The Skin Collector

CHAPTER 17

The morning had been a flurry of activity, trying to correlate the evidence Sachs had come up with to pinpoint a place where the unsub might be living or had decided to make his stalking ground.

Rhyme wheeled back and forth in front of the chart, feeling in his neck and jaw the thump as the Merits chair rolled over one of the power cables bisecting the floor of his parlor.

Rhyme turned from the chart to Amelia Sachs, whom he caught staring out the window into the sleety morning. She was still obviously troubled by the news she’d received yesterday — that Pam was going on a ’round-the-world tour with her boyfriend, then moving in with him when they returned.

Seth was a nice young man, she’d explained as they’d lain in his sumptuous bed last night, lights out, the wind battering the windows. ‘To date. Not hole up in a hostel in Morocco or Goa. Maybe he’s Mr Perfect, maybe he’s not. Who can tell?’

‘Think it’ll blow over?’

‘No. She’s determined.’

‘Like you. Remember your mother didn’t like you going out with a gimp in a wheelchair?’

‘You could’ve been a marathon runner and she wouldn’t’ve liked you. Nobody could meet my mother’s standards. She likes you now, though.’

‘My point exactly.’

‘I like Seth. I’ll like him better in a year.’

Rhyme had smiled.

She had asked, ‘Any thoughts?’

‘Afraid not.’ Rhyme had been married for a few years. He’d gotten divorced not long after his accident (his call; not his wife’s), but the marriage had been doomed for some time. He was sure he’d been in love at some point but the relationship had soured for reasons he could never isolate, quantify and analyze. As for what he had with Sachs? It worked because it worked. That was the best he could say. Lincoln Rhyme was admittedly in no position to offer romantic advice.

But then who, ultimately, was? Love is an occurrence for which there are no expert witnesses.

Sachs had added, ‘And I didn’t handle it well. I got protective. Too motherly. It turned ugly. I should’ve been objective, rational. But, no, I let things get out of control.’

Now, this morning, Rhyme could see that Sachs was still deeply troubled. He was thinking he should say something reassuring, when, to his relief, the professional deflected the personal.

‘Have something here,’ Pulaski called from across the lab, where he’d been staring at a monitor. ‘I think …’ He fell silent, glowering. ‘Damn Internet. Just when I had some hits.’

Rhyme could see that his screen was frozen.

‘Okay, okay, up again.’

He was tapping more keys. Maps and schematics and what appeared to be lists of compounds and elemental materials popped up on the big screen.

‘You’re getting to be quite the scientist, rookie,’ Rhyme said, regarding the notes.

‘What do you have, Ron?’ Mel Cooper asked.

‘Some good news for a change. Maybe.’

CHAPTER 18

Harriet Stanton’s family trip to New York, which she’d been looking forward to for years, had not turned out as planned.

It had been derailed by a chance incident that could have changed her life forever.

Harriet now stood before the mirror of the hotel suite she’d spent a restless night in and looked over her suit. Dark. Not black but navy blue.

How close she’d come to selecting the former color. Bad luck, making that choice.

She plucked a few pieces of random lint off the wool, brushed at some dust — the hotel was not as nice as advertised online (but it was affordable and frugality was important in the Stanton family, which hailed from a town where accommodation standards were set by a Holiday Inn).

Fifty-three years old, with slim shoulders and a pear-shaped build (but a slim pear), Harriet had a staunch face that was ruddy and weathered — from gardening, from marshaling children after class in the backyard, from picnics and barbecues. Yet she was the least vain woman on earth, and the only creases that troubled her were not in her face but in the skirt of the suit — one set of wrinkles that she could control.

Given her destination, a grim place, she might easily have ignored the imperfection. But that wasn’t Harriet’s way. There was a right approach and a wrong, a lazy, a misguided approach. She unzipped and sloughed off the skirt, which slid easily over the beige slip.

She deftly ratcheted open the cheap ironing board with one hand (oh, Harriet knew her laundry implements) and plugged in the inadequate iron, which was secured to the board with a wire; were handheld appliance thefts such a terrible problem in New York? And didn’t the hotel have the guests’ credit cards anyway?

Oh, well. It was a different world here, so different from home.

As she waited for the heat to gather she kept replaying her husband’s words from yesterday as they’d walked through the chill streets of New York.

‘Hey, Harriet, hey.’ He’d stopped on the street, halfway between FAO Schwarz and Madison Avenue, hand on a lamppost.

‘Honey?’ she’d asked, circling.

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ The man, ten years older than his wife, had seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m not feeling so good. Something.’ He’d touched his chest. ‘Something here, you know.’

Cab or call? she’d wondered, debating furiously.

Nine one one, of course. Don’t fool around.

In twenty minutes they were at a nearby hospital emergency room.

And the diagnosis: a mild myocardial infarction.

‘A what?’ she’d asked.

Oh, it seemed: heart attack.

This was curious. Outfitted with low cholesterol, the man had never smoked cigarettes in his life, only occasional cigars, and his six-foot-two frame was as narrow and strong as the pole he’d gripped to steady himself when the heart attack had struck. He trekked through the woods after deer and boar every weekend during hunting season when he could find the time. He helped friends frame rec rooms and garages. Every weekend he muscled onto his shoulder forty-pounders of mulch and potting soil and carried them from pickup truck to shed.

‘Unfair,’ Matthew had muttered, upon hearing the diagnosis. ‘Our dream trip to the city, and look what happens. Damn unfair.’

As a precaution, the doctors had transferred him to a hospital about a half hour north of their hotel, which was apparently the best cardiac facility in the city. His prognosis was excellent and he’d be released tomorrow. No surgery was called for. There would be some medication to lower his blood pressure and he’d carry around nitroglycerine tablets. And he should take an aspirin a day. But the doctors seemed to treat the attack as minor.

To test the iron she flicked a dot of spit onto the Teflon plate. It sizzled and leapt off. She spritzed a bit of water onto the skirt from the Dannon bottle and ironed the wrinkles into oblivion.

Slipping the skirt back on, she reexamined herself in the mirror. Good. But she decided she needed some color and tied a red-and-white silk scarf around her neck. Perfect. Bright but not flamboyant. She collected her handbag and left the room, descending to the lobby in an elevator car outside which a chain jangled at every passing floor.

Once outside, Harriet oriented herself and flagged down a cab. She told the driver the name of the hospital and climbed into the back seat. The air inside was funky and she believed the driver, some foreigner, hadn’t bathed recently. A cliché but true.

Despite the sleet, she rolled down the window, prepared to argue if he objected. But he didn’t. He seemed oblivious to her — well, to everything. He punched the button on the meter and sped off.

As they clattered north in the old taxi, Harriet was thinking about the facilities at the hospital. The staff seemed nice and the doctors professional, even if their English was awkward. The one thing she didn’t like, though, was that Matthew’s room in Upper Manhattan Medical Center was in the basement at the end of a long, dim corridor.

Shabby and creepy. And when she’d visited last night it had been deserted.

Looking at the elegant town houses to the left and Central Park to the right, Harriet tried to cast off any concerns about visiting the unpleasant place. She was thinking that maybe the bad luck of the heart attack was an omen, hinting at worse to come.

But then she put those feelings down to superstition, pulled out her phone and sent a cheerful text that she was on her way.

CHAPTER 19

With his backpack over his shoulder — the pack containing the American Eagle machine and some particularly virulent poison — Billy Haven turned down a side street, past a large construction area, avoiding pedestrians.

That is, avoiding witnesses.

He stepped into the doctors’ office building annex, next to the Upper Manhattan Medical Center complex. In the lobby he kept his head down and walked purposefully toward a stairwell. He’d scoped the place out and knew exactly where he was going and how to get there invisibly.

No one paid any attention to the slim young man, like so many slim young men in New York, an artist, a musician, a wishful actor.

Just like them.

Though their backpacks didn’t contain what his did.

Billy pushed through the fire door and started down the stairs. He descended to the basement level and followed the signs to the hospital proper, through a long, dim corridor. It was deserted, as if not many workers knew about it. More likely, they were aware of the dingy route but preferred to walk from office building to hospital on the surface, where you could not only find a Starbucks or buy a slice of Ray’s original pizza but not get dragged into a closet and raped.

The tunnel leading to the hospital was long — several hundred feet — and painted a gray that you associated with warships. Pipes ran overhead. It was dark because the hospital, perhaps in a move to save money, had placed a bulb in every third socket. There were no security cameras.

Billy knew time was critical but he, of course, had to make one stop. He’d noted the detour yesterday, when he’d checked to see if this would be a suitably private route into the hospital.

The sign on the door had intrigued him.

He’d simply had to go inside.

And he did so now, aware of the time pressure. But feeling like a kid playing hooky to hang out in a toy store.

The large room, labeled by the sign Specimens, was dim but lit well enough by the emergency exit lights, which cast an eerie rosy glow on the contents: a thousand jars filled with body parts floating in a jaundiced liquid, presumably formaldehyde.

Eyes, hands, livers, hearts, lungs, sexual organs, breasts, feet. Whole fetuses too. Billy noted that most of the samples dated to the early twentieth century. Maybe back then medical students used the real thing to learn anatomy, while today’s generation went for high def computer images.

Against the wall were shelves of bones, hundreds of them. He thought back to the infamous case Lincoln Rhyme had worked years ago, the Bone Collector crimes. Yet bones held little interest for Billy Haven.

The Rule of Bone?

No, didn’t resonate like the Rule of Skin. No comparison.

He now walked up and down the aisles, examining the jars, which ranged from a few inches to three feet in height. He paused and stared, eye-to-eye with a severed head. The features seemed of South Pacific heritage to Billy, or so he wanted to believe — because, to his delight, the head sported a tattoo: a cross just below where the hairline would have been.

Billy took this as a good sign. The word ‘tattoo’ comes from the Polynesian or Samoan tatau, the process of inking the lower male torso with an elaborate geometric design, called a pe’a (and a woman’s with a similar inking, called a malu). The process takes weeks and is extremely painful. Those who finish the inking get a special title and are respected for their courage. Those who don’t even try are called ‘naked’ in Samoan and marginalized. The worst stigma, though, was awarded to the men and women who started the procedure but didn’t finish it because they couldn’t stand the pain. The shame remained with them forever.

Billy liked the fact that they defined themselves according to their relationship to inking.

He decided to believe that the man he was staring at had endured getting his pe’a and had gone on to be a force in his tribe. Heathen though he might have been, he was brave, a good warrior (even if not clever enough to avoid having his head end up on a steel shelf in the New World).

Billy held the jar in one hand and leaned forward until he was only a few inches from the severed head, separated by thick glass and thin liquid.

He thought about one of his favorite books. The Island of Doctor Moreau. The H. G. Wells novel was about an Englishman shipwrecked on an island, on which the doctor of the title surgically combined humans and animals. Hyena-men, Leopard-men … Billy had read and reread the book the way other kids would read Harry Potter or Twilight.

Vivisection and recombination were the ultimate modding, of course. And Doctor Moreau was the perfect example of the application of the Rule of Skin.

All right. Time to get back to reality, he chided himself.

Billy now stepped to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Still deserted. He continued his way to the hospital and knew when he’d crossed into the building. The neutral scent of cleanser and mold from the office building was overrun by a mélange of smells. Sweet disinfectants, alcohol, Lysol, Betadine.

And the others, repulsive to some, but not to Billy: the aromas of skin in decay, skin melting under infection and bacteria, skin burning to ash … perhaps from lasers in operating rooms.

Or maybe hospital workers were disposing of discarded tissue and organs in an oven somewhere. He couldn’t think of this without recalling the Nazis, who had used the skin of Holocaust victims for practical purposes, like lamp shades and books. And who had devised a system of tattooing that was the simplest — and most significant — in history.

The Rule of Skin …

Billy inhaled deeply.

He sensed some other aroma: extremely offensive. What, what?

Oh, he understood. With so many foreign workers in the medical fields, the foods the hospital prepared included those aromatic with curry and garlic.

Disgusting.

Billy finally entered the heart of the hospital, the third sub-basement. It was completely deserted here. A perfect place to bring a victim for some deadly modding, he reflected.

The elevator would have surveillance cameras so he found the stairwell, entered it and started to climb. At the next sub-basement, number two, he paused and peeked out. It was the morgue, presently unstaffed. Apparently the medicos had not managed to kill anyone yet today.

