The Bone Collector

EIGHTEEN

Saturday, 10:15 p.m., to Sunday, 5:30 a.m.

“HIT ME AGAIN, LON.”

Rhyme drank through a straw, Sellitto from a glass. Both took the smoky liquor neat. The detective sank down in the squeaky rattan chair and Rhyme decided he looked a little like Peter Lorre in Casablanca.

Terry Dobyns was gone – after offering some acerbic psychological insights about narcissism and those employed by the federal government. Jerry Banks had left too. Mel Cooper continued to painstakingly disassemble and pack up his equipment.

“This is good, Lincoln.” Sellitto sipped his Scotch. “Goddamn. I can’t afford this shit. How old’s it?”

“I think that one’s twenty.”

The detective eyed the tawny liquor. “Hell, this was a woman, she’d be legal and then some.”

“Tell me something, Lon. Polling? That little tantrum of his. What was that all about?”

“Little Jimmy?” Sellitto laughed. “He’s in trouble now. He’s the one ran interference to take Peretti off the case and keep it out of the feds’ hands. Really went out on a limb. Asking for you too, that took some doing. There were noses outa joint over that. I don’t mean you personally. Just a civilian in on a hot case like this.”

“Polling asked for me? I thought it was the chief.”

“Yeah, but it was Polling put the bug in his ear in the first place. He called soon as he heard there’d been a taking and there was some bogus PE on the scene.”

And wanted me? Rhyme wondered. This was curious. Rhyme hadn’t had any contact with Polling over the past few years – not since the cop-killer case in which Rhyme had been hurt. It had been Polling who’d run the case and eventually collared Dan Shepherd.

“You seem surprised,” Sellitto said.

“That he asked for me? I am. We weren’t on the best of terms. Didn’t used to be anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“I 14-43’d him.”

An NYPD complaint form.

“Five, six years ago, when he was a lieutenant, I found him interrogating a suspect right in the middle of a secure scene. Contaminated it. I blew my stack. Put in a report and it got cited at one of his IA reviews – the one where he popped the unarmed suspect.”

“Well, I guess all’s forgiven, ’cause he wanted you bad.”

“Lon, make a phone call for me, would you?”

“Sure.”

“No,” Thom said, lifting the phone out of the detective’s hand. “Make him do it himself.”

“I didn’t have time to learn how it works,” Rhyme said, nodding toward the dialing ECU Thom had hooked up earlier.

“You didn’t spend the time. Big difference. Who’re you calling?”

“Berger.”

“No, you’re not,” Thom said. “It’s late.”

“I’ve been reading clocks for a while now,” Rhyme replied coolly. “Call him. He’s staying at the Plaza.”

“No.”

“I asked you to call him.”

“Here.” The aide slapped a slip of paper down on the far edge of the table but Rhyme read it easily. God may have taken much from Lincoln Rhyme but He’d given him the eyesight of a young man. He went through the process of dialing with his cheek on the control stalk. It was easier than he’d thought but he purposely took a long time and muttered as he did it. Infuriatingly, Thom ignored him and went downstairs.

Berger wasn’t in his hotel room. Rhyme disconnected, mad that he wasn’t able to slam the phone down.

“Problem?” Sellitto asked.

“No,” Rhyme grumbled.

Where is he? Rhyme thought testily. It was late. Berger ought to be at his hotel room by now. Rhyme was stabbed with an odd feeling – jealousy that his death doctor was out helping someone else die.

Sellitto suddenly chuckled softly. Rhyme looked up. The cop was eating a candy bar. He’d forgotten that junk food’d been the staple of the big man’s diet when they were working together. “I was thinking. Remember Bennie Ponzo?”

“The OC Task Force ten, twelve years ago?”

“Yeah.”

Rhyme had enjoyed organized-crime work. The perps were pros. The crime scenes challenging. And the vics were rarely innocent.

“Who was that?” Mel Cooper asked.

“Hitman outa Bay Ridge,” Sellitto said. “Remember after we booked him, the candy sandwich?”

Rhyme laughed, nodding.

“What’s the story?” Cooper asked.

Sellitto said, “Okay, we’re down at Central Booking, Lincoln and me and a couple other guys. And Bennie, remember, he was a big guy, he was sitting all hunched over, feeling his stomach. All of a sudden he goes, ‘Yo, I’m hungry, I wanna candy sandwich.’ And we’re like looking at each other and I go, ‘What’s a candy sandwich?’ And he looks at me like I’m from Mars and goes, ‘What the fuck you think it is? Ya take a Hershey bar, ya put it between two slices of bread and ya eat it. That’s a fucking candy sandwich.’ ”

They laughed. Sellitto held out the bar to Cooper, who shook his head, then to Rhyme, who felt a sudden impulse to take a bite. It’d been over a year since he’d had chocolate. He avoided food like that – sugar, candy. Troublesome food. The little things about life were the biggest burdens, the ones that saddened and exhausted you the most. Okay, you’ll never scuba-dive or hike the Alps. So what? A lot of people don’t. But everybody brushes their teeth. And goes to the dentist, gets a filling, takes the train home. Everybody picks a hunk of peanut from out behind a molar when nobody’s looking.

Everybody except Lincoln Rhyme.

He shook his head to Sellitto and drank a long swallow of Scotch. His eyes slid back to the computer screen, recalling the goodbye letter to Elaine he’d been composing when Sellitto and Banks had interrupted him that morning. There were some other letters he wanted to write as well.

The one he was putting off writing was to Pete Taylor, the spinal cord trauma specialist. Most of the time Taylor and Rhyme had talked not about the patient’s condition but about death. The doctor was an ardent opponent of euthanasia. Rhyme felt he owed him a letter to explain why he’d decided to go ahead with the suicide.

And Amelia Sachs?

The Portable’s Daughter would get a note too, he decided.

Crips are generous, crips are kind, crips are iron…

Crips are nothing if not forgiving.

Dear Amelia:

My Dear Amelia:

Amelia:

Dear Officer Sachs:

Inasmuch as we have had the pleasure of working together, I would like to take this opportunity to state that although I consider you a betraying Judas, I’ve forgiven you. Furthermore I wish you well in your future career as a kisser of the media’s ass…

“What’s her story, Lon? Sachs.”

“Aside from the fact she’s got a ball-buster temper I didn’t know about?”

“She married?”

“Naw. A face and bod like that, you’da thought some good-lookin’ hunk woulda snagged her by now. But she doesn’t even date. We heard she was going with somebody a few years ago but she never talks about it.” He lowered his voice. “Lipstick lesbos’s what the rumor is. But I don’t know from that – my social life’s picking up women at the laundromat on Saturday night. Hey, it works. What can I say?”

You’ll have to learn to give up the dead…

Rhyme was thinking about the look on her face when he’d said that to her. What was that all about? Then he grew angry with himself for spending any time thinking about her. And took a good slug of Scotch.

The doorbell rang, then footsteps on the stairs. Rhyme and Sellitto glanced toward the doorway. The sound was from the boots of a tall man, wearing city-issue jodhpurs and a blue helmet. One of NYPD’s elite mounted police. He handed a bulky envelope to Sellitto and returned down the stairs.

The detective opened it. “Lookit what we got here.” He poured the contents onto the table. Rhyme glanced up with irritation. Three or four dozen plastic evidence bags, all labeled. Each contained a patch of cellophane from the packages of veal shanks they’d sent ESU to buy.

“A note from Haumann.” He read: “ 'To: L. Rhyme. L. Sellitto. From: B. Haumann, TSRF.' ”

“What’s 'at?” Cooper asked. The police department is a nest of initials and acronyms. RMP – remote mobile patrol – is a squad car. IED – improvised explosive device – is a bomb. But TSRF was a new one. Rhyme shrugged.

Sellitto continued to read, chuckling. “ 'Tactical Supermarket Response Force. Re: Veal shanks. Citywide search discovered forty-six subjects, all of which were apprehended and neutralized with minimal force. We read them their rights and have transported same to detention facility in the kitchen of Officer T. P. Giancarlo’s mother. Upon completion of interrogation, a half-dozen suspects will be transferred to your custody. Heat at 350 for thirty minutes.' ”

Rhyme laughed. Then sipped more Scotch, savoring the flavor. This was one thing he’d miss, the smoky breath of the liquor. (Though in the peace of senseless sleep, how could you miss anything? Just like evidence, take away the baseline standard and you have nothing to judge the loss against; you’re safe for all eternity.)

Cooper fanned out some of the samples. “Forty-six samples of the cello. One from each chain and the major independents.”

Rhyme gazed at the samples. The odds were good for class identification. Individuation of cellophane’d be a bitch – the scrap found on the veal bone clue wouldn’t of course exactly match one of these. But, because parent companies buy identical supplies for all their stores, you might learn in which chain 823 bought the veal and narrow down the neighborhoods he might live in. Maybe he should call the Bureau’s physical-evidence team and -

No, no. Remember: it’s their fuck-ing case now.

Rhyme commanded Cooper, “Bundle them up and ship them to our federal brethren.”

Rhyme tried shutting down his computer and hit the wrong button with his sometimes ornery ring finger. The speakerphone came on with a loud wail of squelch.

“Shit,” Rhyme muttered darkly. “Fucking machinery.”

Uneasy with Rhyme’s sudden anger, Sellitto glanced at his glass and joked, “Hell, Linc, Scotch this good’s supposed to make you mellow.”

“Got news,” Thom replied sourly. “He is mellow.”

He parked close to the huge drainpipe.

Climbing from the cab he could smell the fetid water, slimy and ripe. They were in a cul-de-sac leading to the wide runoff pipe that ran from the West Side Highway down to the Hudson River. No one could see them here.

The bone collector walked to the back of the cab, enjoying the sight of his elderly captive. Just like he’d enjoyed staring at the girl he’d tied in front of the steam pipe. And the wiggling hand by the railroad tracks early this morning.

Gazing at the frightened eyes. The man was thinner than he’d thought. Grayer. Hair disheveled.

Old in the flesh but young in the bone…

The man cowered away from him, arms folded defensively across his narrow chest.

Opening the door, the bone collector pressed his pistol against the man’s breastbone.

“Please,” his captive whispered, his voice quavering. “I don’t have much money but you can have it all. We can go to an ATM. I’ll -”

“Get out.”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

The bone collector gestured with his head. The frail man looked around miserably then scooted forward. He stood beside the car, cowering, his arms still crossed, shivering despite the relentless heat.

“Why are you doing this?”

The bone collector stepped back and fished the cuffs from his pocket. Because he wore the thick gloves it took a few seconds to find the chrome links. As he dug them out he thought he saw a four-rigger tacking up the Hudson. The opposing current here wasn’t as strong as in the East River, where sailing ships had a hell of a time making their way from the East, Montgomery and Out Ward wharves north. He squinted. No, wait – it wasn’t a sailboat, it was just a cabin cruiser, Yuppies lounging on the long front deck.

As he reached forward with the cuffs, the man grabbed his captor’s shirt, gripped it hard. “Please. I was going to the hospital. That’s why I flagged you down. I’ve been having chest pains.”

“Shut up.”

And the man suddenly reached for the bone collector’s face, the liver-spotted hands gripping his neck and shoulder and squeezing hard. A jolt of pain radiated from the spot where the yellow nails dug into him. With a burst of temper, he pulled his victim’s hands off and cuffed him roughly.

Slapping a piece of tape on the man’s mouth, the bone collector dragged him down the gravel embankment toward the mouth of the pipe, four feet in diameter. He stopped, examined the old man.

It’d be so easy to take you down to the bone.

The bone… Touching it. Hearing it.

He lifted the man’s hand. The terrified eyes gazed back, his lips trembling. The bone collector caressed the man’s fingers, squeezed the phalanges between his own (wished he could take his glove off but didn’t dare). Then he lifted the man’s palm and pressed it hard against his own ear.

“What? -”

His left hand curled around his mystified captive’s little finger and slowly pulled until he heard the deep thonk of brittle bone snapping. A satisfying sound. The man screamed, a muted cry stuttering through the tape. And slumped to the ground.

The bone collector pulled him upright and led the stumbling man into the mouth of the pipe. He prodded the man forward.

They emerged underneath the old, rotting pier. It was a disgusting place, strewn with the decomposed bodies of animals and fish, trash on the wet rocks, a gray-green sludge of kelp. A mound of seaweed rose and fell in the water, humping like a fat lover. Despite the evening heat in the rest of the city, down here it was cold as a March day.

Señor Ortega…

He lowered the man into the river, cuffed him to a pier post, ratcheting the bracelet tight around his wrist again. The captive’s grayish face was about three feet above the surface of the water. The bone collector walked carefully over the slick rocks to the drainpipe. He turned and paused for a moment, watching, watching. He hadn’t cared much whether the constables found the others or not. Hanna, the woman in the taxi. But this one… The bone collector hoped they didn’t find him in time. Indeed, that they didn’t find him at all. So he could come back in a month or two and see if the clever river had scrubbed the skeleton clean.

Back on the gravel drive he pulled the mask off and left the clues to the next scene not far from where he’d parked. He was angry, furious at the constables, and so this time he hid the clues. And he also included a special surprise. Something he’d been saving for them. The bone collector returned to the taxi.

The breeze was gentle, carrying the fragrance of the sour river with it. And the rustle of grass and, as always in the city, the shushhhh of traffic.

Like emery paper on bone.

He stopped and listened to this sound, head cocked as he looked out over the billion lights of the buildings, stretching to the north like an oblong galaxy. It was then that a woman, running fast, emerged on a jogging path beside the drainpipe and nearly collided with him.

In purple shorts and top, the thin brunette danced out of his way. Gasping, she stopped, flicked sweat from her face. In good shape – taut muscles – but not pretty. A hook of a nose, broad lips, blotchy skin.

But beneath that…

“You’re not supposed… You shouldn’t park here. This’s a jogging path…”

Her words fading and fear rising into her eyes, which flicked from his face to the taxi to the wad of ski mask in his hand.

She knew who he was. He smiled, noting her remarkably pronounced clavicle.

Her right ankle shifted slightly, ready to take her weight when she sprinted away. But he got her first. He ducked low, to tackle her, and when she gave a fast scream and dropped her arms to block him the bone collector straightened up fast from his feint and swung his elbow into her temple. There was a crack like a snapping belt.

She went down on the gravel, hard, and lay still. Horrified, the bone collector dropped to his knees and cradled her head. He moaned, “No, no, no…” Furious with himself for striking so hard, sick at heart that he might’ve broken what seemed to be a perfect skull beneath the tentacles of stringy hair and the unremarkable face.

Amelia Sachs finished another COC card and took a break. She paused, found a vending machine and bought a paper cup of vile coffee. She returned to the windowless office, looked over the evidence she’d gathered.

She felt a curious fondness for the macabre collection. Maybe because of what she’d gone through to collect it – her fiery joints ached and she still shuddered when she thought of the buried body at the first scene this morning, the bloody branch of a hand, and of T.J. Colfax’s dangling flesh. Until today physical evidence hadn’t meant anything to her. PE was boring lectures on drowsy spring afternoons at the academy. PE was math, it was charts and graphs, it was science. It was dead.

No, Amie Sachs was going to be a people cop. Walking beats, dissing back the dissers, outing druggies. Spreading respect for the law – like her father. Or pounding it into them. Like handsome Nick Carelli, a five-year vet, the star of Street Crimes, grinning at the world with his yo-you-gotta-problem? smile.

That’s just who she was going to be.

She looked at the crisp brown leaf she’d found in the stockyard tunnel. One of the clues 823 had left for them. And here was the underwear too. She remembered that I the feebies had snagged the PE before Cooper’d finished the test on the… what was that machine? The Chromatograph? She wondered what the liquid soaking the cotton was.

But these thoughts led to Lincoln Rhyme and he was the one person she didn’t want to think about just now.

She began to voucher the rest of the PE. Each COC card had a series of blank lines that would list the custodians of the evidence, in sequence, from the initial discovery at the scene all the way to trial. Sachs had transported evidence several times and her name had appeared on COC cards. But this was the first time A. Sachs, NYPD 5885 had occupied the first slot.

Once again she lifted the plastic bag containing the leaf.

He’d actually touched it. Him. The man who’d killed T.J. Colfax. Who’d held Monelle Gerger’s pudgy arm and cut deep into it. Who was out searching for another vic right now – if he hadn’t already snatched one.

Who’d buried that poor man this morning, waving for mercy he never got.

She thought of Locard’s Exchange Principle. People coming into contact, each transferring something to the other. Something big, something small. Most likely they didn’t even know what.

Had something of 823 come off on this leaf? A cell of skin? A dot of sweat? It was a stunning thought. She felt a trill of excitement, of fear, as if the killer were right here in this tiny airless room with her.

Back to the COC cards. For ten minutes she filled them out and was just finishing the last one when the door burst open, startling her. She spun around.

Fred Dellray stood in the doorway, his green jacket abandoned, his starched shirt rumpled. Fingers pinching the cigarette behind his ear. “Step inside a minute’r two, officer. It’s payoff time. Thought you might wanna be there.”

Sachs followed him down the short corridor, two steps behind his lope.

“The AFIS results’re comin’ in,” Dellray said.

The war room was even busier than before. Jacketless agents hovered over desks. They were armed with their on-duty weapons – the big Sig-Sauer and Smith & Wesson automatics, 10mm and.45s. A half-dozen agents were clustered around the computer terminal beside the Opti-Scan.

Sachs hadn’t liked the way Dellray’d taken the case away from them, but she had to admit that beneath the slick-talking hipster Dellray was one hell of a good cop. Agents – young and old – would come up to him with questions and he’d patiently answer them. He’d yank a phone from the cradle and cajole or berate whoever was on the other end to get him what he needed. Sometimes, he’d look up across the bustling room and roar, “We gonna nail this prick-dick? Yep, you betcha we are.” And the straight-arrows’d look at him uneasily but with the obvious thought in mind that if anybody could nail him it’d be Dellray.

“Here, it’s coming in now,” an agent called.

Dellray barked, “I want open lines to New York, Jersey and Connecticut DMVs. And Corrections and Parole. INS too. Tell ’em to stand by for an incoming ID request. Put everything else on hold.”

Agents peeled off and began making phone calls.

The computer screen filled.

She couldn’t believe that Dellray actually crossed his stickish fingers.

Utter silence throughout the room.

“Got him!” the agent at the keyboard shouted.

“Ain’t no unsub anymore,” Dellray sang melodically, bending over the screen. “Listen up, people. We gotta name: Victor Pietrs. Born here, 1948. His parents were from Belgrade. So, we got a Serbian connection. ID brought to us courtesy of New York D of C. Convictions for drugs, assault, one with a deadly. Two sentences served. Okay, listen to this – psychiatric history, committed three times on involuntary orders. Intake at Bellevue and Manhattan Psychiatric. Last release date three years ago. LKA Washington Heights.”

He looked up. “Who’s got the phone companies?”

Several agents raised their hands.

“Make the calls,” Dellray ordered.

An interminable five minutes.

“Not there. No current New York Telephone listing.”

“Nothing in Jersey,” another agent echoed.

“Negative, Connecticut.”

“Fuck-all,” Dellray muttered. “Mix the names up. Try variations. An’ lookit phone-service accounts canceled in the past year for nonpayment.”

For several minutes voices rose and fell like the tide.

Dellray paced manically and Sachs understood why his frame was so scrawny.

Suddenly an agent shouted, “Found him!”

Everyone turned to look.

“I’m on with NY DMV,” another agent called. “They’ve got him. It’s coming through now… He’s a cabbie. Got a hack license.”

“Why don’ that s’prise me,” Dellray muttered. “Shoulda thoughta that. Where’s home sweet home?”

“Morningside Heights. A block from the river.” The agent wrote down the address and held it aloft as Dellray swept past and took it. “Know the neighborhood. Pretty deserted. Lotta druggies.”

Another agent typed the address into his computer terminal. “Okay, checking deeds… Property’s an old house. A bank’s got title. He must be renting.”

“You want HRT?” one agent called across the bustling room. “I got Quantico on the line.”

“No time,” Dellray announced. “Use the field office SWAT. Get ’em suited up.”

Sachs asked, “And what about the next victim?”

“What next victim?”

“He’s already taken somebody. He knows we’ve had the clues for an hour or two. He’d’ve planted the vic awhile ago. He had to.”

“No reports of anybody missing,” the agent said. “And if he did snatch ’em they’re probably at his house.”

