The Bone Collector

ONE

Friday, 10:30 p.m., to Saturday, 3:30 p.m.

SHE WANTED ONLY TO SLEEP.

The plane had touched down two hours late and there’d been a marathon wait for the luggage. And then the car service had messed up; the limo’d left an hour ago. So now they were waiting for a cab.

She stood in the line of passengers, her lean body listing against the weight of her laptop computer. John rattled on about interest rates and new ways of restructuring the deal but all she could think was: Friday night, 10:30. I wanna pull on my sweats and hit the hay.

Gazing at the endless stream of Yellow Cabs. Something about the color and the similarity of the cars reminded her of insects. And she shivered with the creepy-crawly feeling she remembered from her childhood in the mountains when she and her brother’d find a gut-killed badger or kick over a red-ant nest and gaze at the wet mass of squirming bodies and legs.

T.J. Colfax shuffled forward as the cab pulled up and squealed to a stop.

The cabbie popped the trunk but stayed in the car. They had to load their own luggage, which ticked John off. He was used to people doing things for him. Tammie Jean didn’t care; she was still occasionally surprised to find that she had a secretary to type and file for her. She tossed her suitcase in, closed the trunk and climbed inside.

John got in after her, slammed the door and mopped his pudgy face and balding scalp as if the effort of pitching his suit-bag in the trunk had exhausted him.

“First stop East Seventy-second,” John muttered through the divider.

“Then the Upper West Side,” T.J. added. The Plexiglas between the front and back seats was badly scuffed and she could hardly see the driver.

The cab shot away from the curb and was soon cruising down the expressway toward Manhattan.

“Look,” John said, “that’s why all the crowds.”

He was pointing at a billboard welcoming delegates to the UN peace conference, which was starting on Monday. There were going to be ten thousand visitors in town. T.J. gazed up at the billboard – blacks and whites and Asians, waving and smiling. There was something wrong about the artwork, though. The proportions and the colors were off. And the faces all seemed pasty.

T.J. muttered, “Body snatchers.”

They sped along the broad expressway, which glared an uneasy yellow under the highway lights. Past the old Navy Yard, past the Brooklyn piers.

John finally stopped talking and pulled out his Texas Instruments, started crunching some numbers. T.J. sat back in the seat, looking at the steamy sidewalks and sullen faces of people sitting on the brownstone stoops overlooking the highway. They seemed half-comatose in the heat.

It was hot in the cab too and T.J. reached for the button to lower the window. She wasn’t surprised to find that it didn’t work. She reached across John. His was broken too. It was then that she noticed that the door locks were missing.

The door handles too.

Her hand slid over the door, feeling for the nub of the handle. Nothing – it was as if someone had cut it off with a hacksaw.

“What?” John asked.

“Well, the doors… How do we open them?”

John was looking from one to the other when the sign for the Midtown Tunnel came and went.

“Hey!” John rapped on the divider. “You missed the turn. Where’re you going?”

“Maybe he’s going to take the Queensboro,” T.J. suggested. The bridge meant a longer route but avoided the tunnel’s toll. She sat forward and tapped on the Plexiglas, using her ring.

“Are you taking the bridge?”

He ignored them.

“Hey!”

And a moment later they sped past the Queensboro turnoff.

“Shit,” John cried. “Where’re you taking us? Harlem. I’ll bet he’s taking us to Harlem.”

T.J. looked out the window. A car was moving parallel to them, passing slowly. She banged on the window hard.

“Help!” she shouted. “Please…”

The car’s driver glanced at her once, then again, frowning. He slowed and pulled behind them but with a hard jolt the cab skidded down an exit ramp into Queens, turned into an alley and sped through a deserted warehouse district. They must’ve been going sixty miles an hour.

“What’re you doing?”

T.J. banged on the divider. “Slow down. Where are? -”

“Oh, God, no,” John muttered. “Look.”

The driver had pulled on a ski mask.

“What do you want?” T.J. shouted.

“Money? We’ll give you money.”

Still, silence from the front of the cab.

T.J. ripped open her Targus bag and pulled out her black laptop. She reared back and slammed the corner of the computer into the window. The glass held though the sound of the bang seemed to scare the hell out of the driver. The cab swerved and nearly hit the brick wall of the building they were speeding past.

“Money! How much? I can give you a lot of money!” John sputtered, tears dripping down his fat cheeks.

T.J. rammed the window again with the laptop. The screen flew off under the force of the blow but the window remained intact.

She tried once more and the body of the computer split open and fell from her hands.

“Oh, shit…”

They both pitched forward “violently as the cab skidded to a stop in a dingy, unlit cul-de-sac.

The driver climbed out of the cab, a small pistol in his hand.

“Please, no,” she pleaded.

He walked to the back of the cab and leaned down, peering into the greasy glass. He stood there for a long time, as she and John scooted backwards, against the opposite door, their sweating bodies pressed together.

The driver cupped his hands against the glare from the streetlights and looked at them closely.

A sudden crack resonated through the air, and T.J. flinched. John gave a short scream.

In the distance, behind the driver, the sky filled with red and blue fiery streaks. More pops and whistles. He turned and gazed up as a huge, orange spider spread over the city.

Fireworks, T.J. recalled reading in the Times. A present from the mayor and the UN secretary-general for the conference delegates, welcoming them to the greatest city on earth.

The driver turned back to the cab. With a loud snap he pulled up on the latch and slowly opened the door.

The call was anonymous. As usual.

So there was no way of checking back to see which vacant lot the RP meant. Central had radioed, “He said Thirty-seven near Eleven. That’s all.”

Reporting parties weren’t known for Triple A directions to crime scenes.

Already sweating though it was just nine in the morning, Amelia Sachs pushed through a stand of tall grass. She was walking the strip search – what the Crime Scene people called it – an S-shaped pattern. Nothing. She bent her head to the speaker/mike pinned to her navy-blue uniform blouse.

“Portable 5885. Can’t find anything, Central. You have a further-to?”

Through crisp static the dispatcher replied, “Nothing more on location, 5885. But one thing… the RP said he hoped the vic was dead. K.”

“Say again, Central.”

“The RP said he hoped the victim was dead. For his sake. K.”

“K.”

Hoped the vic was dead?

Sachs struggled over a wilted chain-link and searched another empty lot. Nothing.

She wanted to quit. Call in a 10-90, unfounded report, and go back to the Deuce, which was her regular beat. Her knees hurt and she was hot as stew in this lousy August weather. She wanted to slip into the Port Authority, hang with the kids and have a tall can of Arizona iced tea. Then, at 11:30 – just a couple of hours away – she’d clean out her locker at Midtown South and head downtown for the training session.

But she didn’t – couldn’t – blow off the call. She kept going: along the hot sidewalk, through the gap between two abandoned tenements, through another vegetation-filled field.

Her long index finger pushed into her flattop uniform cap, through the layers of long red hair piled high on her head. She scratched compulsively then reached up underneath the cap and scratched some more. Sweat ran down her forehead and tickled and she dug into her eyebrow too.

Thinking: My last two hours on the street. I can live with it.

As Sachs stepped farther into the brush she felt the first uneasiness of the morning.

Somebody’s watching me.

The hot wind rustled the dry brush and cars and trucks sped noisily to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. She thought what Patrol officers often did: This city is so damn loud somebody could come up right behind me, knife-range away, and I’d never know it.

Or line up iron sights on my back…

She spun around quickly.

Nothing but leaves and rusting machinery and trash.

Climbing a pile of stones, wincing. Amelia Sachs, thirty-one – a mere thirty-one, her mother would say – was plagued by arthritis. Inherited from her grandfather as clearly as she’d received her mother’s willowy build and her father’s good looks and career (the red hair was anybody’s guess). Another jolt of pain as she eased through a tall curtain of dying bushes. She was fortunate to stop herself one pace from a sheer thirty-foot drop.

Below her was a gloomy canyon – cut deep into the bedrock of the West Side. Through it ran the Amtrak roadbed for trains bound north.

She squinted, looking at the floor of the canyon, not far from the railroad bed.

What is that?

A circle of overturned earth, a small tree branch sticking out of the top? It looked like -

Oh, my good Lord…

She shivered at the sight. Felt the nausea rise, prickling her skin like a wave of flame. She managed to step on that tiny part inside her that wanted to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen this.

He hoped the victim was dead. For his sake.

She ran toward an iron ladder that led down from the sidewalk to the roadbed. She reached for the railing but stopped just in time. Shit. The perp might’ve escaped this way. If she touched it she might screw up any prints he’d left. Okay, we do it the hard way. Breathing deeply to dull the pain in her joints, she began climbing down the rock face itself, slipping her issue shoes – polished like silver for the first day of her new assignment – into crevices cut in the stone. She jumped the last four feet to the roadbed and ran to the grave.

“Oh, man…”

It wasn’t a branch sticking out of the ground; it was a hand. The body’d been buried vertical and the dirt piled on until just the forearm, wrist and hand protruded. She stared at the ring finger; all the flesh had been whittled away and a woman’s diamond cocktail ring had been replaced on the bloody, stripped bone.

Sachs dropped to her knees and began to dig.

Dirt flying under her dog-paddling hands, she noticed that the uncut fingers were splayed, stretched beyond where they could normally bend. Which told her that the vic had been alive when the last shovelful of dirt was spooned onto the face.

And maybe still was.

Sachs dug furiously into the loosely packed earth, cutting her hand on a bottle shard, her dark blood mixing into the darker earth. And then she came to the hair and a forehead below it, a cyanotic bluish-gray from the lack of oxygen. Digging further until she could see the dull eyes and the mouth, which had twisted into a horrible grin as the vic had tried in the last few seconds to stay above the rising tide of black earth.

It wasn’t a woman. Despite the ring. He was a heavy-set man in his fifties. As dead as the soil he floated in.

Backing away, she couldn’t take her eyes off his and nearly stumbled over a railroad track. She could think of absolutely nothing for a full minute. Except what it must’ve been like to die that way.

Then: Come on, honey. You got yourself a homicide crime scene and you’re first officer.

You know what to do.

ADAPT

A is for Arrest a known perp.

D is for Detain material witnesses and suspects.

A is for Assess the crime scene.

P is for…

What was P again?

She lowered her head to the mike. “Portable 5885 to Central. Further-to. I’ve got a 10-29 by the train tracks at Three-eight and Eleven. Homicide, K. Need detectives, CS, bus and tour doctor. K.”

“Roger, 5885. Perp in custody, K?”

“No perp.”

“Five-eight-eight-five, K.”

Sachs stared at the finger, the one whittled down to the bone. The incongruous ring. The eyes. And the grin… oh, that fucking grin. A shudder ripped through her body. Amelia Sachs had swum among snakes in summer-camp rivers and had boasted truthfully she’d have no problem bungee-jumping from a hundred-foot bridge. But let her think of confinement… think of being trapped, immobile, and the panic attack’d grab her like an electric shock. Which was why Sachs walked fast when she walked and why she drove cars like light itself.

When you move they can’t getcha…

She heard a sound and cocked her head.

A rumble, deep, getting louder.

Scraps of paper blowing along the roadbed of the tracks. Dust dervishes swirling about her like angry ghosts.

Then a low wail…

Five-foot-nine Patrol Officer Amelia Sachs found herself facing down a thirty-ton Amtrak locomotive, the red, white and blue slab of steel approaching at a determined ten miles an hour.

“Hold up, there!” she shouted.

The engineer ignored her.

Sachs jogged onto the roadbed and planted herself right in the middle of the track, spread her stance and waved her arms, signaling him to stop. The locomotive squealed to a halt. The engineer stuck his head out the window.

“You can’t go through here,” she told him.

He asked her what she meant. She thought he looked woefully young to be driving such a big train.

“It’s a crime scene. Please shut off the engine.”

“Lady, I don’t see any crimes.”

But Sachs wasn’t listening. She was looking up at a gap in the chain-link on the west side of the train viaduct, at the top, near Eleventh Avenue.

That would have been one way to get the body here without being seen – parking on Eleventh and dragging the body through the narrow alley to the cliff. On Thirty-seventh, the cross street, he could be spotted from two dozen apartment windows.

“That train, sir. Just leave it right there.”

“I can’t leave it here.”

“Please shut off the engine.”

“We don’t shut off the engines of trains like this. They run all the time.”

“And call the dispatcher. Or somebody. Have them stop the southbound trains too.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Now, sir. I’ve got the number of that vehicle of yours.”

“Vehicle?”

“I’d suggest you do it immediately,” Sachs barked.

“What’re you going to do, lady? Gimme a ticket?”

But Amelia Sachs was once again climbing back up the stone walls, her poor joints creaking, her lips tasting limestone dust, clay and her own sweat. She jogged to the alley she’d noticed from the roadbed and then turned around, studying Eleventh Avenue and the Javits Center across it. The hall was bustling with crowds – spectators and press. A huge banner proclaimed, Welcome UN Delegates! But earlier this morning, when the street was deserted, the perp could easily have found a parking space along here and carried the body to the tracks undetected. Sachs strode to Eleventh, surveyed the six-lane avenue, which was jammed with traffic.

Let’s do it.

She waded into the sea of cars and trucks and stopped the northbound lanes cold. Several drivers tried end runs and she had to issue two citations and finally drag trash cans out into the middle of the street as a barricade to make sure the good residents did their civic duty.

Sachs had finally remembered the next of the first officer’s ADAPT rules.

P is for Protect the crime scene.

The sound of angry horns began to fill the hazy morning sky, soon supplemented by the drivers’ angrier shouts. A short time later she heard the sirens join the cacophony as the first of the emergency vehicles arrived.

Forty minutes later, the scene was swarming with uniforms and investigators, dozens of them – a lot more than a hit in Hell’s Kitchen, however gruesome the cause of death, seemed to warrant. But, Sachs learned from another cop, this was a hot case, a media groper – the vic was one of two passengers who’d arrived at JFK last night, gotten into a cab and headed for the city. They’d never arrived at their homes.

“CNN’s watching,” the uniform whispered.

So Amelia Sachs wasn’t surprised to see blond Vince Peretti, chief of the Central Investigation and Resource Division, which oversaw the-crime scene unit, climb over the top of the embankment and pause as he brushed dust from his thousand-dollar suit.

She was, however, surprised to see him notice her and gesture her over, a faint smile on his clean-cut face. It occurred to her she was about to receive a nod of gratitude for her Cliffhanger routine. Saved the fingerprints on that ladder, boys. Maybe even a commendation. In the last hour of the last day of Patrol. Going out in a blaze of glory.

He looked her up and down. “Patrolwoman, you’re no rookie, are you? I’m safe in making that assumption.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“You’re not a rookie, I assume.”

