The Bone Collector (19 page)

C
areful,” Rhyme barked.

“I’m an expert at this.”

“Is it new or old?”

“Shhh,” Thom said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. The blade, is it old or new?”

“Don’t breathe. . . . Ah, there we go. Smooth as a baby’s butt.”

The procedure was not forensic but cosmetic.

Thom was giving Rhyme his first shave in a week. He had also washed his hair and combed it straight back.

A half hour before, waiting for Sachs and the evidence to arrive, Rhyme had sent Cooper out of the room while Thom slicked up a catheter with K-Y and wielded the tube. After that business had been completed Thom had looked at him and said, “You look like shit. You realize that?”

“I don’t care. Why would I care?”

Realizing suddenly that he did.

“How ’bout a shave?” the young man had asked.

“We don’t have time.”

Rhyme’s real concern was that if Dr. Berger saw him groomed he’d be less inclined to go ahead with the suicide. A disheveled patient is a despondent patient.

“And a wash.”

“No.”

“We’ve got company now, Lincoln.”

Finally Rhyme had grumbled, “All right.”

“And let’s lose those pajamas, what do you say?”

“There’s nothing wrong with them.”

But that meant all right too.

Now, scrubbed and shaved, dressed in jeans and a
white shirt, Rhyme ignored the mirror his aide held in front of him.

“Take that away.”

“Remarkable improvement.”

Lincoln Rhyme snorted derisively. “I’m going for a walk until they get back,” he announced and settled his head back into the pillow. Mel Cooper turned to him with a perplexed expression.

“In his head,” Thom explained.

“Your head?”

“I imagine it,” Rhyme continued.

“That’s quite a trick,” Cooper said.

“I can walk through any neighborhood I want and never get mugged. Hike in the mountains and never get tired.
Climb
a mountain if I want. Go window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. Of course the things I see aren’t necessarily there. But so what? Neither are the stars.”

“How’s that?” Cooper asked.

“The starlight we see is thousands or millions of years old. By the time it gets to Earth the stars themselves’ve moved. They’re not where we see them.” Rhyme sighed as the exhaustion flooded over him. “I suppose some of them have already burned out and disappeared.” He closed his eyes.

“He’s making it harder.”

“Not necessarily,” Rhyme answered Lon Sellitto.

Sellitto, Banks and Sachs had just returned from the stockyard scene.

“Underwear, the moon and a plant,” cheerfully pessimistic Jerry Banks said. “That’s not exactly a road map.”

“Dirt too,” Rhyme reminded, ever appreciative of soil.

“Have any idea what they mean?” Sellitto asked.

“Not yet,” Rhyme said.

“Where’s Polling?” Sellitto muttered. “He
still
hasn’t answered his page.”

“Haven’t seen him,” Rhyme said.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

“As I live and breathe,” rumbled the stranger’s smooth baritone.

Rhyme nodded the lanky man inside. He was somber-looking but his lean face suddenly cracked into a warm smile, as it tended to do at odd moments. Terry Dobyns was the sum total of the NYPD’s behavioral science department. He’d studied with the FBI behaviorists down at Quantico and had degrees in forensic science and psychology.

The psychologist loved opera and touch football and when Lincoln Rhyme had awakened in the hospital after the accident three and a half years ago Dobyns had been sitting beside him listening to
Aïda
on a Walkman. He’d then spent the next three hours conducting what turned out to be the first of many counseling sessions about Rhyme’s injury.

“Now what’s this I recall the textbooks sayin’ ’bout people who don’t return phone calls?”

“Analyze me later, Terry. You hear about our unsub?”

“A bit,” Dobyns said, looking Rhyme over. He wasn’t an M.D. but he knew physiology. “You all right, Lincoln? Looking a little peaked.”

“I’m getting a bit of a workout today,” Rhyme admitted. “And I could use a nap. You know what a lazy SOB I am.”

“Yeah, right. You’re the man’d call me at three in the morning with some question about a perp and couldn’t understand why I was in the sack. So what’s up? You fishin’ for a profile?”

