The Bone Collector (22 page)

“Which is?”

“Getting out of Major Crimes. You don’t want it.” The lean black face, glossy and wrinkled only about the eyes, seemed sincere for the first time since she’d met him. “Best thing you ever did, going into Public Affairs. You’ll do some good there and it won’t turn you to dust. That’s what happens, you bet. This job turns you to dust.”

One of the last victims of James Schneider’s mad compulsion, a young man named Ortega, had come to Manhattan from Mexico City, where political unrest (the much-heralded populist uprising, which had begun the year before) had made commerce difficult at best. Yet the ambitious entrepreneur had been in the city no more than one week when he vanished from sight. It was learned that he was last seen in front of a West Side tavern and authorities immediately suspected that he was yet another victim of Schneider’s. Sadly, this was discovered to be the case.

The bone collector cruised the streets for fifteen minutes around NYU, Washington Square. Plenty of people
hanging out. But kids mostly. Students in summer school. Skateboarders. It was festive, weird. Singers, jugglers, acrobats. It reminded him of the “museums,” down on the Bowery, popular in the 1800s. They weren’t museums at all of course but arcades, teeming with burlesque shows, exhibits of freaks and daredevils, and vendors selling everything from French postcards to splinters of the True Cross.

He slowed once or twice but nobody wanted a cab, or could afford one. He turned south.

Schneider tied bricks to Señor Ortega’s feet and rolled him under a pier into the Hudson River so the foul water and the fish might reduce his body to mere bone. The corpse was found two weeks after he had vanished and so it was never known whether or not the unfortunate victim was alive or had full use of his senses when he was thrown into the drink. Yet it is suspected that this was so. For Schneider cruelly shortened the rope so that Señor Ortega’s face was inches below the surface of Davy Jones’s locker;—his hands undoubtedly thrashed madly about as he gazed upward at the air that would have been his salvation.

The bone collector saw a sickly young man standing by the curb. AIDS, he thought. But your bones are healthy—and
so
prominent. Your bones’ll last forever. . . . The man didn’t want a cab and the taxi cruised past, the bone collector hungrily gazing at his thin frame in the rearview mirror.

He looked back to the street just in time to swerve around an elderly man who’d stepped off the curb, his thin arm raised to flag down the cab. The man leapt back, as best he could, and the cab skidded to a stop just past him.

The man opened the back door and leaned inside. “You should look where you’re going.” He said this instructionally. Not with anger.

“Sorry,” the bone collector muttered contritely.

The elderly man hesitated for a moment, looked up the street but saw no other taxis. He climbed in.

The door slammed shut.

Thinking: Old and thin. The skin would ride on his bones like silk.

“So, where to?” he called.

“East Side.”

“You got it,” he said as he pulled on the ski mask and spun the wheel sharply right. The cab sped west.

Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York. . . . The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century, and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those which preceded them.

—PHILIP HONE,
MAYOR OF NEW YORK, DIARY, 1845

Saturday, 10:15 p.m., to Sunday, 5:30 a.m.

H
it me again, Lon.”

Rhyme drank through a straw, Sellitto from a glass. Both took the smoky liquor neat. The detective sank down in the squeaky rattan chair and Rhyme decided he looked a little like Peter Lorre in
Casablanca.

Terry Dobyns was gone—after offering some acerbic psychological insights about narcissism and those employed by the federal government. Jerry Banks had left too. Mel Cooper continued to painstakingly disassemble and pack up his equipment.

“This is good, Lincoln.” Sellitto sipped his Scotch. “Goddamn. I can’t afford this shit. How old’s it?”

“I think that one’s twenty.”

The detective eyed the tawny liquor. “Hell, this was a woman, she’d be legal and then some.”

“Tell me something, Lon. Polling? That little tantrum of his. What was that all about?”

“Little Jimmy?” Sellitto laughed. “He’s in trouble now. He’s the one ran interference to take Peretti off the case and keep it out of the feds’ hands. Really went out on a limb. Asking for you too, that took some doing. There were noses outa joint over that. I don’t mean you personally. Just a civilian in on a hot case like this.”

“Polling asked for me? I thought it was the chief.”

“Yeah, but it was Polling put the bug in his ear in the first place. He called soon as he heard there’d been a taking and there was some bogus PE on the scene.”

And wanted me? Rhyme wondered. This was curious. Rhyme hadn’t had any contact with Polling over the past
few years—not since the cop-killer case in which Rhyme had been hurt. It had been Polling who’d run the case and eventually collared Dan Shepherd.

“You seem surprised,” Sellitto said.

“That he asked for me? I am. We weren’t on the best of terms. Didn’t used to be anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“I 14–43’d him.”

An NYPD complaint form.

“Five, six years ago, when he was a lieutenant, I found him interrogating a suspect right in the middle of a secure scene. Contaminated it. I blew my stack. Put in a report and it got cited at one of his IA reviews—the one where he popped the unarmed suspect.”

“Well, I guess all’s forgiven, ’cause he wanted you bad.”