She wasn’t, not technically, though she had only three years’ service under her belt, unlike most of the other Patrol officers her age; they had nine or ten years in. Sachs had foundered for a few years before attending the academy. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

He looked exasperated and the smile vanished. “You were first officer?”

“Yessir.”

“Why’d you close down Eleventh Avenue? What were you thinking of?”

She looked along the broad street, which was still blocked by her trash-can barricade. She’d gotten used to the honking but realized now it was really quite loud; the line of cars extended for miles.

“Sir, the first officer’s job is to arrest a perp, detain any witnesses, protect -”

“I know the ADAPT rule, officer. You closed the street to protect the crime scene?”

“Yessir. I didn’t think the perp would park on the cross street. He could be seen too easily from those apartments. See, there? Eleventh seemed like a better choice.”

“Well, it was a wrong choice. There were no footprints on that side of the tracks, and two sets going to the ladder that leads up to Thirty-seven.”

“I closed Thirty-seven too.”

“That’s my point. That’s all that needed to be closed. And the train?” he asked. “Why’d you stop that?”

“Well, sir. I thought that a train going through the scene might disturb evidence. Or something.”

“Or something, officer?”

“I didn’t express myself very well, sir. I meant -”

“What about Newark Airport?”

“Yessir.” She looked around for help. There were officers nearby but they were busily ignoring the dressing-down. “What exactly about Newark?”

“Why didn’t you shut that down too?”

Oh, wonderful. A schoolmarm. Her Julia Roberts lips grew taut but she said reasonably, “Sir, in my judgment, it seemed likely that -”

“The New York Thruway would’ve been a good choice too. And the Jersey Pike and Long Island Expressway. I-70, all the way to St. Louis. Those are likely means of escape.”

She lowered her head slightly and stared back at Peretti. The two of them were exactly the same height, though his heels were higher.

“I’ve gotten calls from the commissioner,” he continued, “the head of the Port Authority, the UN secretary-general’s office, the head of that expo -”. He nodded toward the Javits Center. “We’ve fucked up the conference schedule, a U.S. senator’s speech and traffic on the entire West Side. The train tracks were fifty feet from the vic and the street you closed was a good two hundred feet away and thirty above. I mean, even Hurricane Eva didn’t fuck up Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor like this.”

“I just thought -”

Peretti smiled. Because Sachs was a beautiful woman – her “foundering” before attending the academy had involved steady assignments for the Chantelle Modeling Agency on Madison Avenue – the cop chose to forgive her.

“Patrolwoman Sachs” – he glanced at the name tag on her chest, flattened chastely by the American Body Armor vest – “an object lesson. Crime scene work is a balance. It’d be nice if we could cordon off the whole city after every homicide and detain about three million people. But we can’t do that. I say this constructively. For your edification.”

“Actually, sir,” she said brusquely, “I’m transferring out of Patrol. Effective as of noon today.”

He nodded, smiled cheerfully. “Then, enough said. But for the record, it was your decision to stop the train and close the street.”

“Yessir, it was,” she said smartly. “No mistake about that.”

He jotted this into a black watchbook with slashing strokes of his sweaty pen.

Oh, please…

“Now, remove those garbage cans. You direct traffic until the street’s clear again. You hear me?”

Without a yessir or nosir or any other acknowledgment she wandered to Eleventh Avenue and slowly began removing the garbage cans. Every single driver who passed her scowled or muttered something. Sachs glanced at her watch.

An hour to go.

I can live with it.

TWO

WITH A TERSE FLUTTER OF WINGS the peregrine dropped onto the window ledge. The light outside, mid-morning, was brilliant and the air looked fiercely hot.

“There you are,” the man whispered. Then cocked his head at the sound of the buzzer of the door downstairs.

“Is that him?” he shouted toward the stairs. “Is it?”

Lincoln Rhyme heard nothing in response and turned back to the window. The bird’s head swiveled, a fast, jerky movement that the falcon nevertheless made elegant. Rhyme observed that its talons were bloody. A piece of yellow flesh dangled from the black nutshell beak. It extended a short neck and eased to the nest in movements reminiscent not of a bird’s but a snake’s. The falcon dropped the meat into the upturned mouth of the fuzzy blue hatchling. I’m looking, Rhyme thought, at the only living creature in New York City with no predator. Except maybe God Himself.

He heard the footsteps come up the stairs slowly.

“Was that him?” he asked Thom.

The young man answered, “No.”

“Who was it? The doorbell rang, didn’t it?”

Thom’s eyes went to the window. “The bird’s back. Look, bloodstains on your windowsill. Can you see them?”

The female falcon inched into view. Blue-gray like a fish, iridescent. Her head scanned the sky.

“They’re always together. Do they mate for life?” Thom wondered aloud. “Like geese?”

Rhyme’s eyes returned to Thom, who was bent forward at his trim, youthful waist, gazing at the nest through the spattered window.

“Who was it?” Rhyme repeated. The young man was stalling now and it irritated Rhyme.

“A visitor.”

“A visitor? Ha.” Rhyme snorted. He tried to recall when his last visitor had been here. It must have been three months ago. Who’d it been? That reporter maybe or some distant cousin. Well, Peter Taylor, one of Rhyme’s spinal cord specialists. And Blaine had been here several times. But she of course was not a vis-i-tor.

“It’s freezing,” Thom complained. His reaction was to open the window. Immediate gratification. Youth.

“Don’t open the window,” Rhyme ordered. “And tell me who the hell’s here.”

“It’s freezing.”

“You’ll disturb the bird. You can turn the air conditioner down. I’ll turn it down.”

“We were here first,” Thom said, further lifting the huge pane of window. “The birds moved in with full knowledge of you.” The falcons glanced toward the noise, glaring. But then they always glared. They remained on the ledge, lording over their domain of anemic ginkgo trees and alternate-side-of-the-street parkers.

Rhyme repeated. “Who is it?”

“Lon Sellitto.”

“Lon?”

What was he doing here?

Thom examined the room. “The place is a mess.”

Rhyme didn’t like the fuss of cleaning. He didn’t like the bustle, the noise of the vacuum – which he found particularly irritating. He was content here, as it was. This room, which he called his office, was on the second floor of his gothic townhouse on the Upper West Side of the city, overlooking Central Park. The room was large, twenty-by-twenty, and virtually every one of those feet was occupied. Sometimes he closed his eyes, playing a game, and tried to detect the smell of the different objects in the room here. The thousands of books and magazines, the Tower of Pisa stacks of photocopies, the hot transistors of the TV, the dust-frosted lightbulbs, the cork bulletin boards. Vinyl, peroxide, latex, upholstery.

Three different kinds of single-malt Scotch.

Falcon shit.

“I don’t want to see him. Tell him I’m busy.”

“And a young cop. Ernie Banks. No, he was a baseball player, right? You really should let me clean. You never notice how filthy someplace is till people come to call.”

“Come to call? My, that sounds quaint. Victorian. How does this sound? Tell ’em to get the hell out. How’s that for fin-de-siècle etiquette?”

A mess…

Thom was speaking of the room but Rhyme supposed he meant his boss too.

Rhyme’s hair was black and thick as a twenty-year-old’s – though he was twice that age – but the strands were wild and bushy, desperately in need of a wash and cut. His face sprouted a dirty-looking three days’ growth of black beard and he’d wakened with an incessant tickle in his ear, which meant that those hairs needed trimming as well. Rhyme’s nails were long, finger and toe, and he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week – polka-dotted pajamas, god-awful ugly. His eyes were narrow, deep brown, and set in a face that Blaine had told him on a number of occasions, passionate and otherwise, was handsome.

“They want to talk to you,” Thom continued. “They say it’s very important.”

“Well, bully for them.”

“You haven’t seen Lon for nearly a year.”

“Why does that mean I want to see him now? Have you scared off the bird? I’ll be pissed if you have.”

“It’s important, Lincoln.”

“Very important, I recall you saying. Where’s that doctor? He might’ve called. I was dozing earlier. And you were out.”

“You’ve been awake since six a.m.”

“No.” He paused. “I woke up, yes. But then I dozed off. I was sound asleep. Did you check messages?”

Thom said, “Yes. Nothing from him.”

“He said he’d be here midmorning.”

“And it’s just past eleven. Maybe we’ll hold off notifying air-sea rescue. What do you say?”

“Have you been on the phone?” Rhyme asked abruptly. “Maybe he tried to call while you were on.”

“I was talking to -”

“Did I say anything?” Rhyme asked. “Now you’re angry. I didn’t say you shouldn’t be making phone calls. You can do that. You’ve always been able to do that. My point is just that he might’ve called while you were on the line.”

“No, your point this morning is to be a shit.”

“There you go. You know, they have this thing – call waiting. You can get two calls at once. I wish we had that. What does my old friend Lon want? And his friend the baseball player?”

“Ask them.”

“I’m asking you.”

“They want to see you. That’s all I know.”

“About something vay-ree im-por-tant.”

“ Lincoln.” Thom sighed. The good-looking young man ran his hand through his blond hair. He wore tan slacks and a white shirt, with a blue floral tie, immaculately knotted. When he’d hired Thom a year ago Rhyme had said he could wear jeans and T-shirts if he wanted. But he’d been dressed impeccably every day since. Rhyme didn’t know why it contributed to the decision to keep the young man on, but it had. None of Thom’s predecessors had lasted more than six weeks. The number of those who quit was exactly equal to the firees.

“All right, what did you tell them?”

“I told them to give me a few minutes to make sure you were decent then they could come up. Briefly.”

“You did that. Without asking me. Thank you very much.”

Thom retreated a few steps and called down the narrow stairway to the first floor, “Come on, gentlemen.”

“They told you something, didn’t they?” Rhyme said. “You’re holding out on me.”

Thom didn’t answer and Rhyme watched the two men approach. As they entered the room Rhyme spoke first. He said to Thom, “Close the curtain. You’ve already upset the birds way too much.”

Which really meant only that he’d had enough of the sputtering sunlight.

Mute.

With the foul, sticky tape on her mouth she couldn’t speak a word and that made her feel more helpless than the metal handcuffs tight on her wrists. Than the grip of his short, strong fingers on her biceps.

The taxi driver, still in his ski mask, led her down the grimy, wet corridor, past rows of ducts and piping. They were in the basement of an office building. She had no idea where.

If I could talk to him…

T.J. Colfax was a player, the bitch of Morgan Stanley’s third floor. A negotiator.

Money? You want money? I’ll get you money, lots of it, boy. Bushels. She thought this a dozen times, trying to catch his eye, as if she could actually force the words into his thoughts.

Pleeeeeeeease, she begged silently, and began thinking about the mechanics of cashing in her 401(k) and giving him her retirement fund. Oh, please…

She remembered last night: The man turning back from the fireworks, dragging them from the cab, handcuffing them. He’d thrown them into the trunk and they’d begun driving again. First over rough cobblestones and broken asphalt then smooth roads then rough again. She heard the whir of wheels on a bridge. More turns, more rough roads. Finally, the cab stopped and the driver got out and seemed to open a gate or some doors. He drove into a garage, she thought. All the sounds of the city were cut off and the car’s bubbling exhaust rose in volume, reverberating off close walls.

Then the cab trunk opened and the man pulled her out. He yanked the diamond ring off her finger and pocketed it. Then he led her past walls of spooky faces, faded paintings of blank eyes staring at her, a butcher, a devil, three sorrowful children – painted on the crumbling plaster. Dragged her down into a moldy basement and dumped her on the floor. He clopped upstairs, leaving her in the dark, surrounded by a sickening smell – rotting flesh, garbage. There she’d lain for hours, sleeping a little, crying a lot. She’d wakened abruptly at a loud sound. A sharp explosion. Nearby. Then more troubled sleep.

A half hour ago he’d come for her again. Led her to the trunk and they’d driven for another twenty minutes. Here. Wherever here was.

They now walked into a dim basement room. In the center was a thick black pipe; he handcuffed her to it then gripped her feet and pulled them out straight in front of her, propping her in a sitting position. He crouched and tied her legs together with thin rope – it took several minutes; he was wearing leather gloves. Then he rose and gazed at her for a long moment, bent down and tore her blouse open. He walked around behind her and she gasped, feeling his hands on her shoulders, probing, squeezing her shoulder blades.

Crying, pleading through the tape.

Knowing what was coming.

The hands moved down, along her arms, and then under them and around the front of her body. But he didn’t touch her breasts. No, as the hands spidered across her skin they seemed to be searching for her ribs. He prodded them and stroked. T.J. shivered and tried to pull away. He gripped her tight and caressed some more, pressing hard, feeling the give of the bone.

He stood. She heard receding footsteps. For a long moment there was silence except for the groans of air conditioners and elevators. Then she barked a frightened grunt at a sound right behind her. A repetitive noise. Wsssh. Wsssh. Very familiar but something she couldn’t place. She tried to turn to see what he was doing but couldn’t. What was it? Listening to the rhythmic sound, over and over and over. It took her right back to her mother’s house.

Wsssh. Wsssh.

Saturday morning in the small bungalow in Bedford, Tennessee. It was the only day her mother didn’t work and she devoted most of it to housecleaning. T.J. would wake up to a hot sun and stumble downstairs to help her. Wsssh. As she cried at this memory she listened to the sound and wondered why on earth he was sweeping the floor and with such careful, precise strokes of the broom.

He saw surprise and discomfort on their faces.

Something you don’t find very often with New York City homicide cops.

Lon Sellitto and young Banks (Jerry, not Ernie) sat where Rhyme gestured with his bush-crowned head: twin dusty, uncomfortable rattan chairs.

Rhyme had changed considerably since Sellitto had last been here and the detective didn’t hide his shock very well. Banks had no benchmark against which to judge what he was seeing but he was shocked nonetheless. The sloppy room, the vagrant gazing at them suspiciously. The smell too certainly – the visceral aroma surrounding the creature Lincoln Rhyme now was.

He immensely regretted letting them up.

“Why didn’t you call first, Lon?”

“You would’ve told us not to come.”

True.

Thom crested the stairs and Rhyme preempted him. “No, Thom, we won’t be needing you.” He’d remembered that the young man always asked guests if they wanted something to drink or eat.

Such a goddamn Martha Stewart.

Silence for a moment. Large, rumpled Sellitto – a twenty-year vet – glanced down into a box beside the bed and started to speak. Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off by the sight of disposable adult diapers.

Jerry Banks said, “I read your book, sir.” The young cop had a bad hand when it came to shaving, lots of nicks. And what a charming cowlick in his hair! My good Lord, he can’t be more than twelve. The more worn the world gets, Rhyme reflected, the younger its inhabitants seem to be.

“Which one?”

“Well, your crime scene manual, of course. But I meant the picture book. The one a couple years ago.”

