The Bone Collector

THIRTY-SEVEN

Monday, 7:15 p.m., to Monday, 10:00 p.m.

IT WAS NEARLY SUNSET when Amelia Sachs walked through his doorway.

She was no longer in sweats. Or uniform. She wore jeans and a forest-green blouse. Her beautiful face sported several scratches Rhyme didn’t recognize, though given the events of the past three days he guessed the wounds weren’t self-inflicted.

“Yuck,” she said, walking around the portion of the floor where Stanton and Polling had died. It had been mopped with bleach – with the perp body-bagged, forensics became moot – but the pink island of stain was huge.

Rhyme watched Sachs pause and nod a cold greeting to Dr. William Berger, who stood by the falcon window with his infamous briefcase at his side.

“So you got him, did you?” she asked, nodding at the bloodstain.

“Yeah,” Rhyme said. “He’s got.”

“All by yourself?”

“It was hardly a fair fight,” he offered. “I forced myself to hold back.”

Outside, the liquid, ruddy light of the low sun ignited treetops and the marching line of elegant buildings along Fifth Avenue across the park.

Sachs glanced at Berger, who said, “Lincoln and I were just having a little talk.”

“Were you?”

There was a long pause.

“Amelia,” he began. “I’m going to go through with it. I’ve decided.”

“I see.” Her gorgeous lips, marred by the black lines of tiny stitches, tightened slightly. It was her only visible reaction. “You know, I hate it when you use my first name. I goddamn hate it.”

How could he explain to her that she was largely the reason he was going ahead with his death? Waking that morning, with her beside him, he realized with a piquant sorrow that she would soon climb from the bed and dress and walk out the door – to her own life, to a normal life. Why, they were as doomed as lovers could be – if he dared even to think of them as lovers. It was only a matter of time until she met another Nick and fell in love. The 823 case was over, and without that binding them together, their lives would have to drift apart. Inevitable.

Oh, Stanton was smarter than he could’ve guessed. Rhyme had been drawn to the brink of the real world once again and, yes, he’d moved far over it.

Sachs, I lied. Sometimes you can’t give up the dead. Sometimes you just have to go with them…

Hands clenched, she walked to the window. “I tried to come up with a ballbuster of an argument to talk you out of it. You know, something real slick. But I couldn’t. All I can say is, I just don’t want you to do it.”

“A deal’s a deal, Sachs.”

She looked at Berger. “Shit, Rhyme.” Walking over to the bed, crouching down. She put her hand on his shoulder, brushed his hair off his forehead. “But will you do one thing for me?”

“What?”

“Give me a few hours.”

“I’m not changing my mind.”

“I understand. Just two hours. There’s something you have to do first.”

Rhyme looked at Berger, who said, “I can’t stay much longer, Lincoln. My plane… If you want to wait a week I can come back…”

“That’s okay, doctor,” Sachs said. “I’ll help him do it.”

“You?” the doctor asked cautiously.

Reluctantly she nodded. “Yes.”

This wasn’t her nature. Rhyme could see that clearly. But he glanced into her blue eyes, which though tearful were remarkably clear.

She said, “When I was… when he was burying me, Rhyme, I couldn’t move. Not an inch. For an instant I was desperate to die. Not to live, just to have it over with. I understood how you feel.”

Rhyme nodded slowly then said to Berger, “It’s all right, doctor. Could you just leave the – what’s the euphemism of the day?”

“How’s ‘paraphernalia’?” Berger suggested.

“Could you just leave them there, on the table?”

“You’re sure?” he asked Sachs.

She nodded again.

The doctor set the pills, brandy and plastic bag on the bedside table. Then he rummaged through his briefcase. “I don’t have any rubber bands, I’m afraid. For the bag.”

“That’s all right,” Sachs said, glancing down at her shoes. “I’ve got some.”

Then Berger stepped close to the bed, put his arm on Rhyme’s shoulder. “I wish you a peaceful self-deliverance,” he said.

“Self-deliverance,” Rhyme said wryly as Berger left. Then, to Sachs: “Now. What’s this I have to do?”

She took the turn at fifty, skidded hard, and slipped smoothly up into fourth gear.

The wind blasted through the open windows and tossed their hair behind them. The gusts were brutal but Amelia Sachs wouldn’t hear of driving with the windows up.

“That’d be un-American,” she announced, and broke the 100-mph mark.

When you move…

Rhyme had suggested it might be wiser to take their spin on the NYPD training course but he wasn’t surprised when Sachs declared that that was a pussy run; she’d disposed of it the first week at the academy. So they were out on Long Island, their cover stories for the Nassau County police ready, rehearsed and marginally credible.

“The thing about five-speeds is, top gear isn’t the fastest. That’s a mileage gear, I don’t give a shit about mileage.” Then she took his left hand and placed it on the round black knob, encircled it with hers, downshifted.

