The Skin Collector

CHAPTER 1

The basement.

She had to go to the basement.

Chloe hated it down there.

But they’d sold out of sizes ten and twelve Rue du Cannes — the tacky little floral number with scalloped hemline and plunging front — and she needed to replenish the racks, fill ’em up for the grazers. Chloe was an actress, not a retail fashion expert, and new to the store. So she hadn’t fathomed why, in a November impersonating January, these particular dresses were selling out. Until her boss explained that, even though the store was in alternative SoHo in Manhattan, the ZIP codes of the purchasers situated them in Jersey, Westchester and Long Island.

‘And?’

‘Cruises, Chloe. Cruises.’

‘Ah.’

Chloe Moore walked into the back of the store. Here the shop was the opposite of the sales floor and about as chic as a storage unit. She found the key among those dangling from her wrist and unlocked the basement door. She flicked on the lights and studied the unsteady stairs.

A sigh and she started down. The door, on a spring, swung shut behind her. Not a small woman, Chloe took the steps carefully. She was also on Vera Wang knockoffs. Pseudo-designer heels and hundred-year-old architecture can be a dangerous combination.

The basement.

Hated it.

Not that she worried about intruders. There was only one door in and out — the one she’d just come through. But the place was moldy, damp, cold … and booby-trapped with cobwebs.

Which meant sly, predatory spiders.

And Chloe knew she’d need a dog roller to remove the dust from the dark-green skirt and black blouse (Le Bordeaux and La Seine).

She stepped onto the uneven, cracked concrete floor, moving to the left to avoid a big web. But another one got her; a long clinging strand clutched her face, tickling. After a comic dance of trying to brush the damn thing off and not fall over, she continued her search. Five minutes later she found the shipments of Rue du Cannes, which may have looked French and sounded French but came in boxes printed largely with Chinese characters.

As she tugged the cartons off the shelf Chloe heard a scrape.

She froze. Tilted her head.

The sound didn’t repeat. But then she was aware of another noise.

Drip, drip, drip.

Was there a leak?

Chloe came down here often, if reluctantly, and she’d never heard water. She stacked the faux French garments near the stairs and turned to investigate. Most of the inventory was on shelves but some cartons rested on the floor. A leak could be disastrous. And while, yes, Chloe was eventually headed for Broadway she nonetheless needed to keep her job here at Chez Nord for the foreseeable future. Stopping a leak before it ruined ten thousand dollars’ worth of overpriced clothes might go a long way in keeping those paychecks dribbling into Chase.

She walked to the back of the cellar, determined to find the leak, though also on serious spider alert.

The dripping grew louder as she moved toward the rear of the room, even murkier than the front, near the stairs.

Chloe stepped behind a shelf, containing a huge supply of blouses so ugly even her mother wouldn’t wear them — a major order by a buyer who, Chloe believed, had made the purchase because he knew he was going to be sacked.

Drip, drip …

Squinting.

Odd. What was that? In the far wall an access door was open. The sound of water was coming from there. The door, painted gray like the walls, was about three feet by four.

What did it lead to? Was there a sub-basement? She’d never seen the doorway but then she didn’t believe she’d ever glanced at the wall behind the last shelf. There was no reason to.

And why was it open? The city was always doing construction work, especially in the older parts, such as here, SoHo. But nobody had talked to the clerks — her, at least — about a repair beneath the building.

Maybe that weird Polish or Rumanian or Russian janitor was doing some repairs. But, no, couldn’t be. The manager didn’t trust him; he didn’t have keys to the basement door.

Okay, the creep factor was rising.

Don’t bother figuring it out. Tell Marge about the drip. Tell her about the open doorway. Get Vlad or Mikhail or whoever he is down here and let him earn his salary.

Then another scrape. This time it seemed to be a foot shifting on gritty concrete.

Fuck. That’s it. Get. Out.

But before she got out, before she even spun an eighth turn away, he was on her from behind, slamming her head into the wall. He pressed a cloth over her mouth to gag her. She nearly fainted from the shock. A burst of pain blossomed in her neck.

Chloe turned fast to face him.

God, God …

She nearly puked, seeing the yellowish latex full-head mask, with slots for eyes and mouth and ears, tight and distorting the flesh underneath, as if his face had melted. He was in worker’s coveralls, some logo on them she couldn’t read.

Crying, shaking her head, she was pleading through the gag, screaming through the gag, which he kept pressed firmly in place with a hand in a glove as tight and sickly yellow as the mask.

‘Listen to me, please! Don’t do this! You don’t understand! Listen, listen …’ But the words were just random sounds through the cloth.

Thinking: Why didn’t I chock the door open? I thought about it … Furious with herself.

His calm eyes looked her over — but not her breasts or lips or hips or legs. Just the skin of her bare arms, her throat, her neck, where he focused intently on a small blue tattoo of a tulip.

‘Not bad, not good,’ he whispered.

She was whimpering, shivering, moaning. ‘What, what, what do you want?’

But why did she even ask? She knew. Of course she knew.

And, with that thought, Chloe controlled the fear. She tightened her heart.

Okay, asshole, wanna play? You’ll pay.

She went limp. His eyes, surrounded by yellow latex like sickly skin, seemed confused. The attacker, apparently not expecting her collapse, adjusted his grip to keep her from falling.

As soon as she felt his hands slacken Chloe lunged forward and grabbed the collar of his coveralls. The zipper popped and cloth tore — both the outer garment and whatever was under it.

Her grip and the blows aimed at his chest and face were fierce. She pumped her knee upward toward his groin. Again and once more.

But she didn’t connect. Her aim was off. It seemed such an easy target but she was suddenly uncoordinated, dizzy. He was cutting off her air with the gag — that was it maybe. Or the aftermath of the shock.

Keep going, she raged. Don’t stop. He’s scared. You can see it. Fucking coward …

And tried to hit him again, claw at his flesh, but she now found her energy fading fast. Her hands tapped uselessly against him. Her head lolled and, looking down, she noticed that his sleeve had ridden up. Chloe caught sight of a weird tattoo, in red, some insect, dozens of little insect legs, insect fangs but human eyes. And then she focused on the floor of the cellar. A glint from the hypodermic syringe. That was the source of the pain in her neck — and of her fleeing strength. He’d injected her with something.

Whatever the drug, it was taking effect in a big way. She was growing exhausted. Her mind tumbled, as if dipping into and out of a dream, and for some reason she found herself obsessing over the cheap perfume Chez Nord sold by the checkout counter.

Who’d buy that crap? Why didn’t—?

What am I doing? she thought as clarity returned. Fight! Fight the son of a bitch!

But her hands were at her sides now, completely still, and her head heavy as stone.

She was sitting on the floor and then the room tilted and began to move. He was dragging her toward the access door.

No, not there, please!

Listen to me! I can explain why you shouldn’t do this. Don’t take me there! Listen!

Here in the cellar proper, at least there was still some hope that Marge would look down the stairs and see them both and she’d scream and he’d scramble off on his insect legs. But once Chloe was deep underground in his bug nest, it would be too late. The room was growing dark but an odd kind of dark, as if the ceiling bulbs, which were still on, were not emitting light but drawing in rays and extinguishing them.

Fight!

But she couldn’t.

Closer to the black abyss.

Drip, drip, drip …

Scream!

She did.

But no sound came from her mouth beyond a hiss, a cricket click, a beetle hum.

Then he was easing her through the door into Wonderland, on the other side. Like that movie. Or cartoon. Or whatever.

She saw a small utility room below.

Chloe believed she was falling, over and over, and a moment later she was on the floor, the ground, the dirt, trying to breathe, the air kicked out of her lungs from the impact. But no pain, no pain at all. The sound of dripping water was more pronounced and she saw a trickle down the far wall, made of old stone and laced with pipes and wires, rusty and frayed and rotting.

Drip, drip …

A trickle of insect venom, of shiny clear insect blood.

Thinking, Alice, I’m Alice. Down the rabbit hole. The hookah-smoking caterpillar, the March Hare, the Red Queen, the red insect on his arm.

She never liked that goddamn story!

Chloe gave up on screaming. She wanted only to crawl away, to cry and huddle, to be left alone. But she couldn’t move. She lay on her back, staring up at the faint light from the basement of the store that she hated working in, the store that she wanted with all her soul to be back inside right now, standing on sore feet and nodding with fake enthusiasm.

No, no, it makes you look sooo thin. Really …

Then the light grew dimmer yet as her attacker, the yellow-face insect, climbed into the hole, pulled the access door shut behind him, and came down the short ladder to where she lay. A moment later a piercing light filled the tunnel; he’d pulled a miner’s lamp onto his forehead, clicked it on. The white beam blinded and she screamed, or didn’t scream, at the piercing brilliance.

Which suddenly faded to complete darkness.

She awoke a few seconds or minutes or a year later.

Chloe was someplace else now, not the utility room, but in a larger room, no, a tunnel. Hard to see, since the only illumination was a weak light above her and the focused beam from the masked insect man’s forehead. It blinded her every time he looked at her face. She was on her back again, staring upward, and he was kneeling over her.

But what she’d been expecting, dreading, wasn’t happening. In a way, though, this was worse because that — ripping her clothes off and then what would follow — would at least have been understandable. It would have fallen into a known category of horror.

This was different.

Yes, her blouse was tugged up but only slightly, exposing her belly from navel to the bottom of her bra, which was still chastely in place. Her skirt was tucked tight around her thighs, almost as if he didn’t want there to be any suggestion of impropriety.

Leaning forward, hunched, intent, he was staring with those calm eyes of his, those insect eyes, at her smooth, white belly skin the way somebody would look over a canvas at MoMA: head tilted, getting the right angle to appreciate Jackson Pollock’s spatter, Magritte’s green apple.

He then slowly extended his index finger and stroked her flesh. His yellow finger. He splayed his palm and brushed back and forth. He pinched and raised peaks of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He let go and watched the mounds flatten back.

His insect mouth curved into a faint smile.

She thought he said, ‘Very nice.’ Or maybe that was the smoke-ring caterpillar talking or the bug on his arm.

She heard a faint hum of vibration and he looked at his watch. Another hum, from elsewhere. Then he glanced at her face and saw her eyes. He seemed surprised, maybe, that she was awake. Turning, he tugged into view a backpack and removed from it a filled hypodermic syringe. He stabbed her again, this time in a vein in her arm.

The warmth flowed, the fear lessened. As darkness trickled around her, sounds vanishing, she saw his yellow fingers, his caterpillar fingers, his insect claws, reach into the backpack once more and carefully remove a small box. He set it beside her exposed skin with the same reverence she remembered her priest displaying as he’d placed the silver vessel holding the blood of Christ on the altar last Sunday during Holy Communion.

CHAPTER 2

Billy Haven shut off his American Eagle tattoo machine to save the batteries.

He squatted back. He examined the work so far.

Eyes scanning.

Less-than-ideal conditions but the art was good.

You always put everything you could into your mods. From the simplest cross on a waitress’s shoulder to an American flag on a contractor’s chest, complete with multiple folds and three colors and blowin’ in the wind, you inked like Michelangelo laboring away on the church ceiling. God and Adam, finger skin to finger skin.

Now, here, Billy could’ve rushed. Considering the circumstances, nobody would have blamed him.

But no. The mod had to be a Billy Mod. What they called it back home, in his shop.

He felt a tickle, sweat.

Lifted the dentist’s face guard and with his gloved hand wiped sweat from his eyes, put the tissue into a pocket. Carefully, so no fibers would flake off. Telltale fibers that could be as dangerous to him as the inking was to Chloe.

The face shield was cumbersome. But necessary. His tattoo instructor had taught him this lesson. He’d had Billy slip one on before the boy had even picked up a machine for the first time. Billy, like most young apprentices, had protested: Got eye protection. Don’t need more. It wasn’t cool. Wearing a dorky mask was like giving newbies, in for their first inking, a pussy ball to squeeze.

Tat up. Get over it.

But then his instructor had Billy sit beside him while he inked a client. A little work: Ozzy Osbourne’s face. For some reason.

Man, the blood and fluid that spattered! The face guard was as flecked as a pickup’s windshield in August.

‘Be smart, Billy. Remember.’

‘Sure.’

Ever since, he’d assumed that each customer was ripe with hep C and B and HIV and whatever other sexual diseases were popular.

And for the mods he’d be inking over the next few days, of course, he couldn’t afford any blowback.

So, protection.

And he’d worn the latex mask and hood, too, to make sure he didn’t shed any of his abundant hair or slough off epidermal cells. To distort his features as well. There was the remote chance that, despite his careful selection of the secluded kill zones, he’d get spotted.

Billy Haven now examined his victim again.

Chloe.

He’d noted the name on the tag on her chest and the pretentious Je m’appelle preceding it. Whatever that meant. Maybe Hello. Maybe Good morning. French. He lowered his gloved hand — double-gloved — and stroked her skin, pinching, stretching, noting the elasticity, the texture, the fine resilience.

Billy noted too the faint rise between her legs, beneath the forest-green skirt. The lower line of the bra. But there was no question of misbehaving. He never touched a client anywhere he shouldn’t touch.

That was flesh. This was skin. Two different things entirely, and it was skin that Billy Haven loved.

He wiped more sweat with a new tissue, carefully tucked it away again. He was hot, his own skin prickling. Though the month was November the tunnel was stifling. Long — about a hundred yards — yet sealed at both ends, which meant no ventilation. It was like many of the passages here in SoHo, south of Greenwich Village. Built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these tunnels honeycombed the neighborhood and had been used for transporting goods underground to and from factories and warehouses and transfer stations.

Abandoned now, they were perfect for Billy’s purposes.

The watch on his right wrist hummed again. A similar sound from a backup watch in his pocket came a few seconds later. Reminding him of the time; Billy often got lost in his work.

Just let me get God’s knuckle perfect, just a minute more …

A clattering came from a bud microphone in his left ear. He listened for a moment then ignored the noise and took up the American Eagle machine once more. It was an old-style model, with a rotary head, which moved the needle like a sewing machine’s, rather than modern devices that used a vibrating coil.

He clicked it on.

Bzzzz …

Face shield down.

A millimeter at a time, he inked with a lining needle, following the bloodline he’d done quickly. Billy was a natural-born artist, brilliant at pencil and ink drawing, brilliant at pastels. Brilliant at needles. He drew freehand on paper, he drew freehand on skin. Most mod artists, however talented, used stencils, prepared ahead of time or — for the untalented — purchased and then placed on the skin for the inker to trace. Billy rarely did this. He didn’t need to. From God’s mind to your hand, his uncle had said.

Now time to fill. He swapped needles. Very, very carefully.

For Chloe’s tat, Billy was using the famous Blackletter font, known more commonly as Gothic or Old English. It was characterized by very thick and very thin strokes. The particular family he used was Fraktur. He’d selected this font because it was the typeface of the Gutenberg Bible — and because it was challenging. He was an artist and what artist didn’t like to show off his skills?

Ten minutes later he was nearly done.

And how was his client doing? He scanned her body then lifted her lids. Eyes still unfocused. Her face gave a few twitches, though. The propofol wouldn’t last much longer. But of course by now one drug was replacing the other.

Suddenly pain coursed through his chest. This alarmed him. He was young and in very good shape; he dismissed the thought of a heart attack. But the big question remained: Had he inhaled something he shouldn’t have?

That was a very real, and lethal, possibility.

Then he probed his own body and realized the pain was on the surface. And he understood. When he’d first grabbed her, Chloe had fought back. He’d been so charged he hadn’t noticed how hard she’d struck him. But now the adrenaline had worn off and the pain was throbbing. He looked down. Hadn’t caused any serious damage, except for tearing his shirt and the coveralls.

He ignored the ache and kept going.

Then Billy noted Chloe’s breathing becoming deeper. The anesthetic would soon wear off. He touched her chest — Lovely Girl wouldn’t have minded — and beneath his hand he could feel her heartbeat thudding more insistently.

It was then that a thought occurred to him: What would it be like to tattoo a living, beating heart? Could it be done? Billy had broken into a medical supply company a month ago in anticipation of his plans here in New York. He’d made off with thousands of dollars in equipment, drugs, chemicals and other materials. He wondered if he could learn enough to put someone under, crack open the chest, ink a design or words onto the heart itself and sew the victim back up. Living out his or her life with the altered organ.

What would the work be?

A cross.

The words: The Rule of Skin

Maybe:

Billy + Lovely Girl 4 Ever

Interesting idea. But thinking about Lovely Girl made him sad and he returned to Chloe, finishing the last of the letters.

Good.

A Billy Mod.

But not quite finished yet. He extracted a scalpel from a dark-green toothbrush container and reached forward, stretching out the marvelous skin once more.

CHAPTER 3

One can view death in two ways.

In the discipline of forensic science an investigator looks at death abstractly, considers it to be merely an event that gives rise to a series of tasks. Good forensic cops view that event as if through the lens of history; the best see death as fiction, and the victim as someone who never existed at all.

Detachment is a necessary tool for crime scene work, just like latex gloves and alternative light sources.

As he sat in the red-and-gray Merits wheelchair in front of the window of his Central Park West town house, Lincoln Rhyme happened to be thinking of a recent death in just this way. Last week a man had been murdered downtown, a mugging gone wrong. Just after leaving his office in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, mid-evening, he’d been pulled into a deserted construction site across the street. Rather than give up his wallet, he’d chosen to fight and, no match for the perp, he’d been stabbed to death.

The case, whose file sat in front of him now, was mundane, and the sparse evidence typical of such a murder: a cheap weapon, a serrated-edge kitchen knife, dotted with fingerprints not on file at IAFIS or anywhere else, indistinct footprints in the slush that had coated the ground that night, and no trace or trash or cigar-ette butts that weren’t day- or week-old trace or trash or cigarette butts. And therefore useless. To all appearances it was a random crime; there were no springboards to likely perps. The officers had interviewed the victim’s fellow employees in the public works department and talked to friends and family. There’d been no drug connections, no dicey business deals, no jealous lovers, no jealous spouses of lovers.

Given the paltry evidence, the case, Rhyme knew, would be solved only one way: Someone would carelessly boast about scoring a wallet near City Hall. And the boastee, collared for drugs or domestic abuse or petty larce, would cut a deal by giving up the boaster.

This crime, a mugging gone wrong, was death observed from a distance, to Lincoln Rhyme. Historical. Fictional.

View number one.

The second way to regard death is from the heart: when a human being with whom you have a true connection is no longer of this earth. And the other death on Rhyme’s mind on this blustery, grim day was affecting him as deeply as the mugging victim’s killing was not.

Rhyme wasn’t close to many people. This was not a function of his physical condition — he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down. No, he’d never been a people person. He was a science person. A mind person.

Oh, there’d been a few friends he’d been close to, some relatives, lovers. His wife, now ex.

Thom, his aide.

Amelia Sachs, of course.

But the second man who’d died several days ago had, in one sense, been closer than all of the others, and for this reason: He’d challenged Rhyme like no one else, forced him to think beyond the expansive boundaries where his own mind roamed, forced him to anticipate and strategize and question. Forced him to fight for his life too; the man had come very close to killing him.

The Watchmaker was the most intriguing criminal Rhyme had ever encountered. A man of shifting identities, Richard Logan was primarily a professional killer, though he’d orchestrated an alpha-omega of crimes, from terrorist attacks to robbery. He would work for whoever paid his hefty fee — provided the job was, yes, challenging enough. Which was the same criterion Rhyme used when deciding to take on a case as a consulting forensic scientist.

The Watchmaker was one of the few criminals able to outthink him. Although Rhyme had eventually set the trap that landed Logan in prison he still stung from his failure to stop several plots that were successful. And even when he failed, the Watchmaker sometimes managed to wreak havoc. In a case in which Rhyme had derailed the attempted killing of a Mexican officer investigating drug cartels, Logan had still provoked an international incident (it was finally agreed to seal the records and pretend the attempted hit had never happened).

But now the Watchmaker was gone.

The man had died in prison — not murdered by a fellow inmate or a suicide, which Rhyme had first suspected upon hearing the news. No, the COD was pedestrian — cardiac arrest, though massive. The doctor, whom Rhyme had spoken to yesterday, reported that even if they’d been able to bring Logan around he would have had permanent and severe brain damage. Though medicos did not use phrases like ‘his death was a blessing,’ that was the impression Rhyme took from the doctor’s tone.

A blast of temperamental November wind shook the windows of Rhyme’s town house. He was in the building’s front parlor — the place in which he felt more comfortable than anywhere else in the world. Created as a Victorian sitting room, it was now a fully decked-out forensic lab, with spotless tables for examining evidence, computers and high-def monitors, racks of instruments, sophisticated equipment like fume and particulate control hoods, latent fingerprint imaging chambers, microscopes — optical and scanning electron — and the centerpiece: a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, the workhorse of forensic labs.

Any small- or even medium-sized police department in the country might envy the setup, which had cost millions. All paid for by Rhyme himself. The settlement after the accident on a crime scene rendering him a quad had been quite substantial; so were the fees that he charged the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies that hired him. (There were occasional offers from other sources that might produce revenue, such as Hollywood’s proposals for TV shows based on the cases he’d worked. The Man in the Chair was one suggested title. Rhyme and Reason another. Thom had translated his boss’s response to these overtures — ‘Are they out of their fucking minds?’ — as, ‘Mr Rhyme has asked me to convey his appreciation for your interest. But he’s afraid he has too many commitments at this point for a project like that.’)

Rhyme now turned his chair around and stared at a delicate and beautiful pocket watch sitting in a holder on the mantelpiece. A Breguet. It happened to be a present from the Watchmaker himself.

His mourning was complex and reflected the dual views of death he’d been thinking of. Certainly there were analytical — forensic — reasons to be troubled by the loss. He’d now never be able to probe the man’s mind to his satisfaction. As the nickname suggested, Logan was obsessed with time and timepieces — he actually made watches and clocks — and that was how he plotted out his crimes, with painstaking precision. Ever since their paths first crossed, Rhyme had marveled at how Logan’s thought processes worked. He even hoped that the man would allow him a prison visit so that they could talk about the chess-match-like crimes he’d planned out.

Logan’s death also left some other, practical concerns. The prosecutor had offered Logan a plea bargain, a reduced sentence in exchange for giving up the names of some of the people who’d hired him and whom he’d worked with; the man clearly had an extensive network of criminal colleagues whose identities the police would like to learn. There were rumors too of plots Logan had put together before he’d gone to prison.

But Logan hadn’t bought the DA’s deal. And, more irritating, he’d pleaded guilty, denying Rhyme another chance to learn more about who he was and to identify his family members and associates. Rhyme had even planned to use facial recognition technology and undercover agents to identify those attending the man’s trial.

Ultimately, though, Rhyme understood he was taking the man’s demise hard because of the second view of death: that connection between them. We’re defined and enlivened by what opposes us. And when the Watchmaker died, Lincoln Rhyme died a bit too.