“There were words too. It was mostly words, in fact. Did you read them?”

“Oh, well, sure,” Banks’ said quickly.

A huge stack of remaindered volumes of The Scenes of the Crime sat against one wall of his room.

“I didn’t know you and Lon were friends,” Banks added.

“Ah, Lon didn’t trot out the yearbook? Show you the pictures? Strip his sleeve and show his scars and say these wounds I had with Lincoln Rhyme?”

Sellitto wasn’t smiling. Well, I can give him even less to smile about if he likes. The senior detective was digging through his attaché case. And what does he have in there?

“How long were you partnered?” Banks asked, making conversation.

“There’s a verb for you,” Rhyme said. And looked at the clock.

“We weren’t partners,” Sellitto said. “I was Homicide, he was head of IRD.”

“Oh,” Banks said, even more impressed. Running the Central Investigation and Resource Division was one of the most prestigious jobs in the department.

“Yeah,” Rhyme said, looking out the window, as if his doctor might be arriving via falcon. “The two musketeers.”

In a patient voice, which infuriated Rhyme, Sellitto said, “Seven years, off and on, we worked together.”

“And good years they were,” Rhyme intoned.

Thom scowled but Sellitto missed the irony. Or more likely ignored it. He said, “We have a problem, Lincoln. We need some help.”

Snap. The stack of papers landed on the bedside table.

“Some help?” The laugh exploded from the narrow nose Elaine had always suspected was the product of a surgeon’s vision though it was not. She also thought his lips were too perfect (Add a scar, she’d once joked and during one of their fights she nearly had). And why, he wondered, does her voluptuous apparition keep rising today? He’d wakened thinking about his ex and had felt compelled to write her a letter, which was on the computer screen at that moment. He now saved the document on the disk. Silence filled the room as he entered the commands with a single finger.

“ Lincoln?” Sellitto asked.

“Yessir. Some help. From me. I heard.”

Banks kept an inappropriate smile on his face while he shuffled his butt uneasily in the chair.

“I’ve got an appointment in, well, any minute now,” Rhyme said.

“An appointment.”

“A doctor.”

“Really?” Banks asked, probably to murder the silence that loomed again.

Sellitto, not sure where the conversation was going, asked, “And how’ve you been?”

Banks and Sellitto hadn’t asked about his health when they’d arrived. It was a question people tended to avoid when they saw Lincoln Rhyme. The answer risked being a very complicated, and almost certainly an unpleasant, one.

He said simply, “I’ve been fine, thanks. And you? Betty?”

“We’re divorced,” Sellitto said quickly.

“Really?”

“She got the house and I got half a kid.” The chunky cop said this with forced cheer, as if he’d used the line before, and Rhyme supposed there was a painful story behind the breakup. One he had no desire to hear. Still, he wasn’t surprised that the marriage had tanked. Sellitto was a workhorse. He was one of the hundred or so first-grade detectives on the force and had been for years – he got the grade when they were handed out for merit not just time served. He’d worked close to eighty hours a week. Rhyme hadn’t even known he was married for the first few months they’d worked together.

“Where you living now?” Rhyme asked, hoping a nice social conversation would tucker them out and send them on their way.

“ Brooklyn. The Heights. I walk to work sometimes. You know those diets I was always on? The trick’s not dieting. It’s exercise.”

He didn’t look any fatter or thinner than the Lon Sellitto of three and a half years ago. Or the Sellitto of fifteen years ago for that matter.

“So,” collegiate Banks said, “a doctor, you were saying. For a…”

“A new form of treatment?” Rhyme finished the dwindling question. “Exactly.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you so much.”

It was 11:36 a.m. Well past midmorning. Tardiness is inexcusable in a man of medicine.

He watched Banks’s eyes twice scan his legs. He caught the pimply boy a second time and wasn’t surprised to see the detective blush.

“So,” Rhyme said. “I’m afraid I don’t really have time to help you.”

“But he’s not here yet, right, the doctor?” asked Lon Sellitto in the same bulletproof tone he’d used to puncture homicide suspects’ cover stories.

Thom appeared at the doorway with a coffeepot.

Prick, Rhyme mouthed.

“ Lincoln forgot to offer you gentlemen something.”

“Thom treats me like a child.”

“If the bootie fits,” the aide retorted.

“All right,” Rhyme snapped. “Have some coffee. I’ll have some mother’s milk.”

“Too early,” Thom said. “The bar isn’t open.” And weathered Rhyme’s glowering face quite well.

Again Banks’s eyes browsed Rhyme’s body. Maybe he’d been expecting just skin and bones. But the atrophying had stopped not long after the accident and his first physical therapists had exhausted him with exercise. Thom too, who may have been a prick at times and an old mother hen at others, was a damn good PT. He put Rhyme through passive ROM exercises every day. Taking meticulous notes on the goniometry – measurements of the range of motion that he applied to each joint in Rhyme’s body. Carefully checking the spasticity as he kept the arms and legs in a constant cycle of abduction and adduction. ROM work wasn’t a miracle but it built up some tone, cut down on debilitating contractures and kept the blood flowing. For someone whose muscular activities had been limited to his shoulders, head and left ring finger for three and a half years, Lincoln Rhyme wasn’t in such bad shape.

The young detective looked away from the complicated black ECU control sitting by Rhyme’s finger, hardwired to another controller, sprouting conduit and cables, which ran to the computer and a wall panel.

A quad’s life is wires, a therapist had told Rhyme a long time ago. The rich ones, at least. The lucky ones.

Sellitto said, “There was a murder early this morning on the West Side.”

“We’ve had reports of some homeless men and women disappearing over the past month,” Banks said. “At first we thought it might be one of them. But it wasn’t,” he added dramatically. “The vic was one of those people last night.”

Rhyme trained a blank expression on the young man with the dotted face. “Those people?”

“He doesn’t watch the news,” Thom said. “If you’re talking about the kidnapping he hasn’t heard.”

“You don’t watch the news?” Sellitto laughed. “You’re the SOB read four papers a day and recorded the local news to watch when he got home. Blaine told me you called her Katie Couric one night when you were making love.”

“I only read literature now,” Rhyme said pompously, and falsely.

Thom added, “Literature is news that stays news.”

Rhyme ignored him.

Sellitto said, “Man and woman coming back from business on the Coast. Got into a Yellow Cab at JFK. Never made it home.”

“There was a report about eleven-thirty. This cab was driving down the BQE in Queens. White male and female passenger in the back seat. Looked like they were trying to break a window out. Pounding on the glass. Nobody got tags or medallion.”

“This witness – who saw the cab. Any look at the driver?”

“No.”

“The woman passenger?”

“No sign of her.”

Eleven forty-one. Rhyme was furious with Dr. William Berger. “Nasty business,” he muttered absently.

Sellitto exhaled long and loud.

“Go on, go on,” Rhyme said.

“He was wearing her ring,” Banks said.

“Who was wearing what?”

“The vic. They found this morning. He was wearing the woman’s ring. The other passenger’s.”

“You’re sure it was hers?”

“Had her initials inside.”

“So you’ve got an unsub,” Rhyme continued, “who wants you to know he’s got the woman and she’s still alive.”

“What’s an unsub?” Thom asked.

When Rhyme ignored him Sellitto said, “Unknown subject.”

“But you know how he got it to fit?” Banks asked, a little wide-eyed for Rhyme’s taste. “Her ring?”

“I give up.”

“Cut the skin off the guy’s finger. All of it. Down to the bone.”

Rhyme gave a faint smile. “Ah, he’s a smart one, isn’t he?”

“Why’s that smart?”

“To make sure nobody came by and took the ring. It was bloody, right?”

“A mess.”

“Hard to see the ring in the first place. Then AIDS, hepatitis. Even if somebody noticed, a lot of folks’d take a pass on that trophy. What’s her name, Lon?”

The older detective nodded to his partner, who flipped open his watchbook.

“Tammie Jean Colfax. She goes by T.J. Twenty-eight. Works for Morgan Stanley.”

Rhyme observed that Banks too wore a ring. A school ring of some sort. The boy was too polished to be just a high-school and academy grad. No whiff of army about him. Wouldn’t be surprised if the jewelry bore the name Yale. A homicide detective? What was the world coming to?

The young cop cupped his coffee in hands that shook sporadically. With a minuscule gesture of his own ring finger on the Everest & Jennings ECU panel, to which his left hand was strapped, Rhyme clicked through several settings, turning the AC down. He tended not to waste controls on things like heating and air-conditioning; he reserved it for necessities like lights, the computer and his page-turning frame. But when the room got too cold his nose ran. And that’s fucking torture for a quad.

“No ransom note?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re the case officer?” Rhyme asked Sellitto.

“Under Jim Polling. Yeah. And we want you to review the CS report.”

Another laugh. “Me? I haven’t looked at a crime scene report in three years. What could I possibly tell you?”

“You could tell us tons, Linc.”

“Who’s head of IRD now?”

“Vince Peretti.”

“The congressman’s boy,” Rhyme recalled. “Have him review it.”

A moment’s hesitation. “We’d rather have you.”

“Who’s we?”

“The chief. Yours truly.”

“And how,” Rhyme asked, smiling like a schoolgirl, “does Captain Peretti feel about this vote of no confidence?”

Sellitto stood and paced through the room, glancing down at the stacks of magazines. Forensic Science Review. Harding & Boyle Scientific Equipment Company catalog. The New Scotland Yard Forensic Investigation Annual. American College of Forensic Examiners Journal. Report of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors. CRC Press Forensics. Journal of the International Institute of Forensic Science.

“Look at them,” Rhyme said. “The subscriptions lapsed ages ago. And they’re all dusty.”

“Everything in here’s fucking dusty, Linc. Why don’t you get off your lazy ass and clean this pigsty up?”

Banks looked horrified. Rhyme squelched the burst of laughter that felt alien inside him. His guard had slipped and irritation had dissolved into amusement. He momentarily regretted that he and Sellitto had drifted apart. Then he shot the feeling dead. He grumbled, “I can’t help you. Sorry.”

“We’ve got the peace conference starting on Monday. We -”

“What conference?”

“At the UN. Ambassadors, heads of state. There’ll be ten thousand dignitaries in town. You heard about that thing in London two days ago?”

“Thing?” Rhyme repeated caustically.

“Somebody tried to bomb the hotel where UNESCO was meeting. The mayor’s scared shitless somebody’s going to move on the conference here. He doesn’t want ugly Post headlines.”

“There’s also the little problem,” Rhyme said astringently, “that Miss Tammie Jean might not be enjoying her trip home either.”

“Jerry, tell him some details. Whet his appetite.”

Banks turned his attention from Rhyme’s legs to his bed, which was – Rhyme readily admitted – by far the more interesting of the two. Especially the control panel. It looked like something off the space shuttle and cost just about as much. “Ten hours after they’re snatched we find the male passenger – John Ulbrecht – shot and buried alive in the Amtrak roadbed near Thirty-seventh and Eleventh. Well, we find him dead. He’d been buried alive. Bullet was a.32.” Banks looked up and added, “The Honda Accord of slugs.”

Meaning there’d be no wily deductions about the unsub from exotic weaponry. This Banks seems smart, Rhyme thought, and all he suffers from is youth, which he might or might not outgrow. Lincoln Rhyme believed he himself had never been young.

“Rifling on the slug?” Rhyme asked.

“Six lands and grooves, left twist.”

“So he’s got himself a Colt,” Rhyme said and glanced over the crime scene diagram again.

“You said 'he,'” the young detective continued. “Actually it’s 'they.'”

“What?”

“Unsubs. There’re two of them. There were two sets of footprints between the grave and the base of an iron ladder leading up to the street,” Banks said, pointing to the CS diagram.

“Any prints on the ladder?”

“None. It was wiped. Did a good job of it. The footprints go to the grave and back to the ladder. Anyway, there had to be two of ’em to schlepp the vic. He weighed over two hundred pounds. One man couldn’t’ve done it.”

“Keep going.”

“They got him to the grave, dropped him in, shot him and buried him, went back to the ladder, climbed it and vanished.”

“Shot him in the grave?” Rhyme inquired.

“Yep. There was no blood trail anywhere around the ladder or the path to the grave.”

Rhyme found himself mildly interested. But he said, “What do you need me for?”

Sellitto grinned ragged yellow teeth. “We got ourselves a mystery, Linc. A buncha PE that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.”

“So?” It was a rare crime scene when every bit of physical evidence made sense.

“Naw, this is real weird. Read the report. Please. I’ll put it here. How’s this thing work?” Sellitto looked at Thom, who fitted the report in the page-turning frame.

“I don’t have time, Lon,” Rhyme protested.

“That’s quite a contraption,” Banks offered, looking at the frame. Rhyme didn’t respond. He glanced at the first page then read it carefully. Moved his ring finger a precise millimeter to the left. A rubber wand turned the page.

Reading. Thinking: Well, this is odd.

“Who was in charge of the scene?”

“Peretti himself. When he heard the vic was one of the taxi people he came down and took over.”

Rhyme continued to read. For a minute the unimaginative words of cop writing held his interest. Then the doorbell rang and his heart galloped with a great shudder. His eyes slipped to Thom. They were cold and made clear that the time for banter was over. Thom nodded and went downstairs immediately.

All thoughts of cabdrivers and PE and kidnapped bankers vanished from the sweeping mind of Lincoln Rhyme.

“It’s Dr. Berger,” Thom announced over the intercom.

At last. At long last.

“Well, I’m sorry, Lon. I’ll have to ask you to leave. It was good seeing you again.” A smile. “Interesting case, this one is.”

Sellitto hesitated then rose. “But will you read through the report, Lincoln? Tell us what you think?”

Rhyme said, “You bet,” then leaned his head back against the pillow. Quads like Rhyme, who had full head-and-neck movement, could activate a dozen controls just by three-dimensional movements of the head. But Rhyme shunned headrests. There were so few sensuous pleasures left to him that he was unwilling to abdicate the comfort of nestling his head against his two-hundred-dollar down pillow. The visitors had tired him out. Not even noon, and all he wanted to do was sleep. His neck muscles throbbed in agony.

When Sellitto and Banks were at the door Rhyme said, “Lon, wait.”

The detective turned.

“One thing you should know. You’ve only found half the crime scene. The important one is the other one – the primary scene. His house. That’s where he’ll be. And it’ll be hard as hell to find.”

“Why do you think there’s another scene?”

“Because he didn’t shoot the vic at the grave. He shot him there – at the primary scene. And that’s probably where he’s got the woman. It’ll be underground or in a very deserted part of the city. Or both… Because, Banks” – Rhyme preempted the young detective’s question – “he wouldn’t risk shooting someone and holding a captive there unless it was quiet and private.”

