The Bone Collector (12 page)

He was on her in an instant, pinning her arms to the concrete, slapping a piece of thick gray tape over her mouth.

Hilfe!

Nein, bitte nicht.

Bitte nicht.

He wasn’t large but he was strong. He easily rolled her over onto her stomach and she heard the ratcheting of the handcuffs closing on her wrists.

Then he stood up. For a long moment, no sound but the drip of water, the rasp of Monelle’s breath, the click of a small motor somewhere in the basement.

Waiting for the hands to touch her body, to tear off her clothes. She heard him walk to the doorway to make sure they were alone.

Oh, he had complete privacy, she knew, furious with herself; she was one of the few residents who used the laundry room. Most of them avoided it because it was so deserted, so close to the back doors and windows, so far away from help.

He returned and rolled her over onto her back. Whispered something she couldn’t make out. Then: “Hanna.”

Hanna?
It’s a mistake! He thinks I’m somebody else. She shook her head broadly, trying to make him understand this.

But then, looking at his eyes, she stopped. Even though he wore a ski mask, it was clear that something was wrong. He was upset. He scanned her body, shaking his head. He closed his gloved fingers around her big arms. Squeezed her thick shoulders, grabbed a pinch of fat. She shivered in pain.

That’s what she saw: disappointment. He’d caught her and now he wasn’t sure he wanted her after all.

He reached into his pocket and slowly withdrew his hand. The click of the knife opening was like an electric shock. It started a jag of sobbing.

Nein, nein, nein!

A hiss of breath escaped from his teeth like wind through winter trees. He crouched over her, debating.

“Hanna,” he whispered. “What am I going to do?”

Then, suddenly, he made a decision. He put the knife away and yanked her to her feet then led her out to the corridor and through the rear door—the one with the broken lock she’d been hounding Herr Neischen for weeks to fix.

A
criminalist is a renaissance man.

He’s got to know botany, geology, ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature, engineering. If he knows facts—that ash with a high strontium content probably came from a highway flare, that
faca
is Portuguese for “knife,” that Ethiopian diners use no utensils and eat with their right hands exclusively, that a slug with five land-and-groove rifling marks, right twist, could not have been fired by a Colt pistol—if he knows these things he may just make the connection that places an unsub at the crime scene.

One subject all criminalists know is anatomy. And this was certainly a specialty of Lincoln Rhyme’s, for he had spent the past three and a half years enmeshed in the quirky logic of bone and nerve.

He now glanced at the evidence bag from the steam room, dangling in Jerry Banks’s hand, and announced, “Leg bone. Not human. So it’s not from the next vic.”

It was a ring of bone about two inches around, sawn through evenly. There was blood in the tracks left by the saw blade.

“A medium-sized animal,” Rhyme continued. “Large dog, sheep, goat. It’d support, I’d guess, a hundred to a hundred fifty pounds of weight. Let’s make sure the blood’s from an animal though. Still could be the vic’s.”

Perps had been known to beat or stab people to death with bones. Rhyme himself had had three such cases; the weapons had been a beef knuckle bone, a deer’s leg bone, and in one disturbing case the victim’s own ulna.

Mel Cooper ran a gel-diffusion test for blood origin. “We’ll have to wait a bit for the results,” he explained apologetically.

“Amelia,” Rhyme said, “maybe you could help us here. Use the eye loupe and look the bone over carefully. Tell us what you see.”

“Not the microscope?” she asked. He thought she’d protest but she stepped forward to the bone, peered at it with curiosity.

“Too much magnification,” Rhyme explained.

She put on the goggles and bent over the white enamel tray. Cooper turned on a gooseneck lamp.

“The cutting marks,” Rhyme said. “Is it hacked up or are they even?”

“They’re pretty even.”

“A power saw.”

Rhyme wondered if the animal had been alive when he’d done this.

“See anything unusual?”

She pored over the bone for a moment, muttered, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It just looks like a hunk of bone.”

It was then that Thom walked past and glanced at the tray. “That’s your clue? That’s funny.”

“Funny,” Rhyme said. “
Funny?
”

Sellitto asked, “You got a theory?”

“No theory.” He bent down and smelled it. “It’s osso bucco.”

“What?”

“Veal shank. I made it for you once, Lincoln. Osso bucco. Braised veal shank.” He looked at Sachs and grimaced. “He said it needed more salt.”