“No, they wouldn’t be.”

“Why not?”

“They’d pick up too much PE,” she said. “Lincoln Rhyme said he has a safe house.”

“Well, then we’ll get him to tell us where they are.”

Another agent said, “We can be real persuasive.”

“Let’s move it,” Dellray called. “Yo, ever’body, let’s thank Officer Amelia Sachs here. She’s the one found that print and lifted it.”

She was blushing. Could feel it, hated it. But she couldn’t help herself. As she glanced down she noticed strange lines on her shoes. Squinting, she realized she was still wearing the rubber bands.

When she looked up she saw a room full of unsmiling federal agents checking weapons and heading for the door as they glanced at her. The same way, she thought, lumberjacks look at logs.

NINETEEN

IN 1911 A TRAGEDY OF MASSIVE DIMENSION befell our fair city.

On March 25, hundreds of industrious young women were hard at work in a garment factory, one of the many, known notoriously as “sweat-shops”, in Greenwich Village in down-town Manhattan.

So enamored of profits were the owners of this company that they denied the poor girls in their employ even the rudimentary facilities that slaves might enjoy. They believed the laborers could not be trusted to make expeditious visits to the rest-room facilities and so kept the doors to the cutting and sewing rooms under lock and key.

The bone collector was driving back to his building. He passed a squad car but he kept his eyes forward and the constables never noticed him.

On the day in question a fire started on the eighth floor of the building and within minutes swept through the factory, from which the young employees tried to flee. They were unable to escape, however, owing to the chained state of the door. Many died on the spot and many more, some horribly afire, leapt into the air a hundred feet above the cobblestones and died from the collision with unyielding Mother Earth.

There numbered 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The police, however, were confounded by the inability to locate one of the victims, a young woman, Esther Weinraub, whom several witnesses had seen leap in desperation from the eighth floor window. None of the other girls who similarly leapt survived the fall. Was it possible that she, miraculously, had? For when the bodies were laid out in the street for bereaved family member to identify, poor Miss Weinraub‘s was not to be found.

Reports began to circulate of a ghoul, a man seen carting off a large bundle from the scene of the fire. So incensed were the constables that someone might violate the sacred remains of an innocent young woman that they put on a still search for the man.

After several weeks, their diligent efforts bore fruit. Two residents of Greenwich Village reported seeing a man leaving the scene of the fire and carrying a heavy bundle “like a carpet” over his shoulder. The constables picked up his trail and tracked him to the West Side of the city, where they interviewed neighbors and learned that the man fit the description of James Schneider, who was still at large.

They narrowed their search to a decrepit abode in an alley in Hell’s Kitchen, not far from the 60th Street stockyards. As they entered the alleyway they were greeted with a revolting stench…

He was now driving past the very site of the Triangle fire itself – maybe he’d even been subconsciously prompted to come here. The Asch Building – the ironic name of the structure that had housed the doomed factory – was gone and the site was now a part of NYU. Then and now… The bone collector would not have been surprised to see white-bloused working girls, trailing sparks and faint smoke, tumbling gracefully to their deaths, falling around him like snow.

Upon breaking into Schneider’s habitation, the authorities found a sight that sent even the most seasoned of them reeling with horror. The body of wretched Esther Weinraub – (or what remained of it) – was found in the basement. Schneider was bent on completing the work of the tragic fire and was slowly removing the woman’s flesh through means too shocking to recount here.

A search of this loathsome place revealed a secret room, off the basement, filled with bones that had been stripped clean of flesh.

Beneath Schneider’s bed, a constable found a diary, in which the madman chronicled his history of evil. “Bone” – (Schneider wrote) – “is the ultimate core of a human being. It alters not, deceives not, yields not. Once the facade of our intemperate ways of the flesh, the flaws of the lesser Races, and the weaker gender, are burnt or boiled away, we are – all of us – noble bone. Bone does not lie. It is immortal.”

The lunatic writings set forth a chronicle of gruesome experimentation as he sought to ascertain the most effective way of cleansing his victims of their flesh. He tried boiling the bodies, burning them, rendering with lye, staking them out for animals, and immersing them in water.

But one method above all he favored for this macabre sport. “It is best, I have concluded” – (his diary continues) – “simply to bury the body in rich earth and let Nature do the tedious work. This is the most time-consuming method but the least likely to arouse suspicion as the odors are kept to a minimum. I prefer to inter the individuals while still alive, though why that might be I cannot say with any certainty.”

In his heretofore secret room three more bodies were discovered in this very condition. The splayed hands and agog faces of the poor victims attest that they were indeed alive when Schneider piled the last shovelful of dirt upon their tormented crowns.

It was these dark designs that prompted the journalists of the day to christen Schneider with the name by which he was forever after known: – “The Bone Collector.”

He drove on, his mind returning to the woman in the trunk, Esther Weinraub. Her thin elbow, her collarbone delicate as a bird’s wing. He sped the cab forward, even risked running two red lights. He couldn’t wait much longer.

“I’m not tired,” Rhyme snapped.

“Tired or not, you need to rest.”

“No, I need another drink.”

Black suitcases lined the wall, awaiting the help of officers from the Twentieth Precinct to transport them back to the IRD lab. Mel Cooper was carting a microscope case downstairs. Lon Sellitto was still sitting in the rattan chair but he wasn’t saying much. Just coming to the obvious conclusion that Lincoln Rhyme was not a mellow drunk at all.

Thom said, “I’m sure your blood pressure’s up. You need rest.”

“I need a drink.”

Goddamn you, Amelia Sachs, Rhyme thought. And didn’t know why.

“You should give it up. Drinking’s never been any good for you.”

Well, I am giving it up, Rhyme responded silently. For good. Monday. And no twelve-step plan for me; it’s a one-stepper.

“Pour me another drink,” he ordered.

Not really wanting one.

“No.”

“Pour me a drink now!” Rhyme snapped.

“No way.”

“Lon, would you please pour me another drink?”

“I -”

Thom said, “He doesn’t get any more. When he’s in a mood like this he’s insufferable and we’re not going to put up with him.”

“You’re going to withhold something from me? I could fire you.”

“Fire away.”

“Crip abuse! I’ll get you indicted. Arrest him, Lon.”

“Lincoln,” Sellitto said placatingly.

“Arrest him!”

The detective was taken aback by the viciousness of Rhyme’s words.

“Hey, buddy, maybe you should go a little light,” Sellitto said.

“Oh, Christ,” Rhyme groaned. He started to moan loudly.

Sellitto blurted, “What is it?” Thom was silent, looking on cautiously.

“My liver.” Rhyme’s face broke into a cruel grin. “Cirrhosis probably.”

Thom swung around, furious. “I will not put up with this crap. Okay?”

“No, It’s not oh-kay -”

A woman’s voice, from the doorway: “We don’t have much time.”

“- at all.”

Amelia Sachs walked into the room, glanced at the empty tables. Rhyme felt spittle on his lip. He was overwhelmed with fury. Because she saw the drool. Because he wore a crisp white shirt he’d changed into just for her. And because he wanted desperately to be alone, forever, alone in the dark of motionless peace – where he was king. Not king for a day. But king for eternity.

The spit tickled. He cramped his already sore neck muscles trying to wipe his lip dry. Thom deftly swiped a Kleenex from a box and dried his boss’s mouth and chin.

“Officer Sachs,” Thom said. “Welcome. A shining example of maturity. We aren’t seeing much of that right at the moment.”

She wasn’t wearing her hat and her navy blouse was open at the collar. Her long red hair tumbled to her shoulders. Nobody’d have any trouble differentiating that hair under a comparison ’scope.

“Mel let me in,” she said, nodding toward the stairs.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime, Sachs?”

Thom tapped a shoulder. Behave yourself, the gesture meant.

“I was just at the federal building,” she said to Sellitto.

“How are our tax dollars doing?”

“They’ve caught him.”

“What?” Sellitto asked. “Just like that? Jesus. They know about it downtown?”

“Perkins called the mayor. The guy’s a cabbie. He was born here but his father’s Serbian. So they’re thinking he’s trying to get even with the UN, or something. Got a yellow sheet. Oh, and a history of mental problems too. Dellray and feebie SWAT’re on their way there right now.”

“How’d they do it?” Rhyme asked. “Betcha it was the fingerprint.”

She nodded.

“I suspected that would figure prominently. And, tell me, how concerned were they about the next victim?”

“They’re concerned,” she said evenly. “But mostly they want to nail the unsub.”

“Well, that’s their nature. And let me guess. They’re figuring they’ll sweat the location of the vic out of him after they take him down.”

“You got it.”

“That may take some doing,” Rhyme said. “I’ll venture that opinion without the benefit of our Dr. Dobyns and the Behavioral mavens. So, a change of heart, Amelia? Why’d you come back?”

“Because whether Dellray collars him or not I don’t think we have time to wait. To save the next vic, I mean.”

“Oh, but we’re dismantled, haven’t you heard? Shut down, done gone outa business.” Rhyme was looking in the dark computer screen, trying to see if his hair had stayed combed.

“You giving up?” she asked.

“Officer,” Sellitto began, “even if we wanted to do somethin’ we don’t have any of the PE. That’s the only link -”

“I’ve got it.”

“What?”

“All of it. It’s downstairs in the RRV.”

The detective glanced out the window.

Sachs continued, “From the last scene. From all the scenes.”

“You have it?” Rhyme asked. “How?”

But Sellitto was laughing. “She ’jacked it, Lincoln. Gawdamn!”

“Dellray doesn’t need it,” Sachs pointed out. “Except for the trial. They’ve got the unsub, we’ll save the victim. Works out nice, hm?”

“But Mel Cooper just left.”

“Naw, he’s downstairs. I asked him to wait.” Sachs crossed her arms. She glanced at the clock. After eleven. “We don’t have much time,” she repeated.

His eyes too were on the clock. Lord, he was tired. Thom was right; he’d been awake longer than in years. But, he was surprised – no, shocked – to find, that, while he might have been furious or embarrassed or stabbed with heartless frustration today, the passing minutes had not lain like hot, unbearable weights on his soul. As they had for the past three and a half years.

“Well, church mice in heaven.” Rhyme barked a laugh. “Thom? Thom! We need coffee. On the double. Sachs, get those cello samples to the lab along with the Polaroid of the bit Mel lifted from the veal bone. I want a polarization-comparison report in an hour. And none of this ‘most probably’ crap. I want an answer – which grocery chain did our unsub buy the veal bone at. And get that little shadow of yours back here, Lon. The one named after the baseball player.”

The black vans sped through side streets.

This was a more circuitous route to the perp’s location but Dellray knew what he was doing; anti-terror operations were supposed to avoid major city streets, which were often monitored by accomplices. Dellray, in the back of the lead van, tightened the Velcro strap on the body armor. They were less than ten minutes away.

He looked at the failing apartments, the trash-filled lots as they sped along. The last time he’d been in this decrepit neighborhood he’d been Rastafarian Peter Haile Thomas from Queens. He’d bought 137 pounds of cocaine from a shriveled little Puerto Rican, who decided at the last minute to ’jack his buyer. He took Dellray’s buy-and-bust money and aimed a gun at Dellray’s groin, pulling the trigger as calmly as if he were picking vegetables at the A &P. Click, click, click. Misfire. Toby Dolittle and the backup team took the fucker and his minders down before the scumbag found his other piece, leaving one shook-up Dellray to reflect on the irony of nearly getting killed because the perp truly bought the agent’s performance – that he was a dealer not a cop.

“ETA, four minutes,” the driver called.

For some reason Dellray’s thoughts flipped to Lincoln Rhyme. He regretted he’d been such a shit when he took over the case. But there hadn’t been much choice. Sellitto was a bulldog and Polling was a psycho – though Dellray could handle them. Rhyme was the one who made him uneasy. Sharp as a razor (hell, it had been his team that found Pietrs’s print, even if they didn’t jump on it as fast as they should’ve). In the old days, before his accident, you couldn’t beat Rhyme if he didn’t want to get beat. And you couldn’t fool him either.

Now, Rhyme was a busted toy. It was a sad thing what could happen to a man, how you could die and still be alive. Dellray had walked into his room – his bedroom, no less – and hit him hard. Harder than he needed to.

Maybe he’d call. He could -

“Show time,” the driver called, and Dellray forgot all about Lincoln Rhyme.

The vans turned onto the street where Pietrs lived. Most of the other streets they’d passed had been filled with sweating residents, clutching beer bottles and cigarettes, hoping for a breath or two of cool air. But this one was dark, empty.

The vans cruised slowly to a stop. Two dozen agents climbed out, in black tactical outfits, carrying their H &Ks equipped with muzzle lights and laser sights. Two homeless men stared at them; one quickly hid his bottle of Colt 44 malt liquor under his shirt.

Dellray gazed at a window in Pietrs’s building; it gave off a faint yellow glow.

The driver backed the first van into a shadowy parking space and whispered to Dellray, “It’s Perkins.” Tapping his headset. “He’s got the director on the horn. They want to know who’s leading the assault.”

“I am,” snapped the Chameleon. He turned to his team. “I want surveillance across the street and in the alleys. Snipers, there, there and there. An’ I want ever’body in place fi’ minutes ago. Are we all together on that?”

Down the stairs, the old wood creaking.

His arm around her, he guided the woman, half-conscious from the blow to her head, into the basement. At the foot of the stairs, he shoved her to the dirt floor and gazed down at her.

Esther…

Her eyes rose to meet his. Hopeless, begging. He didn’t notice. All he saw was her body. He began to remove her clothing, the purple jogging outfit. It was unthinkable that a woman would actually go outside in this day and age wearing what was no more than, well, undergarments. He hadn’t thought that Esther Weinraub was a whore. She’d been a working girl, stitching shirts, five for a penny.

The bone collector observed how her collarbone showed at her throat. And where some other man might glance over her breasts and dark areolae he stared at the indentation at the manubrium and the ribs blossoming from it like spider’s legs.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, groggy from the blow to her head.

The bone collector looked her over carefully but what he saw wasn’t a young, anorectic woman, nose too broad, lips too full, with skin like dirty sand. He saw beneath those imperfections the perfect beauty of her structure.

He caressed her temple, stroked it gently. Don’t let it be cracked, please…

She coughed and her nostrils flared – the fumes were very strong down here though he hardly noticed them anymore.

“Don’t hurt me again,” she whispered, her head lolling. “Just don’t hurt me. Please.”

He took the knife from his pocket and bent down, cut her underwear off. She looked down at her naked body.

“You want that?” she said breathlessly. “Okay, you can fuck me. Okay.”

The pleasure of the flesh, he thought… it just doesn’t come close.

He pulled her to her feet and madly she pushed away from him and began stumbling toward a small doorway in the corner of the basement. Not running, not really trying to escape. Just sobbing, reaching out a hand, weaving toward the door.

The bone collector watched her, entranced by her slow, pathetic gait.

The doorway, which had once opened onto a coal chute, now led to a narrow tunnel that connected to the basement of the abandoned building next door.

Esther struggled to the metal door and pulled it open. She climbed inside.

It was no more than a minute later that he heard the wailing scream. Followed by a breathless, wrenching, “God, no, no, no…” Other words too, lost in her boiling howls of terror.

Then she was coming back through the tunnel, moving faster now, whipping her hands around her, as if she was trying to shake off what she’d just seen.

Come to me, Esther.

Stumbling over the dirt floor, sobbing.

Come to me.

Running straight into his patient, waiting arms, which wrapped around her. He squeezed the woman tight as a lover, felt that marvelous collarbone beneath his fingers, and slowly dragged the frantic woman back toward the tunnel doorway.

TWENTY

THE PHASES OF THE MOON, the leaf, the damp underwear, dirt. Their team was back in Rhyme’s bedroom – all except Polling and Haumann; it was straining NYPD loyalty to bring captains in on what was, no two ways about it, an unauthorized operation.

“You G-C’d the liquid in the underwear, right, Mel?”

“Have to do it again. They shut us down before we got the results.”

He blotted out a sample and injected it into the Chromatograph. As he ran the machine Sachs jockeyed to look at the peaks and valleys of the profile appearing on the screen. Like a stock index. Rhyme realized she was standing close to him, as if she’d edged near when he wasn’t looking. She spoke in a low voice. “I was…”

“Yes?”

“I was blunter than I meant to be. Before, I mean. I have a temper. I don’t know where I got it from. But I have it.”

“You were right,” Rhyme said.

They easily held each other’s eyes and Rhyme thought of the times he and Blaine had had serious discussions. As they talked they always focused on an object between them – one of the ceramic horses she collected, a book, a nearly empty bottle of Merlot or Chardonnay.

He said, “I work scenes differently than most criminalists. I needed somebody without any preconceived ideas. But I also needed somebody with a mind of her own.”

The contradictory qualities we seek in that elusive perfect lover. Strength and vulnerability, in equal measures.

“When I talked to Commissioner Eckert,” she said, “it was just to get my transfer through. That’s all I wanted. It never occurred to me that word’d get back to the feds and they’d take the case away.”

“I know that.”

“I still let my temper go. I’m sorry for that.”

“Don’t backpedal, Sachs. I need somebody to tell me I’m a jerk when I act like one. Thom does. That’s why I love him.”

“Don’t get sentimental on me, Lincoln,” Thom called from across the room.

Rhyme continued, “Nobody else ever tells me to go to hell. They’re always walking on eggshells. I hate it.”

“It doesn’t seem like there’ve been many people around here to say much of anything to you lately.”

After a moment he said, “That’s true.”

On the screen of the chromatograph-spectrometer the peaks and valleys stopped moving and became one of nature’s infinite signatures. Mel Cooper tapped on the computer keys and read the results. “Water, diesel oil, phosphate, sodium, trace minerals… No idea what it means.”

What, Rhyme wondered, was the message? The underwear itself? The liquid? He said, “Let’s move on. I want to see the dirt.”

Sachs brought him the bag. It contained pinkish sand, laced with chunks of clay and pebbles.

“Bull’s liver,” he announced. “Rock-and-sand mixture. Found just above the bedrock in Manhattan. Sodium silicate mixed in?”

Cooper ran the Chromatograph. “Yep. Plenty of it.”

“Then we’re looking for a downtown location within fifty yards of the water – ” Rhyme laughed at the astonished gaze on Sachs’s face. “It’s not magic, Sachs. I’ve just done my homework, that’s all. Contractors mix sodium silicate with bull’s liver to stabilize the earth when they dig foundations in deep-bedrock areas near the water. That means it’s got to be downtown. Now, let’s take a look at the leaf.”

She held up the bag.

“No clue what it is,” Rhyme said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like that. Not in Manhattan.”

“I’ve got a list of horticulture web sites,” Cooper said, staring at his computer screen. “I’ll do some surfing.”

Rhyme himself had spent some time on-line, cruising the Internet. As it had with books, movies and posters, his interest in the cyberworld had eventually paled. Perhaps because so much of his own world was virtual, the net was, in the end, a forlorn place for Lincoln Rhyme.

Cooper’s screen flicked and danced as he clicked on hyperlinks and disappeared deeper into the web. “I’m downloading some files. Should take ten, twenty minutes.”

Rhyme said, “All right. The rest of the clues Sachs found… Not the planted ones. The others. They might tell us about where he’s been. Let’s look at our secret weapon, Mel.”

“Secret weapon?” Sachs asked.

“The trace evidence.”

Special Agent Fred Dellray had put together a ten-man entry operation. Two teams plus search and surveillance. The flak-jacketed agents stood in the bushes, sweating madly. Across the street, upstairs in an abandoned brownstone, the S &S team had their Big Ears and video infrareds trained on the perp’s house.

The three snipers, with their big Remingtons strapped, loaded and locked, lay prone on rooftops. Their binoculared spotters crouched beside them like Lamaze coaches.

Dellray – wearing an FBI windbreaker and jeans instead of his Leprechaun-green outfit – listened through his clip-on earphone.

“Surveillance to Command. We’ve got infrared on the basement. Somebody moving down there.”

“What’sa view like?” Dellray asked.

“No view. Windows’re too dirty.”

“He all by his humble self? Maybe got a vic with him?” Knowing somehow that Officer Sachs was probably right; that he’d already ’napped somebody else now.

“Can’t tell. We’ve just got motion and heat.”

Dellray had sent other officers around to the sides of the house. They reported in. “No sign of anyone on the first or second floor. Garage is locked.”

“Snipers?” Dellray asked. “Report.”

“Shooter One to Command. I’ve acquired on front door. Over.”