“Maybe he used a silencer.”

“No traces of rubber or cotton baffling on the slug,” Rhyme snapped.

“But how could the man’ve been shot there?” Banks countered. “I mean, there wasn’t any blood spatter at the scene.”

“I assume the victim was shot in the face,” Rhyme announced.

“Well, yes,” Banks answered, putting a stupid smile on his own. “How’d you know?”

“Very painful, very incapacitating, very little blood with a.32. Rarely lethal if you miss the brain. With the vic in that shape the unsub could lead him around wherever he wanted. I say unsub singular because there’s only one of them.”

A pause. “But… there were two sets of prints,” Banks nearly whispered, as if he were defusing a land mine.

Rhyme sighed. “The soles’re identical. They were left by the same man making the trip twice. To fool us. And the prints going north are the same depth as the prints going south. So he wasn’t carrying a two-hundred-pound load one way and not the other. Was the vic barefoot?”

Banks flipped through his notes. “Socks.”

“Okay, then the perp was wearing the vic’s shoes for his clever little stroll to the ladder and back.”

“If he didn’t come down the ladder how did he get to the grave?”

“He led the man along the train tracks themselves. Probably from the north.”

“There’re no other ladders to the roadbed for blocks in either direction.”

“But there are tunnels running parallel to the tracks,” Rhyme continued. “They hook up with the basements of some of the old warehouses along Eleventh Avenue. A gangster during Prohibition – Owney Madden – had them dug so he could slip shipments of bootleg whisky onto New York Central trains going up to Albany and Bridgeport.”

“But why not just bury the vic near the tunnel? Why risk being seen schlepping the guy all the way to the overpass?”

Impatient now. “You do get what he’s telling us, don’t you?”

Banks started to speak then shook his head.

“He had to put the body where it’d be seen,” Rhyme said. “He needed someone to find it. That’s why he left the hand in the air. He’s waving at us. To get our attention. Sorry, you may have only one unsub but he’s plenty smart enough for two. There’s an access door to a tunnel somewhere nearby. Get down there and dust it for prints. There won’t be any. But you’ll have to do it just the same. The press, you know. When the story starts coming out… Well, good luck, gentlemen. Now, you’ll have to excuse me. Lon?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget about the primary crime scene. Whatever happens, you’ll have to find it. And fast.”

“Thanks, Linc. Just read the report.”

Rhyme said of course he would and observed that they believed the lie. Completely.

THREE

HE HAD THE BEST BEDSIDE MANNER Rhyme had ever encountered. And if anyone had had experience with bedside manners it was Lincoln Rhyme. He’d once calculated he’d seen seventy-eight degreed, card-carrying doctors in the past three and a half years.

“Nice view,” Berger said, gazing out the window.

“Isn’t it? Beautiful.”

Though because of the height of the bed Rhyme could see nothing except a hazy sky sizzling over Central Park. That – and the birds – had been the essence of his view since he’d moved here from his last rehab hospital two and half years ago. He kept the shades drawn most of the time.

Thom was busy rolling his boss – the maneuver helped keep his lungs clear – and then catheterizing Rhyme’s bladder, which had to be done every five or six hours. After spinal cord trauma, sphincters can be stuck open or they can be stuck closed. Rhyme was fortunate that his got jammed closed – fortunate, that is, provided someone was around to open up the uncooperative little tube with a catheter and K-Y jelly four times a day.

Dr. Berger observed this procedure clinically and Rhyme paid no heed to the lack of privacy. One of the first things crips get over is modesty. While there’s sometimes a halfhearted effort at draping – shrouding the body when cleaning, evacuating and examining – serious crips, real crips, macho crips don’t care. At Rhyme’s first rehab center, after a patient had gone to a party or been on a date the night before, all the wardmates would wheel over to his bed to check the patient’s urine output, which was the barometer of how successful the outing had been. One time Rhyme earned his fellow crips’ undying admiration by registering a staggering 1430 cc’s.

He said to Berger, “Check out the ledge, doctor. I have my own guardian angels.”

“Well. Hawks?”

“Peregrine falcons. Usually they nest higher. I don’t know why they picked me to live with.”

Berger glanced at the birds then turned away from the window, let the curtain fall back. The aviary didn’t interest him. He wasn’t a large man but he looked fit, a runner, Rhyme guessed. He seemed to be in his late forties but the black hair didn’t have a trace of gray in it and he was as good-looking as any news anchor. “That’s quite a bed.”

“You like it?”

The bed was a Clinitron, a huge rectangular slab. It was an air-fluidized support bed and contained nearly a ton of silicone-coated glass beads. Pressurized air flowed through the beads, which supported Rhyme’s body. If he had been able to feel, it would have felt as if he was floating.

Berger was sipping the coffee that Rhyme had ordered Thom to fetch and that the young man had brought, rolling his eyes, whispering, “Aren’t we suddenly social?” before retreating.

The doctor asked Rhyme, “You were a policeman, you were telling me.”

“Yes. I was head of forensics for the NYPD.”

“Were you shot?”

“Nope. Searching a crime scene. Some workmen’d found a body at a subway-stop construction site. It was a young patrolman who’d disappeared six months before – we had a serial killer shooting cops. I got a request to work the case personally and when I was searching it a beam collapsed. I was buried for about four hours.”

“Someone was actually going around murdering policemen?”

“Killed three and wounded another one. The perp was a cop himself. Dan Shepherd. A sergeant working Patrol.”

Berger glanced at the pink scar on Rhyme’s neck. The telltale insignia of quadriplegia – the entrance wound for the ventilator tube that remains embedded in the throat for months after the accident. Sometimes for years, sometimes forever. But Rhyme had – thanks to his own mulish nature and his therapists’ herculean efforts – weaned himself off the ventilator. He now had a pair of lungs on him that he bet could keep him underwater for five minutes.

“So, a cervical trauma.”

“C4.”

“Ah, yes.”

C4 is the demilitarized zone of spinal cord injuries. An SCI above the fourth cervical vertebra might very well have killed him. Below C4 he would have regained some use of his arms and hands, if not his legs. But trauma to the infamous fourth kept him alive though virtually a total quadriplegic. He’d lost the use of his legs and arms. His abdominal and intercostal muscles were mostly gone and he was breathing primarily from his diaphragm. He could move his head and neck, his shoulders slightly. The only fluke was that the crushing oak beam had spared a single, minuscule strand of motor neuron. Which allowed him to move his left ring finger.

Rhyme spared the doctor the soap opera of the year following the accident. The month of skull traction: tongs gripping holes drilled into his head and pulling his spine straight. Twelve weeks of the halo device – the plastic bib and steel scaffolding around his head to keep the neck immobile. To keep his lungs pumping, a large ventilator for a year then a phrenic nerve stimulator. The catheters. The surgery. The paralytic ileus, the stress ulcers, hypotension and bradycardia, bedsores turning into decubitus ulcers, contractures as the muscle tissue began to shrink and threatened to steal away the precious mobility of his finger, the infuriating phantom pain – burns and aches in extremities that could feel no sensation.

He did, however, tell Berger about the latest wrinkle. “Autonomic dysreflexia.”

The problem had been occurring more often recently. Pounding heartbeat, off-the-charts blood pressure, raging headaches. It could be brought on by something as simple as constipation. He explained that nothing could be done to prevent it except avoiding stress and physical constriction.

Rhyme’s SCI specialist, Dr. Peter Taylor, had become concerned with the frequency of the attacks. The last one – a month ago – was so severe that Taylor ’d given Thom instructions in how to treat the condition without waiting for medical help and insisted that the aide program the doctor’s number into the phone’s speed dialer. Taylor had warned that a severe enough bout could lead to a heart attack or stroke.

Berger took in the facts with some sympathy then said, “Before I got into my present line I specialized in geriatric orthopedics. Mostly hip and joint replacements. I don’t know much neurology. What about chances for recovery?”

“None, the condition’s permanent,” Rhyme said, perhaps a little too quickly. He added, “You understand my problem, don’t you, doctor?”

“I think so. But I’d like to hear it in your words.”

Shaking his head to clear a renegade strand of hair, Rhyme said, “Everyone has the right to kill himself.”

Berger said, “I think I’d disagree with that. In most societies you may have the power but not the right. There’s a difference.”

Rhyme exhaled a bitter laugh. “I’m not much of a philosopher. But I don’t even have the power. That’s why I need you.”

Lincoln Rhyme had asked four doctors to kill him. They’d all refused. He’d said, okay, he’d do it himself and simply stopped eating. But the process of wasting himself to death became pure torture. It left him violently stomach-sick and racked with unbearable headaches. He couldn’t sleep. So he’d given up on that and, during the course of a hugely awkward conversation, asked Thom to kill him. The young man had grown tearful – the only time he’d shown that much emotion – and said he wished he could. He’d sit by and watch Rhyme die, he’d refuse to revive him. But he wouldn’t actually kill him.

Then, a miracle. If you could call it that.

After The Scenes of the Crime had come out, reporters had appeared to interview him. One article – in The New York Times – contained this stark quotation from author Rhyme:

“No, I’m not planning any more books. The fact is, my next big project is killing myself. It’s quite a challenge. I’ve been looking for someone to help me for the past six months.”

That screeching-stop line got the attention of the NYPD counseling service and several people from Rhyme’s past, most notably Blaine (who told him he was nuts to consider it, he had to quit thinking only about himself – just like when they’d been together – and, now that she was here, she thought she should mention that she was remarrying).

The quotation also caught the attention of William Berger, who’d called unexpectedly one night from Seattle. After a few moments of pleasant conversation Berger explained that he’d read the article about Rhyme. Then a hollow pause and he’d asked, “Ever hear of the Lethe Society?”

Rhyme had. It was a pro-euthanasia group he’d been trying to track down for months. It was far more aggressive than Safe Passage or the Hemlock Society. “Our volunteers are wanted for questioning in dozens of assisted suicides throughout the country,” Berger explained. “We have to keep a low profile.”

He said he wanted to follow up on Rhyme’s request. Berger refused to act quickly and they’d had several conversations over the past seven or eight months. Today was their first meeting.

“There’s no way you can pass, by yourself?”

Pass…

“Short of Gene Harrod’s approach, no. And even that’s a little iffy.”

Harrod was young man in Boston, a quad, who decided he wanted to kill himself. Unable to find anyone to help him he finally committed suicide the only way he was able to. With the little control he had he set a fire in his apartment and when it was blazing drove his wheelchair into it, setting himself aflame. He died of third-degree burns.

The case was often raised by right-to-deathers as an example of the tragedy that anti-euthanasia laws can cause.

Berger was familiar with the case and shook his head sympathetically. “No, that’s no way for anyone to die.” He assayed Rhyme’s body, the wires, the control panels. “What are your mechanical skills?”

Rhyme explained about the ECUs – the E &J controller that his ring finger operated, the sip-and-puff control for his mouth, the chin joysticks, and the computer dictation unit that could type out words on the screen as he spoke them.

“But everything has to be set up by someone else?” Berger asked. “For instance, someone would have to go to the store, buy a gun, mount it, rig the trigger and hook it up to your controller?”

“Yes.”

Making that person guilty of a conspiracy to commit murder, as well as manslaughter.

“What about your equipment?” Rhyme asked. “It’s effective?”

“Equipment?”

“What you use? To, uhm, do the deed?”

“It’s very effective. I’ve never had a patient complain.”

Rhyme blinked and Berger laughed. Rhyme joined him. If you can’t laugh about death what can you laugh about?

“Take a look.”

“You have it with you?” Hope blossomed in Rhyme’s heart. It was the first time he’d felt that warm sensation in years.

The doctor opened his attaché case and – rather ceremonially, Rhyme thought – set out a bottle of brandy. A small bottle of pills. A plastic bag and a rubber band.

“What’s the drug?”

“Seconal. Nobody prescribes it anymore. In the old days suicide was a lot easier. These babies’d do the trick, no question. Now, it’s almost impossible to kill yourself with modern tranquilizers. Halcion, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax… You may sleep for a long time but you’re going to wake up eventually.”

“And the bag?”

“Ah, the bag.” Berger picked it up. “That’s the emblem of the Lethe Society. Unofficially, of course – it’s not like we have a logo. If the pills and the brandy aren’t enough then we use the bag. Over the head, with a rubber band around the neck. We add a little ice inside because it gets pretty hot after a few minutes.”

Rhyme couldn’t take his eyes off the trio of implements. The bag, thick plastic, like a painter’s drop cloth. The brandy was cheap, he observed, and the drugs generic.

“This’s a nice house,” Berger said, looking around. “ Central Park West… Do you live on disability?”

“Some. I’ve also done consulting for the police and the FBI. After the accident… the construction company that was doing the excavating settled for three million. They swore there was no liability but there’s apparently a rule of law that a quadriplegic automatically wins any lawsuits against construction companies, no matter who was at fault. At least if the plaintiff comes to court and drools.”

“And you wrote that book, right?”

“I get some money from that. Not a lot. It was a ‘better-seller.’ Not a best-seller.”

Berger picked up a copy of The Scenes of the Crime, flipped through it. “Famous crime scenes. Look at all this.” He laughed. “There are, what, forty, fifty scenes?”

“Fifty-one.”

Rhyme had revisited – in his mind and imagination, since he’d written it after the accident – as many old crime scenes in New York City as he could recall. Some solved, some not. He’d written about the Old Brewery, the notorious tenement in Five Points, where thirteen unrelated murders were recorded on a single night in 1839. About Charles Aubridge Deacon, who murdered his mother on July 13, 1863, during the Civil War draft riots, claiming former slaves had killed her and fueling the rampage against blacks. About architect Stanford White’s love-triangle murder atop the original Madison Square Garden and about Judge Crater’s disappearance. About George Metesky, the mad bomber of the ’50s, and Murph the Surf, who boosted the Star of India diamond.

“Nineteenth-century building supplies, underground streams, butler’s schools,” Berger recited, flipping through the book, “gay baths, Chinatown whorehouses, Russian Orthodox churches… How d’you learn all this about the city?”

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 A₂B₅(Si, Al)₈O₂₂(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.

FOUR

“THE 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.

And John? she wondered. Where was he? Refusing to think about the loud crack she’d heard last night in the basement. She’d grown up in Eastern Tennessee and knew what gunshots sounded like.

Please, she prayed for her boss. Let him be all right.

Stay calm, she raged to herself. You fucking start to cry again, you remember what happened. In the basement, after the gunshot, she’d lost it completely, breaking down, sobbing in panic, and had nearly suffocated.

Right. Calm.

Look at the black eye in the pipe. Pretend it’s winking at you. The eye of your guardian angel.