He looked at the other two people in the room. One was the youngster on Rhyme’s team, NYPD patrol officer Ron Pulaski, who was packing up the evidence in the City Hall mugging/homicide case.

The other was Rhyme’s caregiver, Thom Reston, a handsome, slim man, dressed as immaculately as always. Today: dark-brown slacks with an enviable knife-blade crease, a pale-yellow shirt and a zoological tie in greens and browns; the cloth seemed to sport a simian face or two. Hard to tell. Rhyme himself paid little attention to clothing. His black sweats and green long-sleeved sweater were functional and good insulators. That was all he cared about.

‘I want to send flowers,’ Rhyme now announced.

‘Flowers?’ Thom asked.

‘Yes. Flowers. Send them. People still do that, I assume. Wreaths saying RIP, Rest in Peace, though what’s the point of that? What else’re the dead going to be doing? It’s a better message than Good Luck, don’t you think?’

‘Send flowers to … Wait. Are you talking about Richard Logan?’

‘Of course. Who else has died lately who’s flower-worthy?’

Pulaski said, ‘Hm, Lincoln. “Flower-worthy.” That is not an expression I would ever imagine you saying.’

‘Flowers,’ Rhyme repeated petulantly. ‘Why is this not registering?’

‘And why’re you in a bad mood?’ Thom asked.

‘Old married couple’ was a phrase that could be used to describe caregiver and charge.

‘I’m hardly in a bad mood. I simply want to send flowers to a funeral home. But nobody’s doing it. We can get the name from the hospital that did the autopsy. They’ll have to send the corpse to a funeral home. Hospitals don’t embalm or cremate.’

Pulaski said, ‘You know, Lincoln. One way to think about it is: There’s some justice. You could say the Watchmaker got the death penalty, after all.’

Blond and determined and eager, Pulaski had the makings of a fine crime scene officer and Rhyme had taken on the job of mentor. Which included not only instruction in forensic science but also getting the kid to use his mind. This he didn’t seem to be doing presently. ‘And just how does a random arterial occlusion, rookie, equal justice? If the prosecutor in New York State chose not to seek the death penalty, then you might say that a premature death undermines justice. Not furthers it.’

‘I—’ the young man stammered, blushing Valentine red.

‘Now, rookie, let’s move on from spurious observations. Flowers. Find out when the body’s being released from Westchester Memorial and where it’s going. I want the flowers there ASAP, whether there’s a service or not. With a card from me.’

‘Saying what?’

‘Nothing other than my name.’

‘Flowers?’ Amelia Sachs’s voice echoed from the hallway leading to the kitchen and the back door of the town house. She walked into the parlor, nodding greetings.

‘Lincoln’s going to send flowers to the funeral home. For Richard Logan. I mean, I am.’

She hung her dark jacket on a hook in the hall. She was in close-fitting black jeans, a yellow sweater and a black wool sport coat. The only indication of her rank as a police detective was a Glock riding high on her hip, though the leap from weapon to law enforcer was a tentative deduction at best. To look at the tall, slim redhead — with abundant straight hair — you might guess she was a fashion model. Which she had been, before joining the NYPD.

Sachs walked closer and kissed Rhyme on the lips. She tasted of lipstick and smelled of gunshot residue; she’d been to the range that morning.

Thinking of cosmetics, Rhyme recalled that the victim of the City Hall mugging/murder had shaved just before leaving the office; nearly invisible bits of shave cream and tiny rods of beard had been found adhering to his neck and cheek. He’d also recently sprayed or rubbed on aftershave. In their analysis, while Rhyme had been noting those facts, potentially helpful for the investigation, Sachs had grown still. She’d said, ‘So he was going out that night, a date probably — you wouldn’t shave for guy friends. You know, Rhyme, if he hadn’t spent that last five minutes in the restroom, the timing would’ve changed. And everything would’ve turned out different. He’d’ve survived the night. And maybe gone on to live a long, full life.’

Or he might’ve gotten into his car drunk and rammed a bus filled with schoolchildren.

Waste of time, playing the fate game.

View of Death Number One, View of Death Number Two.

‘You know the funeral home?’ Sachs asked.

‘Not yet.’

Not knowing he was about to be arrested, and believing he was minutes away from murdering Rhyme, Logan had made a promise that he would spare Sachs’s life. Perhaps this clemency was another of the reasons for Rhyme’s mourning the man’s death.

Thom nodded to Sachs. ‘Coffee? Anything else?’

‘Just coffee, thanks.’

‘Lincoln?’

The criminalist shook his head.

When the aide returned with the cup, he handed it off to Sachs, who thanked him. While the nerves throughout most of his body were insensate, Rhyme’s gustatory cells, aka taste buds, worked just fine and he appreciated that Thom Reston made a very good cup of coffee. No capsules or pre-ground, and the word ‘instant’ was not in his vocabulary.

With a wry smile the aide said to her, ‘So. What do you think of Lincoln’s emotional side?’

She warmed her hands around the coffee. ‘No, Thom, I think there’s method to his sentiment.’

Ah, that’s my Sachs. Always thinking. This was one of the reasons he loved her. Their eyes met. Rhyme knew that his smile, minuscule though it was, probably matched hers muscle for muscle.

Sachs continued, ‘The Watchmaker was always an enigma. We didn’t know much about him — he had California connections was about all. Some distant family we could never track down, no associates. This might be the chance to find people who knew and worked with him — legitimately or in his criminal projects. Right, Rhyme?’

One hundred percent, he reflected.

Rhyme said to Pulaski, ‘And when you find out the funeral home, I want you there.’

‘Me?’

‘Your first undercover assignment.’

‘Not first,’ he corrected.

‘First at a funeral.’

‘That’s true. Who should I be?’

Rhyme said the first thing that came to his mind. ‘Harold Pigeon.’

‘Harry Pigeon?’

‘I was thinking of birds.’ A nod toward the nest of peregrine falcons on Rhyme’s window ledge, huddled down against the storm. They tended to nest lower in bad weather.

‘Harry Pigeon.’ The patrolman was shaking his head. ‘No way.’

Sachs laughed. Rhyme grimaced. ‘I don’t care. Make up your own damn name.’

‘Stan Walesa. My mother’s father.’

‘Perfect.’ An impatient look at a box in the corner of the room. ‘There. Get one of those.’

‘What’s that?’

Sachs explained, ‘Prepaid mobiles. We keep a half dozen of them here for ops like this.’

The young officer collected one. ‘A Nokia. Hm. Flip phone. State of the art.’ He said this with consummate sarcasm.

Before he dialed, Sachs said, ‘Just be sure to memorize the number first, so if somebody asks for it you don’t fumble.’

‘Sure. Good.’ Pulaski used the prepaid to call his personal phone and noted the number then stepped away to make the call.

Sachs and Rhyme turned to the crime scene report on the City Hall mugging case and made some edits.

A moment later Pulaski returned. ‘The hospital said they’re waiting to hear about where to send the body. The morgue director said he’s expecting a call in the next few hours.’

Rhyme looked him over. ‘You up for this?’

‘I suppose. Sure.’

‘If there’s a service, you’ll go. If not, you’ll get to the funeral home at the same time as whoever’s picking up the remains. The flowers from me’ll be there. Now, that’ll be a conversation starter — the man Richard Logan tried to kill and who put him in jail sends flowers to his funeral.’

‘Who’s Walesa supposed to be?’

‘An associate of Logan’s. Exactly who, I’m not sure. I’ll have to think it through. But it should be somebody inscrutable, dangerous.’ He scowled. ‘I wish you didn’t look like an altar boy. Were you one?’

‘My brother and I both.’

‘Well, practice looking scruffy.’

‘Don’t forget dangerous,’ Sachs said, ‘though that’s going to be tougher than inscrutable.’

Thom brought Rhyme some coffee in a straw-fitted cup. Apparently the aide had noticed him glancing at Sachs’s. Rhyme thanked him with a nod.

Old married couple …

Thom said, ‘I feel better now, Lincoln. For a minute I really did think I was seeing a soft side. It was disorienting. But knowing that you’re just setting up a sting to spy on the family of a corpse? It’s restored my faith in you.’

Rhyme grumbled, ‘It’s simply logical. You know, I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.’

Though ironically Rhyme did want to send the flowers in part for a sentimental reason: to pay his respects to a worthy adversary. He suspected the Watchmaker would have done the same for him.

Views of Death Number One and Number Two were not, of course, mutually exclusive.

Rhyme then cocked his head.

‘What?’ Sachs asked.

‘What’s the temperature?’

‘Right around freezing.’

‘So there’s ice on the steps outside?’ Rhyme’s town house sported both stairs and a disabled-accessible ramp.

‘There was in the back,’ she said. ‘Front too, I assume.’

‘We’re about to have a visitor, I think.’

Though the evidence was largely anecdotal, Rhyme had come to believe that, after the accident that deprived him of so many sensations, those that survived grew more discerning. Hearing in particular. He’d detected someone crunching up the front steps.

A moment later the buzzer sounded and Thom went to answer it.

The sound and pacing of the footsteps as the visitor entered the hallway and made for the parlor revealed who’d come a-callin’.

‘Lon.’

Detective First-Grade Lon Sellitto turned the corner and strode through the archway, pulling off his Burberry overcoat. It was tan and vivid with the creases that characterized most of Sellitto’s garb, thanks to his portly physique and careless posture. Rhyme wondered why he didn’t stick with dark clothing, which wouldn’t show the rumpling so much. Though once the overcoat was off and tossed over a rattan chair, Rhyme noted that the navy-blue suit displayed its own troubled texture.

‘Bad out there,’ Sellitto muttered. He dusted his thinning gray-black hair, and a few dots of sleet bailed. His eyes followed them down. He’d tracked in muck and ice. ‘Sorry about that.’

Thom said not to worry and brought him a cup of coffee.

‘Bad,’ the detective repeated, toasting his hands on the mug the way Sachs had. Eyes toward the window, on the other side of which, beyond the falcons, you could see sleet and mist and black branches. And little else of Central Park.

Rhyme didn’t get out much and in any event weather meant nothing to him, unless it was a factor in a crime scene.

Or it helped his early warning system detect visitors.

‘It’s pretty much finished,’ Rhyme said, nodding at the City Hall mugging/murder crime scene report.

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s not why I’m here.’ Spoken nearly as one word.

Rhyme’s attention hovered. Sellitto was a senior officer in Major Cases and if he wasn’t here to pick up the report, then maybe something else, something more interesting, was on the horizon. More propitious was that Sellitto had seen a tray of pastry, homemade by Thom, and had turned away as if the crullers were invisible. His mission here had to be urgent.

And, therefore, engaging.

‘We got a call, a homicide down in SoHo, Linc. Earlier today. We drew straws and you got picked. Hope you’re free.’

‘How can I get picked if I never drew a straw?’

A sip of coffee. Ignoring Rhyme. ‘It’s a tough one.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Woman was abducted from the basement of the store where she worked. Some boutique. Killer dragged her through an access door and into a tunnel under the building.’

Rhyme knew that beneath SoHo was a warren of tunnels, dug years ago for transporting goods from one industrial building to another. He’d always believed it was just a matter of time before somebody used the place as a killing zone.

‘Sexual assault?’

‘No, Amelia,’ Sellitto said. ‘The perp’s a tattoo artist, seems. And from what the respondings said a pretty fucking good one. He gave her a tat. Only he didn’t use ink. He used poison.’

Rhyme had been a forensic scientist for many years; his mind often made accurate deductions from scant preliminary details. But inferences work only when the facts presented echo those from the past. This information was unique in Rhyme’s memory and didn’t become a springboard for any theories whatsoever.

‘What was the toxin he used?’

‘They don’t know. This just happened, I was saying. We’re holding the scene.’

‘More, Lon. The design? That he tattooed on her?’

‘It was some words, they said.’

The intrigue factor swelled. ‘Do you know what they were?’

‘The respondings didn’t say. But they told me it looked like only part of a sentence. And you can guess what that means.’

‘He’s going to need more victims,’ Rhyme said, glancing Sachs’s way. ‘So he can send the rest of his message.’

CHAPTER 4

Sellitto was explaining:

‘Her name was Chloe Moore, twenty-six. Part-time actress — had a few roles in commercials and some walk-ons in thrillers. Working in the boutique to pay the bills.’

Sachs asked the standard questions: Boyfriend trouble, husband trouble, triangle troubles?

‘Naw, none of the above that we could tell. I just started uniforms canvassing around the area but the prelim from the clerks in the store and her roommate is that she hung with a good crowd. Was pretty conservative. No boyfriend presently and no bad breakups.’

Rhyme was curious. ‘Any tattoos, other than the one he killed her with?’

‘I dunno. First responders scooted as soon as the ME’s team declared DCDS.’

Deceased, declared dead at scene. The official pronouncement by the city’s medical examiner that got the crime scene clock running and started all kinds of procedures. Once DCDS was called, there was no reason for anybody to remain on the scene; Rhyme insisted that responders get the hell out to avoid contamination. ‘Good,’ he told Sellitto. He realized he was fully in View of Death Number One mode.

‘All right, Sachs. Where are we with the city worker?’ A glance at the City Hall report.

‘I’d say it’s done. Still awaiting customer records about people who bought that brand of knife. But I’m betting the perp didn’t use his credit card or fill out a questionnaire about customer service. Not much else to do.’

‘Agreed. Okay, Lon, we’ll take it. Though I can’t help but note you didn’t really ask. You just drew a straw on my behalf and stomped slush in here, assuming I’d get on board.’

‘What the fuck else’d you be doing, Linc? Cross-country skiing through Central Park?’

Rhyme liked it when people didn’t shrink from his condition, when they weren’t afraid to make jokes like Sellitto’s. He grew furious when people treated him like a broken doll.

There, there, poor you …

Sellitto said, ‘I’ve called Crime Scene in Queens. There’s an RRV en route. They’ll let you take the lead, Amelia.’

‘On my way.’ She pulled on a wool scarf and gloves. She picked another leather jacket from the hook, longer, mid-thigh. In all their years together Rhyme had never seen her wear a full overcoat. Leather jackets or sport, that was about it. Rarely a windbreaker, either, unless she was undercover or on a tac op.

The wind again blasted the ancient windows, rattling the frames, and Rhyme nearly told Sachs to drive carefully — she piloted a classic rear-wheel-drive muscle car that behaved badly on ice — but telling Sachs to be cautious was like telling Rhyme to be patient; it just wasn’t going to happen.

‘You want help?’ Pulaski asked.

Rhyme debated. He asked Sachs, ‘You need him?’

‘Don’t know. Probably not. Single victim, confined area.’

‘For the time being, rookie, you’ll be our undercover mourner. Stay here. We’ll think about your cover story.’

‘Sure, Lincoln.’

‘I’ll call in from the scene,’ Sachs said, grabbing the black canvas bag that contained the com unit she used to talk with Rhyme from the field, and hurried out the door. There was a brief howl of wind, then silence after the creak and slam.

Rhyme noticed that Sellitto was rubbing his eyes. His face was gray and he radiated exhaustion.

The detective saw that Rhyme was looking his way. He said, ‘That fucking Met case. Not getting any sleep. Who breaks into someplace where you got a billion dollars’ worth of art, pokes around and walks out empty-handed? Doesn’t make sense.’

Last week at least three very clever perps had broken into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue after hours. Video cameras were disabled and alarms suspended — no easy matter — but an exhaustive crime scene search had revealed that the perps had spent time in two areas: the antique arms hall of the museum, which was open to the public — a schoolboy’s delight, filled with swords, battle-axes, armor and hundreds of other clever devices meant to excise body parts; and the museum’s basement archives, storage and restoration areas. They’d left after several hours and remotely reactivated the alarms. The intrusion had been pieced together by computer analysis of the security shutdowns and physical examinations of the rooms after discovering the alarm breaches.

It was almost as if the burglars were like many tourists who visit the museum: They’d seen enough, grown bored and headed for a nearby restaurant or bar.

A complete inventory revealed that while some items in both areas had been moved, the intruders hadn’t perped a single painting, collectible or packet of Post-it notes. Crime Scene investigators — Rhyme and Sachs hadn’t worked that one — had been overwhelmed by the amount of space to search; the arms and armor displays were bad enough but the network of archives and storage rooms extended underground, far east, well past Fifth Avenue.

The case had been demanding time-wise but Sellitto had admitted that wasn’t the worst of it. ‘Politics. Fucking politics.’ He’d gone on to explain, ‘Hizzoner thinks it looks bad his prize jewel got busted into. Which translates: My crew’s working overtime and hell with everything else. We’ve got terror threats in the city, Linc. Code red or orange or whatever color means we’re fucked. We got Tony Soprano wannabes. And what’m I doing? I’m looking through every dusty room, at every weird canvas and every naked statue in the basement. I mean, every. You wanna know my feeling about art, Linc?’

‘What, Lon?’ Rhyme had asked.

‘Fuck art. That’s my feeling.’

But now the new case — the poison tat artist — had derailed the old, to the detective’s apparent relief. ‘You got a killer like this, the papers ain’t gonna be happy we’re spending our time worried about paintings of water lilies and statues of Greek gods with little dicks. You see those statues, Linc? Some of those guys … Really, you’d think the model’d tell the sculptor to add an inch or two.’

He sat heavily in a chair, sipped more coffee. Still no interest in the pastry.

Rhyme then frowned. ‘One thing, Lon?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When did this tattoo killing happen exactly?’

‘TOD was about an hour ago. Ninety minutes maybe.’

Rhyme was confused. ‘You couldn’t get the tox screen back in that time.’

‘Naw, the ME said a couple hours.’

‘Then how’d they’d know she was poisoned?’

‘Oh, one of the medics ran a tox case a couple years ago. He said you could tell from the rictus on the face and the posture. The pain, you know. It’s one hell of a way to die. We gotta get this son of a bitch, Linc.’

CHAPTER 5

Great. Just great.

Standing in the basement of the SoHo boutique where Chloe Moore had been abducted, Amelia Sachs grimaced, leaning down and peering into the utility room. She was staring at the narrow tunnel that led from that room to the crime scene itself, apparently a larger tunnel, where Chloe had been killed.

The body was just visible and brightly lit by lamps the first responders had set up.

Palms sweating, Sachs continued to peer through the tiny shaft she’d have to crawl through.

Just great.

She stepped back into the cellar and inhaled two or three times, sucking moldy, fuel-oil-scented air deep into her lungs. Years ago, Lincoln Rhyme had created a database of layouts of underground areas in New York, assembled from the Department of Buildings and other city government agencies. She’d downloaded one through a secure app on her iPhone and — with dismay — reviewed the layout before her.

Where did phobias come from? Sachs wondered. Some childhood trauma, some genetic imprinting that discourages us from petting poisonous snakes or cavorting on mountain ledges?

Serpents and heights weren’t her problem; claustrophobia was. If she believed in former lives, which she didn’t, Sachs could imagine that she, in an earlier incarnation, had been buried alive. Or, if you followed the logic of karma, more likely she’d been a vindictive queen who’d slowly interred her rivals as they begged for mercy.

Sachs, close to six feet tall, looked at the chart of her nemesis: the twenty-eight- or thirty-inch-diameter tunnel from the utility room to the bigger transport tunnel, the site of the killing. The narrow passage was, according to the chart, twenty-three feet long.

It’s a round coffin, she thought.

The site of the killing was also accessible through a manhole thirty feet or so from where the body lay. That was probably his entrance to the kill site but Sachs knew she would have to wriggle through the smaller tunnel, collecting trace as she went, since that’s where he’d crawled to get to the basement of the boutique — and through which he’d dragged Chloe before murdering her.

‘Sachs?’ Rhyme’s voice crackled through the headset. She jumped and cranked down the volume. ‘Where are you? I can’t see anything.’ The com device Sachs wore featured not only a microphone and earpiece but also a high-def video camera. She’d just donned the unit and hadn’t activated the visual yet.

She touched a button on the surprisingly small camera — about the size of a double-A battery — and heard, ‘Okay.’ Then a grumbled ‘It’s still pretty dark.’

‘Because it is dark. I’m in a basement — and about to climb into a tunnel the size of a breadbasket.’

‘I’ve never actually seen a breadbasket,’ he replied. ‘I’m not sure they exist.’ Rhyme was always in good humor when approaching a new crime scene. ‘Well, let’s get going. Scan around. Let’s see what we’ve got.’

She often wore this equipment when she searched a scene. Rhyme would offer suggestions — many fewer now than when they began working together and she was a novice. He also liked to keep an eye out for her safety, though he never admitted that. Rhyme insisted that officers search a scene solo — too much distraction otherwise. The best forensic experts bonded with the scene psychologically. They became the victim, became the perp — and accordingly located evidence they might have missed. That connection didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen as easily, when somebody else searched with you. But being alone was a risk. It was surprising how many times a scene turned hot: The perp returned, or remained, and attacked the officer walking the grid. It even happened that, though the perp was long gone, another, unrelated attack might occur. Sachs had once been assaulted by a homeless man, a schizophrenic who thought she’d come to steal his imaginary dog.

She looked into the utility room once more, to give Rhyme a view, and then gazed through the tunnel of hell briefly.

‘Ah,’ he said, now understanding her concern. ‘Breadbasket.’

Sachs made the final adjustments to her outfit. She was dressed in a white Tyvek jumpsuit, hood and booties. Because poison had been the apparent weapon, she wore an N95 respirator. The toxin had been injected, the first responders reported, via the tattoo gun, and there seemed to be no airborne chemicals to worry about that they’d noted. Still, why take the chance?

Footsteps behind her, someone approaching through the moldy, damp basement of Chez Nord.

She glanced back at an attractive crime scene officer who’d be helping process the boutique. Sachs had known Jean Eagleston for years; she was one of the stars of the CS oper-ation. Eagleston had been interviewing the store manager, who’d found the body. Sachs had wanted to know if the manager had entered the scene itself — where Chloe’s body lay — to check on her employee.

But Eagleston said, ‘No. She noticed the door was open and looked into the utility room, saw the vic lying there. That was enough for her. She didn’t go any farther.’

Can’t blame the manager, Sachs reflected. Even if one wasn’t claustrophobic, who’d go into a deserted tunnel with an apparent murder victim lying on the ground and, possibly, the killer still there?

‘How could she see the victim?’ Rhyme asked. He’d overheard the conversation. ‘I thought I could see spotlights there now, from the medics. But wasn’t it dark then?’

Sachs relayed the question. But the crime scene officer didn’t know. ‘All the manager said was that she could see inside.’

Rhyme said, ‘Well, we’ll find out.’

Eagleston added, ‘The only other people at the kill site were one responding uniform and one medic. But they backed out as soon as they confirmed death. To wait for us. I’ve got samples of their shoes, so we can eliminate any footprints. They tell me they didn’t touch anything other than the vic, to check on her condition. And the EMT was gloved.’