Up another flight to the basement level, a floor with patient rooms. Peering out through the fire door’s greasy glass, crosshatched with fine metal mesh, he could see a flash of color, then motion: a woman walking down the corridor, her back to him.

Ah, he thought, noting that while her skirt and jacket were navy blue, the scarf around her neck was red-and-white shimmery silk. It stood out like a flag in the drab setting. She was alone. He eased through the door and followed. He noted her muscular legs — revealed clearly by the knee-length skirt — noted the slim waist, noted the hips. The hair, in a tight bun, was brown with a bit of gray. Although the sheer pantyhose revealed a few purplish veins near the ankle, her skin was superb for an older woman’s.

Billy found himself aroused, heart pounding, the blood throbbing in his temples. And elsewhere.

Blood. The Oleander Room … blood on the carpet, blood on the floor.

Put those thoughts away. Now! Think of Lovely Girl.

He did and the urges dimmed. But dimming isn’t vanishing.

Sometimes you just gave in. Whatever the consequences might be.

Oleander …

He moved more quickly now, coming up behind her.

Thirty feet away, twenty-five …

Billy closed the distance to about fifteen feet, ten, three, his eyes staring at her legs. It was then that he heard a woman’s no-nonsense voice behind him.

‘You, in the cap. Police! Drop the backpack. Put your hands on your head!’

CHAPTER 20

About thirty feet away from the man, Amelia Sachs steadied her Glock and repeated, more harshly, ‘Backpack on the ground. Hands on your head! Now!’

The woman he’d been about to assault, only a few feet from him, turned. The confusion in her face became horror as she stared at her would-be assailant and understood what was happening. ‘No, please, no!’

The attacker was in a jacket, not the longer thigh-length coat that the witness reported their unsub wore, but he had the same telltale stocking cap and black backpack. If she was wrong, she’d apologize. ‘Now!’ Sachs called again.

With his back to her still, he slowly lifted his hands. As his sleeve rode up she got a glimpse of a red tattoo of some kind on his left arm, starting at the back of his hand and disappearing under his coat. A snake, a dragon?

He was raising his hands, yes, but not dropping the backpack.

Shit. He’s going to rabbit.

And, sure enough, in an instant, he tugged his hat down into a ski mask and leapt forward, grabbing the woman, spinning her around. He got his arm around her neck. She cried out and struggled. Her dark eyes were wide with fear.

Okay. He’s Unsub 11-5.

Sachs eased forward slowly, the blade sights of the Glock searching for a clear target.

Couldn’t find one. Thanks largely to the panicked hostage, who was struggling to get away, kicking and twisting. He pressed his face close to her ear, apparently whispered something and, with wide eyes, she stopped struggling.

‘I have a gun!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill her. Drop your gun. Now.’

Sachs called back, ‘No.’

Because you never dropped your weapon, you never went off target. Period. She doubted he had a gun — because he would’ve pulled it out and started firing by now — but even if he did, you never lowered your aim.

Sachs rested the sights on the new moon of his head. It was an easy shot with a static target but he was walking backward and sideways and kept ducking behind the hostage.

‘No, please don’t hurt me! Please!’ the woman cried in a low voice.

‘Shut up!’ the unsub muttered.

Reasonably, Sachs said, ‘Listen, there’s no way you’re getting out of here. Raise your hands and—’

A door nearby opened and a slim man in blue scrubs stepped into the corridor. It was just enough of a distraction to draw Sachs’s eye for an instant.

And that was enough for the unsub to seize his chance. He shoved his hostage directly toward Sachs and, before she could sidestep and draw a target, he crashed through another doorway and vanished.

Sachs was sprinting past the woman in the navy suit. Terrified, she stared with wide eyes, backing up against the wall.

‘What was he—?’

No time for back and forth. Sachs flung the door open and peered in fast. No threat, no target. She shouted over her shoulder to the woman and the medico, ‘Get back to the lobby. Now! Wait there! Call nine one one.’

‘Who—?’ the hostage called.

‘Go!’ Sachs turned and eased through the doorway the unsub had just disappeared into. She listened. A faint click — from below. Made sense; he wasn’t going to escape from the upper floors. Unsub 11-5 was their underground man.

Sachs hadn’t come here on a tactical mission so she didn’t have a radio but she pulled her iPhone out and called 911. It was easier than going roundabout to Central Dispatch. She reported a 10–13, officer needing assistance. She supposed the hostage and the hospital worker might be calling too but they could also simply have vanished, not wanting to get involved.

Down another flight of stairs. Steady but slow. Who’s to say the guy hadn’t clicked the ground-floor door latch to fool her and then returned to snipe away with the pistol he did, in fact, have in his pocket?

Sachs had never thought this trip would actually end up in a sighting of the unsub. She’d come here simply to see if any staffers had spotted anyone fitting the perp’s description. Rhyme had speculated that there might be an attack at this hospital. Terry Dobyns’s profile was that, as an organized offender, the unsub would plan the attacks ahead of time. That meant some of the trace they’d found at the Chloe Moore scene might have come from the sites of future poisonings.

Ron Pulaski’s find forty minutes ago was that the Inwood marble trace Sachs had collected was unique to this portion of Manhattan and that explosives permits had been issued to the general contractor building a new wing of the Upper Manhattan Medical Center. Other trace — the industrial cleanser quats and the adhesive that could be used in bandages — also suggested that he’d been inside the hospital to plan his attack on victim number two.

Sachs had hardly expected to actually interrupt him.

Breathing deeply, she paused at the fire door, pushed it open, dropping into a combat shooting pose. Swiveling back and forth. This was the morgue level; there were four employees in scrubs chatting and sipping coffee, standing beside two covered gurneys.

They turned, saw the gun, then Sachs, and went wide-eyed, frozen.

She held up her shield. ‘White male in dark coat. About six feet, stocking cap or mask. Slim build. Come by here?’

‘No.’

‘How long you been here?’

‘Ten, fifteen min—’

‘Get inside and lock the door.’

One attendant started to push the gurney through the door. Sachs called, ‘Only the live ones.’

Back to the dim stairwell. Down more stairs. She hit the lowest sub-basement. He had to’ve come here.

Go.

Fast.

When you move, they can’t getcha …

She pushed through the door, swinging the muzzle right and left.

This floor was deserted, devoted mostly to infrastructure and storerooms, it seemed.

She kept swiveling, right, left. Because in the back of her mind was the persistent thought that maybe this wasn’t an escape at all. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe he was hiding here to kill a pursuer.

She remembered the line from the book Serial Cities, about Rhyme:

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.

Maybe Unsub 11-5 was anticipating too.

Terry Dobyns had also suggested that he might target the police.

As her eyes oriented to the dimness, she examined the corridor. He couldn’t go to the left — that was a dead end. To the right, a sign announced, was the tunnel that led to the doctors’ office building.

He could either escape that way … or lie in wait for her.

But nothing to do other than go for it.

Knuckle time …

She started in that direction.

Suddenly a figure appeared in front of her, coming down the tunnel. She paused, plastered herself against the wall, aiming her weapon high but in the general direction of the man.

‘Hey,’ he called. ‘I can see you there. You police?’

A large African American dressed in a black rent-a-cop security outfit — more intimidating than an NYPD uniform — walked closer. ‘I can see you! Officer.’

She whispered harshly, ‘Come here! Get under cover. We’ve got a perp somewhere.’

He joined her and they both pressed against the wall.

‘Amelia.’

‘I’m Leron.’ The man had quick eyes and he took in the hallway. ‘I heard a ten-thirteen.’

‘Heard?’

‘Gotta scanner.’

‘Backup’s on their way?’

‘Right.’

She noted he had a Beretta Nano on his hip, a small gun, 9mm, and accurate enough under good conditions if you mastered the long trigger pull. Unusual for a hospital guard to be armed. She noted that he hadn’t drawn it. No need, no target. This explained him.

‘You were in?’ she asked.

‘Nineteenth.’

One of the Upper East Side precincts.

‘Patrol. Retired, medical. Diabetes. That sucks. Keep your weight down.’ He was breathing hard. ‘Not that you—’

‘You came from the doctors’ office building?’

‘Yep. Drew that detail today. Security in the hospital called me.’ He looked behind her and snickered. ‘None of the brothers I work with decided to come take a look-see. Ha.’

‘So he couldn’t’ve gotten out that way.’

‘Nope. Not past me.’ Leron scanned again, behind them, to the left, then to the right.

So 11-5 was here somewhere near, then. But there weren’t many places to hide. There were only a few doors and most of them, storage or electrical and infrastructure, were padlocked.

Leron whispered, ‘Backpack.’

‘Right.’

‘Bomb?’

‘Not his MO. Serial doer, we’re thinking.’

‘Weapon?’

‘Said so but I didn’t see it.’

‘If they say and don’t show they usually don’t have.’

This was true.

‘But, Leron, time for you to get upstairs.’ Nodding toward the stairwell. ‘I’ll take over.’ She was supposed to keep civilians — which Leron was, even in his storm trooper uniform and with an American-made Italian gun — out of tactical situations.

‘Sorry, Detective,’ the man said firmly. ‘The hospital, ’s my ’hood here. Nobody fucks with it. You tell me to stay put, I’ll follow you anyway. An’ I don’t suppose you want to hear footsteps behind you in a spooky place like this.’

Backup, she guessed, was still ten, fifteen minutes away.

She debated. But not very long. ‘Deal. Just don’t fire that sissy gun of yours unless the perp’s about to park one in me. Or you. And you get yourself shot, I’ll be writing up reports till kingdom come. That’ll piss me off.’

‘Got it.’

‘We’ll go together, Leron. Now let’s move.’

CHAPTER 21

As they eased along the wall, she asked the guard, ‘Where would you hide?’

‘He can’t’ve gone that way.’ Leron nodded toward a corridor to the right. ‘Dead end and no doorways to get through. Gotta be somewhere off this hallway.’ He gestured forward. She took the lead and they moved about twenty feet farther down the tunnel connecting the hospital proper to the office building.

He whispered, ‘There?’ The men’s and women’s restrooms were across from each other.

A nod from Sachs.

Leron continued, ‘You ladies got all those stalls for cover. I’ll take that one first. And—’

‘I take it and you wait here.’

‘I can back you up.’

‘No, if he sees we’re both inside and he’s someplace else, he’ll rabbit.’ She was speaking near his ear. He wore a pleasant aftershave. ‘If you fire, remember the tile.’

‘Got it. Amplifies the sound. One shot, we’re both deaf for five minutes. I’ve been there. That happens, we have to scan visually. We can’t hear him coming … That is, if I don’t hit him. I am not, by any stretch, Amelia, a bad shot.’

She liked him. ‘You’ve done this before.’

‘Way, way too many times.’

‘Draw,’ she said.

The Nano was in his hand, dwarfed and nearly invisible in the dark flesh. He had two rings: wedding and a police academy signet. ‘Gotcha covered. Go.’

She breached the women’s room.

No drama. There were only two stalls and the doors were open.

Then she was outside. Scanning. He nodded his all-clear.

The one-stall men’s room was even faster.

Outside once more, Sachs gazed at the dozen storerooms opening onto the corridor. Then noted that Leron’s head was cocked. He touched his ear and pointed to a doorway, about twenty feet away. He’d heard something. The door was marked with the word Specimens.

Leron whispered, ‘A scrape. In there. I’m sure.’

‘Any windows?’

‘No. We’re way underground here.’

‘Locked?’

‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. Anybody can get through these doors, you got a bobby pin. Women still use bobby pins?’

‘Sure, to pick locks,’ she replied.

She and Leron moved close. There was a rippled glass window in the door, and the guard ducked under to the other side as they flanked it.

You’ve done this before …

Amelia Sachs debated.

On the other side was most likely a perp they had to assume was armed — and at the very least in possession of deadly toxins.

Wait for full backup from Emergency Service? With bio-chem gear?

Debating …

Yes, no?

She decided. She was going in. Every minute the unsub could fortify himself behind barricades and rig traps.

But mostly, she was going in because she wanted to go in.

Had to go in. Thinking: Can’t explain it, Rhyme. Just the way it is.

When you move …

‘You back me up,’ she mouthed. ‘From the hall.’

‘No, I …’ But Leron fell silent, looking at her eyes. He nodded.

She gripped the knob, which turned. Unlocked.

Then pushing forward … The door ploughed open, revealing nothing on the other side except blackness. Sachs jogged left and dropped into a crouch, so she wouldn’t be silhouetted by the open doorway.

