The Bone Collector

TWENTY-SEVEN

Sunday, 5:45 a.m., to Monday, 7:00 p.m.

HE AWOKE TO A SCENT. AS HE OFTEN DID.

And – as on many mornings – he didn’t at first open his eyes but just remained in his half-seated position, trying to figure out what the unfamiliar smell might be:

The gassy scent of dawn air? The dew on the oil-slick streets? Damp plaster? He tried to detect the scent of Amelia Sachs but could not.

His thoughts skipped over her and continued. What was it?

Cleanser? No.

A chemical from Cooper’s impromptu lab?

No, he recognized all of those.

It was… Ah, yes… marking pen.

Now he could open his eyes and – after a glance at sleeping Sachs to make certain she hadn’t deserted him – found himself gazing at the Monet poster on the wall. That’s where the smell was coming from. The hot, humid air of this August morning had wilted the paper and brought the scent out.

· knows CS proc.

· possibly has record

· knows FR prints

· gun =.32 Colt

· Ties vics w/unusual knots

· “Old” appeals to him

· Called one vic “Hanna”

· Knows basic German

· Underground appeals to him

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 •Greenwich & Bank,

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

•Recent model sedan

•Lt. gray, silver, beige

Other

•knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

•Ties vics w/ unusual knots

UNSUB 823 (page 2 of 3)

Appearance

•Ski mask? Navy blue?

•Gloves are dark

•Aftershave = Brut

•Hair color not brown

•Deep scar, index finger

Residence

•ShopRite • 8th Ave. & 24th,

•ShopRite Houston & Lafayette,

•ShopRite

•Old building, pink marble

•At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional

Vehicle

•Rental car: prob. stolen

•Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model

Other

•“Old” appeals to him

•Called one vic “Hanna”

•Knows basic German

•Underground appeals to him

•Dual personalities

UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 3)

Appearance

•Casual clothes

•Gloves faded? Stained?

Residence

•ShopRite Houston & Lafayette,

•ShopRite

•Old building, pink marble

•At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional

Vehicle

•Rental car: prob. stolen

•Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model

Other

•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

•Listened as he broke vic’s finger

•Left snake as slap at investigators

The wall clock’s pale numbers glowed: 5:45 a.m. His eyes returned to the poster. He couldn’t see it clearly, just a ghostly pattern of pure white against a lesser white. But there was enough light from the dawn sky to make out most of the words.

· Dual personalities

· Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

· Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

· Listened as he broke vic’s finger

· Left snake as slap at investigators

The falcons were waking. He was aware of a flutter at the window. Rhyme’s eyes skipped over the chart again. In his office at IRD he’d nailed up a dozen erasable marker boards and on them he’d keep a tally of the characteristics of the unsubs in major cases. He remembered: pacing, staring at them, wondering about the people they described.

Molecules of paint, mud, pollen, leaf…

· Old building, pink marble

Thinking about a clever jewel thief he and Lon had collared ten years ago. At Central Booking the perp had coyly said they’d never find the loot from the prior jobs but if they’d consider a plea he’d tell them where he’d hidden it. Rhyme had responded, “Well, we have been having some trouble figuring out where it is.”

“I’m sure you have,” the snide crook said.

“See,” Rhyme continued, “we’ve narrowed it down to the stone wall in the coal bin of a Colonial farmhouse on the Connecticut River. About five miles north of Long Island Sound. I just can’t tell whether the house is on the east bank or the west bank of the river.”

When the story made the rounds the phrase everybody used to describe the expression on the perp’s face was: You had to fucking be there.

Maybe it is magic, Sachs, he thought.

· At least 100 years” old, prob. mansion or institutional

He scanned the poster once again and closed his eyes, leaning back into his glorious pillow. It was then that he felt the jolt. Almost like a slap on his face. The shock rose to his scalp like spreading fire. Eyes wide, locked onto the poster.

· “Old” appeals to him

“Sachs!” he cried. “Wake up!”

She stirred and sat up. “What? What’s…?”

Old, old, old…

“I made a mistake,” he said tersely. “There’s a problem.”

She thought at first it was something medical and she leapt from the couch, reaching for Thom’s medical bag.

“No, the clues, Sachs, the clues… I got it wrong.” His breathing was rapid and he ground his teeth together as he thought.

She pulled her clothes on, sat back, her fingers disappearing automatically into her scalp, scratching. “What, Rhyme? What is it?”

“The church. It might not be in Harlem.” He repeated, “I made a mistake.”

Just like with the perp who killed Colin Stanton’s family. In criminalistics you can nail down a hundred clues perfectly and it’s the one you miss that gets people killed.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Quarter to six, a little after. Get the newspaper. The church-services schedule.”

Sachs found the paper, thumbed through it. Then looked up. “What’re you thinking?”

“Eight twenty-three’s obsessed with what’s old. If he’s after an old black church then he might not mean uptown. Philip Payton started the Afro-American Realty Company in Harlem in 1900. There were two other black settlements in the city. Downtown where the courthouses are now and San Juan Hill. They’re mostly white now but… Oh, what the hell was I thinking of?”

“Where’s San Juan Hill?”

“Just north of Hell’s Kitchen. On the West Side. It was named in honor of all the black soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War.”

She read through the paper.

“Downtown churches,” she said. “Well, in Battery Park there’s the Seamen’s Institute. A chapel there. They have services. Trinity. Saint Paul’s.”

“That wasn’t the black area. Farther north and east.”

“A Presbyterian church in Chinatown.”

“Any Baptist. Evangelical?”

“No, nothing in that area at all. There’s – Oh, hell.” With resignation in her eyes she sighed. “Oh, no.”

Rhyme understood. “Sunrise service!”

She was nodding. “Holy Tabernacle Baptist… Oh, Rhyme, there’s a gospel service starting at six. Fifty-ninth and Eleventh Avenue.”

“That’s San Juan Hill! Call them!”

She grabbed the phone and dialed the number. She stood, head down, fiercely plucking an eyebrow and shaking her head. “Answer, answer… Hell. It’s a recording. The minister must be out of his office.” She said into the receiver, “This is the New York Police Department. We have reason to believe there’s a firebomb in your church. Evacuate as fast as possible.” She hung up, pulled her shoes on.

“Go, Sachs. You’ve got to get there. Now!”

“Me?”

“We’re closer than the nearest precinct. You can be there in ten minutes.”

She jogged toward the door, slinging her utility belt around her waist.

“I’ll call the precinct,” he yelled as she leapt down the stairs, hair a red cloud around her head. “And Sachs, if you ever wanted to drive fast, do it now.”

The RRV wagon skidded into 81st Street, speeding west.

Sachs burst into the intersection at Broadway, skidded hard and whacked a New York Post vending machine, sending it through Zabar’s window before she brought the wagon under control. She remembered all the crime scene equipment in the back. Rear-heavy vehicle, she thought; don’t corner at fifty.

Then down Broadway. Brake at the intersections. Check left. Check right. Clear. Punch it!

She peeled off on Ninth Avenue at Lincoln Center and headed south. I’m only -

Oh, hell!

A mad stop on screaming tires.

The street was closed.

A row of blue sawhorses blocked Ninth for a street fair later that morning. A banner proclaimed, Crafts and Delicacies of all Nations. Hand in hand, we are all one.

Gaw… damn UN! She backed up a half block and got the wagon up to fifty before she slammed into the first sawhorse. Spreading portable aluminum tables and wooden display racks in her wake, she tore a swath through the deserted fair. Two blocks later the wagon broke through the southern barricade and she skidded west on Fifty-ninth, using far more of the sidewalk than she meant to.

There was the church, a hundred yards away.

Parishioners on the steps – parents, little girls in frilly white and pink dresses, young boys in dark suits and white shirts, their hair in gangsta knobs or fades.

And from a basement window, a small puff of gray smoke.

Sachs slammed the accelerator to the floor, the engine roaring.

Grabbing the radio. “RRV Two to Central, K?”

And in the instant it took her to glance down at the Motorola to make sure the volume was up, a big Mercedes slipped out of the alley directly into her path.

A fast glimpse of the family inside, eyes wide in horror, as the father slammed on the brakes.

Sachs instinctively spun the wheel hard to the left, putting the wagon into controlled skid. Come on, she was begging the tires, grip, grip, grip! But the oily asphalt was loose from the heat of the past few days and covered with dew. The wagon danced over the road like a hydrofoil.

The rear end met the Merc’s front flat-on at fifty miles an hour. With an explosive boom the 560 sheared off the rear right side of the wagon. The black CS suitcases flew into the air, breaking open and strewing their contents along the street. Church-goers dove for cover from the splinters of glass and plastic and sheet metal.

The air bag popped and deflated, stunning Sachs. She covered her face as the wagon tumbled over a row of cars and through a newsstand then skidded to a stop upside down. Newspapers and plastic evidence bags floated to the ground like tiny paratroopers.

Held upside down by the harness, blinded by her hair, Sachs wiped blood from her torn forehead and lip and tried to pop the belt release. It held tight. Hot gasoline flowed into the car and trickled along her arm. She pulled a switchblade from her back pocket, flicked the knife open and cut the seat belt. Falling, she nearly skewered herself on the knife and lay, gasping, choking on the gas fumes.

Come on, girl, get out. Out!

The doors were jammed closed and there was no escape through the crushed rear end of the wagon. Sachs began kicking the windows. The glass wouldn’t break. She drew her foot back and slammed it hard into the cracked windshield. No effect, except that she nearly sprained her ankle.

Her gun!

She slapped her hip; the gun had been torn from the holster and tossed somewhere inside the car. Feeling the hot drizzle of gasoline on her arm and shoulder, she searched frantically through the papers and CS equipment littering the ceiling of the station wagon.

Then she saw the clunky Glock near the dome light. She swept it up and aimed at the side window.

Go ahead. Backdrop’s clear, no spectators yet.

Then she hesitated. Would the muzzle flash ignite the gas?

She held the gun as far away from her soaked uniform blouse as she could, debating. Then squeezed the trigger.

TWENTY-EIGHT

FIVE SHOTS, A STAR PATTERN, and even then the honest General Motors glass held firm.

Three more blasts, deafening her in the confines of the wagon. But at least the gas didn’t explode.

She began to kick again. Finally the window burst outward in a cascade of blue-green ice. Just as she rolled out the interior of the wagon exploded with a breathless woosh.

Stripping down to her T-shirt, she flung away her gas-soaked uniform blouse and bulletproof vest and tossed aside the headset mike. Felt her ankle wobble but sprinted to the front door of the church, past the fleeing churchgoers and choir. The ground floor was filled with bubbling smoke. Nearby, a section of the floor rippled and steamed and then burst into flames.

The minister appeared suddenly, choking, tears streaming down his face. He was dragging an unconscious woman behind him. Sachs helped him get her to the door.

“Where’s the basement?” she asked.

He coughed hard, shook his head.

“Where?” she cried, thinking of Carole Ganz and her little daughter. “The basement?”

“There. But…”

On the other side of the patch of burning floor.

Sachs could barely see it, the smoke was so thick. A wall collapsed in front of them, the old joists and posts behind it snapping and firing sparks and jets of hot gas, which hissed into the cloudy room. She hesitated, then started for the basement door.

The minister took her arm. “Wait.” He opened a closet and grabbed a fire extinguisher, yanked the arming pin. “Let’s go.”

Sachs shook her head. “Not you. Keep checking up here. Tell the fire department there’s a police officer and another victim in the basement.”

Sachs was sprinting now.

When you move…

She jumped over the fiery patch of floor. But because of the smoke she misjudged the distance to the wall; it was closer than she’d thought and she slammed into the wood paneling then fell backwards, rolling as her hair brushed the fire, some strands igniting. Gagging on the stink, she crushed the flames out and started to push herself to her feet. The floor, weakened by the flames beneath, broke under her weight and her face crashed into the oak. She felt the blaze in the basement lick her hands and arms as she yanked her hands back.

Rolling away from the edge she climbed to her feet and reached for the knob to the basement door. She stopped suddenly.

Come on, girl, think better! Feel a door before opening it. If it’s too hot and you let oxygen into a superheated room it’ll ignite and the backdraft’ll fry your ass good. She touched the wood. It was scorching hot.