So contamination of the scene — the introduction of evidence unrelated to the crime itself or the perp — would be minimal. That was one advantage of a murder in a hellhole like this. A crime on the street could have dozens of contaminants, from blowing dust, pouring rain and fierce sleet (like today) to passersby and even souvenir seekers. One of the worst contaminants was fellow officers, especially brass grandstanding if reporters were present and eager to grab a video bite to slap on the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

One more glance at the circular coffin.

Okay, Amelia Sachs thought: Knuckle time …

A phrase of her father’s. The man had also been a cop, a beat patrolman working the Deuce — Midtown South; back then Times Square was like Deadwood in the 1800s. Knuckle time meant referring to those moments when you have to go up against your worst fears.

Breadbasket …

Sachs returned to the access door and climbed through it and down into the utility room below the cellar. Then she took the evidence collection gear bag from the other officer. Sachs said, ‘You search the basement, Jean?’

‘I’ll do it now,’ Eagleston said. ‘And then get everything into the RRV.’

They’d done a fast examination of the cellar. But it was apparent that the perp had spent minimal time there. He’d grabbed Chloe, subdued her somehow and dragged her to the access door; her heel marks were visible.

Sachs set the heavy bag on the floor and opened it. She photographed and gathered evidence from the utility room, although, as with the basement, the perp and the victim would have spent little time here; he’d’ve wanted to get her out of sight as soon as possible. She bagged and tagged the trace and set the plastic and paper containers on the floor in the cellar for the other crime scene officers to cart to the RRV.

Then Sachs turned to the tiny shaft’s opening, eyeing it the way one would glance at the muzzle of a pistol in the hand of a desperate perp.

Breadbasket …

She didn’t move. Heard her heart thudding.

‘Sachs.’ Rhyme’s voice sounded in her ear.

She didn’t respond.

He said softly, ‘I understand. But.’

Meaning: Get your ass going.

Fair enough.

‘Got it, Rhyme. No worries.’

Knuckle time …

It’s not that long, she reassured herself. Twenty three feet. That’s nothing. Though, for some inexplicable reason, Sachs found herself passionately resenting that extra yard past twenty. As she approached, her palms began to sweat fiercely; her scalp too, which itched more than normally. She wanted to scratch, dig her nails into her skin, her cuticles. A nervous habit. The urge rose when she was unable to move — in all senses, physically, emotionally, mentally.

Static: How she hated that state.

Her breath came in short intervals and shallow gulps.

Orienting, she touched her Glock 17, which was strapped to her hip. A slight risk of contamination from the weapon, even if she didn’t blow anyone away, but there was that security issue again. And if any perp had a good scenario for hurting a crime scene officer, it would be here.

She hooked a nylon tie-down to her evidence collection gear bag and the other end to her weapon belt, to drag it behind her.

Moving forward. Pausing before the opening. Then on her hands and knees. And into the shaft. Sachs wanted to leave the headlamp off — seeing the tunnel would be more troubling than concentrating on the goal at the end of it — but she was afraid she’d miss some evidence.

Click.

Under the halogen beam, the metal coffin seemed to shrink and wrap its steel shell around her.

Get. Going.

She extracted a dog hair roller from her pocket and swept the floor of the tunnel as she went forward. She knew that because of the confining space and presumably the perp’s struggling with the victim, it was likely that he had shed evidence, so she concentrated on seams and rough spots that might dislodge trace.

She thought of a joke, a Steven Wright routine from years ago. ‘I went into the hospital for an MRI. I wanted to find out if I had claustrophobia.’

But the humor and the distraction of the task didn’t keep the panic away for long.

She was a third of the way through when fear stabbed her gut, a frozen blade.

Get out, get out, get out!

Teeth chattering despite the intense heat around her.

‘You’re doing fine, Sachs.’ Rhyme’s voice in her ear.

She appreciated his baritone reassurance, but didn’t want it. She dialed down the volume on the headset.

Another few feet. Breathe, breathe.

Concentrate on the job. Sachs tried. But her hands were unsteady and she dropped the roller, the clang of the handle on the metal skin of the tunnel nearly making her gag.

And then the madness of fear snagged her. Sachs got it into her head that the unknown subject — the unsub — was behind her. He had somehow perched on the ceiling of the utility room and dropped to the floor after her. Why didn’t I look up? You always look up at crime scenes! Fuck.

Then a tug.

She gasped.

It wasn’t the gear bag tethered to her. No, it was the perp’s hand! He was going to tie her down here. And then fill the tunnel with dirt, slowly, starting with her feet. Or flood it. She’d heard dripping water in the utility space; there’d been pipes. He’d undo the plug, open a valve. She’d drown, screaming, as the water rose and she couldn’t move forward or back.

No!

That this scenario was improbable at best didn’t matter. Fear made the unlikely, even the impossible, more than plausible. Fear itself was now another occupant of the tunnel, breathing, kissing, teasing, sliding its wormy arms around her body.

She raged at herself: Don’t be crazy. You’re in danger of getting fucking shot when you climb out the other end of the tunnel, not getting suffocated by some nonexistent perp with a nonexistent shovel. There is no way the tunnel’s going to collapse and hold you as tight as a mouse in a snake’s grip. That’s not. Going. To. Happen.

But then that image itself — snake and pinned mouse — screwed itself into her thoughts, and the panic notched up a level more.

Shit. I’m going to lose it. I’m going to fucking lose it.

The end of the tunnel was now about eight feet away, and she was possessed by an urge to sprint out. But she couldn’t. There wasn’t enough room for her to move any more quickly than at a crawl. Anyway, Sachs knew that trying to hurry would be a disaster. For one thing, she could miss clues. And going more quickly would ratchet up the dread, which would explode within her like a chain reaction.

Also: Moving faster out of the tunnel, even if she could, would be a defeat.

Her personal mantra — which she’d also learned from her father — was: When you move they can’t getcha.

But sometimes, like now, they’ll getcha when you do move.

So, stop, she commanded.

And she did. Came to a complete halt. And felt the perverse arms of the tunnel embrace her ever more tightly.

Panic, cresting like waves. Panic, stabbing like that frosty knife.

Don’t move. Be with it, she told herself. Face it. Confront it. She believed Rhyme was speaking to her, the whisper of his faraway voice perplexed or concerned or impatient. All of those, probably. Down went the headset volume to silence.

Breathe.

She did. In, out. Eyes open, looking at the disk of light ahead of her, relief a mile ahead. No, not that. Evidence. Look for evidence. That’s your job. Her gaze took in the metal shell, inches away.

And the sting of panic began to detach. Not vanish completely. But it grew loose.

Okay. She continued through the tunnel, rolling for trace, collecting scraps, intentionally moving more slowly than before.

And finally her head emerged. Shoulders.

Birthing, she laughed to herself, a pallid sound, and blinked sweat from her eyes.

Then she rolled quickly into the larger tunnel; it seemed like a concert hall by comparison. Rising to a crouch, drawing her Glock.

But no intruders were aiming weapons her way, not in the immediate area at least. The spotlights over the body were blinding and there might have been a threat in the blackness beyond but she immediately shone her Maglite in that direction. No threat.

Rising, Sachs tugged the gear bag out of the tunnel. She gazed around and saw that the diagram from Rhyme’s database was accurate. This tunnel resembled a mine shaft, about twenty feet square. It disappeared west into the darkness. She knew it had been used, a century ago, for transporting wheeled carts of goods to and from factories and warehouses. Now the damp, moldy passageway served only as New York City infrastructure. There were large iron pipes overhead and smaller aluminum and PVC ones, perhaps for electrical cables, running through old battered junction boxes. Newer conduits sprouted from bright-yellow boxes secured with thick padlocks. These were embossed with the letters IFON. She didn’t know what that meant. The iron pipes were stamped NYC DS and NYC DEP — Sanitation and Environmental Protection, the agencies that handled the city’s sewage and water supply, respectively.

She realized it was utterly quiet and turned up the volume of the radio.

‘—the hell is going on?’

‘Sorry, Rhyme,’ Sachs said. ‘Had to concentrate.’

He was silent for a moment. Then he seemed to get it — her wrestling with the breadbasket. ‘All right. Well. The scene secure, as far as you can tell?’

‘The immediate scene.’ The tunnel was bricked off to the east but she glanced again at the darkness to the west.

‘Turn one of the spotlights that way. It’ll blind anybody trying to target you. And you’ll be able to see him coming before he sees you.’

The first responders had brought two halogen lamps on tripods, connected to large batteries. She turned one in the direction Rhyme had suggested and squinted as she examined the receding tunnel.

No indication of threats.

Sachs hoped there’d be no firefight. The big pipe overhead, newly installed, it seemed — the one stamped DEP — appeared to be thick iron; her rounds in the Glock, hollow-points, wouldn’t break through the metal. But if the unsub returned with guns a-blazing he might be loaded with armor-piercing slugs, which could pierce the pipe. Because of the huge water pressure inside, she imagined, a rupture might create an explosion like a massive load of C-4.

And even if he had regular bullets, the ricochet off metal and the stone and brick walls could kill or wound as easily as a direct shot.

She peered up the tunnel again and saw no movement.

‘Clear, Rhyme.’

‘Good. So. Let’s get going.’ He’d turned impatient.

Sachs already was. Wanted to get out of here.

‘Start with the vic.’

She’s more than a victim, Rhyme, Sachs thought. She has a name. Chloe Moore. She was a twenty-six-year-old sale clerk in a boutique that sold clothing with loose strands escaping the stitching. She was working for near minimum wage because she was intoxicated on New York. On acting. On being twenty-six. And God bless her for it.

And she didn’t deserve to die. Much less like this.

Sachs slipped rubber bands on her booties, the balls of the feet, to differentiate her footfalls from those of the perp and the first responders — whose footgear she would photograph later as control samples.

She walked closer to the body. Chloe lay on her back, her blouse tugged up to below the breasts. Sachs noted that even in death her round, pretty face was distorted with an asymmetrical grimace, muscles taut. It was evidence of the obvious pain she’d experienced, pain tapering to death. She’d frothed at the mouth. And vomited copiously. The smell was vile. Sachs mentally moved past it.

Chloe’s hands, under her body, were secured in cheap handcuffs. With a universal key Sachs removed these. The victim’s ankles were duct-taped. With surgical scissors Sachs clipped the tape and bagged the gray, dusty strips. She scraped beneath the young woman’s deep-purple fingernails, noting fibers and bits of off-white flecks. Perhaps she’d fought him and if so bits of valuable trace, even skin, might be present; if her killer was in the CODIS DNA database, they might have his identity in hours.

Rhyme said, ‘I want to see the tattoo, Sachs.’

Sachs noted a small blue tattoo on Chloe’s neck, right and near the shoulder, but that had been done long ago. Besides, it was easy to see which one the killer had done. She knelt down and trained her eyes, and the camera, on Chloe’s abdomen.

‘There it is, Rhyme.’

The criminalist whispered, ‘His message. Well, part of his message. What do you think it means?’

But given the sparse letters, Sachs realized, his question had to be rhetorical.

CHAPTER 6

The two words were about six inches long and ran horizontally one inch above the woman’s navel.

Although he’d presumably used poison, not ink, the inflamed wound, swollen and scarring, was easy enough to read.

‘All right,’ Rhyme said, ‘“the second.” And the border, the scalloped lines. Wonder what those are about?’

Sachs commented, ‘They’re not as swollen as the letters. Maybe there was no poison in them. They look like wounds, not tattoos. And, Rhyme, look at the characters.’

‘How well done they are?’

‘Exactly. Calligraphy. He’s good. He knows what he’s doing.’

‘And another observation. It must’ve taken some time to do. He could’ve written them crudely. Or just injected her with the poison. Or shot her for that matter. What’s his game?’

Sachs had a thought. ‘And if it took awhile, that meant she was in pain for a long time.’

‘Well, yes, you can see the pain reaction but I have a feeling that was later. She couldn’t have been conscious while he was writing his message. Even if she wasn’t trying to get away, the involuntary movement would’ve ruined his handiwork. No, he subdued her somehow. Any trauma to the head?’

She examined the woman’s scalp carefully and looked under her blouse, front and back. ‘No. And I don’t see any signs of Taser barbs. No stun gun welts … Ah but, Rhyme, see that?’ She pointed out a tiny red dot on her neck.

‘Injection site?’

‘I think so. I’m guessing sedative, not poison. There’s no sign of any swelling or other irritation that toxin would cause.’

‘The blood work will tell us.’

Sachs took pictures of the wound and then bent down and swabbed the area carefully, lifting trace. Then the rest of her body too and the ground around her. It was likely that a perp this diligent would have worn gloves — it certainly appeared that way. Yet valuable evidence from even a gloved-and-gowned perp could still easily be transferred to the victim or crime scene.

Edmond Locard, the French criminalist who lived a century before, formulated the Exchange Principle: that every time a crime occurs there is a transfer of evidence between criminal and scene, or criminal and victim. That evidence (which he referred to as ‘dust’) might be very, very difficult to detect and collect but it exists, for the diligent and innovative forensic scientist.

‘There’s something odd, Rhyme.’

‘Odd?’ A splinter of disdain for the artless word. ‘Go ahead, Sachs.’

‘I’m using only one of the first responders’ spotlights — the other’s pointed up the tunnel. But there’re two shadows on the ground.’ She looked up and walked in a slow circle to get a clear view. ‘Ah, there’s another light near the ceiling, between those two pipes. It looks like a flashlight.’

‘Not left by the first responders?’

‘What cop or medic is going to give up his Maglite?’

The big black tubed flashlights that all cops and firemen carried around were invaluable — great sources of illumination and they doubled as bone-breaking weapons in a clutch.

But she noted it wasn’t one of those expensive models. This was cheap, plastic.

‘It’s taped to the pipe. Duct tape. Why would he leave a light here, Rhyme?’

‘That explains it.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘How the store manager found the body. The flashlight. Our perp wanted to make sure we found the message from our sponsor.’

The words seemed a little flippant to Sachs but she’d always suspected that much of Rhyme’s gruff façade and sardonic delivery were defense mechanisms. Still, she wondered if he raised the barricade of protection higher than he needed to.

She preferred to leave her heart unguarded.

‘I’ll collect it last,’ Sachs told him. ‘Every bit of light helps.’

She then walked the grid, which was Rhyme’s phrase for searching a crime scene. The grid pattern was the most comprehensive approach in looking for evidence and assessing what had occurred. This technique involved walking slowly across the scene, then pivoting and moving one step to the right or left and returning to the far side. You did this over and over until you’d covered the entire space. Then you turned 90 degrees and covered the same ground again, perpendicular. Like mowing a lawn twice.

And with each step you paused to look up and down and side-to-side.

You smelled the scene too, though in this case Sachs couldn’t detect more than Chloe’s vomit. No methane or feces, which surprised her, considering that one of the pipes here was connected to the city’s sewage system.

The search didn’t reveal much. Whatever implements the perp had brought with him he’d taken — aside from the flashlight, cuffs and strips of duct tape. She did make one find, a small ball of crumpled paper, slightly yellowed.

‘What’s that, Sachs? I can’t see very clearly.’

She explained.

‘Leave it as is; we’ll open it back here. Might have trace inside. Wonder if it’s from her.’

Her. The Vic.

Chloe Moore.

‘Or maybe from the perp, Rhyme,’ Sachs added. ‘I found what looked like fibers of newsprint or paper under her nails.’

‘Ah, that could be good. Did they fight? Did she grab something of his? Or did he want something she had and rip it from her fingers — while she struggled to hold on to it? Questions, questions, questions.’

Using additional adhesive rollers and a small handheld vacuum, Sachs continued the search. Once these samples had been bagged and tagged she used a separate vacuum and a new roller to collect trace from places as far away as possible from where Chloe lay and where the unsub had walked. These were control samples — natural trace from this area. If analysis back at the lab revealed, for example, a clay-rich earth near one of the unsub’s footprints, which didn’t match any control specimens, they could conclude that he possibly lived or worked in or had some other connection to a locale loaded with clay. A small step toward finding the perp … but a step nonetheless.

‘I can’t see many shoe or boot marks, Sachs.’

She was looking down at where he’d stood or walked. ‘I can make a few out but they’re not going to be much help. He wore booties.’

‘Brother,’ the criminalist muttered.

‘I’ll roll the footfalls for trace but there’s no point in electrostaticking.’

She was referring to using sheets of plastic to lift shoe prints, in much the same way that fingerprints were lifted. The resulting tread pattern not only could suggest shoe size but might show up in the massive footwear database that Rhyme had created at the NYPD years ago, which was still maintained.

‘And I’d say he had his own adhesive roller with him. It looks like he swept up as much as he could.’

‘I hate smart perps.’

No, he didn’t, Sachs reflected. He hated stupid perps. Smart bad guys were challenging and a lot more fun. Sachs was smiling beneath her N95 respirator. ‘I’m going silent, Rhyme. Checking the entrance and exit routes. The manhole.’

She withdrew her Maglite, flicked on the powerful beam and continued down the tunnel toward the ladder leading up to the manhole, noting not a bit of pain from the persistent arthritis that had plagued her for decades; recent surgery had worked its magic. Her shadow, cast by the halogen spot behind, stretched out before her, a distorted silhouette of a puppet. The ground beneath the manhole was damp. This strongly suggested it was how he’d gotten into and out of the tunnel. She noted this fact then continued on, into the darker reaches beyond.

With every step she grew more uneasy. Not because of claustrophobia this time — the tunnel was unpleasant but spacious compared with the entrance shaft. No, her discomfort was because she’d seen the perp’s handiwork — the tattoo, the cutting, the poison. The combination of his cleverness, his calculation and his perverse choice of weaponry all conspired to suggest that he’d be more than happy to hang around and try to stop his pursuers.

The flashlight in her left hand, while her right hovered near the Glock, Sachs continued down the increasingly dark tunnel, listening for footsteps, an attacker’s breaths, the click and snap of weapons chambering rounds or going off safety or cocking.

None of those, though she did hear a hum from one or more of the conduits or the yellow IFON boxes, whatever they were. A faint rush from the water pipe.

Then a scrape, a flash of movement.

Glock out, left hand gripping the Maglite, forearm supporting her shooting hand. The muzzle followed the beam. Sweeping, scanning.

Where?

Sweat again, a thud of heartbeat.

But very different from claustrophobia’s chest-thudding panic. This wasn’t sour fear. This was anticipation. This was hunt. And Amelia Sachs lived for the sensation.

She was ready, finger off the guard, onto the trigger but feather-light; it takes little more than a breath to fire a Glock.

Scanning, scanning …

Where? Where?

Snap …

She crouched.

And the rat stepped blithely out from behind a pillar, looked her way with faint concern and turned, scuttling away.

Thank you, Sachs thought, following in the creature’s general direction — toward the distant end of the tunnel. If the rodent was walking so nonchalantly over the ground it was unlikely that an ambush awaited. She continued walking. In sixty or so yards she came to the bricked-up wall. There were no footprints here — normal or bootied — so their perp hadn’t wandered this way. She returned to the ladder.

She lifted out her cell phone — encased in uncontaminating plastic — and called up the GPS map. She noted that she was underneath Elizabeth Street, to the east, near a curb.

Sachs turned up the volume to the headset.

‘I’m below the manhole, Rhyme.’ She explained where it was and that this was likely how he’d gotten in, because there was significant moisture on the ground; the manhole cover had probably been removed in the past hour or so, she estimated. ‘It’s muddy here.’ A sigh. ‘But there’re no prints. Naturally. Let’s have Lon canvass the stores and apartments around the neighborhood, see if anybody saw the perp.’

‘I’ll call him. And get any security CCTVs too.’ Rhyme was skeptical about witnesses. He believed that in most cases they were more trouble than they were worth. They misobserved, they had bad memories — intentionally and otherwise — and they were afraid to get involved. A digital image was far more trustworthy. This was not necessarily Sachs’s opinion.

She swabbed the rungs as she climbed the ladder, depositing the adhesive cloth in plastic evidence collection bags.

At the top she rolled the underside of the manhole cover, then lifted a small alternative light source unit to check for fingerprints on the surface. ALS’s are lamps that use colors of the spectrum of visible light (like blue or green) combined with filters to make apparent evidence that’s impossible to see under regular bulbs or in daylight. ALS sources also include invisible light, like ultraviolet, which makes certain substances glow.

The scan, of course, revealed no prints or other evidence from their unsub. She tested the manhole cover’s weight; she could budge it but just barely. She supposed it weighed close to a hundred pounds. Hard to push open but not impossible for a strong individual.

She heard traffic overhead, the shushhh sound of tires cutting through the wet sleet. She was shining the light straight up, looking into the hole through which a worker would feed the hook to remove the cover. Wondering about marks that might lead them to a particular brand of tool the perp had used. Nothing.

It was then that an eye appeared through the hole.

Jesus … Sachs gasped.

Inches away, on the street above her, someone was crouching and looking through the pry hole, down at her. For a moment nothing happened; then the eye narrowed, as if the person — a man, she sensed — squinted slightly. Maybe smiling, maybe troubled, maybe curious about why a flashlight beam was firing out of a manhole cover in SoHo.

She spun away, thinking he’d seat a pistol muzzle in the hole and start shooting. The Maglite plummeted as she grabbed the top rung with both hands to keep from falling.

‘Rhyme!’

‘What? What’s going on? You’re moving fast.’

‘There’s somebody on top of the manhole. Did you call Lon?’

‘Just. You think it’s the perp?’

‘Could be. Call Dispatch! Get somebody to Elizabeth Street now!’

‘I’m calling, Sachs.’

She pressed her hand against the bottom of the manhole and pushed. Once. Twice. All her strength.

The slab of iron rose a fraction of an inch. But no more.

Rhyme said, ‘I got Lon. He’s sending uniforms. Some ESU too. They’re on their way, getting close.’

‘I think he’s gone. I tried to open the cover, Rhyme. I couldn’t. Goddamn it. I couldn’t. I was looking right at him. Had to be the perp. Who else’d kneel down in the middle of the street on a day like this and look through a manhole cover?’

She tried once more, thinking maybe he’d been squatting on it and that’s what had prevented her from pushing it up. But, no, it was impossible to move with her one free hand.

Shit.

‘Sachs?’

‘Go ahead.’

Rhyme said, ‘An officer saw somebody at the manhole in a short dark-gray coat, stocking cap. He took off running. Disappeared into the crowd on Broadway. White male. Slim or medium build.’

‘Damn it!’ she muttered. ‘It was him! Why run otherwise? Have somebody pop the cover, Rhyme!’

‘Look, there’re plenty of people after him. Keep walking the grid. That’s our priority.’

Heart racing, she shoved a palm into the manhole cover once more. Convinced, unreasonably, that if she could get to the surface she could find him, even if the others couldn’t.

She pictured his eye. She saw the narrowing lid.