The engine screamed and they shot up to 120, as trees and houses streaked past and the uneasy horses grazing in the fields stared at the black streak of Chevrolet.

“Isn’t this the best, Rhyme?” she shouted. “Man, better than sex. Better than anything.”

“I can feel the vibrations,” he said. “I think I can. In my finger.”

She smiled and he believed she squeezed his hand beneath hers. Finally, they ran out of deserted road, population loomed, and Sachs reluctantly slowed, turned around and pointed the nose of the car toward the hazy crescent of moon as it rose above the distant city, nearly invisible in the stew of hot August air.

“Let’s try for one-fifty,” she proposed. Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensation of wind and the perfume of freshly cut grass and the speed.

The night was the hottest of the month.

From Lincoln ’s Rhyme’s new vantage point he could look down into the park and see the weirdos on the benches, the exhausted joggers, the families reclining around the smoke of dwindling barbecue fires like the survivors of a medieval battle. A few dog walkers unable to wait for the night’s fever to break made their obligatory rounds, Baggies in hand.

Thom had put on a CD – Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio for Strings. But Rhyme had snorted a derisive laugh, declared it a sorry cliché and ordered him to replace it with Gershwin.

Amelia Sachs climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom, noticed him looking outside. “What do you see?” she asked.

“Hot people.”

“And the birds? The falcons?”

“Ah, yes, they’re there.”

“Hot too?”

He examined the male. “I don’t think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing.”

She set the bag on the foot of the bed and lifted out the contents, a bottle of expensive brandy. He’d reminded her of the Scotch but Sachs said she’d contribute the liquor. She set it next to the pills and the plastic bag. Looking like a breezy professional wife, home from Balducci’s with piles of vegetables and seafood and too little time to whip them into dinner.

She’d also bought some ice, at Rhyme’s request. He’d remembered what Berger had explained about the heat in the bag. She lifted the cap off the Courvoisier and poured herself a glass and filled his tumbler, arranged the straw toward his mouth.

“Where’s Thom?” she asked him.

“Out.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes.”

They sipped the brandy.

“Do you want me to say anything to your wife?”

Rhyme considered it for a long moment, thinking: We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets – and oh how we squander those moments. Here he’d known Amelia Sachs all of three days and they’d bared their hearts far more than he and Elaine had done in nearly a decade.

“No,” he said. “I’ve e-mailed her.” A chuckle. “That’s a comment on our times, I’d say.”

More brandy, the astringent bite on his palate was dissipating. Growing smoother, duller, lighter.

Sachs leaned over the bed and tapped her glass to his.

“I have some money,” Rhyme began. “I’m giving a lot of it to Blaine and to Thom. I -”

But she shushed him with a kiss to the forehead and shook her head.

A soft clatter of pebbles as she spilled the tiny Seconals into her hand.

Rhyme instinctively thought: The Dillie-Koppanyi color test reagent. Add 1 percent cobalt acetate in methanol to the suspect material followed by 5 percent isopropylamine in methanol. If the substance is a barbiturate the reagent turns a beautiful violet-blue color.

“How should we do it?” She asked, gazing at the pills. “I really don’t know.”

“Mix them in the booze,” he suggested.

She dropped them in his tumbler. They dissolved quickly.

How fragile they were. Like the dreams they induce.

She stirred the mixture with the straw. He glanced at her wounded nails but even that he couldn’t be sorrowful for. This was his night and it was a night of joy.

Lincoln Rhyme had a sudden recollection of childhood in suburban Illinois. He never drank his milk and to get him to do so his mother bought straws coated on the inside with flavoring. Strawberry, chocolate. He hadn’t thought about them until just this moment. It was a great invention, he remembered. He always looked forward to his afternoon milk.

Sachs pushed the straw close to his mouth. He took it between his lips. She put her hand on his arm.

Light or dark, music or silence, dreams or the meditation of dreamless sleep? What will I find?

He began to sip. The taste was really no different from straight liquor. A little more bitter maybe. It was like -

From downstairs came a huge pounding on the door. Hands and feet both, it seemed. Voices shouting too.

He lifted his lips away from the straw. Glanced into the dim stairwell.

She looked at him, frowning.

“Go see,” he said to her.

She disappeared down the stairs and a moment later returned, looking unhappy. Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks followed. Rhyme noticed that the young detective had done another butcher job on his face with a razor. He’d really have to get that under control.

Sellitto glanced at the bottle and the bag. His eyes swayed toward Sachs but she crossed her arms and held her own, silently ordering him to leave. This was not an issue of rank, the look told the detective, and what was happening here was none of his business. Sellitto’s eyes acknowledged the message but he wasn’t about to go anywhere just yet.

“Lincoln, I need to talk to you.”

“Talk. But talk fast, Lon. We’re busy.”