Then thought: But what the hell else can I do?

Spitting on her hand, she gripped the knob fast, twisting it open and releasing it just before the burn seared her palm.

The door burst open and a cloud of smoke and sparks shot outward.

“Anybody down there?” she called and started down.

The lower stairs were burning. She blasted them with a short burst of carbon dioxide and leapt into the murky basement. She broke through the second-to-last step, pitching forward. The extinguisher clattered to the floor as she grabbed the railing just in time to save her leg from snapping.

Pulling herself out of the broken step, Sachs squinted through the haze. The smoke wasn’t as bad down here – it was rising – but the flames were raging all around her. The extinguisher had rolled under a burning table. Forget it! She ran through the smoke.

“Hello?” she shouted.

No answer.

Then remembered that Unsub 823 used duct tape; he liked his vics silent.

She kicked in a small doorway and looked inside the boiler room. There was a door leading outside but burning debris blocked it completely. Beside it stood the fuel tank, which was now surrounded by flames.

It won’t explode, Sachs remembered from the academy – the lecture on arson. Fuel oil doesn’t explode. Kick aside the debris and push the door open. Clear your escape route. Then go look for the woman and the girl.

She hesitated, watching the flames roll over the side of the oil tank.

It won’t explode, it won’t explode.

She started forward, edging toward the door.

It won’t -

The tank suddenly puffed out like a heated soda can and split down the middle. The oil squirted into the air, igniting in a huge orange spume. A fiery pool formed on the floor and flowed toward Sachs.

Won’t explode. Okay. But it burns pretty fucking well. She leapt back through the door, slammed it shut. So much for her escape route.

Backing toward the stairs, choking now, keeping low, looking for any signs of Carole and Pammy. Could 823 have changed the rules? Could he have given up on basements and put these vics in the church attic?

Crack.

A fast look upward. She saw a large oak beam, rippling with flames, start to fall.

With a scream Sachs leapt aside, but tripped and landed hard on her back, staring at the huge falling bar of wood streaking directly at her face and chest. Instinctively she held her hands up.

A huge bang as the beam landed on a child’s Sunday-school chair. It stopped inches from Sachs’s head. She crawled out from underneath and rolled to her feet.

Looking around the room, peering through the darkening smoke.

Hell no, she thought suddenly. I’m not losing another one. Choking, Sachs turned back to the fire and staggered toward the one corner she hadn’t checked.

As she jogged forward a leg shot out from behind a file cabinet and tripped her.

Hands flying outward, Sachs landed face down inches from a pool of burning oil. She rolled to her side, drawing her weapon and swinging it into the panicked face of a blond woman struggling to sit up.

Sachs pulled the gag off her mouth and the woman spit black mucus. She gagged for a moment, a deep, dying sound.

“Carole Ganz?”

She nodded.

“Your daughter?” Sachs cried.

“Not… here. My hands! The cuffs.”

“No time. Come on.” Sachs cut Carole’s ankles free with her switchblade.

It was then that she saw, against the wall by the window, a melting plastic bag.

The planted clues! The ones that told where the little girl would be. She stepped toward it. But with a deafening bang the door to the boiler room cracked in half, spewing a six-inch tidal wave of burning oil over the floor, surrounding the bag, which disintegrated instantly.

Sachs stared for a moment and then heard the woman’s scream. All the stairs were blazing now. Sachs knocked the fire extinguisher out from under the smoldering table. The handle and nozzle had melted away and the metal canister was too hot to grasp. With her knife she cut a patch off her uniform blouse and lifted the crackling extinguisher by its neck, flung it to the top of the burning stairs. It staggered for a moment, like an uncertain bowling pin, and then started down.

Sachs drew her Glock and when the red cylinder was halfway down, fired one round.

The extinguisher erupted in a huge booming explosion; pieces of red shrapnel from the casing hissed over their heads. The mushroom cloud of carbon dioxide and powder settled over the stairs and momentarily dampened most of the flames.

“Now, move!” Sachs shouted.

Together they took the steps two at a time, Sachs carrying her own weight and half the woman’s, and pushed through the doorway into the inferno on the first floor. They hugged the wall as they stumbled toward the exit, while above them stained-glass windows burst and rained hot shards – the colorful bodies of Jesus and Matthew and Mary and God Himself – down upon the bent backs of the escaping women.

TWENTY-NINE

FORTY MINUTES LATER, Sachs had been salved and bandaged and stitched and had sucked so much pure oxygen she felt like she was tripping. She sat beside Carole Ganz. They stared at what was left of the church. Which was virtually nothing. Only two walls remained and, curiously, a portion of the third floor, jutting into space above a lunar landscape of ash and debris piled in the basement.

“Pammy, Pammy…” Carole moaned, then retched and spit. She took her own oxygen mask to her face, leaned back, weary and in pain.

Sachs examined another alcohol-soaked rag with which she was wiping the blood from her face. The rags had started out brown and were now merely pink. The wounds weren’t serious – a cut on her forehead, swatches of second-degree burns on her arm and hand. Her lips were no longer flawless, however; the lower one had been cut deeply in the crash, the tear requiring three stitches.

Carole was suffering from smoke inhalation and a broken wrist. An impromptu cast covered her left wrist and she cradled it, head down, speaking through clenched teeth. Every breath was an alarming wheeze. “That son of a bitch.” Coughing. “Why… Pammy? Why on earth? A three-year-old child!” She wiped angry tears with the back of her uninjured arm.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt her. So he just brought you to the church.”

“No,” she spat out angrily. “He doesn’t care about her. He’s sick! I saw the way he looked at her. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.” The harsh words dissolved into a harsher bout of coughing.

Sachs winced in pain. She’d unconsciously dug a nail into a burned fingertip. She pulled out her watchbook. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Between bouts of sobbing and throaty coughs, Carole told her the story of the kidnapping.

“You want me to call anybody?” Sachs asked. “Your husband?”

Carole didn’t answer. She drew her knees up to her chin, hugged herself, wheezing roughly.

With her scalded right hand Sachs squeezed the woman’s biceps and repeated the question.

“My husband…” She stared at Sachs with an eerie look. “My husband’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Carole was getting groggy from the sedative and a woman medic helped her into the ambulance to rest.

Sachs looked up and saw Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks running toward her from the burned-out church.

“Jesus, officer.” Sellitto was surveying the carnage in the street. “What about the girl?”

Sachs nodded. “He’s still got her.”

Banks said, “You okay?”

“Nothing serious.” Sachs glanced toward the ambulance. “The vic, Carole, she doesn’t have any money, no place to stay. She’s in town to work for the UN. Think you could make some calls, detective? See if they could set her up for a while?”

“Sure,” Sellitto said.

“And the planted clues?” Banks asked. He winced as he touched a bandage over his right eyebrow.

“Gone,” Sachs said. “I saw them. In the basement. Couldn’t get to them in time. Burned up and buried.”

“Oh, man,” Banks muttered. “What’s going to happen to the little girl?”

What does he think’s going to happen to her?

She walked back toward the wreck of the IRD wagon, found the headset. She pulled it on and was about to call in a patch request to Rhyme but hesitated then lifted off the mike. What could he tell her anyway? She looked at the church. How can you work a crime scene when there is no scene?

She was standing with her hands on her hips, staring out onto the smoldering hulk of the building, when she heard a sound she couldn’t place. A whining, mechanical sound. She paid no attention to it until she was aware of Lon Sellitto pausing as he dusted ash off his wrinkled shirt. He said, “I don’t believe it.”

She turned toward the street.

A large black van was parked a block away. A hydraulic ramp was protruding off the side and something sat on it. She squinted. One of those bomb squad robots, it seemed. The ramp lowered to the sidewalk and the robot rolled off.

Then she laughed out loud.

The contraption turned toward them and started to move. The wheelchair reminded her of a Pontiac Firebird, candy-apple red. It was one of those electric models, small rear wheels, a large battery and motor mounted underneath.

Thom walked along beside it but Lincoln Rhyme himself was driving – in control, she observed wryly – via a straw that he held in his mouth. His movements were oddly graceful. Rhyme pulled up to her and stopped.

“All right, I lied,” he said abruptly.

She exhaled a sigh. “About your back? When you said you couldn’t use a wheelchair.”

“I’m confessing I lied. You’re going to be mad, Amelia. So be mad and get it over with.”

“You ever notice when you’re in a good mood you call me Sachs, when you’re in a bad mood, you call me Amelia?”

“I’m not in a bad mood,” he snapped.

“He really isn’t,” Thom agreed. “He just hates to get caught at anything.” The aide nodded toward the impressive wheelchair. She glanced at the side. It was made by the Action Company, a Storm Arrow model. “He had this in the closet downstairs all the while he spun his pathetic little tale of woe. Oh, I let him have it for that.”

“No annotations, Thom, thank you. I’m apologizing, all right? I. Am. Sorry.”

“He’s had it for years,” Thom continued. “Learned the sip-’n’-puff cold. That’s the straw control. He’s really very good at it. By the way, he always calls me Thom. I never get preferential last-name treatment.”

“I got tired of being stared at,” Rhyme said matter-of-factly. “So I stopped going for joyrides.” Then glanced at her torn lip. “Hurt?”

She touched her mouth, which was bent into a grin. “Stings like hell.”

Rhyme glanced sideways. “And what happened to you, Banks? Shaving your forehead now?”

“Walked into a fire truck.” The young man grinned and touched the bandage again.

“Rhyme,” Sachs began, smiling no longer. “There’s nothing here. He’s got the little girl and I couldn’t get to the planted PE in time.”

“Ah, Sachs, there’s always something. Have faith in the teachings of Monsieur Locard.”

“I saw them burn up, the clues. And if there was anything left at all, it’s all buried under tons of debris.”

“Then we’ll look for the clues he didn’t mean to leave. We’ll do this scene together, Sachs. You and me. Come on.”

He gave two short breaths into the straw and started forward. They’d got ten feet nearer the church when she said suddenly, “Wait.”

He braked to a stop.

“You’re getting careless, Rhyme. Get some rubber bands on those wheels. Wouldn’t want to confuse your prints with the unsub’s.”

“Where do we start?”

“We need a sample of the ash,” Rhyme said. “There were some clean paint cans in the back of the wagon. See if you can find one.”

She collected a can from the remains of the RRV.

“You know where the fire started?” Rhyme asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Take a sample of ash – a pint or two – as close to the point of origin as you can get.”

“Right,” she said, climbing up on a five-foot-high wall of brick – all that remained of the north side of the church. She peered down into the smoky pit at her feet.

A fire marshal called, “Hey, officer, we haven’t secured the area yet. It’s dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as the last time I was there,” she answered. And holding the handle of the can in her teeth started down the wall.

Lincoln Rhyme watched her but he was really seeing himself, three and a half years ago, pull his suit jacket off and climb down into the construction site at the subway entrance near City Hall. “Sachs,” Rhyme called. She turned. “Be careful. I saw what was left of the RRV. I don’t want to lose you twice in one day.”

She nodded and then disappeared over the edge of the wall.

After a few minutes Rhyme barked to Banks, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“What I’m saying is, could you go check on her?”

“Oh, sure.” He walked to the wall, looked over.

“Well?” Rhyme asked.

“It’s a mess.”

“Of course it’s a mess. Do you see her?”

“No.”

“Sachs?” Rhyme shouted.

There was a long groan of wood then a crash. Dust rose.

“Sachs? Amelia?”

No answer.

Just as he was about to send ESU in after her they heard her voice. “Incoming.”

“Jerry?” Rhyme called.

“Ready,” the young detective called.

The can came flying up out of the basement. Banks caught it one-handed. Sachs climbed out of the basement, wiping her hands on her slacks, wincing.

“Okay?”

She nodded.

“Now, let’s work the alley,” Rhyme ordered. “There’s traffic at all hours around here so he’d want the car off the street while he got her inside. That’s where he parked. Used that door right there.”

“How do you know?”

“There’re two ways to open locked doors – without explosives, that is. Locks and hinges. This one’d be dead-bolted from the inside so he took the pins out of the hinges. See, he didn’t bother to put them in very far again when he left.”