She believed the perp was laughing at her, taunting her because she hadn’t been able to open the cover.

What color was the iris? she wondered. Green, gray, hazel? She hadn’t thought to register the color. This lapse infuriated her.

‘One thing occurs to me.’ Rhyme brought her back to earth.

‘What’s that?’

‘We know that’s how he got into the tunnel — through the manhole. And that means he’d’ve rigged a work zone. He’d have cones and tape or a barricade of some kind. And that might show up on video.’

‘Or a witness might’ve seen.’

‘Well. Yes, maybe. For what that’s worth.’

Sachs climbed back down the ladder and returned to the victim. She had done a fast sex-crime exam of Chloe’s body but now wanded it with the ALS to look for traces of the three S’s present in most sexual assault cases — semen, sweat and saliva.

Negative on that but it was clear he’d probed her skin with his gloved fingers — or at least the abdomen, arms, neck and face. No other parts of the body appeared to have been touched.

She used the light on the rest of the scene — from the manhole to the breadbasket — and found nothing.

All that remained for her was removing the flashlight that the unsub had left as a beacon.

‘Sachs,’ Rhyme called.

‘Yeah?’

‘Why don’t we have city workers pop the manhole and you come out that way? You’ll have to search that area on the street anyway. We know that’s how he got in — and he was there about five minutes ago. Could have some trace.’

But she knew he was suggesting this so she could avoid the smaller of the two tunnels.

The circular coffin …

Sachs glanced at the black maw. It seemed even smaller now. ‘It’s a thought, Rhyme. But I think I’ll go out the way I came in.’

She’d beaten the fear once; she wasn’t going to let it win now.

Using a rough ledge on the brick wall to support her weight, she stepped up and boosted herself to within reach of the unsub’s flashlight. She took the surgical scissors from her pocket and cut the tape.

Pulling it down, she dislodged a handful of grayish powder, which she suddenly realized the perp had set as a trap for the crime scene officers. That’s why he’d left the light! The material poured straight into her eyes and, desperately brushing it away, she dislodged the N95 respirator and inhaled a good amount of the toxin.

‘No!’

Choking, choking, drowning on the stinging powder. Instantly the fierce burn began. She fell to the ground and stumbled back, nearly tripping over Chloe’s body.

Rhyme’s voice was in her ear. ‘Sachs! What was that? I couldn’t see.’

She struggled to inhale, to clear the poison from her lungs. The barbed hooks scorched her windpipe and eyes and nose. She ripped off the face mask, spitting, aware that she was contaminating the scene but she was unable to stop.

Rhyme was shouting. It was hard for her to hear but she believed he was calling, probably into his phone, ‘Medics down there! Now!’ And ‘I don’t care.’ And ‘Poison control. Fast.’

But then she heard nothing more than the choking that consumed her.

CHAPTER 7

Making his way back to his workshop off Canal Street, west of Chinatown, Billy Haven was thinking of Lovely Girl again, after the memories of her face, her voice, her touch had arisen so persistently during the modding session with Little Miss Pretentious, Chloe.

He was thinking of the letters he’d done: the second. The borders too.

Yes, a good work.

A Billy Mod.

He’d changed out of his coveralls, which had possibly been contaminated with poison (why take chances?), and had slipped them into a garbage bag. Then into a Dumpster a long way from the boutique. He was wearing street clothes underneath: black jeans, leather gloves, also black. His dark-gray wool coat. It was short — to mid-thigh. Warm enough and not so long that it might interfere if he had to sprint to escape from someone, which as Billy was well aware was a very real possibility at some point over the next few days.

On his head was the ski mask scrunched up as a stocking cap, also wool. He looked like any other young man in Manhattan heading to his apartment through the freezing rain, hunched over, cold.

Lovely Girl …

Billy remembered seeing her for the first time, years ago. It was a photograph, actually, not even the girl herself. But he’d fallen in love — yes, yes, at first sight. Not long after that his aunt had commented, ‘Oh, she’s a lovely girl. You could do much worse than her.’

Billy immediately took that as the pet name for his beloved.

The girl with the beautiful ivory skin.

Squinting against the crappy weather — the wind firing BBs of ice and freezing rain into his face — Billy pulled his coat tighter around him. Concentrated on avoiding icy patches. This was difficult.

It was now some hours after he’d finished with Chloe in the tunnel beneath the boutique. He’d stayed around the area, sticking to the shadows, to see about the police. Somebody had dialed 911 about five minutes after Billy had climbed from the manhole on Elizabeth Street. The cops had arrived en masse and Billy’d checked out their procedures. He’d observed and taken mental notes and would later transcribe his thoughts. The Modification Commandments weren’t phrased like the biblical ones, of course. But if they had been, one would be: Know thy enemy as thyself.

Trudging along, walking carefully. He was young and in good shape, agile, but he could hardly afford a fall. A broken arm would be disastrous.

Billy’s workshop wasn’t far from the site of the attack but he was walking a complicated route back home, making sure no one had seen him near the manhole and followed.

He went around the block once, then twice, just to be safe, and returned to the ugly, squat four-story former warehouse, now a quasi-residential structure. That is, quasi-legal. Or maybe completely illegal. We’re talking New York City real estate, after all. He’d paid cash for the short-term rental, a lot of cash. The agent had taken the money with a smile and made a point of not asking a single question.

Not that it mattered. He’d been prepared to spin a credible tale, forged documents included.

Thou shalt have thy cover story memorized.

Then, confirming that the sidewalk was deserted, Billy walked down a short flight of stairs to his front door. Three clicks of three locks and he was inside, exchanging as a soundtrack the horns of irritated drivers stuck in Chinatown by the bad weather for the rumble and brake squeals of the subway cars running directly beneath his place.

Sounds from underground. Comforting.

Billy pressed a switch and anemic lights filled the twenty-by-twenty-five-foot space — a combination living room/bedroom/kitchen/everything else. The room had a certain dungeon feel to it. One wall was exposed brick, the others halfhearted Sheetrock. He had a second rental, farther north, a safe house, which he’d planned to stay in more frequently than here on his mission for the Modification, but the workshop had turned out to be more comfortable than the safe house, which was smack on a busy street populated with the sort of people he despised.

The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents, some more helpful than others. The Field Guide to Poisonous Plants was sumptuously illustrated but didn’t have quite the same level of useful information as the underground blog called Knock ’Em Off: A Dozen Deadly Recipes for When the Revolution Comes and We Have to Fight Back!!

All arranged neatly on the workspace, just like in his tattoo parlor back home. The far corner of the room was pooled in the cool glow of ultraviolet lights that illuminated eight terrariums. He walked to these now and examined the plants inside. The leaves and flowers comforted him, they were so reminiscent of home. Pinks and whites and purples and greens in a thousand shades. The colors fought against the dull mud tone of the city, whose hateful spirit lapped every minute at Billy Haven’s heart. Suitcases contained changes of clothes and toiletries. A gym bag held several thousand dollars, sorted by denomination but wrinkled and old and very untraceable.

He watered the plants and spent just a few minutes finishing a sketch of one of them, an interesting configuration of leaves and twigs. Even as someone who’d drawn all his life, Billy sometimes wondered where the urge came from. Sometimes he just had to take out a pencil or crayon and transfer something from life, which would fade, into something that would not. That would last forever.

He’d sketched Lovely Girl a thousand times.

The pencil now drooped in his hand and he left a sketch of a branch half-finished, tossing the pad aside.

Lovely Girl …

He couldn’t think of her without hearing his uncle’s somber voice, the deep baritone: ‘Billy. There’s something I have to tell you.’ His uncle had gripped him by the shoulders and looked down into his eyes. ‘Something’s happened.’

And, with those simple, horrific words, he’d learned she was gone.

Billy’s parents too were gone — though their deaths had been years ago and he’d come to some terms with the loss.

Lovely Girl’s? No, never.

She was going to be his companion forever. She was going to be his wife, the mother of his children. She was going to be the one to save him from the past, from all the bad, from the Oleander Room.

Gone, just like that.

But today he wasn’t thinking so much of the terrible news, wasn’t thinking of the unfairness of what had happened, though what had happened was unfair.

And he wasn’t thinking of the cruelty, though what had happened was cruel.

No, at the moment, having just finished inking Chloe, Billy was thinking that he was on the road to the end of pain.

The Modification was under way.

Billy sat at the rickety table in the kitchen area of the basement apartment and removed from his shirt pocket the pages of the book he’d found that morning.

He’d found out about the volume weeks ago and knew he needed a copy to complete his planning for the Modification. It was out of print, though he’d found a few copies he could buy online through secondhand-book sellers. But he couldn’t very well order one with a credit card and have it shipped to his home. So Billy had been searching through used-book shops and libraries. There were two copies in the New York Public Library but they weren’t where they should have been in the stacks, in either the Mid-Manhattan branch or a satellite branch in Queens.

But he’d tried once more, earlier today, returning on a whim to the library on Fifth Avenue.

And there it was, reshelved and Dewey Decimaled into place. He’d pulled the book down from the shelf and stood in the shadows, skimming.

Badly written, he’d noted from his brief read in the stacks. An absurdly sensational cover in black, white, red. Both the style and the graphics helped explain the out-of-print status. But what the book contained? Just what he needed, filling in portions of the plan the way flats or round shader needles filled in the space between the outlines of a tattoo.

Billy had worried about getting the book out of the library — he couldn’t check it out, of course. And there’d been security cameras near the photocopiers. In the end he’d decided to slice out the chapter he wanted with a razor blade. He’d cut deep and carefully before hiding the book away so no one else could find it. He knew that the book itself probably contained a chip in the spine that would have set off the alarm at the front doors if he’d tried to walk out with the entire thing. Still, he’d flipped through all the pages he’d stolen, one by one, to search for a second chip. There’d been none and he’d walked out of the library without a blare of alarms.

Now he was eager to study the pages in depth, to help with the rest of the plans for the Modification. But as he spread them out before him, he frowned. What was this? The first page was damaged, the corner torn off. But he was sure that he’d extracted all of them intact from the spine without any tearing. Then he glanced at his shirt breast pocket and noted it too was torn. He remembered that Chloe’d ripped his coveralls when she’d fought back. That’s what had happened. She’d torn both the clothing and the page.

But the damage wasn’t too bad though and only a small portion was missing. He now read carefully. Once, twice. The third time he took notes and tucked them into the Commandments.

Helpful. Good. Real helpful.

Setting the pages aside, he answered some texts, received some. Staying in touch with the outside world.

Now it was cleaning time.

No one appreciates germs, bacteria and viruses more than a skin artist. Billy wasn’t the least concerned about infecting his victims — that was, really, the whole point of the Modification — but he was very concerned about infecting himself, with whatever tainted the blood of his clients and, in particular, with the wonderful substances he was using in place of ink.

He walked to the sink and unzipped his backpack. Pulling on thick gloves, he took the American Eagle tattoo machine to the sink and dismantled it. He drained the tubes of liquid and washed them in two separate gallon buckets of water, rinsing them several times and drying them with a Conair. The water he poured into a hole he’d cut in the floor, letting it soak into the earth beneath the building. He didn’t want to flush or pour the water down the drain. That little matter of evidence, once again.

This bath was just the start, however. He cleaned each piece of the machine with alcohol (which sanitizes only; it doesn’t sterilize). He placed the parts in an ultrasonic bath of disinfectants. After that he sealed them in bags and popped them into the autoclave — a sterilization oven. Normally needles are disposed of but these were very special ones and hard to come by. He autoclaved these too.

Of course, only part of this was sanitizing to protect himself from poisons and infection. There was a second reason as well: What better way to sever any link between you and your victims than to burn it away at 130 degrees Celsius?

Might even make hash of your ‘dust’ theory, don’t you think, Monsieur Locard?

CHAPTER 8

Lincoln Rhyme was waiting impatiently.

He asked Thom, ‘And Amelia?’

The aide hung up the landline. ‘I can’t get through.’

‘Goddamn it. What do you mean you can’t get through? Which hospital?’

‘Manhattan General.’

‘Call them again.’

‘I just did. I can’t get through to the main line. There’re some problems.’

‘That’s ridiculous. It’s a hospital. Call nine one one.’

‘You can’t call emergency to find out the status of a patient.’

‘I’ll call.’

But just then the front door buzzer sounded. Rhyme bluntly ordered Thom to ‘answer the damn bell’ and a moment later he heard footsteps in the front hall.

Two crime scene officers, the ones who’d assisted Sachs at the Chez Nord boutique homicide, entered the parlor, carrying large milk crates, filled with evidence bags — both plastic and paper. Rhyme knew the woman, Detective Jean Eagleston, who nodded a greeting, which he acknowledged a nod. The other officer, a large body-build of a cop, said, ‘Captain Rhyme, an honor to work with you.’

‘Decommissioned,’ Rhyme muttered. He was noting that weather must have been worse — the officers’ jackets were dusted with ice and snow. He noted that they’d wrapped the evidence cartons in cellophane. Good.

‘How is Amelia?’ asked Eagleston.

‘We don’t know anything yet,’ Rhyme muttered.

‘Anything else we can do,’ said her burly male partner, ‘just give us a call. Where do you want them?’ A nod at the crates.

‘Give them to Mel.’

Rhyme was referring to the latest member of the team, who’d just arrived.

Slim and with a retiring demeanor, NYPD Detective Mel Cooper was a renowned forensic lab man. Rhyme would bully anybody, all the way up to and including the mayor, to get Cooper assigned to him, especially for a case like this, in which toxin seemed to be the murder weapon of choice. With degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry, Cooper was perfect for the investigation.

The CS tech cop nodded greetings to Eagleston and her partner, who like him were based in the massive NYPD crime scene oper-ation in Queens. Despite the ornery weather and a chill in the parlor, Cooper wore a short-sleeved white shirt along with baggy black slacks, giving him the appearance of a crusading Mormon elder or high school science professor. His shoes were Hush Puppies. People usually weren’t surprised to learn that he lived with his mother; the astonishment came when they met his towering and beautiful Scandinavian girlfriend, a professor at Columbia. The two were champion ballroom dancers.

Cooper, in a lab coat, latex gloves, goggles and mask, gestured to an empty evidence examination table. His colleagues set the cartons on it and nodded goodbye, then went out once more into the storm.

‘You too, rookie. Let’s see what we’ve got.’

Ron Pulaski pulled on similar protective gear and stepped up to the table to help.

‘Careful,’ Rhyme said unnecessarily, since Pulaski had done this a hundred times and no one was more careful than he with evidence.

But the criminalist was distracted; his thoughts returned to Amelia Sachs. Why wasn’t she calling? He remembered seeing the powder pour into the video camera lens at the same time it hit her face. Remembered her choking.

And then: a key in the door.

A moment later. Wind. A cough. A throat clearing.

‘Well?’ Rhyme called.

Amelia Sachs turned the corner of the parlor, pulling her jacket off. A pause. More coughing.

‘Well?’ he repeated. ‘Are you all right?’

Her response was to guzzle a bottle of water that Thom handed to her.

‘Thanks,’ she said to the young man. Then to Rhyme: ‘Fine,’ her low sultry voice lower and sultrier than normal. ‘More or less.’

Rhyme had known that she hadn’t been poisoned. He’d spoken to the EMT who specialized in toxins as she’d been shepherded to Manhattan General Medical Center. Her symptoms were atypical for poisoning, the med tech had reported, and by the time the ambulance got to Emergency, her only symptoms were a racking cough and teary eyes, which had been flushed several times with water. The unsub had created a less-than-lethal trap — but the irritant might have blinded her or played havoc with the lungs.

‘What was it, Sachs?’

She now explained that swabs of mucous membranes and a lightning-fast blood workup had revealed that the ‘poison’ was dust composed mostly of ferric oxide.

‘Rust.’

‘That’s what they said.’

Pulling the duct tape off an old metal armature to which the unsub had attached the flashlight had dislodged a handful of the stuff, which had poured into Sachs’s face.

As a criminalist, Rhyme was familiar with Fe₂O₃, more commonly known as iron (III) oxide. Rust is a wonderful trace element since it has adhesive properties and transfers readily from perp to victim and vice versa quite readily. It can be toxic but only in massive quantities — more than 2500 mg/m^3. It’s presence seemed to Rhyme didn’t smell weaponized. He instructed Pulaski to call the city works department to find out if ferric oxide dust was common in the tunnels.

‘Yep,’ the young officer reported after he’d hung up. ‘The city’s been installing pipes throughout Manhattan — because of the new water tunnel. Some of the fixtures they’re cutting away are a hundred and fifty years old. End up with a lot of dust. All their workers’re wearing face masks, it’s so bad.’

So the unsub had just happened to pick one of those fixtures to mount the flashlight to.

Sachs coughed some more, drank another gulp or two of water. ‘I’m pissed off I got careless.’

‘And, Sachs, we were waiting for a phone call.’

‘I tried. The lines were out. One of the EMS techs said it was an Internet problem that’s also screwing up the phone switches. Been happening for the past couple of days. Some dispute between the hardwire cable companies and the new fiber-optic ones. Turf wars. Even talking sabotage.’

Rhyme’s look said, Who cares?

With another faint, alto cough Sachs suited up for the lab and walked to the evidence cartons.

‘Let’s get our charts going.’ Rhyme nodded at the cluster of large whiteboards, standing about like herons on their stalky legs. They used these to list the evidence in a case. Only one was filled: the case of the recent mugging turned homicide near City Hall. The man who’d shaved so carefully for his date before stepping out into the street to be robbed and killed.

Sachs moved that board to the corner and pulled a clean one front and center. She took an erasable marker and asked, ‘What do we call him?’

‘November fifth’s today’s date. Let’s stick with our tradition. Unknown Subject Eleven-Five.’

Sachs coughed once, nodded, then wrote in her precise script:

Rhyme glanced at the white space. ‘Now let’s start filling it in.’

CHAPTER 9

Before they could get to the evidence, though, the doorbell hummed once more.

With the familiar howl of wind and Gatling gun of falling ice, the door opened and closed. Lon Sellitto walked into the parlor, stomping his feet and missing the rug.

‘Getting worse. Man. What a mess.’

Rhyme ignored the AccuWeather. ‘The security videos?’

Referring to any surveillance cameras on Elizabeth Street, near the manhole that the perp had used to gain access to the murder site. And where he had apparently been spying on Sachs.

‘Zip.’

Rhyme grimaced.

‘But there was a witness.’

Another sour look from Rhyme.

‘I don’t blame you, Linc. But it’s all we got. Guy coming home from his shift saw somebody beside the manhole about ten minutes before nine one one got the call.’

‘Home from his shift,’ Rhyme said cynically. ‘So your wit was tired.’

‘Yeah, and a fucking tired witness who sees the perp is better than a fresh one who doesn’t.’

‘In which case he wouldn’t be a witness,’ Rhyme replied. A glance at the evidence board. Then: ‘The manhole was open?’

‘Right. Orange cones and warning tape around it.’

Rhyme said, ‘Like I thought. So he pops the cover with a hook, sets up the cones, climbs down, kills the vic and leaves.’ He turned to Sachs. ‘Moisture at the bottom of the ladder, you said. So he kept it open the whole time. What happened to the cones and tape?’

‘None there,’ Sachs said. ‘Not when I came out.’

‘He’s not going to be leaving them lying around nearby. Too smart for that. Lon, what’d your wit say about him, the perp?’

‘White male, stocking cap, thigh-length dark coat. Black or dark backpack. Didn’t see a lot of the face. Pretty much the same descrip of the guy by the manhole when Amelia was running the scene underneath.’

The one peering at Sachs. Who’d escaped into the crowds on Broadway.

‘What about the evidence on the street?’

‘In that storm?’ Sachs replied.

Weather was one of the classic contaminators of evidence and one of the most pernicious. And at the scene near the manhole, there’d been another problem: The emergency workers’ footprints and gear would have destroyed any remaining evidence as they raced to get Sachs into the ambulance after the apparent poisoning from the trap that wasn’t.

‘So we’ll write off that portion of the scene and concentrate on underground. First, the basement of the boutique?’

Jean Eagleston and her partner had photographed and searched the basement and the small utility room that opened onto it but they’d found very little. Mel Cooper examined the trace they’d collected. He reported, ‘Matches the samples from the cellar. Nothing helpful there.’

‘All right. The big question: What’s the tox screen result? COD?’

They were starting with the assumption that the cause of death was poison but that wouldn’t be known until the medical examiner completed the analysis. Sachs had called and harangued the chief examiner to send over a preliminary report ASAP. They needed both the toxin and whatever sedative, as seemed likely, the perp had injected into Chloe to subdue her. Sachs had sealed the urgency by pointing out that they believed this murder was the start of a serial killing spree. The ME, she reported, had sounded as burdened as doctors generally do, especially city employee doctors, but he’d promised to move the Chloe Moore case to the front of the queue.

Again piqued by impatience, Rhyme said, ‘Sachs, you swabbed the site of the tattoo?’

‘Sure.’

‘Run that, Mel, and let’s see if we can get a head start on the poison.’

‘Will do.’ The tool Cooper used for this analysis was the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer — two large, joined instruments sitting in the corner of the parlor. The gas chromatography portion of the equipment analyzes an unknown sample of trace by separating out each chemical it contains based on its volatility — that is, how long it takes to evaporate. The GC separates the component parts; the second device, the mass spectrometer, identifies the substances by comparing their unique structure with a database of known chemicals.

Running the noisy, hot machine — the samples are, in effect, burned — Cooper soon got results.

‘Cicutoxin.’

The NYPD had an extensive toxin database, which Rhyme had used occasionally when he’d been head of Investigation Resources — the old name for Crime Scene — though murder by poison was uncommon then and even more so now. Cooper scrolled through the entry for this substance. He paraphrased: ‘Comes from the water hemlock plant. Attacks the central nervous system. She’d have experienced severe nausea, vomiting, we can see frothing too. Muscle twitching.’ He looked up. ‘It’s one of the most deadly plants in North America.’

He nodded at the machine. ‘And it’s been distilled. No instances of that level of concentration ever recorded. Usually takes some time to die after it’s been administered. At these levels? She’d be dead in a half hour, little longer, maybe.’

‘What some famous Greek killed himself with, right?’ Pulaski asked.

Cooper said, ‘Not quite. Different strain of hemlock. Both in the carrot family, though.’

‘Who cares about Socrates?’ Rhyme snapped. ‘Let’s focus here. Does anyone else, aside from me, notice anything troubling about the source?’

Sachs said, ‘He could’ve found it in any field or swamp in the country.’

‘Exactly.’

A commercial substance that was toxic, like those used in industrial processes and easily purchased on the open market, might be traced to a manufacturer and onward to a buyer. Some even had chemical tags that might lead investigators to receipts with the perp’s name on them. But that wasn’t going to happen if he dug his weapon out of the ground.