The others were covering the hallway and a room on the first floor. “Loaded and locked,” they radioed in.

Dellray drew his large automatic.

“Okay, we got paper,” Dellray said. Meaning a warrant. They wouldn’t have to knock. “Lessgo! Teams one and two, deploy, deploy, deploy.”

The first team took out the front door with a battering ram while the second used the slightly more civilized approach of breaking in the back-door window and unlocking the dead bolt. They streamed inside, Dellray following the last of Team One’s officers into the old, filthy house. The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming and Dellray, no stranger to crime scenes, swallowed hard, struggling to keep from vomiting.

The second team secured the ground floor and then charged up the stairs toward the bedroom while the first sped down the basement stairs, boots thumping loudly on the old wood.

Dellray raced down into the foul-smelling basement. He heard a door being kicked in somewhere below and the shout of, “Don’t move! Federal agents. Freeze, freeze, freeze!”

But when he reached the basement doorway he heard the same agent blurt in a very different tone, “What the hell’s this? Oh, Jesus.”

“Fuck,” another one called. “That’s gross.”

“Shit in a flaming pile,” Dellray spat out, choking, as he stepped inside. Swallowing hard at the vile smell.

The man’s body lay on the floor, leaching black fluid. Throat cut. His dead, glazed eyes stared at the ceiling but his torso seemed to be moving – swelling and shifting. Dellray shuddered; he’d never developed much immunity to the sight of insect infestation. The number of bugs and worms suggested the vic’d been dead for at least three days.

“Why’d we get positive on the infrared?” one agent asked.

Dellray pointed out the rat and mouse teeth marks along the vic’s bloated leg and side. “They’re around here someplace. We interrupted dinner hour.”

“So what happened? One of the vics get him?”

“Watcha talkin’ about?” Dellray snapped.

“Isn’t that him?”

“No, it’s not him,” Dellray exploded, gazing at one particular wound on the corpse.

One of the team was frowning. “Naw, Dellray. This’s the guy. We got mug shots. That’s Pietrs.”

“Of course it’s fucking Pietrs. But he ain’t the unsub. Don’tcha get it?”

“No? What do you mean?”

It was all clear to him now. “Sumvabitch.”

Dellray’s phone chirped and made him jump. He flipped it open, listened for a minute. “She did what? Oh, like I really need this too… No, we don’t have the fucking perp in fucking custody.”

He jammed the OFF button, pointed an angry finger at two SWAT agents. “You’re coming with me.”

“What’s up, Dellray?”

“We gonna pay ourselves a visit. And what ain’t we gonna be when we do it?” The agents looked at each other, frowning. But Dellray supplied the answer. “We ain’t gonna be very nice at all.”

Mel Cooper shook the contents of the envelopes out onto newsprint. Examined the dust with an eye loupe. “Well, there’s the brick dust. And some other kind of stone. Marble, I think.”

He put a sample on the slide and examined it under the compound ’scope. “Yep, marble. Rose-colored.”

“Was there any marble at the stockyard tunnel? Where you found the German girl?”

“None,” Sachs responded.

Cooper suggested it might have come from Monelle’s residence hall when Unsub 823 grabbed her.

“No, I know the block the Deutsche Haus is in. It’s just a converted East Village tenement. The best stone you’d find there’d be polished granite. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a fleck of his hidey-hole. Anything notable about it?”

“Chisel marks,” Cooper said, bending over the ’scope.

“Ah, good. How clean?”

“Not very. Ragged.”

“So an old steam stonecutter?”

“Yes, I’d guess.”

“Write, Thom,” Rhyme instructed, nodding at the poster. “There’s marble in his safe house. And it’s old.”

“But why do we care about his safe house?” Banks asked, looking at his watch. “The feds’ll be there by now.”

“You can never have too much information, Banks. Remember that. Now, what else’ve we got?”

“Another bit of the glove. That red leather. And what’s this?” he asked Sachs, holding up a plastic bag containing a plug of wood.

“The sample of the aftershave. Where he brushed up against a post.”

“Should I run an olfactory profile?” Cooper wondered.

“Let me smell it first,” Rhyme said.

Sachs brought the bag over to him. Inside was a tiny disk of wood. She opened it up and he inhaled the air.

“Brut. How could you miss it? Thom, add that our man uses drugstore cologne.”

Cooper announced, “Here’s that other hair.” The technician mounted it in a comparison ’scope. “Very similar to the one we found earlier. Probably the same source. Oh, hell, Lincoln, for you, I’ll say it is the same. Brown.”

“Are the ends cut or fractured naturally?”

“Cut.”

“Good, we’re closing in on hair color,” Rhyme said.

Thom wrote brown just as Sellitto said, “Don’t write that!”

“What?”

“Obviously it’s not brown,” Rhyme continued.

“I thought -”

“It’s anything but brown. Blond, sandy, black, red…”

The detective explained, “ ‘S’an old trick. You go into an alley behind a barbershop, cop some hairs from the garbage. Drop ’em around the scene.”

“Oh.” Banks filed this somewhere in his enthusiastic brain.

Rhyme said, “Okay. The fiber.”

Cooper mounted it in the polarizing ’scope. As he adjusted knobs he said, “Birefringence of.053.”

Rhyme blurted, “Nylon 6. What’s it look like, Mel?”

“Very coarse. Lobed cross-section. Light gray.”

“Carpet.”

“Right. I’ll check the database.” A moment later he looked up from the computer. “It’s a Hampstead Textile 118B fiber.”

Rhyme exhaled a disgusted sigh.

“What?” Sachs asked.

“The most common trunk liner used by U.S. automakers. Found in over two hundred different makes going back fifteen years. Hopeless… Mel, is there anything on the fiber? Use the SEM.”

The tech cranked up the scanning electron microscope. The screen burst to life with an eerie blue-green glow. The strand of fiber looked like a huge rope.

“Got something here. Crystals. A lot of ’em. They use titanium dioxide to deluster shiny carpet. That might be it.”

“Gas it. It’s important.”

“There’s not enough here, Lincoln. I’d have to burn the whole fiber.”

“So, burn it.”

Sellitto said delicately, “Borrowing federal evidence is one thing. Destroying it? I don’t know ’bout that, Lincoln. If there’s a trial…”

“We have to.”

“Oh, man,” Banks said.

Sellitto nodded reluctantly and Cooper mounted the sample. The machine hissed. A moment later the screen flickered and columns appeared. “There, that’s the long-chained polymer molecule. The nylon. But that small wave, that’s something else. Chlorine, detergent… It’s cleanser.”

“Remember,” Rhyme said, “the German girl said the car smelled clean. Find out what kind it is.”

Cooper ran the information through a brand-name database. “Pfizer Chemicals makes it. It’s sold under the name Tidi-Kleen by Baer Automotive Products in Teterboro.”

“Perfect!” cried Lincoln Rhyme. “I know the company. They sell in bulk to fleets. Mostly rental-car companies. Our unsub’s driving a rental.”

“He wouldn’t be crazy enough to drive a rental car to crime scenes, would he?” Banks asked.

“It’s stolen,” Rhyme muttered, as if the young man had asked what was two plus two. “And it’ll have stolen tags on it. Is Emma still with us?”

“She’s probably home by now.”

“Wake her up and have her start canvassing Hertz, Avis, National, Budget for thefts.”

“Will do,” Sellitto said, though uneasily, perhaps smelling the faint stench of burned federal evidence wafting through the air.

“The footprints?” Sachs asked.

Rhyme looked over the electrostatic impressions she’d lifted.

“Unusual wear on the soles. See the rubbed-down portion on the outsides of each shoe at the ball of the foot?”

“Pigeon-toed?” Thom wondered aloud.

“Possibly but there’s no corresponding heel wear, which you’d expect to see.” Rhyme studied the prints. “What I think is, he’s a reader.”

“A reader?”

“Sit in a chair there,” Rhyme said to Sachs. “And hunch over the table, pretend you’re reading.”

She sat, then looked up. “And?”

“Pretend you’re turning pages.”

She did, several times. Looked up again.

“Keep going. You’re reading War and Peace.”

The pages kept turning, her head was bowed. After a moment, without thinking, she crossed her ankles. The outside edges of her shoes “were the only part that met the floor.

Rhyme pointed this out. “Put that in the profile, Thom. But add a question mark.

“Now let’s look at the friction ridges.”

Sachs said she didn’t have the good fingerprint, the one they’d ID’d the unsub with. “It’s still at the federal building.”

But Rhyme wasn’t interested in that print. It was the other one, the Kromekote Sachs had lifted from the German girl’s skin, he wanted to look at.

“Not scannable,” Cooper announced. “Isn’t even C grade. I wouldn’t give an opinion about this if I had to.”

Rhyme said, “I’m not interested in identity. I’m interested in that line there.” It was crescent-shaped and sat right in the middle of the pad of the finger.

“What is it?” Sachs asked.

“A scar, I think,” Cooper said. “From an old cut. A bad one. Looks like it went all the way to the bone.”

Rhyme thought back to other markings and defects he’d seen on skin over the years. In the days before jobs became mostly paper shuffling and computer key-boarding it was far easier to tell people’s jobs by examining their hands: distorted finger pads from manual typewriters, punctures from sewing machines and cobbler’s needles, indentations and ink stains from stenographers’ and accountants’ pens, paper cuts from printing presses, scars from die cutters, distinctive calluses from various types of manual labor…

But a scar like this told them nothing.

Not yet at any rate. Not until they had a suspect whose hands they might examine.

“What else? The knee print. This is good. Give us an idea of what he’s wearing. Hold it up, Sachs. Higher! Baggy slacks. It retained that deep crease there so it’s natural fiber. In this weather, I’ll bet cotton. Not wool. You don’t see silk slacks much nowadays.”

“Lightweight, not denim,” Cooper said.

“Sports clothes,” Rhyme concluded. “Add that to our profile, Thom.”

Cooper looked back at the computer screen and typed some more. “No luck with the leaf. Doesn’t match anything at the Smithsonian.”

Rhyme stretched back into his pillow. How much time would they have? An hour? Two?

The moon. Dirt. Brine…

He glanced at Sachs who was standing by herself in the corner. Her head was down and her long red hair fell dramatically toward the floor. She was looking into an evidence bag, a frown on her face, lost in concentration. How many times had Rhyme himself stood in the same pose, trying to -

“A newspaper!” she cried, looking up. “Where’s a newspaper?” Her eyes were frantic as she looked from table to table. “Today’s paper?”

“What is it, Sachs?” Rhyme asked.

She grabbed The New York Times from Jerry Banks and leafed quickly through it.

“That liquid… in the underwear,” she said to Rhyme. “Could it be salt water?”

“Salt water?” Cooper pored over the GC-MS chart. “Of course! Water and sodium and other minerals. And the oil, phosphates. It’s polluted seawater.”

Her eyes met Rhyme’s and they said simultaneously, “High tide!”

She held up the paper, open to the weather map. It contained a phases-of-the-moon diagram identical to the one found at the scene. Below it was a tidal chart. “High tide’s in forty minutes.”

Rhyme’s face curled in disgust. He was never angrier than when he was angry with himself. “He’s going to drown the vic. They’re under a pier downtown.” He looked hopelessly at the map of Manhattan, with its miles of shoreline. “Sachs, time to play race-car driver again. You and Banks go west. Lon, why don’t you take the East Side? Around the South Street Seaport. And Mel, figure out what the hell that leaf is!”

A fluke of wave slapped his sagging head.

William Everett opened his eyes and snorted the shivery water from his nose. It was icy cold and he felt his questionable heart stutter as it struggled to send warming blood through his body.

He almost fainted again, like when the son of a bitch’d broken his finger. Then he floated back to waking, his thoughts on his late wife – and for some reason, on their travels. They’d been to Giza. And to Guatemala. Nepal. Teheran (one week before the embassy takeover).

Their Southeast China Airlines plane had lost one of two engines an hour out of Beijing and Evelyn had lowered her head, the crash position, preparing to die and staring at an article in the in-flight magazine. It warned that drinking hot tea right after a meal was dangerous for you. She told him about it afterwards, at the Raffles bar in Singapore, and they’d laughed hysterically until tears came to their eyes.

Thinking of the kidnapper’s cold eyes. His teeth, the bulky gloves.

Now, in this horrid wet tomb the unbearable pain rolled up his arm and into his jaw.

Broken finger or heart attack? he wondered.

Maybe a little of both.

Everett closed his eyes until the pain subsided. He looked around him. The chamber where he was handcuffed was beneath a rotting pier. A lip of wood dipped from the edge toward the churning water, which was about six inches below the bottom of the rim. Lights from boats on the river and the industrial sites of Jersey reflected through the narrow slit. The water was up to his neck now and although the roof of the pier was several feet above his head the cuffs were extended as far as they’d go.

The pain swept up from his finger again and Everett’s head roared with the agony and dipped toward the water as he passed out. A noseful of water and the racking cough that followed revived him.

Then the moon tugged the plane of water slightly higher and with a sodden gulp the chamber was sealed off from the river outside. The room went dark. He was aware of the sounds of groaning waves and his own moaning from the pain.

He knew he was dead, knew he couldn’t keep his head above the greasy surface for more than a few minutes. He closed his eyes, pressed his face against the slick, black column.

TWENTY-ONE

“ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN, SACHS,” Rhyme’s voice clattered from the radio.

She punched the accelerator of the RRV, red lights flashing, as they screamed downtown along the West Side Highway. Ice-cool, she goosed the wagon up to eighty.

“Okay, whoa,” said Jerry Banks.

Counting down. Twenty-third Street, Twentieth, the skidding jog at the Fourteenth Street garbage-barge dock. As they roared through the Village, the meatpacking district, a semi pulled out of a side street directly into her path. Instead of braking she nudged the wagon over the center curb like a steeple-chaser, drawing breathless oaths from Banks and a wail from the air horn of the big White, which jackknifed spectacularly.

“Oops,” said Amelia Sachs and swung back into the southbound lane. To Rhyme she added, “Say again. Missed that.”

Rhyme’s tinny voice popped through her earphones. “Downtown is all I can tell you. Until we figure out what the leaf means.”

“We’re coming up on Battery Park City.”

“Twenty-five minutes to high tide,” Banks called.

Maybe Dellray’s team could get the exact location out of him. They could drag Mr. 823 into an alley somewhere with a bag of apples. Nick had told her that was the way they talked perps into “cooperating.” Whack ’em in the gut with a bag of fruit. Really painful. No marks. When she was growing up she wouldn’t have thought cops did that. Now she knew different.

Banks tapped her shoulder. “There. A bunch of old piers.”

UNSUB 823 (page 1 of 4)

Appearance

Caucasian male, slight build

•Dark clothing

•Old gloves, reddish kidskin

Residence

•Prob. has safe house

•Located near:B’way & 82nd,

•ShopRite B’way &96th,

• Anderson Foods

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

Other

•knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

UNSUB 823 (page 2 of 4)

Appearance

•Aftershave; to cover up other scent?

•Ski mask? Navy blue?

•Gloves are dark

Residence

• Greenwich & Bank,

•ShopRite 2nd Ave., 72nd-73rd,

• Grocery World Battery Park City,

•J &G’s Emporium 1709 2nd Ave.,

Vehicle

•Recent model sedan

Other

•Ties vics w/ unusual knots

•“Old” appeals to him

•Called one vic “Hanna”

UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 4)

Appearance

•Aftershave = Brut

•Hair color not brown

Residence

• Anderson Foods 34th & Lex.,

•Food Warehouse 8th Ave. & 24th,

•ShopRite Houston & Lafayette,

•ShopRite 6th Ave. & Houston,

Vehicle

•Lt. gray, silver, beige

Other

•Knows basic German

•Underground appeals to him

•Dual personalities

UNSUB 823 (page 4 of 4)

Appearance

•Deep scar, index finger

•Casual clothes

Residence

•J &G’s Emporium Greenwich & Franklin,

•Grocery World

•Old building, pink marble

Vehicle

•Rental car;

prob. stolen

Other

•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

Rotten wood, filthy? Spooky places.

They skidded to a stop and climbed out, running toward the water.

“You there, Rhyme?”

“Talk to me, Sachs. Where are you?”

“A pier just north of Battery Park City.”

“I just heard from Lon, on the East Side. He hasn’t found anything.”

“It’s hopeless,” she said. “There’re a dozen piers. Then the whole promenade… And the fireboat house and ferry docks and the pier at Battery Park… We need ESU.”

“We don’t have ESU, Sachs. They’re not on our side anymore.”

Twenty minutes to high tide.

Her eyes darted along the waterfront. Her shoulders sagged with helplessness. Hand on her weapon, she sprinted to the river, Jerry Banks not far behind.

“Get me something on that leaf, Mel. A guess, anything. Wing it.”

Fidgeting, Cooper looked from the microscope to the computer screen.

Eight thousand varieties of leafy plants in Manhattan.

“It doesn’t fit the cell structure of anything.”

“It’s old,” Rhyme said. “How old?”

Cooper looked at the leaf again. “Mummified. I’d put it at a hundred years, little less maybe.”

“What’s gone extinct in the last hundred years?”

“Plants don’t go extinct in an ecosystem like Manhattan. They always show up again.”

A ping in Rhyme’s mind. He was close to remembering something. He both loved and hated this feeling. He might grab the thought like a slow pop-up fly. Or it might vanish completely, leaving him with only the sting of lost inspiration.

Sixteen minutes to high tide.

What was the thought? He grappled with it, closed his eyes…

Pier, he was thinking. The vic’s under a pier.

What about it? Think!

Pier… ships… unloading… cargo.

Unloading cargo!

His eyes snapped open. “Mel, is it a crop?”

“Oh, hell. I’ve been looking at general-horticulture pages, not cultivated crops.” He typed for what seemed like hours.

“Well?”

“Hold on, hold on. Here’s a list of the encoded binaries.” He scanned it. “Alfalfa, barley, beets, corn, oats, tobacco…”

“Tobacco! Try that.”

Cooper double clicked his mouse and the image slowly unfurled on the screen.

“That’s it!”

“The World Trade Towers,” Rhyme announced. “The land from there north used to be tobacco plantations. Thom, the research for my book – I want the map from the 1740s. And that modern map Bo Haumann was using for the asbestos-cleanup sites. Put them up there on the wall, next to each other.”

The aide found the old map in Rhyme’s files. He taped them both onto the wall near his bed. Crudely drawn, the older map showed the northern part of the settled city – a cluster on the lower portion of the isle – covered with plantations. There were three commercial wharves along the river, which was then called not the Hudson but the West River. Rhyme glanced at the recent map of the city. The farmland was gone of course, as were the original wharves, but the contemporary map showed an abandoned wharf in the exact location of one of the tobacco exporter’s old piers.

Rhyme strained forward, struggling to see the street name it was near. He was about to shout for Thom to come hold the map closer when, from downstairs, he heard a loud snap and the door crashed inward. Glass shattered.

Thom started down the stairs.

“I want to see him.” The terse voice filled the hallway.

“Just a – ” the aide began.

“No. Not inaminute, not in a hour. But right. Fucking. Now.”

“Mel,” Rhyme whispered, “ditch the evidence, shut the systems down.”

“But -”

“Do it!”

Rhyme shook his head violently, dislodging the headset microphone. It fell onto the side of the Clinitron. Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

Thom did the best he could to stall but the visitors were three federal agents and two of the three were holding large guns. Slowly they backed him up the stairs.

Bless him, Mel Cooper pulled apart a compound microscope in five seconds flat and was calmly replacing the components with meticulous care as the FBI crested the stairs and stormed into Rhyme’s room. The evidence bags were stuffed under a table and covered with National Geographics.

“Ah, Dellray,” Rhyme asked. “Find our unsub, did you?”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Tell you what?”

“That the fingerprint was bogus.”

“No one asked me.”

“Bogus?” Cooper asked, mystified.

“Well, it was a real print,” Rhyme said, as if it were obvious. “But it wasn’t the unsub’s. Our boy needed a taxi to catch his fish with. So he met – what was his name?”

“Victor Pietrs,” Dellray muttered and gave the cabbie’s history.

“Nice touch,” Rhyme said with some genuine admiration.

“Picked a Serb with a rap sheet and mental problems. Wonder how long he looked for a candidate. Anyway, 823 killed poor Mr. Pietrs and stole his cab. Cut off his finger. He kept it and figured if we were getting too close he’d leave a nice obvious print at a scene to throw us off. I guess it worked.”