They started at the door and worked their way to the back of the grim canyon, the smoldering building on their right. They moved a foot at a time, Sachs training the PoliLight on the cobblestones. “I want tire treads,” Rhyme announced. “I want to know where his trunk was.”

“Here,” she said, examining the ground. “Treads. But I don’t know whether these’re the front or the rear tires. He might’ve backed in.”

“Are they clear or fuzzy? The treadmarks?”

“A little fuzzy.”

“Then those’re the front.” He laughed at her bewildered expression. “You’re the automotive expert, Sachs. Next time you get in a car and start it see if you don’t spin the wheel a little before you start moving. To see if the tires are pointed straight. The front treads’re always fuzzier than the rear. Now, the stolen car was a ’97 Ford Taurus. It measures 197.5 stem to stern, wheelbase 108.5. Approximately 45 inches from the center of the rear tire to the trunk. Measure that and vacuum.”

“Come on, Rhyme. How’d you know that?”

“Looked it up this morning. You do the vic’s clothing?”

“Yep. Nails and hair too. And, Rhyme, get this: the little girl’s name is Pam but he called her Maggie. Just like he did with the German girl – he called her Hanna, remember?”

“You mean his other persona did,” Rhyme said. “I wonder who the characters are in his little play.”

“I’m going to vacuum around the door too,” she announced. Rhyme watched her – face cut and hair uneven, singed short in spots. She vacuumed the base of the door and just as he was about to remind her that crime scenes were three-dimensional she ran the vacuum up and around the jamb.

“He probably looked inside before he took her in,” she said and began vacuuming the windowsills too.

Which would have been Rhyme’s next order.

He listened to the whine of the Dustbuster. But second by second he was fading away. Into the past, some hours before.

“I’m -” Sachs began.

“Shhh,” he said.

Like the walks he now took, like the concerts he now attended, like so many of the conversations he had, Rhyme was slipping deeper and deeper into his consciousness. And when he got to a particular place – even he had no idea where – he found he wasn’t alone. He was picturing a short man wearing gloves, dark sports clothes, a ski mask. Climbing out of the silver Ford Taurus sedan, which smelled of cleanser and new car. The woman – Carole Ganz – was in the trunk, her child captive in an old building made of pink marble and expensive brick. He saw the man dragging the woman from the car.

Almost a memory, it was that clear.

Popping the hinges, pulling open the door, dragging her inside, tying her up. He started to leave but paused. He walked to a place where he could look back and see Carole clearly. Just like he’d stared down at the man he’d buried at the railroad tracks yesterday morning.

Just like he’d chained Tammie Jean Colfax to the pipe in the center of the room. So he could get a good look at her.

But why? Rhyme wondered. Why does he look? To make sure the vics can’t escape? To make sure he hasn’t left anything behind? To -

His eyes sprang open; the indistinct apparition of Unsub 823 vanished. “Sachs! Remember the Colfax scene? When you found the glove print?”

“Sure.”

“You said he was watching her, that’s the reason he chained her out in the open. But you didn’t know why. Well, I figured it out. He watches the vics because he has to.” Because it’s his nature.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on!”

Rhyme sipped twice into the straw control, which turned the Arrow wheelchair around. Then puffed hard and he started forward.

He wheeled to the sidewalk, sipped hard into the straw to stop. He squinted as he looked all around him. “He wants to see his victims. And I’m betting he wanted to see the parishioners too. From someplace he thought was safe. Where he didn’t bother to sweep up afterwards.”

He was gazing across the street at the only secluded vantage point on the block: the outdoor patio of a restaurant opposite the church.

“There! Sweep it clean, Sachs.”

She nodded, slipped a new clip into her Glock, grabbed evidence bags, a pair of pencils and the Dust-buster. He saw her run across the street and work her way up the steps carefully, examining them. “He was here,” she shouted. “There’s a glove print. And the shoeprint – it’s worn just like the other ones.”

Yes! Rhyme thought. Oh, this felt good. The warm sun, the air, the spectators. And the excitement of the chase.

When you move they can’t getcha.

Well, if we move faster, maybe we can.

Rhyme happened to glance at the crowd and saw that some people were staring at him. But far more were watching Amelia Sachs.

For fifteen minutes she pored over the scene and when she returned she held up a small evidence bag.

“What did you find, Sachs? His driver’s license? His birth certificate?”

“Gold,” she said, smiling. “I found some gold.”

THIRTY

“COME ON, PEOPLE,” Rhyme called. “We’ve got to move on this one. Before he gets the girl to the next scene. I mean move!”

Thom did a sitting transfer to get Rhyme from the Storm Arrow back into bed, perching him momentarily on a sliding board and then easing him back into the Clinitron. Sachs glanced at the wheelchair elevator that had been built into one of the bedroom closets – it was the one he hadn’t wanted her to open when he was directing her to the stereo and CDs.

Rhyme lay still for a moment, breathing deeply from the exertion.

“The clues’re gone,” he reminded them. “There’s no way we can figure out where the next scene is. So we’re going for the big one – his safe house.”

“You think you can find it?” Sellitto asked.

Do we have a choice? Rhyme thought, and said nothing.

Banks hurried up the stairs. He hadn’t even stepped into the bedroom before Rhyme blurted, “What did they say? Tell me. Tell me.”

Rhyme knew that the tiny fleck of gold that Sachs had found was beyond the capabilities of Mel Cooper’s impromptu lab. He’d asked the young detective to speed it down to the FBI’s regional PERT office and have it analyzed.

“They’ll call us in the next half hour.”

“Half hour?” Rhyme muttered. “Didn’t they give it priority?”

“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should’ve seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if the metallurgy report wasn’t in your hands ASAP there’d be one mean mother – you get the picture – reaming their – you get the rest of the picture.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs said, “there’s something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he’d let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot.”

“Flail?”

“Cut the skin off it.”

“Flay,” Rhyme corrected.

“Oh. Anyway, he didn’t do anything. She said it was – in the end – like he couldn’t bring himself to cut her.”

“Just like the first scene – the man by the railroad tracks,” Sellitto offered.

“Interesting…” Rhyme reflected. “I thought he’d cut the vic’s finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl’s arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett ’s finger… There’s something about the way he sees his victims. Something…”

“Anatomical?”

“Exactly, Sachs.”

“Except the Ganz woman,” Sellitto said.

“My point,” Rhyme said. “He could’ve cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?”

Sellitto said, “What’s different about her? Can’t be that she’s a woman. Or she’s from out of town. So was the German girl.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her in front of her daughter,” Banks said.

“No,” Rhyme said, laughing grimly, “compassion isn’t his thing.”

Sachs said suddenly, “But that is one thing different about her – she’s a mother.”

Rhyme considered this, “That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn’t carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark.” He then asked Sachs, “Did she say anything else about the way he looked?”

Sachs flipped through her notebook.

“Same as before.” She read. “Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he -”

“Black gloves?” Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. “Not red?”

“She said black. I asked her if she was sure.”

“And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn’t it, Mel? Maybe that was from the gloves. So what’s the red leather from?”

Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it’s something close to him.”

Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. “What else did we find?”

“The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway.” Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. “Plenty o’ nothin’,” he announced. “Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar.”

Which was found throughout the city.

“Keep going.”

“Decomposed leaves. That’s about it.”

“How about the Ganz woman’s clothes?”

Cooper and Sachs opened the newspaper and examined the trace.

“Mostly soil,” Cooper said. “And a few bits of what look like stone.”

“Where did he keep her at his safe house? Exactly?”

“On the floor in the basement. She said it was a dirt floor.”

“Excellent!” Rhyme shouted. To Cooper: “Burn it. The soil.”

Cooper placed a sample in the GC-MS. They waited impatiently for the results. Finally the computer screen blinked. The grid resembled a lunar landscape.

“All right, Lincoln. Interesting. I’m reading off-the-charts for tannin and -”

“Sodium carbonate?”

“Ain’t he amazin’?” Cooper laughed. “How’d you know?”

“They were used in tanneries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tannic acid cures the hide and the alkaline fixes it. So, his safe house is near the site of an old tannery.”

He smiled. Couldn’t help himself. He thought: You hear footsteps, 823? That’s us behind you.

His eyes slipped to the Randel Survey map. “Because of the smell no one wanted tanneries in their neighborhoods so the commissioners restricted them. I know there were some on the Lower East Side. And in West Greenwich Village – when it literally was a village, a suburb of the city. And then on the far West Side in the Fifties – near the stockyard tunnel where we found the German girl. Oh, and in Harlem in the early 1900s.”

Rhyme glanced at the list of grocery stores – the locations of the ShopRites that sold veal shanks. “Chelsea’s out. No tanning there. Harlem too – no ShopRites there. So, it’s the West Village, Lower East Side or Midtown West Side – Hell’s Kitchen again. Which he seems to like.”

Only about ten square miles, Rhyme estimated cynically. He’d figured out on his first day on the job that it was easier to hide in Manhattan than in the North Woods.

“Let’s keep going. What about the stone in Carole’s clothes?”

Cooper was bent over the microscope. “Okay. Got it.”

“Patch it in to me, Mel.”

Rhyme’s computer screen burst to life and he watched the flecks of stone and crystal, like brilliant asteroids.

“Move it around,” Rhyme instructed. Three substances were bonded together.

“The one on the left is marble, pinkish,” Cooper said. “Like what we found before. And in between, that gray stuff…”

“It’s mortar. And the other is brownstone,” Rhyme announced. “It’s from a Federal-style building, like the 1812 City Hall. Only the front facade was marble; the rest was brownstone. They did it to save money. Well, they did it so the money appropriated for marble could find its way into various pockets. Now, what else do we have? The ash. Let’s find the arson accelerant.”

Cooper ran the ash sample through the GC-MS. He stared at the curve that appeared on the screen.

Newly refined gasoline, containing its manufacturer’s dyes and additives, was unique and could be traced back to a single source, as long as different batches of gas weren’t mixed together at the service station where the perp bought it. Cooper announced that the gasoline matched perfectly the brand sold by the Gas Exchange service stations.

Banks grabbed the Yellow Pages and flipped them open. “We’ve got six stations in Manhattan. Three downtown. One at Sixth Avenue and Houston. One on Delancey, 503 East. And one at Nineteenth and Eighth.”

“Nineteenth’s too far north,” Rhyme said. He stared at the profile chart. “East Side or West. Which is it?”

Grocery stores, gasoline…

A lanky figure suddenly filled the doorway.

“I still invited to this here party?” Frederick Dellray asked.

“Depends,” Rhyme countered. “You bearing gifts?”

“Ah got presents galore,” the agent said, waving a folder emblazoned with the familiar disk of the FBI emblem.

“You ever knock, Dellray?” Sellitto asked.

“Got outa the habit, you know.”

“Come on in,” Rhyme said. “What’ve you got?”

“Dunno for sure. Doesn’t make any sense to this boy. But then, whatta I know?”

Dellray read from the report for a moment then said, “We had Tony Farco at PERT – said ‘Hey’ to you by the way, Lincoln – analyze that bit of PE you found. Turns out it’s gold leaf. Probably sixty to eighty years old. He found a few cellulose fibers attached so he thinks it’s from a book.”

“Of course! Gold topstain from a page,” Rhyme said.

“Now he also found some particles of ink on it. He said, I’m quotin’ the boy now: ‘It’s not inconsistent with the type of ink the New York Public Library uses to stamp the ends of their books.’ Don’t he talk funny?”

“A library book,” Rhyme mused.

Amelia Sachs said, “A red-leather-bound library book.”

Rhyme stared at her. “Right!” he shouted. “That’s what the bits of red leather’re from. Not the glove. It’s a book he carries around with him. Could be his bible.”

“Bible?” Dellray asked. “You thinkin’ he’s some kinda religious nutzo?”

“Not the Bible, Fred. Call the library again, Banks. Maybe that’s how he wore down his shoes – in the reading room. I know, it’s a long shot. But we don’t have a lot of options here. I want a list of all the antiquarian books stolen from Manhattan locations in the past year.”