Then, a huge crash from the back left corner of the room.

Leron surged forward as Sachs gave a whisper-shout, ‘No!’

But the guard pressed through the door anyway, gallantly coming to a rescue she didn’t need, a rescue that was purely a diversion.

For what was coming next.

‘Look out!’ Sachs cried. Seeing something flying out of the blackness toward Leron. It glinted in the light from the doorway as it arched overhead. She knew the bottle contained toxin, more cicutoxin or maybe that zombie fish crap.

No known antidote …

‘It’s poison!’ she called and ducked instinctively. Leron leapt to the left but stumbled and fell on his back, hard. He grunted in pain.

But it seemed the unsub hadn’t been aiming for her or the guard directly. Of course not. Their flesh wouldn’t shatter the poison container; he’d tossed it high, at the ceiling.

Leron was directly under the bottle when it hit a pipe and shattered. The poison rained down on him. He dropped his Nano and began screaming.

By the time Sachs rolled to her feet, the unsub had pushed through a second door to the specimen room, thirty feet up the corridor. She heard his footfalls fading as he sprinted toward the doctors’ office building.

She turned back to Leron, who was moaning and wiping desperately at his face. ‘Water, wash it off … I can’t see.’

What the hell was it? She smelled a noxious odor, astringent.

Acid! It looked like parts of his flesh were melting off.

Jesus!

Sachs debated. Go after the unsub … or do what she could for Leron?

Hell. She grabbed her phone and called 911 again, reporting that the perp was escaping through the connecting tunnel to the doctors’ office building next to the hospital.

She then ran to a nearby fire station and yanked the hose off the rack, turning on the stream of water and spraying Leron’s face and chest, though this didn’t seem to offer much relief, to judge from his screams, which were far louder than the fiercely loud rush of water.

‘Nuh, nuh, nuh …’

Then the heavyset man was sitting up, waving his hands fiercely. ‘Enough, enough, enough!’

He started choking and Sachs realized she was firing the water directly into his face, half drowning him. She shut off the stream.

Leron rose to his knees, spitting.

His eyes were red, but he seemed otherwise all right — aside from the choking.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked. ‘Are you burned? Was it acid? Poison?’

‘’S okay, ’s okay … I’m all right.’

Sachs squinted at the floor, the broken glass. She walked over to a shard that held a yellowing label.

Oh.

Leron nodded, squinting. ‘He threw one of them samples at me, a specimen. One of the jars, right?’

‘Looks that way. Probably formaldehyde.’

‘Stings, but not bad. You washed most of it off me.’

Sachs then scanned the floor and noted the tissue sample on the floor, near where Leron sat. She’d thought the unsub had thrown acid, which had melted off the guard’s skin. In reality, the flesh was what had been in the bottle.

Leron looked down too, prodded the lumpy tube of flesh with his foot. ‘Shit. That what I think it is?’

‘I’d say so.’

‘He threw a dick and balls at me? Motherfucker. After you collar his ass, Amelia, I wanna piece of him.’

CHAPTER 22

In the doctors’ office building, Billy Haven emerged from the connecting tunnel, where his pursuers — cop and security guard — were, he hoped, writhing in pain and clutching their inflamed eyes.

He hadn’t seen exactly how much formaldehyde spattered them — hadn’t, of course, been able to watch, however appealing that sight might have been.

Now he spotted a men’s room down a deserted corridor, entered and stepped into a stall. He dug through his backpack for a change of clothing. Not many options. He slipped on worker’s coveralls and replaced the stocking cap with a Mets hat. Pulled on dark-rimmed reading glasses too. Finally, he extracted a canvas gear bag, like a contractor would use, and shoved the backpack and his coat into it. He carried the bag around for this very purpose — to change his identity in case of escape.

Thou shalt be prepared to become someone else …

He eased out of the restroom and made his way to the front door. He was about to step out onto the street through the double-door entry when a police car showed up, followed by two others, the tires squealing in brief skids. Officers leapt out and began speaking to every white male between fifteen and fifty near the building, asking for IDs, looking through bags.

Hell.

Soon other officers arrived, along with a large, blue-and-white NYPD Emergency Service truck. They formed a perimeter in the front — and presumably they were ganging at the back door and loading dock too.

Billy turned back. He shivered in anger. The policewoman’s presence, so unexpected, had ruined everything. He’d been shocked to see that it was Amelia Sachs herself, ironically looking just as steely eyed as in the photo in chapter seven of Serial Cities. Wearing pretty much the same unsexy outfit too. Oh, he wanted so badly to get her on her back and give her one of his special mods. Angel’s trumpet. Brugmansia. Lethal quickly, but not so fast that Officer Sachs wouldn’t die in excruciating pain.

But before that he had to get out of here. The police, it seemed, were getting ready to search the building.

And he knew they’d search carefully.

The first wave of officers was moving toward the door.

Billy casually pivoted and headed to the elevator bank, where he paused and, as nonchalantly as he could, carefully regarded the building directory as if he didn’t have a care in the world — other than finding his doctor for a mole removal or colonoscopy appointment.

He was thinking furiously. The building was ten or eleven stories tall. Did it have external fire escapes? Probably not. You didn’t see those much anymore. There were probably fireproof stairwells, leading to unmarked doors opening onto alleyways. The cops would be stationed there, of course. Guns out, waiting for the perp.

Then he noticed a sign for a doctor’s office on the sixth floor.

Billy Haven thought for a moment.

Good, he concluded, and turned away from the directory as the first cops stepped into the lobby.

Thou shalt always be ready to improvise …

CHAPTER 23

Lon Sellitto jogged into the main hallway of Upper Manhattan Medical Center. The elevator seemed sluggish — four people waited. Impatient patients, he joked to himself — and so he descended the stairs to the basement level, where Amelia Sachs had stopped the unsub from another attack. Stopped him with seconds to spare, it seemed. If Rhyme and Pulaski hadn’t figured out the target location the perp had been checking out earlier, they’d be running a homicide now, not conducting a manhunt.

His gold shield, on a lanyard, bounced on his substantial belly. His Burberry over his arm, Sellitto was moving fast and he was out of breath.

Fucking diets. Was there any one that worked?

Also, gotta work out more.

Think about it later.

Downstairs he entered the cardiac care unit and walked a good fifty yards before he found the room he sought. Outside were two uniforms, male, one Latino, one black. In the room, he observed a white-haired man in bed, lean, with a wrinkled — and unhappy — face. Sitting in the chair beside him was a handsome woman in her early fifties, he guessed. She was in a conservative navy suit and nearly opaque stockings, a bright scarf. Her long face was hollow and her green eyes zipped around the room uneasily. Then she glanced at Sellitto in the corridor and went back to perusing the patient. Her ruddy hands were kneading a tissue to shreds. A young blond man — resembling her slightly, son probably — sat on the other side of the bed.

Sellitto nodded to the uniforms and they stepped away from the door.

The detective asked in a low voice, ‘So. Detective Sachs?’

‘She stayed with the guard, the hospital guard, till the emergency room guys got there. Now? She’s sweeping the hallway and room where the perp attacked them, her and the guard, I mean. She already ran the scene where he was going after the vic, the woman.’ A nod toward the hospital room. Name badge: Juarez.

‘It was poison?’

‘Naw.’

‘Naw?’ Sellitto mocked.

The kid didn’t get he was being challenged and continued, ‘Naw. The perp threw this jar from a storeroom or something at her and the guard. Broke. He’s the one got hit with whatever crap was inside. He’d been on the force. Retired from the Nineteenth.’

‘Detective Sachs wasn’t hurt,’ his partner added. Williams.

‘What kind of crap?’

Juarez: ‘They don’t know. But the first report was that it coulda been acid or something like that.’

‘Fucker. Acid?’

‘Naw, it wasn’t. Just preservative.’

Sellitto asked, ‘Hospital’s secure?’

‘Lockdown, yeah.’

The final word of that sentence prompted a glare at Juarez. He got it this time. ‘Yessir. That’s right. But they’re pretty sure he’s in the building next door. Detective Sachs saw him get out through the access tunnel. Only one place to end up. There, the doctors’ office building.’

‘And ESU thinks he’s still there?’

Juarez said, ‘He’d have to be fast, real fast, to get out. Detective Sachs called it in right away. Had the place sealed two minutes after the attack. Possible he got out, Detective, but real unlikely.’

‘Two minutes.’ Sellitto brushed at his wrinkled tie, as if that would iron the cloth flat as steel, then forgot about it. Pulling out a battered notebook, he stepped into the hospital room.

He identified himself.

The man in bed said, ‘I’m Matthew Stanton. Don’t they have security here?’ His dark eyes bored into Sellitto as if the detective had held the door open for the psycho.

Sellitto could understand but he had a job. ‘We’re looking into that.’ Which didn’t really answer the question. Then he turned to the woman. ‘And you’re—’

The man said stiffly, ‘My wife. Harriet. That’s my son, Josh.’

The young man rose and shook Sellitto’s hand.

‘Could you tell me what happened?’ the detective asked Harriet.

Matthew rasped, ‘She was just walking down the corridor, coming to visit me. And this—’

‘Sir, please. Could I hear from your wife?’

‘All right. But I’m talking to my lawyer. When we get home. I’m going to sue.’

‘Yessir.’ An eyebrow raised to Harriet.

‘I’m, I’m kind of flustered,’ she said.

Sellitto didn’t feel like smiling but he did anyway. ‘It’s fine. Take your time.’

Harriet seemed numb as she explained that the family had come to town several days ago with their son and his cousin. It was a toss-up between the Big Apple and Disney. But New York, closing in on Christmas, had won. Yesterday, on the way to toy shop at FAO Schwarz, her husband had suffered what turned out to be a minor heart attack. She’d come to visit this morning and was here, on this floor, when she’d heard the policewoman calling out stop or something like that.

‘I didn’t know anybody was there. He came up real quiet. I turned around and, goodness, there was this man. Do you think he was going to, Detective? I mean, going to attack me?’

‘We don’t know, Mrs Stanton. The individual fits the description of a suspect in a prior attack—’

‘And,’ the husband said, ‘you didn’t warn people about him?’

‘Matthew, please. You can also look at it the other way. The police saved me, you know.’

The man fell silent but seemed even more furious. Sellitto was hoping he didn’t have another coronary.

‘What was this earlier assault?’ Harriet asked hesitantly. Her voice left no doubt what she was asking.

‘Not sexual assault. Homicide.’

She was breathing rapidly now and under the heavy makeup her face seemed to grow paler. ‘A, like a serial killer?’ What was left of the tissue disintegrated further.

‘Again, we don’t know. Could you describe him?’

‘I’ll try. I only saw him for a few seconds before he pulled a mask down, grabbed me and turned me around.’

Sellitto had been interviewing witnesses for decades and knew that even the best-intentioned remembered little or accidentally supplemented accurate observations with mistaken ones. Still, Harriet was pretty specific. She described a white man around thirty wearing a dark jacket, probably leather, gloves, a black or navy-blue wool cap, dark slacks or jeans. He was slim of build but had a round face — it struck her as Russian in appearance.

‘My husband and I went to Saint Petersburg a few years ago and we noticed that was typical of how young men look. Round heads, round faces.’

Matthew pointed out in a sneering tone, ‘Crime there too but only pickpockets. They don’t sneak up on you in hospitals.’

‘Higher standards, yeah,’ Sellitto replied. Then: ‘Or the guy’s appearance: maybe Slavic in general? Eastern European?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. We’ve only been to Russia. Oh, and his eyes were light blue. Very light.’

‘Scars?’

‘I didn’t see any. I think he had a tattoo. One of his arms. Red. But I couldn’t see much of it. He had the coat on.’

‘Hair?’

Harriet’s eyes scanned the floor. ‘He pulled that hat down pretty quick. I just couldn’t tell you for sure.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Just whispered to stop struggling or he’d hurt me. I didn’t hear an accent.’

And that was it.

Age, build, eye color and a round head. Russian or Slavic. Clothing.

Sellitto radioed to Bo Haumann, the head of NYPD Emergency Service, and the officer in charge of the manhunt. He gave the description and the latest information.

‘Roger that, Lon. We’ve sealed the office building. Don’t think he got out but I’ve got some teams canvassing the streets nearby. K.’

‘I’ll get back to you, Bo.’ Sellitto didn’t bother with radio code propriety. Never did. It wasn’t that rank had privilege; tenure did.