Rhyme glanced at the clock. Fourteen minutes left.

“How’d you know?” Dellray glanced at the maps on Rhyme’s wall but, thank God, wasn’t interested in them.

“The print showed signs of dehydration and shriveling. Bet the body was a mess. And you found it in the basement? Am I right? Where our boy likes to stow his victims.”

Dellray ignored him and nosed around the room like a giant terrier. “Where you hidin’ our evidence?”

“Evidence? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Say, did you break my door? Last time you walked in without knocking. Now you just kicked it in.”

“You know, Lincoln, I was thinking of apologizing to you for before -”

“That’s big of you, Fred.”

“But now I’m a inch away from collaring your ass.”

Rhyme glanced down at the microphone headset, dangling on the floor. He imagined Sachs’s voice bleating from the earphones.

“Gimme that evidence, Rhyme. You don’t realize what kind of pissy-bad trouble you’re in.”

“Thom,” Rhyme asked slowly, “Agent Dellray startled me and I dropped my Walkman headset. Could you hook it on the bedframe?”

The aide didn’t miss a beat. He rested the mike next to Rhyme’s head, out of Dellray’s sight.

“Thank you,” Rhyme said to Thom. Then added, “You know, I haven’t had my bath yet, I think it’s about time, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve been wondering when you were going to ask,” said Thom, with the ability of a natural-born actor.

“Come in, Rhyme. For Christ’s sake. Where are you?”

Then she heard a voice in her headset. Thom’s. It sounded stilted, exaggerated. Something was wrong.

“I’ve got the new sponge,” the voice said.

“Looks like a good one,” Rhyme answered.

“Rhyme?” Sachs blurted. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Cost seventeen dollars. It ought to be good. I’m going to turn you over.”

More voices sounded through the earphone but she couldn’t make them out.

Sachs and Banks were jogging along the waterfront, peering over the wharves into the gray-brown water of the Hudson. She motioned to Banks to stop, leaned away from the cramp below her breastbone, spit into the river. Tried to catch her breath.

Through the headset she heard: “… won’t take long. You’ll have to excuse us, gentlemen.”

“… we’ll just wait, you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” Rhyme said. “Can’t I get a little privacy here?”

“Rhyme, can you hear me?” Sachs called desperately. What the hell was he doing?

“Nup. No privacy for them that steal evidence.”

Dellray! He was in Rhyme’s room. Well, that’s the end of it. The vic’s as good as dead.

“I want that evidence,” the agent barked.

“Well, what you’re going to get is a panoramic view of a man taking a sponge bath, Dellray.”

Banks started to speak but she waved him quiet.

Some muttered words she couldn’t hear.

The agent’s angry shout.

Then Rhyme’s calm voice again. “… You know, Dellray, I used to be a swimmer. Swam every day.”

“We’ve got less than ten minutes,” Sachs whispered. The water lapped calmly. Two placid boats cruised past.

Dellray muttered something.

“I’d go down to the Hudson River and swim. It was a lot cleaner then. The water, I mean.”

A garbled transmission. He was breaking up.

“…old pier. My favorite one’s gone now. Used to be the home of the Hudson Dusters. That gang, you ever hear of them? In the 1890s. North of where Battery Park City is now. You look bored. Tired of looking at a crip’s flabby ass? No? Suit yourself. That pier was between North Moore and Chambers. I’d dive in, swim around the piers…”

“North Moore and Chambers!” Sachs shouted. Spinning around. They’d missed it because they’d gone too far south. It was a quarter mile from where they were. She could see the brown scabby wood, a large drainpipe backing up with tidal water. How much time was left? Hardly any. There was no way they could save him.

She ripped the headset off and started sprinting to the car, Banks close behind.

“Can you swim?” she asked.

“Me? A lap or two at the Health and Racquet Club.”

They’d never make it.

Sachs stopped suddenly, spun around in a fast circle, gazing at the deserted streets.

The water was nearly to his nose.

A small wave washed over William Everett’s face just as he inhaled and the foul, salty liquid streamed into his throat. He began to choke, a deep, horrible sound. Racking. The water filled his lungs. He lost his grip on the pier piling and sank under the surface, stiffened and rose once more, then sank again.

No, Lord, no… please don’t let -

He shook the cuffs, kicked hard, trying to get some play. As if some miracle might happen and his puny muscles could bend the huge bolt he was cuffed to.

Snorting water from his nose, swiping his head back and forth in panic. He cleared his lungs momentarily. Neck muscles on fire – as painful as his shattered finger – from bending his head back to find the faint layer of air just above his face.

He had a moment’s respite.

Then another wave, slightly higher.

And that was it.

He couldn’t fight anymore. Surrender. Join Evelyn, say goodbye…

And William Everett let go. He floated beneath the surface into the drecky water, full of junk and tendrils of seaweed.

Then jerked back in horror. No, no…

He was here. The kidnapper! He’d come back.

Everett kicked to the surface, sneezing more water, trying desperately to get away. The man shone a brilliant light into Everett’s eyes and reached toward him with a knife.

No, no…

It wasn’t enough to drown him, he had to slash him to death. Without thinking Everett kicked out toward him. But the kidnapper vanished under the water… and then, snap, Everett ’s hands were free.

The old man forgot his placid goodbyes and kicked like hell to the surface, sucking sour air through his nose and ripping the tape from his mouth. Gasping, spitting the foul water. His head banged solidly into the underside of the oak pier and he laughed out loud. “Oh, God, God, God…”

Then another face appeared… Also hooded, with another blindingly bright lamp attached, and Everett could just make out the NYPD emblem on the man’s wetsuit. They weren’t knives the men held but metal cutters. One of them thrust a bitter rubber mouthpiece between Everett’s lips and he inhaled a dazzling breath of oxygen.

The diver slipped his arm around him and together they swam to the lip of the pier.

“Take a deep breath, we’ll be out in a minute.”

He filled his narrow lungs to bursting and, eyes closed, sailed with the diver deep into the water, lit eerily by the man’s yellow light. It was a short but harrowing trip, straight down then up again through cloudy, flecked water. Once he slipped out of the diver’s hands and they separated momentarily. But William Everett took the glitch in stride. After this evening, a solo swim in the choppy Hudson River was a piece of cake.

She hadn’t planned on taking a cab. The airport bus would’ve been fine.

But Pammy was wired from too little sleep – they’d both been up since five that morning – and she was getting restless. The little girl needed to be in bed soon, tucked away with her blanket and her bottle of Hawaiian Punch. Besides, Carole herself couldn’t wait to get to Manhattan – she was just a skinny Midwest gal who’d never been farther east than Ohio in all her forty-one years, and she was dying for her first look at the Big Apple.

Carole collected her luggage and they started toward the exit. She checked to make sure she had everything they’d left Kate and Eddie’s house with that afternoon.

Pammy, Pooh, purse, blanket, suitcase, yellow knapsack.

Everything accounted for.

Her friends had warned her about the city. “They’ll hustle you,” Eddie’d said. “Purse snatchers, pickpockets.”

“And don’t play those card games on the street,” maternal Kate had added.

“I don’t play cards in my living room,” Carole reminded her, laughing. “Why’m I going to start playing on the streets of Manhattan?”

But she appreciated their concern. After all, here she was, a widow with a three-year-old, heading to the toughest city on earth for the UN conference – more foreigners, hell, more people than she’d ever seen at one time.

Carole found a pay phone and called the residence hotel to check on their reservations. The night manager said the room was ready and waiting for them. He’d see them in forty-five minutes or so.

They walked through automatic doors and were socked breathless by the scalding summer air. Carole paused, looking around. Gripping Pammy firmly with one hand, the handle of the battered suitcase with the other. The heavy yellow knapsack was snug on her shoulder.

They joined the line of passengers waiting at the taxi starter’s booth.

Carole glanced at a huge billboard across the highway. Welcome U.N. Delegates! it announced. The artwork was terrible, but she stared at it for a long moment; one of the men on the billboard looked like Ronnie.

For a time, after he died, two years ago, virtually everything reminded her of her handsome, crew-cut husband. She’d drive past McDonald’s and remember that he liked Big Macs. Actors in movies who didn’t look a thing like him might cock their heads the way he used to. She’d see a flyer for a lawn-mower sale and remember how much he loved to cut their tiny square of grass in Arlington Heights.

Then the tears would come. And she’d go back on Prozac or imipramine. She’d spend a week in bed. Reluctantly acquiesce in Kate’s offer that she stay with her and Eddie for a night. Or a week. Or a month.

But no tears anymore. She was here to jump-start her life. The sorrow was behind her now.

Tossing her mass of dark-blond hair off her sweaty shoulders, Carole ushered Pammy forward and kicked the luggage ahead of them as the taxi queue moved up several places. She looked all around, trying to catch a glimpse of Manhattan. But she could see nothing except traffic and the tails of airplanes and a sea of people and cabs and cars. Steam rose like frantic ghosts from manholes and the night sky was black and yellow and hazy.

Well, she’d see the city soon enough, she guessed. She hoped that Pammy was old enough to keep her first memory of the sight.

“How do you like our adventure so far, honey?”

“Adventure. I like adventures. I want some ’Waiin Punch. Can I please have some?”

Please… That was new. The three-year-old was learning all the keys and buttons. Carole laughed. “We’ll get you some soon.”

Finally they got their cab. The trunk popped open and Carole dumped the luggage inside, slammed the lid. They climbed into the back seat and closed the door.

Pammy, Pooh, purse…

The driver asked, “Where to?” And Carole gave him the address of the Midtown Residence Hotel, shouting through the Plexiglas divider.

The driver pulled into traffic. Carole sat back and settled Pammy on her lap.

“Will we go past the UN?” she called.

But the man was concentrating on changing lanes and didn’t hear her.

“I’m here for the conference,” she explained. “The UN conference.”

Still no answer.

She wondered if he had trouble with English. Kate had warned her that the taxi drivers in New York were all foreigners. (“Taking American jobs,” Eddie grumbled. “But don’t get me started on that.”) She couldn’t see him clearly through the scuffed divider.

Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk.

They swung onto another highway – and, suddenly, there it was in front of her, the jagged skyline of the city. Brilliant. Like the crystals that Kate and Eddie collected. A huge cluster of blue and gold and silver buildings in the middle of the island and another cluster way to the left. It was bigger than anything Carole had ever seen in her life and for a moment the island seemed like a massive ship.

“Look, Pammy, that’s where we’re going. Is that beeaaautiful or what?”

A moment later, though, the view was cut off as the driver turned off the expressway and made a fast turn at the bottom of the ramp. Then they were moving through hot, deserted streets, lined with dark brick buildings.

Carole leaned forward. “Is this the right way to the city?”

Again, no answer.

She rapped hard on the Plexiglas. “Are you going the right way? Answer me. Answer me!”

“Mommy, what’s wrong?” Pammy said and started to cry.

“Where are you going?” Carole shouted.

But the man just kept driving – leisurely, stopping at all the red lights, never going over the speed limit. And when he pulled into the deserted parking lot behind a dark, abandoned factory he made sure he signaled properly.

Oh no… no!

He pulled on a ski mask and climbed from the cab. Walking to the back, he reached for the door. But he hesitated and his hand dropped. He leaned forward, face against the window, and tapped on the glass. Once, twice, three times. Getting the attention of lizards in the reptile room at a zoo. He stared at the mother and daughter for a long moment before he opened the door.

TWENTY-TWO

“HOW’D YOU DO IT, SACHS?”

Standing beside the pungent Hudson River, she spoke into her stalk mike. “I remembered seeing the fireboat station at Battery Park. They scrambled a couple divers and were at the pier in about three minutes. Man, you should’ve seen that boat move! I want to try one of those someday.”

Rhyme explained to her about the fingerless cabbie.

“Son of a bitch!” she said, clicking her tongue in disgust. “The weasel tricked us all.”

“Not all of us,” Rhyme reminded her coyly.

“So Dellray knows I boosted the evidence. Is he looking for me?”

“He said he was heading back to the federal building. Probably to decide which one of us to collar first. How’s the scene there, Sachs?”

“Pretty bad,” she reported. “He parked on gravel -”

“So no footprints.”

“But it’s worse than that. The tide backed out of this big drainpipe and where he parked’s underwater.”

“Hell,” Rhyme muttered. “No trace, no prints, no nothing. How’s the vic?”

“Not so good. Exposure, broken finger. He’s had heart problems. They’re going to keep him in the hospital for a day or two.”

“Can he tell us anything?”

Sachs walked over to Banks, who was interviewing William Everett.

“He wasn’t big,” the man said matter-of-factly, carefully examining the splint the medic was putting on his hand. “And he wasn’t really strong, not a muscle man. But he was stronger’n me. I grabbed him and he just pulled my hands away.”

“Description?” Banks asked.

Everett recounted the dark clothes and ski mask. That was all he could remember.

“One thing I should tell you,” Everett held up his bandaged hand. “He’s got a mean streak. I grabbed him, like I said. I wasn’t thinking – I just panicked. But he got real mad. That’s when he busted my finger.”

“Retaliation, hm?” Banks asked.

“I guess. But that’s not the strange part.”

“No?”

“The strange part is he listened to it.”

The young detective had stopped writing. Looked at Sachs.

“He held my hand against his ear, real tight, and bent the finger until it broke. Like he was listening. And liking it.”

“Did you hear that, Rhyme?”

“Yes. Thom’s added it to our profile. I don’t know what it means, though. We’ll have to think about it.”

“Any sign of the planted PE?”

“Not yet.”

“Grid it, Sachs. Oh, and get the vic’s -”

“Clothes? I’ve already asked him. I – Rhyme, you all right?” She heard a fit of coughing.

The transmission was shut off momentarily. He came back on a moment later. “You there, Rhyme? Everything okay?”

“Fine,” he said quickly. “Get going. Walk the grid.”

She surveyed the scene, lit starkly by the ESU halogens. It was so frustrating. He’d been here. He’d walked on the gravel just a few feet away. But whatever PE he’d inadvertently left behind was lying inches below the surface of the dim water. She covered the ground slowly. Back and forth.

“I can’t see anything. The clues might’ve been washed away.”

“No, he’s too smart not to’ve taken the tide into account. They’ll be on dry land somewhere.”

“I’ve got an idea,” she said suddenly. “Come on down here.”

“What?”

“Work the scene with me, Rhyme.”

Silence.

“Rhyme, did you hear me?”

“Are you talking to me?” he asked.

“You look like De Niro. You can’t act as good as De Niro. You know? That scene from Taxi Driver?”

Rhyme didn’t laugh. He said, “The line’s ‘Are you looking at me?’ Not ‘talking to me.’”

Sachs continued, unfazed, “Come on down. Work the scene with me.”

“I’ll spread my wings. No, better yet, I’ll project myself there. Telepathy, you know.”

“Quit joking. I’m serious.”

“I -”

“We need you. I can’t find the planted clues.”

“But they’ll be there. You just have to try a little harder.”

“I’ve walked the entire grid twice.”

“Then you’ve defined the perimeter too narrowly. Add another few feet and keep going. Eight twenty-three’s not finished yet, not by a long shot.”

“You’re changing the subject. Come on down and help me.”

“How?” Rhyme asked. “How’m I supposed to do that?”

“I had a friend who was challenged,” she began. “And he -”

“You mean he was a crip,” Rhyme corrected. Softly but firmly.

She continued, “His aide’d put him into this fancy wheelchair every morning and he drove himself all over the place. To the movies, to -”

“Those chairs…” Rhyme’s voice sounded hollow. “They don’t work for me.”

She stopped speaking.

He continued, “The problem’s how I was injured. It’d be dangerous for me to be in a wheelchair. It could” – he hesitated – “make things worse.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

After a moment he said, “Of course you didn’t.”

Blew that one. Oh, boy. Brother…

But Rhyme didn’t seem any the worse for her faux pas. His voice was smooth, unemotional. “Listen, you’ve got to get on with the search. Our unsub’s making it trickier. But it won’t be impossible… Here’s an idea. He’s the underground man, right? Maybe he buried them.”

She looked over the scene.

Maybe there… She saw a mound of earth and leaves in a patch of tall grass near the gravel. It didn’t look right; the mound seemed too assembled.

Sachs crouched beside it, lowered her head and, using the pencils, began to clear away leaves.

She turned her face slightly to the left and found she was staring at a rearing head, bared fangs…

“Jesus Lord,” she shouted, stumbling backwards, falling hard on her butt, scrambling to draw her weapon.

No…

Rhyme shouted, “You all right?”

Sachs drew a target and tried to steady the gun with very unsteady hands. Jerry Banks came running up, his own Glock drawn. He stopped. Sachs climbed to her feet, looking at what was in front of them.

“Man,” Banks whispered.

“It’s a snake – well, a snake’s skeleton,” Sachs told Rhyme. “A rattlesnake. Fuck.” Holstered the Glock. “It’s mounted on a board.”

“A snake? Interesting.” Rhyme sounded intrigued.

“Yeah, real interesting,” she muttered. She pulled on latex gloves and lifted the coiled bones. She turned it over. “ ‘Metamorphosis.’ ”

“What?”

“A label on the bottom. The name of the store it came from, I’d guess. 604 Broadway.”

Rhyme said, “I’ll have the Hardy Boys check it out. What’ve we got? Tell me the clues.”

They were underneath the snake. In a Baggie. Her heart pounded as she crouched down over the bag.

“A book of matches,” she said.

“Okay, maybe he’s thinking arson. Anything printed on them?”

“Nope. But there’s a smear of something. Like Vaseline. Only stinky.”

“Good, Sachs – always smell evidence you’re not sure about. Only be more precise.”

She bent close. “Yuck.”

“That’s not precise.”

“Sulfur maybe.”

“Could be nitrate-based. Explosive. Tovex. Is it blue?”

“No, it’s milky clear.”

“Even if it could go bang I imagine it’s a secondary explosive. They’re the stable ones. Anything else?”

“Another scrap of paper. Something on it.”

“What, Sachs? His name, his address, e-mail handle?”

“Looks like it’s from a magazine. I can see a small black-and-white photo. Looks like part of a building but you can’t see which one. And underneath that, all you can read is a date. May 20, 1906.”

“Five, twenty, oh-six. I wonder if it’s a code. Or an address. I’ll have to think about it. Anything else?”

“Nope.”

She heard him sigh. “All right, come on back, Sachs. What time is it? My God, almost one a.m. I haven’t been up this late in years. Come on back and let’s see what we have.”

Of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Lower East Side has remained the most unchanged over the course of the city’s history.

Much of it’s gone of course: The rolling pastoral fields. The solid mansions of John Hancock and early government luminaries. Der Kolek, the large freshwater lake (its Dutch name eventually corrupted to “The Collect,” which more accurately described the grossly polluted pond). The notorious Five Points neighborhood – in the early 1800s the most dangerous square mile on earth – where a single tenement, like the decrepit Gates of Hell, might be the site of two or three hundred murders every year.

But thousands of the old buildings remained – tenements from the nineteenth century and Colonial frame houses and Federal brick townhomes from the prior one, Baroque meeting halls, several of the Egyptian-style public buildings constructed by order of the regally corrupt Congressman Fernando Wood. Some were abandoned, their facades overgrown with weeds and floors cracked by persistent saplings. But many were still in use; this had been the land of Tammany Hall iniquity, of pushcarts and sweat-shops, of the Henry Street Settlement house, Minsky’s burlesque and the notorious Yiddish Gomorra – the Jewish Mafia. A neighborhood that gives birth to institutions like these does not die easily.

It was toward this neighborhood that the bone collector now piloted the taxi containing the thin woman and her young daughter.

Observing that the constabulary was on to him, James Schneider went once again to ground like the serpent that he was, seeking accommodations – it is speculated – in the cellars of the city’s many tenant-houses (which the reader may perchance recognize as the still-prevalent “tenements”). And so he remained, quiescent for some months.

As he drove home, the bone collector saw around him not the Manhattan of the 1990s – the Korean delis, the dank bagel shops, the X-rated-video stores, the empty clothing boutiques – but a dreamy world of bowler-clad men, women in rustling crinoline, hems and cuffs filthy with street refuse. Hordes of buggies and wagons, the air filled with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes repulsive scent of methane.

But such was the foul, indefatigable drive within him to start his collection anew that he was soon forced from his lair to waylay yet another good citizen; – this, a young man newly arrived in town to attend university.