“Will do.” The young man rubbed a shaving scar as he called the mayor at home and bluntly asked hizzoner to contact the director of the public library and tell them what they needed.

A half hour later the fax machine buzzed and spewed out two pages. Thom ripped the transmission out of the machine. “Whoa, readers sure have sticky fingers in this city,” he said as he brought it to Rhyme.

Eighty-four books fifty years old or older had disappeared from the public library branches in the past twelve months, thirty-five of them in Manhattan.

Rhyme scanned the list. Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Dreiser… Books about music, philosophy, wine, literary criticism, fairy tales. Their value was surprisingly low. Twenty, thirty dollars. He supposed that none of them were first editions but perhaps the thieves hadn’t known that.

He continued to scan the list.

Nothing, nothing. Maybe -

And then he saw it.

Crime in Old New York, by Richard Wille Stephans, published by Bountiful Press in 1919. Its value was listed at sixty-five dollars, and it had been stolen from the Delancey Street branch of the New York Public Library nine months earlier. It was described as five by seven inches in size, bound in red kidskin, with marbleized endpapers, gilded edges.

“I want a copy of it. I don’t care how. Get somebody to the Library of Congress if you have to.”

Dellray said, “I’ll take care of that one.”

Grocery stores, gasoline, the library…

Rhyme had to make a decision. There were three hundred searchers available – cops and state troopers and federal agents – but they’d be spread microscopically thin if they had to search both the West and East sides of downtown New York.

Gazing at the profile chart.

Is your house in the West Village? Rhyme silently asked 823. Did you buy the gas and steal the book on the East Side to fox us? Or is that your real neighborhood? How clever are you? No, no, the question’s not how clever you are but how clever you think you are. How confident were you that we’d never find those minuscule bits of yourself that M. Locard assures us you’d leave behind?

Finally Rhyme ordered, “Go with the Lower East. Forget the Village. Get everybody down there. All of Bo’s troops, all of yours, Fred. Here’s what you’re looking for: A large Federal-style building, close to two hundred years old, rose-colored marble front, brownstone sides and back. May have been a mansion or a public building at one time. With a garage or carriage house attached. A Taurus sedan and a Yellow Cab coming and going for the past few weeks. More often in the last few days.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs.

Giving up the dead…

Sellitto and Dellray made their calls.

Sachs said to Rhyme, “I’m going too.”

“I hadn’t expected anything else.”

When the door had closed downstairs he whispered, “Godspeed, Sachs. Godspeed.”

THIRTY-ONE

THREE SQUAD CARS CRUISED SLOWLY through the streets of the Lower East Side. Two constables in each. Eyes searching.

And a moment later two black broughams appeared… two sedans, he meant. Unmarked, but their telltale searchlights next to the left side-view mirrors left no doubt who they were.

He’d known they were narrowing the search, of course, and that it was only a matter of time until they found his house. But he was shocked that they were this close. And he was particularly upset to see the cops get out and examine a silver Taurus parked on Canal Street.

How the hell had they found out about his carriage? He’d known that stealing a car was a huge risk but he thought it would take Hertz days to notice the missing vehicle. And even if they did he was sure the constables would never connect him with the theft. Oh, they were good.

One of the mean-eyed cops happened to glance at his cab.

Staring forward, the bone collector turned slowly onto Houston Street, lost himself in a crowd of other cabs. A half hour later, he’d ditched the taxi and the Hertz Taurus and had returned on foot to the mansion.

Young Maggie looked up at him.

She was scared, yes, but she’d stopped crying. He wondered if he should just keep her. Take himself a daughter. Raise her. The idea glowed within him for a moment or two then it faded.

No, there’d be too many questions. Also, there was something eerie about the way the girl was looking at him. She seemed older than her years. She’d always remember what he’d done. Oh, for a while she might think it had been a dream. But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

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 Greenwich & Bank,

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

•Recent model sedan

•Lt. gray, silver, beige

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 4)

Appearance

•Aftershave; to cover up other scent?

•Ski mask? Navy blue?

Residence

•ShopRite

• 8th Ave. & 24th,

Vehicle

•Rental car: prob. stolen

Other

•Called one vic “Hanna”

•Knows basic German

•Underground appeals to him

•Dual personalities

UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 4)

Appearance

•Gloves are dark

•Aftershave = Brut

Residence

•ShopRite •Houston & Lafayette,

•Old building, pink marble

Vehicle

•Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model

Other

•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

•Listened as he broke vic’s finger

•Left snake as slap at investigators

UNSUB 823 (page 4 of 4)

Appearance

•Hair color not brown

Residence

•At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional

•Federal-style building, Lower East Side

Vehicle

Other

•Wanted to flay vic’s foot

•Called one vic “Maggie”

•Mother & child, special meaning to him?

•Book “Crime in Old NY,” his model?

No, he couldn’t trust her any more than he trusted anyone else. Every human soul would let you down in the end. You could trust hate. You could trust bone. Everything else was betrayal.

He crouched beside Maggie and eased the tape off her mouth.

“Mommy!” she howled. “I want my mommy!”

He said nothing, just stood and looked down at her. At her delicate skull. At her twigs of arms.

She screamed like a siren.

He took off his glove. His fingers hovered over her for a moment. Then he caressed the soft hair on her head. (“Fingerprints can be lifted from flesh, if taken within 90 minutes of contact [See kromekote] but no one has as yet successfully lifted and reconstructed friction-ridge prints from human hair.” Lincoln Rhyme, Physical Evidence, 4th ed. [New York: Forensic Press, 1994].)

The bone collector slowly rose and walked upstairs, into the large living room of the building, past the paintings on the walls – the workers, the staring women and children. He cocked his head at a faint noise outside. Then louder – a clatter of metal. He grabbed his weapon and hurried to the back of the building. Unbolting the door he pushed it open suddenly, dropping into a two-handed shooting stance.

The pack of wild dogs glanced at him. They returned quickly to the trash can they’d knocked over. He slipped the gun into his pocket and returned to the living room.

He found himself next to the bottle-glass window again, looking out at the old graveyard. Oh, yes. There! There was the man again, wearing black, standing in the cemetery. In the distance the sky was spiked by the black masts of clipper ships and sloops docked in the East River along the Out Ward’s shore.

The bone collector felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow. He wondered if some tragedy had just occurred. Maybe the Great Fire of 1776 had just destroyed most of the buildings along Broadway. Or the yellow fever epidemic of 1795 had decimated the Irish community. Or the General Slocum excursion-boat fire in 1904 had killed over a thousand women and children, destroying the Lower East Side’s German neighborhood.

Or maybe he was sensing tragedies soon to occur.

After a few minutes Maggie’s screams grew quiet, replaced by the sounds of the old city, the roar of steam engines, the clang of bells, the pops of black-powder gunshots, the clop of hooves on resonant cobblestones.

He continued to stare, forgetting the constables who pursued him, forgetting Maggie, just watching the ghostly form stroll down the street.

Then and now.

His eyes remained focused out the window for a long moment, lost in a different time. And so he didn’t notice the wild dogs, who’d pushed through the back door he’d left ajar. They looked at him through the doorway of the living room and paused only momentarily before turning around and loping quietly into the back of the building.

Noses lifted at the smells, ears pricked at the sounds of the strange place. Particularly the faint wailing that rose from somewhere beneath them.

It was a sign of their desperation that even the Hardy Boys split up.

Bedding was working a half-dozen blocks around Delancey, Saul was farther south. Sellitto and Banks each had their search areas, and the hundreds of other officers, FBI agents and troopers made the door-to-door rounds, asking about a slight man, a young child crying, a silver Ford Taurus, a deserted Federal-style building, fronted in rose marble, the rest of it dark brownstone.

Huh? What the hell you mean, Federal?… Seen a kid? You asking if I ever seen a kid on the Lower East? Yo, Jimmy, you ever see any kids ’round here? Like not in the last, what, sixty seconds?

Amelia Sachs was flexing her muscle. She insisted that she be on Sellitto’s crew, the one hitting the ShopRite on East Houston that Had sold Unsub 823 the veal chop. And the gas station that had sold him the gasoline. The library from which he’d stolen Crime in Old New York.

But they’d found no leads there and scattered like wolves smelling a dozen different scents. Each picked a chunk of neighborhood to call his or her own.

As Sachs gunned the engine of the new RRV and tried another block she felt the same frustration she’d known when working the crime scenes over the past several days: too damn much evidence, too much turf to cover. The hopelessness of it. Here, on the hot, damp streets, branching into a hundred other streets and alleys running past a thousand buildings – all old – finding the safe house seemed as impossible as finding that hair that Rhyme had told her about, pasted to the ceiling by the blowback from a.38 revolver.

She’d intended to hit every street but as time wore on and she thought of the child buried underground, near death, she began to search more quickly, speeding down streets, glancing right and left for the rosy-marble building. Doubt stabbed her. Had she missed the building in her haste? Or should she drive like lightning and cover more streets?

On and on. Another block, another. And still nothing.

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.

Lincoln Rhyme’s left ring finger twitched slightly and the frame turned the onion-skin page of Crime in Old New York, which had been delivered by two federal officers ten minutes earlier, service expedited thanks to Fred Dellray’s inimitable style.

“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.”

Terry Dobyns had been right. Chapter 10, “James Schneider: the ‘Bone Collector,’ ” was a virtual blueprint for Unsub 823’s behavior. The MOs were the same – fire, animals, water, boiling alive. Eight twenty-three prowled the same haunts Schneider had. He’d confused a German tourist with Hanna Goldschmidt, a turn-of-the-century immigrant, and had been drawn to a German residence hall to find a victim. And he’d called little Pammy Ganz by a different name too – Maggie. Apparently thinking she was the young O’Connor girl, one of Schneider’s victims.

A very bad etching in the book, covered by tissue, showed a demonic James Schneider, sitting in a basement, examining a leg bone.

Rhyme stared at the Randel Survey map of the city.

Bones…

Rhyme was recalling a crime scene he’d run once. He’d been called to a construction site in lower Manhattan where some excavators had discovered a skull a few feet below the surface of a vacant lot. Rhyme saw immediately that the skull was very old and brought a forensic anthropologist into the case. They continued to dig and discovered a number of bones and skeletons.

A little research revealed that in 1741 there’d been a slave rebellion in Manhattan and a number of slaves – and militant white abolitionists – had been hanged on a small island in the Collect. The island became a popular site for hangings and several informal cemeteries and potter’s fields sprang up in the area.

Where had the Collect been? Rhyme tried to recall. Near where Chinatown and the Lower East Side meet. But it was hard to say for certain because the pond had been filled in so long ago. It had been -

Yes! he thought, his heart thudding: The Collect had been filled in because it had grown so polluted the city commissioners considered it a major health risk. And among the main polluters were the tanneries on the eastern shore!

Pretty good with the dialer now, Rhyme didn’t flub a single number and got put through to the mayor on the first try. Hizzoner, though, the man’s personal secretary said, was at a brunch at the UN. But when Rhyme identified himself the secretary said, “One minute, sir,” and in much less time than that he found himself on the line with a man who said, through a mouthful of food, “Talk to me, detective. How the fuck’re we doing?”

“Five-eight-eight-five, K,” Amelia Sachs said, answering the radio. Rhyme heard the edginess in her voice.

“Sachs.”

“This isn’t good,” she told him. “We’re not having any luck.”

“I think I’ve got him.”

“What?”

“The six-hundred block, East Van Brevoort. Near Chinatown.”

“How’d you know?”

“The mayor put me in touch with the head of the Historical Society. There’s an archaeologic dig down there. An old graveyard. Across the street from where a big tannery used to be. And there were some big Federal mansions in the area at one time. I think he’s nearby.”

“I’m rolling.”

Through the speakerphone he heard a squeal of tires, then the siren cut in.

“I’ve called Lon and Haumann,” he added. “They’re on their way over now.”

“Rhyme,” her urgent voice crackled. “I’ll get her out.”

Ah, you’ve got a cop’s good heart, Amelia, a professional heart, Rhyme thought. But you’re still just a rookie. “Sachs?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been reading this book. Eight twenty-three’s picked a bad one for this role model of his. Really bad.”

She said nothing.