He turned back to Harriet Stanton and her husband, who was still glowering. Heart attack? He looked pretty spare. And had an outdoor-weathered face, so he probably got a fair amount of exercise. Maybe being in a bad mood was a risk factor for coronaries. Sellitto felt bad for Harriet, who seemed like a nice enough lady.

Since there didn’t seem to be any connection between the unsub and the first victim, the same was probably true now; he was hunting randomly. Still, Sellitto asked if she’d ever seen him before, or had any awareness of being followed prior to her visit to the hospital. Or if she and her husband were wealthy or involved in anything that might make them a target of criminals.

The last query seemed to amuse Harriet. No, she explained, they were just working-class tourists — whose vacation to New York had been ruined.

Sellitto took her number and the name of the hotel where they were staying and wished her husband a fast recovery.

Harriet thanked him. Matthew nodded gruffly, grabbed the TV’s remote control and upped the volume on the History Channel.

Then the would-be victim vanished from Sellitto’s thoughts as his radio crackled to life.

‘All units, report of assault on sixth floor of physicians’ office building, where search operation for unsub is under way. Next to Upper Manhattan Medical Center. There’s been chemical weapon release, substance unknown. Only personnel with bio-chem masks are to remain in the building.’

Sellitto’s thoughts tumbled. ‘Son of a bitch.’

Gasping, he ran up the hallway and out of the hospital, into the circular drive. He looked up at the office building, which was to his left. He began jogging toward it, pulling his radio from his belt. He made a call.

‘Bo?’ He was breathless. ‘Bo?’ he tried again.

‘That you, Lon? Over.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just heard. The assault. What happened?’

The former drill sergeant said crisply, ‘I’m getting secondhand reports. Looks like the perp tried to steal some scrubs in a doctor’s office on the sixth floor. An orderly spotted him and he ran. But not before he opened a bottle and spilled something on the floor.’

‘Maybe formaldehyde, like with Amelia.’

‘No, he said it was bad. People puking, passing out. Fumes everywhere. Definitely toxic.’

Sellitto considered this. Finally he asked, ‘Do you know what office? That he dumped the poison in?’

‘I can find out. I’m on the first floor, near the directory. I’ll see.’ A moment later he came back on. ‘There’s only one doctor on six. He has the whole floor.’

Sellitto asked, ‘Is he a plastic surgeon?’

‘Wait. You’re right. How’d you know?’

‘Because our boy wrapped his face in bandages and is strolling down the fire stairs right now with all the other patients you’re evacuating.’

A pause. Haumann said, ‘Hell. Okay, we’ll marshal ’em in the lobby, get IDs. Nobody with a Band-Aid on is getting out the front door. Good call, Lon. We’re lucky, we’ll have him in ten minutes.’

CHAPTER 24

Rhyme was wheeling back and forth, back and forth, in front of the high-definition monitor. It was around forty minutes after the report had come in about the perp releasing the poison gas in the sixth-floor suite in the doctors’ office building.

On the screen was an image of the front of the building and, beyond that, the hospital itself.

Courtesy of an Emergency Service Unit video cam.

The buzzer sounded and Thom went to answer. The door clicked, the wind howled.

Then a familiar clomp of footsteps, which told Rhyme that Lon Sellitto had arrived.

Ah …

The detective turned the corner. Stopped. His face was a grimace.

‘Now,’ Rhyme said, his voice infused with sharp humor. ‘I’m just curious—’

‘All right, Linc,’ Sellitto said, stripping off the wet Burberry. ‘It was—’

‘Curious, I was saying. Did it occur to anyone? Any single one? Did it occur to any person on the face of the earth that it wasn’t an orderly reporting the poison gas? That it was the unsub himself who called in a fake report? So that everyone would start checking out patients with bandages on their faces?’

‘Linc—’

‘And no one would start checking out anyone in a dental face guard, like tattoo artists would wear, and coveralls, strolling casually out the front door like an emergency worker.’

‘I know that now, Linc.’

‘So I guess it didn’t occur to anyone at the time. It’s only—’

‘You made your fucking point.’

‘—now that we can figure out—’

‘You can be a real prick sometimes, Linc. You know that.’

Rhyme did know that and he didn’t care. ‘And the manhunt around Marble Hill?’

‘Checkpoints at main streets, officers at every bus stop and subway station in the area.’

‘Looking for …?’ Rhyme asked.

‘Any white male around thirty with a pulse.’

Rhyme’s computer dinged, and he called up the email. It was Jean Eagleston again, the Crime Scene officer. She was the one who’d done an Identi-Kit composite rendering of the man, based on Harriet Stanton’s observation. It depicted an unsmiling young man with Slavic features, a prominent forehead and brows close together. The unsub’s pale eyes gave him a startling, eerie visage.

Rhyme didn’t believe that good or evil could be objectively reflected in appearance. But his gut told him this was the face of a truly dangerous person.

A second high-def monitor nearby fluttered to life and there was Amelia Sachs, peering his way.

‘You there, Rhyme?’

‘Yes, yes, Sachs. Go ahead.’ This was the computer they used for face-to-face videoconferencing with law enforcers in other cities, for occasional interrogation of suspects and for Skyping with the children of Rhyme’s closest relative — his cousin who lived in New Jersey — well, Sachs primarily, who read them stories and told jokes. Sachs and Pam would also Skype, sometimes spending hours, chatting away.

He wondered if now, after their fight, that wouldn’t be happening anymore.

She asked, ‘What’s the story? Is it true, the getaway?’

Rhyme grimaced and glanced at Sellitto, who rolled his eyes and said, ‘He’s gone, yeah. But we got a good description from the hostage.’

‘What’s the prognosis, Sachs? The guard?’

‘Eyes’re going to need some treatment is all. He got hit by formaldehyde and severed male genitals. That’s what was in the jar. Which he’s not happy about.’ She gave a faint laugh. ‘It was dark, I saw some flesh on the ground. I thought the unsub had used acid and it was melting the guard’s flesh off. But he’ll be okay. Now, Lon, how’s the manhunt going?’

The detective explained to her, ‘We’ve got undercover at all the bus and subway stations in Marble Hill and north and south — the Number One train. He could get a cab but I’m thinking he won’t want to be seen one on one — by the driver. According to our tat expert, he’s not from around here so he probably doesn’t know about gypsy cabs. We’re betting he’ll stick to public transportation.’

Rhyme could see Sachs nodding, then the image was breaking up, freezing. The unreliable Internet.

The picture came in clear again.

She said, ‘He might try for a train farther east.’

‘Yeah, I suppose he could.’

Rhyme said, ‘Good point.’ He told Sellitto, ‘Get some of your people to the Number Four train and the D and B lines. That’s central Bronx. He’s not going to get farther east than that.’

‘Hm. I’ll do it.’ The detective stepped away to make the call.

Sachs said, ‘One thing occurred to me, Rhyme?’

‘And?’

‘There were dozens of storerooms he could’ve hidden in. Why did he pick that one?’

‘Your thought?’

‘He’d spent time there before. I think that’s where he was going to take Harriet Stanton to tattoo her.’

‘Why?’

‘It was like a skin museum.’ She described the preserved tissue samples in jars.

‘Skin. Sure. His obsession.’

‘Exactly. Internal organs, brains. But easily half the jars contained external flesh.’

‘You working up some kind of dark psychology here, Sachs? I’m not sure that’s helpful. We know he’s interested in skin.’

‘I’m just figuring he’d spent more time there than just checking it out as a possible murder site. Like a tourist at MoMA, you know. It drew him. So I walked the grid three times there.’

‘Now, that’s a valid use for psychobabble,’ Rhyme said.

CHAPTER 25

Head down, Billy strode quickly toward the subway in the Bronx that would take him south to Manhattan, to his workshop, to his terrariums, to safety and comfort.

He reflected back to the hospital corridor, picturing Amelia Sachs … He couldn’t help but think of her with some familiarity, having learned everything he could about the woman — and Lincoln Rhyme.

How had she found him? Well, that wasn’t quite the question. How had Rhyme found him? She was good, sure. But Rhyme was better.

Okay, how? How exactly?

Well, he’d been to the hospital earlier. Maybe he’d picked up some trace there and, despite his diligence, had unwittingly deposited a bit near Chloe Moore’s body.

Were the police thinking they’d avert another attack by sending Amelia Sachs to stop him?

But, no, Billy decided, they couldn’t predict that he’d return when he had. The policewoman had come to the hospital just to ask if any staffers had seen a man fitting his description.

His thoughts strayed to Amelia Sachs … She reminded him in some ways of Lovely Girl, her beautiful face, her hair, her keen and determined eyes. Some women, he knew, you had to control by reasoning with them, some by dominating. Others you couldn’t control, and that was a problem.

Picturing her pale skin.

The Oleander Room …

He imagined Amelia there, lying on the couch, the settee, the love seat, the lounger.

Breath growing faster, he pictured blood on her skin, he tasted blood on her skin. He smelled blood.

But forget that now.

Another word came to mind: anticipate.

If Rhyme had figured out about the hospital, he might have figured out Billy would come this way to escape. So he picked up his pace. It was a busy street. Discount shops, diners, and mobile phone and calling card stores. The clientele, working class. Payroll Advances. Best Rates in Town.

And people everywhere: parents with little kids, bundled up like sock puppets against the cutting chill and endless sleet. Teenagers ignoring the cold or genuinely not feeling it. Thin jackets, jeans, short skirts and fake fur collars on loud jackets. High heels, no stockings. Constant motion. Billy dodged a skateboarder a moment before collision.

He wanted to grab the kid, fling him off the board. But he was past in a flash. Besides, Billy wouldn’t have made a scene. Bad idea, under the circumstances.

Back to his eastward escape. He noted here too a lot of skin art — Billy’s preferred term for tats. Here, lower class, mixed race, he noticed a lot of writing on skin. In script primarily. Bible passages maybe or poems or manifestos. Martin Luther King, Jr., was represented, Billy speculated. But the lines might have been from Shaq or the Koran. Some writings were prominent — seventy-two-point type. Most, though, were so tiny you needed a magnifier to read them.

Crosses in all designs — inked on men who looked like gangbangers and drug dealers and on girls who looked like whores.

A young man, around twenty, approached from the opposite direction, very dark-skinned, broad, a bit shorter than Billy, who stared at the keloids on his cheeks and temples — an intricate pattern of crosshatched lines.

He noticed Billy’s attention and slowed, then stopped, nodded. ‘Hey.’ Just stood there, smiling. Maybe he sensed that Billy was appreciating the scarification. Which he was.

Billy stopped too. ‘You’ve got some righteous marking.’

‘Yo. Thanks.’

In sub-Saharan African tradition this form of modification was done by cutting flaps in the skin and packing in irritating plant juices to raise welts, which hardened into permanent designs. Keloids serve several purposes: They identify the bearers as members of a particular family or tribe, they indicate fixed social or political positions, they mark milestones in life’s transit, like puberty and readiness for marriage. In some African cultures, scarification indicates sexual prowess and appetite — and the scars themselves can become erogenous zones. The more extensive a woman’s scarring, the more appealing she is as a partner because it implies she’s better able to withstand the pain of childbirth and produce many offspring.

Billy had always appreciated keloids; he’d never done any. The ones on the young man’s face were impressive, linked chains and vines. African skin art is largely geometric; rarely are animals, plants or people depicted. Never words. Billy was nearly overcome by an urge to touch the pattern. With effort, he resisted.

The local, in turn, regarded Billy with an odd gaze that embraced both curiosity and camaraderie. Finally he looked around and seemed to come to a decision. A whisper: ‘Yo, you want brown? Moonrock? Sugar? Whatchu want?’

‘I …’

‘How much you got to spend? I hook you up.’

Drugs.

Disgusting.

In an instant the admiration of the scarification turned to hatred. It felt like the young man had betrayed him. The skin art was ruined. Billy wanted to stick his neck with a needle, get him into an alley and ink a message on his gut with snakeroot or hemlock.

But then Billy realized this was just another incident that proved the Rule of Skin true. No surprise here. He could be no more upset at this than a law of physics.

He gave a disappointed smile, walked around the man and kept moving.

‘Yo, I hook you up!’