“Whatever you can tell us’ll help.”

Sellitto briefed Dobyns, who—as Rhyme recalled from the days they worked together—never took notes but managed to retain everything he heard inside a head crowned with dark-red hair.

The psychologist paced in front of the wall chart, glancing up at it occasionally as he listened to the detective’s rumbling voice.

He held up a finger, interrupting Sellitto. “The victims, the victims . . . They’ve all been found underground. Buried, in a basement, in the stockyard tunnel.”

“Right,” Rhyme confirmed.

“Go on.”

Sellitto continued, explaining about the rescue of Monelle Gerger.

“Fine, all right,” Dobyns said absently. Then braked to a halt and turned to the wall again. He spread his legs and, hands on hips, gazed at the sparse facts about Unsub 823. “Tell me more about this idea of yours, Lincoln. That he likes old things.”

“I don’t know what to make of it. So far his clues have something to do with historical New York. Building materials from the turn of the century, the stockyards, the steam system.”

Dobyns stepped forward suddenly and tapped the profile. “Hanna. Tell me about Hanna.”

“Amelia?” Rhyme asked.

She told Dobyns how the unsub had referred to Monelle Gerger as Hanna for no apparent reason. “She said he seemed to like saying the name. And speaking to her in German.”

“And he took a bit of a chance to ’nap her, didn’t he?” Dobyns noted. “The cab, at the airport—that was safe for him. But hiding in a laundry room . . . He must’ve been real motivated to snatch somebody German.”

Dobyns twined some ruddy hair around a lengthy finger and flopped down in one of the squeaky rattan chairs, stretched his feet out in front of him.

“Okay, try this on for size. The underground . . . that’s the key. It tells me he’s somebody who’s hiding something and when I hear that I start thinking hysteria.”

“He’s not acting hysterical,” Sellitto said. “He’s pretty damn calm and calculating.”

“Not hysteria in that sense. It’s a category of mental disorders. The condition manifests when something traumatic happens in a patient’s life and the subconscious
converts
that trauma into something else. It’s an attempt to protect the patient. With traditional conversion hysteria you see physical symptoms—nausea, pain, paralysis. But I think here we’re dealing with a related problem. Dissociation—that’s what we call it when the reaction to the trauma affects the mind, not the physical body. Hysterical amnesia, fugue states. And multiple personalities.”

“Jekyll and Hyde?” Mel Cooper played straight man this time, beating Banks to the punch.

“Well, I don’t think he’s got true multiple personalities,” Dobyns continued. “That’s a very rare diagnosis and the classic mult pers is young and has a lower IQ than your boy.” He nodded at the profile chart. “He’s slick and he’s smart. Clearly an organized offender.” Dobyns stared out the window for a moment. “This is interesting, Lincoln. I think your unsub pulls on his other personality when it suits him—when he wants to kill—and that’s important.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, it tells us something about his main personality. He’s someone who’s been trained—maybe at his job, maybe his upbringing—to help people, not hurt them. A priest, a counselor, politician, social worker. And, two, I think it means he’s found himself a blueprint. If you can find out what it is, maybe you can get a lead to him.”

“What kind of blueprint?”

“He may have wanted to kill for a long time. But he didn’t act until he found himself a role model. Maybe from a book or movie. Or somebody he actually knows. It’s someone he can identify with, someone whose own crimes in effect give him permission to kill. Now, I’m going out on a limb here—”

“Climb,” Rhyme said. “Climb.”

“His obsession with history tells me that his personality is a character from the past.”

“Real life?”

“That I couldn’t say. Maybe fictional, maybe not. Hanna, whoever she is, figures in the story somewhere. Germany too. Or German Americans.”

“Any idea what might’ve set him off?”