“Lon, make a phone call for me, would you?”

“Sure.”

“No,” Thom said, lifting the phone out of the detective’s hand. “Make him do it himself.”

“I didn’t have time to learn how it works,” Rhyme said, nodding toward the dialing ECU Thom had hooked up earlier.

“You didn’t
spend
the time. Big difference. Who’re you calling?”

“Berger.”

“No, you’re not,” Thom said. “It’s late.”

“I’ve been reading clocks for a while now,” Rhyme replied coolly. “Call him. He’s staying at the Plaza.”

“No.”

“I asked you to call him.”

“Here.” The aide slapped a slip of paper down on the far edge of the table but Rhyme read it easily. God may have taken much from Lincoln Rhyme but He’d given him the eyesight of a young man. He went through the process of dialing with his cheek on the control stalk. It was easier than he’d thought but he purposely took a long time and muttered as he did it. Infuriatingly, Thom ignored him and went downstairs.

Berger wasn’t in his hotel room. Rhyme disconnected, mad that he wasn’t able to slam the phone down.

“Problem?” Sellitto asked.

“No,” Rhyme grumbled.

Where is he? Rhyme thought testily. It
was
late. Berger ought to be at his hotel room by now. Rhyme was stabbed with an odd feeling—jealousy that
his
death doctor was out helping someone else die.

Sellitto suddenly chuckled softly. Rhyme looked up. The cop was eating a candy bar. He’d forgotten that junk food’d been the staple of the big man’s diet when they were working together. “I was thinking. Remember Bennie Ponzo?”

“The OC Task Force ten, twelve years ago?”

“Yeah.”

Rhyme had enjoyed organized-crime work. The perps were pros. The crime scenes challenging. And the vics were rarely innocent.

“Who was that?” Mel Cooper asked.

“Hitman outa Bay Ridge,” Sellitto said. “Remember after we booked him, the candy sandwich?”

Rhyme laughed, nodding.

“What’s the story?” Cooper asked.

Sellitto said, “Okay, we’re down at Central Booking, Lincoln and me and a couple other guys. And Bennie, remember, he was a big guy, he was sitting all hunched over, feeling his stomach. All of a sudden he goes, ‘Yo, I’m hungry, I wanna candy sandwich.’ And we’re like looking at each other and I go, ‘What’s a candy sandwich?’ And he looks at me like I’m from Mars and goes, ‘What the fuck you think it is? Ya take a Hershey bar, ya put it between two slices of bread and ya eat it. That’s a fucking candy sandwich.’ ”

They laughed. Sellitto held out the bar to Cooper, who shook his head, then to Rhyme, who felt a sudden impulse to take a bite. It’d been over a year since he’d had chocolate. He avoided food like that—sugar, candy. Troublesome food. The little things about life were the biggest burdens, the ones that saddened and exhausted you the most. Okay, you’ll never scuba-dive or hike the Alps. So what? A lot of people don’t. But everybody brushes their teeth. And goes to the dentist, gets a filling,
takes the train home. Everybody picks a hunk of peanut from out behind a molar when nobody’s looking.

Everybody except Lincoln Rhyme.

He shook his head to Sellitto and drank a long swallow of Scotch. His eyes slid back to the computer screen, recalling the goodbye letter to Blaine he’d been composing when Sellitto and Banks had interrupted him that morning. There were some other letters he wanted to write as well.

The one he was putting off writing was to Pete Taylor, the spinal cord trauma specialist. Most of the time Taylor and Rhyme had talked not about the patient’s condition but about death. The doctor was an ardent opponent of euthanasia. Rhyme felt he owed him a letter to explain why he’d decided to go ahead with the suicide.

And Amelia Sachs?

The Portable’s Daughter would get a note too, he decided.

Crips are generous, crips are kind, crips are iron . . .

Crips are nothing if not forgiving.

Dear Amelia:

My Dear Amelia:

Amelia:

Dear Officer Sachs:

 

Inasmuch as we have had the pleasure of working together, I would like to take this opportunity to state that although I consider you a betraying Judas, I’ve forgiven you. Furthermore I wish you well in your future career as a kisser of the media’s ass. . . .

“What’s her story, Lon? Sachs.”

“Aside from the fact she’s got a ball-buster temper I didn’t know about?”

“She married?”

“Naw. A face and bod like that, you’da thought some good-lookin’ hunk woulda snagged her by now. But she doesn’t even date. We heard she was going with somebody a few years ago but she never talks about it.” He
lowered his voice. “Lipstick lesbos’s what the rumor is. But I don’t know from that—
my
social life’s picking up women at the laundromat on Saturday night. Hey, it works. What can I say?”

You’ll have to learn to give up the dead
. . . .

Rhyme was thinking about the look on her face when he’d said that to her. What was that all about? Then he grew angry with himself for spending any time thinking about her. And took a good slug of Scotch.

The doorbell rang, then footsteps on the stairs. Rhyme and Sellitto glanced toward the doorway. The sound was from the boots of a tall man, wearing city-issue jodhpurs and a blue helmet. One of NYPD’s elite mounted police. He handed a bulky envelope to Sellitto and returned down the stairs.