“What I’m saying is,” he continued, “whether the girl’s there or not, if you find him and he so much as flinches, you nail him.”

“But we get him alive, he can lead us to her. We can -”

“No, Sachs. Listen to me. You take him out. Any sign he’s going for a weapon, anything… you take him out.”

Static clattered. Then he heard her steady voice, “I’m at Van Brevoort, Rhyme. You were right. Looks like his place.”

Eighteen unmarkeds, two ESU vans and Amelia Sachs’s RRV were clustered near a short, deserted street on the Lower East Side.

East Van Brevoort looked like it was in Sarajevo. The buildings were abandoned – two of them burned to the ground. On the east side of the street was a dilapidated hospital of some kind, its roof caved in. Next to it was a large hole in the ground, roped off, with a No Trespassing sign emblazoned with the County Court seal – the archaeologic dig Rhyme had mentioned. A scrawny dog had died and lay in the gutter, its corpse picked over by rats.

In the middle of the other side of the street was a marble-fronted townhouse, faintly pink, with an attached carriage house, marginally nicer than the other decrepit tenements along Van Brevoort.

Sellitto, Banks and Haumann stood beside the ESU van, as a dozen officers suited up in Kevlar and racked their M-16s. Sachs joined them and, without asking, tucked her hair under a helmet and started to vest up.

Sellitto said, “Sachs, you’re not tactical.”

Slapping the Velcro strap down, she stared at the detective, eyebrow lifted high, until he relented and said, “Okay. But you’re rear guard. That’s an order.”

Haumann said, “You’ll be Team Two.”

“Yessir. I can live with that.”

One ESU cop offered her an MP-5 machine gun. She thought about Nick – their date on the range at Rodman’s Neck. They’d spent two hours practicing with automatic weapons, firing Z-patterns through doors, flip-reloading with taped banana clips and field-stripping M-16s to clear the sand jams that plagued the Colts. Nick loved the staccato clutter but Sachs didn’t much like the messy firepower of the big weapons. She’d suggested a match between them with Glocks and had whupped him three straight at fifty feet. He laughed and kissed her hard as the last of her empty casings spun, ringing, onto the firing range.

“I’ll just use my sidearm,” she told the ESU officer.

The Hardy Boys ran up, crouching as if they were mindful of snipers.

“Here’s what we’ve got. There’s nobody around. Block is -”

“Completely empty.”

“The windows of his building’re all barred. A back entrance -”

“Leading into the alley. The door’s open.”

“Open?” Haumann asked, glancing at several of his officers.

Saul confirmed, “Not just unlocked but open.”

“Booby traps?”

“Not that we could see. Which isn’t to say -”

“There aren’t any.”

Sellitto asked, “Any vehicles in the alley?”

“Nope.”

“Two front entrances. Main front door -”

“Which looks painted shut. The second’s the carriage-house doors. Double, wide enough for two vehicles. There’s a padlock and chain.”

“But they’re lying on the ground.”

Haumann nodded, “So maybe he’s inside.”

“Maybe,” Saul said, then added, “And tell him what we think we heard.”

“Very faint. Could have been crying.”

“Could have been screaming.”

Sachs asked, “The little girl?”

“Maybe. But then it just stopped. How’d Rhyme figure this place?”

“You tell me how his mind works,” Sellitto said.

Haumann called one of his commanders and issued a series of orders. A moment later two ESU vans pulled into the intersection and blocked the other end of the street.

“Team One, front door. Blow it with cutting charges. It’s wood and it’s old so keep the plastic down, okay? Team Two, into the alley. On my three, you go. Got it? Neutralize but we’re assuming the girl’s in there so check your backdrops ’fore you squeeze. ‘Officer Sachs, you’re sure you want to do this?”

A firm nod.

“Okay, boys and girls. Go get him.”

THIRTY-TWO

SACHS AND THE FIVE OTHER OFFICERS of Team Two ran into the torrid alley, which had been blocked off by ESU trucks. Renegade weeds grew profusely through the cobblestones and cracked foundations and the desolation reminded Sachs of the train-track grave yesterday morning.

He hoped the victim was dead. For his sake…

Haumann had ordered troopers onto the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and she saw the muzzles of their black Colts bristling like antennae.

The team paused at the rear doorway. Her fellow cops glanced at Sachs as she checked the rubber bands over her shoes. Heard one of them whisper to another something about superstition.

Then she heard through her earphone:

“Team One leader at front door, charge mounted and armed. We are clear, K.”

“Roger, Team One leader. Team Two?”

“Team Two, in position, K.”

“Roger, Team Two leader. Both teams, dynamic entry. On my three.”

Checked her weapon one last time.

“One…”

Her tongue touched a dot of sweat hanging from the swollen wound on her lip.

“Two…”

Okay, Rhyme, here we go…

“Three!”

The explosion was very sedate, a distant pop, and then the teams were moving. Fast. She sprinted along behind the ESU troopers as they slipped inside and scattered, their muzzle-mounted flashlights crisscrossing the shafts of brilliant sunlight that streamed through the windows. Sachs found herself alone as the rest of the team dispersed, checking out armoires and closets and the shadows behind the grotesque statues the place was filled with.

She turned the corner. A pale face loomed. A knife…

A thud in her heart. Combat stance, gun up. She laid five pounds of pressure on the slick trigger before she realized she was staring at a painting on the wall. An eerie, moon-faced butcher, holding a knife in one hand, a slab of meat in the other.

Brother…

He picked a great place for home.

The ESU troops clopped upstairs, searching the first and second floors.

But Sachs was looking for something else.

She found the door leading down to the basement. Partly open. Okay. Halogen off. You’ve got to take a look first. But she remembered what Nick had said: never look around corners at head or chest level – that’s where he’s expecting you. Down on one knee. A deep breath. Go!

Nothing. Blackness.

Back to cover.

Listen…

At first she heard nothing. Then there was a definite scratching. A clatter. The sound of a fast breath or grunt.

He’s there and he’s digging his way out!

Into her mike she said, “I’ve got activity in the basement. Backup.”

“Roger.”

But she couldn’t wait. She thought of the little girl down there with him. And she started down the stairs. Paused and listened again. Then she realized she was standing with her body fully exposed from the waist down. She practically leapt down to the floor, dropped into a crouch in the darkness.

Breathe deep.

Now, do it!

The halogen in her “left hand stabbed a brilliant rod of light through the room. The muzzle of her weapon targeted the center of the white disk as it swung left to right. Keep the beam down. He’d be at crotch level too. Remembering what Nick had told her: Perps don’t fly.

Nothing. No sign of him.

“Officer Sachs?”

An ESU trooper was at the top of the stairs.

“Oh, no,” she muttered, as her beam fell on Pammy Ganz, frozen in the corner of the basement.

“Don’t move,” she called to the trooper.

Inches away from the girl stood the pack of emaciated wild dogs, sniffing at her face, her fingers, her legs. The girl’s wide eyes darted from one animal to the other. Her tiny chest rose and fell and tears streamed down her face. Her mouth was open and the dot of her pink tongue seemed glued to the right arc of her lip.

“Stay up there,” she said to the ESU trooper. “Don’t spook ’em.”

Sachs drew targets but didn’t fire. She could kill two or three but the others might panic and grab the girl. One was big enough to snap her neck with a single flip of its scarred, mangy head.

“Is he down there?” the ESU cop asked.

“Don’t know. Get a medic here. To the top of the stairs. Nobody come down.”

“Roger.”

Her weapon sights floating from one animal to another, Sachs slowly started forward. One by one the dogs became aware of her and turned away from Pammy. The little girl was merely food; Sachs was a predator. They growled and snarled, front legs quivering as their hindquarters tensed, ready to jump.

“I’m ascared,” Pammy said shrilly, drawing their attention again.

“Shhhh, honey,” Sachs cooed. “Don’t say anything. Be quiet.”

“Mommy. I want my mommy!” Her abrasive howl set the dogs off. They danced in place, and swung their battered noses from right to left, growling.

“Easy, easy…”

Sachs moved to the left. The dogs were facing her now, glancing from her eyes to her outstretched hand and the gun. They separated into two packs. One stayed close to Pammy. The other moved around Sachs, trying to flank her.

She eased between the little girl and the three dogs closest to her.

The Glock swinging back and forth, a pendulum. Their black eyes on the black gun.

One dog, with a scabby yellow coat, snarled and stepped forward on Sachs’s right.

The little girl was whimpering, “Mommy…”

Sachs moved slowly. She leaned down, clamped her hand on the child’s sweatshirt and dragged Pammy behind her. The yellow dog moved closer.

“Shoo,” Sachs said.

Closer still.

“Go away!”

The dogs behind the yellow one tensed as he bared cracked brown teeth.

“Get the fuck outa here!” Sachs snarled and slammed the barrel of the Glock onto his nose. The dog blinked in dismay, yelped, skittered up the stairs.

Pammy screamed, sending the others into a frenzy. They started fighting among themselves, a whirlwind of snapping teeth and slaver. A scarred Rottweiler tossed a dustmop of a mutt to the floor in front of Sachs. She stamped her foot beside the scrawny brown thing and he skittered to his feet, raced up the stairs. The others chased him like greyhounds after a rabbit.

Pammy began to sob. Sachs crouched beside her and swept the basement again with her light. No sign of the unsub.

“It’s okay, honey. We’ll have you home soon. You’ll be all right. That man here? You remember him?”

She nodded.

“Did he leave?”

“I don’t know. I want my mommy.”

She heard the other officers call in. The first and second floors were secure. “The car and taxi?” Sachs asked. “Any sign?”

A trooper transmitted, “They’re gone. He’s probably left.”

He’s not there, Amelia. That would be illogical.

From the top of the stairs an officer called, “Basement secure?’’

She said, “I’m going to check. Hold on.”

“We’re coming down.”

“Negative on that,” she said. “We’ve got a pretty clean crime scene here and I want to keep it that way. Just get a medic down here to check out the little girl.”

The young medic, a sandy-haired man, walked down the stairs and crouched beside Pammy.

It was then that Sachs saw the trail leading into the back of the basement – to a low, black-painted metal door. She walked to it, avoiding the path itself to save the prints, and crouched down. The door was partly open and there seemed to be a tunnel on the other side, dark but not completely black, leading to another building.

An escape route. The son of a bitch.

With the knuckles of her left hand she pushed the door open wider. It didn’t squeak. She peered into the tunnel. Faint light, twenty, thirty feet away. No moving shadows.

If Sachs saw anything in the dimness it was T.J.’s contorted body dangling from the black pipe, Monelle Gerger’s round, limp body as the black rat crawled toward her throat.

“Portable 5885 to CP,” Sachs said into her mike.

“Go ahead, K,” Haumann’s terse voice responded.

“I’ve got a tunnel leading to the building south of the unsub’s. Have somebody cover the doors and windows.”

“Will do, K.”

“I’m going in,” she told him.

“The tunnel? We’ll get you some backup, Sachs.”

“Negative. I don’t want the scene contaminated. Just have somebody keep an eye on the girl.”

“Say again.”

“No. No backup.”

She clicked the light out and started crawling.

There’d been no courses in tunnel-rat work at the academy of course. But the things Nick had told her about securing a unfriendly scene came back to her. Weapon close to the body, not extended too far, where it could be knocked aside. Three steps – well, shuffles – forward, pause. Listen. Two more steps. Pause. Listen. Four steps next time. Don’t do anything predictable.

Hell, it’s dark.

And what’s that smell? She shivered in disgust at the hot, foul stink.

The claustrophobia wrapped around her like a cloud of oil smoke and she had to stop for a moment, concentrating on anything but the closeness of the walls. The panic slipped away but the smell was worse. She gagged.

Quiet, girl. Quiet!

Sachs controlled the reflex and kept going.

And what’s that noise? Something electrical. A buzzing. Rising and falling.

Ten feet from the end of the tunnel. Through the doorway she could see a second large basement. Murky though not quite as dark as the one Pammy had been in. Light leached in through a greasy window. She saw motes of dust pedaling through the gloom.

No, no, girl, the gun’s too far in front of you. One kick and it’s gone. Close to your face. Keep your weight low and back! Use your arms to aim, ass for support.