T.J. sat on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pipes and ducts and snakes of conduit and wires. Hotter than her brother’s diner, hotter than the back seat of Jule Whelan’s Nova ten years ago. Water dripped, stalactites drooped from the ancient girders above her head. A half-dozen tiny yellow bulbs were the only illumination. Above her head – directly above – was a sign. She couldn’t read it clearly, though she caught the red border. At the end of whatever the message might have been was a fat exclamation point.

She struggled once more but the cuffs held her tight, pinching against the bone. From her throat rose a desperate cry, an animal’s cry. But the thick tape on her mouth and the insistent churning of machinery swallowed up the sound; no one could’ve heard her.

The black eye continued to stare. You’ll save me, won’t you? she thought.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a clanging slam, an iron bell, far away. Like a ship’s door slamming shut. The noise came from the hole in the pipe. From her friendly eye.

She jerked the cuffs against the pipe and tried to stand. But she couldn’t move more than a few inches.

Okay, don’t panic. Just relax. You’ll be all right.

It was then that she happened to see the sign above her head. In her jockeying for slack she’d straightened up slightly and moved her head to the side. This gave her an oblique view of the words.

Oh, no. Oh, Jesus in my heart…

The tears began again.

She imagined her mother, her hair pulled back from her round face, wearing her cornflower-blue housedress, whispering, “Be all raht, honey love. Doan’ you worry.”

But she didn’t believe the words.

She believed what the sign said.

Extreme Danger! Superheated steam under High Pressure. Do not remove plate from pipe. Call Consolidated Edison for access. Extreme danger!

The black eye gaped at her, the eye that opened into the heart of the steam pipe. It stared directly at the pink flesh of her chest. From somewhere deep inside the pipe came another clink of metal on metal, workers hammering, tightening old joints.

As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.

FIVE

“HERE’S THE SITUATION,” Lincoln Rhyme announced. “We’ve got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline.”

“No ransom demands” – Sellitto supplemented Rhyme’s synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. “Jerry,” Rhyme said to Banks, “brief them about the scene this morning.”

There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme’s dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme’d be home of course) but he’d discouraged that. And he’d stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He’d spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he’d given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.

Solitude.

It was all he craved, and oh how he missed it now.

Pacing, looking tense, was compact Jim Polling. Lon Sellitto was the case officer but an incident like this needed a captain on board and Polling had volunteered for the job. The case was a time bomb and could nuke careers in a heartbeat so the chief and the dep coms were happy to have him intercept the flak. They’d be practicing the fine art of distancing and when the Beta-cams rolled their press conferences would be peppered with words like delegated and assigned and taking the advice of and they’d be fast to glance at Polling when it came time to field the hardball questions. Rhyme couldn’t imagine why any cop in the world would volunteer to head up a case like this one.

Polling was an odd one. The little man had pummeled his way through Midtown North Precinct as one of the city’s most successful, and notorious, homicide detectives. Known for his bad temper, he’d gotten into serious trouble when he’d killed an unarmed suspect. But he’d managed, amazingly, to pull his career together by getting a conviction in the Shepherd case – the cop-serial-killer case, the one in which Rhyme’d been injured. Promoted to captain after that very public collar, Polling went through one of those embarrassing midlife changes – giving up blue jeans and Sears suits for Brooks Brothers (today he wore navy-blue Calvin Klein casual) – and began his dogged climb toward a plush corner office high in One Police Plaza.

Another officer leaned against a nearby table. Crew-cut, rangy Bo Haumann was a captain and head of the Emergency Services Unit. NYPD’s SWAT team.

Banks finished his synopsis just as Sellitto pushed disconnect and folded his phone. “The Hardy Boys.”

“Anything more on the cab?” Polling asked.

“Nothing. They’re still beating bushes.”

“Any sign she was fucking somebody she shouldn’t’ve been?” Polling asked. “Maybe a psycho boyfriend?”

“Naw, no boyfriends. Just dated a few guys casually. No stalkers, it looks like.”

“And still no ransom calls?” Rhyme asked.

“No.”

The doorbell rang. Thom went to answer it.

Rhyme looked toward the approaching voices.

A moment later the aide escorted a uniformed police officer up the stairs. She appeared very young from a distance but as she drew closer he could see she was probably thirty or so. She was tall and had that sullen, equine beauty of women gazing out from the pages of fashion magazines.

We see others as we see ourselves and since the accident Lincoln Rhyme rarely thought of people in terms of their bodies. He observed her height, trim hips, fiery red hair. Somebody else’d weigh those features and say, What a knockout. But for Rhyme that thought didn’t occur to him. What did register was the look in her eyes.

Not the surprise – obviously, nobody’d warned he was a crip – but something else. An expression he’d never seen before. It was as if his condition was putting her at ease. The exact opposite of how most people reacted. As she walked into the room she was relaxing.

“Officer Sachs?” Rhyme asked.

“Yessir,” she said, catching herself just as she was about to extend a hand. “Detective Rhyme.”

Sellitto introduced her to Polling and Haumann. She’d know about the latter two, by reputation if nothing else, and now her eyes grew cautious once more.

She took in the room, the dust, the gloominess. Glanced at one of the art posters. It was partially unrolled, lying under a table. Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. The lonely people in a diner late at night. That one had been the last to come down.

Rhyme briefly explained about the 3:00 p.m. deadline. Sachs nodded calmly but Rhyme could see the flicker of what? – fear? disgust? – in her eyes.

Jerry Banks, fingers encumbered by a class ring but not a wedding band, was attracted immediately by the lamp of her beauty and offered her a particular smile. But Sachs’s single glance in response made clear that no matches were being made here. And probably never would be.

Polling said, “Maybe it’s a trap. We find the place he’s leading us to, walk in and there’s a bomb.”

“I doubt it,” Sellitto said, shrugging, “why go to all this trouble? If you want to kill cops all you gotta do is find one and fucking shoot him.”

Awkward silence for a moment as Polling looked quickly from Sellitto to Rhyme. The collective thought registered that it was on the Shepherd case that Rhyme had been injured.

But faux pas meant nothing to Lincoln Rhyme. He continued, “I agree with Lon. But I’d tell any Search and Surveillance or HRT teams to keep an eye out for ambush. Our boy seems to be writing his own rules.”

Sachs looked again at the poster of the Hopper painting. Rhyme followed her gaze. Maybe the people in the diner really weren’t lonely, he reflected. Come to think of it, they all looked pretty damn content.

“We’ve got two types of physical evidence here,” Rhyme continued. “Standard PE. What the unsub didn’t mean to leave behind. Hair, fibers, fingerprints, maybe blood, shoeprints. If we can find enough of it – and if we’re lucky – that’ll lead us to the primary crime scene. That’s where he lives.”

“Or his hidey-hole,” Sellitto offered. “Something temporary.”

“A safe house?” Rhyme mused, nodding. “Bet you’re right, Lon. He needs someplace to operate out of.” He continued, “Then there’s the planted evidence. Apart from the scraps of paper – which tell us the time and date – we’ve got the bolt, the wad of asbestos and the sand.”

“A fucking scavenger hunt,” Haumann growled and ran a hand through his slick buzz cut. He looked just like the drill sergeant Rhyme recalled he’d been.

“So I can tell the brass there’s a chance of getting the vic in time?” Polling asked.

“I think so, yes.”

The captain made a call and wandered to the corner of the room as he talked. When he hung up he grunted, “The mayor. The chiefs with ’im. There’s gonna be a press conference in an hour and I gotta be there to make sure their dicks’re in their pants and their flies’re zipped. Anything more I can tell the big boys?”

Sellitto glanced at Rhyme, who shook his head.

“Not yet,” the detective said.

Polling gave Sellitto his cellular phone number and left, literally jogging out the door.

A moment later a skinny, balding man in his thirties ambled up the stairs. Mel Cooper was as goofy-looking as ever, the nerdy neighbor in a sitcom. He was followed by two younger cops carrying a steamer trunk and two suitcases that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds each. The officers deposited their heavy loads and left.

“Mel.”

“Detective.” Cooper walked up to Rhyme and gripped his useless right hand. The only physical contact today with any of his guests, Rhyme noted. He and Cooper had worked together for years. With degrees in organic chemistry, math and physics, Cooper was an expert both in identification – friction-ridge prints, DNA and forensic reconstruction – and in PE analysis.

“How’s the world’s foremost criminalist?” Cooper asked him.

Rhyme scoffed good-naturedly. The title had been bestowed on him by the press some years ago, after the surprising news that the FBI had selected him – a city cop – as adviser in putting together PERT, their Physical Evidence Response Team. Not satisfied with “forensic scientist” or “forensic specialist,” reporters dubbed Rhyme a “criminalist.”

The word had actually been around for years, first applied in the United States to the legendary Paul Leland Kirk, who ran the UC Berkeley School of Criminology. The school, the first in the country, had been founded by the even more legendary Chief August Vollmer. The handle had recently become chic, and when techs around the country sidled up to blondes at cocktail parties now they described themselves as criminalists, not forensic scientists.

“Everybody’s nightmare,” Cooper said, “you get into a cab and turns out there’s a psycho behind the wheel. And the whole world’s watching the Big Apple ’causa that conference. Wondered if they might not bring you out of retirement for this one.”

“How’s your mother?” Rhyme asked.

“Still complaining about every ache and pain. Still healthier than me.”

Cooper lived with the elderly woman in the Queens bungalow where he’d been born. His passion was ballroom dancing – the tango his specialty. Cop gossip being what it is, there’d been speculation around IRD as to the man’s sexual preference. Rhyme had had no interest in his employees’ personal lives but had been as surprised as everyone else to finally meet Greta, Cooper’s steady girlfriend, a stunning Scandinavian who taught advanced mathematics at Columbia.

Cooper opened the large trunk, which was padded with velvet. He lifted out parts for three large microscopes and began assembling them.

“Oh, house current.” He glanced at the outlets, disappointed. He pushed his metal-rimmed glasses up on his nose.

“That’s because it’s a house, Mel.”

“I assumed you lived in a lab. Wouldn’t have been surprised.”

Rhyme stared at the instruments, gray and black, battered. Similar to the ones he’d lived with for over fifteen years. A standard compound microscope, a phase-contrast ’scope, and a polarized-light model. Cooper opened the suitcases, which contained a Mr. Wizard assortment of bottles and jars and scientific instruments. In a flash, words came back to Rhyme, words that had once been part of his daily vocabulary. EDTA vacuum blood-collection tubes, acetic acid, orthotolidine, luminol reagent, Magna-Brush, Ruhemann’s purple phenomenon…

The skinny man looked around the room. “Looks just like your office used to, Lincoln. How do you find anything? Say, I need some room here.”

“Thom.” Rhyme moved his head toward the least cluttered table. They moved aside magazines and papers and books, revealing a tabletop Rhyme had not seen in a year.

Sellitto gazed at the crime scene report. “Whatta we call the unsub? We don’t have a case number yet.”

Rhyme glanced at Banks. “Pick a number. Any number.”

Banks suggested, “The page number. Well, the date, I mean.”

“Unsub 823. Good as any.”

Sellitto jotted this on the report.

“Uhm, excuse me? Detective Rhyme?”

It was the patrolwoman who’d spoken. Rhyme turned to her.

“I was supposed to be at the Big Building at noon.” Coptalk for One Police Plaza.

“Officer Sachs…” He’d forgotten about her momentarily. “You were first officer this morning? At that homicide by the railroad tracks.”

“That’s right, I took the call.” When she spoke, she spoke to Thom.

“I’m here, officer,” Rhyme reminded sternly, barely controlling his temper. “Over here.” It infuriated him when people talked to him through others, through healthy people.

Her head swiveled quickly and he saw the lesson had been learned. “Yessir,” she said, a soft tone in her voice but ice in her eyes.

“I’m decommissioned. Just call me Lincoln.”

“Would you just get it over with, please?”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“The reason why you brought me here. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. If you want a written apology I’ll do it. Only, I’m late for my new assignment and I haven’t had a chance to call my commander.”

“Apology?” Rhyme asked.

“The thing is, I didn’t have any real crime scene experience. I was sort of flying by the seat of my pants.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stopping the trains and closing Eleventh Avenue. It was my fault the senator missed his speech in New Jersey and that some of the senior UN people didn’t make it in from Newark Airport in time for their meetings.”

Rhyme was chuckling. “Do you know who I am?”

“Well, I’ve heard of you of course. I thought you…”

“Were dead?” Rhyme asked.

“No. I didn’t mean that.” Though she had. She continued quickly, “We all used your book in the academy. But we don’t hear about you. Personally, I mean…” She looked up at the wall and said stiffly, “In my judgment, as first officer, I thought it was best to stop the train and close the street to protect the scene. And that’s what I did. Sir.”

“Call me Lincoln. And you’re…”

“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.”

SIX

“THE 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.

“So it isn’t sand,” Rhyme muttered. “It’s something ground up… Can you individuate it?”

Individuation… The goal of the criminalist. Most physical evidence can be identified. But even if you know what it is there are usually hundreds or thousands of sources it might have come from. Individuated evidence is something that could have come from only one source or a very limited number of sources. A fingerprint, a DNA profile, a paint chip that fits into a missing spot on the perp’s car like a jigsaw-puzzle piece.

“Maybe,” the tech responded, “if I can figure out what it is.”

“Ground glass?” Rhyme suggested.

Glass is essentially melted sand but the glassmaking process alters the crystalline structure. You don’t get birefringence with ground glass. Cooper examined the sample closely.

“No, I don’t think it’s glass. I don’t know what it is. I wish I had an EDX here.”

A popular crime lab tool was a scanning electron microscope married to an energy-dispersive X-ray unit; it determined what elements were in trace samples found at crime scenes.

“Get him one,” Rhyme ordered Sellitto, then looked around the room. “We need more equipment. I want a vacuum metal fingerprint unit too. And a GC-MS.” A gas Chromatograph broke down substances into their component elements, and mass photospectrometry used light to identify each one of them. These instruments let criminalists test an unknown sample as small as one millionth of a gram and compare it against a database of a hundred thousand known substances, cataloged by identity and name brand.

Sellitto phoned the wish list in to the CSU lab.

“But we can’t wait for the fancy toys, Mel. You’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Tell me more about our phony sand.”

“It’s mixed with a little dirt. There’s loam, flecks of quartz, feldspar and mica. But minimal leaf and decomposed-plant fragments. Flecks here of what could be bentonite.”

“Bentonite.” Rhyme was pleased. “That’s a volcanic ash that builders use in slurry when they’re digging foundations in watery areas of the city where the bedrock’s deep. It prevents cave-ins. So we’re looking for a developed area that’s on or near the water, probably south of Thirty-fourth Street. North of that the bedrock’s much closer to the surface and they don’t need slurry.”