“Goddamn!” Sellitto cried. “He bought it at a grocery store!”

“If we’re lucky,” Rhyme said, “he bought it at
his
grocery store.”

Cooper confirmed that the precipitin test showed negative for human blood on the samples Sachs had collected. “Probably bovine,” he said.

“But what’s he trying to tell us?” Banks asked.

Rhyme had no idea. “Let’s keep going. Oh, anything on the chain and padlock?”

Cooper glanced at the hardware in a crisp plastic bag. “Nobody name-stamps chain anymore. So we’re out of
luck there. The lock’s a Secure-Pro middle-of-the-line model. It isn’t very secure and definitely not professional. How long d’it take to break it?”

“Three whole seconds,” Sellitto said.

“See. No serial numbers and it’s sold in every hardware and variety store in the country.”

“Key or combination?” Rhyme asked.

“Combination.”

“Call the manufacturer. Ask them if we take it apart and reconstruct the combination from the tumblers, will that tell us which shipment it was in and where it went to?”

Banks whistled. “Man, that’s a long shot.”

Rhyme’s glare sent a ferocious blush across his face. “And the enthusiasm in your voice, detective, tells me you’re just the one to handle the job.”

“Yessir”—the young man held up his cellular phone defensively—“I’m on it.”

Rhyme asked, “Is that blood on the chain?”

Sellitto said, “One of our boys. Cut himself pretty bad trying to break the lock off.”

“So it’s contaminated.” Rhyme scowled.

“He was trying to save her,” Sachs said to him.

“I understand. That was good of him. It’s still contaminated.” Rhyme glanced back at the table beside Cooper. “Prints?”

Cooper said he’d checked it and found only Sellitto’s print on the links.

“All right, the splinter of wood Amelia found. Check for prints.”

“I did,” Sachs said quickly. “At the scene.”

P.D., Rhyme reflected. She didn’t seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were.

“Let’s try the heavy guns, just to be sure,” Rhyme said and instructed Cooper, “Use DFO or ninhydrin. Then hit it with the nit-yag.”

“The what?” Banks asked.

“A neodymium:yttrium aluminum garnet laser.”

The tech spritzed the splinter with liquid from a plastic spray bottle and trained the laser beam on the wood.
He slipped on tinted goggles and examined it carefully. “Nothing.”

He shut off the light and examined the splinter closely. It was about six inches long, dark wood. There were black smears on it, like tar, and it was impregnated with dirt. He held it with forceps.

“I know Lincoln likes the chopstick approach,” Cooper said, “but I always ask for a fork when I go to Ming Wa’s.”

“You could be crushing the cells,” the criminalist grumbled.

“I
could
be but I’m not,” Cooper responded.

“What kind of wood?” Rhyme wondered. “Want to run a spodogram?”

“No, it’s oak. No question.”

“Saw or plane marks?” Rhyme leaned forward. Suddenly his neck spasmed and the cramp that bolted through the muscles was unbearable. He gasped, closed his eyes and twisted his neck, stretching. He felt Thom’s strong hands massaging the muscles. The pain finally faded.

“Lincoln?” Sellitto asked. “You okay?”

Rhyme breathed deeply. “Fine. It’s nothing.”

“Here.” Cooper brought the piece of wood over to the bed, lowered the magnifying goggles over Rhyme’s eyes.

Rhyme examined the specimen. “Cut in the direction of the grain with a frame saw. There’re big variations in the cuts. So I’d guess it was a post or beam milled over a hundred years ago. Steam saw probably. Hold it closer, Mel. I want to smell it.”

He held the splinter under Rhyme’s nose.

“Creosote—coal-tar distillation. Used for weatherproofing wood before lumber companies started pressure-treating. Piers, docks, railroad ties.”

“Maybe we’ve got a train buff here,” Sellitto said. “Remember the tracks this morning.”

“Could be.” Rhyme ordered, “Check for cellular compression, Mel.”

The tech examined the splinter under the compound microscope. “It’s compressed all right. But
with
the
grain. Not against it. Not a railroad tie. This is from a post or column. Weight-bearing.”

A bone . . . an old wooden post . . .

“I see dirt embedded in the wood. That tell us anything?”

Cooper set a large pad of newsprint on the table, tore the cover off. He held the splinter over the pad and brushed some dirt from cracks in the wood. He examined the speckles lying on the white paper—a reverse constellation.