Driving through the notorious Eighteenth Ward, once the home of nearly fifty thousand people crammed into a thousand decrepit tenements. When most people thought of the nineteenth century they thought in sepia – because of old photographs. But this was wrong. Old Manhattan was the color of stone. With choking industrial smoke, paint prohibitively expensive and dim lighting, the city was many shades of gray and yellow.

Schneider snuck up behind the fellow and was about to strike when Fortune’s conscience, at last, cried out. Two constables chanced upon the assault. They recognized Schneider and gave chase. The killer fled east, across that engineering marvel, the Manhattan Bridge, completed In 1909, two years before these events. But he stopped halfway across, seeing that three constables were approaching from Brooklyn, having heard the alarm raised by the whistles and pistol reports of their confederates from Manhattan.

Schneider, unarmed, as chance would have it, climbed onto the railing of the bridge as he was surrounded by the law. He shouted maniacal diatribes against the constables, condemning them for having ruined his life. His words grew ever madder. As the constabulary moved closer, he leapt from the rail into the River. A week later a pilot discovered his body on the shore of Welfare Island, near Hell Gale. There was little left, for the crabs and turtles had been diligently working to reduce Schneider to the very bone which he, in his madness, cherished.

He turned the taxi onto his deserted cobblestoned street, East Van Brevoort, and paused in front of the building. He checked the two filthy strings he’d run low across the doors to make certain that no one had entered. A sudden motion startled him and he heard the guttural snarling of the dogs again, their eyes yellow, teeth brown, bodies dotted with scars and sores. His hand strayed to his pistol but they suddenly turned and, yelping, charged after a cat or rat in the alley.

He saw no one on the hot sidewalks and opened the padlock securing the carriage-house door then climbed back inside the car and drove into the garage, parked beside his Taurus.

After the villain’s death his effects were secured and perused by detectives. His diary showed that he had murdered eight good citizens of the city. Nor was he above grave robbery, for it was ascertained from his pages (if his claims be true) that he had violated several holy resting places In cemeteries around the city. None of his victims had accorded him the least affront; – nay, most were upstanding citizens, industrious and innocent. And yet he felt not a modicum of guilt. Indeed, he seems to have labored under the mad delusion that he was doing his victims a favor.

He paused, wiped sweat from his mouth. The ski mask itched. He dragged the woman and her daughter out of the trunk and through the garage. She was strong and fought hard. At last he managed to get the cuffs on them.

“You prick!” she howled. “Don’t you dare touch my daughter. You touch her and I’ll kill you.”

He gripped her hard around the chest and taped her mouth. Then he did the little girl’s too.

“Flesh withers and can be weak,” – (the villain wrote in his ruthless yet steady hand) – “Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone. It is a noble goal I had, and it is beyond me why any-one might quarrel with it. I did a kindness to them all. They are immortal now. I freed them. I took them down to the bone.”

He dragged them into the basement and pushed the woman down hard on the floor, her daughter beside her. Tied their cuffs to the wall with clothesline. Then returned upstairs.

He lifted her yellow knapsack from the back of the cab, the suitcases from the trunk, and pushed through a bolt-studded wooden door into the main room of the building. He was about to toss them into a corner but found that, for some reason, he was curious about these particular captives. He sat down in front of one of the murals – a painting of a butcher, placidly holding a knife in one hand, a slab of beef in the other.

He examined the luggage tag. Carole Ganz. Carole with an E. Why the extra letter? he wondered. The suitcase contained nothing but clothes. He started through the knapsack. He found the cash right away. There must have been four or five thousand. He put it back in the zippered compartment.

There were a dozen child’s toys: a doll, a tin of water-colors, a package of modeling clay, a Mr. Potato Head kit. There were also an expensive Discman, a half-dozen CDs and a Sony travel clock radio.

He looked through some pictures. Photos of Carole and her girl. In most of the pictures the woman seemed very somber. In a few others, she seemed happier. There were no photos of Carole and her husband even though she wore a wedding ring. Many were of the mother and daughter with a couple – a heavyset woman wearing one of those old granny dresses and a bearded, balding man in a flannel shirt.

For a long time the bone collector gazed at a portrait of the little girl.

The fate of poor Maggie O’Connor, the young slip of a girl, merely eight years of age, was particularly sad. It was her misfortune, the police speculate, that she stumbled across the path of James Schneider as he was disposing of one of his victims.

The girl, a resident of the notorious “Hell’s Kitchen,” had gone out to pluck horsehairs from one of the many dead animals found in that impoverished part of the city. It was the custom of youngsters to wind tail-hairs into bracelets and rings – the only trinkets such urchins might have to adorn themselves with.

Skin and bone, skin and bone.

He propped the photo on the mantelpiece, beside the small pile of bones he’d been working on that morning and some that he’d stolen from the store where he’d found the snake.

It is surmised that Schneider found young Maggie near his lair, witnessing the macabre spectacle of his murdering one of his victims. Whether he dispatched her quickly or slowly we cannot guess. But unlike his other victims, whose remains were ultimately discovered, – of frail, becurled Maggie O’Connor, nought was ever found.

The bone collector walked downstairs.

He ripped the tape off the mother’s mouth and the woman gasped for air, eyed him with cold fury. “What do you want?” she rasped. “What?”

She wasn’t as thin as Esther but, thank God, she was nothing at all like fat Hanna Goldschmidt. He could see so much of her soul. The narrow mandible, the clavicle. And, through the thin blue skirt, the hint of the innominate bone – a fusion of the ilium, the ischium, the pubis. Names like Roman gods’.

The little girl squirmed. He leaned forward and placed his hand on her head. Skulls don’t grow from a single piece of bone but from eight separate ones, and the crown rises up like the triangular slabs of the Astrodome roof. He touched the girl’s occipital bone, the parietal bones of the cap of the skull. And two of his favorites, the sensuous bones around the eye sockets – the sphenoid and the ethmoid.

“Stop it!” Carole shook her head, furious. “Keep away from her.”

“Shhhh,” he said, holding his gloved finger to his lips. He looked at the little girl, who cried and pressed close to her mother.

“Maggie O’Connor,” he cooed, looking at the shape of the girl’s face. “My little Maggie.”

The woman glared at him.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, child. What did you see me do?”

Young in the bone.

“What are you talking about?” Carole whispered. He turned his attention to her.

The bone collector had always wondered about Maggie O’Connor’s mother.

“Where’s your husband?”

“He’s dead,” she spat out. Then glanced at the little girl and said more softly, “He was killed two years ago. Look, just let my daughter go. She can’t tell them anything about you. Are you… listening to me? What are you doing?”

He gripped Carole’s hands and lifted them.

He fondled the metacarpals of the wrists. The phalanges – the tiny fingers. Squeezing the bones.

“No, don’t do that. I don’t like that. Please!” Her voice crackled with panic.

He felt out of control and didn’t like the sensation one bit. If he was going to succeed here, with the victims, with his plans, he had to fight down the encroaching lust – the madness was driving him further and further into the past, confusing the now with the then.

Before and after…

He needed all of his intelligence and craftiness to finish what he’d started.

And yet… yet…

She was so thin, she was so taut. He closed his eyes and imagined how a knife blade scraping over her tibia would sing like the bowing of an old violin.

His breathing was fast, he was sweating rivers.

When finally he opened his eyes he found he was looking at her sandals. He didn’t have many foot bones in good condition. The homeless people he’d been preying on in the past months… well, they’d suffered from rickets and osteoporosis, their toes were impacted by badly fitting shoes.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he heard himself saying.

She looked down at her daughter. Wriggled closer to her.

“I’ll make a deal. I’ll let you go if you let me do something.”

“What?” Carole whispered.

“Let me take your skin off.”

She blinked.

He whispered, “Let me. Please? A foot. Just one of your feet. If you do that I’ll let you go.”

“What…?”

“Down to the bone.”

She gazed at him with horror. Swallowed.

What would it matter? he thought. She was so nearly there anyway, so thin, so angular. Yes, there was something different about her – different from the other victims.

He put the pistol away and took the knife out of his pocket. Opened it with a startling click.

She didn’t move, her eyes slid to the little girl. Back to him.

“You’ll let us go?”

He nodded. “You haven’t seen my face. You don’t know where this place is.”

A long moment. She stared around her at the basement. She muttered a word. A name, he thought. Ron or Rob.

And with her eyes firmly on his, she extended her legs and pushed her feet toward him. He slipped her shoe off the right foot.

He took her toes. Kneaded the fragile twigs.

She leaned back, the cables of her tendons rising beautifully from her neck. Her eyes squeezed shut. He caressed her skin with the blade.

A firm grip on the knife.

She closed her eyes, inhaled and gave a faint whimper. “Go ahead,” she whispered. And turned the girl’s face away. Hugged her tightly.

The bone collector imagined her in a Victorian outfit, crinoline and black lace. He saw the three of them, sitting together at Delmonico’s or strolling down Fifth Avenue. He saw little Maggie with them, dressed in frothy lace, rolling a hoop with a stick as they walked over the Canal bridge.

Then and now…

He nestled the stained blade in the arch of her foot.

“Mommy!” the girl screamed.

Something popped within him. For a moment he was overwhelmed with revulsion at what he was doing. At himself.

No! He couldn’t do it. Not to her. Esther or Hanna, yes. Or the next one. But not her.

The bone collector shook his head sadly and touched her cheekbone with the back of his hand. He slapped the tape over Carole’s mouth again and cut the cord binding her feet.

“Come on,” he muttered.

She struggled fiercely but he gripped her head hard and pinched her nostrils till she passed out. Then he hefted her over his shoulder and started up the stairs, carefully lifting the bag that sat nearby. Very carefully. It was not the sort of thing he wanted to drop. Up the stairs. Pausing only once, to look at young, curly-haired Maggie O’Connor, sitting in the dirt, looking hopelessly up at him.

TWENTY-THREE

HE SNAGGED THEM BOTH in front of Rhyme’s town-house.

Quick as the coiled snake that Jerry Banks was carrying at his side like a souvenir from Santa Fe.

Dellray and two agents stepped from an alley. He announced casually, “Got some news, honey dear. You’re under arrest for the theft of evidence under custodial care of the U.S. government.”

Lincoln Rhyme had been wrong. Dellray hadn’t made it to the federal building after all. He’d been staking out Rhyme’s digs.

Banks rolled his eyes. “Chill out, Dellray. We saved the vic.”

“And a mighty good thing you did, sonny. If you hadn’t we were gonna bring you up on homicide.”

“But we saved ’im,” Sachs said. “And you didn’t.”

“Thanks for that snappy recap, officer. Hold your wrists out.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Cuff this young lady,” the Chameleon said dramatically to a burly agent beside him.

She began, “We found more clues, Agent Dellray. He’s got another one. And I don’t know how much time we have.”

“Oh, and invite that thayre boy to ouah party too.” Dellray nodded to Banks, who turned to the woman FBI agent approaching him and seemed to be thinking of decking her.

Dellray said a cheerful, “No, no, no. You don’ wanna.”

Banks reluctantly held out his hands.

UNSUB 823 (page 1 of 3)

Appearance

Caucasian male, slight build

•Dark clothing

•Old gloves, reddish kidskin

•Aftershave; to cover up other scent?

Residence

•Prob. has safe house

•Located near: B’way &82nd,

•ShopRite B’way &96th,

• Anderson Foods

• Greenwich & Bank,

•ShopRite 2nd Ave., 72nd-73rd,

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

•Recent model sedan

Other

•knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

•Ties vics w/ unusual knots

•“Old” appeals to him

UNSUB 823 (page 2 of 3)

Appearance

•Ski mask? Navy blue?

•Gloves are dark

•Aftershave = Brut

Residence

• Grocery World Battery Park City

•J &G’s Emporium 1709 2nd Ave.,

• Anderson Foods 34th & Lex.,

•Food Warehouse8th Ave. & 24th,

Vehicle

•Lt. gray, silver, beige

Other

•Called one vic “Hanna”

•Knows basic German

•Underground appeals to him

•Dual personalities

•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 3)

Appearance

•Hair color not brown

•Deep scar, index finger

•Casual clothes

Residence

•ShopRite Houston & Lafayette,

•ShopRite 6th Ave. & Houston,

•J &G’s Emporium Greenwich & Franklin,

•Grocery World

•Old building, pink marble

Vehicle

•Rental car: prob. stolen

Other

•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

•Listened as he broke vic’s finger

Sachs, angry, offered the agent a cold smile. “How was your trip to Morningside Heights?”

“He still killed that cabbie. Our PERT boys’re crawling over that house now like beetles on dung.”

“And that’s all they’re going to find,” Sachs said. “This unsub knows crime scenes better than you and I do.”

“Downtown,” Dellray announced, nodding at Sachs, who winced as the cuffs ratcheted tight around her wrists.

“We can save the next one too. If you -”

“You know what you got, Officer Sachs? Take a guess. You gotchaself the right to remain silent. You got -”

“All right,” the voice called from behind them. Sachs looked around and saw Jim Polling striding along the sidewalk. His slacks and dark sports shirt were rumpled. It looked as if he’d napped in them, though his bleary face suggested he hadn’t slept in days. You could see a day’s growth of beard and his sandy hair was an unruly mess.

Dellray blinked uneasily though it wasn’t the cop he was troubled by but the tall physique of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District behind Polling. And bringing up the rear, SAC Perkins.

“Okay, Fred. Let ’ em go.” From the U.S. attorney.

In the modulated baritone of an FM disk jockey the Chameleon said, “She stole evidence, sir. She -”

“I just expedited some forensic analysis,” Sachs said.

“Listen-” Dellray began.

“Nope,” Polling said, completely in control now. No temper tantrums. “No, we’re not listening.” He turned to Sachs and barked, “But don’t you try to be funny.”

“Nosir. Sorry, sir.”

The U.S. attorney said to Dellray. “Fred, you made a judgment call and it went south. Facts of life.”

“It was a good lead,” Dellray said.

“Well, we’re changing the direction of the investigation,” the U.S. attorney continued.

SAC Perkins said, “We’ve been conferencing with the director and with Behavioral. We’ve decided that Detectives Rhyme and Sellitto’s positioning is the approach to pursue.”

“But my snitch was clear that something was going down at the airport. That’s not the sorta thing he’d be wishy about.”

“It comes down to this, Fred,” the U.S. attorney said bluntly. “Whatever the fucker’s up to, it was Rhyme’s team that saved the vics.”

Dellray’s lengthy fingers folded into an uncertain fist, opened again. “I appreciate that fact, sir. But -”

“Agent Dellray, this’s a decision that has already been made.”

The glossy black face – so energized at the federal building when he was marshaling his troops – was now somber, reserved. For the moment, the hipster was gone. “Yessir.”

“This most recent hostage would’ve died if Detective Sachs here hadn’t intervened,” the U.S. attorney said.

“That’d be Officer Sachs,” she corrected. “And it was mostly Lincoln Rhyme. I was his legman. So to speak.”

“The case is going back to the city,” the U.S. attorney announced. “The Bureau’s A-T is to continue to handle terrorist-informant liaison but with reduced manpower. Anything they learn should be conveyed to Detectives Sellitto and Rhyme. Dellray, you’re gonna put bodies at their disposal for any search-and-surveillance or hostage-rescue effort. Or anything else they might need. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. You want to remove those handcuffs from these officers now?”

Dellray placidly unlocked the cuffs and slipped them into his pocket. He walked to a large van parked nearby. As Sachs picked up the evidence bag she saw him standing by himself at the edge of a pool of streetlight, his index finger lifted, stroking the cigarette behind his ear. She wasted a moment’s sympathy on the feebie then turned and ran up the stairs, two at a time, after Jerry Banks and his rattlesnake.

“I have it figured out. Well, almost.”

Sachs had just walked into Rhyme’s room when he made this pronouncement. He was quite pleased with himself.

“Everything except the rattler and the glop.”

She delivered the new evidence to Mel Cooper. The room had been transformed yet again and the tables were covered with new vials and beakers and pillboxes and lab equipment and boxes. It wasn’t much compared to the feds’ headquarters but, to Amelia Sachs, it felt oddly like home.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday… pardon me – today’s Sunday. He’s going to burn down a church.”

“How do you figure?”

“The date.”

“On the scrap of paper? What’s it mean?”

“You ever hear of the anarchists?”

“Little Russians in trench coats carrying around those bombs that look like bowling balls?” Banks said.

“From the man who reads picture books,” Rhyme commented dryly. “Your Saturday-morning-cartoon roots are showing, Banks. Anarchism was an old social movement calling for the abolition of government. One anarchist, Enrico Malatesta – his shtick was ‘propaganda by deed.’ Translated that means murder and mayhem. One of his followers, an American named Eugene Lockworthy, lived in New York. One Sunday morning he bolted the doors of a church on the Upper East Side just after the service began and set the place on fire. Killed eighteen parishioners.”

“And that happened on May 20, 1906?” Sachs asked.

“Yep.”

“I’m not going to ask how you figured that out.”

Rhyme shrugged. “Obvious. Our unsub likes history, right? He gave us some matches so he’s telling us he’s planning arson. I just thought back to the city’s famous fires – the Triangle Shirtwaist, Crystal Palace, the General Slocum excursion boat… I checked the dates – May twentieth was the First Methodist Church fire.”

Sachs asked, “But where? Same location as that church?”

“Doubt it,” Sellitto said. “There’s a commercial high-rise there now. Eight twenty-three doesn’t like new places. I’ve got a couple men on it just in case but we’re sure he’s going for a church.”

“And we think,” Rhyme added, “that he’s going to wait till a service starts.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, that’s what Lockworthy did,” Sellitto continued. “Also, we were thinking ’bout what Terry Dobyns was telling us – upping the ante. Going for multiple vics.”

“So we’ve got a little more time. Until the service starts.”

Rhyme looked up at the ceiling. “Now, how many churches are there in Manhattan?”

“Hundreds.”

“That was rhetorical, Banks. I mean – let’s keep looking over the clues. He’ll have to narrow it down some.”

Footsteps on the stair.

It was the twins once again.

“We passed Fred Dellray outside.”

“He wasn’t the least bit cordial.”

“Or happy.”

“Whoa, look at that.” Saul – Rhyme believed it was Saul; he’d forgotten who had the freckles – nodded at the snake. “I’ve seen more of those in one night than I ever want to again.”

“Snakes?” Rhyme asked.

“We were at Metamorphosis. It’s a -”

“- very spooky place. Met the owner there. Weird guy. As you may’ve guessed.”

“Long, long beard. Wish we hadn’t gone at night,” Bedding continued.

“They sell taxidermied bats and insects. You wouldn’t believe some of the insects -”

“Five inches long.”

“- and critters like that one.” Saul nodded at the snake.

“Scorpions, a lot of scorpions.”

“Anyway, they had a break-in a month ago and guess what got took? A rattler’s skeleton.”

“Reported?” Rhyme asked.

“Yep.”

“But total value of the perped merch was only a hundred bucks or so. So Larceny wasn’t like all-hands-onboard, you know.”

“But tell them.”

Saul nodded. “The snake wasn’t the only thing missing. Whoever broke in took a couple dozen bones.”

“Human bones?” Rhyme asked.

“Yep. That’s what the owner thought was funny. Some of those insects -”

“Forget five inches, some of ’em were eight. Easy.”

“- are worth three or four hundred. But all the perp boosted was the snake and some bones.”

“Any particular ones?” Rhyme asked.

“An assortment. Like your Whitman’s Sampler.”

“His words, not ours.”

“Mostly little ones. Hand and foot. And a rib, maybe two.”

“The guy wasn’t sure.”

“Any CS report?”

“For ’jacked bones? Noooope.”

The Hardy Boys departed once more, heading downtown to the last scene to start canvassing the neighborhood.

Rhyme wondered about the snake. Was it giving them a location? Did it relate to the First Methodist fire? If rattlers had been indigenous to Manhattan, urban development had long ago played Saint Patrick and purged the island of them. Was he making a play on the word snake or rattler?

Then Rhyme suddenly believed he understood. “The snake’s for us.”

“Us?” Banks laughed.

“It’s a slap in the face.”

“Whose face?”

“Everybody who’s looking for him. I think it’s a practical joke.”

“I wasn’t laughing very hard,” Sachs said.

“Your expression was pretty funny.” Banks grinned.

“I think we’re better than he expected and he’s not happy about it. He’s mad and he’s taking it out on us. Thom, add that to our profile, if you would. He’s mocking us.”

