The Bone Collector (3 page)

“There were words too. It was
mostly
words, in fact. Did you read them?”

“Oh, well, sure,” Banks said quickly.

A huge stack of remaindered volumes of
The Scenes of the Crime
sat against one wall of his room.

“I didn’t know you and Lon were friends,” Banks added.

“Ah, Lon didn’t trot out the yearbook? Show you the pictures? Strip his sleeve and show his scars and say these wounds I had with Lincoln Rhyme?”

Sellitto wasn’t smiling. Well, I can give him even less to smile about if he likes. The senior detective was digging through his attaché case. And what does he have in
there?

“How long were you partnered?” Banks asked, making conversation.

“There’s a verb for you,” Rhyme said. And looked at the clock.

“We weren’t partners,” Sellitto said. “I was Homicide, he was head of IRD.”

“Oh,” Banks said, even more impressed. Running the Central Investigation and Resource Division was one of the most prestigious jobs in the department.

“Yeah,” Rhyme said, looking out the window, as if his doctor might be arriving via falcon. “The two musketeers.”

In a patient voice, which infuriated Rhyme, Sellitto said, “Seven years, off and on, we worked together.”

“And good years they were,” Rhyme intoned.

Thom scowled but Sellitto missed the irony. Or more likely ignored it. He said, “We have a problem, Lincoln. We need some help.”

Snap.
The stack of papers landed on the bedside table.

“Some help?” The laugh exploded from the narrow nose Blaine had always suspected was the product of a surgeon’s vision though it was not. She also thought his lips were too perfect (Add a scar, she’d once joked and during one of their fights she nearly had). And why, he wondered, does her voluptuous apparition keep rising today? He’d wakened thinking about his ex and had felt compelled to write her a letter, which was on the computer screen at that moment. He now saved the
document on the disk. Silence filled the room as he entered the commands with a single finger.

“Lincoln?” Sellitto asked.

“Yessir. Some help. From me. I heard.”

Banks kept an inappropriate smile on his face while he shuffled his butt uneasily in the chair.

“I’ve got an appointment in, well, any minute now,” Rhyme said.

“An appointment.”

“A doctor.”

“Really?” Banks asked, probably to murder the silence that loomed again.

Sellitto, not sure where the conversation was going, asked, “And how’ve you been?”

Banks and Sellitto hadn’t asked about his health when they’d arrived. It was a question people tended to avoid when they saw Lincoln Rhyme. The answer risked being a very complicated, and almost certainly an unpleasant, one.

He said simply, “I’ve been fine, thanks. And you? Betty?”

“We’re divorced,” Sellitto said quickly.

“Really?”

“She got the house and I got half a kid.” The chunky cop said this with forced cheer, as if he’d used the line before, and Rhyme supposed there was a painful story behind the breakup. One he had no desire to hear. Still, he wasn’t surprised that the marriage had tanked. Sellitto was a workhorse. He was one of the hundred or so first-grade detectives on the force and had been for years—he got the grade when they were handed out for merit not just time served. He’d worked close to eighty hours a week. Rhyme hadn’t even known he was married for the first few months they’d worked together.

“Where you living now?” Rhyme asked, hoping a nice social conversation would tucker them out and send them on their way.

“Brooklyn. The Heights. I walk to work sometimes. You know those diets I was always on? The trick’s not dieting. It’s exercise.”

He didn’t look any fatter or thinner than the Lon
Sellitto of three and a half years ago. Or the Sellitto of fifteen years ago for that matter.

“So,” collegiate Banks said, “a doctor, you were saying. For a . . .”

“A new form of treatment?” Rhyme finished the dwindling question. “Exactly.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you
so
much.”

It was 11:36 a.m. Well past midmorning. Tardiness is inexcusable in a man of medicine.

He watched Banks’s eyes twice scan his legs. He caught the pimply boy a second time and wasn’t surprised to see the detective blush.