A block east, Billy glanced behind him — he saw no one that was a threat — and stepped into a clothing store. He paid cash for a Yankees baseball cap and a pair of cheap sneakers. He tugged the hat on and swapped shoes. His old ones he didn’t throw out — concerned that the police might search the trash cans and find a pair of Bass with his prints on them — but when the clerk wasn’t looking he left one in a bin of discount shoes and the other on a rack, behind a row of similar footwear. He then stepped outside, striding fast toward his goal: the subway that would take him back to Canal Street, back to safety. Head down, once more, examining the congested sidewalks, filthy, marred with ovals of dog pee and dark dots of chewing gum, bordered with tired slush.

Yet no one looked at the coveralls, at the gear bag, no one glanced his way as if wondering: Is he the man who killed that girl in SoHo? The man who was nearly cornered and gunned down at the hospital in Marble Hill?

Walking fast once more, inhaling cold air rich with noxious exhaust. Of course he wouldn’t take the Number One train, which had a Marble Hill stop, because it was so close to the hospital. He’d spent days studying the New York City transit system. He was making for a station farther east, even if it meant a fast walk through unpleasant weather and amid more unpleasant people.

Yo, I hook you up …

And there were lots of them. The crowds were thicker now, more shoppers — taking advantage of the pre-Christmas season to stock up on presents, he guessed. Dressed in dark clothing, worn and shabby.

Doctor Moreau’s Swine-men, Dog-men …

Some police cars sped past, heading toward Marble Hill. None of them paused.

Breathing hard, chest hurting again, he finally approached the metro entrance. Here the trains were not underground but elevated. He swiped his Metrocard and walked nonchalantly up the steep stairs and onto the platform, where he huddled as the damp wind sliced around him.

He pulled his cap lower, swapped the reading glasses for some with different frames, then pulled his gray scarf up around his mouth; the air was frigid enough so that this didn’t look odd.

Scanning for police. No flashing lights on the streets below, no uniformed officers in the crowds or on the platform. Maybe—

But wait.

He noted two men in overcoats about thirty feet away on the platform. One looked his way then turned back to his companion. They stood out here, being white and dressed in conservative clothing, white shirts and ties, under the bulky coats; most of the other passengers on the platform were black or Latino or mixed, and dressed much more casually.

Undercover cops? He had a feeling they were. They might not have been part of the actual manhunt — were here investigating a drug deal, maybe — but they’d heard the alert, and now believed they had the Underground Man.

One made a brief call and Billy had a feeling that it had been placed to Lincoln Rhyme. No basis for this, but instinct told him the cop was a friend and colleague of Rhyme’s.

A train was approaching but was still two hundred yards away. The men whispered something to each other and then walked his way, steadying themselves in the wind.

He’d been so careful, so smart in escaping from the doctors’ office building. Was he about to get caught because of a coincidence? Two cops who happened nearby.

Billy was nowhere near the exit. If he ran, he’d never make it in time. Could he jump?

No, twenty feet to the traffic-filled street below. He’d break bones.

Billy decided he’d just have to bluff. He had a city employee ID, which would pass fast examination, but one call to downtown and they’d find out it was fake. He also had legitimate ID, which was, technically, a breach of the Commandments.

Thou shalt remain unidentifiable.

But, of course, that wouldn’t work. One radio or phone call and they’d find out who he really was.

He’d have to go on the offense. He’d pretend to ignore the men until they were right next to him and turn, smiling. Then he would shove one, or both, onto the tracks. He could escape in the chaos afterwards.

A messy plan. Clumsy and dangerous. But, he decided, there was little choice.

The men were getting closer now. Smiling but Billy didn’t trust that expression for a second.

The train was near now. A hundred feet away, eighty, thirty …

He looked for guns on the men’s hips, but they hadn’t unbuttoned their coats. He glanced toward the exit, judged timing and distance.

Get ready. The big one. Push him first. Lincoln Rhyme’s buddy.

The train was almost to the platform.

The taller of the two men, the one who was about to die first, nodded as he caught Billy’s eye.

Wait, wait. Give it ten seconds more. Eight, seven, six …

Billy tensed.

Four, three …

The man then smiled. ‘Eric?’

‘I’m, uhm, I’m sorry?’

‘Are you Eric Wilson?’

The train rushed into the station and squealed to a stop.

‘Me? No.’

‘Oh, hey, you look just like the son of a guy I work with. Sorry to bother you.’

‘No problem.’ Billy’s hands were trembling, his jaw too, and only partly from the cold.

The men turned and walked away, toward the train, which was now discharging passengers.

Billy walked onto the subway car, choosing a spot to stand that was close enough to the men to hear their conversation. Yes, he realized, they were just as they seemed to be — businessmen who’d finished some meeting uptown and were heading back to their office on Madison Avenue to write up some reports about how the meeting had gone.

Brakes released, and with a grind the train started south, rocking, squealing through the switches.

Soon they were in Manhattan, and diving beneath the surface. The Underground Man was in his world once again.

It had been a risk, taking the subway, but at least he’d minimized the danger. And apparently won. Rather than take the Number One train or the Number Four — the next one east — or even the B and D, he’d sped the several miles to the Allerton Avenue station, to catch the Number Two train. He’d assumed that someone — well, Lincoln Rhyme of course — might have ordered officers to the closer stations. But even the NYPD didn’t have the resources to search everywhere. He’d hoped his brisk pace would put him beyond the reach of a manhunt.

Apparently this was so.

As they sped south, Billy reflected: You’re not the only one who can anticipate, Captain Rhyme.

CHAPTER 26

Mr 11-5 knows what he’s doing, Lincoln Rhyme reflected yet again, as he guided his Merits to the evidence examination table, where Mel Cooper and Sachs were examining the evidence from the hospital.

Despite her exhaustive search of the corridors, the doctors’ office building and the ‘skin museum’, the evidentiary findings from the abortive assault on Harriet Stanton were minimal.

There were no friction ridges; he’d been clever enough not to actually touch Harriet with his fingers (prints can be lifted off skin). He’d either gripped only her clothing or touched her flesh with his sleeves. And somewhere between fleeing the site of the attack in the basement and his slipping into the specimens room, he’d pulled on latex gloves (not vinyl, which display distinctive wrinkle patterns that can be introduced at trial).

But unlike the earlier scenes, he’d been taken by surprise, so he didn’t have the chance to don booties. Sachs got some good electrostatic footprints.

Size eleven Bass shoe, though that meant only that he was wearing a size eleven Bass shoe, not that he had size eleven feet.

The wear pattern of the tread marks, which sometimes could give details about weight and posture, didn’t reveal much but, Rhyme reflected, who cared? They knew his weight and posture.

Sachs rolled the floor around the footprints for trace, just in case. But Mel Cooper reported that the analysis revealed, ‘A lot of Inwood marble and more of the cleanser and medical materials that had led us to the hospital in the first place. Some of the cleanser again. Nothing else.’

She had found some unique trace in the specimens room, identified by the chromatograph/spectrometer as dimethicone, which was used in cosmetics and industrial lubricants and processed foods to prevent caking. Interestingly it was also the primary ingredient in Silly Putty. Rhyme didn’t dismiss this fact immediately but after some consideration decided that the novelty toy didn’t figure in the unsub’s plan.

‘I think he picked dimethicone up when he grabbed Mrs Stanton.’ Sachs explained that, as a woman in her fifties, she had worn a fair amount of makeup. Sachs dug out her mobile and called the number Harriet had given her. She answered and, after Sachs gave her an update of the case, got the brand name of the woman’s preferred makeup products. Running the manufacturer’s website, Sachs learned that dimethicone was in fact one of the ingredients in her foundation.

Dead end there.

And no other trace or fibers.

As she wrote the details up on the whiteboard chart Sachs said, ‘One other thing. I saw he had a tattoo on his—’ She frowned. ‘Yes, his left arm. An animal or some kind of creature. Maybe a dragon. From that thriller book. The Dragon Tattoo. In red.’

‘Right,’ Sellitto added, looking at his notebook. ‘Harriet Stanton said he had one. She didn’t see what it was, though.’

‘Any trace of the poison he intended to use on the vic?’ Pulaski asked Cooper.

‘Nothing. No toxins on anything that Amelia collected.’

‘I think we can assume he keeps his love potions sealed up until he’s ready to start using them.’ Rhyme was wondering again: Why that MO? Poison was a rare murder weapon now. The technique of killing with toxins, popular through the ages, began to fall out of fashion long ago, in the mid-1800s, after the famed English chemist James Marsh invented a test that could detect arsenic in tissue postmortem. Tests for other toxins soon followed. Homicidal husbands and greedy heirs, who’d believed that doctors would rule cause of death coronary or stroke or illness, began ending up in prison or on the gallows after early forensic detectives presented their cases in court.

Some substances like ethylene glycol — automotive coolant — were still fed to husbands by unhappy wives, and Homeland Security worried about all sorts of toxins as terrorist weapons, ranging from castor beans turned into ricin, to cyanide, to botulinum, which was the deadliest substance in existence (a very mild form of which was used in cosmetic Botox injections); a few kilograms of botulinum could kill every person on earth.

Yet poisons were cumbersome and detectable and hard to administer, not to mention potentially lethal to the poisoners. Why do you love them so much? Rhyme silently asked the unsub.

Mel Cooper interrupted his musings. ‘It was a close call at the hospital. Do you think he’ll go away?’

Rhyme grunted.

‘That means no?’

Sachs interpreted. ‘That means no.’

‘The only question,’ Rhyme said, ‘is where’s he going to strike next?’ He wheeled to the board. ‘The answer’s there. Maybe.’

CHAPTER 27

Provence² was crowded.

As soon as the Times had bestowed its stars, this hole-in-the-wall in Hell’s Kitchen had been inundated with folks desperate to cram into the loud, frantic rooms and to sample dishes that were a fusion of two southern cuisines, American and French.

Fried chicken with capers and ratatouille.

Les escargots avec grits.

Improbable. But the dish works …

Straddled by a warehouse to the south and a chic steel-and-glass office building to the north, the restaurant was housed in a structure typical of those on the west side of Midtown: a century old, angled floors that snapped and creaked underfoot, and ceilings of hammered tin. Low archways led from one cramped dining room to the next and the walls were sandblasted brick, which did nothing to dim the din.

Lighting was low, courtesy of yellow bulbs in what seemed to be lamp fixtures as old as the structure itself (though they’d come not from a Victorian-era ironworks on the Hudson but a factory outside Seoul).

At one of the tables in the back, the conversation ricocheted like an air-hockey puck.

‘He doesn’t have a chance. It’s ridiculous.’

‘Did you hear about his girlfriend?’

‘She’s not his girlfriend.’

‘She is his girlfriend, it was on Facebook.’

‘Anyway I don’t even think she’s a girl.’

‘Ooo. That’s sweet.’

‘When the press finds out, he’s toast. Let’s get another bottle. The Chablis.’

Samantha Levine listened to her companions’ banter but not with her full attention. For one thing, she wasn’t much concerned about local politics. The candidate they were speaking of probably wouldn’t win the next election but not because of girlfriends who might or might not pass the physical but because he was bland and petty. You needed the quality of more to be mayor of the city of New York.

You needed that je ne sais quoi, y’all.

Apart from that, though, Samantha’s thoughts kept returning to her job. Major trouble lately. She’d worked late — close to eight p.m., a half hour ago — then hurried here from her office in the glitzy building next door to join her friends. She tried a memory dump of the concerns she’d lugged with her but in the high-tech world you couldn’t really escape from the puzzle and problems you faced every day. Sure, there were advantages: You could wear — as she did now — jeans and sweaters (tank tops in the summer), you made six figures, you could be inked or studded, you could work flex hours, you could bring a pillow couch to your office and use that for your desk.

Only you had to produce.

And be one step ahead of the competition.

And, fuck, there was a lot of competition out there.

The capital-I Internet. What a place. So much money, so many chances for breathtaking success. And for bottomless fuck-ups.

The thirty-two-year-old, with a voluptuous figure, ornery brown and purple hair and big doey Japanese anime dark eyes, sipped more white wine and tried to focus past a particularly difficult meeting with her boss not long ago, a meeting that had floated in her thoughts ever since.

Put. It. Away.

Finally, she managed to. Spearing and eating a wedge of fried green tomato topped with ground anchovies, she turned her attention back to her friends. Smiling, all of them (except Text Girl), as Raoul — her roommate, yes, just a roommate — was telling a story about her. He was an assistant to a fashion photog who shot for Vogue-wannabe mags, all online. The slim, bearded boss had come to pick up Raoul in the apartment they shared in Chelsea and he’d looked over Samantha’s T-shirt and PJ bottoms, sprouting hair tamed with mismatched rubber bands and very, very serious glasses. ‘Hmmmm. Can I shoot you?’