Sellitto’s phone rang. He opened it and answered. “Emma darlin’. Whatcha got?” He nodded as he jotted notes. Then looked up and announced, “Rental-car thefts. Two Avises disappeared from their location in the Bronx in the past week, one in Midtown. They’re out ’cause the colors’re wrong: red, green and white. No Nationals. Four Hertz were ’jacked. Three in Manhattan – one from their downtown East Side location, from Midtown and from the Upper West Side. There were two green and – this could be it – one tan. But a silver Ford got boosted from White Plains. That’s my vote.”

“Agree,” Rhyme announced. “White Plains.”

“How do you know?” Sachs asked. “Monelle said it could’ve been either beige or silver.”

“Because our boy’s in the city,” Rhyme explained, “and if he’s going to boost something as obvious as a car he’ll do it as far away from his safe house as he can. It’s a Ford, you said?”

Sellitto asked Emma the question, then looked up. “Taurus. This year’s model. Dark-gray interior. Tag’s irrelevant.”

Rhyme nodded. “The first thing he changed, the plates. Thank her and tell her to get some sleep. But not to wander too far from the phone.”

“Got something here, Lincoln,” Mel Cooper called.

“What’s that?”

“The glop. I’m running it through the database of brand names now.” He stared at the screen. “Cross-referencing… Let’s see, the most likely match is Kink-Away. It’s a retail hair straightener.”

“Politically incorrect but helpful. That puts us up in Harlem, wouldn’t you think? Narrows down the churches considerably.” Banks was looking through the religious-service directories of all three metro newspapers. “I count twenty-two.”

“When’s the earliest service?”

“Three have services at eight. Six at nine. One at nine-thirty. The rest at ten or eleven.”

“He’ll go for one of the first services. He’s already giving us hours to find the place.”

Sellitto said, “I’ve got Haumann getting the ESU boys together again.”

“How ’bout Dellray?” Sachs said. She pictured the forlorn agent by himself on the street corner outside.

“What about him?” Sellitto muttered.

“Aw, let’s cut him in. He wants a piece of this guy bad.”

“Perkins said he was supposed to help,” Banks offered.

“You really want him?” Sellitto asked, frowning.

Sachs was nodding. “Sure.”

Rhyme agreed. “Okay, he can run the fed S &S teams. I want a team on each church right away. All entrances. But they should stay way back. I don’t want to spook him. Maybe we can nail him in the act.”

Sellitto took a phone call. He looked up, eyes closed. “Jesus.”

“Oh, no,” Rhyme muttered.

The detective wiped his sweating face and nodded. “Central got a 9-1-1 from the night manager at this place? The Midtown Residence Hotel? Woman and her little girl called him from La Guardia, said they were just about to get a cab. That was a while ago; they never showed up. With all the news about the ’nappings he thought he should call. Her name’s Carole Ganz. From Chicago.”

“Hell,” Banks muttered. “A little girl, too? Oughta just pull all the cabs off the streets till we nail his butt.”

Rhyme was drenched with weariness. His head raged. He remembered working a crime scene at a bomb factory. Nitroglycerin had bled out of some dynamite and seeped into an armchair Rhyme had to search for trace. Nitro gave you blinding headaches.

The screen of Cooper’s computer flickered. “E-mail,” he announced and called up the message. He read the fine type.

“They’ve polarized all the samples of cello that ESU collected. They think the scrap we found in the bone at the Pearl Street scene was from a ShopRite grocery store. It’s closest to the cello they use.”

“Good,” Rhyme called. He nodded at the poster. “Cross off all the grocery stores but the ShopRites. What locations do we have?”

He watched Thom ink through the stores, leaving four.

B’way & 82nd

Greenwich & Bank

8th Ave. & 24th

Houston & Lafayette

“That leaves us with the Upper West Side, West Village, Chelsea and the Lower East Side.”

“But he could have gone anywhere to buy them.”

“Oh, sure he could’ve, Sachs. He could’ve bought them in White Plains when he was stealing the car. Or in Cleveland visiting his mother. But see, there’s a point when unsubs feel comfortable in their deception and they stop bothering to cover their tracks. The stupid – or lazy – ones toss the smoking gun in the Dumpster behind their building and go on their merry way. The smarter ones drop it in a bucket of Spackle and pitch it into Hell Gate. The brilliant ones sneak into a refinery and vaporize it in a five-thousand-degree-centigrade furnace. Our unsub’s smart, sure. But he’s like every other perp in the history of the world. He’s got limits. I’m betting he thinks we won’t have the time or inclination to look for him or his safe house because we’ll be concentrating on the planted clues. And of course he’s dead wrong. This is exactly how we’ll find him. Now, let’s see if we can’t get a little closer to his lair. Mel, anything in the vic’s clothes from the last scene?”

But the tidal water had washed away virtually everything from William Everett’s clothing.

“You say they fought, Sachs? The unsub and this Everett?”

“Wasn’t much of a fight. Everett grabbed his shirt.”

Rhyme clicked his tongue. “I must be getting tired. If I’d thought about it I would have had you scrape under his nails. Even if he was underwater that’s one place -”

“Here you go,” she said, holding up two small plastic bags.

“You scraped?”

She nodded.

“But why’re there two bags?”

Holding up one bag then the other she said, “Left hand, right hand.”

Mel Cooper broke into a laugh. “Even you never thought about separate bags for scraping, Lincoln. It’s a great idea.”

Rhyme grunted. “Differentiating the hands might have some marginal forensic value.”

“Whoa,” Cooper said, laughing still. “That means he thinks it’s a brilliant idea and he’s sorry he didn’t think of it first.”

The tech examined the scrapings. “Got some brick here.”

“There was no brick anywhere around the drainpipe or the field,” Sachs said.

“It’s fragments. But there’s something attached to it. I can’t tell what.”

Banks asked, “Could it’ve come from the stockyard tunnel? There was a lotta brick there, right?”

“All that came from Annie Oakley here,” Rhyme said, nodding ruefully at Sachs. “No, remember, the unsub’d left before she pulled out her six-gun.” Then he frowned, found himself straining forward. “Mel, I want to see that brick. In the ’scope. Is there any way?”

Cooper looked over Rhyme’s computer. “I think we can rig something up.” He ran a cable from the video-output port on the compound ’scope to his own computer and then dug into a large suitcase. He pulled out a long, thick gray wire. “This’s a serial cable.” He connected the two computers and transferred some software to Rhyme’s Compaq. In five minutes, Rhyme, delighted, was seeing exactly what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece.

The criminalist’s eyes scanned the chunk of brick – hugely magnified. He laughed out loud. “He outfoxed himself. See those white blobs attached to the brick?”

“What are they?” Sellitto asked.

“Looks like glue,” Cooper offered.

“Exactly. From a pet-hair roller. Perps who’re real cautious use them to clean trace off themselves. But it backfired. Some bits of adhesive must’ve come off the roller and stuck to his clothes. So we know it’s from his safe house. Held the brick in place until Everett picked it up under his fingernails.”

“Does the brick tell us anything?” Sachs asked.

“It’s old. And it’s expensive – cheap brick was very porous because they mixed in filler. I’d guess his place is either institutional or built by someone wealthy. At least a hundred years old. Maybe older.”

“Ah, here we go,” Cooper said. “Another bit of glove, it looks like. If the damn things keep disintegrating we’ll be down to his friction ridges before too long.”

Rhyme’s screen flashed and a moment later what he recognized as a tiny fleck of leather came on the screen. “Something’s funny here,” Cooper said.

“It’s not red,” Rhyme observed. “Like the other particle. This fleck’s black. Run it through the microspectro-photometer.”

Cooper ran the test and then tapped his computer screen. “It’s leather. But the dye is different. Maybe it’s stained or faded.”

Rhyme was leaning forward, straining, looking closely at the fleck on the screen when he realized he was in trouble. Serious trouble.

“Hey, you okay?” It was Sachs who’d spoken.

Rhyme didn’t answer. His neck and jaw began to shiver violently. A feeling like panic rose from the crest of his shattered spine and moved up into his scalp. Then, as if a thermostat had clicked on, the chills and goose bumps vanished and he began to sweat. Perspiration poured from his face and tickled frantically.

“Thom!” he whispered. “Thom, it’s happening.”

Then he gasped as the headache seared through his face and spread along the walls of his skull. He jammed his teeth together, swayed his head, anything to stop the unbearable agony. But nothing worked. The light in the room flickered. The pain was so bad his reaction was to flee from it, to run flat-out on legs that hadn’t moved in years.

“Lincoln!” Sellitto was shouting.

“His face,” Sachs gasped, “it’s bright red.”

And his hands were pale as ivory. All of his body below the magic latitude at C4 was turning white. Rhyme’s blood, on its phony, desperate mission to get to where it thought it was needed, surged into the tiny capillaries of his brain, expanding them, threatening to burst the delicate filaments.

As the attack grew worse Rhyme was aware of Thom over him, ripping the blankets off the Clinitron. He was aware of Sachs stepping forward, her radiant blue eyes narrowed in concern. The last thing he saw before the blackness was the falcon pushing off the ledge on his huge wings, startled by the sudden flurry of activity in the room, seeking easy oblivion in the hot air over the empty streets of the city.

TWENTY-FOUR

WHEN RHYME PASSED OUT, Sellitto got to the phone first.

“Call 911 for EMS,” Thom instructed. “Then hit that number there. Speed dial. It’s Pete Taylor, our spinal cord specialist.”

Sellitto made the calls.

Thom was shouting, “I’ll need some help here. Somebody!”

Sachs was closest. She nodded, stepped up to Rhyme. The aide had grabbed the unconscious man under the arms and pulled him higher up in bed. He ripped open the shirt and prodded the pale chest, saying, “Everybody else, if you could just leave us.”

Sellitto, Banks and Cooper hesitated for a moment then stepped through the doorway. Sellitto closed the door behind them.

A beige box appeared in the aide’s hands. It had switches and dials on the top and sprouted a wire ending in a flat disk, which he placed over Rhyme’s chest and taped down.

“Phrenic nerve stimulator. It’ll keep him breathing.” He clicked on the machine.

Thom slipped a blood-pressure cuff onto Rhyme’s alabaster-white arm. Sachs realized with a start that his body was virtually wrinkle-free. He was in his forties but his body was that of a twenty-five-year-old.

“Why’s his face so red? It looks like he’s going to explode.”

“He is,” Thom said matter-of-factly, yanking a doctor’s kit from underneath the bedside table. He opened it then he continued to take the pressure. “Dysreflexia… All the stress today. Mental and physical. He’s not used to it.”

“He kept saying he was tired.”

“I know. And I wasn’t paying careful enough attention. Shhhh. I have to listen.” He plugged the stethoscope into his ears, inflated the cuff and let the air out slowly. Staring at his watch. His hands were rock-steady. “Shit. Diastolic’s one twenty-five. Shit.”

Father in heaven, Sachs thought. He’s going to stroke out.

Thom nodded at the black bag. “Find the bottle of nifedipine. And open up one of those syringes.” As she searched, Thom yanked down Rhyme’s pajamas and grabbed a catheter from beside the bed, tore open its plastic wrapper too. He smeared the end with K-Y jelly and lifted Rhyme’s pale penis, inserting the catheter gently but quickly into the tip.

“This’s part of the problem. Bowel and urinary pressure can trigger an attack. He’s been drinking way more than he should today.”

She opened the hypodermic but said, “I don’t know how to do the needle.”

“I’ll do it.” He looked up at her. “Could I ask… would you mind doing this? I don’t want the tube to get a kink in it.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“You want gloves?”

She pulled on a pair and carefully took Rhyme’s penis in her left hand. She held the tube in her right. It had been a long, long time since she’d held a man here. The skin was soft and she thought how strange it was that this center of a man’s being is, most of the time, as delicate as silk.

Thom expertly injected the drug.

“Come on, Lincoln…”

A siren sounded in the distance.

“They’re almost here,” she said glancing out the window.

“If we don’t bring him back now there’s nothing they can do.”

“How long does it take the drug to work?”

Thom stared at the unresponsive Rhyme, said, “It should’ve by now. But too high a dose and he goes into shock.” The aide bent down and lifted an eyelid. The blue pupil was glazed, unfocused.

“This isn’t good.” He took the pressure again. “One fifty. Christ.”

“It’ll kill him,” she said.

“Oh. That’s not the problem.”

“What?” a shocked Amelia Sachs whispered.

“He doesn’t mind dying.” He looked at her briefly as if surprised she hadn’t figured this out. “He just doesn’t want to be any more paralyzed than he already is.” He prepared another injection. “He may already’ve had one. A stroke, I mean. That’s what terrifies him.”

Thom leaned forward and injected more of the drug.

The siren was closer now. Honking too. Cars would be blocking the ambulance’s way, in no hurry to pull aside – one of the things that infuriated Sachs about the city.

“You can take the catheter out now.”

She carefully extracted the tube. “Should I…” Nodding toward the urine bag.

Thom managed a weak smile. “That’s my job.”

Several minutes passed. The ambulance seemed to make no progress then a voice crackled over a speaker and gradually the siren grew closer.

Suddenly Rhyme stirred. His head shook slightly. Then it lolled back and forth, pressed into the pillow. His skin lost some of its florid tone.

“Lincoln, can you hear me?”

He moaned, “Thom…”

Rhyme was shivering violently. Thom covered him with a sheet.

Sachs found herself smoothing Rhyme’s mussed hair. She took a tissue and wiped his forehead.

Footsteps pounded on the stairs and two burly EMS medics appeared, radios crackling. They hurried into the room, took Rhyme’s blood pressure and checked the nerve stimulator. A moment later Dr. Peter Taylor burst into the room.

“Peter,” Thom said. “Dysreflexia.”

“Pressure?”

“It’s down. But it was bad. Crested at one fifty.”

The doctor winced.

Thom introduced Taylor to the EMS techs. They seemed pleased an expert was there and stepped back as Taylor walked over to the bedside.

“Doctor,” Rhyme said groggily.

“Let’s look at those eyes.” Taylor shone a light into Rhyme’s pupils. Sachs scanned the doctor’s face for a reaction and was troubled by his frown.

“Don’t need the nerve stimulator,” Rhyme whispered.

“You and your lungs, right?” the doctor asked wryly. “Well, let’s keep it going for a little while, why don’t we? Just till we see what exactly’s going on here.” He glanced at Sachs. “Maybe you could wait downstairs.”

Taylor leaned close and Rhyme noticed the beads of sweat dotting the doctor’s scalp under his thin hair.

The man’s deft hands lifted a lid and gazed again into one pupil, then the next. He rigged up the sphygmomanometer and took Rhyme’s blood pressure, his eyes distant with that concentration of medicos lost in their minute, vital tasks.

“Approaching normal,” he announced. “How’s the urine?”

“Eleven hundred ccs,” Thom said.

Taylor glowered. “Been neglecting things? Or just drinking to excess?”

Rhyme glowered right back. “We were distracted, doctor. It’s been a busy night.”

Taylor followed Rhyme’s nod and glanced around the room, surprised, as if someone had just sneaked the equipment in when he wasn’t looking. “What’s all this?”

“They hauled me out of retirement.”

Taylor’s perplexed frown grew into a smile. “About time. I’ve been after you for months to do something with your life. Now, what’s the bowel situation?”

Thom said, “Probably twelve hours, fourteen.”

“Careless of you,” Taylor chided.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Rhyme snapped. “I’ve had a roomful of people here all day.”

“I don’t want to hear excuses, the doctor shot back. This was Pete Taylor, who never spoke through anyone when he talked to Rhyme and never let his bullying patient bully him.

“We better take care of things.” He pulled on surgical gloves, leaned over Rhyme’s torso. His fingers began manipulating the abdomen to trick the numb intestines into doing their work. Thom lifted the blankets and got the disposable diapers.

A moment later the job was done and Thom cleaned his boss.

Taylor said suddenly, “So you’ve given up that nonsense, I hope?” Studying Rhyme closely.

That nonsense…

He’d meant the suicide. With a glance at Thom, Rhyme said, “Haven’t thought about that for a while.”

“Good.” Taylor looked over the instruments on the table. “This is what you ought to be doing. Maybe the department’ll put you back on the payroll.”

“Don’t think I could pass the physical.”

“How’s the head?”

“ ‘A dozen sledgehammers’ comes close to describing it. My neck too. Had two bad cramps so far today.”

Taylor walked behind the Clinitron, pressed his fingers on either side of Rhyme’s spine, where – Rhyme supposed, though he’d never seen the spot of course – there were prominent incision scars from the operations he’d had over the years. Taylor gave Rhyme an expert massage, digging deep into the taut straps of muscle in his shoulders and neck. The pain slowly vanished.

He felt the doctor’s thumbs pause at what he guessed was the shattered vertebra.

The spaceship, the stingray…

“Someday they’ll fix this,” Taylor said. “Someday, it’ll be no worse than breaking your leg. You listen to me. I predict it.”

Fifteen minutes later Peter Taylor came down the stairs and joined the cops on the sidewalk. “Is he all right?” Amelia Sachs asked anxiously.

“The pressure’s down. He needs rest mostly.”

The doctor, a plain-looking man, suddenly realized he was talking to a very beautiful woman. He smoothed his thinning gray hair and cast a discreet glance at her willowy figure. His eyes then went to the squad cars in front of the townhouse and he asked, “What’s the case he’s helping you with?”

Sellitto demurred, as all detectives will in the face of that question from civilians. But Sachs had guessed Taylor and Rhyme were close so she said, “The kidnappings? Have you heard about them?”

“The taxi-driver case? It’s on all the news. Good for him. Work is the best thing that could happen to him. He needs friends and he needs purpose.”

Thom appeared at the top of the stairs. “He said thanks, Pete. Well, he didn’t actually say thanks. But he meant it. You know how he is.”

“Level with me,” Taylor asked, voice lower now, conspiratorial. “Is he still planning on talking to them?”

And when Thom said, “No, he’s not,” something in his tone told Sachs that he was lying. She didn’t know about what or what significance it might have. But it rankled.

Planning on talking to them?

In any case Taylor seemed not to pick up on the aide’s deceit. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow, see how he’s doing.”

Thom said he’d appreciate it and Taylor slung his bag over his shoulder and started up the sidewalk. The aide gestured to Sellitto. “He’d like to talk to you for a minute.” The detective climbed the stairs quickly. He disappeared into the room and a few minutes later he and Thom walked outside. Sellitto, solemn himself now, glanced at her. “Your turn.” And nodded toward the stairs.

Rhyme lay in the massive bed, hair mussed, face no longer red, hands no longer ivory. The room smelled ripe, visceral. There were clean sheets on the bed and his clothes had been changed again. This time the pajamas were as green as Dellray’s suit.

“Those are the ugliest PJs I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Your ex gave them to you, didn’t she?”

“How’d you guess? An anniversary present… Sorry for the scare,” he said, looking away from her. He seemed suddenly timid and that upset her. She thought of her father in the pre-op room at Sloan-Kettering before they took him down to the exploratory surgery he never awoke from.

“Sorry?” she asked ominously. “No more of that shit, Rhyme.”

He appraised her for a minute then said, “You two’ll do fine.”

“We two?”

“You and Lon. Mel too of course. And Jim Polling.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m retiring.”

“You’re what?”

“Too taxing for the old system, I’m afraid.”

“But you can’t quit.” She waved at the Monet poster. “Look at everything we’ve found about 823. We’re so close.”

“So you don’t need me. All you need is a little luck.”

“Luck? It took years to get Bundy. And what about the Zodiac killer? And the Werewolf?”

“We’ve got good information here. Hard information. You’ll come up with some good leads. You’ll nail him, Sachs. Your swan song before they lap you up into Public Affairs. I’ve got a feeling Unsub 823's getting cocky; they might even collar him at the church.”

“You look fine,” she said after a moment. Though he didn’t.

Rhyme laughed. Then the smile faded. “I’m very tired. And I hurt. Hell, I think I hurt in places the docs’ll say I can’t hurt.”

“Do what I do. Take a nap.”

He tried to snort a derisive laugh but he sounded weak. She hated seeing him this way. He coughed briefly, glanced down at the nerve stimulator, and grimaced, as if he was embarrassed that he depended on the machine. “Sachs… I don’t suppose we’ll be working together again. I just wanted to say that you’ve got a good career ahead of you, you make the right choices.”

“Well, I’ll come back and see you after we snag his bad ass.”