“So,” Rhyme said. “I’m afraid I don’t really have time to help you.”

“But he’s not here yet, right, the doctor?” asked Lon Sellitto in the same bulletproof tone he’d used to puncture homicide suspects’ cover stories.

Thom appeared at the doorway with a coffeepot.

Prick, Rhyme mouthed.

“Lincoln forgot to offer you gentlemen something.”

“Thom treats me like a child.”

“If the bootie fits,” the aide retorted.

“All right,” Rhyme snapped. “Have some coffee. I’ll have some mother’s milk.”

“Too early,” Thom said. “The bar isn’t open.” And weathered Rhyme’s glowering face quite well.

Again Banks’s eyes browsed Rhyme’s body. Maybe he’d been expecting just skin and bones. But the atrophying had stopped not long after the accident and his first physical therapists had exhausted him with exercise. Thom too, who may have been a prick at times and an old mother hen at others, was a damn good PT. He put Rhyme through passive ROM exercises every day. Taking meticulous notes on the goniometry—measurements of the range of motion that he applied to each joint in Rhyme’s body. Carefully checking the spasticity as he kept the arms and legs in a constant cycle of abduction and adduction. ROM work wasn’t a miracle but it built up some tone, cut down on debilitating contractures and kept the blood flowing. For someone whose muscular
activities had been limited to his shoulders, head and left ring finger for three and a half years, Lincoln Rhyme wasn’t in such bad shape.

The young detective looked away from the complicated black ECU control sitting by Rhyme’s finger, hard-wired to another controller, sprouting conduit and cables, which ran to the computer and a wall panel.

A quad’s life is wires, a therapist had told Rhyme a long time ago. The rich ones, at least. The lucky ones.

Sellitto said, “There was a murder early this morning on the West Side.”

“We’ve had reports of some homeless men and women disappearing over the past month,” Banks said. “At first we thought it might be one of them. But it wasn’t,” he added dramatically. “The vic was one of those people last night.”

Rhyme trained a blank expression on the young man with the dotted face. “Those
people?
”

“He doesn’t watch the news,” Thom said. “If you’re talking about the kidnapping he hasn’t heard.”

“You don’t watch the news?” Sellitto laughed. “You’re the SOB read four papers a day and recorded the local news to watch when he got home. Blaine told me you called her Katie Couric one night when you were making love.”

“I only read literature now,” Rhyme said pompously, and falsely.

Thom added, “ ‘Literature is news that stays news.’ ”

Rhyme ignored him.

Sellitto said, “Man and woman coming back from business on the Coast. Got into a Yellow Cab at JFK. Never made it home.”

“There was a report about eleven-thirty. This cab was driving down the BQE in Queens. White male and female passenger in the back seat. Looked like they were trying to break a window out. Pounding on the glass. Nobody got tags or medallion.”

“This witness—who saw the cab. Any look at the driver?”

“No.”

“The woman passenger?”

“No sign of her.”

Eleven forty-one. Rhyme was furious with Dr. William Berger. “Nasty business,” he muttered absently.

Sellitto exhaled long and loud.

“Go on, go on,” Rhyme said.

“He was wearing her ring,” Banks said.

“
Who
was wearing
what?
”

“The vic. They found this morning. He was wearing the woman’s ring. The other passenger’s.”

“You’re sure it was hers?”

“Had her initials inside.”

“So you’ve got an unsub,” Rhyme continued, “who wants you to know he’s got the woman and she’s still alive.”

“What’s an unsub?” Thom asked.

When Rhyme ignored him Sellitto said, “Unknown subject.”

“But you know how he got it to fit?” Banks asked, a little wide-eyed for Rhyme’s taste. “Her ring?”

“I give up.”

“Cut the skin off the guy’s finger. All of it. Down to the bone.”

Rhyme gave a faint smile. “Ah, he’s a smart one, isn’t he?”

“Why’s that smart?”

“To make sure nobody came by and took the ring. It was bloody, right?”