Cooper moved the slide. “If I had to guess, I’d say this is mostly calcium. Wait, something fibrous here.”

The knob turned and Rhyme would’ve paid anything to be looking through that eyepiece. Flashed back to all the evenings he’d spent with his face pressed against the gray sponge rubber, watching fibers or flecks of humus or blood cells or metal shavings swim into and out of focus.

“Here’s something else. A larger granule. Three layers. One similar to horn, then two layers of calcium. Slightly different colors. The other one’s translucent.”

“Three layers?” Rhyme spat out angrily. “Hell, it’s a seashell!” He felt furious with himself. He should have thought of that.

“Yep, that’s it.” Cooper was nodding. “Oyster, I think.”

The oyster beds around the city were mostly off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey. Rhyme had hoped that the unsub would limit the geographic area of the search to Manhattan – where the victim that morning was found. He muttered, “If he’s opening up the whole metro area the search’ll be hopeless.”

Cooper said, “I’m looking at something else. I think it’s lime. But very old. Granular.”

“Concrete maybe?” Rhyme suggested.

“Possibly. Yes.

“I don’t get the shells then,” Cooper added reflectively. “Around New York the oyster beds’re full of vegetation and mud. This is mixed with concrete and there’s virtually no vegetable matter at all.”

Rhyme barked suddenly: “Edges! What are the edges of the shell like, Mel?”

The tech gazed into the eyepiece. “Fractured, not worn. This’s been pulverized by dry pressure. Not eroded by water.”

Rhyme’s eyes slipped over the Randel map, scanning right and left. Focusing on the leaping dog’s rump.

“Got it!” he cried.

In 1913 F. W. Woolworth built the sixty-story structure that still bears his name, terra-cotta-clad, covered with gargoyles and Gothic sculpture. For sixteen years it was the world’s tallest building. Because the bedrock in that part of Manhattan was more than a hundred feet below Broadway, workmen had to dig deep shafts to anchor the building. It wasn’t long after the groundbreaking that workmen discovered the remains of Manhattan industrialist Talbott Soames, who’d been kidnapped in 1906. The man’s body was found buried in a thick bed of what looked like white sand but was really ground oyster shells, a fact the tabloids had a hey-day with, noting the obese tycoon’s obsession with rich food. The shells were so common along the lower eastern tip of Manhattan they’d been used for landfill. They were what had given Pearl Street its name.

“She’s downtown somewhere,” Rhyme announced. “Probably the east side. And maybe near Pearl. She’ll be underground, about five to fifteen feet down. Maybe a construction site, maybe a basement. An old building or tunnel.”

“Cross-check the EPA diagram, Jerry,” Sellitto instructed. “Where they’re doing asbestos cleanup.”

“Along Pearl? Nothing.” The young officer held up the map he and Haumann were working from. “There’re three-dozen cleanup sites – in Midtown, Harlem and the Bronx. But nothing downtown.”

“Asbestos… asbestos…” Rhyme mused again. What was so familiar about it?

It was 2:05 p.m.

“Bo, we’ve got to move. Get your people down there and start a search. All the buildings along Pearl Street. Water Street too.”

“Man,” the cop sighed, “that’s beaucoup buildings.” He started for the door.

Rhyme said to Sellitto, “Lon, you better go too. This’s going to be a photo finish. They’ll need all the searchers they can get. Amelia, I want you down there too.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking -”

“Officer,” Sellitto snapped, “you got your orders.”

A faint glower crossed her beautiful face.

Rhyme said to Cooper, “Mel, you drive over here in a bus?”

“An RRV,” he answered.

The city’s big crime scene buses were large vans – filled with instruments and evidence-collection supplies, better equipped than the entire labs of many small towns. But when Rhyme was running IRD he’d ordered smaller crime scene vehicles – station wagons basically – containing the essential collection-and-analysis equipment. The Rapid Response Vehicles looked placid but Rhyme had bullied Transportation into getting them fitted with turbocharged Police Interceptor engines. They often beat Patrol’s squad cars to the scene; on more than one occasion the first officer was a seasoned crime scene tech. Which is every prosecutor’s dream.

“Give Amelia the keys.”

Cooper handed them to Sachs, who stared briefly at Rhyme then wheeled and hurried down the stairs. Even her footsteps sounded angry.

“All right, Lon. What’s on your mind?”

Sellitto glanced at the empty hallway and walked up close to Rhyme. “You really want P.D. for this?”

“P.D.?”

“I mean her. Sachs. P.D.’s a nickname.”

“For what?”

“Don’t say it around her. Ticks her off. Her dad was a beat cop for forty years. So they call her the Portable’s Daughter.”

“You don’t think I should’ve picked her?”

“Naw, I don’t. Why d’you want her?”

“Because she climbed down a thirty-foot embankment so she wouldn’t contaminate the scene. She closed a major avenue and an Amtrak line. That’s initiative.”

“Come on, Linc. I know a dozen CS cops’d do something like that.”

“Well, she’s the one I wanted.” And Rhyme gave Sellitto a grave look, reminding him, subtly but without debate, what the terms of this bargain had been.

“All I’ll say is,” the detective muttered, “I just talked to Polling. Peretti’s fucking outa joint about being flanked and if – no, I’ll say when – the brass finds out somebody from Patrol’s walking the grid at the scene, there’ll be fucking trouble.”

“Probably,” Rhyme said softly, gazing at the profile poster, “but I have a feeling that’s going to be the least of our trouble today.”

And let his weary head ease back into the thick down pillow.

SEVEN

THE STATION WAGON RACED toward the dark, sooty canyons of Wall Street, downtown New York.

Amelia Sachs’s fingers danced lightly on the steering wheel as she tried to imagine where T.J. Colfax might be held captive. Finding her seemed hopeless. The approaching financial district had never looked so enormous, so full of alleys, so filled with manholes and doorways and buildings peppered with black windows.

So many places to hide a hostage.

In her mind she saw the hand sticking out of the grave beside the railroad tracks. The diamond ring sitting on the bloody bone of a finger. Sachs recognized the type of jewelry. She called them consolation rings – the sort lonely rich girls bought themselves. The sort she’d be wearing if she were rich.

Speeding south, dodging bicycle messengers and cabs.

Even on this glaring afternoon, under a choked sun, this was a spooky part of town. The buildings cast grim shadows and were coated with grime dark as dried blood.

Sachs took a turn at forty, skidding on the spongy asphalt, and punched the pedal to bring the station wagon back up to sixty.

Excellent engine, she thought. And decided to see how well the wagon handled at seventy.

Years before, while her old man slept – he worked the three-to-eleven watch usually – teenage Amie Sachs would palm the keys to his Camaro and tell her mother Rose she was going shopping, did she want anything from the Fort Hamilton pork store? And before her mother could say, “No, but you take the train, you’re not driving,” the girl would disappear out the door, fire up the car and race west.

UNSUB 823:

Appearance

Residence

Prob. has safe house

Vehicle

Yellow Cab

Other

knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

Coming home three hours later, pork-less, Amie would sneak up the stairs to be confronted by a mother frantic and angry, who – to her daughter’s amusement – would lecture her about the risks of getting pregnant and how that would ruin her chances to use her beautiful face to make a million dollars at modeling. And when finally the woman learned that her daughter wasn’t sleeping around but was merely driving a hundred mph on Long Island highways, she grew frantic and angry and would lecture the girl about smashing up her beautiful face and ruining her chances to make a million dollars at modeling.

Things grew even worse when she got her driver’s license.

Sachs now sliced between two double-parked trucks, hoping that neither a passenger nor a driver would open his door. In a Doppler whisper she was past them.

When you move they can’t getcha…

Lon Sellitto kneaded his rotund face with blunt fingertips and paid no attention to the Indy 500 driving. He talked with his partner about the case like an accountant discussing a balance sheet. As for Banks, though, he was no longer stealing infatuated glances at Sachs’s eyes and lips and had taken to checking the speedometer every minute or so.

They skidded in a frantic turn past the Brooklyn Bridge. She thought again of the woman captive, picturing T.J.’s long, elegant nails, while she tapped her own picked fingers on the wheel. She saw again in her mind the image that refused to go away: the white birch branch of a hand, sticking up out of the moist grave. The single bloody bone.

“He’s kind of loony,” she blurted suddenly, to change the direction of her thoughts.

“Who?” Sellitto asked.

“Rhyme.”

Banks added, “Ask me, he looks like Howard Hughes’s kid brother.”

“Yeah, well, that surprised me,” the older detective admitted. “Wasn’t looking too good. Used to be a handsome guy. But, well, you know. After what he’s been through. How come if you drive like this, Sachs, you’re a portable?”

“Where I got assigned. They didn’t ask, they told me.” Just like you did, she reflected. “Was he really as good as that?”

“Rhyme? Better. Most CSU guys in New York handle two hundred bodies a year. Tops. Rhyme did double that. Even when he was running IRD. Take Peretti, he’s a good man but he gets out once every two weeks or so and only on media cases. You’re not hearing this from me, officer.”

“Nosir.”

“But Rhyme’d run the scenes himself. And when he wasn’t running scenes he’d be out walking around.”

“Doing what?”

“Just walking around. Looking at stuff. He walked miles. All over the city. Buying things, picking up things, collecting things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Evidence standards. Dirt, food, magazines, hubcaps, shoes, medical books, drugs, plants… You name it, he’d find it and catalog it. You know – so when some PE came in he’d have a better idea where the perp might’ve been or what he’d been doing. You’d page him and he’d be in Harlem or the Lower East Side or Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Police in his blood?”

“Naw. Father was some kind of scientist at a national laboratory or something.”

“Is that what Rhyme studied? Science?”

“Yeah. Went to school at Champaign-Urbana, got a coupla fancy degrees. Chemistry and history. Which I have no idea why. His folks’re gone since I knew him, that’d be, hell, coming on fifteen years now. And he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters. He grew up in Illinois. That’s why the name, Lincoln.”

She wanted to ask if he was, or had been, married but didn’t. She settled for: “Is he really that much of a…”

“You can say it, officer.”

“A shit?”

Banks laughed.

Sellitto said, “My ma had this expression. She said somebody was ‘of a mind.’ Well, that describes Rhyme. He’s of a mind. One time this dumb-ass tech sprayed luminol – that’s a blood reagent – on a fingerprint, instead of ninhydrin. Ruined the print. Rhyme fired him on the spot. Another time a cop took a leak at a scene and flushed the toilet. Man, Rhyme went ballistic, told him to get his ass down to the basement and bring back whatever was in the sewer trap.” Sellitto laughed. “The cop, he had rank, he said, ‘I’m not doing that, I’m a lieutenant.’ And Rhyme said, ‘Got news. You’re a plumber now.’ I could go on and on. Fuck, officer, you doing eighty?”

They streaked past the Big Building and she thought, achingly, That’s where I oughta be right now. Meeting fellow information officers, sitting through the training session, soaking up the air-conditioning.

She steered expertly around a taxi that was oozing through a red light.

Jesus, this is hot. Dust hot, stink hot, gas hot. The ugly hours of the city. Tempers spurted like gray water shooting from hydrants up in Harlem. Two Christmases ago, she and her boyfriend had an abbreviated holiday celebration – from 11:00 p.m. to midnight, the only mutual free time their watches allowed – in the four-degree night. She and Nick, sitting at Rockefeller Center, outside, near the skating rink, drinking coffee and brandy. They’d agreed they’d rather have a week of cold than a single hot August day.

Finally, streaking down Pearl she spotted Haumann’s command post. Leaving eight-foot skid marks, Sachs put the RRV into a slot between his car and an EMS bus.

“Damn, you drive good.” Sellitto climbed out. For some reason Sachs was delighted to notice Jerry Banks’s sweaty fingerprints remained prominently on the window when he pushed the rear door open.

EMS officers and Patrol uniforms were everywhere, fifty or sixty of them. And more were on their way. It seemed as if the entire attention of Police Plaza was focused on downtown New York. Sachs found herself thinking idly that if anybody wanted to try an assassination or to take over Gracie Mansion or a consulate, this’d be the time to do it.

Haumann trotted up to the station wagon. He said to Sellitto, “We’re doing door-to-door, seeing about construction along Pearl. Nobody knows anything about asbestos work and nobody’s heard any calls for help.”

Sachs started to climb out but Haumann said, “No, officer. Your orders’re to stay here with the CS vehicle.”

She got out anyway.

“Yessir. Who exactly said that?”

“Detective Rhyme. I just talked to him. You’re supposed to call in to Central when you’re at the CP.”

Haumann was walking away. Sellitto and Banks hurried toward the command post.

“Detective Sellitto,” Sachs called.

He turned. She said, “Excuse me, detective. The thing is, who’s my watch commander? Who’m I reporting to?”

He said shortly, “You’re reporting to Rhyme.”

She laughed. “But I can’t be reporting to him.”

Sellitto gazed at her blankly.

“I mean, aren’t there liability issues or something? Jurisdiction? He’s a civilian. I need somebody, a shield, to report to.”

Sellitto said evenly, “Officer, listen up. We’re all reporting to Lincoln Rhyme. I don’t care whether he’s a civilian or he’s the chief or he’s the fucking Caped Crusader. Got that?”

“But -”

“You wanna complain, do it in writing and do it tomorrow.”

And he was gone. Sachs stared after him for a moment then returned to the front seat of the wagon and called in to Central that she was 10-84 at the scene. Awaiting instructions.

She laughed grimly as the woman reported, “Ten-four, Portable 5885. Be advised. Detective Rhyme will be in touch shortly, K.”

Detective Rhyme.

“Ten-four, K,” Sachs responded and looked in the back of the wagon, wondering idly what was in the black suitcases.

Two-forty p.m.

The phone rang in Rhyme’s townhouse. Thom answered. “It’s a dispatcher from headquarters.”

“Put ’em through.”

The speakerphone burst to life. “Detective Rhyme, you don’t remember me but I worked at IRD when you were there. Civilian. Did phone detail then. Emma Rollins.”

“Of course. How’re the youngsters, Emma?” Rhyme had a memory of a large, cheerful black woman, supporting five children with two jobs. He recalled her blunt finger stabbing buttons so hard she once actually broke one of the government-issue phones.

“Jeremy’s starting college in a couple weeks and Dora’s still acting, or she thinks she is. The little ones’re doing just fine.”

“Lon Sellitto recruited you, did he?”

“Nosir. I heard you were working on the case and I booted some child back to 911. Emma’s taking this job, I told her.”

“What’ve you got for us?”

“We’re working out of a directory of companies making bolts. And a book that lists places wholesaling them. Here’s what we found. It was the letters did it. The ones stamped on the bolt. The CE. They’re made special for Con Ed.”