Then she was at the doorway.

She gagged again, tried to stifle the sound.

Is he waiting for me, or not?

Head out, a fast look. You’ve got a helmet. It’ll deflect anything but a full-metal or Teflon and remember he’s shooting a.32. A girl gun.

All right. Think. Look which way first?

The Patrolman’s Guide wasn’t any help and Nick wasn’t offering any advice at the moment. Flip a coin.

Left.

She stuck her head out fast, glancing to the left. Back into the tunnel.

She’d seen nothing. A blank wall, shadows.

If he’s the other way he’s seen me and’s got good target positioning.

Okay, fuck. Just go. Fast.

When you move…

Sachs leapt.

…they can’t getcha.

She hit the ground hard, rolling. Twisting around.

The figure was hidden in shadows against the wall to the right, under the window. Drawing a target she started to fire. Then froze.

Amelia Sachs gasped.

Oh, my God…

Her eyes were inexorably drawn to the woman’s body, propped up against the wall.

From the waist up she was thin, with dark-brown hair, a gaunt face, small breasts, bony arms. Her skin was covered with swarms of flies – the buzzing Sachs had heard.

From the waist down, she was… nothing. Bloody hip bones, femur, the whip of her spine, feet… All the flesh had been dissolved in the repulsive bath she rested next to – a horrible stew, deep brown, chunks of flesh floating in it. Lye or acid of some sort. The fumes stung Sachs’s eyes, while horror – and fury too – boiled in her heart.

Oh, you poor thing…

Sachs waved pointlessly at the flies that strafed the new intruder.

The woman’s hands were relaxed, palms upward as if she were meditating. Eyes closed, A purple jogging outfit lay by her side.

She wasn’t the only victim.

Another skeleton – completely stripped – lay beside a similar vat, older, empty of the terrible acid but coated with a dark sludge of blood and melted muscle. Its forearm and hand were missing. And beyond that was another one – this victim picked apart, the bones carefully scrubbed of all the flesh, cleaned, resting carefully on the floor. A stack of triple-ought sandpaper rested beside the skull. The elegant curve of the head shone like a trophy.

And then she heard it behind her.

A breath. Faint but unmistakable. The snap of air deep in a throat.

She spun around, furious at herself for her carelessness.

But the emptiness of the basement gaped back at her. She swept the light over the floor, which was stone and didn’t show footprints as clearly as the dirt floor in 823’s building next door.

Another inhalation.

Where was he? Where?

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

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

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

Pause. Listen.

Breathing?

Yes. No.

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

Come on!

Eyes back again.

Moving along the floor.

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

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

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

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

Neither of them moved for a moment. Absolutely frozen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The team rose from their defensive positions.

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

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

“Mommy!”

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

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

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

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

“Sir,” he protested, “I’m ESU.”

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

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

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

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

Well, she was angry now. Furious.

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

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

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

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

“Hello?”

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

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

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

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

“That lady, she killed a doggie -”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, thank God.”

“Is anything missing?” he asked her.

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

The detective gave her a receipt to sign.

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

Carole asked him, “When can she leave?”

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

“A few days? But she’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes!”

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

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

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

THIRTY-THREE

AMELIA SACHS FINALLY WENT HOME to her apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

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

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

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

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

“You been following the news, Mom?”

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

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

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

“I’ve got the inside scoop.”

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

“Amie, your father’d be so proud.”

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

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

“It’s not that expensive, Mom.”

“Not that much? It’s a fortune.”

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

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

A pause.

“That might be nice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her lids closed.

Giving up the dead…

A bargain was a bargain. But goddammit, Rhyme…

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

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

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

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

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

Unsub 823 stood in the middle of her bedroom.

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

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

Kicking furiously, struggling madly to pull the cuffs apart.

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

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

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

Amelia Sachs began to cry.

Rubbing the back of his head into the pillow.

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

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

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

The scar on the finger.

The knot.

The aftershave.

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

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

He felt eyes on him and looked to his right.

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

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

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

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

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

We will undoubtedly never know.

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

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

Dirt is heavier than anything.

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

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

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

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

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

He likes to watch…

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

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

Giving up the dead…

And then she was under.

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

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

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

Blackness.

Giving up the…

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

Waving for her to follow.

Rhyme, I’ll miss you.

Giving up…

THIRTY-FOUR

SOMETHING STRUCK HER FOREHEAD. Hard. She felt the thump but no pain.

What, what? His shovel? A brick? Maybe in an instant of compassion 823’d decided that this slow death was more than anyone could bear and was striking for her throat to sever her veins.

Another blow, and another. She couldn’t open her eyes, but she was aware of light growing around her. Colors. And air. She forced the mass of dirt from her mouth and sucked in tiny breaths, all she could manage. Began coughing in a loud bray, retching, spitting.

Her lids sprang open and through tearing eyes she found herself looking up at the muddy vision of Lon Sellitto, kneeling over her, beside two EMS medics, one of whom dug into her mouth with latex-clad fingers and pulled out more gunk, while the other readied an oxygen mask and green tank.

Sellitto and Banks continued to uncover her body, shoving the dirt away with their muscular hands. They pulled her up, leaving the robe behind like a shed skin. Sellitto, old divorcé that he was, looked chastely away from her body as he put his jacket around her shoulders. Young Jerry Banks did look of course but she loved him anyway.

“Did… you…?” she wheezed, then surrendered to a racking cough.

Sellitto glanced expectantly at Banks, who was the more breathless of the two. He must’ve done the most running after the unsub. The young detective shook his head. “Got away.”

Sitting up, she inhaled oxygen for a moment.

“How?” she wheezed. “How’d you know?”

“Rhyme,” he answered. “Don’t ask me how. He called in 10-13s for everybody on the team. When he heard we were okay he sent us over here ASAP.”

Then the numbness left, snap, in a flash. And for the first time she realized what had nearly happened. She dropped the oxygen mask, backed away in panic, tears streaming, her panicky keening growing louder and louder. “No, no, no…”

Slapping her arms and thighs, frantic, trying to shake off the horror clinging to her like a teeming swarm of bees.

“Oh God oh God… No…”

“Sachs?” Banks asked, alarmed. “Hey, Sachs?”

The older detective waved his partner away. “It’s okay.” He kept his arm around her shoulders as she dropped to all fours and vomited violently, sobbing, sobbing, gripping the dirt desperately between her fingers as if she wanted to strangle it.

Finally Sachs calmed and sat back on her naked haunches. She began laughing, softly at first then louder and louder, hysterical, astonished to find that the skies had opened and it had been raining – huge hot summer drops – and she hadn’t even realized it.

Arm around his shoulders. Face pressed against his. They stayed that way for a long moment.

“Sachs… Oh, Sachs.”

She stepped away from the Clinitron and scooted an old armchair from the corner of the room. Sachs – wearing navy sweatpants and a Hunter College T-shirt – flopped down into the chair and dangled her exquisite legs over the arm like a schoolgirl.

“Why us, Rhyme? Why’d he come after us?” Her voice was a raspy whisper from the dirt she’d swallowed.

“Because the people he kidnapped aren’t the real victims. We are.”

“Who’s we?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Society maybe. Or the city. Or the UN. Cops. I went back and reread his bible – the chapter on James Schneider. Remember Terry’s theory about why the unsub’d been leaving the clues?”

Sellitto said, “Sort of making us accessories. To share the guilt. Make it easier for him to kill.”

Rhyme nodded but said, “I don’t think that’s the reason though. I think the clues were a way to attack us. Every dead vic was a loss for us.”

In her old clothes, hair pulled back in a ponytail, Sachs looked more beautiful than any time in the past two days. But her eyes were tin. She’d be reliving every shovelful of dirt, he supposed, and Rhyme found the thought of her living burial so disturbing he had to look away.

“What’s he got against us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Schneider’s father was arrested by mistake and died in prison. Our unsub? Who knows why? I only care about evidence -”

“- not motives.” Amelia Sachs finished the sentence.

“Why’d he start going after us directly?” Banks asked, nodding at Sachs.

“We found his hidey-hole and saved the little girl. I don’t think he expected us so soon. Maybe he just got pissed. Lon, we need twenty-four-hour babysitters for all of us. He could’ve just taken off after we saved the kid but he stuck around to do some damage. You and Jerry, me, Cooper, Haumann, Polling, we’re all on his list, betcha. Meanwhile, get Peretti’s boys over to Sachs’s. I’m sure he kept it clean but there might be something there. He left a lot faster than he’d planned to.”

“I better get over there,” Sachs said.

“No,” Rhyme said.

“I have to work the scene.”

“You have to get some rest,” he ordered. “That’s what you have to do, Sachs. You don’t mind my saying, you look lousy.”

“Yeah, officer,” Sellitto said. “ ‘S’an order. I told you to stand down for the rest of the day. We’ve got two hundred searchers looking for him. And Fred Dellray’s got another hundred and twenty feebies.”

“I got a crime scene in my own backyard and you’re not gonna let me walk the grid?”

“That’s it,” Rhyme said, “in a nutshell.”

Sellitto walked to the doorway. “Any problems with that, officer?”

“Nosir.”

“Come on, Banks, we got work to do. You need a lift, Sachs? Or’re they still trusting you with vehicles?”

“No thanks, got wheels downstairs,” she said.

The two detectives left. Rhyme heard their voices echoing through the empty hall. Then the door closed and they were gone.

Rhyme realized the glaring overhead lights were on. He clicked through several commands and dimmed them.

Sachs stretched.

“Well,” she said, just as Rhyme said, “So.”

She glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“Sure is.”

Rising, she walked to the table where her purse rested. She picked it up. Clicked it open, found her compact and examined her cut lip in the mirror.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Rhyme said.

“Frankenstein,” she said, prodding. “Why don’t they use flesh-colored stitches?” She put the mirror away, slung the purse over her shoulder. “You moved the bed,” she noticed. It was closer to the window.

“Thom did. I can look at the park. If I want to.”

“Well, that’s good.”

She walked to the window. Looked down.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rhyme thought to himself. Do it. What can happen? He blurted quickly, “You want to stay here? I mean, it’s getting late. And Latents’ll be dusting your place for hours.”

He felt a mad bolt of anticipation deep within him. Well, kill that, he thought, furious with himself. Until her face blossomed into a smile. “I’d like that.”

“Good.” His jaw shivered from the adrenaline. “Wonderful. Thom!”

Listening to music, drinking some Scotch. Maybe he’d tell her more about famous crime scenes. The historian in him was also curious about her father, about police work in the ’60s and ’70s. About the infamous Midtown South Precinct in the old days.

Rhyme shouted, “Thom! Get some sheets. And a blanket. Thom! I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. Thom!”

Sachs started to say something but the aide appeared in the doorway and said testily, “One rude shout would’ve been enough, you know, Lincoln.”

“Amelia’s staying over again. Could you get some blankets and pillows for the couch?”

“No, not the couch again,” she said. “It’s like sleeping on rocks.”

Rhyme was stabbed with a splinter of rejection. Thinking ruefully to himself: Been a few years since he’d felt that emotion. Resigned, he nonetheless smiled and said, “There’s a bedroom downstairs. Thom can make it up for you.”

But Sachs set down her purse. “That’s okay, Thom. You don’t have to.”

“It’s no bother.”

“It’s all right. Good night, Thom.” She walked to the door.

“Well, I -”

She smiled.

“But -” he began, looking from her to Rhyme, who frowned, shook his head.

“Good night, Thom,” she said firmly. “Watch your feet.” And closed the door slowly, as he stepped back out of the way into the hall. It closed with a loud click.

Sachs kicked off her shoes, pulled off the sweats and T-shirt. She wore a lace bra and baggy cotton panties. She climbed into the Clinitron beside Rhyme, showing every bit of the authority beautiful women wield when it comes to climbing into bed with a man.

She wriggled down into the pellets and laughed. “This is one hell of a bed,” she said, stretching like a cat. Eyes closed, Sachs asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Rhyme?”

“What?”

“Tell me more about your book, okay? Some more crime scenes?”

He started to describe a clever serial killer in Queens but in less than one minute she was asleep.