Impossible to narrow down beyond regions of the country. And presumably, the month being November, he’d picked the plant long ago. Or might even have grown it in a hothouse in his basement.

Equally troubling was the fact that he’d somehow reduced it to create a particularly virulent form of the toxin.

Ron Pulaski happened to be standing beside the whiteboard. Rhyme said to him, ‘Add that to the list in your concise handwriting, rookie, which the Sisters of the Skeptical Heart Church would be exceedingly proud of.’

Rhyme’s mood had improved considerably now that there were challenges to confront, mysteries to unravel … and they had some evidence to work with.

Sachs continued, ‘Now, there were no friction ridges.’

Rhyme hadn’t expected fingerprints. No, the perp was too smart for that.

‘As far as hairs — I found some from rats and some from Chloe but no others, so I’m guessing headgear beyond the stocking cap.’

Close-fitting hats tended to dislodge hair more than keep it from falling out, especially wool or nylon, since the wearer would tend to scratch or rub itches. Rhyme guessed the perp had known this and taken other, more careful precautions to keep his fiber and DNA evidence to himself.

She continued, ‘The prelim for sexual assault was negative — though the ME might find something else. But genitals and secondary sexual locations don’t seem to have been touched. Aside from her abdomen’ — she nodded at the photographs — ‘she was fully clothed. But when I wanded her with the ALS, I found something interesting: dozens of places where he touched her skin, stroked it. More than just to pull it taut to do the tattoo. And she had a small tat on her neck. A flower.’ Sachs displayed the picture on Rhyme’s high-def monitor. ‘He rubbed that a few times, the wand showed.’

‘But not sexual touching?’ Sellitto muttered.

‘Not traditionally sexual,’ Sachs pointed out. ‘He may have a fetish or paraphilia. My impression was that he was fascinated with her skin. He wanted to touch it. Or was driven to maybe.’

Rhyme said, ‘Driven? That’s getting a little fishy for me, Sachs. A little soft. Noted but let’s move on.’

They began on the trace, analyzing substances that Sachs had found near the body and comparing them with control samples from the tunnel, trying to isolate those that were unique to the unsub.

Cooper kept the GC/MS humming.

‘Okay, clustered together we have nitric oxide, ozone, iron, manganese, nickel, silver, beryllium, chlorinated hydrocarbon, acetylene.’

Rhyme nodded. ‘Those were near the body?’

‘Right.’ Sachs looked over her detailed chain-of-custody card, which noted the exact location of each sample.

‘Hm.’ He grunted.

‘What, Linc?’ Sellitto asked.

‘Those’re materials used in welding. Oxy-fuel welding primarily. Maybe it came from our unsub but I’d think it’s more likely from the workers who installed the pipe. But we’ll put it on the chart anyway.’

Cooper selected another sample. It was from the floor near the ladder that led to the manhole. When this analysis was finished the tech frowned. ‘Well, may have something here.’

Rhyme sighed. Then share it, please and thank you, his burdened smile said.

But Cooper wasn’t going to be rushed. He carefully read the mass spectrum — the computer analysis from the instruments.

‘It’s tetrodotoxin.’

Rhyme was intrigued. ‘Ah, yes, we do have something here. Another possible murder weapon.’

‘Poison, Linc?’ Sellitto asked.

Mel Cooper said, ‘Oh, indeed. A good one. It’s from the ovaries of the puffer fish, the fugu. It’s a neurotoxin with no known antidote. Sixty or so people a year die in Japan — from eating it intentionally. In low dosages you can get a high … and survive to pay the check. And for what it’s worth, tetrodotoxin’s the zombie drug.’

‘The what?’ Sellitto asked, barking a laugh.

‘Really.’ Cooper added, ‘Like out of a movie. In the Caribbean people take it to lower their heart rate and respiration to the point where they appear dead. Then they come back to life. Either for religious rituals or as scams. Anthropologists think it might’ve been the source for the zombie myth.’

‘Just the diversion for a slow Saturday night in Haiti,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘Could we stay on point here? On focus? On message?’

Cooper pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. ‘Very small trace amounts.’

‘Unless the ME finds some in Chloe’s blood, he’s probably planning to use it for a future attack.’ Rhyme grimaced. ‘And where the hell did he get it? Probably caught a puffer fish himself. Like he grew the hemlock. Keep going, Mel.’

Cooper was reading from Sachs’s chain-of-custody card. ‘Here’s something from a footprint — one of his, I’m assuming, since it was near the ladder. And obscured.’

Booties …

‘That’s right,’ Sachs confirmed. Cooper showed her the mass spectrum and she nodded, then transcribed the computer analysis to the whiteboard.

Stercobilin, urea 9.3 g/L, chloride 1.87 g/L, sodium 1.17 g/L, potassium 0.750 g/L, creatinine 0.670 g/L

‘Crap,’ Rhyme muttered.

‘What’s wrong?’ Pulaski asked.

‘No,’ Rhyme replied. ‘Literally. Fecal material. Why that? Why there? Any deductions, boys and girls?’

‘There were DS — Sanitation — pipes overhead, but I couldn’t see any sewage on the ground or walls. Probably didn’t come from there.’

‘Dog-walking park?’ Sellitto suggested. ‘Or he owns a dog.’

‘Please,’ Rhyme said, refraining from rolling his eyes. ‘Those chemicals suggest human shit. We could run DNA but that would be a waste of time. Excuse the choice of words.’

‘Bathroom just before he came to the scene?’

‘Possibly, rookie, but I’d guess he picked it up from the sewage system somewhere. I think it tells us he’s been spending a lot of time in underground New York. That’s his killing zone. He’s comfortable there. And if there wasn’t any effluence at the Chloe Moore scene, that means he’s already got a few other sites selected. And it also tells us he’s scoping out his targets ahead of time.’

The parlor phone rang. Sachs answered. Had a brief conversation and then hung up. ‘The ME. Yep, COD was cicutoxin — and no tetrodotoxin. You were right, Mel: This was eight times more concentrated than what you’d find in a natural plant. And he sedated her with propofol. Neck and arm. Two injection sites.’

‘Prescription drug,’ Rhyme noted. ‘You can’t grow that in your backyard. How did he have access to that? Well, put it on the chart and let’s keep going. The tattoo itself. That’s what I’m really curious about.’

Rhyme gazed at the picture Sachs had taken: inkless but easy to see from the red, inflamed skin. A much clearer image than what he’d viewed through the video camera at the dim crime scene.

‘Man,’ Ron Pulaski said, ‘it’s good.’

‘I don’t know the tattoo world,’ Rhyme said. ‘But I wonder if there’re only a limited number of artists who could do that in a short period of time.’

‘I’ll hit some of the bigger parlors in town,’ Sellitto said. ‘See what I can find.’

Rhyme mused, ‘Those lines.’ He pointed to the border, scallops above and below the words. ‘You were right, Sachs. They look cut, not tattooed. Like he used a razor blade or scalpel.’

Sellitto muttered, ‘Just fucking decorations. What a prick.’

‘On the chart. Don’t know what to make of that. Now, the words: “the second”. Meaning? Thoughts?’

‘The second victim?’ Pulaski offered.

Sellitto laughed. ‘This guy ain’t really covering up his tracks. We probably woulda heard if there was a number one, don’tcha think? Bet CNN would’ve caught on.’

‘Sure, true. Wasn’t thinking.’

Rhyme regarded the picture. ‘Not enough to draw conclusions at this point. And what’s the rest of the message? My impression is that somebody who knows calligraphy that well also knows spelling and grammar. Lowercase “t” on the article “the”. So something preceded it. There’s no period so something comes after the phrase.’

Sachs said, ‘I wonder if it’s a line he made up. Or is it a quotation? A puzzle?’

‘No clue … Lon, get some bodies at HQ to search the databases.’

‘Good idea. Efficient: a task force to find “the second” in a book or something? You think that’s ever appeared before, Linc?’

‘First, Lon, aren’t air quotes a bit overused? More to the point: How’s this? Have them search for the words in famous quotes about crimes, killers, tattoos, underground New York. Tell them to be creative!’

Sellitto muttered, ‘All right. “The second”. And for the number — the numeral two — with “nd” as a suffix.’

‘Hm,’ Rhyme muttered, nodding. He hadn’t thought of that.

The bulky detective placed a call, rising and walking to the corner of the parlor, and a moment later began barking orders. He disconnected and wandered back.

‘Let’s keep going,’ Rhyme said to the others.

After more trace analysis Mel Cooper announced, ‘We’ve got several instances of benzalkonium chloride.’

‘Ah,’ Rhyme said. ‘It’s a quat. Quaternary ammonium. A basic institutional sanitizer, used mostly where there’s particular concern about exposure to bacteria and a vulnerable clientele. School cafeterias, for instance. On the board.’

Cooper continued, ‘Adhesive latex.’

Rhyme announced that the product was used in everything from bandages to construction work. ‘Generic?’

‘Yep.’

‘Naturally,’ Rhyme grumbled. Forensic scientists vastly preferred brand-name trace — it was more easily sourced.

The tech ran additional tests. After a few minutes he regarded the computer screen. ‘Good, good. Strong results for a type of stone. Marble. Specifically Inwood marble.’

‘What form?’ Rhyme asked. ‘Put it up on the screen.’

Cooper did and Rhyme found they were looking at dust and grains of various sizes, white, off-white and beige. The tech said, ‘Fractured. See the edge on that piece in the upper left-hand corner?’

‘Sure is,’ Rhyme offered. ‘Bake it!’

The tech ran a sample through the GC/MS. He announced, ‘We’re positive for Tovex residue.’

Sellitto said, ‘Tovex? Commercial explosive.’

Rhyme was nodding. ‘Had a feeling we’d find something like that. Used in blasting foundations out of rock. Given the trauma to the marble grains, our unsub picked up that trace at or near a construction site. Someplace where there’s a lot of Inwood marble. Call the city for blasting permits, rookie. And then cross-reference with the geological database of the area. Now, what else?’

The scrapings beneath Chloe Moore’s fingernails revealed no skin, only off-white cotton cloth and paper fibers.

Rhyme explained to Sellitto: ‘Chloe may’ve fought him and picked those up in the struggle. A shame she didn’t get a chunk of his skin. Where’s the DNA when you need it? On the board, and let’s keep at it.’

The duct tape that the unsub had used to bind Chloe’s feet was generic; the handcuffs too. And the flashlight — the beacon to reveal his handiwork — was a cheap, plastic variety. Neither that nor the D batteries inside bore fingerprints, and no hairs or other trace adhered, except a bit of adhesive similar to that used on sticky rollers — exactly what crime scene officers employed to pick up trace. As Sachs had speculated, he’d probably rolled himself before leaving for the crime scene.

‘This boy’s even better than I thought,’ Rhyme said. Dismay mixing with a certain reluctant admiration.

‘Now, any electrical outlets down there, Sachs? I don’t recall.’

‘No. The spotlights that the first responders set up were battery-powered.’

‘So his tattoo gun would be battery-operated too. Rookie — when you take a break from your marble quest, find out who makes battery tattoo guns.’

Pulaski went back online, saying, ‘Hopefully, they’ll be pretty rare.’

‘Now, that’s going to be interesting.’

‘What?’

‘Finding a tattoo gun that’s filled with hope.’

‘That’s filled with … what?’

Sellitto was smiling sourly. He knew what was coming.

Rhyme continued, ‘That’s what “hopefull”Y means. Your sentence didn’t say “I hope that portable tattoo guns’re rare.” Using “hopefull”Y as a disjunct — an opinion by the speaker — is non-standard. English teachers and journalists disapprove.’

The young officer’s head bobbed. ‘Lincoln, sometimes I think I’ve walked into a Quentin Tarantino movie when I’m talking to you.’

Rhyme’s eyebrows arched. Continue.

Pulaski grumbled, ‘You know, that scene where two hit men are going to blow somebody away but they talk and talk and talk for ten minutes about how “eager” and “anxious” aren’t the same, or how “disinterested” doesn’t mean “uninterested”. You just want to slap ’em.’

Sachs coughed a laugh.

‘Those two misuses bother me just as much,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘And good job knowing the distinction. Now, that last bit of evidence. That’s the one I’m most interested in.’

He turned back to the collection bag, thinking he’d have to find out who this Tarantino was.

CHAPTER 10

Mel Cooper carefully opened the sole remaining evidence bag over an examination table. Using tweezers, he extracted the crumpled ball of paper. He began to unwrap it. Slowly.

‘Where was it, Amelia?’ he asked.

‘About three feet from the body. Below one of those yellow boxes.’

‘I saw those,’ Rhyme said. ‘IFON. Electric grid, telephone, I’d guess.’

The paper was from the upper corner of a publication, torn out. It was about three inches long, two high. The words on the front, the right-hand page, were these:

On the reverse page:

Rhyme looked at Cooper, who was using a Bausch + Lomb microscope to compare the paper fibers from this sample with those found under the victim’s fingernails.

‘We can associate them. Probably from the same source. And there were no other samples of the cloth fibers under her nails from the scene.’

‘So the presumption is that she tore the scrap in a struggle with him.’

Sellitto asked, ‘Why’d he have it with him? What was it?’

Rhyme noted that the stock was uncoated, so the scrap was likely not from a magazine. Nor was the paper newsprint, so the source probably wasn’t a daily or weekly paper or tabloid.

‘It’s probably from a book,’ he announced, staring at the triangular scrap.

‘But what’d the scenario be?’ Pulaski asked.

‘Good question: You mean if the scrap was from the pocket of our unsub and she tore it off while grappling with him, how can the pages be from a book?’

‘Right.’

‘Because I would think he sliced important pages out of the book and kept them with him. I want to know what that scrap is from.’

‘The easy way?’ Cooper suggested.

‘Oh, Google Books? Right. Or whatever that thing is called, that online service that has ninety percent or however many of the world’s books in a database. Sure, give it a shot.’

But, unsurprisingly, the search returned no hits. Rhyme didn’t know much about how the copyright laws worked but he suspected that there were more than a few authors of books still protected by the US Code that didn’t want to share their creative sweat labor royalty-free.

‘So, it’s the hard way,’ Rhyme announced. ‘What do they call that in computer hacking? Brute-force attack?’ He reflected for a moment then added, ‘But we can maybe narrow down the search. Let’s see if we can find out when it was printed and look for books published around then that deal with — to start — crimes. The word “bodies” is a hint there. Now, let’s get a date.’

‘Carbon dating?’ Ron Pulaski asked, drawing a smile from Mel Cooper. ‘What?’ the young officer asked.

‘Haven’t read my chapter on radiocarbon, rookie?’ Referring to Rhyme’s textbook on forensic science.

‘Actually I have, Lincoln.’

‘And?’

Pulaski recited, ‘Carbon dating is the comparison of non-degrading carbon-12 with degrading carbon-14, which will give an idea of the age of the object being tested. I said “idea”; I think you said “approximation”.’

‘Ah, well quoted. Just a shame you missed the footnote.’

‘Oh. There were footnotes?’

‘The error factor for carbon dating is thirty to forty years. And that’s with recent samples. If our perp had carried around a chapter printed on papyrus or dinosaur hide, the deviation would be greater.’ Rhyme gestured toward the scrap. ‘So, no, carbon dating isn’t for us.’

‘At least it would tell us if it was printed in the last thirty or forty years.’

‘Well, we know that,’ Rhyme snapped. ‘It was printed in the nineties, I’m almost certain. I want something more specific.’

Now Sellitto was frowning. ‘How do you know the decade, Linc?’

‘The typeface. It’s called Myriad. Created by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems. It became Apple’s font.’

‘It looks like any other sans serif font to me,’ Sachs said.

‘Look at the “y” descender and the slanting “e”.’

‘You studied that?’ asked Pulaski, as if a huge gap in his forensic education threatened to swallow him whole.

Years ago Rhyme had run a kidnapping case in which the perp had crafted a ransom note by cutting letters from a magazine. He’d used characters from editorial headlines as well as from a number of advertisements. Correlating the typefaces from dozens of magazines and advertisers’ logos, Rhyme had concluded it was from a particular issue of the Atlantic Monthly. A warrant for subscriber lists — and some other evidence — led to the perp’s door and the rescue of the victim. He explained this to Pulaski.

‘But how do we date it more specifically?’ Sellitto asked.

‘The ink,’ Rhyme said.

‘Tags?’ Cooper asked.

‘Doubt it.’ In the 1960s ink manufacturers began adding tags — chemical markers, in the same way that explosives manufacturers did — so that, in the event of a crime, the ink sample would be easy to trace to a single source or at least to a brand name of ink or pen. (The primary purpose of tagging was to track down forgers, though the markers also nailed a number of kidnappers and psychopathic killers, who left messages at the scenes of their crimes.) But the ink used for book printing, as in this sample, was sold in large batches, which were rarely if ever tagged.

So, Rhyme explained, they needed to compare the composition of this particular ink with those in the NYPD ink database.

‘Extract the ink, Mel. Let’s find out what it’s made out of.’

From a rack of tools above the evidence examination tables, Cooper selected a modified hypodermic syringe, the point partially filed down. He poked this through the paper seven times. The resulting tiny disks, all of which contained samples of the ink, he soaked in pyridine to extract the ink itself. He dried the solution to a powdery residue, which he then analyzed.

Cooper and Rhyme looked over the resulting chromatogram — a bar chart of peaks and valleys representing the ink used in the printing of the mysterious book.

By itself, the analysis meant nothing, but running the results through the database revealed that the ink was similar to those used in the production of adult trade books from 1996 through 2000.

‘Adult?’ Pulaski asked.

‘No, not your kind of adult books,’ Sellitto said, laughing.

‘My—’ The officer was blushing furiously. ‘Wait.’

Rhyme continued, ‘It means as opposed to juvenile publishing. Legitimate books for adults. And the paper? Check acidity.’

Cooper ran a basic pH analysis, using a small corner of the paper.

‘It’s very acidic.’

‘That means it’s from a mass-produced commercial hardcover — not paperback because they’re printed on newsprint. And it’s commercial because more expensive, limited-edition books are printed on low-acid or acid-free paper.

‘Add that to your team’s to-do list, Lon. Find the book. I’m leaning toward nonfiction, the aforementioned years. Possibly true crime. And each chapter devoted to a different subject, since he sliced out only what he needed. Have your people start talking to editors, bookstores, crime book collectors … and true crime writers themselves. How many could there be?’

‘Yeah, yeah, in all the free time they have when they’re not browsing for the trillion quotations featuring the words “the second”.’

‘Oh, and by the way, make it a priority. If our unsub went to enough trouble to find a copy of the book, cut out the pages and carry them around with him, I really want to know what’s in it.’

The big detective was looking at the picture of the tattoo once more. He said to Cooper, ‘Print out a picture of that, willya, Mel? I’ll start hitting those tattoo parlors — is that what they still call ’em? Probably “studio” now. And get me a list of the big ones.’

Rhyme watched Cooper print out the picture then go online with the NYC business licensing agency. He downloaded a list of what seemed to be about thirty tattoo businesses. Cooper handed it to the detective.

‘That many?’ Sellitto grumbled. ‘Wonderful. I just can’t really get outside enough on these fine fall days.’ He tossed the list and the photo of the tattoo into his briefcase. Then pulled on his Burberry and dug his wadded gloves from the pocket. Without a farewell he stalked out of the room. Rhyme once again heard the wind briefly as the door opened and slammed shut.

‘And, rookie, how’re we coming on the marble?’

The young officer turned to a nearby computer. He read through the screen. ‘Still going through blasting permits. They’re blowing up a lot of stuff in the city at the moment.’

‘Keep at it.’

‘You bet. I’ll have some answers soon.’ He turned his gaze to Rhyme. ‘Hopefully.’

‘Hopefully?’ Rhyme frowned.

‘Yep. I’m filled with hope that I don’t get any more damn grammar lessons from you, Lincoln.’

CHAPTER 11

‘Hey, dude. Take a seat. I’ll get to you in a few. You want to check out the booklet there? Find something fun, something to impress the ladies. You’re never too old for ink.’

The man’s eyes alighted on Lon Sellitto’s unadorned ring finger and turned back to the young blonde he was speaking to.

The tattoo artist — and owner of the parlor (yeah, parlor, not studio) — was early thirties, scrawny as a crab leg. He was wearing well-cut and pressed black jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, white, immaculate. His dark-blond hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. He had a dandy beard, an elaborate affair that descended from his upper lip in four thin lines of dark silky hair that circled his mouth and reunited on his chin in a spiral. His cheeks were shaved smooth but his sideburns, sharp as hooks, swept forward from his ears. A steel rod descended from his upper ear down to the lobe. Another, smaller, pierced each eyebrow vertically. After the facial hair and the metalwork, the full-color tattoos of Superman on one forearm and Batman on the other were pretty tame.

Sellitto stepped forward.

‘A minute, dude, I was saying.’ He studied the cop for a moment. ‘You know, for an older guy, a bigger guy — I don’t mean any offense — you’re a good candidate. Your skin isn’t going to sag.’ His voice faded. ‘Oh, hey. Look at that.’

Sellitto had grown tired of the ramble. He’d thrust his gold shield toward the hipster in a way that was both aggressive and lethargic.

‘Okay. Police. You’re police?’

The tat artist was sitting on a stool next to a comfortable-looking but well-worn reclining chair of black leather, occupied by the girl he’d been speaking with when Sellitto walked in. She wore excessively tight jeans and a gray tank top over what seemed to be three bras or spaghetti-strap camisoles, or whatever they were called. Pink, green and blue. Her strikingly golden hair was long on the left and crew cut on the right. Pretty face if you could get past the skewed hair and nervous eyes.

‘You want to talk to me?’ the tattoo artist asked.

‘I want to talk to TT Gordon?’

‘I’m TT.’

‘Then I want to talk to you.’

Nearby another artist, a chubby thirty-something in cargo pants and T, was working away on another client — a massive bodybuilder — who was lying face down on a leather bed, like a masseur would use. The man was getting an elaborate motorcycle inked on his back.

Both employee and customer looked at Sellitto, who stared back.

They returned to inking and being inked.

The detective shot a glance at Gordon and the girl with the unbalanced hair. She was upset, really bothered. Gordon, though, didn’t seem fazed by the cop’s presence. The owner of the Sonic Hum-Drum Tattoo Parlor had all his permits in a row and his tax bills paid, the detective knew. He’d checked.

‘Let me just finish up here.’

Sellitto said, ‘It’s important.’

‘This’s important too,’ Gordon said, ‘dude.’

‘No, dude,’ Sellitto said. ‘What you’re going to do is sit down over there and answer my questions. Because my important is more important than your important. And, Miss Gaga, you’re gonna have to leave.’

She was nodding. Breathless.

‘But—’ Gordon began.

Sellitto asked bluntly, ‘You ever hear about section two sixty point twenty-one, New York State Penal Code?’

‘I. Uhm. Sure.’ Gordon nodded matter-of-factly.