Hell. Of course.

“They’re marked that way because they’re a different size than most bolts this company sells – fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and a lot more threads than most other bolts. That’d be Michigan Tool and Die in Detroit. They use ’em in old pipes only in New York. Ones made sixty, seventy years ago. The way the parts of the pipe fit together they have to be real close seals. Fit closer’n a bride and groom on their wedding night’s what the man told me. Trying to make me blush.”

“Emma, I love you. You stay on call, will you?”

“You bet I will.”

“Thom!” Rhyme shouted. “This phone isn’t going to work. I need to make calls myself. That voice-activation thing in the computer. Can I use it?”

“You never ordered it.”

“I didn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I need it.”

“Well, we don’t have it.”

“Do something. I want to be able to make calls.”

“I think there’s a manual ECU somewhere.” Thom dug through a box against the wall. He found a small electronic console and plugged one end into the phone and the other into a stalk control that mounted next to Rhyme’s cheek.

“That’s too awkward!”

“Well, it’s all we’ve got. If we’d hooked up the infrared above your eyebrow like I suggested, you could’ve been making phone-sex calls for the past two years.”

“Too many fucking wires,” Rhyme spat out.

His neck spasmed suddenly and knocked the controller out of reach. “Fuck.”

Suddenly this minute task – not to mention their mission – seemed impossible to Lincoln Rhyme. He was exhausted, his neck hurt, his head. His eyes particularly. They stung and – this was more painful to him – he felt a chip of urge to rub the backs of his fingers across his closed lids. A tiny gesture of relief, something the rest of the world did every day.

Thom replaced the joystick. Rhyme summoned patience from somewhere and asked his aide, “How does it work?”

“There’s the screen. See it on the controller? Just move the stick till it’s on a number, wait one second and it’s programmed in. Then do the next number the same way. When you’ve got all seven, push the stick here to dial.”

He snapped, “It’s not working.”

“Just practice.”

“We don’t have time!”

Thom snarled, “I’ve been answering the phone for you way too long.”

“All right,” Rhyme said, lowering his voice – his way of apology. “I’ll practice later. Could you please get me Con Ed? And I need to speak to a supervisor.”

The rope hurt and the cuffs hurt but it was the noise that scared her the most.

Tammie Jean Colfax felt all the sweat in her body run down her face and chest and arms as she struggled to saw the handcuff links back and forth on the rusty bolt. Her wrists were numb but it seemed to her that she was wearing through some of the chain.

She paused, exhausted, and twitched her arms this way and that to keep a cramp at bay. She listened again. It was, she thought, the sound of workmen tightening bolts and hammering parts into place. Final taps of hammers. She imagined they were just finishing up their job on the pipe and thinking of going home.

Don’t go, she cried to herself. Don’t leave me. As long as the men were there, working, she was safe.

A final bang, then ringing silence.

Git on outa thayr, girl. G’on.

Mamma…

T.J. cried for several minutes, thinking of her family back in Eastern Tennessee. Her nostrils clogged but as she began to choke she blew her nose violently, felt an explosion of tears and mucus. Then she was breathing again. It gave her confidence. Strength. She began to saw once more.

“I appreciate the urgency, detective. But I don’t know how I can help you. We use bolts all over the city. Oil lines, gas lines…”

“All right,” Rhyme said tersely and asked the Con Ed supervisor at the company’s headquarters on Fourteenth Street, “Do you insulate wiring with asbestos?”

A hesitation.

“We’ve cleaned up ninety percent of that,” the woman said defensively. “Ninety- five.”

People could be so irritating. “I understand that. I just need to know if there’s still any asbestos used for insulation.”

“No,” she said adamantly. “Well, never for electricity. Just the steam and that’s the smallest percentage of our service.”

Steam!

It was the least-known and the scariest of the city’s utilities. Con Ed heated water to 1,000 degrees then shot it through a hundred-mile network of pipes running under Manhattan. The blistering steam itself was superheated – about 380 degrees – and rocketed through the city at seventy-five miles an hour.

Rhyme now recalled an article in the paper. “Didn’t you have a break in the line last week?”

“Yessir. But there was no asbestos leak. That site had been cleaned years ago.”

“But there is asbestos around some of your pipes in the system downtown?”

She hesitated. “Well…”

“Where was the break?” Rhyme continued quickly.

“Broadway. A block north of Chambers.”

“Wasn’t there an article in the Times about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

“And did the article mention asbestos?”

“It did,” she admitted, “but it just said that in the past asbestos contamination’d been a problem.”

“The pipe that broke, was it… does it cross Pearl Street farther south?”

“Well, let me see. Yes, it does. At Hanover Street. On the north side.”

He pictured T.J. Colfax, the woman with the thin fingers and long nails, about to die.

“And the steam’s going back on at three?”

“That’s right. Any minute now.”

“It can’t!” Rhyme shouted. “Somebody’s tampered with the line. You can’t turn that steam back on!”

Cooper looked up uneasily from his microscope.

The supervisor said, “Well, I don’t know…”

Rhyme barked to Thom, “Call Lon, tell him she’s in a basement at Hanover and Pearl. The north side.” He told him about the steam. “Get the fire department there too. Heat-protective outfits.”

Rhyme shouted into the speakerphone. “Call the work crews! Now! They can’t turn that steam back on. They can’t!” He repeated the words absently, detesting his exquisite imagination, which showed, in an endless loop, the woman’s flesh growing pink then red then splitting apart under the fierce clouds of sputtering white steam.

In the station wagon the radio crackled. It was three minutes to three by Sachs’s watch. She answered the call.

“Portable 5885, K-”

“Forget the officialese, Amelia,” Rhyme said. “We don’t have time.”

“I -”

“We think we know where she is. Hanover and Pearl.”

She glanced over her shoulder and saw dozens of ESU officers running flat-out toward an old building.

“Do you want me to -”

“They’ll look for her. You have to get ready to work the scene.”

“But I can help -”

“No. I want you to go to the back of the station wagon. There’s a suitcase in it labeled zero two. Take it with you. And in a small black case there’s a PoliLight. You saw one in my room. Mel was using it. Take that too. In the suitcase marked zero three you’ll find a headset and stalk mike. Plug it into your Motorola and get over to the building where the officers are. Call me back when you’re rigged. Channel thirty-seven. I’ll be on a landline but you’ll be patched through to me.”

Channel thirty-seven. The special ops citywide frequency. The priority frequency.

“What? -” she asked. But the dead radio did not respond.

She had a long black halogen flashlight on her utility belt so she left the bulky twelve-volter in the back of the wagon and grabbed the PoliLight and the heavy suitcase. It must have weighed fifty pounds. Just what my damn joints need. She adjusted her grip and, teeth clamped together against the pain, hurried toward the intersection.

Sellitto, breathless, ran to the building. Banks joined them.

“You hear?” the older detective asked. Sachs nodded.

“This is it?” she asked.

Sellitto nodded toward the alley. “He had to take her in this way. The lobby’s got a guard station.” They now trotted down the shadowy, cobblestoned canyon, steaming hot, smelling of piss and garbage. Battered blue Dumpsters sat nearby.

“There,” Sellitto shouted. “Those doors.”

The cops fanned out, running. Three of the four doors were locked tight from the inside.

The fourth had been jimmied open and was now chained shut. The chain and lock were new.

“This’s it!” Sellitto reached for the door, hesitated. Thinking probably about fingerprints. Then he grabbed the handle and yanked. It opened a few inches but the chain held tight. He sent three of the uniforms around to the front to get into the basement from the inside. One cop worked a cobblestone loose from the alley floor and began pounding on the door handle. A half-dozen blows, a dozen. He winced as his hand struck the door; blood gushed from a torn finger.

A fireman ran up with a Halligan tool – a combination pickax and crowbar. He rammed the end into the chain and ripped the padlock open. Sellitto looked at Sachs expectantly. She gazed back.

“Well, go, officer!” he barked.

“What?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Who?”

“Rhyme.”

Hell, she’d forgotten to plug in the headset. She fumbled it, finally got it plugged in. Heard: “Amelia, where -”

“I’m here.”

“Are you at the building?”

“Yes.”

“Go inside. They shut the steam off but I don’t know if it was in time. Take a medic and one ESU trooper. Go to the boiler room. You’ll probably see her right away, the Colfax woman. Walk to her but not directly, not in a straight line from the door to her. I don’t want you to disturb any footprints he might’ve left. Understand?”

“Yes.” She nodded emphatically, not thinking that he couldn’t see her. Gesturing the medic and an Emergency Services trooper after her, Sachs stepped forward into the murky corridor, shadows everywhere, the groan of machinery, dripping water.

“Amelia,” Rhyme said.

“Yes.”

“We were talking about ambush before. From what I know about him now I don’t think that’s the case. He’s not there, Amelia. That would be illogical. But keep your shooting hand free.”

Illogical.

“Okay.”

“Now go! Fast.”

EIGHT

A MURKY CAVERN. HOT, BLACK, DAMP.

The three of them moved quickly down the filthy hallway toward the only doorway Sachs could see. A sign said BOILER ROOM. She was behind the ESU officer, who wore full body armor and helmet. The medic was in the rear.

Her right knuckles and shoulder throbbed from the weight of the suitcase. She shifted it to her left hand, nearly dropped it and readjusted her grip. They continued to the door.

There, the SWAT officer pushed inside and swung his machine gun around the dimly lit room. A flashlight was attached to the barrel and it cast a line of pale light in the shreds of steam. Sachs smelled moisture, mold. And another scent, loathsome.

Click. “Amelia?” The staticky burst of Rhyme’s voice scared the absolute hell out of her. “Where are you, Amelia?”

With a shaking hand she turned down the volume.

“Inside,” she gasped.

“Is she alive?”

Sachs rocked on her feet, staring at the sight. She squinted, not sure at first what she was seeing. Then she understood.

“Oh, no.” Whispering. Feeling the nausea.

The sickening boiled-meat smell wafted around her. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Neither was the sight of the woman’s skin, bright red, almost orange, peeling off in huge scales. The face completely stripped of skin. No, what brought the dread home was the angle of TJ Colfax’s body, the impossible twisting of her limbs and torso as she’d tried to get away from the spray of ravaging heat.

He hoped the vic was dead. For his sake…

“Is she alive?” Rhyme repeated.

“No,” Sachs whispered. “I don’t see how… No.”

“Is the room secure?”

Sachs glanced at the officer, who’d heard the transmission and nodded.

“Scene secure.”

Rhyme told her, “I want the ESU trooper out then you and the medic go check on her.”

Sachs gagged once on the smell and forced herself to control the reflex. She and the medic walked in an oblique path to the pipe. He bent unemotionally forward and felt the woman’s neck. He shook his head.

“Amelia?” Rhyme asked.

Her second body in the line of duty. Both in one day.

The medic said, “DCDS.”

Sachs nodded, said formally into the mike, “We have a deceased, confirmed dead at the scene.”

“Scalded to death?” Rhyme asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Tied to the wall?”

“A pipe. Handcuffed, hands behind. Feet tied with clothesline. Duct-tape gag. He opened the steam pipe. She was only a couple of feet from it. God.”

Rhyme continued, “Back the medic out the way you came. To the door. Watch where you put your feet.”

She did this, staring at the body. How could the skin be so red? Like a boiled crab shell.

“All right, Amelia. You’re going to work the scene. Open the suitcase.”

She said nothing. Kept staring.

“Amelia, are you at the door?… Amelia?”

“What?” she shouted.

“Are you at the door?”

His voice was so fucking calm. So different from the snide, demanding voice of the man she remembered in the bedroom. Calm… and something else. She didn’t know what.

“Yes, I’m at the door. You know, this is crazy.”

“Utterly insane,” Rhyme agreed, almost cheerfully. “Is the suitcase open?”

She flipped up the lid and glanced inside. Pliers and forceps, a flex mirror on a handle, cotton balls, eyedroppers, pinking sheers, pipettes, spatulas, scalpels…

What is all this?

… a Dustbuster, cheesecloth, envelopes, sifting screens, brushes, scissors, plastic and paper bags, metal cans, bottles – 5 percent nitric acid, ninhydrin, silicone, iodide, friction-ridge-printing supplies.

Impossible. Into the mike she said, “I don’t think you believed me, detective. I really don’t know anything about CS work.”

Eyes on the woman’s ruined body. Water dripped off her peeled nose. A bit of white – bone – showed through the cheek. And her face was drawn into an anguished grin. Just like the vic that morning.

“I believed you, Amelia,” he said dismissively. “Now, the case is open?” He was calm and he sounded… what? Yes, that was the tone. Seductive. He sounds like a lover.

I hate him, she thought. It’s wrong to hate a cripple. But I fucking hate him.

“You’re in the basement, right?”

“Yessir.”

“Listen, you’ve got to call me Lincoln. We’re going to know each other very well by the time this is over.”

Which is gonna be about sixty minutes, tops.

“You’ll find some rubber bands in the suitcase, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I see some.”

“Put them around your shoes. Where the ball of your foot is. If there’s any confusion as to footprints you’ll know which ones are yours.”

“Okay, done.”

“Take some evidence bags and envelopes. Put a dozen of each in your pocket. Can you use chopsticks?”

“What did you say?”

“You live in the city, right? You ever go to Mott Street? For General Tsao’s chicken? Cold noodles with sesame paste?”

Her gorge rose at the talk of food. She refused to glance at the woman dangling in front of her.

“I can use chopsticks,” she said icily.

“Look in the suitcase. I’m not sure you’ll find them. They kept them there when I was running scenes.”

“I don’t see any.”

“Well, you’ll find some pencils. Put those in your pocket. Now you’re going to walk a grid. Cover every inch. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“First tell me what you see.”

“One big room. Maybe twenty by thirty. Full of rusted pipes. Cracked concrete floor. Walls’re brick. Mold.”

“Any boxes? Anything on the floor?”

“No, it’s empty. Except for the pipes, oil tanks, the boiler. There’s the sand – the shells, a pile of it spilling out of a crack in the wall. And there’s some gray stuff too -”

“'Stuff'?” he jumped. “I don’t recognize that word. What’s 'stuff'?”

A burst of anger tore through her. She calmed and said, “It’s the asbestos but not wadded up like this morning. It’s in crumbling sheets.”

“Good. Now, the first sweep. You’re looking for footprints and any staged clues that he’s left for us.”

“You think he left more?”

“Oh, I’ll betcha,” Rhyme said. “Put on the goggles and use the PoliLight. Keep it low. Grid the room. Every inch. Get going. You know how to walk a grid?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She bristled. “I don’t need to be tested.”

“Ah, humor me. How?”

“Back and forth in one direction, then back and forth in the perpendicular direction.”

“Each step, no more than one foot in length.”