“I’d like that. I’m glad you were first officer yesterday morning. There’s nobody else I’d rather’ve walked the grid with.”

“I -”

“Lincoln,” a voice said. She turned to see a man in the doorway. He looked around the room curiously, taking in all the equipment.

“Been some excitement around here, looks like.”

“Doctor,” Rhyme said. His face blossoming into a smile. “Please come in.”

He stepped into the room. “I got Thom’s message. Emergency, he said?”

“Dr. William Berger, this is Amelia Sachs.” But Sachs could see she’d already ceased to exist in Lincoln Rhyme’s universe. Whatever else was left to be said – and she felt there were some things, maybe many things – would have to wait. She walked through the door. Thom, who stood in the large hallway outside, closed the door behind her and, ever proper, paused, nodding for her to precede him.

As Sachs walked out into the steamy night she heard a voice from nearby. “Excuse me.”

She turned and found Dr. Peter Taylor standing by himself under a ginkgo tree. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Sachs followed Taylor up the sidewalk a few doors.

“Yes?” she asked. He leaned against a stone wall and gave another self-conscious swipe at his hair. Sachs recalled how many times she’d intimidated men with a single word or glance. She thought, as she often did: What a useless power beauty is.

“You’re his friend, right?” the doctor asked her. “I mean, you work with him but you’re a friend too.”

“Sure. I guess I am.”

“That man who just went inside. Do you know who he is?”

“Berger, I think. He’s a doctor.”

“Did he say where he was from?”

“No.”

Taylor looked up at Rhyme’s bedroom window for a moment. He asked, “You know the Lethe Society?”

“No, oh, wait… It’s a euthanasia group, right?”

Taylor nodded. “I know all of Lincoln’s doctors. And I’ve never heard of Berger. I was just thinking maybe he’s with them.”

“What?”

Is he still talking to them…

So that’s what the conversation was about.

She felt weightless from the shock. “Has he… has he talked seriously about this before?”

“Oh, yes.” Taylor sighed, gazed into the smoky night sky. “Oh, yes.” Then glanced at her name badge. “Officer Sachs, I’ve spent hours trying to talk him out of it. Days. But I’ve also worked with quads for years and I know how stubborn they are. Maybe he’d listen to you. Just a few words. I was thinking… Could you? -”

“Oh, goddamn it, Rhyme,” she muttered and started down the sidewalk at a run, leaving the doctor in midsentence.

She got to the front door of the townhouse just as Thom was closing it. She pushed past him. “Forgot my watchbook.”

“Your? -”

“Be right back.”

“You can’t go up there. He’s with his doctor.”

“I’ll just be a second.”

She was at the landing before Thom started after her.

He must have known it was a scam because he took the stairs two at a time. But she had a good lead and had shoved open Rhyme’s door before the aide got to the top of the stairs.

She pushed in, startling both Rhyme and the doctor, who was leaning against the table, arms crossed. She closed the door and locked it. Thom began pounding. Berger turned toward her with a frown of curiosity on his face.

“Sachs,” Rhyme blurted.

“I have to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“About you.”

“Later.”

“How much later, Rhyme?” she asked sarcastically. “Tomorrow? Next week?”

“What do you mean?”

“You want me to schedule a meeting for, maybe, a week from Wednesday? Will you be able to make it then? Will you be around?”

“Sachs -”

“I want to talk to you. Alone.”

“No.”

“Then we’ll do it the hard way.” She stepped up to Berger. “You’re under arrest. The charge is attempted assisted suicide.” And the handcuffs flashed, click, click, snapping onto his wrists in a silver blur.

She guessed the building was a church.

Carole Ganz lay in the basement, on the floor. A single shaft of cold, oblique light fell on the wall, illuminating a shabby picture of Jesus and a stack of mildewy Golden Book Bible stories. A half-dozen tiny chairs – for Sunday-school students, she guessed – were nested in the middle of the room.

The cuffs were still on and so was the gag. He’d also tied her to a pipe near the wall with a four-foot-long piece of clothesline.

On a tall table nearby she could see the top of a large glass jug.

If she could knock it off she might use a piece of glass to cut the clothesline. The table seemed out of reach but she rolled over onto her side and started to squirm, like a caterpillar, toward it.

This reminded her of Pammy when she was an infant, rolling on the bed between herself and Ron; she thought of her baby, alone in that horrible basement, and started to cry.

Pammy, Pooh, purse.

For a moment, for a brief moment, she weakened. Wished she’d never left Chicago.

No, stop thinking that way! Quit feeling sorry for yourself! This was the absolute right thing to do. You did it for Ron. And for yourself too. He’d be proud of you. Kate had told her that a thousand times, and she believed it.

Struggling once more. She moved a foot closer to the table.

Groggy, couldn’t think straight.

Her throat stung from the terrible thirst. And the mold and mildew in the air.

She crawled a little farther then lay on her side, catching her breath, staring up at the table. It seemed hopeless. What’s the use? she thought.

Wondering what was going through Pammy’s mind.

You fucker! thought Carole. I’ll kill you for this!

She squirmed, trying to move farther along the floor. But instead, she lost her balance and rolled onto her back. She gasped, knowing what was coming. No! With a loud pop, her wrist snapped. She screamed through the gag. Blacked out. When she came to a moment later she was overwhelmed with nausea.

No, no, no… If she vomited she’d die. With the gag on, that would be it.

Fight it down! Fight it. Come on. You can do it. Here I go… She retched once. Then again.

No! Control it.

Rising in her throat.

Control…

Control it…

And she did. Breathing through her nose, concentrating on Kate and Eddie and Pammy, on the yellow knapsack containing all her precious possessions. Seeing it, picturing it from every angle. Her whole life was in there. Her new life.

Ron, I don’t want to blow it. I came here for you, honey…

She closed her eyes. Thought: Breathe deep. In, out.

Finally, the nausea subsided. And a moment later she was feeling better and, though she was crying in pain from the snapped wrist, she managed to continue to caterpillar her way toward the table, one foot. Two.

She felt a thump as her head collided with the table leg. She’d just managed to connect with it and couldn’t move any farther. She swung her head back and forth and jostled the table hard. She heard the bottle slosh as it shifted on the tabletop. She looked up.

A bit of the jug was showing beyond the edge of the table. Carole drew back her head and hit the table leg one last time.

No! She’d knocked the leg out of reach. The jug teetered for a moment but stayed upright. Carole strained to get more slack from the clothesline but couldn’t.

Damn. Oh, damn! As she gazed hopelessly up at the filthy bottle she realized it was filled with a liquid and something floated inside. What is that?

She scrunched her way back toward the wall a foot or two and looked up.

It seemed like a lightbulb inside. No, not a whole bulb, just the filament and the base, screwed into a socket. A wire ran from the socket out of the jug to one of those timers that turn the lights on and off when you’re away on vacation. It looked like -

A bomb! Now she recognized the faintest whiff of gasoline.

No, no…

Carole began to squirm away from the table as fast as she could, sobbing in desperation. There was a filing cabinet by the wall. It’d give her some protection. She drew her legs up then felt a chill of panic and unwound them furiously. The motion knocked her off balance. She realized, to her horror, that she was rolling onto her back once more. Oh, stop. Don’t… She stayed poised, perfectly still, for a long moment, quivering as she tried to shift her weight forward. But then she continued to roll, collapsing onto her cuffed hand, her shattered wrist taking the weight of her body. There was a moment of incredible pain and, mercifully, she fainted once more.

TWENTY-FIVE

“NO WAY, RHYME. YOU CAN’T DO IT.”

Berger looked on uneasily. Rhyme supposed that in this line of work he’d seen all sorts of hysterical scenarios played out at moments like this. The biggest problem Berger’d have wasn’t those wanting to die but those who wanted everyone else to live.

Thom pounded on the door.

“Thom,” Rhyme called. “It’s all right. You can leave us.” Then to Sachs: “We’ve said our farewells. You and me. It’s bad form to ruin a perfect exit.”

“You can’t do this.”

Who’d blown the whistle? Pete Taylor maybe. The doctor must’ve guessed that he and Thom were lying.

Rhyme saw her eyes slip to the three items on the table. The gifts of the Magi: the brandy, the pills and the plastic bag. Also a rubber band, similar to the ones Sachs still wore on her shoes. (How many times had he come home from a crime scene to find Blaine staring at the bands on his shoes, horrified? “Everybody’ll think my husband can’t afford new shoes. He’s keeping the soles on with rubber bands. Honestly, Lincoln!”)

“Sachs, take the cuffs off the good doctor here. I’ll have to ask you to leave one last time.”

She barked a fast laugh. “Excuse me. This’s a crime in New York. The DA could bootstrap it into murder, he wanted to.”

Berger said, “I’m just having a conversation with a patient.”

“That’s why the charge’s only attempt. So far. Maybe we should run your name and prints through NCIC. See what we come up with.”

“Lincoln,” Berger said quickly, alarmed. “I can’t -”

“We’ll get it worked out,” Rhyme said. “Sachs, please.”

Feet apart, hands on trim hips, her gorgeous face imperious. “Let’s go,” she barked to the doctor.

“Sachs, you have no idea how important this is.”

“I won’t let you kill yourself.”

“Let me?” Rhyme snapped. “Let me? And why exactly do I need your permission?”

Berger said, “Miss… Officer Sachs, it’s his decision and it’s completely consensual. Lincoln’s more informed than most of the patients I deal with.”

“Patients? Victims, you mean.”

“Sachs!” Rhyme blurted, trying to keep the desperation from his voice. “It’s taken me a year to find someone to help me.”

“Maybe because it’s wrong. Ever consider that? Why now, Rhyme? Right in the middle of the case?”

“If I have another attack and a stroke, I might lose all ability to communicate. I could be conscious for forty years and completely unable to move. And if I’m not brain-dead, nobody in the universe is going to pull the plug. At least now I’m still able to communicate my decisions.”

“But why?” she blurted.

“Why not?” Rhyme answered. “Tell me. Why not?”

“Well…” It seemed as if the arguments against suicide were so obvious she was having trouble articulating them. “Because…”

“Because why, Sachs?”

“For one thing, it’s cowardly.”

Rhyme laughed. “Do you want to debate it, Sachs? Do you? Fair enough. ‘Cowardly,’ you say. That leads us to Sir Thomas Browne: ‘When life is more terrible than death, it’s the truest valor to live.’ Courage in the face of insurmountable adversity… A classic argument in favor of living. But if that’s true then why anesthetize patients before surgery? Why sell aspirin? Why fix broken arms? Why is Prozac the most prescribed medicine in America? Sorry, but there’s nothing intrinsically good about pain.”

“But you’re not in pain.”

“And how do you define pain, Sachs? Maybe the absence of all feeling can be pain too.”

“You can contribute so much. Look at all you know. All the forensics, all the history.”

“The social-contribution argument. That’s a popular one.” He glanced at Berger but the medico remained silent. Rhyme saw his interest dip to the bone sitting on the table – the pale disk of spinal column. He picked it up, kneaded it in his cuffed hands. He was a former orthopedics man, Rhyme recalled.

He continued to Sachs, “But who says we should contribute anything to life? Besides, the corollary is I might contribute something bad. I might cause some harm too. To myself or someone else.”

“That’s what life is.”

Rhyme smiled. “But I’m choosing death, not life.”

Sachs looked uneasy as she thought hard. “It’s just… death isn’t natural. Life is.”

“No? Freud’d disagree with you. He gave up on the pleasure principle and came to feel that there was another force – a non-erotic primary aggression, he called it. Working to unbind the connections we build in life. Our own destruction’s a perfectly natural force. Everything dies; what’s more natural than that?”

Again she worried a portion of her scalp.

“All right,” she said. “Life’s more of a challenge to you than most people. But I thought… everything I’ve seen about you tells me you’re somebody who likes challenges.”

“Challenges? Let me tell you about challenges. I was on a ventilator for a year. See the tracheotomy scar on my neck? Well, through positive-pressure breathing exercises – and the greatest willpower I could muster – I managed to get off the machine. In fact I’ve got lungs like nobody’s business. They’re as strong as yours. In a C4 quad that’s one for the books, Sachs. It consumed my life for eight months. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eight months just to handle a basic animal function. I’m not talking about painting the Sistine Chapel or playing the violin. I’m talking about fucking breathing.”

“But you could get better. Next year, they might find a cure.”

“No. Not next year. Not in ten years.”

“You don’t know that. They must be doing research -”

“Sure they are. Want to know what? I’m an expert. Transplanting embryonic nerve tissue onto damaged tissue to promote axonal regeneration.” These words tripped easily from his handsome lips. “No significant effect. Some doctors are chemically treating the affected areas to create an environment where cells can regenerate. No significant effect – not in advanced species. Lower forms of life show pretty good success. If I were a frog I’d be walking again. Well, hopping.”

“So there are people working on it?” Sachs asked.

“Sure. But no one expects any breakthroughs for twenty, thirty years.”

“If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?”

Rhyme laughed. She was good.

Sachs tossed the veil of red hair from her eyes and said, “Your career was law enforcement, remember. Suicide’s illegal.”

“It’s a sin too,” he responded. “The Dakota Indians believed that the ghosts of those who committed suicide had to drag around the tree they’d hanged themselves from for all eternity. Did that stop suicide? Nope. They just used small trees.”

“Tell you what, Rhyme. Here’s my last argument.” She nodded at Berger, grabbed the cuff chain. “I’m taking him in and booking him. Refute that one.”

“Lincoln,” Berger said uneasily, panic in his eyes.

Sachs took the doctor by the shoulder and led him to the door. “No,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.”

As Sachs opened the door Rhyme called out, “Sachs, before you do that, answer me something.”

She paused. One hand on the knob.

“One question.”

She looked back.

“Have you ever wanted to? Kill yourself?”

She unlocked the door with a loud snap.

He said, “Answer me!”

Sachs didn’t open the door. She stood with her back to him. “No. Never.”

“Are you happy with your life?”

“As much as anybody.”

“You’re never depressed?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”

“You like to drive, you were telling me. People who like to drive like to drive fast. You do, don’t you?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“What’s the fastest you’ve done?”

“I don’t know.”

“Over eighty?”

A dismissing smile. “Yes.”

“Over a hundred?”

She gestured upward with her thumb.

“One ten? One twenty?” he asked, smiling in astonishment.

“Clocked at 168.”

“My, Sachs, you are impressive. Well, driving that fast, didn’t you think that maybe, just maybe, something might happen. A rod or axle or something would break, a tire would blow, a spot of oil on the road?”

“It was pretty safe. I’m not crazy.”

“Pretty safe. But driving as fast as a small plane, well, that’s not completely safe, now, is it?”

“You’re leading the witness.”

“No, I’m not. Stay with me. You drive that fast, you have to accept that you could have an accident and die, right?”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

Berger, cuffed hands in front of him, looked on nervously, as he kneaded the pale yellow disk of spinal column.

“So you’ve moved close to that line, right? Ah, you know what I’m talking about. I know you do – the line between the risk of dying and the certainty of dying. See, Sachs, if you carry the dead around with you it’s a very short step over that line. A short step to joining them.”

She lowered her head and her face went completely still, as the curtain of hair obscured her eyes.

“Giving up the dead,” he whispered, praying she wouldn’t leave with Berger, knowing he was so very close to pushing her over the edge. “I touched a nerve there. How much of you wants to follow the dead? More than a little, Sachs. Oh, much more than a little.”

She was hesitating. He knew he was near her heart.

She turned angrily to Berger, gripped him by the cuffs. “Come on.” Pushed through the door.

Rhyme called, “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Again she stopped.

“Sometimes… things happen, Sachs. Sometimes you just can’t be what you ought to be, you can’t have what you ought to have. And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point it just isn’t worth the fight to try to fix what went wrong.”

He watched them standing, motionless, in the doorway. The room was utterly silent. She turned and looked back at him.

“Death cures loneliness,” Rhyme continued. “It cures tension. It cures the itch.” Just like she’d glanced at his legs earlier he now gave a fast look at her torn fingers.

She released Berger’s cuffs and walked to the window. Tears glistened on her cheeks in the yellow radiance from the streetlights outside.

“Sachs, I’m tired,” he said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how tired I am. You know how hard life is to start with. Pile on a whole mountainful of… burdens. Washing, eating, crapping, making phone calls, buttoning shirts, scratching your nose… Then pile on a thousand more. And more after that.”

He fell silent. After a long moment she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

“What’s that?”

She nodded toward the poster. “Eight twenty-three’s got that mother and her little girl… Help us save them. Just them. If you do that I’ll give him an hour alone with you.” She glanced at Berger. “Provided he gets the hell out of town afterwards.”

Rhyme shook his head. “Sachs, if I have a stroke, if I can’t communicate…”

“If that happens,” she said evenly, “even if you can’t say a word, the deal still holds. I’ll make sure you have one hour together.” She crossed her arms, spread her feet again, in what was now Rhyme’s favorite image of Amelia Sachs. He wished he could’ve seen her on the railroad tracks that morning, stopping the train. She said, “That’s the best I’ll do.”

A moment passed. Rhyme nodded. “Okay. It’s a deal.” To Berger he said, “Monday?”

“Okay, Lincoln. Fair enough.” Berger, still shaken, watched Sachs cautiously as she unlocked the cuffs. Afraid, it seemed, that she might change her mind. When he was free he walked quickly to the door. He realized he was still holding the vertebra and returned, set it – almost reverently – next to Rhyme on the crime scene report for the first murder that morning.

“Happier’n hogs in red Virginia mud,” Sachs remarked, slouching in the squeaky rattan chair. Meaning Sellitto and Polling, after she’d told them that Rhyme had agreed to remain on the case for another day.

“Polling particularly,” she said. “I thought the little guy was going to hug me. Don’t tell him I called him that. How are you feeling? You look better.” She sipped some Scotch and set the glass back on the bedside table, beside Rhyme’s tumbler.

“Not bad.”

Thom was changing the bedclothes. “You were sweating like a fountain,” he said.

“But only above my neck,” Rhyme pointed out. “Sweating, I mean.”

“That right?” Sachs asked.

“Yep. That’s how it works. Thermostat’s busted below that. I never need any axial deodorant.”

“Axial?”

“Pit,” Rhyme snorted. “Armpit. My first aide never said armpit. He’d say, ‘I’m going to elevate you by your axials, Lincoln.’ Oh, and: ‘If you feel like regurgitating go right ahead, Lincoln.’ He called himself a ‘caregiver.’ The word was actually on his résumé. I have no idea why I hired him. We’re very superstitious, Sachs. We think calling something by a different name is going to change it. Unsub. Perpetrator. But that aide, he was just a nurse who was up to his own armpits in piss ’n’ puke. Right, Thom? Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s an honorable profession. Messy but honorable.”

“I thrive on mess. That’s why I work for you.”

“What’re you, Thom? An aide or a caregiver?”

“I’m a saint.”

“Ha, fast with the comebacks. And fast with the needle too. He brought me back from the dead. Done it more than once.”

Rhyme was suddenly pierced with a fear that Sachs had seen him naked. Eyes fixed firmly on the unsub profile, he asked, “Say, do I owe you some thanks too, Sachs? Did you play Clara Barton here?” He uneasily waited for her answer, didn’t know how he could look at her again if she had.

“Nup,” Thom answered. “Saved you all by my lonesome. Didn’t want any of these sensitive souls repulsed by the sight of your baggy rear end.”

Thank you, Thom, he thought. Then barked, “Now go away. We have to talk about the case. Sachs and me.”

“You need some sleep.”

“Of course I do. But we still need to talk about the case. Good night, good night.”

After Thom left, Sachs poured some Macallan in a glass. She lowered her head and inhaled the smoky vapors.

“Who snitched?” Rhyme asked. “Pete?”

“Who?” she asked.

“Dr. Taylor, the SCI man.”

She hesitated long enough for him to know that Taylor was the one. She said finally, “He cares about you.”

“Of course he does. That’s the problem – I want him to care a little less. Does he know about Berger?”

“He suspects.”

Rhyme grimaced. “Look, tell him that Berger’s just an old friend. He… what?”

Sachs exhaled slowly, as if shooting cigarette smoke through her pursed lips. “You not only want me to let you kill yourself you want me to lie to the one person who could talk you out of it.”

“He couldn’t talk me out of it,” Rhyme responded.

“Then why do you want me to lie?”

He laughed. “Let’s just keep Dr. Taylor in the dark for a few more days.”

“All right,” she said. “Jesus, you’re a tough person to deal with.”