Rhyme glanced down and noted her breast against his chest, her knee resting on his thigh. A woman’s hair was banked against his face for the first time in years. It tickled. He’d forgotten that this happened. For someone who lived so in the past, with such a good memory, he was surprised to find he couldn’t exactly remember when he’d experienced this sensation last. What he could recall was an amalgam of evenings with Elaine, he supposed, before the accident. He did remember that he’d decided to endure the tickle, not push the strands away, so he wouldn’t disturb his wife.

Now, of course, he couldn’t brush away Sachs’s hair if God Himself had asked. But he wouldn’t think of moving it aside. Just the opposite; he wanted to prolong the sensation until the end of the universe.

THIRTY-FIVE

THE NEXT MORNING LINCOLN RHYME was alone again.

Thom had gone shopping and Mel Cooper was at the IRD lab downtown. Vince Peretti had completed the CS work at the mansion on East Van Brevoort and at Sachs’s. They’d found woefully few clues though Rhyme put the lack of PE down to the unsub’s ingenuity, not Peretti’s derivative talents.

Rhyme was awaiting the crime scene report. But both Dobyns and Sellitto believed that 823 had gone to ground – temporarily at least. There’d been no more attacks on the police and no other victims had been kidnapped in the past twelve hours.

Sachs’s minder – a large Patrol officer from MTS – had accompanied her to an appointment with an ear, nose and throat man at a hospital in Brooklyn; the dirt had done quite a number on her throat. Rhyme himself had a bodyguard too – a uniform from the Twentieth Precinct, stationed in front of his townhouse – a friendly cop he’d known for years and with whom Rhyme enjoyed a running argument on the merits of Irish peat versus Scottish in the production of whisky.

Rhyme was in a great mood. He called downstairs on the intercom. “I’m expecting a doctor in a couple of hours. You can let him up.”

The cop said he would.

Dr. William Berger had assured Rhyme that today he’d be on time.

Rhyme leaned back in the pillow and realized he wasn’t completely alone. On the windowsill, the falcons paced. Rarely skittish, they seemed uneasy. Another low front was approaching. Rhyme’s window revealed a calm sky but he trusted the birds; they were infallible barometers.

UNSUB 823 (page 1 of 5)

Appearance

•Caucasian male, slight build

•Dark clothing

•Old gloves, reddish kidskin

Residence

•Prob. has safe house

•Located near: B’way &82nd,

•ShopRite Greenwich & Bank,

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

•Recent model sedan

Other

•knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

•Ties vics w/ unusual knots

UNSUB 823 (page 2 of 5)

Appearance

•Aftershave; to cover up other scent?

•Ski mask? Navy blue?

•Gloves are dark

•Aftershave = Brut

Residence

•ShopRite 8th Ave. & 24th,

•ShopRite Houston & Lafayette,

Vehicle

•Lt. gray, silver, beige

•Rental car: prob. Stolen

Other

•“Old” appeals to him

•Called one vic “Hanna”

•Knows basic German

•Underground appeals to him

•Dual personalities

UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 5)

Appearance

•Hair color not brown

•Deep scar, index finger

Residence

•Old building, pink marble

•At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional

Vehicle

•Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model

Other

•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

•Listened as he broke vic’s finger

UNSUB 823 (page 4 of 5)

Appearance

•Casual clothes

Residence

•Federal-style building, Lower East Side

Vehicle

Other

•Left snake as slap at investigators

•Wanted to flay vic’s foot

•Called one vic “Maggie”

•Mother & child, special meaning to him?

UNSUB 823 (page 5 of 5)

Appearance

•Gloves are black

Residence

•Located near archaeologic dig

Vehicle

Other

•Book “Crime in Old NY,” his model?

•Bases crimes on James Schneider, the“ Bone Collector”

•Has hatred of police

He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 11:00 a.m. Here he was, just like two days ago, awaiting Berger’s arrival. That’s life, he thought: postponement upon postponement but ultimately, with some luck, we get to where we’re meant to be.

He watched television for twenty minutes, trolling for stories about the kidnappings. But all the stations were doing specials on the opening day of the UN conference. Rhyme found it boring and turned to a rerun of Matlock, flipped back to a gorgeous CNN reporter standing outside UN headquarters and then shut the damn set off.

The telephone rang and he went through the complicated gestures of answering it. “Hello.”

There was a pause before a man’s voice said, “Lincoln?”

“Yes?”

“Jim Polling. How you doin’?”

Rhyme realized that he hadn’t seen much of the captain since early yesterday, except for the news conference last night, where he’d whispered prompts to the mayor and Chief Wilson.

“Okay. Any word on our unsub?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing yet. But we’ll get him.” Another pause. “Hey, you alone?”

“Yep.”

A longer pause.

“Okay if I stop by?”

“Sure.”

“A half hour?”

“I’ll be here,” Rhyme said jovially.

He rested his head in the thick pillow and his eyes slipped to the knotted clothesline hanging beside the profile poster. Still no answer about the knot. It was – he laughed aloud at the joke – a loose end. He hated the idea of leaving the case without finding out what kind of knot it was. Then he remembered that Polling was a fisherman. Maybe he’d recognize -

Polling, Rhyme reflected.

James Polling…

Funny how the captain had insisted Rhyme handle the case. How he’d fought to keep him on it, rather than Peretti – who was the better choice, politically, for Polling. Remembering too how he’d lost his temper at Dellray when the feebie tried to strong-arm the investigation away from the NYPD.

Now that he thought about it, Polling’s whole involvement in the case was a mystery. Eight twenty-three wasn’t the kind of perp you took on voluntarily – even if you were looking for juicy cases to hang on your collar record. Too many chances to lose vics, too many opportunities for the press – and the brass – to snipe at you for fucking up.

Polling… Recalling how he’d breeze into Rhyme’s bedroom, check out their progress and leave.

Sure, he was reporting to the mayor and the chief. But – the thought slipped unexpectedly into Rhyme’s mind – was there someone else Polling was reporting back to?

Someone who wanted to keep tabs on the investigation? The unsub himself?

But how on earth could Polling have any connection with 823? It seemed -

And then it struck him.

Could Polling be the unsub?

Of course not. It was ridiculous. Laughable. Even apart from motive and means, there was the question of opportunity. The captain had been here, in Rhyme’s room, when some of the kidnappings had occurred…

Or had he?

Rhyme looked up at the profile chart.

Dark clothing and wrinkled cotton slacks. Polling’d been wearing dark sports clothes over the past several days. But so what? So did a lot of -

Downstairs a door opened and closed.

“Thom?”

No answer. The aide wasn’t due back for hours.

“Lincoln?”

Oh, no. Hell. He started to dial on the ECU.

9- 1

With his chin he bumped the cursor to 2.

Footsteps on the stairs.

He tried to redial but he knocked the joystick out of reach in his desperation.

And Jim Polling walked into the room. Rhyme had counted on the babysitter’s calling upstairs first. But of course a beat cop would let a police captain inside without thinking twice.

Polling’s dark jacket was unbuttoned and Rhyme got a look at the automatic on his hip. He couldn’t see if it was his issue weapon. But he knew that.32 Colts were on the NYPD list of approved personal weapons.

“Lincoln,” Polling said. He was clearly uneasy, cautious. His eyes fell to the bleached bit of spinal cord.

“How you doing, Jim?”

“Not bad.”

Polling the outdoorsman. Had the scar on the fingerprint been left by years of casting a fishing line? Or an accident with a hunting knife? Rhyme tried to look but Polling kept his hands jammed into his pockets. Was he holding something in there? A knife?

Polling certainly knew forensics and crime scenes – he knew how not to leave evidence.

The ski mask? If Polling was the unsub he’d have to wear the mask of course – because one of the vics might see him later. And the aftershave… what if the unsub hadn’t worn the scent at all but had just carried a bottle with him and sprayed some at the scenes to make them believe he wore Brut? So when Polling showed up here, not wearing any, no one would suspect him.

“You’re alone?” Polling asked.

“My assistant -”

“The cop downstairs said he wouldn’t be back for a while.”

Rhyme hesitated. “That’s right.”

Polling was slight but strong, sandy-haired. Terry Dobyns’s words came back: Someone helpful, upstanding. A social worker, counselor, politician. Somebody helping other people.

Like a cop.

Rhyme wondered now if he was about to die. And to his shock he realized that he didn’t want to. Not this way, not on somebody else’s terms.

Polling walked to the bed.

Yet there was nothing he could do. He was at this man’s complete mercy.

“Lincoln,” Polling repeated gravely.

Their eyes met and the feeling of electrical connection went through them. Dry sparks. The captain looked quickly out the window. “You’ve been wondering, haven’t you?”

“Wondering?”

“Why I wanted you on the case.”

“I figured it was my personality.”

This drew no smile from the captain.

“Why did you want me, Jim?”

The captain’s fingers knitted together. Thin but strong. The hands of a fisherman, a sport that, yes, may be genteel but whose purpose is nonetheless to wrench a poor beast from his home and slice through its smooth belly with a thin knife.

“Four years ago, the Shepherd case. We were on it together.”

Rhyme nodded.

“The workers found the body of that cop in the subway stop.”

A groan, Rhyme recalled, like the sound of the Titanic sinking in A Night to Remember. Then an explosion loud as a gunshot as the beam came down on his hapless neck, and dirt packed around his body.

“And you ran the scene. You yourself, like you always did.”

“I did, yes.”

“Did you know how we convicted Shepherd? We had a wit.”

A witness? Rhyme hadn’t heard that. After the accident he’d lost all track of the case, except for learning that Shepherd had been convicted and, three months later, stabbed to death on Riker’s Island by an assailant who was never captured.

“An eyewitness,” Polling continued. “He could place Shepherd at one of the victims’ homes with the murder weapon.” The captain stepped closer to the bed, crossed his arms. “We had the wit a day before we found the last body – the one in the subway. Before I put in the request that you run the scene.”

“What’re you saying, Jim?”

The captain’s eyes rooted themselves to the floor. “We didn’t need you. We didn’t need your report.”

Rhyme said nothing.

Polling nodded. “You understand what I’m saying? I wanted to nail that fuck Shepherd so bad… I wanted an airtight case. And you know what a Lincoln Rhyme crime scene report does to defense lawyers. It scares the everlovin’ shit out of them.”

“But Shepherd would’ve been convicted even without my report from the subway scene.”

“That’s right, Lincoln. But it’s worse than that. See, I got word from MTA Engineering that the site wasn’t safe.”

“The subway site. And you had me work the scene before they shored it up?”

“Shepherd was a cop-killer.” Polling’s face twisted up in disgust. “I wanted him so bad. I woulda done anything to nail him. But…” He lowered his head to his hands.

Rhyme said nothing. He heard the groan of the beam, the explosion of the breaking wood. Then the rustle of the dirt nestling around him. A curious, warm peace in his body while his heart stuttered with terror.

“Jim -”

“That’s why I wanted you on this case, Lincoln. You see?” A miserable look crossed the captain’s tough face; he stared at the disk of spinal column on the table. “I kept hearing these stories that your life was crap. You were wasting away here. Talking about killing yourself. I felt so fucking guilty. I wanted to try to give you some of your life back.”

Rhyme said, “And you’ve been living with this for the last three and a half years.”

“You know about me, Lincoln. Everybody knows about me. I collar somebody, he gives me any shit, he goes down. I get a hard-on for some perp, I don’t stop till the prick’s bagged and tagged. I can’t control it. I know I’ve fucked over people sometimes. But they were perps – or suspects, at least. They weren’t my own, they weren’t cops. What happened to you… that was a sin. It was just fucking wrong.”

“I wasn’t a rookie,” Rhyme said. “I didn’t have to work a scene I thought wasn’t safe.”

“But -”

“Bad time?” another voice said from the doorway.

Rhyme glanced up, expecting to see Berger. But it was Peter Taylor who’d come up the stairs. Rhyme recalled that he was coming by today to check on his patient after the dysreflexia attack. He supposed too that the doctor was planning to give him hell about Berger and the Lethe Society. He wasn’t in the mood for that; he wanted time alone – to digest Polling’s confession. At the moment it just sat there, numb as Rhyme’s thigh. But he said, “Come on in, Peter.”