“Freud felt it was caused by—what else?—sexual conflict at the Oedipal stage. Nowadays, the consensus is that developmental glitches’re only one cause—any trauma can trigger it. And it doesn’t have to be a single event. It could be a personality flaw, a long series of personal or professional disappointments. Hard to say.” His eyes glowed as they gazed at the profile. “But I sure
hope you bag him alive, Lincoln. I’d love the chance to get him on the couch for a few hours.”

“Thom, are you writing this down?”

“Yes, bwana.”

“But one question,” Rhyme began.

Dobyns whirled around. “I’d say it’s
the
question, Lincoln: Why is he leaving the clues? Right?”

“Yep. Why the clues?”

“Think about what he’s done. . . . He’s talking to you. Not rambling incoherently like Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer. He’s not schizophrenic. He’s communicating—in
your
language. The language of forensics. Why?” More pacing, eyes flipping over the chart. “All I can think of is that he wants to share the guilt. See, it’s hard for him to kill. It becomes easier if he makes us accomplices. If we don’t save the vics in time their deaths are partly
our
fault.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Rhyme asked. “It means he’ll keep giving us clues that are solvable. Otherwise, if the puzzle’s too hard, he’s not sharing the burden.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dobyns said, smiling no longer. “But there’s another factor at work too.”

Sellitto supplied the answer. “Serial activity escalates.”

“Right,” Dobyns confirmed.

“How can he strike more often?” Banks muttered. “Every three hours isn’t fast enough?”

“Oh, he’ll find a way,” the psychologist continued. “Most likely, he’ll start targeting multiple victims.” The psychologist’s eyes narrowed. “Say, you all right, Lincoln?”

There were beads of sweat on the criminalist’s forehead and he’d been squinting his eyes hard. “Just tired. A lot of excitement for an old crip.”

“One last thing. The profile of the victims’s vital in serial crimes. But here we’ve got different sexes, ages and economic classes. All white but he’s been preying in a predominantly white pool so that’s not statistically significant. With what we know so far we can’t figure out why he’s taken these particular people. If you can, you might just get ahead of him.”

“Thanks, Terry,” Rhyme said. “Stick around for a while.”

“Sure, Lincoln. If you’d like.”

Then Rhyme ordered, “Let’s look at the PE from the stockyard scene. What’ve we got? The underwear?”

Mel Cooper assembled the bags that Sachs had brought back from the scene. He glanced at the one containing the underwear. “Katrina Fashion’s D’Amore line,” he announced. “One hundred percent cotton, elastic band. Cloth made in the U.S. They were cut and sewn in Taiwan.”

“You can tell that just by looking at them?” Sachs asked, incredulous.

“Naw, I was reading,” he answered, pointing at the label.

“Oh.”

The cops laughed.

“He’s telling us he’s got another woman then?” Sachs asked.

“Probably,” Rhyme said.

Cooper opened the bag. “Don’t know what the liquid is. I’ll do a chromatograph.”

Rhyme asked Thom to hold up the scrap of paper with the phases of the moon on it. He studied it closely. A scrap like this was wonderful individuated evidence. You could fit it to the sheet it’d been torn from and link the two as closely as fingerprints. The problem here of course was that they had no original piece of paper. He wondered if they’d ever find it. The unsub might have destroyed it once he’d torn this bit out. Yet Lincoln Rhyme preferred to think not. He liked to picture it somewhere. Just waiting to be found. The way he always pictured source evidence: the automobile the paint chip had scraped off of, the finger that had lost the nail, the gun barrel that had discharged the rifled slug found in the victim’s body. These sources—always close to the unsub—took on personalities of their own in Rhyme’s mind. They could be imperious or cruel.

Or mysterious.

Phases of the moon.

Rhyme asked Dobyns if their unsub could be driven to act cyclically.

“No. The moon isn’t in a major phase right now. We’re four days past new.”

“So the moons mean something else.”

“If they’re even moons in the first place,” Sachs said. Pleased with herself, and rightly so, Rhyme thought. He said, “Good point, Amelia. Maybe he’s talking about circles. About ink. About paper. About geometry. The planetarium . . .”