“A mess.”

“Hard to see the ring in the first place. Then AIDS, hepatitis. Even if somebody noticed, a lot of folks’d take a pass on that trophy. What’s her name, Lon?”

The older detective nodded to his partner, who flipped open his watchbook.

“Tammie Jean Colfax. She goes by T.J. Twenty-eight. Works for Morgan Stanley.”

Rhyme observed that Banks too wore a ring. A school ring of some sort. The boy was too polished to be just a high-school and academy grad. No whiff of army about him. Wouldn’t be surprised if the jewelry bore the name Yale. A homicide detective? What was the world coming to?

The young cop cupped his coffee in hands that shook sporadically. With a minuscule gesture of his own ring finger on the Everest & Jennings ECU panel, to which his left hand was strapped, Rhyme clicked through several settings, turning the AC down. He tended not to waste controls on things like heating and air-conditioning; he reserved it for necessities like lights, the computer and his page-turning frame. But when the room got too cold his nose ran. And
that’s
fucking torture for a quad.

“No ransom note?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re the case officer?” Rhyme asked Sellitto.

“Under Jim Polling. Yeah. And we want you to review the CS report.”

Another laugh. “Me? I haven’t looked at a crime scene report in three years. What could I possibly tell you?”

“You could tell us tons, Linc.”

“Who’s head of IRD now?”

“Vince Peretti.”

“The congressman’s boy,” Rhyme recalled. “Have him review it.”

A moment’s hesitation. “We’d rather have you.”

“Who’s we?”

“The chief. Yours truly.”

“And how,” Rhyme asked, smiling like a schoolgirl, “does Captain Peretti feel about this vote of no confidence?”

Sellitto stood and paced through the room, glancing down at the stacks of magazines.
Forensic Science Review.
Harding & Boyle Scientific Equipment Company catalog.
The New Scotland Yard Forensic Investigation Annual. American College of Forensic Examiners Journal. Report of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors.
CRC Press
Forensics. Journal of the International Institute of Forensic Science.

“Look at them,” Rhyme said. “The subscriptions lapsed ages ago. And they’re all dusty.”

“
Everything
in here’s fucking dusty, Linc. Why don’t you get off your lazy ass and clean this pigsty up?”

Banks looked horrified. Rhyme squelched the burst of
laughter that felt alien inside him. His guard had slipped and irritation had dissolved into amusement. He momentarily regretted that he and Sellitto had drifted apart. Then he shot the feeling dead. He grumbled, “I can’t help you. Sorry.”

“We’ve got the peace conference starting on Monday. We—”

“What conference?”

“At the UN. Ambassadors, heads of state. There’ll be ten thousand dignitaries in town. You heard about that thing in London two days ago?”

“
Thing?
” Rhyme repeated caustically.

“Somebody tried to bomb the hotel where UNESCO was meeting. The mayor’s scared shitless somebody’s going to move on the conference here. He doesn’t want ugly
Post
headlines.”

“There’s also the little problem,” Rhyme said astringently, “that Miss Tammie Jean might not be enjoying her trip home either.”

“Jerry, tell him some details. Whet his appetite.”

Banks turned his attention from Rhyme’s legs to his bed, which was—Rhyme readily admitted—by far the more interesting of the two. Especially the control panel. It looked like something off the space shuttle and cost just about as much. “Ten hours after they’re snatched we find the male passenger—John Ulbrecht—shot and buried alive in the Amtrak roadbed near Thirty-seventh and Eleventh. Well, we find him dead. He’d
been
buried alive. Bullet was a .32.” Banks looked up and added, “The Honda Accord of slugs.”

Meaning there’d be no wily deductions about the unsub from exotic weaponry. This Banks seems smart, Rhyme thought, and all he suffers from is youth, which he might or might not outgrow. Lincoln Rhyme believed he himself had never been young.

“Rifling on the slug?” Rhyme asked.