‘It’s a crime to tattoo minors under the age of eighteen and the crime is defined as unlawfully dealing with a child in the second degree.’ Turning to the client. ‘How old’re you really?’ Sellitto barked.

She was crying. ‘Seventeen. I’m sorry. I just, I didn’t, I really, I mean …’

‘You want to finish that sentence sometime soon?’

‘Please, I just, I mean …’

‘Lemme put it this way: Get outta here.’

She fled, leaving behind her vinyl leather jacket. As both Sellitto and Gordon watched, she stopped, debated then snuck back fast, grabbed the garment and vanished again, permanently this time.

Turning to the owner of the store, Sellitto was enjoying himself, though he was also noting that Gordon still wasn’t cringing with guilt. Or fear. The detective pushed harder. ‘That happens to be a class B misdemeanor. Punishable by three months in jail.’

Gordon said, ‘Punishable by up to three months in jail but production of an apparently valid identification card is an affirmative defense. Her license? It was really, really good. Top-notch. I believed it was valid. The jury’d believe it was valid.’

Sellitto tried not to blink but wasn’t very successful.

Gordon continued, ‘Not that it mattered. I wasn’t going to ink her. I was in my Sigmund mode.’

Sellitto cocked his head.

‘Freud. The doctor is in, kind of thing. She wanted a work, real badly, but I was counseling her out of it. She’s some kid from Queens or Brooklyn got dumped by a guy for a slut was inked with quinto death heads.’

‘What?’

‘Five. Quinto. Death heads, you know. She wanted seven. Septo.’

‘And how was the therapy going, Doc?’

The man pulled a face. ‘It was going great — I was talking her out of it. When you walked in. Discouragus interruptus. But I think she’s scared off for the time being.’

‘Talking her out of it?’

‘Right. I was making some shit up about inking would ruin her skin. In a few months she’d look ten years older. Which is funny because women in the South Pacific used to get tattooed because it made them look younger. Lips and eyelids. Ouch, yeah. I figured she wouldn’t know Samoan customs.’

‘But you thought she was legal. Then why talk her out of it?’

‘Dude. First, I had my doubts about the license. But that wasn’t the point. She came in here for all the wrong reasons. You get inked to make a positive statement about yourself. Not for revenge, not to shove it in somebody’s face. Not because you want to be that stupid girl with a dragon tattoo. Ink’s about who you are, not being anybody else. Get it?’

Not really, Sellitto’s expression said.

But Gordon continued, ‘You saw her hair, the goth makeup? Well, despite all that, she was not a candidate for inking. She had a Hello Kitty purse, for Christ’s sake. And a Saint Timothy’s cross around her neck. In your day, you would’ve called her the girl next door, you know, going to the malt shop.’

My day? Malt? Still, Sellitto found himself leaning reluctantly toward the veracity of his story.

‘Besides, I didn’t have a big enough pussy ball for her,’ the young man said, grinning. Pushing Sellitto some.

‘A …?’

He explained: a tennis ball you gave to customers you didn’t think could handle the pain of the tattooing process. ‘That kid couldn’t take it. But, you gonna get inked, you gotta have the pain. Them’s the rules: pain and blood. The commitment, dude. Get it? So what can I do you for, now that I know there’s no, you know, mid-life crisis involved.’

The detective grumbled. ‘You ever say “Dig it” instead of “Get it”?’

‘“Dig it.” From your day.’

‘From my day,’ Sellitto said. ‘Me and the beatniks.’

TT Gordon laughed.

‘There’s a case we’re working on. I need some help.’

‘I guess. Gimme one minute.’ Gordon stepped to a third workstation. This fellow tat artist, arms blue-and-red sleeves of elaborate inking, was working on a man in his late twenties. He was getting a flying hawk on his biceps. Sellitto thought of the falcons on Rhyme’s window ledges.

The customer looked like he’d just subwayed it up here from Wall Street and would head back to his law firm afterward for an all-nighter.

Gordon looked over the job. Gave some suggestions.

Sellitto examined the shop. It seemed to belong to a different era: specifically, the 1960s. The walls were covered with hundreds of bright samples of tats: faces, religious symbols, cartoon characters, slogans, maps, landscapes, skulls … many of them psychedelic. Also, several dozen photos of piercings available for purchase. Some frames were covered by curtains. Sellitto could guess in what body parts those studs and pins resided, though he wondered why the modesty.

The inking stations reminded Sellitto of those in a hair salon with the reclining chairs for customers and stools for the artists. Equipment and bottles and rags sat on a counter. On the wall was a mirror, on which were pasted some bumper stickers and taped certificates from the Board of Health. Despite the fact that the place existed for the purpose of spattering body fluids about, it looked immaculate. The smell of disinfectant was strong and there were warning signs everywhere about cleaning equipment, sterilizing.

130 Degrees Celsius Is Your Friend.

Gordon finished his suggestions and gestured Sellitto to the back room. They pushed through a plastic bead curtain into the office part of the shop. It too was well ordered and clean.

Gordon took a bottle of water from a mini fridge and offered it to Sellitto, who wasn’t putting in his mouth anything from this shop. Shook his head.

The owner of the store unscrewed the top and drank. He nodded to the doorway, where the beads still pendulumed. ‘That’s what we’ve become.’ As if Sellitto was his new best dude.

‘How’s that?’

‘The guy in the business suit,’ he said softly. The hawk man. ‘You see where his tat is?’

‘His biceps.’

‘Right. High. Easy to hide. Guy’s got two point three children, or will have in the next couple years. Went to Columbia or NYU. Lawyer or accountant.’ A shake of the head. The ponytail swung. ‘Tats used to be insidious. The inked were bad boys and girls. Now getting a work’s like putting on a charm bracelet or a tie. There’s a joke somebody’s going to open a tattoo franchise in strip malls. Call it Tat-bucks.’

‘That’s why the rods?’ Sellitto nodded at the bars in Gordon’s head.

‘You have to go to greater lengths to make a statement. That sounded effete. Sorry. So. What can I do for you, Officer?’

‘I’m making the rounds of the big parlors in the city. None of ’em could help so far but they all said I had to come see you. This’s the oldest parlor in the city, they said. And you know everybody in the community.’

‘Hard to say about the oldest. Inking — I mean modern inking in the US, not tribal — pretty much began in New York. The Bowery, late eighteen hundreds. But it was banned in ’sixty-one after some hepatitis outbreaks. Only legalized again in ’ninety-seven. I found some records that this shop dated back to the twenties — man, those must’ve been the days. You got a tat, you were Mr Alternative. Or Miss, though women rarely got works done then. Not unheard of. Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake eating its tail.’ He noted that Sellitto was not much interested in the history lesson. A shrug. My enthusiasm isn’t your enthusiasm. Got it.

‘This is, what I’m about to tell you, this’s confidential.’

‘No worries there, dude. People tell me all sorts of shit when they’re under the machine. They’re nervous and so they start rambling away. I forget everything I hear. Amnesia, you know.’ A frown. ‘You here about somebody might be a customer of mine?’

‘Don’t have any reason to think so but could be.’ Sellitto added, ‘If we showed you a tat, you think you could tell us something about the guy who did it?’

‘Maybe. Everybody’s got their own style. Even two artists working from the same stencil’re going to be different. It’s how you learned to ink, the machine you use, the needles you hack together. A thousand things. Anyway, I can’t guarantee it but I’ve worked with artists from all over the country, been to conventions in almost every state. I might be able to help you out.’

‘Okay, here.’

Sellitto dug into his briefcase and extracted the photo Mel Cooper had printed out.

Gordon bent low and, frowning, studied the picture carefully. ‘The guy drew this knows what he’s doing — definitely a pro. But I don’t get the inflammation. There’s no ink. The skin’s all swollen and rough. Real badly infected. And there’s no color. Did he use invisible ink?’

Sellitto thought Gordon was joking and said so. Gordon explained that some people didn’t want to make a commitment, so they were inked with special solutions that appeared invisible but showed up under blacklight.

‘The pussy-ball crowd.’

‘You got it, dude.’ A fist poked in Sellitto’s direction. The detective declined to bump. Then the artist frowned. ‘I got a feeling something else is going on, right?’

Sellitto nodded. They’d kept the poison out of the press; this was the sort of MO that might lead to copycatting. And if there were informants, or the perp himself decided to ring up City Hall and gloat, they’d need to know that the caller had access to the actual details of the killing.

Besides, as a general rule, Sellitto preferred to explain as little as possible when canvassing for witnesses or asking advice. In this case, though, he had no option. He needed Gordon’s help. And Sellitto decided he kind of liked the guy.

Dude …

‘The suspect we’re looking for, he used poison instead of ink.’

The artist’s eyes widened, the metal pins lifting dramatically. ‘Jesus. No! Jesus.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Ever hear about anybody doing that?’

‘No way.’ Gordon brushed the backs of his fingers across the complicated facial hair. ‘That’s just wrong. Man. See, we’re … what we do is we’re sort of this hybrid of artist and cosmetic surgeon — people put their trust in us. We’ve got a special relationship with people.’ Gordon’s voice grew taut. ‘Using inking to kill somebody. Oh, man.’

The parlor phone rang and Gordon ignored it. But a few moments later the heavy-set tat artist — working on the motorcycle — stuck his head through the curtain of beads.

‘Hey, TT.’ A nod to Sellitto.

‘What?’

‘Got a call. Can we ink a hundred-dollar bill on a guy’s neck?’ The accent was southern. Sellitto couldn’t place where.

‘A hundred? Yeah, why not?’

‘I mean, ain’t it illegal to reproduce money?’

Gordon rolled his eyes. ‘He’s not going to feed himself into any slots in Atlantic City.’

‘I’m just asking.’

‘It’s okay.’

The artist said into his phone, ‘Yessir, we’ll do it.’ Then disconnected. He started to turn but Gordon said, ‘Hold on a sec.’ To Sellitto he added, ‘Eddie’s been around. You might want to talk to him too.’

The detective nodded, and Gordon introduced them. ‘Eddie Beaufort, Detective Sellitto.’

‘Nice to meet you.’ A Mid-Atlantic Southern lilt, Sellitto decided. The man had a genial face, which didn’t fit with the elaborate sleeves — mostly of wild animals, it seemed. ‘Detective. Police. Hm.’

‘Tell Eddie what you were telling me.’

Sellitto explained the situation to Beaufort, whose look of astonishment and dismay matched Gordon’s. The detective now asked, ‘You ever heard of anybody using ink or tattoo guns as a weapon? Poison or otherwise? Either of you?’

‘No,’ Beaufort whispered. ‘Never.’

Gordon said to his colleague, ‘Good inking.’

‘Yup. Man knows what he’s about. That’s poison, hm?’

‘That’s right.’

Gordon asked, ‘How’d he get her, I mean, how’d she stay still for that long?’

‘Knocked her out with drugs. But it didn’t take him very long. We think he did that tat in about fifteen minutes.’

‘Fifteen?’ Gordon asked, astonished.

‘That’s unusual?’

Beaufort said, ‘Unusual? Church, man. I don’t know anybody could lay a work like that in fifteen. It’d take an hour, at least.’

‘Yep,’ Gordon offered.

Beaufort nodded to the front of the shop. ‘Got a half-nekkid man. Better git.’

Sellitto nodded thanks. He asked Gordon, ‘Well, looking at that, is there anything you can tell me about the guy did it?’

Gordon leaned forward and examined the photos of the inking on Chloe Moore’s body. His brows V’ed together. ‘It’s not all that clear. Do you have anything closer up? Or in better definition?’

‘We can get it.’

‘I could come to the station. Heh. Always wanted to do that.’

‘We’re working out of a consultant’s office. We— Hold on.’ Sellitto’s phone was humming. He looked at the screen, read the text. Interesting. Responded briefly.

He turned to Gordon. ‘I’ve gotta be someplace but get over here.’ Sellitto wrote down Rhyme’s name and address. ‘That’s the consultant’s place. I’ve gotta stop by headquarters then I’ll meet you there.’

‘Okay. Like when?’

‘Like ASAP.’

‘Sure. Hey, you want a Glock or something?’

‘What?’ Sellitto screwed up his face.

‘I’ll ink you for free. A gun, a skull. Hey, how about an NYPD badge?’

‘No skulls, no badges.’ He jabbed his finger at the card, containing the Central Park address. ‘All I need is you to show up.’

‘ASAP.’

‘You got it, dude.’

CHAPTER 12

‘How’re we doing, rookie?’

Sitting on a stool in Rhyme’s parlor, Ron Pulaski was hunched over the computer keyboard. He was narrowing down the locations in the city from which the Inwood marble trace might have come. ‘Moving slow. It’s not just blasting for foundations. There’s a lot of demolition going on in the city too. And it’s November. In this weather. Who would’ve thought? I—’

A mobile phone buzzed. The young officer fished into his pocket and removed the unit. It was the prepaid.

The Watchmaker undercover assignment was heating up. Rhyme was encouraged that somebody had called the officer so quickly.

And what would the substance of the conversation be?

He heard some pleasantries. Then: ‘Yes, about the remains. Richard Logan. Right.’ He wandered off to the corner. Rhyme could hear no more.

But he noted Pulaski’s grave expression — a pun that Rhyme decided not to share, given that this assignment seemed to be weighing on the man.

After two or three minutes Pulaski disconnected and jotted notes.

‘And?’ Rhyme asked.

Pulaski said, ‘They transferred Logan’s body to the Berkowitz Funeral Home.’

‘Where?’ Rhyme asked. It sounded familiar.

‘Not far from here. Upper Broadway.’

‘A memorial service?’

‘No, just somebody’s coming to pick up his ashes on Thursday.’

Without looking up from the large computer monitor, Rhyme muttered, ‘Nothing from the FBI on sources for the poisons and not a goddamn thing about “the second”. Though I suppose we can’t be too optimistic about that. Who?’

Neither Pulaski nor Cooper responded. Sachs too was silent.

‘Well?’ Rhyme called.

‘Well what?’ From Cooper.

‘I’m asking Pulaski. Who’ll be where? To pick up Logan’s ashes? Did you ask the funeral director who’d be there?’

‘No.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Because,’ the patrol officer replied, ‘it’d seem suspicious, don’t you think, Lincoln? What if it’s the Watchmaker’s silent partner coming to pay his last respects and the director casually mentions that somebody was curious who’s going to be there — which isn’t really a question you’d ask—’

‘All right. Made your point.’

‘A good point,’ Cooper said.

A fair point.

Then Rhyme was thinking again about the message of the tattoo on Chloe Moore’s body. He doubted that ‘the second’ was part of a findable quotation at all. Maybe it was something that the unsub had spontaneously chosen and couldn’t be tracked down. And maybe there was no meaning at all behind it.

A distraction, a misdirection.

Smoke and mirrors …

But if you do mean something, what could it be? Why are you playing your thoughts out like fishing line?

‘I don’t know,’ Cooper said.

Apparently Rhyme had spoken the query to the cryptic perp aloud.

‘Damn message,’ he muttered.

Everyone in the room looked at it once more.

‘… the second, the second …’

‘Anagram?’ the tech suggested.

Rhyme scanned the letters. Nothing significant appeared by rearranging them. ‘Anyway, I have a feeling the message is mysterious enough. He doesn’t need to play Scrabble with us. So, rookie, you’ll be going undercover to the funeral home. You okay with that?’

‘Sure.’

Spoken too quickly, Rhyme reflected. He knew this reluctance about the job had nothing to do with physical risk. Even if the late Watchmaker’s mantle had been inherited by an associate, and he was the one collecting the ashes, he wasn’t going to pull out a gun in a funeral parlor and start a shootout with an undercover cop. No, it was a fear of inadequacy that plagued the young officer, all thanks to the head injury he’d suffered some years ago. Pulaski was great in searching crime scenes. He was good, for a non-scientist, in the lab. But when he had to deal with people and make fast decisions, uncertainties and hesitations arose. ‘We’ll talk about what to wear, how to act, who to be, later.’

Pulaski nodded, slipped away the phone, which he’d been kneading nervously in his hand, and returned to the Inwood marble job.

Rhyme now eased his Merits wheelchair close to the examination table on which rested evidence from the Chloe Moore murder in SoHo. Then he lifted his gaze to the monitor above it, the one displaying the photos Sachs had taken at the scene, glowing in difficult, high-definition glory. He studied the dead woman’s face, the flecks of spittle, the rictus, the vomit, the wide, glazed eyes. The expression reflected her last moments on earth. The deadly toxin extracted from a water hemlock would have induced fierce seizures and excruciating abdominal pain.

Why poison? Rhyme wondered again.

And why a tattoo gun as a means of slipping it into her body?

‘Hell,’ Sachs muttered, leaning away from her own work-station. She was helping Pulaski trace commercial blasting permits. ‘The computer’s down again. Happened twice in the past twenty minutes. Just like the phones earlier.’

‘Not just here,’ Thom said. ‘Outages all over the city. Slow download times. A real pain. About a dozen neighborhoods’ve been affected.’

Rhyme snapped, ‘Great. Just what we need.’ You couldn’t run a criminal investigation now without computers, from DMV to encrypted police and national security agency databases to Google. If the stream was choked off, cases ground to a halt. And you never thought about how dependent you were on those invisible bits and bytes until the flow of data choked to a stop.

Sachs announced, ‘Okay, it’s back now.’

But the concerns about the World Wide Web were sidelined when Lon Sellitto, tugging off his coat, burst into Rhyme’s parlor. He tossed the Burberry onto a chair, piled his gloves atop the garment and pulled something out of his briefcase.

Rhyme looked at him, frowning.

Sellitto said defensively, ‘I’ll mop the fucking floor, Linc.’

‘I don’t care about the floor. Why would I care about the floor? I want to know what you have in your hand.’

Sellitto wiped sweat. His internal thermometer was unaffected, apparently, by the coldest, nastiest November in the past twenty-five years. ‘First off, I found a tattoo artist who’s going to help and he’s on his way. Or he better be. TT Gordon. You should see the mustache.’

‘Lon.’

‘Now this.’ He held up a book. ‘Those guys at HQ? They tracked down where that scrap of paper came from.’

Rhyme’s heart beat faster — a sensation that most people would feel in their chest but that for him, of course, registered simply as an upped pulsing in his neck and head, the only sensate parts of his body.

ies

that his greatest skill was his ability to anticipate

‘How’d they do it, Lon?’ Sachs asked.

Sellitto continued, ‘You know Marty Belson, Major Cases.’

‘Oh, the brainiac.’

‘Right. Loves his puzzles. Does Sudoku in his sleep.’ Sellitto explained to Rhyme: ‘Works financial crimes mostly. Anyway, he figured out the top letters were part of the title, you know how books have the author’s name at the top of one side and the title at the top of the facing page?’

‘We know. Keep going.’

‘He was playing with what words end in “ies”?’

Rhyme said, ‘A word on the reverse page was “body”, so that’s an option, pluralized. We speculated it was a crime book. Or given the corpse theme, maybe Enemies.’

‘Nope. Cities. The full title is Serial Cities. That was on the short list of about six that Marty came up with. He called all the major book publishers in town — there aren’t as many as there used to be — and read them the passages. One editor recognized it. He said his company’d published it a long time ago. Serial Cities. It’s out of print now but he even knew the chapter that the passage was from. Number Seven. Had a copy messengered to us.’

Excellent! Rhyme asked, ‘And what’s this special chapter about?’

Sellitto wiped more sweat. ‘You, Linc. It’s all about you.’

CHAPTER 13

‘And you too, Amelia.’

Sellitto was opening the book. Rhyme noted the full title: Serial Cities: Famous Killers from Coast to Coast.

‘Let me guess: The theme is that every major city’s had a serial killer.’

‘Boston Strangler, Charles Manson in LA, the I-5 Killer in Seattle.’

‘Sloppy journalism. Manson wasn’t a serial killer.’

‘I don’t think the public cares.’

‘And we made it into the book?’ Sachs asked.

‘Chapter seven’s titled, “The Bone Collector”.’

That was the popular name, courtesy of the press and an overblown novelization, of a serial kidnapper who taunted Rhyme and the NYPD some years ago by stashing his victims in places where they would die if he couldn’t figure out in time where they’d been hidden.

Some of the victims had been saved, some had not. The case had been significant for several reasons: It had brought Rhyme back from the dead — almost literally. He’d been planning to take his own life, so depressed had he been about his quadriplegia, but he’d decided to stick around for a while after the exhilaration of mentally wrestling with the brilliant killer.

The case had also brought Rhyme and Sachs together.

Rhyme now muttered, ‘And we’re not the first chapter?’

Sellitto shrugged. ‘Oh, sorry, Linc.’

‘But it’s New York.’

And it is me, Rhyme couldn’t help thinking.

‘Can I see it?’ Sachs asked. She opened the book to the chapter and began to read quickly.

‘Short,’ Rhyme observed, even more irritated. Did the Boston Strangler investigation get more pages?

‘You know,’ Sachs said, ‘I seem to remember talking to a writer a while ago. He said he was working on a book and took me out for coffee to find out some details that weren’t in the press or the official record.’ She smiled. ‘I think he said he called you too, Rhyme, and you chewed his head off and hung up on him.’

‘I don’t recall,’ he grumbled. ‘Journalism. What’s the point of it anyway?’

‘You wrote that,’ Pulaski pointed out, nodding toward a bookshelf on which sat Rhyme’s own nonfiction account of famous crime scenes in New York City.

‘It was a lark. I don’t devote my life to regurgitating lurid stories to a bloodsucking audience.’

Though perhaps he should have been more lurid, he reflected; The Scenes of the Crime had been remaindered years ago.

‘The important question is, what’s Unsub Eleven-Five’s interest in the Bone Collector case?’ He nodded at the book. ‘What’s the nature of my chapter? Does it have a theme? Does the author have an ax to grind?’

How long was it, for God’s sake? Only ten pages? Rhyme grew even more offended.

Sachs continued skimming. ‘Don’t worry. You come off well. I do too, I have to say … It’s mostly a description of the kidnapping incidents and the investigation techniques.’

She flipped more pages. ‘A lot of procedural details about the crime scene work. Some footnotes. There’s a long one about your condition.’

‘Oh, that must be some truly compelling reading.’

‘Another one about the politics of the case.’

Sachs had gotten into hot water by closing down a train line to preserve evidence — which resulted in a rift all the way up to Albany.

‘And one more footnote — about Pam’s mother,’ Sachs said.

A young girl named Pam Willoughby and her mother had been kidnapped by the Bone Collector. Rhyme and Sachs had saved them — only to have Mom turn out to be someone other than an innocent victim. After learning this, Sachs and Rhyme had tried desperately to find the child. A few years ago they’d managed to rescue her. Pam was now nineteen, in college and working in New York. She’d become Sachs’s de facto younger sister.

Sachs read to the end. ‘The author’s mostly concerned with the perp’s psychological makeup: Why was he so interested in bones?’