“You’ve got a very funny security system, Lincoln. The guard asked if I was a doctor and he let me up. What? Do lawyers and accountants get booted?”

Rhyme laughed. “I’ll only be a second.” Rhyme turned back to Polling. “Fate, Jim. That’s what happened to me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens.”

“Thanks, Lincoln.” Polling put his hand on Rhyme’s right shoulder and squeezed it gently.

Rhyme nodded and, to deflect the uneasy gratitude, introduced the men. “Jim, this is Pete Taylor, one of my doctors. And this is Jim Polling, we used to work together.”

“Nice to meet you,” Taylor said, sticking out his right hand. It was a broad gesture and Rhyme’s eyes followed it, noticing for some reason the deep crescent scar on Taylor’s right index finger.

“No!” Rhyme shouted.

“So you’re a cop too.” Taylor gripped Polling’s hand tightly as he slid the knife, held firmly in his left hand, in and out of the captain’s chest three times, navigating around the ribs with the delicacy of a surgeon. Undoubtedly so he wouldn’t nick the precious bone.

THIRTY-SIX

IN TWO LONG STEPS TAYLOR WAS BESIDE THE BED. He grabbed the ECU controller from beneath Rhyme’s finger, flung it across the room.

Rhyme took a breath to shout. But the doctor said, “He’s dead too. The constable.” Nodding toward the door, meaning the bodyguard downstairs. Taylor stared with fascination as Polling thrashed like a spine-cracked animal, spraying his blood on the floor and walls.

“Jim!” Rhyme cried. “No, oh, no…”

The captain’s hands curled over his ruined chest. A repugnant gurgling from his throat filled the room, accompanied by the mad thudding of his shoes on the floor as he died. Finally he quivered once violently and lay still. His glazed eyes, dotted with blood, stared at the ceiling.

Turning to the bed he kept his eyes on Lincoln Rhyme as he walked around it. Slowly circling, the knife in his hand. His breathing was hard.

“Who are you?” Rhyme gasped.

Silently Taylor stepped forward, put his fingers around Rhyme’s arm, squeezed the bone several times, perhaps hard, perhaps not. His hand strayed to Rhyme’s left ring finger. He lifted it off the ECU and caressed it with the dripping blade of the knife. Slipped the sharp point up under the nail.

Rhyme felt faint pain, a queasy sensation. Then harder. He gasped.

Then Taylor noticed something and froze. He gasped. Leaned forward. Staring at the copy of Crime in Old New York on the turning frame.

“That’s how… You actually found it… Oh, the constables should be proud to have you in their ranks, Lincoln Rhyme. I thought it’d be days before you got to the house. I thought Maggie’d be stripped down by the dogs by then.”

“Why’re you doing this?” Rhyme asked.

But Taylor didn’t answer; he was examining Rhyme carefully, muttering, half to himself, “You didn’t used to be this good, you know. In the old days. You missed a lot back then, didn’t you? In the old days.”

The old days… What did he mean?

He shook his balding head, gray hair – not brown – and glanced at a copy of Rhyme’s forensic textbook. There was recognition in his eyes and slowly Rhyme began to understand.

“You read my book,” the criminalist said. “You studied it. At the library, right? The public library branch near you?”

Eight twenty-three was, after all, a reader.

So he knew Rhyme’s CS procedures. That’s why he’d swept up so carefully, why he’d worn gloves touching even surfaces most criminals wouldn’t’ve thought would retain prints, why he’d sprayed the aftershave at the scene – he’d known exactly what Sachs would be looking for.

And of course the manual wasn’t the only book he’d read.

Scenes of the Crime too. That’s what had given him the idea for the planted clues – Old New York clues. Clues that only Lincoln Rhyme would be able to figure out.

Taylor picked up the disk of spinal column he’d given to Rhyme eight months ago. He kneaded it absently between his fingers. And Rhyme saw the gift, so touching back then, for the horrific preface that it was.

His eyes were unfocused, distant. Rhyme recalled he’d seen this before – when Taylor’d examined him over the past months. He’d put it down to a doctor’s concentration but now knew it was madness. The control he’d been struggling to maintain was disappearing.

“Tell me,” Rhyme asked. “Why?”

“Why?” Taylor whispered, moving his hand along Rhyme’s leg, probing once more, knee, shin, ankle. “Because you were something remarkable, Rhyme. Unique. You were invulnerable.”

“What do you mean?”

“How can you punish a man who wants to die? If you kill him you’ve done what he wants. So I had to make you want to live.”

And the answer came to Rhyme finally.

The old days…

“It was fake, wasn’t it?” he whispered. “That obituary from the Albany coroner. You wrote it yourself.”

Colin Stanton. Dr. Taylor was Colin Stanton.

The man whose family had been butchered in front of him on the streets of Chinatown. The man who stood paralyzed in front of the bodies of his wife and two children as they bled to death, and could not make the obscene choice about which of them to save.

You missed things. In the old days.

Now, too late, the final pieces fell into place.

His watching the victims: T.J. Colfax and Monelle and Carole Ganz. He’d risked capture to stand and stare at them – just as Stanton had stood over his family, watching as they died. He wanted revenge but he was a doctor, sworn never to take a life, and so in order to kill he had to become his spiritual ancestor – the bone collector, James Schneider, a nineteenth-century madman whose family had been destroyed by the police.

“After I got out of the mental hospital I came back to Manhattan. I read the inquest report about how you missed the killer at the crime scene, how he got out of the apartment. I knew I had to kill you. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why… I kept waiting and waiting for something to happen. And then I found the book. James Schneider… He’d been through exactly what I had. He’d done it; I could too.”

I took them down to the bone.

“The obituary,” Rhyme said.

“Right. I wrote it myself on my computer. Faxed it to NYPD so they wouldn’t suspect me. Then I became someone else. Dr. Peter Taylor. I didn’t realize until later why I picked that name. Can you figure it out?” Stanton’s eyes strayed to the chart. “The answer’s there.”

Rhyme scanned the profile.

· Knows basic German

“Schneider,”Rhyme said, sighing, “It’s German for ‘tailor.’ ”

Stanton nodded. “I spent weeks at the library reading up on spinal cord trauma and then called you, claimed I’d been referred by Columbia SCI. I planned to kill you during the first appointment, cut your flesh off a strip at a time, let you bleed to death. It might’ve taken hours. Even days. But what happened?” His eyes grew wide. “I found out you wanted to kill yourself.”

He leaned close to Rhyme. “Jesus, I still remember the first time I saw you. You son of a bitch. You were dead. And I knew what I had to do – I had to make you want to live. I had to give you purpose once more.”

So it didn’t matter whom he kidnapped. Anyone would do. “You didn’t even care whether the victims lived or died.”

“Of course not. All I wanted was to force you to try to save them.”

“The knot,” Rhyme asked, noticing the loop of clothesline hanging beside the poster. “It was a surgical suture?”

He nodded.

“Of course. And the scar on your finger?”

“My finger?” He frowned. “How did you… Her neck! You printed her neck, Hanna’s. I knew that was possible. I didn’t think about it.” Angry with himself. “I broke a glass in the mental hospital library,” Stanton continued. “To cut my wrist. I squeezed it till it broke.” He madly traced the scar with his left index finger.

“The deaths,” Rhyme said evenly, “your wife and children. It was an accident. A terrible accident, horrible. But it didn’t happen on purpose. It was a mistake. I’m so sorry for you and for them.”

In a sing-songy voice, Stanton chided, “Remember what you wrote?… in the preface of your textbook?” He recited perfectly, “ ‘The criminalist knows that for every action there’s a consequence. The presence of a perpetrator alters every crime scene, however subtly. It is because of this that we can identify and locate criminals and achieve justice.’ ” Stanton grabbed Rhyme’s hair and tugged his head forward. They were inches apart. Rhyme could smell the madman’s breath, see the lenses of sweat on the gray skin. “Well, I’m the consequence of your actions.”

“What’ll you accomplish? You kill me and I’m no worse off than I would’ve been.”

“Oh, but I’m not going to kill you. Not yet.”

Stanton released Rhyme’s hair, backed away.

“You want to know what I’m going to do?” he whispered. “I’m going to kill your doctor, Berger. But not the way he’s used to killing. Oh, no sleeping pills for him, no booze. We’ll see how he likes death the old-fashioned way. Then your friend Sellitto. And Officer Sachs? Her too. She was lucky once. But I’ll get her the next time. Another burial for her. And Thom too of course. He’ll die right here in front of you. Work him down to the bone… Nice and slow.” Stanton’s breathing was fast. “Maybe we’ll take care of him today. When’s he due back?”

“I made the mistakes. It’s my-” Rhyme suddenly coughed deeply. He cleared his throat, caught his breath. “It’s my fault. Do whatever you want with me.”

“No, it’s all of you. It’s -”

“Please. You can’t -” Rhyme began to cough again. It turned into a violent racking. He managed to control it.

Stanton glanced at him.

“You can’t hurt them. I’ll do whatever-” Rhyme’s voice seized. His head flew back, his eyes bulged.

And Lincoln Rhyme’s breath stopped completely. His head thrashed, his shoulders shivered violently. The tendons in his neck tightened like steel cords.

“Rhyme!” Stanton cried.

Sputtering, saliva shooting from his lips, Rhyme trembled once, twice, an earthquake seemed to ripple through his entire limp body. His head fell back, blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“No!” Stanton shouted. Slamming his hands into Rhyme’s chest. “You can’t die!”

The doctor lifted Rhyme’s lids, revealing only whites.

Stanton tore open Thom’s medicine box and prepared a blood-pressure hypodermic, injected the drug. He yanked the pillow off the bed and pulled Rhyme flat. He tilted back Rhyme’s lolling head, wiped the lips and placed his mouth on Rhyme’s, breathing hard into the unresponsive lungs.

“No!” Stanton raged. “I won’t let you die! You can’t!”

No response.

Again. He checked the unmoving eyes.

“Come on! Come on!”

Another breath. Pounding on the still chest.

Then he backed up, frozen with panic and shock, staring, staring, watching the man die in front of him.

Finally he bent forward and one last time exhaled deeply into Rhyme’s mouth.

And it was when Stanton turned his head and lowered his ear to listen for the faint sound of breath, any faint exhalation, that Rhyme’s head shot forward like a striking snake. He closed his teeth on Stanton’s neck, tearing through the carotid artery and gripping a portion of the man’s own spine.

Down to…

Stanton screamed and scrabbled backwards, sliding Rhyme off the bed on top of him. Together they fell in a pile on the floor. The hot coppery blood gushed and gushed, filling Rhyme’s mouth.

…the bone.

His lungs, his killer lungs, had already gone for a minute without air but he refused to loosen his grip now to gasp for breath, ignoring the searing pain from inside his cheek where he’d bit into the tender skin, bloodying it to give credence to his sham attack of dysreflexia. He growled in rage – seeing Amelia Sachs buried in dirt, seeing the steam spew over T.J. Colfax’s body – and he shook his head, feeling the snap of bone and cartilage.

Pummeling Rhyme’s chest, Stanton screamed again, kicking to get away from the monster that had socketed itself to him.

But Rhyme’s grip was unbreakable. It was as if the spirits of all the dead muscles throughout his body had risen into his jaw.

Stanton clawed his way to the bedside table and managed to grab his knife. He jabbed it into Rhyme. Once, twice. But the only places he could reach were the criminalist’s legs and arms. It’s pain that incapacitates and pain was one thing to which Lincoln Rhyme was immune.

The vise of his jaws closed harder and Stanton’s scream was cut off as his windpipe went. He plunged the knife deep into Rhyme’s arm. It stopped when it hit bone. He started to draw it out to strike again but the madman’s body froze then spasmed violently once, then again, and suddenly went completely limp.

Stanton collapsed to the floor, pulling Rhyme after him. The criminalist’s head slammed onto the oak with a loud crack. Yet Rhyme wouldn’t let go. He held tight and continued to crush the man’s neck, shaking, tearing the flesh like a hungry lion crazed by blood and by the immeasurable satisfaction of a lust fulfilled.