“You have enough for a density-gradient test?” Rhyme asked.

In a D-G test, dirt is poured into a tube containing liquids of different specific gravities. The soil separates and each particle hangs suspended according to its own gravity. Rhyme had established a very extensive library of density-gradient profiles for dirt from all over the five boroughs. Unfortunately the test only worked with a fair amount of soil; Cooper didn’t think they had enough. “We could try it but we’d have to use the entire sample. And if it didn’t work we wouldn’t have anything left for other tests.”

Rhyme instructed him to do a visual then analyze it in the GC-MS—the chromatograph-spectrometer.

The technician brushed some dirt onto a slide. He gazed at it for a few minutes under the compound microscope. “This is strange, Lincoln. It’s topsoil. With an unusually high level of vegetation in it. But it’s in a curious form. Very deteriorated, very decomposed.” He looked up and Rhyme noticed the dark lines under his eyes from the eyepieces. He remembered that after hours of lab work the marks were quite pronounced and that occasionally a forensic tech would emerge from the IRD lab only to be greeted by a chorus of
Rocky Raccoon.

“Burn it,” Rhyme ordered.

Cooper mounted a sample in the GC-MS unit. The machine rumbled to life and there was a hiss. “A minute or two.”

“While we’re waiting,” Rhyme said, “the bone . . . I keep wondering about the bone. ’Scope it, Mel.”

Cooper carefully set the bone onto the examination stage of the compound microscope. He went over it carefully. “Whoa, got something here.”

“What?”

“Very small. Transparent. Hand me the hemostat,” Cooper said to Sachs, nodding at a pair of gripper tweezers. She handed them to him and he carefully probed in the marrow of the bone. He lifted something out.

“A tiny piece of regenerated cellulose,” Cooper announced.

“Cellophane,” Rhyme said. “Tell me more.”

“Stretch and pinch marks. I’d say he didn’t leave it intentionally; there are no cut edges. It’s not inconsistent with heavy-duty cello,” Cooper said.

“ ‘Not inconsistent.’ ” Rhyme scowled. “I don’t like his hedges.”

“We
have
to hedge, Lincoln,” Cooper said cheerfully.

“ ‘Associate with.’ ‘Suggest.’ I particularly hate ‘not inconsistent.’ ”

“Very versatile,” Cooper said. “The boldest I’ll be is that it’s probably commercial butcher or grocery store cellophane. Not Saran Wrap. Definitely not generic-brand wrap.”

Jerry Banks walked inside from the hallway. “Bad news. The Secure-Pro company doesn’t keep any records on combinations. A machine sets them at random.”

“Ah.”

“But interesting . . . they said they get calls from the police all the time about their products and you’re the first one who’s ever thought of tracing a lock through the combination.”

“How ‘interesting’ can it be if it’s a dead end?” Rhyme grumbled and turned to Mel Cooper, who was shaking his head as he stared at the GC-MS computer. “What?”

“Got that soil sample result. But I’m afraid the machine might be on the fritz. The nitrogen’s off the charts. We should run it again, use more sample this time.”

Rhyme instructed him to go ahead. His eyes turned back to the bone. “Mel, how recent was the kill?”

He examined some scrapings under the electron microscope.

“Minimal bacteria clusters. Bambi here was recently deceased, looks like. Or just out of the fridge about eight hours.”

“So our perp just bought it,” Rhyme said.

“Or a month ago and froze it,” Sellitto suggested.

“No,” Cooper said. “It hasn’t been frozen. There’s no evidence of tissue damage from ice crystals. And it hasn’t been refrigerated that long. It’s not desiccated; modern refrigerators dehydrate food.”

“It’s a good lead,” Rhyme said. “Let’s get to work on it.”

“ ‘Get to work’?” Sachs laughed. “Are you saying we call up all the grocery stores in the city and find out who sold veal bones yesterday?”

“No,” Rhyme countered. “In the past
two
days.”

“You want the Hardy Boys?”

“Let them keep doing what they’re doing. Call Emma, downtown, if she’s still working. And if she isn’t get her back to the office with the other dispatchers and put them on overtime. Get her a list of every grocery chain in town. I’ll bet our boy isn’t buying groceries for a family of four so have Emma limit the list to customers buying five items or less.”