The kidnapper had stolen human bones and carved, sanded and polished them. His obsession, it seemed, stemmed from the fact that he had suffered a loss in the past, loved ones killed, and he found subconscious comfort in the permanence of bones.

His crimes were revenge for that loss.

Rhyme said, ‘First, I think we need to see if our unsub’s got any connection to the Bone Collector himself. Look up the files. Track down any family members of the perp, where they lived, what they’re up to.’

It took some time to unearth the files — the official reports and evidence were at the NYPD, in the archives. The case was quite old. Rhyme had some material on his computer but the word processing files weren’t compatible with his new system. Some of the info was on three-and-a-half-inch disks, which Thom unearthed from the basement — the verb appropriate since the boxes were so dust-covered.

‘What’re those?’ asked Pulaski, a representative of the generation that measured data storage in gigabytes.

‘Floppy disks,’ Sellitto said.

‘Heard of them. Never seen one.’

‘No kidding? And you know, Ron, they used to have big round black vinyl things you listened to music on. Oh, and we roasted our mastodon steaks over real fire, rookie. Before microwaves.’

‘Ha.’

The disks proved useless but Thom also managed to find hard copies of the files in the basement. Rhyme and the others were able to piece together a bio of the Bone Collector and use the Internet (now working at a fine clip) to determine that the perp from back then had no living relatives, none close at least.

Rhyme was quiet for a moment as he thought: And I know why he doesn’t have any family.

Sachs caught his troubled gaze. She gave a reassuring nod, which Rhyme didn’t respond to.

‘How about the survivors?’

More online research, more phone calls.

It turned out that aside from Pam none of the victims saved from the Bone Collector were still alive or living in the city.

Rhyme said brusquely, ‘All right, doesn’t sound like there’s any direct connection to the Bone Collector case. Revenge might be a dish best served cold but too much time has elapsed for somebody to come after us for that.’

‘Let’s talk to Terry,’ Sachs suggested.

The NYPD’s chief psychologist, Terry Dobyns. He was the one who’d formulated the theory that the Bone Collector’s obsession with bones was rooted in their permanence and reflected some loss in the perp’s past.

Dobyns was also the doctor who’d been a pit bull after Rhyme’s accident some years ago. He’d refused to accept Rhyme’s withdrawal from life and his flirtation with suicide. He’d helped the criminalist adjust to the world of the disabled. And no ‘How does that make you feel’ crap. Dobyns knew how you felt and he guided the conversation in directions that took the hard edges off what you were going through while not shying from the truth that, yeah, sometimes life fucks with you.

The doctor was smart, no question. And a talented shrink. But Sachs’s suggestion for enlisting him now was another matter altogether; she wanted a psychological profile of Unsub 11-5 and profiling was an art — not a science, mind you — that Rhyme found dubious at best.

‘Why bother?’ he asked.

‘Cross our t’s and—’

‘No clichés, please, Sachs.’

‘—dot our j’s.’

Sellitto took sides. ‘What can it hurt, Linc?’

‘It’ll take time away from doing something valuable — analyzing the evidence. It’ll be distracting. That’s what will hurt, Lon.’

‘You analyze away,’ Sellitto shot back. ‘Amelia and I’ll give Terry a call. You don’t even have to listen. Look, our unsub went to a lot of trouble to get his hands on a book that’s about the Bone Collector. I want to know why.’

‘All right,’ Rhyme said, surrendering.

Sellitto placed a call and when Dobyns answered, the detective hit a button on his mobile.

‘You’re on speaker, Terry. ’S Lon Sellitto. I’m here with Lincoln and a couple of others. We’ve got a case we’d like to ask you about.’

‘Been awhile,’ the doctor said in his smooth baritone. ‘How are you doing, Lon?’

‘Okay, okay.’

‘And Lincoln?’

‘Fine,’ Rhyme muttered and began looking over the evidence chart once more. Inwood marble. Being blown up. That, he was far more interested in than spongy psychological guesswork.

Alchemy …

‘It’s Amelia too,’ she said. ‘And Ron Pulaski and Mel Cooper.’

‘I’m deducing this’s about the tattoo case. I saw it on the wire.’

Though the press hadn’t been informed about the nuances of the Unsub 11-5 case, all law enforcement agencies in the area had been contacted, with a request for matching MOs (none had answered in the affirmative).

‘That’s right. There’s a development and we’d like your thoughts.’

‘I’m all ears.’

Rhyme had to admit that he found the man’s intonation calming. He could picture the sinewy, gray-haired doctor, whose smile was as easy as his voice. When he was listening to you, he truly listened. You were the center of the universe.

Sachs explained about the perp’s theft of the chapter about the Bone Collector — and the fact that he’d been carrying it around with him during the crime. She added too that there was no direct connection with the Bone Collector case but that he’d probably gone to some trouble to obtain a copy of the book.

Lon Sellitto added, ‘And he left a message.’ He explained about the tattooed phrase ‘the second’ in Old English type.

The doctor was silent for a moment. Then: ‘Well, the first thing that I thought of, which you obviously have too, is that he’s a serial doer. A partial message means there’re more to come. And then his interest in the Bone Collector, who was a serial kidnapper.’

‘We assume he’s going to keep hunting,’ Sellitto said.

‘Do you have any leads at all?’

Sachs said, ‘Description — white male, slim. Some details on the poisons he used and one that he probably intends to.’

‘And the victim’s white female?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fits the serial killer model.’ Most such killers hunted in the same racial pool as their own.

Sachs continued, ‘He subdued her with propofol. So maybe he’s got a medical background.’

‘Like the Bone Collector,’ Dobyns said.

‘Right,’ Rhyme said, eyes shifting from the evidence to the speaker phone. ‘I hadn’t thought about that.’ His attention to the psychiatrist now edged over the 50 percent mark.

‘Sexual component?’

‘No,’ Sellitto said.

Sachs added, ‘It took her some time to die. Presumably he was there, watching. And possibly enjoying it.’

‘Sadistic,’ Ron Pulaski said.

‘Who’s that?’ Dobyns asked.

‘It’s Ron Pulaski, Patrol. I work with Lincoln and Amelia.’

‘Hello, Officer. Well, no, actually I don’t see sadism. That occurs only in a sexual context. If he enjoys inflicting pain for its own sake his condition would probably be diagnosed as anti-social personality disorder.’

‘Yessir.’ Pulaski was blushing, not from the correction but, it seemed, because of Rhyme’s glare at the interruption.

Dobyns said, ‘Off the top of my head, he’s an organized offender and he’ll be planning out the attacks carefully. I’d also say there’re two possible reasons for your unsub’s interest in the Bone Collector and in you, Lincoln. Amelia too, don’t forget. One, he might have been affected by the Bone Collector’s crimes a decade ago. Emotionally moved by them, I mean.’

‘Even if he had no direct connection?’ Rhyme asked, forgetting he was trying to ignore the doctor’s input.

‘Yes. You don’t know his age exactly but it’s possible he was in early adolescence then — just the time when a news story about a serial doer might’ve spoken to him. As for that message? Well, the Bone Collector was, if I remember, all about revenge.’

‘That’s right.’

Sellitto asked, ‘What kind of revenge would our unsub be after, Doc? Family members who’d died? Some other personal loss?’

‘Really, it could be anything. Maybe he suffered a loss, a tragedy that he blames someone for — or some thing, a company, organization, institution. The loss might’ve happened when the Bone Collector story hit the press and he embraced the idea of getting retribution the same way the Bone Collector did. He’s been carrying that thought around with him. That’s one explanation for why this murder echoes the attacks from a decade ago — some of those crimes were underground too, weren’t they?’

‘That’s right,’ Rhyme confirmed.

‘And your unsub has a morbid interest in the morphology of the human body. Skin, in his case.’

Sachs added, ‘Yes, I found evidence that he touched the victim in a number of places — not sexually. There was no reason related to the tattooing for that that I could see. It gave him some satisfaction, I was thinking. My impression.’

The doctor continued, ‘So, the first reason he might be interested in the Bone Collector: a psychological bonding with him.’ He chuckled. ‘An insight that, I suspect, is rather low in your estimation, Lincoln.’ He knew of Rhyme’s distrust of what the criminalist called ‘woo-woo’ policing. ‘But that might hint he too is out for revenge,’ Dobyns added.

Rhyme said, ‘Noted, Doctor. We’ll put it on our evidence chart.’

‘I think you’ll be more interested in the second reason he was interested in the chapter of this book. Whatever his motive — revenge or joy killing or distracting you so he could rob the Federal Reserve — he knows you’ll be after him and he’ll want to learn as much as he can about you, your tactics, how you think. How specifically you tracked down a serial criminal. So he doesn’t make the same mistakes. He wants to know where your weaknesses are. You and Amelia.’

This made more sense to Rhyme. He nodded at Sachs, who told the doctor, ‘The book is practically a how-to guide on using forensics to stop a serial criminal. And it’s clear from running the scenes that he’s been paying attention to scrubbing the evidence.’

Pulaski asked, ‘Doctor, any idea why this victim? There was no, you know, prior contact between them that we could find.’ He gave a brief bio of Chloe Moore.

Sachs said, ‘Seems to be random.’

‘With the Bone Collector, remember, his true victims were somebody else: the city of New York, the police, you, Lincoln. I’d guess that the choice of victim by your unsub is mostly accessibility and convenience — to have a place and the time to do the tattoo undisturbed … Then I think there’s the fear factor.’

‘What’sat?’ Sellitto asked.

‘He’s got another agenda beyond murdering individuals — clearly it’s not to rob them, it’s not sexual. It may serve his purposes to put the whole city on edge. Everybody in New York’s going to be thinking twice about heading into basements and garages and laundry rooms and using back doors to their offices and apartments. Now, a few other points. First, if he’s truly been influenced by the Bone Collector, then he may think about targeting you personally, Lincoln. And Amelia. In fact, you all might be in danger. Second, he’s clearly an organized offender, as I said. And that means he’s been checking out his victims, or at least the kill sites, ahead of time.’

Rhyme said, ‘We’re going on that assumption.’

‘Good. And finally — if he were really a copycat he would have concentrated on the victim’s bones. But he’s obsessed with skin. It’s central to his goal. He could just as easily be injecting them with poison or making them drink it. Or for that matter stabbing people or shooting them. But he’s not. He’s obviously a professional artist — so every time he puts one of his designs on a body, he claims somebody else’s skin as his own.’

‘A skin collector,’ Pulaski said.

‘Exactly. If you can find out why he’s so fascinated with skin, that’s key to understanding the case.’ Rhyme heard another voice, indistinct, from the doctor’s office. ‘Ah, you’ll have to excuse me now. I’m afraid I have a session to get to.’

‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Sachs said.

After he disconnected, Rhyme told Pulaski to put Dobyns’s observations up on the chart.

Quasi-babble … but, Rhyme reluctantly admitted, it might be helpful.

He said, ‘We should talk to Pam. See if anybody’s contacted her about the Bone Collector.’

Sachs nodded. ‘Not a bad idea.’

Pam was now out of the foster system and living on her own in Brooklyn, not far from where Sachs kept her apartment. It seemed unlikely that the unsub would even know about her. Because Pam was a child at the time of the Bone Collector kidnapping, her name had never come up in the press. And Serial Cities hadn’t mentioned her either.

Sachs gave the young woman a call and left a message asking her to come over to Rhyme’s. There was something she wanted to discuss.

‘Pulaski. Get back to marble detail. I want to find where that stone dust came from.’

The doorbell buzzed. And Thom disappeared to answer it.

He returned to the parlor a moment later beside a sinewy man in his thirties, with a weathered, creased face and long blond ponytail. He also had the most extravagant beard Rhyme had ever seen. He was amused at the difference between the two standing before him. Thom was in dark dress slacks, a pastel-yellow shirt and a rust-colored tie. The visitor wore a spotless tuxedo jacket, way too thin for the raging weather, ironed black jeans and a black long-sleeve pullover emblazoned with a red spider. His brown boots were polished like a mahogany table. The only attribute this man and the aide shared was a slender build, though Thom was a half foot taller.

‘You must be TT Gordon,’ Rhyme said.

‘Yeah. And, hey, you’re the dude in the wheelchair.’

CHAPTER 14

Rhyme took in the bizarre beard, the steel rods in the ears and eyebrows.

Parts of tats were visible on the backs of Gordon’s hands; the rest of the inking vanished under his pullover. Rhyme believed he could make out POW! on the right wrist.

He drew no conclusions about the man’s appearance. He’d long ago given up on the spurious practice of equating the essence of a person with his or her physical incarnation. His own condition was the prototype for this way of thinking.

His main reaction was: How badly had the piercings hurt? This was something Rhyme could relate to; his ears and brows were places in which he could feel pain. And the other thought: If TT Gordon ever got busted he’d be picked out of a lineup in an instant.

A nod to Sellitto, who reciprocated.

‘Hey. The wheelchair thing I said? It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded,’ Gordon said, smiling and looking at everyone in the room. His eyes returned to Rhyme’s. ‘Obviously you’re in a wheelchair. I meant, hey, you’re the famous dude in the wheelchair. I didn’t make the connection before. When he’ — a nod at Sellitto — ‘came to my shop, he said “consultant”. You’re in the papers. I’ve seen you on TV. Why don’t you do that Nancy Grace show? That’d be very cool. Do you watch it?’

This was just natural rambling, Rhyme deduced, not awkward, I-don’t-want-to-be-with-a-gimp rambling. The disability seemed to Gordon merely another aspect of Rhyme, like his dark hair and fleshy nose and intense eyes and trim fingernails.

An identifying marker, not a political one.

Gordon greeted the others, Sachs, Cooper and Pulaski. Then he gazed around the room, whose decor Rhyme had once described as Hewlett-Packard Victorian. ‘Hm. Well. Cool.’

Sachs said, ‘We appreciate your coming here to help us.’

‘Like, no problem. I want this guy taken down. This dude, what he’s doing? It’s bad for everybody who mods for a living.’

‘What does that mean? “Mods”?’ Sachs asked.

‘Modifying bodies, you know. Inking people, piercing, cutting.’ He tapped his ear bars. ‘Everything. “Modding” covers the gamut.’ He frowned. ‘Whatever a gamut is. I don’t really know.’

Rhyme said, ‘Lon says you’re pretty well connected in the tattoo community here and that you don’t have any specific idea who it might be.’

Gordon confirmed this.

Sellitto added that Gordon had looked over a picture of the victim’s tattoo but wanted a better image; the printout hadn’t been that clear.

Cooper said, ‘I’ll call up the raw.nef files and save them as enhanced.tiffs.’

Rhyme had no clue what he was talking about. In the days when he worked crime scenes himself he used actual thirty-five-millimeter film that had to be developed in chemicals and printed in a darkroom. Back then you made every frame count. Now? You shot the hell out of a crime scene and culled.

Cooper said, ‘I’ll send them to the Nvidia computer — the big screen there.’

‘Whatever, dude. As long as it’s clear.’

Pulaski asked, ‘You seen The Big Lebowski?’

‘Oh, man.’ Gordon grinned and punched a fist Pulaski’s way. The rookie reciprocated.

Rhyme wondered: Maybe Tarantino.

The pictures appeared on the largest monitor in the room. They were extremely high-definition images of the tattoo on Chloe Moore’s abdomen. TT Gordon gave one blink of shock at the worried skin, the welts, the discoloration. ‘Worse than I thought, the poisoning and everything. Like he created his own hot zone.’

‘What’s that?’

Gordon explained that tattoo parlors were divided into zones, hot and cold. The cold zone was where there was no risk of contamination by one customer’s blood getting into another’s. No unsterilized needles or machine parts or chairs, for instance. Hot, obviously, was the opposite, where the tattoo machine and needles were tainted by customers’ blood and body fluids. ‘We do everything we can to keep the two separate. But here, this dude did the opposite — intentionally infected, well, poisoned her. Man. Fucked up.’

But then the artist settled into an analytic mode that Rhyme found encouraging. Gordon eyed a computer. ‘Can I?’

‘Sure,’ Cooper said.

The artist hit keys and scrolled through the images, enlarging some.

Rhyme asked, ‘TT, are the words “the second” significant in any way in the tattoo world?’

‘No. Has no meaning that I know about and I’ve been inking for nearly twenty years. Guess it’s something significant to the dude who killed her. Or maybe the victim.’

‘Probably the perp,’ Amelia Sachs explained to Gordon. ‘There’s no evidence that he knew Chloe before he killed her.’

‘Oh. She was Chloe.’ Gordon said this softly. He touched his beard. Then scrolled once more. ‘Well, it’s weird for a client to make up a phrase or a passage for a modding. Sometimes I’ll ink a poem they’ve written. I’ll tell you, mostly they suck, big time. Usually, though, if somebody wants text, it’s a passage from something like their favorite book. The Bible. Or a famous quote. Or a saying, you know. “Live Free or Die.” “Born to Ride.” Things like that.’ Then he frowned. ‘Hm. Okay.’

‘What?’

‘Could be a splitter.’

‘And that is?’ Rhyme asked.

‘Some clients split their mods. They get half a word on one arm, the other half on another. Sometimes they’ll get part of the tat inked on their body, and their girlfriend or boyfriend get the other part on theirs.’

‘Why?’ Pulaski asked.

‘Why?’ Gordon seemed perplexed by the question. ‘Tats connect people. That’s one of the whole points of getting inked. Even if you’ve got unique works, you’re still part of the ink world. You got something in common, you know. That connects you, see, dude?’

Sachs said, ‘You seem to’ve done some thinking about all this.’

Gordon laughed. ‘Oh, I could be a shrink, I tell you.’

‘Freud,’ Sellitto said.

‘Dude,’ Gordon responded with a grin. That fist again. Sellitto didn’t take the offer.

Sachs asked, ‘And can you tell us anything concrete about him?’

Sellitto added, ‘We’re not going to quote you. Or get you on the witness stand. We just want to know who this guy is. Get into his head.’

Gordon was looking at the equipment, hesitating.

‘Well, okay. First, he’s a natural, a total talent as an artist, not just a technician. A lot of inkers are paint-by-numbers guys. They slap on a stencil somebody else did and fill it in. But’ — a nod at the picture — ‘there’s no evidence of a stencil there. He used a bloodline.’

‘Which is what?’ Rhyme asked.

‘If they’re not using a stencil, most artists draw an outline of the work on the skin first. Some draw freehand with a pen — water-soluble ink. But there’s no sign of that here. Your guy didn’t do that. He just turned on his tattoo machine and used a lining needle for the outline, so instead of ink you have a line of blood that’s the outer perimeter of your design. So, bloodline. Only the best tat artists do that.’

Pulaski asked, ‘A pro then?’

‘Oh, yeah, dude’d have to be a pro. Like I told him.’ A nod at Sellitto. ‘Or was at some point. That level of skill? He could open his own shop in a blind second. And probably he’s a real artist too — I mean like with paint and pen and ink and everything. And I don’t think he’s from here. For one thing, I probably would’ve heard. Not from the tristate area, either. Doing this in fifteen minutes? Man, that’s lightning. His name’d get around. Then, look at the typeface.’

Rhyme’s, and everyone else’s, eyes slipped to the screen.

‘It’s Old English, or some Gothic variation. You don’t see that much now around here. I’d guess he’s got rural roots: redneck, shit kicker, biker, meth cooker. On the other hand, maybe born-again, righteous, upstanding. But definitely a country boy.’

‘The typeface tells you that?’ Sachs asked.

‘Oh, yeah. Here, if somebody wants words, they’ll go for some kind of flowery script or thick sans serif. At least that’s current now. Man, for a few years everybody wanted this Elvish crap.’

‘Elvis Presley?’ Sellitto asked.

‘No, Elvish. Lord of the Rings.’

‘So country,’ Rhyme said. ‘Any particular region?’

‘Not really. There’s city inking and country inking. All I can say is this smells like country. Now, look at the border. The scallops. The technique is scarification. Or cicatrization is the official name for it. That’s important.’

He looked up and tapped the scallops surrounding the words ‘the second’.

‘What’s significant is that usually people scar to draw attention to an image. It’s important for this dude to make that design more prominent. It would’ve been easier just to ink a border. But, no, he wanted cicatrization. There’s a reason for it, I’m guessing. No clue what. But there it is.

‘Now, there’s one other thing. I was thinking about it. I brought show-and-tell.’ Gordon reached into his canvas shoulder bag and lifted out a plastic sack containing a number of metal parts. Rhyme recognized the transparent container as the sort in which surgical and forensic instruments are sterilized in an autoclave. ‘These are part of a tattoo machine — you don’t call them guns, by the way.’ Gordon smiled. ‘Whatever you hear on TV.’

He took a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut open the bag. In a moment he’d assembled a tattoo gun — well, machine. ‘Here’s what it looks like put together and ready to ink.’ The tattoo artist walked closer to the others. ‘These’re the coils that move the needle up and down. This’s the tube for the ink and here’s the needle itself, coming out the end.’

Rhyme could see it, very small.

‘Needles have to go into the dermis — the layer of skin just below the outermost layer.’

‘Which is the epidermis,’ Rhyme said.

Nodding, Gordon disassembled the device and lifted out the needle, displaying it to everyone. Resembling a thin shish kebab skewer, about three inches long, it had a ring on one end. The other end contained a cluster of tiny metal rods soldered or welded together. They ended in sharp points.

‘See how they’re joined together, in a star-shaped pattern? I make ’em myself. Most serious artists do. But we have to buy blanks and combine ’em. There’re two types of needles: those for lining — outlining the image — and then those for filling or shading. The dude needed to get a lot of poison into her body fast. That means he had to use filling needles after he was done with the bloodline. But these wouldn’t work, I don’t think. They wouldn’t go deep enough. But this kind of needle would.’ He reached into his bag once more and extracted a small plastic jar. He shook out two rods of metal, similar to his needles but longer. ‘They’re from an old-time rotary machine — the new ones, like mine, are two-coil, oscillation models. Was it a portable machine?’

‘Had to be. There was no electric source,’ Sachs told him.

Pulaski said, ‘I’ve been looking for portable guns … machines. But there’re a lot of them.’

Gordon thought for a moment. Then said, ‘I’m guessing it would have to be an American Eagle model. Goes way back. One of the first to run off battery power. It comes from the days when tattooing wasn’t very scientific. The artist could adjust the stroke of the needles. He could make them go real deep. I’d look for somebody who’s got an Eagle.’

Sellitto asked, ‘Are they sold here? In supply stores?’

‘I’ve never seen any. They’re not made anymore. You could get them online, I’d guess. That’d be the only way to find them.’

‘No, he’s not going to be buying anything that way, too traceable,’ Rhyme pointed out. ‘He probably picked it up where he lives. Or maybe he’s had it for years or inherited it.’