The detective opened it. “Lookit what we got here.” He poured the contents onto the table. Rhyme glanced up with irritation. Three or four dozen plastic evidence bags, all labeled. Each contained a patch of cellophane from the packages of veal shanks they’d sent ESU to buy.

“A note from Haumann.” He read: “ ‘To: L. Rhyme. L. Sellitto. From: B. Haumann, TSRF.’ ”

“What’s ’at?” Cooper asked. The police department is a nest of initials and acronyms. RMP—remote mobile patrol—is a squad car. IED—improvised explosive device—is a bomb. But TSRF was a new one. Rhyme shrugged.

Sellitto continued to read, chuckling. “ ‘Tactical Supermarket Response Force. Re: Veal shanks. Citywide search discovered forty-six subjects, all of which were apprehended and neutralized with minimal force. We read them their rights and have transported same to detention facility in the kitchen of Officer T. P. Giancarlo’s mother. Upon completion of interrogation, a half-dozen suspects will be transferred to your custody. Heat at 350 for thirty minutes.’ ”

Rhyme laughed. Then sipped more Scotch, savoring the flavor. This was one thing he’d miss, the smoky breath of the liquor. (Though in the peace of senseless sleep, how could you miss anything? Just like evidence,
take away the baseline standard and you have nothing to judge the loss against; you’re safe for all eternity.)

Cooper fanned out some of the samples. “Forty-six samples of the cello. One from each chain and the major independents.”

Rhyme gazed at the samples. The odds were good for class identification. Individuation of cellophane’d be a bitch—the scrap found on the veal bone clue wouldn’t of course exactly match one of these. But, because parent companies buy identical supplies for all their stores, you might learn in which
chain
823 bought the veal and narrow down the neighborhoods he might live in. Maybe he should call the Bureau’s physical-evidence team and—

No, no. Remember: it’s their
fucking
case now.

Rhyme commanded Cooper, “Bundle them up and ship them to our federal brethren.”

Rhyme tried shutting down his computer and hit the wrong button with his sometimes ornery ring finger. The speakerphone came on with a loud wail of squelch.

“Shit,” Rhyme muttered darkly. “Fucking machinery.”

Uneasy with Rhyme’s sudden anger, Sellitto glanced at his glass and joked, “Hell, Linc, Scotch this good’s supposed to make you mellow.”

“Got news,” Thom replied sourly. “He
is
mellow.”

He parked close to the huge drainpipe.

Climbing from the cab he could smell the fetid water, slimy and ripe. They were in a cul-de-sac leading to the wide runoff pipe that ran from the West Side Highway down to the Hudson River. No one could see them here.

The bone collector walked to the back of the cab, enjoying the sight of his elderly captive. Just like he’d enjoyed staring at the girl he’d tied in front of the steam pipe. And the wiggling hand by the railroad tracks early this morning.

Gazing at the frightened eyes. The man was thinner than he’d thought. Grayer. Hair disheveled.

Old in the flesh but young in the bone . . .

The man cowered away from him, arms folded defensively across his narrow chest.

Opening the door, the bone collector pressed his pistol against the man’s breastbone.

“Please,” his captive whispered, his voice quavering. “I don’t have much money but you can have it all. We can go to an ATM. I’ll—”

“Get out.”

“Please don’t hurt me.”

The bone collector gestured with his head. The frail man looked around miserably then scooted forward. He stood beside the car, cowering, his arms still crossed, shivering despite the relentless heat.

“Why are you doing this?”

The bone collector stepped back and fished the cuffs from his pocket. Because he wore the thick gloves it took a few seconds to find the chrome links. As he dug them out he thought he saw a four-rigger tacking up the Hudson. The opposing current here wasn’t as strong as in the East River, where sailing ships had a hell of a time making their way from the East, Montgomery and Out Ward wharves north. He squinted. No, wait—it wasn’t a sailboat, it was just a cabin cruiser, Yuppies lounging on the long front deck.

As he reached forward with the cuffs, the man grabbed his captor’s shirt, gripped it hard. “Please. I was going to the hospital. That’s why I flagged you down. I’ve been having chest pains.”

“Shut up.”

And the man suddenly reached for the bone collector’s face, the liver-spotted hands gripping his neck and shoulder and squeezing hard. A jolt of pain radiated from the spot where the yellow nails dug into him. With a burst of temper, he pulled his victim’s hands off and cuffed him roughly.

Slapping a piece of tape on the man’s mouth, the bone collector dragged him down the gravel embankment toward the mouth of the pipe, four feet in diameter. He stopped, examined the old man.

It’d be so easy to take you down to the bone.

The bone . . . Touching it. Hearing it.

He lifted the man’s hand. The terrified eyes gazed back, his lips trembling. The bone collector caressed the
man’s fingers, squeezed the phalanges between his own (wished he could take his glove off but didn’t dare). Then he lifted the man’s palm and pressed it hard against his own ear.