She hadn’t known that. “I know,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

The PoliLight flashed on with an eerie, otherworldly glow. She knew it was something called an ALS – alternative light source – and that it made fingerprints and semen and blood and some shoeprints fluoresce. The brilliant bile-green light made shadows dance and jump and more than once she nearly drew down on a dark form that turned out to be a mere phantom of darkness.

“Amelia?” Rhyme’s voice was sharp. She jumped again.

“Yes? What?”

“Do you see any footprints?”

She continued to stare at the floor. “I, uh, no. I see streaks in the dust. Or something.” She cringed at the careless word. But Rhyme, unlike Peretti that morning, paid no attention. He said, “So. He swept up afterwards.”

She was surprised. “Yeah, that’s it! Broom marks. How’d you know?”

Rhyme laughed – a jarring sound to Sachs in this rank tomb – and he said, “He was smart enough to cover his tracks this morning; no reason to stop now. Oh, he’s good, this boy is. But we’re good too. Keep going.”

Sachs bent over, her joints on fire, and began the search. She covered every square foot of the floor. “Nothing here. Nothing at all.”

He picked up on the note of finality in her voice. “You’ve only just started, Amelia. Crime scenes are three-dimensional. Remember that. What you mean is there’s nothing on the floor. Now search the walls. Start with the spot farthest away from the steam and cover every inch.”

She slowly circled the horrible marionette in the center of the room. She thought of a Maypole game she’d played at some Brooklyn street feast when she was six or seven, as her father proudly took home movies. Circling slowly. It was an empty room and yet there were a thousand different places to search.

Hopeless… Impossible.

But it wasn’t. On a ledge, about six feet above the floor, she found the next set of clues. She barked a fast laugh. “Got something here.”

“In a cluster?”

“Yes. A big splinter of dark wood.”

“Chopsticks.”

“What?” she asked.

“The pencils. Use them to pick it up. Is it wet?”

“Everything in here’s wet.”

“Sure, it would be. The steam. Put it in a paper evidence bag. Plastic keeps the moisture in and in this heat bacteria’ll destroy the trace evidence. What else is there?” he asked eagerly.

“It’s, I don’t know, hairs, I think. Short, trimmed. A little pile of them.”

“Loose or attached to skin?”

“Loose.”

“There’s a role of two-inch tape in the suitcase. 3M. Pick them up with that.”

Sachs lifted most of the hairs, placed them in a paper envelope. She studied the ledge around the hairs. “I see some stains. Looks like rust or blood.” She thought to hit the spot with the PoliLight. “They’re fluorescing.”

“Can you do a presumptive blood test?”

“No.”

“Let’s just assume it’s blood. Could it be the victim’s?”

“Doesn’t seem to be. It’s too far away and there’s no trail to her body.”

“Does it lead anywhere?”

“Looks like it. To a brick in the wall. It’s loose. No prints on it. I’m going to move it aside. I – oh, Jesus!” Sachs gasped and stumbled back a foot or two, nearly fell.

“What?” Rhyme asked.

She eased forward, staring in disbelief.

“Amelia. Talk to me.”

“It’s a bone. A bloody bone.”

“Human?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “How would I…? I don’t know.”

“Recent kill?”

“Looks like it. About two inches long and two in diameter. There’s blood and flesh on it. It’s been sawn off. Jesus. Who the fuck’d do something -”

“Don’t get rattled.”

“What if he got it from another victim?”

“Then we better find ’im pretty damn soon, Amelia. Bag it. Plastic for the bone.”

As she did this, he asked, “Any other staged clues?” He sounded concerned.

“No.”

“That’s all? Hairs, a bone and a splinter of wood. He’s not making it very easy, is he?”

“Should I bring it back to your… office?”

Rhyme was laughing. “He’d like us to call it quits. But no. We’re not through yet. Let’s find out a little more about Unsub 823.”

“But there’s nothing here.”

“Oh, yes there is, Amelia. There’s his address and his phone number and his description and his hopes and aspirations. They’re all around you.”

She was furious at his professor’s tone and remained silent.

“You have the flashlight?”

“I’ve got my issue halogen -”

“No,” he grumbled. “Issue lights are too narrow. You need the twelve-volt broad beam.”

“Well, I didn’t bring it,” she snapped. “Should I go back and get it?”

“No time. Check out the pipes.”

She searched for ten minutes, climbing up to the ceiling, and with the powerful light she illuminated spots that perhaps hadn’t been lit in fifty years. “No, I don’t see a thing.”

“Go back to the door. Hurry.”

She hesitated and returned.

“Okay, I’m here.”

“Now. Close your eyes. What do you smell?”

“Smell? Did you say smell?” Was he crazy?

“Always smell the air at a crime scene. It can tell you a hundred things.”

She kept her eyes wide and breathed in. She said, “Well, I don’t know what I smell.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer.”

She exhaled in exasperation and hoped the hiss was coming through his telephone loud and clear. She jammed her lids closed, inhaled, fought the nausea again. “Mold, mustiness. The smell of hot water from the steam.”

“You don’t know where it’s from. Just describe it.”

“Hot water. The woman’s perfume.”

“Are you sure it’s hers?”

“Well, no.”

“Are you wearing any?”

“No.”

“How ’bout aftershave? The medic? The ESU officer?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“Describe it.”

“Dry. Like gin.”

“Take a guess, man’s aftershave or woman’s perfume.”

What had Nick worn? Arrid Extra Dry.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Man’s.”

“Walk to the body.”

She glanced once at the pipe then down to the floor.

“I -”

“Do it,” Lincoln Rhyme said.

She did. The peeling skin was like black-and-red birch.

“Smell her neck.”

“It’s all… I mean, there isn’t much skin left.”

“I’m sorry, Amelia, but you have to do it. We have to see if it’s her perfume.”

She did, inhaled. Gagged, nearly vomited.

I’m going to puke, she thought. Just like Nick and me that night at Pancho’s, done in by those damn frozen daiquiris. Two hard-ass cops, swigging down sissy drinks with blue plastic swordfish swimming in them.

“Do you smell the perfume?”

Here it comes… Gagging again.

No. No! She closed her eyes, concentrated on her aching joints. The most painful one – her knee. And, miraculously, the wave of nausea passed. “It’s not her perfume.”

“Good. So maybe our boy’s vain enough to wear a lot of aftershave. That could be a social-class indicator. Or maybe he wants to cover up some other smell he might’ve left. Garlic, cigars, fish, Whisky. We’ll have to see. Now, Amelia, listen carefully.”

“What?”

“I want you to be him.”

Oh. Psychoshit. Just what I need.

“I really don’t think we have time for this.”

“There’s never enough time in crime scene work,” Rhyme continued soothingly. “But that doesn’t stop us. Just get into his head. You’ve been thinking the way we think. I want you to think the way he does.”

“Well, how do I do that?”

“Use your imagination. That’s why God gave us one. Now, you’re him. You’ve got her cuffed and gagged. You take her into the room there. You cuff her to the pipe. You scare her. You’re enjoying this.”

“How do you know he’s enjoying it?”

“You’re enjoying it. Not him. How do I know? Because nobody goes to this much trouble to do something they don’t enjoy. Now, you know your way around. You’ve been here before.”

“Why d’you think that?”

“You had to check it out earlier – to find a deserted place with a feeder pipe from the steam system. And to get the clues he left by the train tracks.”

Sachs was mesmerized by his fluid, low voice. She forgot completely that his body was destroyed. “Oh. Right.”

“You take the steam-pipe cover off. What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. That I want to get it over with. Get out.”

But the words were hardly out of her mouth before she thought: Wrong. And she wasn’t surprised when she heard Rhyme’s tongue click in her headset. “Do you really?” he asked.

“No. I want to make it last.”

“Yes! I think that’s exactly what you want. You’re thinking about what the steam will do to her. What else do you feel?”

“I…”

A thought formed in her mind, vague. She saw the woman struggling to free herself. Saw something else… some one else. Him, she thought. Unsub 823. But what about him? She was close to understanding. What… what? But suddenly the thought vanished. Gone.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“Do you feel any urgency? Or are you pretty cool about what you’re doing?”

“I’m in a hurry. I have to leave. The cops could be here at any minute. But I still…”

“What?”

“Shhhh,” she ordered, and scanned the room again, looking for whatever had put the seed of the vanished thought in her mind.

The room was swimming, a black, starry night. Swirls of darkness and distant, jaundiced lights. Lord, don’t let me faint!

Maybe he -

There! That’s it. Sachs’s eyes were following the steam pipe. She was looking at another access plate in a shadowy alcove of the room. It would have been a better hiding place for the girl – you couldn’t see it from the doorway if you were walking past – and the second plate had only four bolts on it, not eight, like the one he chose.

Why not that pipe?

Then she understood.

“He doesn’t want… I don’t want to leave just yet because I want to keep an eye on her.”

“Why do you think that?” he inquired, echoing her own words just moments before.

“There’s another pipe I could’ve chained her to but I picked the one that was in the open.”

“So you could see her?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“Maybe to make sure she can’t get away. Maybe to make sure the gag’s tight… I don’t know.”

“Good, Amelia. But what does it mean? How can we use that fact?”

Sachs looked around the room for the place where he’d have the best view of the girl without being seen. It turned out to be a shadowy spot between two large heating-oil tanks.

“Yes!” she said excitedly, looking at the floor. “He was here.” Forgetting the role-playing. “He swept up.”

She scanned the area with the bile glow of the PoliLight wand.

“No footprints,” she said, disappointed. But as she lifted the light to shut it off, a smudge glowed on one of the tanks.

“I’ve got a print!” she announced.

“A print?”

“You get a better view of the girl if you lean forward and support yourself on a tank. That’s what he did, I’m sure. Only, it’s weird, Lincoln. It’s… deformed. His hand.” She shivered looking at the monstrous palm.

“In the suitcase there’s an aerosol bottle labeled DFO. It’s a fluorescent stain. Spray that on the print, hit the PoliLight and shoot the image with the one-to-one Polaroid.”

She told him when she’d finished this and he said, “Now Dust-bust the floor between the tanks. If we’re lucky he scratched off a hair or chewed a fingernail.”

My habits, Sachs thought. It was one of the things that had finally ruined her modeling career – the bloody nail, the worried eyebrow. She’d tried and tried and tried to stop. Finally gave up, discouraged, bewildered that a tiny habit could change the direction of your life so dramatically.

“Bag the vacuum filter.”

“In paper?”

“Yes, paper. Now, the body, Amelia.”

“What?”

“Well, you’ve got to process the body.”

Her heart sank. Somebody else, please. Have somebody else do it. She said, “Not until the ME’s finished. That’s the rule.”

“No rules today, Amelia. We’re making up our own. The medical examiner’ll get her after us.”

Sachs approached the woman.

“You know the routine?”

“Yes.” She stepped close to the destroyed body.

Then froze. Hands inches from the victim’s skin.

I can’t do it. She shuddered. Told herself to keep going. But she couldn’t; the muscles weren’t responding.

“Sachs? You there?”

She couldn’t answer.

I can’t do this… It was as simple as that. Impossible. I can’t.

“Sachs?”

And then she looked into herself and, somehow, saw her father, in uniform, stooping low on the hot, pitted sidewalk of West Forty-second Street, sliding his arm around a scabby drunk to help him home. Then was seeing her Nick as he laughed and drank beer in a Bronx tavern with a hijacker who’d kill him in a second if he knew the young cop was working undercover. The two men in her life, doing what they had to do.

“Amelia?”

These two images bobbed in her thoughts, and why they calmed her, or where that calm came from, she couldn’t begin to guess. “I’m here,” she said to Lincoln Rhyme and went about her business as she’d been taught. Taking the nail scrapings, combing the hair – pubic and head. Telling Rhyme what she did as she did it.

Ignoring the dull orbs of eyes…

Ignoring the crimson flesh.

Trying to ignore the smell.

“Get her clothing,” Rhyme said. “Cut off everything. Put a sheet of newsprint under them first to pick up any trace that falls off.”

“Should I check the pockets?”

“No, we’ll do that here. Wrap them up in the paper.”

Sachs cut the blouse and skirt off, the panties. She reached out for what she thought was the woman’s bra, dangling from her chest. It felt curious, disintegrating in her fingers. Then, like a slap she realized what she held and she gave a short scream. It wasn’t cloth, it was skin.

“Amelia? Are you all right?”

“Yes!” she gasped. “I’m fine.”

“Describe the restraints.”

“Duct tape for the gag, -two inches wide. Standard-issue cuffs for hands, clothesline for the feet.”

“PoliLight her body. He might’ve touched her with his bare hands. Look for prints.”

She did. “Nothing.”

“Okay. Now cut the clothesline – but not through the knot. Bag it. In plastic.”

Sachs did. Then Rhyme said, “We need the cuffs.”

“Okay. I’ve got a cuff key.”

“No, Amelia. Don’t open them.”

“What?”

“The cuff lock mechanism is one of the best ways to pick up trace from the perp.”

“Well, how’m I supposed to get them off without a key?” She laughed.

“There’s a razor saw in the suitcase.”

“You want me to cut off the cuffs?”

There was a pause. Rhyme said, “No, not the cuffs, Amelia.”

“Well, what do you want me to… Oh, you can’t be serious. Her hands?”

“You have to.” He was irritated at her reluctance.

Okay, that’s it. Sellitto and Polling’ve picked a nutcase for a partner. Maybe their careers’re tanking but I’m not going down with them.

“Forget it.”

“Amelia, it’s just another way to collect evidence.”

Why did he sound so reasonable? She thought desperately for excuses. “They’ll get blood all over them if I cut -”

“Her heart’s not beating. Besides,” he added like a TV chef, “the blood’ll be cooked into a solid.”

The gorge rising again.

“Go on, Amelia. Go to the suitcase. Get the saw. In the lid.” He added a frosty, “Please.”

“Why’d you have me scrape under her nails? I could’ve just brought you back her hands!”

“Amelia, we need the cuffs. We have to open them here and we can’t wait for the ME. It has to be done.”

She walked back to the doorway. Unsnapped the thongs, lifted the wicked-looking saw from the case. She stared at the woman, frozen in her tortured pose in the center of the vile room.

“Amelia? Amelia?”

Outside, the sky was still clogged with stagnant, yellow air and the buildings nearby were covered with soot like charred bones. But Sachs had never been so glad to be out in the city air as now. The CU suitcase in one hand, the razor saw in the other, the headset dangling dead around her neck. Sachs ignored the huge crowd of cops and spectators staring at her and walked straight toward the station wagon.

As she passed Sellitto she handed him the saw without pausing, practically tossed it to him. “If he wants it done that badly tell him he can damn well walk down here and do it himself.”