‘Oh, you’re the one got the contract for the Geek Girl calendar?’ Samantha had offered. Raoul now gave his delivery a little extra oomph and the table roared.

This was a good group. Raoul and James — his best bud — and Louise from Samantha’s office and Some Other Woman, who’d arrived on James’s arm. Was her name Katrina or Katharine or Karina? Jamie’s blonde of the week. Samantha had dubbed her Text Girl.

The men continued their discussion of politics, as if they had money on the outcome of the election, Louise was now trying to discuss something serious with Samantha and the K woman texted some more.

‘Be back,’ Samantha said.

She rose and started along the antique floor, which was — after the three glasses of anti-stress wine — not as even as it had been when she’d arrived. Easy, girl. You can drink-fall in the Hamptons, you can drink-fall in Cape May. You don’t drink-fall in Manhattan.

Two flirts from the tiny bar. She ignored them, though she ignored one less stridently than the other. It was the fellow sitting by himself at the end. He was a slim guy, pale — only-goes-out-at-night kind of skin. Painter or sculptor or some other artist, she guessed. Handsome, though there might be a weak-chin factor if he looked down. Piercing eyes. They offered one of those glances. Samantha called them ‘laps’, as in a dog lapping up food.

She got a chill. Because the look went on a little too long and then got scary.

He was undressing her, looking over her body.

She regretted tapping his eyes with hers. And continued quickly to the most challenging route the restaurant offered: the narrow stairway down to the restrooms in the basement.

Clunk, clunk …

She made it.

Dark and quiet down here, clean, which had surprised her the first time she’d come to the place. The people who’d renovated had spent plenty of time making the dining rooms rough-edged rustic (yeah, we get it: French and American countryside), but the bathrooms were pure SoHo. Slate, recessed lighting, ornamental grasses for decoration. Mapplethorpe on the walls but nothing too weird. No whips, no butts.

Samantha walked to the W, tried the door.

Locked. She grimaced. Provence² wasn’t big but no fucking restaurant in the world should have a single-occupancy women’s room. Were the owners crazy?

Creaks overhead, from footsteps on the sprung wood flooring. Muted voices.

Thinking of the man at the bar.

What was I doing, looking back at him like that? Jesus. Be a little smarter. Okay? Why flirt? You’ve got Elliott from work. He isn’t a dream boy but he’s decent and dependable and watches PBS. Next time he asks, say yes. He has those sweet eyes and he’s probably even pretty decent in bed.

Come on, I’ve gotta pee. One damn restroom?

Then, with a different pitch of creak, footsteps were coming down the stairs.

Clunk, clunk …

Samantha’s heart thudded. She knew it was the flirter, the dangerous one.

She saw boots appearing on the steps. Men’s ankle boots. Out of the ’70s. Weird.

Her head swiveled. She was at the far end of the corridor. Nowhere to go from here. No exits. What do I do if he rushes me? The decibel level in the restaurant itself was piercing; nobody would hear. I left my cell phone upstairs, I –

Then: Relax. You’re not alone. There was the bimb in the restroom. She’d hear a scream.

Besides, nobody, however horny, would risk a rape in a restaurant corridor.

More likely it would be just an Awkward Incident. The slim guy coming on too strong, pushing the flirt, growing angry, but ultimately backing off. How many dozens of times had that happened? The worst injury would be branding her a cocktease.

Which was what happened when women glanced at a guy. Different rules. When men did the glancing, oh, it was all right. With men, oh, that’s what they do.

Would things ever change?

But then: What if he was a real psycho? With a knife? A slasher. The man’s piercing eyes had suggested maybe he was. And there was that murder just the other day — some girl in SoHo killed in the basement.

Just like here. Hell, I’ll hold it—

Then Samantha barked a laugh.

The boot-wearer appeared. A fat old guy in a suit and string tie. A tourist from Dallas or Houston. He glanced at her once, nodded a vague greeting and walked into the men’s room.

Then she was turning back to the door of the W.

Come on, honey. Jesus. You got your slutty makeup on just right? Or are you puking up your fourth Cosmo? Samantha gripped the knob again to remind the inconsiderate occupant that there was a queue.

The handle turned.

Hell, she thought. It’d been unlocked all along. She’d probably turned it the wrong way a moment ago.

How stupid can you be? She pushed inside and swept the light on, letting the door swing shut.

And saw the man standing behind it. He wore coveralls and a stocking cap. In a flash he locked the door.

Oh, Jesusjesusjesus …

His face was burned! No, distorted, mushed under a latex hood, transparent but yellow. And rubber gloves, the same color, on his hands. On his left arm, a sliver of a red tattoo was visible between the end of the glove and the start of the sleeve. An insect, with pincers, spiny legs, but human eyes.

‘Ahhhh, no, no, no …’

She spun about fast, grabbing at the door, but he got to her first, arm around her chest. And she felt a sharp pain as he punched her neck.

Kicking, starting to scream, but he clapped a thick cloth over her mouth. The sounds were absorbed.

And then she noticed a small door across from the toilet, two by three feet or so, open onto a blackness — a tunnel or passage to an even deeper basement, below the restaurant.

‘Please!’ she muttered but the word was swallowed by the gag.

Growing limp, growing tired. Hardly afraid anymore. And she realized: the neck punch. He’d injected her with something. Before sleep took her completely Samantha felt herself being eased to the floor then dragged across it, closer and closer to the black doorway.

She sensed warmth, felt the trickle down her leg — fear and the lack of control as whatever drug he’d stuck her with took effect.

‘No,’ she whispered.

And heard a voice in her ear. ‘Yes.’ The word was drawn out for a very long time, as if it weren’t the assailant who was speaking but the insect on his arm, hissing, hissing, hissing.

CHAPTER 28

The Rule of Skin …

As he labored away on his new victim’s very nice belly with the American Eagle, Billy reflected on his fascination with the substance, God’s own canvas.

Skin.

It was Billy’s canvas too and he’d become as fixated on it as the Bone Collector had been on the skeletal system of the body — which Billy had found interesting reading in Serial Cities. He appreciated the Bone Collector’s obsession but frankly he couldn’t understand his fascination with bones. Skin was far and away the more revealing aspect of the human body. Far more central. More important.

What insights did bones give? Nothing. Not like skin.

Of the integumentary organs, which protect the body, skin is the most evolved, far more than hooves, nails, scales, feathers, and the clever, creepy arthropod exoskeletons. In mammals, skin is the largest organ. Even if organs and vessels might be maintained by some alternative Dr Seuss contraption, skin does so much more. It prevents infection and is an early warning system against and protection from excessive cold and heat, from disease or invasion, from ticks to teeth to clubs and, under certain circumstances, even spears and bullets. Skin retains that vitally precious substance, water. It absorbs the light we need and even manufactures vitamin D. How about that?

Skin.

Delicate or tough as, yes, leather. (Around the eyes it’s only a half millimeter thick; on the soles of the feet, five millimeters.)

The epidermis is the top layer, the beige or black or brown sheath we can see, and the dermis, into which a tattoo machine’s needles must penetrate, is below. Skin is a master at regeneration, which means that the most beautiful tattoo in the world will vanish if the needles don’t go deep enough, which would be like painting the Mona Lisa on sand.

But these basic facts about skin, as interesting as they were to Billy Haven, didn’t touch on its true value. Skin reveals, skin explains. Wrinkles report age and childbearing, calluses hint at vocation and hobby, color suggests health. And then there’s pigmentation. A whole other story.

Now Billy Haven sat back and surveyed his work on the parchment of his victim’s skin. Yes, good.

A Billy Mod …

The watch on his right wrist hummed. Five seconds later the second watch, in his pocket, did so too. Sort of a snooze alarm, prescribed by the Modification Commandments.

And not a bad idea. Like most artists, Billy tended to get caught up in his work.

He rose and, with illumination provided by the halogen headlamp strapped to his forehead, walked around the dim space underneath Provence².

This area was an octagonal chamber, about thirty feet across. Three arches led to three darkened tunnels. In a different century, Billy had learned in research, these corridors had been used to direct cattle to two different underground abattoirs here on the West Side of Manhattan.

Healthy cows were directed to one doorway, sickly to another. Both were slaughtered for meat but the tainted ones were sold locally to the poor in Hell’s Kitchen or shipped down to Five Points or the city of Brooklyn, for the filthy markets there. The more robust cattle ended up in the kitchens of the Upper East- and Westsiders and the better restaurants in town.

Billy didn’t know which of the exits was for the healthy beef, which for the sickly. He’d been down both until they ended, one in brick, one in rubble, but he couldn’t deduce which was which. He wished he knew because he wanted to tattoo the young lady in the tainted beef corridor — it just seemed appropriate. But he’d decided to do his mod in the place where the livestock cull had been made: the octagon itself.

He looked her over carefully. The tattoo was good. The cicatrized border too. He was pleased. When he did a work for clients in his shop back home, Billy never worried about their reaction. He had his own standards. A job they seemed indifferent to might fill him with ecstasy. Or a girl could tearfully look over her wedding cake tattoo (yes, pretty popular) and cry at how beautiful it was but he’d see one flaw, a tiny stroke out of place, and Billy would be furious with himself for days.

This art was good, though. He was satisfied.

He wondered if they’d catch on to the message now. But, no, not even Lincoln Rhyme was that good.

Thinking about the difficulty he’d had earlier — at the hospital and the doctors’ office building — he’d decided it was time to start slowing down those pursuing him.

One of the passages in the Commandments, written in Billy’s flowing script, was this: ‘Continually reassess the strengths of the officers investigating you. It may be necessary to throw up roadblocks to their investigation. Aim for the lower-level officers only; too senior, and the authorities will bring more effort to bear on finding you.’

Or, in Billy’s terms: Thou shalt smite all those who are trying to mess with the Modification.

His idea for slowing them down was simple. People who’ve never been inked think that machines use a hollow needle. But that’s not the case. Tattoo needles are solid, usually several soldered together, allowing the ink to run down the shaft and into the skin.

But Billy had some hypodermics, to sedate his victims. He now reached into his gear bag and withdrew a plastic medicine bottle with a locking cap. He opened the lid carefully and set the brown cylinder on the ground. He selected a surgeon’s hemostat, long tweezers, from his stash of stolen medical equipment. With this instrument he reached into the plastic bottle and picked up the three-quarter-inch tip of a thirty-gauge hypodermic — one of the smallest diameters. He’d carefully fatigued this tip off the syringe and packed it with poison.

He now picked up the woman’s purse and worked the dull end of the needle into the leather under the clasp so that when the crime scene cop opened the bag, the business end of the nearly microscopic needle would pierce the glove and the skin. The tip was so thin, it was unlikely that the person pricked would feel a thing.

Until, of course, about an hour later, when the symptoms hit them like a fireball. And those symptoms were delicious: Strychnine produces some of the most extreme and painful reactions of any toxin. You can count on nausea, convulsion of muscles, hypertension, grotesque flexing of the body, raw sensitivity and finally asphyxiation.

Strychnine, in effect, spasms you to death.

Though in this case, the dosage would, in an adult, lead to severe brain damage rather than death.

Visit pestilence upon your pursuers.

A moan from behind him.

She was swimming to consciousness.

Billy turned toward her, the beam of the halogen whipsawing around the room, fast, leveraged by the motion of his head.

He carefully set the purse on the ground in a spot that looked as if he’d tossed it aside casually — they’d think it contained all sorts of good trace evidence and fingerprints. He hoped it would be Amelia Sachs who picked it up. He was angry at her for finding him at the hospital, even if Lincoln Rhyme was the one responsible. He’d hoped someday to go back to the specimens room but, thanks to her, he never could.

Of course, even if she didn’t get jabbed, maybe one of Lincoln Rhyme’s assistants would.

And Rhyme himself? He supposed it was possible; he’d learned that the man had regained some use of his arm and hand. Maybe he’d don a glove and pick up the purse. He definitely wouldn’t feel the sting.

‘Oh …’

He turned to look at the art gallery of beautiful skin stretched out before him. Ivory. He taped a flashlight in place over his canvas, flicked it on. Looked at her eyes, squinting first in confusion, then in pain.

His wristwatch hummed.

Then the other.

And it was time to leave.

CHAPTER 29

Lights flashed off the falling sleet, off the encrusted piles of old snow, off the wet asphalt.