He examined her closely. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“About what?”

“Who’s the dead? That you haven’t given up?”

“There’s plenty of them.”

“Such as?”

“Read the newspaper.”

“Come on, Sachs.”

She shook her head, stared down at her Scotch with a faint smile on her lips. “No, I don’t think so.”

He put her silence down to reluctance about having an intimate conversation with someone she’d known only for one day. Which seemed ironic, considering she sat next to a dozen catheters, a tube of K-Y jelly and a box of Depends. Still he wasn’t going to push it and said nothing more. So he was surprised when she suddenly looked up and blurted, “It’s just… It’s just… Oh, hell.” And as the sobbing began she lifted her hands to her face, spilling a good two inches of Scotland ’s best all over the parquet.

TWENTY-SIX

“I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M TELLING YOU THIS.” She sat huddled in the deep chair, legs drawn up, issue shoes kicked off. The tears were gone though her face was as ruddy as her hair.

“Go on,” he encouraged.

“That guy I told you about? We were going to get an apartment together.”

“Oh, with the collie. You didn’t say it was a guy. Your boyfriend?”

The secret lover? Rhyme wondered.

“He was my boyfriend.”

“I was thinking maybe it was your father you’d lost.”

“Naw. Pop did pass away – three years ago. Cancer. But we knew it was coming. If that prepares you for it I guess we were prepared. But Nick…”

“He was killed?” Rhyme asked softly.

But she didn’t answer. “Nick Carelli. One of us. A cop. Detective, third. Worked Street Crimes.”

The name was familiar. Rhyme said nothing and let her continue.

“We lived together for a while. Talked about getting married.” She paused, seemed to be lining up her thoughts like targets at a shooting range. “He worked undercover. So we were pretty secret about our relationship. He couldn’t let word get around on the street that his gal was a cop.” She cleared her throat. “It’s hard to explain. See, we had this… thing between us. It was… it hasn’t happened for me very often. Hell, it never happened before Nick. We clicked in some really deep way. He knew I had to be a cop and that wasn’t a problem for him. Same with me and his working undercover. That kind of… wavelength. You knew, where you just completely understand someone? You ever felt what I’m talking about? With your wife?”

Rhyme smiled faintly. “I did. Yes. But not with Blaine, my wife.” And that was all he wanted to say on the subject. “How’d you meet?” he asked.

“The assignments lectures at the academy. Where somebody gets up and they tell you a little about what their division does. Nick was lecturing on undercover work. He asked me out on the spot. Our first date was at Rodman’s Neck.”

“The gun range?”

She nodded, sniffing. “Afterwards, we went to his mom’s in Brooklyn and had pasta and a bottle of Chianti. She pinched me hard and said I was too skinny to have babies. Made me eat two cannoli. We went back to my place and he stayed over that night. Quite a first date, huh? From then on we saw each other all the time. It was gonna work, Rhyme. I felt it. It was gonna work just fine.”

Rhyme said, “What happened?”

“He was…”

Another bolstering hit of old liquor. “He was on the take is what happened. The whole time I knew him.”

“He was?”

“Crooked. Oh, way crooked. I never had a clue. Not a single goddamn clue. He socked it away in banks around the city. He dusted close to two hundred thousand.”

Lincoln was silent a moment. “I’m sorry, Sachs. Drugs?”

“No. Merch, mostly. Appliances, TVs. ’Jackings. They called it the Brooklyn Connection. The papers did.”

Rhyme was nodding. “That’s why I remember it. There were a dozen of them in the ring, right? All cops?”

“Mostly. A few ICC people too.”

“What happened to him? Nick?”

“You know what happens when cops bust cops. They beat the crap out of him. Said he resisted but I know he didn’t. Broke three ribs, a couple fingers, smashed his face all up. Pleaded guilty but he still got twenty to thirty.”

“For hijacking?” Rhyme was astonished.

“He worked a couple of the jobs himself. Pistol-whipped one driver, took a shot at another one. Just to scare him. I know it was just to scare him. But the judge threw him away.” She closed her eyes, pressed her lips together hard.

“When he got collared, Internal Affairs went after him like they were in heat. They checked pen registers. We were real careful about calling each other. He said perps sometimes tapped his line. But there were some calls to my place. IA came after me too. So Nick just cut me off. I mean, he had to. Otherwise I would’ve gone down with him. You know IA – it’s always a goddamn witch-hunt.”

“What happened?”

“To convince them that I wasn’t anything to him… Well, he said some things about me.” She swallowed, her eyes fixed on the floor. “At the IA inquest they wanted to know about me. Nick said, ‘Oh, P.D. Sachs? I just fucked her a few times. Turned out she was lousy. So I dumped her.’ ” She tilted her head back and mopped tears with her sleeve. “The nickname? P.D.”

“Lon told me.”

She frowned. “Did he tell you what it means?”

“The Portable’s Daughter. After your father.”

She smiled wanly. “That’s how it started. But that’s not how it ended up. At the inquest Nick said I was such a lousy fuck it really stood for ‘Pussy Diver’ ’cause I probably liked girls better. Guess how fast that went through the department.”

“It’s a low common denominator out there, Sachs.”

She took a deep breath. “I saw him in court toward the end of the inquest. He looked at me once and… I can’t even describe what was in his eyes. Just pure heartbreak. Oh, he did it to protect me. But still… You were right, you know. About the lonely stuff.”

“I didn’t mean -”

“No,” she said, unsmiling. “I hit you, you hit me. That was fair. And you were right. I hate being alone. I want to go out, I want to meet somebody. But after Nick I lost my taste for sex.” Sachs gave a sour laugh. “Everybody thinks looking like me’s wonderful. I could have my pick of guys, right? Bullshit. The only ones with the balls to ask me out’re the ones who want to screw all the time. So I just gave up. It’s easier by myself. I hate it, but it’s easier.”

At last Rhyme understood her reaction at seeing him for the first time. She was at ease with him because here was a man who was no threat to her. No sexual come-ons. Someone she wouldn’t have to fend off. And perhaps a certain camaraderie too – as if they were both missing the same, crucial gene.

“You know,” he joked, “you and me, we ought to get together and not have an affair.”

She laughed. “So tell me about your wife. How long were you married?”

“Seven years. Six before the accident, one after.”

“And she left you?”

“Nope. I left her. I didn’t want her to feel guilty about it.”

“Good of you.”

“I’d have driven her out eventually. I’m a prick. You’ve only seen my good side.” After a moment he asked, “This thing with Nick… it have anything to do with why you’re leaving Patrol?”

“No. Well, yes.”

“Gunshy?”

Finally she nodded. “Life on the street’s different now. That’s what did it to Nick, you know. What turned him. It’s not like it was when Pop was walking his beat. Things were better then.”

“You mean it’s not like the stories your dad told you.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. Sachs slumped the chair. “The arthritis? That’s true but it’s not as serious as I pretend it is.”

“I know,” Rhyme said.

“You know? How?”

“I just looked at the evidence and drew some conclusions.”

“Is that why you’ve been on my case all day? You knew I was faking?”

“I’ve been on your case,” he said, “because you’re better than you think you are.”

She gave him a screwy look.

“Ah, Sachs, you remind me of me.”

“I do?”

“Let me tell you a story. I’d been on crime scene detail maybe a year when we got a call from Homicide there was a guy found dead in an alley in Greenwich Village. All the sergeants were out and so I got elected to run the scene. I was twenty-six years old, remember. I go up there and check it out and it turns out the dead guy’s the head of the City Health and Human Services. Now, what’s he got all around him but a load of Polaroids? You should’ve seen some of those snaps – he’d been to one of those S &M clubs off Washington Street. Oh, and I forgot to mention, when they found him he was dressed in a stunning little black minidress and fishnet stockings.

“So, I secure the scene. All of a sudden a captain shows up and starts to cross the tape. I know he’s planning to have those pictures disappear on the way to the evidence room but I was so naive I didn’t care much about the pictures – I was just worried about somebody walking through the scene.”

“P is for Protect the crime scene.”

Rhyme chuckled. “So I didn’t let him in. While he was standing at the tape screaming at me a dep com tried an end run. I told him no. He started screaming at me. The scene stays virgin till IRD’s through with it, I told them. Guess who finally showed up?”

“The mayor?”

“Well, deputy mayor.”

“And you held ’em all off?”

“Nobody got into that scene except Latents and Photography. Of course my payback was spending six months printing floaters. But we nailed the perp with some trace and a print off one of those Polaroids – happened to be the same snap the Post used on page one, as a matter of fact. Just like what you did yesterday morning, Sachs. Closing off the tracks and Eleventh Avenue.”

“I didn’t think about it,” she said. “I just did it. Why’re you looking at me that way?”

“Come on, Sachs. You know where you ought to be. On the street. Patrol, Major Crimes, IRD, doesn’t matter… But Public Affairs? You’ll rot there. It’s a good job for some people but not you. Don’t give up so fast.”

“Oh, and you’re not giving up? What about Berger?”

“Things’re a little different with me.”

Her glance questioned, They are? And she went prowling for a Kleenex. When she returned to the chair she asked, “You don’t carry any corpses around with you?”

“I have in my day. They’re all buried now.”

“Tell me.”

“Really, there’s nothing -”

“Not true. I can tell. Come on – I showed you mine.”

He felt an odd chill. He knew it wasn’t dysreflexia. His smile faded.

“Rhyme, go on,” she persisted. “I’d like to hear.”

“Well, there was a case a few years ago,” he said, “I made a mistake. A bad mistake.”

“Tell me.” She poured them each another finger of the Scotch.

“It was a domestic murder-suicide call. Husband and wife in a Chinatown apartment. He shot her, killed himself. I didn’t have much time for the scene; I worked it fast. And I committed a classic error – I’d made up my mind about what I was going to find before I started looking. I found some fibers that I couldn’t place but I assumed that the husband and wife’d tracked them in. I found the bullet fragments but didn’t check them against the gun we found at the scene. I noticed the blowback pattern but didn’t grid it to double-check the exact position of the gun. I did the search, signed off and went back to the office.”

“What happened?”

“The scene had been staged. It was really a burglary-murder. And the perp had never left the apartment.”

“What? He was still there?”

“After I left he crawled out from under the bed and started shooting. He killed one forensic tech and wounded an assistant ME. He got out on the street and there was a shootout with a couple of portables who’d heard the 10-13. The perp was shot up – he died later – but he killed one of the cops and wounded the other. He also shot up a family that’d just come out of a Chinese restaurant across the street. Used one of the kids as a shield.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Colin Stanton was the father’s name. He wasn’t hurt at all and he’d been an army medic – EMS said he probably could’ve saved his wife or one or both of the kids if he’d tried to stop the bleeding but he panicked and froze. He just stood there, watching them all die in front of him.”

“Jesus, Rhyme. But it wasn’t your fault. You -”

“Let me finish. That wasn’t the end of it.”

“No?”

“The husband went back home – upstate New York. Had a breakdown and went into a mental hospital for a while. He tried to kill himself. They put him under a suicide watch. First he tried to cut his wrist with a piece of paper – a magazine cover. Then he sneaked into the library and found a water glass in the librarian’s bathroom, shattered it and slashed his wrists. They stitched him up okay and kept him in the mental hospital for another year or so. Finally they released him. A month or so after he was out he tried again. Used a knife.” Rhyme added coolly, “That time it worked.”

He’d learned about Stanton’s death in an obituary faxed from the Albany County coroner to NYPD Public Affairs. Someone there had sent it to Rhyme via interoffice mail with a Post-It attached: FYI – thought you’d be interested, the officer had written.

“There was an IA investigation. Professional incompetence. They slapped my wrist. I think they should’ve fired me.”

She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. “And you’re telling me you don’t feel guilty about that?”

“Not anymore.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I served my time, Sachs. I lived with those bodies for a while. But I gave ’ em up. If I hadn’t, how could I have kept on working?”

After a long moment she said, “When I was eighteen I got a ticket. Speeding. I was doing ninety in a forty zone.”

“Well.”

“Dad said he’d front me the money for the fine but I’d have to pay him back. With interest. But you know what else he told me? He said he would’ve tanned my hide for running a red light or reckless driving. But going fast he understood. He told me, ‘I know how you feel, honey. When you move they can’t getcha.’ ” Sachs said to Rhyme, “If I couldn’t drive, if I couldn’t move, then maybe I’d do it too. Kill myself.”

“I used to walk everywhere,” Rhyme said. “I never did drive much. Haven’t owned a car in twenty years. What kind do you have?”

“Nothing a snooty Manhattanite like you’d drive. A Chevy. Camaro. It was my father’s.”

“Who gave you the drill press? For working on cars, I assume?”

She nodded. “And a torque wrench. And spark-gap set. And my first set of ratcheting sockets – my thirteenth-birthday present.” Laughing softly. “That Chevy, it’s a wobbly-knob car. You know what that is? An American car. The radio and vents and light switches are all loose and cheesy. But the suspension’s like a rock, it’s light as an egg crate and I’ll take on a BMW any day.”

“And I’ll bet you have.”

“Once or twice.”

“Cars are status in the crip world,” Rhyme explained. “We’d sit – or lie – around the ward in rehab and talk about what we could get out of our insurance companies. Wheelchair vans were the top of the heap. Next are hand-control cars. Which wouldn’t do me any good of course.” He squinted, testing his supple memory. “I haven’t been in a car in years. I can’t remember the last time.”

“Got an idea,” Sachs said suddenly. “Before your friend – Dr. Berger – comes back, let me take you for a ride. Or is that a problem? Sitting up? You were saying that wheelchairs don’t work for you.”

“Well, no, wheelchairs’re a problem. But a car? I think that’d be okay.” He laughed. “A hundred and sixty-eight? Miles per hour?”

“That was a special day,” Sachs said, nodding at the memory. “Good conditions. And no highway patrol.”

The phone buzzed and Rhyme answered it himself. It was Lon Sellitto.

“We got S &S on all the target churches in Harlem. Dellray’s in charge of that – man’s become a true believer, Lincoln. You wouldn’t recognize him. Oh, and I’ve got thirty portables and a ton of UN security cruising for any other churches we might’ve missed. If he doesn’t show up, we’re going to do a sweep of all of them at seven-thirty. Just in case he snuck in without us seeing him. I think we’re going to nail him, Linc,” the detective said, suspiciously enthusiastic for a New York City homicide cop.

“Okay, Lon, I’ll send Amelia up to your CP around eight.”

They hung up.

Thom knocked on the door before coming into the room.

As if he’d catch us in a compromising position, Rhyme laughed to himself.

“No more excuses,” he said testily. “Bed. Now.”

It was after 3:00 a.m. and Rhyme had left exhaustion far behind long ago. He was floating somewhere else. Above his body. He wondered if he’d start to hallucinate.

“Yes, Mother,” he said. “Officer Sachs’s staying over, Thom. Could you get her a blanket, please?”

“What did you say?” Thom turned to face him.

“A blanket.”

“No, after that,” the aide said. “That word?”

“I don’t know. ‘Please’?”

Thom’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Are you all right? You want me to get Pete Taylor back here? The head of Columbia-Presbyterian? The surgeon general?”

“See how this son of a bitch torments me?” Rhyme said to Sachs. “He never knows how close he comes to getting fired.”

“A wake-up call for when?”

“Six-thirty should be fine,” Rhyme said.

When he was gone, Rhyme asked, “Hey, Sachs, you like music?”

“Love it.”

“What kind?”

“Oldies, doo-wop, Motown… How ’bout you? You seem like a classical kind of guy.”

“See that closet there?”

“This one?”

“No, no, the other one. To the right. Open it up.”

She did and gasped in amazement. The closet was a small room filled with close to a thousand CDs.

“It’s like Tower Records.”

“That stereo, see it on the shelf?”

She ran her hand over the dusty black Harmon Kardon.

“It cost more than my first car,” Rhyme said. “I don’t use it anymore.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer but said instead, “Put something on. Is it plugged in? It is? Good. Pick something.”

A moment later she stepped out of the closet and walked over to the couch as Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops started singing about love.

It had been a year since there’d been a note of music in this room, Rhyme estimated. Silently he tried to answer Sachs’s question about why he’d stopped listening. He couldn’t.

Sachs lifted files and books off the couch. Lay back on it and thumbed through a copy of Scenes of the Crime.

“Can I have one?” she asked.

“Take ten.”

“Will you…” Her voice braked to a halt.

“Sign it for you?” He laughed. She joined him. “How ’bout if I put my thumbprint on it? Graphoanalysts’ll never give you more than an eighty-five percent probability of a handwriting match. But a thumbprint? Any friction-ridge expert’ll certify it’s mine.”

He watched her read the first chapter. Her eyes drooped. She closed the book.

“Will you do something for me?” she asked.

“What?”

“Read to me. Something from the book. When Nick and I were together…” Her voice faded.

“What?”

“When we were together, a lot of times Nick’d read out loud before we went to sleep. Books, the paper, magazines… It’s one of the things I miss the most.”

“I’m a terrible reader,” Rhyme confessed. “I sound like I’m reciting crime scene reports. But I’ve got this memory… It’s pretty good. How ’bout if I just tell you about some scenes?”

“Would you?” She turned her back, pulled her navy blouse off and unstrapped the thin American Body Armor vest, tossed it aside. Beneath it she wore a mesh T-shirt and under that a sports bra. She pulled the blouse back on and lay on the couch, pulling the blanket over her, and curled up on her side, closed her eyes.

With the environmental control unit Rhyme dimmed the lights.

“I always found the sites of death fascinating,” he began. “They’re like shrines. We’re a lot more interested in where people bought the big one than where they were born. Take John Kennedy. A thousand people a day visit the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. How many you think make pilgrimages to some obstetrics ward in Boston?”

Rhyme nestled his head in the luxurious softness of the pillow. “Is this boring you?”

“No,” she said. “Please don’t stop.”

“You know what I’ve always wondered about, Sachs?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s fascinated me for years – Calvary. Two thousand years ago. Now, there’s a crime scene I’d like to’ve worked. I know what you’re going to say: But we know the perps. Well, do we? All we really know is what the witnesses tell us. Remember what I say – never trust a wit. Maybe those Bible accounts aren’t what happened at all. Where’s the proof? The PE. The nails, blood, sweat, the spear, the cross, the vinegar. Sandal prints and friction ridges.”

Rhyme turned his head slightly to the left and he continued to talk about crime scenes and evidence until Sachs’s chest rose and fell steadily and faint strands of her fiery red hair blew back and forth under her shallow breath. With his left index finger he flipped through the ECU control and shut off the light. He too was soon asleep.

A faint light of dawn was in the sky.

Awakening, Carole Ganz could see it through the chicken- wire- impregnated glass above her head. Pammy. Oh, baby… Then she thought of Ron. And all her possessions sitting in that terrible basement. The money, the yellow knapsack…

Mostly, though, she was thinking about Pammy.

Something had wakened her from a light, troubled sleep. What was it?

The pain from her wrist? It throbbed horribly. She adjusted herself slightly. She -

The tubular howl of a pipe organ and a rising chorus of voices filled the room again.

That’s what had wakened her. Music. A crashing wave of music. The church wasn’t abandoned. There were people around! She laughed to herself. Somebody would -

And that was when she remembered the bomb.

Carole peered around the filing cabinet. It was still there, teetering on the edge of the table. It had the crude look of real bombs and murder weapons – not the slick, shiny gadgets you see in movies. Sloppy tape, badly stripped wires, dirty gasoline… Maybe it’s a dud, she thought. In the daylight it didn’t look so dangerous.

Another burst of music. It came from directly over her head. Accompanied by a shuffling of footsteps. A door closed. Creaks and groans as people moved around the old, dry wood floors. Plumes of dust fell from the joists.

The soaring voices were cut off in mid-passage. A moment later they started singing again.

Carole banged with her feet but the floor was concrete, the walls brick. She tried to scream but the sound was swallowed by the gag. The rehearsal continued, the solemn, vigorous music rattling through the basement.

After ten minutes Carole collapsed on the floor in exhaustion. Her eyes were drawn back to the bomb again. Now the light was better and she could see the timer clearly.

Carole squinted. The timer!

It wasn’t a dud at all. The arrow was set for 6:15 a.m. The dial showed the time was now 5:30.

Squirming her way farther behind the filing cabinet, Carole began to kick the metal sides with her knee. But whatever faint noises the blows made immediately vanished in the booming, mournful rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” filling the church basement from above.