‘Needles’re a different story. You might be able to find somebody who’s sold needles for American Eagles. Anybody who bought those recently could be he.’

‘What’d you say?’ Rhyme asked.

‘What did I say?’ The slim man frowned. ‘When, now? Whoever’s buying needles for an American Eagle machine, it could be your perp. Don’t you say that? They do on NCIS.’

The criminalist laughed. ‘No. I was noting the proper use of the pronoun. Nominative case.’

Rhyme noted Pulaski roll his eyes.

‘Oh, that? The “he”?’ Gordon shrugged. ‘I never did very … well in school. Thought I was going to say “good”, didn’t you? Couple years at Hunter but got bored, you know. But when I started inking, I’d do a lot of text. Bible verses, passages from books, poems. So I learned writing from famous authors. Spelling, grammar. I mean, dude, it was pretty interesting. Typography too. The same passage in one font has a whole different impact when it’s printed in another.

‘Sometimes a couple’d come in and they’d want to ink wedding vows on their arms or ankles. Or crappy love poems they’d written, like I mentioned. I’d say, okay, dudes, you sure you want to go through life with “Jimmy I love you you’re heart and mine for ever” on your biceps. That’s Jimmy no comma, you no period or semicolon, Y-O-U apostrophe R-E, and for ever two words. They’d say, “Huh.” I’d edit anyway when I inked them. They’ll have kids and have to go to a PTA meeting, meet the English teacher. After all, not like you can use White-Out, right?’

‘And cut and paste would be really bad,’ Pulaski joked, drawing smiles.

But not from Gordon. ‘Oh, there’s a version of scarification where people actually cut strips of skin out of their body.’

Rhyme then heard a click in the front door latch and the door open — or, more accurately, the wind howl and the sleet clatter from the sky.

The door closed.

After that footsteps and a light, airy laugh.

He knew who had come to visit and shot a glance to Sachs, who quickly rose and turned around the whiteboard that contained the crime scene pictures of Chloe Moore and switched the high-def screens away from the images TT Gordon had been examining.

A moment later Pam Willoughby stepped into the room. The pretty, slim nineteen year old was enwrapped in a brown overcoat trimmed in faux fur. Her long, dark hair was tucked up under a burgundy stocking cap, and her outer garments were dusted with dots of sleet or snow, melting fast. She waved hello to everyone.

Accompanying her was her boyfriend, Seth McGuinn, a handsome, dark-haired man of about twenty-five. She introduced him to Pulaski and Mel Cooper, neither of whom he’d met.

Seth’s dark-brown eyes, which matched Pam’s, blinked when they turned to TT Gordon, who greeted the couple pleasantly. Pam had a similar reaction. Rhyme had seen athletic Seth in a T-shirt and jogging shorts, when he and Pam had been going to the park several weeks ago, and noted he’d sported no tattoos. Pam had none either, visible at least. The young couple now tried, unsuccessfully, to hide their surprise at Rhyme’s quirky visitor.

Pam detached herself from Seth’s arm, kissed Rhyme on the cheek and hugged Thom. Seth shook everyone’s hand.

TT Gordon asked if they needed any more help with the case. Sellitto glanced around the room at the others and when Rhyme shook his head, said, ‘Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out for anything weird. In the community, you know what I mean? So long, dudes.’

Gordon stashed his gear, pulled on his pitifully thin jacket and headed out the door.

Seth and Pam shared a smile, looking after Gordon’s exit.

Sachs said, ‘Hey, Pam. I think Seth needs a ’stache.’

The clean-cut young man nodded, frowning. ‘Hell, I can outdo him. I’d go with braids.’

Pam said, ‘Naw, get pierced. That way we can swap earrings.’

Seth said he had to be going; a deadline for his ad agency loomed. He kissed Pam, chastely, as if Rhyme and Sachs were the girl’s real parents. Then he nodded a farewell to the others. At the archway he turned and reminded Sachs and Rhyme that his parents would like to have lunch or dinner with them soon. Rhyme generally disliked such socializing but since Pam was, in effect, family, he’d agreed to go. And reminded himself to endure the pleasantries and mundane conversation with a smile.

‘Next week?’ Rhyme asked.

‘Perfect. Dad’s back from Hong Kong.’ He added that his father had found a copy of Rhyme’s book about New York crime scenes. ‘Any chance of an autograph?’

Recent surgery had improved Rhyme’s muscle control to the point that he actually could write his name — not as clearly as before the accident but as good as any doctor writing a prescription. ‘Delighted to.’

When he’d left, Pam pulled off her jacket and hat, set them on a chair, asked Sachs, ‘So, your message? What’s up?’

The detective nodded toward the sitting room, across the hall from Rhyme’s lab/parlor, and said, ‘How ’bout we go in there.’

CHAPTER 15

‘Now,’ Sachs said, ‘listen. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’

In her charming lilt of an alto voice Pam said, ‘Okay, there’s a way to start a conversation.’ She tossed her hair, which she wore like Sachs’s, beyond shoulder length, no bangs.

Sachs smiled. ‘No, really.’ She was looking the girl over closely and decided that she had a glow about her. Maybe it was her job, ‘costuming’, Pam called it, for a theater production company. She loved behind the scenes Broadway. College too she enjoyed.

But, no, Sachs asked herself: What’m I thinking? Of course. The answer was Seth.

Thom appeared in the doorway with a tray. Hot chocolate. The smell was both bitter and sweet. ‘Don’t you just love the winter?’ he asked. ‘When the temperature’s below thirty-five hot chocolate doesn’t have any calories. Lincoln could come up with the chemical formula for that.’

They thanked the aide. He then asked Pam, ‘When’s the premiere?’

Pam was attending NYU but she had a light class load this semester and — as a talented seamstress — was working part-time as an assistant to the assistant costumer for a Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd — the musical adaptation, by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, of an older play detailing the life of the homicidal barber in London. Todd would slice his customers’ throats and a conspirator would bake the victims into pies. Rhyme had reported to Sachs and Pam that the perp reminded him of a criminal he’d once pursued, though he added that Todd was purely fictional. Pam had seemed playfully disappointed at that factoid.

Cutting throats, cannibalism, Sachs reflected. Talk about body modification.

‘We open in a week,’ Pam said. ‘And I’ll have tickets for everybody. Even Lincoln.’

Thom said, ‘He’s actually looking forward to going.’

Sachs said, ‘No!’

‘Gospel.’

‘Heart be still.’

Pam said, ‘I’ve got a disabled slot reserved. And you know the theater has a bar.’

Sachs laughed. ‘He’ll be there for sure.’

Thom left, closing the door behind him, and Sachs continued, ‘So, here’s what’s happened. The man who kidnapped you and your mother? Years ago?’

‘Oh, yeah. The Bone Collector?’

Sachs nodded. ‘It looks like there’s somebody who’s copying him. In a way. He’s not obsessed with bones, though. But skin.’

‘God. What does he …? I mean, does he skin people?’

‘No, he killed his victim by tattooing her with poison.’

Pam closed her eyes and shivered. ‘Sick. Oh, wait. That guy on the news. He killed the girl in SoHo?’

‘Right. Now, there’s no evidence he has any interest in the surviving victims from back then. He’s using the tattoos to send a message, so he’ll pick targets in out-of-the-way places, we think — if we don’t stop him first. We checked but none of the other survivors of the Bone Collector are in the area. You’re the only one. Now, has anybody asked you anything about being kidnapped, about what happened?’

‘No, nobody.’

‘Well, we’re ninety-nine percent sure he has no interest in you at all. The killer—’

‘The unsub,’ Pam said, offering a knowing smile.

‘The unsub won’t know about you — your name wasn’t in the press because you were so young. And your mother used a pseudonym back then anyway. But I wanted you to know. Keep an eye out. And at night we’re going to have an officer parked outside your apartment.’

‘Okay.’ Pam didn’t seem fazed by this information. In fact, Sachs now realized something: The news that there might be a connection, however tenuous, with Unsub 11-5 whom the press had dubbed the Underground Man, was greeted with what seemed to Sachs to be such lack of concern that she realized the girl had another topic in mind.

And it was soon placed — no, dumped — on the table.

Pam sipped some cocoa and her eyes looked everywhere but at Sachs’s. ‘So, here’s the thing, Amelia. Something I wanted to talk about with you.’ Smiling. Smiling too much. Sachs grew nervous. She too took a sip. Didn’t taste a bit of the rich brew. She thought immediately: Pregnant?

Of course. That was it.

Sachs stifled her anger. Why hadn’t they been careful? Why—?

‘I’m not going to have a baby. Relax.’

Sachs did. Coughed a brief laugh. She wondered if her body language was that readable.

‘But Seth and me? We’re moving in together.’

This soon? Still, Sachs kept the smile on her face. Was it just as fake as the teenager’s?

‘Are you now? Well. That’s exciting news.’

Pam laughed, apparently at the disconnect between the modifier and Sachs’s less-than-excited expression. ‘Look, Amelia. We’re not getting married. Just, it’s time for this to happen. I feel it. He feels it. It’s just right. We’re like totally compatible. He knows me, really knows me. There’re times I don’t even have to say anything and he knows what I’m thinking. And he’s just so nice, you know?’

‘It’s kind of fast, don’t you think, honey?’

Pam’s enthusiasm, the sparkle, dimmed. Sachs recalled that her mother, who’d beaten the girl and locked her in a closet for hours on end, had called her ‘honey’, and Pam had grown to hate the endearment. Sachs regretted using it but she’d been flustered and forgotten the word was tainted.

She tried again. ‘Pam, he’s a great guy. Lincoln and I both think so.’

This was true.

But Sachs couldn’t stop herself. ‘It’s just, I mean, don’t you really think it’d be better to wait? What’s the hurry? Just hang out, date. Spend the night … Go away on a trip.’

Coward, Sachs told herself, having given the last two suggestions, since her goal was to wedge some distance between Pam and Seth. She was negotiating against herself.

‘Well, interesting you say that.’

Interesting? Sachs reflected. If she’s not pregnant … Oh, no. Her jaw tightened and the next words confirmed her fear.

‘What we’re going to do is take a year off. We’re going to travel.’

‘Oh. Okay. A year.’ Sachs was simply buying time at this point. She might’ve said, ‘How ’bout them Yankees?’ Or ‘I hear the sleet’s going to break in a day or so.’

Pam pressed forward. ‘He’s sick of copywriting freelance. He’s totally talented. But nobody appreciates him in New York. He doesn’t complain but I can see he’s upset. The ad agencies he works for, they have budget problems. So they can’t hire him full-time. He wants to go places. He’s ambitious. It’s so hard here.’

‘Well, sure. New York is always a tough place to get ahead.’

Pam’s voice hardened as she said, ‘He’s tried. It’s not like he hasn’t tried.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘He’s going to write travel articles. I’m going to help him. I’ve always wanted to travel; we’ve talked about that.’

They had, yes. Except Sachs had always imagined that she and Pam would explore Europe or Asia. Big sister and kid sister. She had a fantasy of touring the parts of Germany her ancestors had come from.

‘But school … The statistics show it’s so hard to come back after dropping out.’

‘Why? What statistics? That doesn’t make sense.’

Okay, Sachs didn’t have any numbers. She was making that up. ‘Hon — Pam, I’m happy for you, both of you. Just, well, you have to understand. This’s a pretty big surprise. Fast, like I was saying. You haven’t known him that long.’

‘A year.’

True. In a way. They’d met last December and dated briefly. Then Seth had gone to England for training with an ad agency planning to open a New York office, and he and Pam had joined the ranks of those keeping a relationship afloat via text, Twitter and email. The company had decided not to venture into the US market, though, and Seth had come back a month ago and resumed free-lance copywriting. Normal dating had resumed.

‘And so what if it’s fast?’ An edge to Pam’s voice again. She’d always had a temper — you couldn’t have her upbringing and not find anger near the surface. But she pulled back. ‘Look, Amelia. Now’s the time to do this. When we’re this age. Later? If we get married and if we have kids?’

Please. Don’t go there.

‘You can’t backpack around Europe then.’

‘What about money? You can’t work over there.’

‘That’s not a problem. He’ll sell his articles. And Seth’s been saving for a while and his parents’re totally rich. They can help us out.’

His mother was a lawyer and father an investment banker, Sachs recalled.

‘And we have the blog. I’ll keep doing that from the road.’

Seth had created a website a few years ago where people could post their support for various social and political issues, mostly left-leaning. Women’s right to choose, support for the arts, gun control. Pam was now more involved than he was in running the site. Yes, it seemed popular, though Sachs estimated that the donations they received totaled about a thousand dollars a year.

‘But … where? What countries? Is it safe?’

‘We don’t know yet. That’s part of the adventure.’

Desperate to buy time, Sachs asked, ‘What do the Olivettis say?’

After Sachs had rescued her the girl had gone into a foster home (which Sachs had checked out as if vetting the president’s personal bodyguard). The temporary parents had been wonderful but at eighteen, last year, Pam had wanted to be on her own and — with Rhyme’s and Sachs’s help — she enrolled in college and got a part-time job. Pam had remained close to her foster mom and dad, though.

‘They’re okay with it.’

But, of course, the Olivettis were professional parents; they’d had no connection with Pam before she’d been placed with them. They hadn’t kicked in a door and saved her from the Bone Collector and a wild dog eager to shake her to death. They hadn’t leapt into a firefight with Pam’s stepfather, who was trying to suffocate her.

And, those traumas aside, it had been Sachs who’d spent a lot more time than the busy foster parents schlepping Pam to and from after-school activities, doctors’ appointments and counselling sessions. And it was the detective who’d used some of the few existing connections from her former fashion model career to get Pam the wardrobe department job on Broadway.

Sachs couldn’t help but note too that the girl had told the Olivettis first about her travel plans.

Come on, I deserve a hearing, Sachs thought.

Which was not, however, Pam’s opinion. She said brusquely, ‘Anyway, we’ve decided.’

Then Pam grew suddenly giddy, though Sachs could see the emotions were fake. That was clear. ‘It’ll be a year. Two, tops.’

Now two?

‘Pam,’ Sachs began. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

Yes, you do. So say it.

As a cop, Sachs never held back. She couldn’t as a big sister either. Or surrogate mother. Or whatever her role in the girl’s life might be.

‘Knuckle time, Pam.’

The girl knew of Sachs’s father’s expression. She gauged Sachs with narrowed eyes, which were both cautious and flinty.

‘A year on the road with somebody you don’t really know?’ Sachs said this evenly, trying to keep some tenderness in the tone.

But the woman responded as if Sachs had thrown open the parlor window and let in a flood of sleety wind. ‘We do know each other,’ Pam said defiantly. ‘That’s the whole point. Didn’t you hear me?’

‘I mean really know each other. That takes years.’

Pam shot back, ‘We’re right for each other. It’s simple.’

‘Have you met his family?’

‘I’ve talked to his mother. She’s totally sweet.’

‘Talked to?’

‘Yes,’ the girl snapped. ‘Talked to. And his father knows all about me.’

‘But you haven’t met them?’

A cool chill. ‘This’s about me and Seth. Not his parents. And this cross-examination is pissing me off.’

‘Pam.’ Sachs leaned forward. She reached for the girl’s hand. It was, of course, eased out of reach. ‘Pam, have you told him about what happened to you?’

‘I have. And he doesn’t care.’

‘Everything? Have you told him everything?’

Pam fell silent and looked down. Then she said defensively, ‘There’s no need to … No, not everything. I told him my mother was crazy and did some bad things. He knows she’s in jail and will be there forever. He’s totally fine with it.’

Then he was from The Walking Dead, Sachs reflected. ‘And where you grew up? How you grew up? Did you tell him any of that?’

‘Not really. But that’s in the past. That’s over with.’

‘I don’t think you can ignore it, Pam. He has to know. Your mother did a lot of damage—’

‘Oh, I’m crazy too? Like my mother? That’s how you look at me?’

Sachs was stung by this comment but she tried to keep a light tone. ‘Come on, you’re saner than any politician in Washington.’ She smiled. It wasn’t reciprocated.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ Pam’s voice rose.

‘Of course not, no! I’m just concerned about you.’

‘No. You’re saying I’m too fucked up, I’m too immature to make decisions on my own.’

Sachs was growing angry herself. The defensive didn’t suit her. ‘Then make smart ones.’ If you really love him and it’s going to work out, a year or so of dating won’t mean anything.’

‘We’re going away, Amelia. And then we’re moving in when we get back. I mean, Get over it.’

‘Don’t talk that way to me,’ Sachs snapped back. She knew she was losing it but couldn’t stop herself.

The young woman rose abruptly, knocking her cup over and spilling it onto the silver tray.

‘Shit.’

She bent forward and angrily mopped it up. Sachs leaned in to help but Pam pulled the tray away and continued cleaning by herself, then tossed down the brown, saturated napkin. She glared at Sachs with shockingly feral eyes. ‘I know exactly what’s going on. You want to break us up. You’re looking for any excuse.’ A cold grin. ‘It’s all about you, isn’t it, Amelia? You want to break us up just so you can have the daughter you were too busy being a cop to have.’

Sachs nearly gasped at the searing accusation — perhaps, she admitted silently, because there was a splinter of truth in it.

Pam stormed to the door, paused and said, ‘You’re not my mother, Amelia. Remember that. You’re the woman who put my mother in prison.’

Then she was gone.

CHAPTER 16

Near midnight, Billy Haven cleared away his supper dishes, washing everything that wasn’t disposable in bleach to remove DNA.

Which was as dangerous — to him — as some of the poisons he’d extracted and refined.

He sat back down at the rickety table in the kitchen area of his workshop, off Canal Street, and opened the dog-eared, battered notebook, the Commandments.

Delivered, in a way, by the hand of God.

Those stone tablets to Moses.

The notebook, with its dozen or so pages of tightly packed sentences — in Billy’s beautiful, flowing cursive writing — described in detail how the Modification should unfold, who should die, when to do what, the risks to avoid, the risks to take, what advantages to seize, how to cope with unexpected reversals. An exact timetable. If Genesis were a how-to guide like the Modification Commandments, the first book of the Bible would read:

Which naturally brought to mind Lovely Girl. He pictured her for a moment, face, hair, pure-white skin, then eased away the distracting image the way you’d set aside a precious snapshot of a departed loved one — carefully, out of a superstitious fear of harming your love if you dropped the frame.

Flipping through the pages, he studied what was coming next. Pausing once again to reflect that the Modification was certainly complicated. At various points in the process he’d wondered if it was too much so. But he thought back to the pages of the chapter he’d stolen from the library earlier that day, Serial Cities, recalling all the surprising — no, shocking — information it had revealed.

Experts in law enforcement universally voice the opinion of Lincoln Rhyme that his greatest skill was his ability to anticipate what the criminals he’s pursuing will do next.

He believed that was the quotation; he wasn’t sure, since Chloe Moore, no longer of this earth, had inconsiderately ripped a portion of that passage from the book.

Anticipate …

So, yes, the plan for the Modification had to be this precise. The people he was up against were too good for him to be careless, to miss a cue in any way.

He reviewed plans for the next attack, tomorrow. He memorized locations, he memorized timing. Everything seemed in order. In his mind he rehearsed the attack; he’d already been to the site. He now pictured it, he smelled it.

Good. He was ready.

Then he glanced at his right wrist, the watch. He was tired.

And what, he wondered, was going on with the investigation into the demise of Ms Chloe?

He turned on the radio, hoping for news.

The earlier reports had been that a young resident of Queens, a woman clerk in a stylish boutique in SoHo, had been found dead in an access tunnel off the cellar. Well, Billy had thought, perplexed, it was hardly very stylish. Chinese crap, overpriced and meant for frothy-hair sluts from Jersey and mothers seared by the approach of middle age.

Initially Chloe’s name had not been released, pending notification of next of kin.

Hearing that, Billy had reflected: How sadistic can one cop be? To release the news that a young woman from Queens has been killed and not divulge the name? How many parents of kids living in that area had started making desperate phone calls?

Now, waiting for an update, all he got were commercials. Didn’t anyone care about poor Chloe Moore?

Chloe Moore, Chloe the whore …

He paced back and forth in front of his terrariums. White leaves, green leaves, red leaves, blue …

Then, as often happened when he looked over the plants who were his companions, he thought of Oleander.

And the Oleander Room.

Billy resented that that thought intruded but there was nothing to do about it. He could—

Ah, now the news. Finally.

A city council scandal, a minor train derailment, an economic report. Then, at last, a follow-up on Chloe Moore’s demise. Additional details were coughed up now, a bit of history. The facts suggested the attack was not sexual in nature. (Of course not; Billy was offended that the subject had even come up. The media. Despicable.) A rough description. So someone had spotted him near the manhole.

He listened as the story wound down.

Still nothing about tattooing. Nothing about poison.

That was typical, Billy knew. He’d read about police procedures in verifying confessions. The cops ask people taking credit for a crime certain unique details and, if they can’t answer, the supposed perpetrators are dismissed as crackpots (a surprising number of people confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed).

Nor had the story mentioned anything about the phrase ‘the second’.

But that would be a thorn in their sides, of course.

What on earth could the message be that their mysterious perp was sending?

The Modification Commandments required, however, that it would be impossible for the police to decipher his message from the first several victims.

He shut the radio off.

Billy yawned. Sleep soon. He checked email, sent some texts, received some, then two hums of the watches told him it was time to get some rest.

When he was through in the bathroom, where he cleaned the basin and toothbrush with bleach — banishing the DNA once more — he returned to his bed, flopping down in it. He tugged his Bible from under the pillow and propped it on his chest.

Billy had had a crisis of faith a few years ago. A serious one. He believed in Jesus and the power of Christ. But he also believed he was meant to put his talents to use as a tattoo artist.

The problem was this: The book of Leviticus warned, You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.

He’d been depressed for weeks upon learning this. He wrestled with how to reconcile the conflict.

One argument was that the Bible was full of such dissonance: In the same chapter, for instance, it was written: ‘Nor shall a garment of mixed linen and wool come upon you.’ Yet God surely had other priorities than sending to hell people wearing blended cloth suits.

Billy had wondered if He intended future generations to reinterpret the Bible, to bring it into line with contemporary society. But that seemed suspect; it was like those Supreme Court justices who said that the Constitution was a living thing and should change to suit the times.

Dangerous, thinking like that.

Finally the answer to this apparent contradiction appeared. Billy had reasoned: The Bible also says, Thou shalt not kill. But the Good Book was filled with instances of outright murder — including a fair amount of carnage by the Almighty Himself. So, it was okay to kill in certain instances. Such as to further the glory of God, eliminate infidels and threats, further the values of truth and justice. Dozens of reasons.

So in Leviticus, it was clear, God had to mean that tattooing too was acceptable under certain circumstances, just like taking lives.

And what better circumstances could there be than the mission Billy was on at the moment?

The Modification.

He opened his Bible. He settled on a verse in Exodus, a well-read page.