Blue glows, white, red. Pulsing. Urgent.

Amelia Sachs was climbing out of her maroon Torino, parked beside several ambulances, though several ambulances weren’t necessary. None were. The only required medical vehicle was the city morgue van. The first responders to this scene reported that Samantha Levine, the unsub’s second victim, was deceased, declared dead at the scene.

Poison again, of course. That was the preliminary, from the first responders, but there was no doubt this was Unsub 11-5’s work.

When she hadn’t returned to the table of the chic restaurant Provence², her friends had become concerned. A search of the restroom revealed an access door, which was slightly askew. A waiter had pulled it open, stuck his head in, gasped and vomited.

Sachs stood on the street, looking over the restaurant and the assembling vehicles. Lon Sellitto walked up. ‘Amelia.’

She shook her head. ‘We stopped him at the hospital this morning and he got somebody else. Right away. Telling us basically: “Fuck you.”’

Diners were settling checks and leaving and the staff were looking about as thrilled as you could imagine, upon learning that a patron had been abducted in the restroom and dragged into a tunnel beneath their establishment and murdered.

It was only a matter of time, Sachs guessed, before Provence² would be shuttered. It was as if the restaurant itself were a second victim. She supposed the boutique on Elizabeth Street too would be out of business soon.

‘I’ll start canvassing,’ the big detective muttered and ambled off, digging a notebook from his pocket.

The crime scene bus arrived and nosed up to the curb. Sachs waved to the CS techs who were climbing out. Jean Eagleston was the lead, the woman who’d worked the Chloe Moore scene in SoHo — only yesterday though it seemed like last month. She had a new partner, a slim Latino who had calm but probing eyes — hinting that he was perfect for crime scene work. Sachs walked up to them. ‘Same procedure. I’ll go in first, process the body, walk the grid. You can handle the restroom where he snatched her, any exit routes.’

Eagleston said, ‘Will do, Amelia.’ She nodded and Sachs went to the back of the CS vehicle to suit up in the Tyvek, booties, hood and gloves. The N95 respirator too. Remembering that, whatever happened, she should leave it in place.

Rust …

Goggles this time.

As she was stepping into the legs of the coveralls, she happened to glance up the street. On the corner, the same side of the street as the restaurant, was a man in a dark jacket that was similar to what the unsub had worn at the hospital for the attempted assault on Harriet Stanton — though he was in a baseball cap, not a stocking. He was on a phone and paying only moderate attention to the scene. Still, there was something artificial about his pose.

Could it be the unsub, back again, as he’d done in SoHo?

She looked away quickly and continued to gown herself, trying to act casual.

It wasn’t common for a perp to return to the scene of the crime — that was a cliché helpful only in bad murder mysteries and made-for-TV movies — but it did happen sometimes. Particularly perps who weren’t professional criminals but psychopaths, whose motives for murder were rooted in mental or emotional disturbance, which pretty much described Unsub 11-5.

On the pretext of getting a new pair of gloves from the far side of the bus, Sachs eased up to a detective she knew, a sharp, streetwise officer who’d recently been assigned to Midtown North. Nancy Simpson was handling crowd control detail and directing diners out of the immediate scene as they exited the restaurant.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘Nancy.’

‘This guy again?’ the woman muttered. She was in an NYPD windbreaker, collar pulled high against the weather. Sachs liked the stylish beret, in dark green.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Got people scared all over town,’ Simpson told her. ‘Reports of intruders in basements’re up a hundred percent. None of ’em pan out, but we send Patrol anyway. Tying up everything.’ She added with a wink. ‘And nobody’s washing their clothes. Afraid of the laundry room.’

‘We may have a situation, Nancy.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Don’t look behind you.’

‘I won’t. Why?’

‘We’ve got a fish I’m interested in. A guy on the corner. This block. He’s in a jacket, baseball cap. I want you to get close but don’t see him. You know what I mean?’

‘Sure. I saw somebody. Peripheral. Wondered.’

‘Get close. And then stop him. Keep your weapon ready. There’s an off-chance it might be the perp.’

‘Who did this?’

‘Who did this. Not likely, I’m saying. But maybe.’

‘How should I get close?’

‘You’re checking traffic, you’re on your phone, pretending you’re on your phone, I mean.’

‘Arrest?’

‘Just ID at this point. I’ll come up behind. I’ll have my weapon drawn.’

‘Fish. I’m bait.’

Sachs glanced to the side. ‘Oh, hell. He’s gone.’

The unsub, or whoever he was, had disappeared around the corner of a glass-and-chrome building, about ten stories high, next to the restaurant where Samantha Levine had been dining — before the fateful trip to the restroom.

‘I’m on it,’ Simpson said. She sprinted in the direction the man had gone.

Sachs ran to the command post and told Bo Haumann there was a possible suspect. Instantly he marshaled a half-dozen ESU and other officers. She glanced toward Simpson. From the way she paused and looked around, Sachs deduced the suspect had vanished.

The detective turned and trotted back to Sachs and Haumann.

‘Sorry, Amelia. He’s gone. Maybe ducked into that building — the fancy one on the corner — or took off in a car.’

Haumann said, ‘We’ll follow up. We have a picture of your unsub from the homicide yesterday, the Identi-Kit image.’

She pictured the surly, Slavic-looking face, the weirdly light eyes.

The ESU leader said to the men he’d called around him, ‘Deploy. Go find him. And somebody call it in to Midtown South. I want a team moving west down Fifty-two Street. We’ll hem him in, if we can.’

‘Yessir.’

They trotted off.

As much as she wanted to go with them — she considered handing off the crime scene — Sachs finished dressing for the grid.

When she was gowned, bootied and hooded, she grabbed the collection kit and, with a glance back at the street down which the fish had swum away, Sachs started for the door of the restaurant.

CHAPTER

30

Sachs was grateful that, as at the previous scene, she didn’t have to lug the heavy halogen spots down to the murder site; they were already set up and burning brightly.

Thank you, first responders.

She glanced at the diagram from Rhyme’s database of underground New York to orient herself.

There were some similarities to the prior scene: the waterpipe, the utility conduits, the yellow boxes marked IFON. But there was a major difference too. This space was much bigger. And she could climb directly into it through the access doorway in the bathroom. No circular coffin breadbaskets.

Thank you …

From the ancient wooden pens surrounding the dirt floor, she deduced that it had been part of a passageway to move animals to and from one of the stockyards that used to operate near here, in Hell’s Kitchen. She remembered that the perp seemed to be influenced by the Bone Collector; that killer too had used a former slaughterhouse as a place to stash one of his victims — and staked her down, bloody, so she would be devoured alive by rats.

Unsub 11-5 certainly had learned at the feet of a master.

The access door in the restroom opened into a large octagon, from which three tunnels disappeared into the darkness.

Sachs clicked on the video and audio feed. ‘Rhyme? You there?’

‘Ah, Sachs. I was wondering.’

‘He might’ve come back again. Like on Elizabeth Street.’

‘Returned to the scene?’

‘Or never left. I saw someone on the street, matching. Bo Haumann’s got officers checking it out.’

‘Anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why’s he coming back?’ Rhyme mused. Not expecting an answer.

The camera was pointed in the direction she was looking — toward the dimness of a tunnel’s end. Before turning to the body, though, she slipped rubber bands over her booties and tracked along the unsub’s footprints, also muted by protective plastic, which led down one of the tunnels.

‘That’s how he got in? I can’t see clearly.’

‘Looks that way, Rhyme. I see some lights up ahead.’

The perp hadn’t used a manhole to gain access. This tunnel, one of three, opened onto a train track — the line running north from Penn Station. The opening was largely obscured by a pile of debris but there was plenty of room for a person to climb over it. The unsub had simply walked up or down the tracks, from a spot near the West Side Highway, and then scaled the rubble and made his way to the octagon-shaped space where Samantha had died. She radioed Jean Eagleston and told her about the secondary crime scene — the entrance/exit route.

Then Sachs returned to the center of the octagon, where the victim lay. She looked up and shielded her eyes from the brilliant halogens the medics had set up. ‘Another flashlight, Rhyme. He sure wants to be certain nobody misses the vic.’

Messages from our sponsor …

Like Chloe, Samantha was handcuffed and her ankles duct-taped. She’d also been partially disrobed — but only to expose her abdomen, where the unsub had inked her. A fast examination revealed no apparent sexual contact here either. Indeed, there was something oddly chaste about the way he’d left both victims. This was, she reflected, eerier than a straight-up sex crime — since it suggested the underlying mystery of the case: Why was he doing this? Rape, at least, was categorical. This?

She gazed down at the tattoo.

Rhyme’s voice intruded on the quiet. ‘“forty”. Lowercase again. Part of the phrase. Cardinal number this time, not the ordinal “fortieth”. Why?’ Testily he added, ‘Well, no time to speculate. Let’s get going.’

She processed the body, scraping nails (nothing obvious this time, as with Chloe), taking samples of the blood, the body fluids and presumably the poison oozing from the wounds. Then scanning her for prints, though he’d worn gloves again, of course.

Sachs walked the grid, collecting trace near the body and distant samples of dirt and trace too, for control. She studied the ground. ‘Booties again. No tread marks.’

‘He’s wearing new shoes,’ Rhyme said. ‘He’ll’ve pitched the others, the famous Bass size elevens. They’re in the sewer in the Bronx by now.’

As she walked the grid, she noticed something against one of the far walls. At first she thought it was a rat lying on its side. The lump wasn’t moving so she speculated that the creature chewed a bit of Samantha’s flesh, ingested the poison and crawled away to die.

But as she got closer she noted that, no, it was a purse.

‘Got her handbag.’

‘Good. Maybe there’ll be trace on that.’

She collected it and dropped the leather purse into an evidence bag.

This and all of the other samples of trace, also bagged in plastic or paper, she added to a milk crate.

Sachs wanded with the alternative light source — Samantha’s body, the ground of the octagon, the tunnels. Again, Unsub 11-5 had punched and probed her flesh. She noted from the bootie prints that the unsub had walked up and down the tunnel several times to and from the debris pile, which seemed curious, and she told Rhyme. Maybe because he’d heard intruders, he suggested. Or maybe he’d left some of his gear at the mouth. She took pictures and finally returned to the access door, muttering thanks once more to no one in particular that there was nothing claustrophobic about this search.

Once on the outside again, she handed off to the other CS techs, who had finished with the secondary scenes. Detective Jean Eagleston reported the not-surprising news that any of the perp’s movements around the train tracks and the entrance to the tunnel from the outside were obliterated by the rain and sleet.

Aside from what presumably had been a brief struggle in the women’s room, there were no signs that he’d touched anything. There were no tool marks in the screws he’d removed to gain access to the bathroom. And no footprints either, except those of dozens of street shoes — from the people who’d used the toilet.

The sleet beat an irritating drum tap on the hood she wore and she told Rhyme she was disconnecting the video camera for fear the moisture would short out the expensive, high-def system.

She returned to her car, where she filled out chain-of-custody cards for each item collected, working under the trunk lid to keep the cards and evidence bags dry. Stripping off the Tyvek suit, she slipped it into a burn bag in the crime scene van and returned to the street, pulling on her leather jacket.

Sachs noticed Nancy Simpson, the detective, speaking to Bo Haumann. The other officers who’d gone off in pursuit of the fish were straggling back.

Haumann rubbed his grizzled crew cut as Sachs walked up. ‘Nothing. Nobody saw him. But—’ He glanced up at the inhospitable skies. ‘Not a lot of people out tonight.’

She nodded then headed over to Lon Sellitto, who was talking to a group of people about Samantha’s age. She told him about the pursuit — of the unsub or an innocent voyeur — the unsuccessful pursuit. He took the news with a grunt, then they both turned to the others, who were, the detective reported, Samantha’s fellow diners. She’d deduced this earlier from their expressions.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Sachs said. One woman’s face was streaked with tears — a co-worker. The other woman, a blonde, looked put out and uneasy. Sachs guessed she had coke in her purse. Let it go.

The two men were angry and resolute. None of these had been Samantha’s lover, it seemed. But one was her roommate; the greatest sorrow within the four resided in his eyes.

She and Sellitto both asked questions, learning the unsurprising news that Samantha Levine had no enemies that they’d ever heard of. She was a businesswoman and had never been in trouble with the law. No problems with former boyfriends.

Another random death. In some ways this was the most tragic of all crimes: the happenstance victim.