The detective sat heavily in the noisy rattan chair. “An hour ago a bomb went off at the United Nations. Right next to the banquet hall. During the welcome dinner for the peace conference delegates.”

“Six dead, fifty-four hurt,” Banks added. “Twenty of them serious.”

“My God,” Sachs whispered.

“Tell him,” Sellitto muttered.

Banks continued, “For the conference, the UN hired a bunch of temps. The perp was one of them – a receptionist. A half-dozen people saw her carrying a knapsack to work and putting it in a storeroom near the banquet hall. She left just before the bang. The bomb squad estimates we’re looking at about two pounds of C4 or Semtex.”

Sellitto said, “Linc, the bomb, it was a yellow knapsack, the wits said.”

“Yellow?” Why was that familiar?

“UN human resources ID’d the receptionist as Carole Ganz.”

“The mother,” Rhyme and Sachs said simultaneously.

“Yeah. The woman you saved in the church. Only Ganz’s an alias. Her real name’s Charlotte Willoughby. She was married to a Ron Willoughby. Ring a bell?”

Rhyme said it didn’t.

“It was in the news a couple years ago. He was an Army sergeant assigned to a UN peacekeeping force in Burma.”

“Keep going,” the criminalist said.

“Willoughby didn’t want to go – thought an American soldier shouldn’t be wearing a UN uniform and taking orders from anybody except the U.S. Army. It’s a big right-wing issue nowadays. But he went anyway. Wasn’t there a week before he’s blown away by some little punk in Rangoon. Got shot in the back. Became a conservative martyr. Anti-Terror says his widow got recruited by an extremist group out in the Chicago burbs. Some U of C grads gone underground. Edward and Katherine Stone.”

Banks took over the narrative. “The explosive was in a package of kid’s modeling clay, along with some other toys. We think she was going to take the little girl with her so security at the banquet-hall entrance wouldn’t think anything of the clay. But with Pammy in the hospital she didn’t have her cover story so she gave up on the hall and just planted it in the storeroom. Did enough damage as it was.”

“Rabitted?”

“Yep. Not a trace.”

“What about the little girl,” Sachs asked, “Pammy?”

“Gone. The woman checked her out of the hospital around the time of the bang. No sign of either of them.”

Rhyme asked, “The cell?”

“The group in Chicago? They’re gone too. Had a safe house in Wisconsin but it’s been hosed. We don’t know where they are.”

“So that was the rumor Dellray’s snitch heard.” Rhyme laughed. “Carole was the one coming into the airport. Had nothing to do with Unsub 823.”

He found Banks and Sellitto staring at him.

Oh, the old silent trick again.

“Forget it, Lon.” Rhyme said, all too aware of the glass sitting inches from him, radiating a welcoming heat. “Impossible.”

The older detective plucked his sweaty shirt away from his body, cringing. “God damn cold in here, Lincoln. Jesus. Look, just think about it. What’sa harm?”

“I can’t help you.”

Sellitto said, “There was a note. Carole wrote it and sent it to the secretary-general by interoffice envelope. Harping on world government, taking away American liberties. Some shit like that. Claimed credit for the UNESCO bombing in London too and said there’d be more. We’ve gotta get ’em, Linc.”

Feeling his oats, scarface Banks said, “The secretary-general and the mayor both’ve asked for you. SAC Perkins too. And there’ll be a call from the White House, you need any more persuading. We sure hope you don’t, detective.”

Rhyme didn’t comment on the error regarding his rank.

“They’ve got the Bureau’s PERT team ready to go. Fred Dellray’s running the case and he asked – respectfully, yeah, he used that very word – he asked respectfully if you’d do the forensic work. And it’s a virgin scene, except for getting the bodies and the wounded out.”

“Then it’s not virgin,” Rhyme snapped. “It’s extremely contaminated.”

“All the more reason we need you,” Banks ventured, adding “sir” to defuse Rhyme’s glare.

Rhyme sighed, looked at the glass and the straw. Peace was so close to him just now. And pain too. Infinite sums of both.

He closed his eyes. Not a sound in the room.

Sellitto added, “It was just the woman herself, hey, wouldn’t be that big a deal. But she’s got her daughter with her, Lincoln. Underground, with a little girl? You know what that kid’s life’s going to be like?”

I’ll get you for that too, Lon.

Rhyme nestled his head into the opulent pillow. Finally his eyes sprang open. He said, “There’d be some conditions.”

“Name it, Linc.”

“First of all,” he said. “I don’t work alone.”

Rhyme looked toward Amelia Sachs.

She hesitated for a moment then smiled and stood, lifted the glass of tainted brandy out from under the straw. She opened the window wide and flung the tawny liquid into the ripe, hot air above the alley next to the townhouse, while, just feet away, the falcon looked up, glaring angrily at the motion of her arm, cocked his gray head, then turned back to feed his hungry youngster.