yellow Cab.”

“Right. And under ‘Other’ add that he knows CS—crime scene—procedures.”

“Which,” Sellitto added, “maybe means he’s had his turn in the barrel.”

“How’s that?” Thom asked.

“He might have a record,” the detective explained.

Banks said, “Should we add that he’s armed with a .32 Colt?”

“Fuck yes,” his boss confirmed.

Rhyme contributed, “And he knows FRs. . . .”

“What?” Thom asked.

“Friction ridges—fingerprints. That’s what they are, you know, ridges on our hands and feet to give us traction. And put down that he’s probably working out of a safe house. Good job, Thom. Look at him. He’s a born law enforcer.”

Thom glowered and stepped away from the wall, brushing at his shirt, which had picked up a stringy cobweb from the wall.

“There we go, folks,” Sellitto said. “Our first look at Mr. 823.”

Rhyme turned to Mel Cooper. “Now, the sand. What can we tell about it?”

Cooper lifted the goggles onto his pale forehead. He poured a sample onto a slide and slipped it under the polarized-light ’scope. He adjusted dials.

“Hmm. This is curious. No birefringence.”

Polarizing microscopes show birefringence—the double refraction of crystals and fibers and some other materials. Seashore sand birefringes dramatically.