And in many ways the most difficult to solve.

It was then that a man in an expensive suit — no overcoat — came hurrying up to them, oblivious to the sleet and cold. He was in his fifties, tanned, hair carefully cut. He wasn’t tall but was quite handsome and well proportioned.

‘Mr Clevenger!’ one of the women cried and hugged him. Samantha’s co-worker. He gripped her hard and greeted the others in Samantha’s party with a somber nod.

‘Louise! Is it true? I just heard. I just got a call. Is she, Samantha? Is she gone?’ He stepped back and the woman he’d been embracing said, ‘Yes, I can’t believe it. She’s … I mean, she’s dead.’

The newcomer turned to Sachs, who asked, ‘So you knew Ms Levine?’

‘Yes, yes. She works for me. She was … I was talking to her a few hours ago. We had a meeting … just a few hours ago.’ He nodded at the glossy building beside the restaurant. ‘There. I’m Todd Clevenger.’ He handed her a card. International Fiber Optic Networks. He was the company’s president and CEO.

Sellitto asked, ‘Was there any reason anybody would want to hurt her? Anything about her job that was sensitive? That might’ve exposed her to threats?’

‘Can’t imagine it. All we do is lay fiber optic for broadband Internet … just communications. Anyway, she never said anything, like she was in danger. I can’t imagine. She was the sweetest person in the world. Smart. Really smart.’

The woman named Louise said to Sachs, ‘I was thinking about something. There was that woman killed the other day. In SoHo. Is this the same psycho?’

‘I can’t really comment. It’s an ongoing investigation.’

‘But that woman was killed underground too. Right? In a tunnel. It was on the news.’

The scrawny young artistic-looking man, who’d identified himself as Raoul, Samantha’s roommate, said, ‘That’s right. It was the same thing. The, you know, MO.’

Sachs again demurred. She and Sellitto asked a few more questions but it was soon clear there was nothing more these people could help them with.

Wrong place, wrong time.

A happenstance victim …

Ultimately, in cases where the victim had been alone with the perpetrator, no witnesses, the truth would have to be revealed through the evidence.

And this was what Sachs and the other Crime Scene officers now packed carefully into the trunk of her Torino.

In five minutes she was racing up the West Side Highway, blue light on the dash pulsing madly, as she skidded around cars and trucks — the slaloming more a function of her powerful engine and her comfort in high revs than the inclement weather.

CHAPTER 31

At close to eleven p.m. Rhyme heard Sachs enter the hallway, her arrival announced by the modulating hiss of sleet-filled wind.

‘Ah, finally.’

She stepped into the parlor a moment later, holding a large milk crate containing a dozen plastic and paper bags. She nodded a greeting to Mel Cooper, who sagged with fatigue but seemed game to start on the analysis.

Rhyme asked quickly, ‘Sachs, you said you thought he might be around the scene?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What came of that?’

‘Nothing. Bo sent a half-dozen ESU boys and girls after him. But he was gone. And I didn’t get a good look at him. It was maybe nothing. But my gut told me it was him.’ She called up a map of Hell’s Kitchen on the main computer monitor and pointed out the restaurant, Provence², and on the corner an office building. ‘He went down there but, see? It’s only a few blocks from Times Square. He got lost in the crowd. Not sure it was him but it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore completely. He seems curious about the investigation; after all, the perp did come back to Elizabeth Street and spied on me through the manhole cover.’

Eye-to-eye …

‘Well, let’s get to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?’

Thom Reston said firmly, ‘Find out — what she has, that is — but find out quickly. You’re going to bed soon, Lincoln. It’s been a long day.’

Rhyme scowled. But he also accepted that the caregiver’s job was to keep him healthy and alive. Quadriplegics were susceptible to a number of troublesome conditions, the most dangerous of which was autonomic dysreflexia — a spike in blood pressure brought on by physical stress. It wasn’t clear that exhaustion was a precipitating factor but Thom had never been one to take anything for granted.

‘Yes, yes, yes. Just a few minutes.’

‘Nothing spectacular,’ Sachs said, nodding at the evidence.

But then, Rhyme reflected, there rarely were any smoking guns. Crime scene work was incremental. And obvious finds, he felt, were automatically suspect; they might be planted evidence. Which happened more than one might suspect.

First, Sachs displayed the photographs of the tattoo.

Surrounded by the scalloped border that, according to TT Gordon, was in some way significant.

Which made its cryptic nature all the more infuriating.

‘First “the second” and now “forty”. No article preceding this one but, again, no punctuation.’

What the hell was he saying? A gap of thirty-eight from two to forty. And why the switch from ordinal to cardinal? Rhyme mused, ‘Smells like a place to me, an address. GPS or longitude and latitude coordinates. But not enough to go on yet.’

He gave up speculating and turned back to the evidence she’d collected. Sachs selected a bag and gave it to Cooper. He extracted the cotton ball inside.

‘The poison,’ Sachs said. ‘One sample’s gone to the ME’s Office but I want a head start. Burn it, Mel.’

He ran the materials through the chromatograph and a few minutes later had the mass spectrum. ‘It’s a combination of atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.’

Rhyme was staring at the ceiling. ‘That comes from some plant … yes, yes … Hell, I can’t remember what.’

Cooper typed the cocktail of ingredients into the toxin database and reported a moment later, ‘Angel’s trumpet: Brugmansia.’

‘Yes,’ Rhyme called. ‘Of course that’s it. But I don’t know the details.’

Cooper explained that it was a South American plant, particularly popular among criminals in Colombia, who called it devil’s breath. They blew it into the faces of their victims and the paralyzing, amnesiac drug rendered them unconscious or, if they remained awake, unable to fight their assailants.

And with the right dose, as with Samantha Levine, the drug could induce death in a matter of minutes.

Coincidentally, at that moment, the parlor landline rang: the medical examiner’s office.

Cooper lifted an eyebrow, looking toward Sachs. ‘Must be a slow night. Or you scared them into prioritizing us, Amelia.’

Rhyme knew which.

The ME official on call confirmed that devil’s breath was the poison that had been used on Samantha Levine’s abdomen in the tattooed message. He added that it was a highly concentrated version of the toxin. And there was residue of propofol in her bloodstream. Cooper thanked him.

Sachs and the tech continued to examine the trace she’d collected. This time, though, they found no variation from the control samples, which meant the residues found on her body and where the unsub had walked in the crime scene had not been tracked in by him; they were all indigenous to the underground stockyard pen.

That, in turn, meant the substances wouldn’t lead to anywhere the perp might have been.

‘Ergo,’ Rhyme muttered, ‘fucking useless.’

Finally, Sachs used tongs to pick up a plastic bag containing what seemed to Rhyme to be a purse. ‘Thought it was a rat at first. Brown, you know. And the strap seemed to be the tail. Be careful. There’s a booby trap inside.’ A glance at Cooper.

‘What?’ Rhyme asked.

She explained, ‘It was sitting by itself about ten feet from Samantha’s body. It just felt wrong being there. I looked at it closely and saw a needle sticking up. Very small. I used forceps to collect the bag.’ Sachs added that she’d been on the lookout for traps because the NYPD psychologist, Terry Dobyns, had told them the perp might start targeting his pursuers.

‘That’s sneaky,’ Cooper said, donning an eye loupe to examine the needle. ‘Hypodermic. I’d say thirty-gauge. Very small. White substance inside.’

Rhyme wheeled close and looked; his keen eyes could make out a tiny glint near the clasp.

Cooper selected a hemostat and then cautiously lifted the purse from the bag.

‘Check for explosives,’ Rhyme said. This wasn’t the unsub’s MO but you could never be too careful.

The scan came back negative. Still, Cooper decided to put the purse in a containment vessel and used remote arms to open the bag, given the possibility that it was also rigged with some trap that might spray with toxin whoever opened it.

But, no, the needle was the only trap. The contents were mundane, if wrenching, clues to a life now abruptly ended: a health club membership card, a breast cancer donation thank-you note, a discount certificate to a Midtown restaurant. Pictures of children — nieces and nephews, it seemed.

As for the booby trap, Cooper extracted the needle carefully.

‘It’s small,’ Rhyme said. ‘What do we make of that?’

Cooper said, ‘Can be used for insulin but this type is mostly used by plastic surgeons.’

Rhyme reminded, ‘He’s got propofol too. A general anesthetic. Could be that he’s planning some cosmetic surgery as part of his escape plan. Though maybe he just broke into a medical supply house and stole what he wanted. Sachs, check if there’ve been any reports of that in the past month or so in the area.’ She stepped away to make a call downtown, requesting an NCIC search. Rhyme continued, ‘But more to the point — excuse the expression — that needle in particular: What’s inside his little present to us? Is it more of the angel’s trumpet?’

Cooper ran the sample. And a moment later he read the results. ‘Nope. It’s worse. Well, I shouldn’t say worse. That’s a qualitative judgment. I’ll just say it’s more efficient.’

‘Meaning deadlier?’ Rhyme asked.

‘A lot. Strychnine.’ Cooper explained: The toxin came from Strychnos, a genus of trees and climbing shrubs. The substance was popular as a rodenticide. It had been a common murder weapon a century ago though it was less so now since it was easily traced. Strychnine was the most pain-inducing of any toxin.

‘Not enough to kill an adult,’ Cooper said. ‘But it would keep the victim out of commission for weeks and might cause brain damage.’

On the positive side, though, from the investigators’ perspective, the poison was still sold commercially as a pesticide. Rhyme mentioned this to Sachs and Cooper.

‘I’ll see if we can find any commercial suppliers,’ the tech said. ‘They have to keep records of poison sales.’

Cooper was looking at his computer, though, and frowning. ‘Dozens of sources. Brick-and-mortar stores. And all he’d need is a fake ID to buy some. Pay cash. No trace.’

In the world of forensic science too many options were as bad as too few.

Sachs got a phone call and listened for a moment, then thanked the person on the other end of the line and disconnected. ‘No reported thefts of drugs or other medical equipment or supplies in the area, the last thirty days, except a few stoners or crack-heads knocking over pharmacies; they all got busted. No propofol missing.’

Thom appeared in the doorway.

‘Ah, my, what a stern expression.’

‘Close to midnight, Lincoln You’re going to bed.’

‘Yes, dear, yes, dear.’ Then Rhyme said to Cooper, ‘Be careful, Mel. No reason for him to know you’re working this case but still, be careful. Sachs, text Lon and Pulaski and tell them the same thing.’ A glance at the mass spectrum of the strychnine. ‘We’re targets now. He’s declared war.’

She sent messages to the two officers, then stepped to a clean whiteboard and wrote down the evidence, as well as the information she and Lon Sellitto had learned about the victim.

Rhyme gazed at the entries and then shrugged. ‘It’s as mysterious as the message he’s trying to send.’

Thom said, ‘Witching hour.’

‘Okay, you win.’

Cooper pulled his jacket on and said good night.

‘Sachs?’ Rhyme asked. ‘You coming upstairs?’

She’d turned from the board and was staring out the window at the stark, ice-coated branches bending in the persistent wind.

‘What?’ She hadn’t heard, it seemed.

‘You coming to bed?’

‘I’ll be a few more minutes.’

Thom climbed the stairs and Rhyme wheeled to the elevator that would take him to the second floor. Once there, he rolled toward the bedroom. He paused, though, cocked his head, listening. Sachs was on the phone, speaking softly, but he could still make out the words.

‘Pam, hey, it’s me … Hope you’re checking messages. Really like to talk. Give me a call. Okay, love you. ’Night.’

That was, Rhyme believed, the third such call today.

He heard her footfalls on the stairs and immediately veered into the bedroom and struck up a conversation with Thom — which must have bordered on the surreal to the aide, given that Rhyme was concentrating on his words not one bit; he simply wanted to keep Sachs from knowing he’d overheard her plea to Pam Willoughby.

Sachs crested the top stair and walked into the bedroom. Rhyme was thinking how unsettling it is when the people who are the hubs of our lives are suddenly vulnerable. And worse yet when they mask it with stoic smiles, as Sachs did now.

She saw his glance and asked, ‘What?’

Rhyme vamped. ‘Just thinking. I have a feeling we’re going to get him tomorrow.’

He expected her to look incredulous and say something like, ‘You? Have a feeling.’

But instead she glanced subtly at her phone’s screen, pocketed the unit and said, eyes out the window, ‘Could be, Rhyme. Could be.’