The Bone Collector (34 page)

T
hree squad cars cruised slowly through the streets of the Lower East Side. Two constables in each. Eyes searching.

And a moment later two black broughams appeared . . . two
sedans,
he meant. Unmarked, but their telltale searchlights next to the left side-view mirrors left no doubt who they were.

He’d known they were narrowing the search, of course, and that it was only a matter of time until they found his house. But he was shocked that they were this close. And he was particularly upset to see the cops get out and examine a silver Taurus parked on Canal Street.

How the hell had they found out about his carriage? He’d known that stealing a car was a huge risk but he thought it would take Hertz days to notice the missing vehicle. And even if they did he was sure the constables would never connect him with the theft. Oh, they were good.

One of the mean-eyed cops happened to glance at his cab.

Staring forward, the bone collector turned slowly onto Houston Street, lost himself in a crowd of other cabs. A half hour later, he’d ditched the taxi and the Hertz Taurus and had returned on foot to the mansion.

Young Maggie looked up at him.

She was scared, yes, but she’d stopped crying. He wondered if he should just keep her. Take himself a daughter. Raise her. The idea glowed within him for a moment or two then it faded.

No, there’d be too many questions. Also, there was something eerie about the way the girl was looking at
him. She seemed older than her years. She’d always remember what he’d done. Oh, for a while she might think it had been a dream. But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

No, he couldn’t trust her any more than he trusted anyone else. Every human soul would let you down in the end. You could trust hate. You could trust bone. Everything else was betrayal.

He crouched beside Maggie and eased the tape off her mouth.

“Mommy!” she howled. “I want my mommy!”

He said nothing, just stood and looked down at her. At her delicate skull. At her twigs of arms.

She screamed like a siren.

He took off his glove. His fingers hovered over her for a moment. Then he caressed the soft hair on her head. (“
Fingerprints can be lifted from flesh, if taken within 90 minutes of contact [See
KROMEKOTE
] but no one has as yet successfully lifted and reconstructed friction-ridge prints from human hair.” Lincoln Rhyme,
Physical Evidence,
4th ed. [New York: Forensic Press, 1994].)

The bone collector slowly rose and walked upstairs, into the large living room of the building, past the paintings on the walls—the workers, the staring women and children. He cocked his head at a faint noise outside. Then louder—a clatter of metal. He grabbed his weapon and hurried to the back of the building. Unbolting the door he pushed it open suddenly, dropping into a two-handed shooting stance.

The pack of wild dogs glanced at him. They returned quickly to the trash can they’d knocked over. He slipped the gun into his pocket and returned to the living room.

He found himself next to the bottle-glass window again, looking out at the old graveyard. Oh, yes. There! There was the man again, wearing black, standing in the cemetery. In the distance the sky was spiked by the black masts of clipper ships and sloops docked in the East River along the Out Ward’s shore.

The bone collector felt an overwhelming sense of
sorrow. He wondered if some tragedy had just occurred. Maybe the Great Fire of 1776 had just destroyed most of the buildings along Broadway. Or the yellow fever epidemic of 1795 had decimated the Irish community. Or the
General Slocum
excursion-boat fire in 1904 had killed over a thousand women and children, destroying the Lower East Side’s German neighborhood.

Or maybe he was sensing tragedies soon to occur.

After a few minutes Maggie’s screams grew quiet, replaced by the sounds of the old city, the roar of steam engines, the clang of bells, the pops of black-powder gunshots, the clop of hooves on resonant cobblestones.

He continued to stare, forgetting the constables who pursued him, forgetting Maggie, just watching the ghostly form stroll down the street.

Then and now.

His eyes remained focused out the window for a long moment, lost in a different time. And so he didn’t notice the wild dogs, who’d pushed through the back door he’d left ajar. They looked at him through the doorway of the living room and paused only momentarily before turning around and loping quietly into the back of the building.

Noses lifted at the smells, ears pricked at the sounds of the strange place. Particularly the faint wailing that rose from somewhere beneath them.

It was a sign of their desperation that even the Hardy Boys split up.

Bedding was working a half-dozen blocks around Delancey, Saul was farther south. Sellitto and Banks each had their search areas, and the hundreds of other officers, FBI agents and troopers made the door-to-door rounds, asking about a slight man, a young child crying, a silver Ford Taurus, a deserted Federal-style building, fronted in rose marble, the rest of it dark brownstone.

Huh? What the hell you mean, Federal? . . . Seen a kid? You asking if I ever seen a kid on the Lower East? Yo, Jimmy, you ever see any kids ’round here? Like not in the last, what, sixty seconds?

Amelia Sachs was flexing her muscle. She insisted that she be on Sellitto’s crew, the one hitting the ShopRite
on East Houston that had sold Unsub 823 the veal chop. And the gas station that had sold him the gasoline. The library from which he’d stolen
Crime in Old New York.

But they’d found no leads there and scattered like wolves smelling a dozen different scents. Each picked a chunk of neighborhood to call his or her own.

As Sachs gunned the engine of the new RRV and tried another block she felt the same frustration she’d known when working the crime scenes over the past several days: too damn much evidence, too much turf to cover. The hopelessness of it. Here, on the hot, damp streets, branching into a hundred other streets and alleys running past a thousand buildings—all old—finding the safe house seemed as impossible as finding that hair that Rhyme had told her about, pasted to the ceiling by the blowback from a .38 revolver.

She’d intended to hit every street but as time wore on and she thought of the child buried underground, near death, she began to search more quickly, speeding down streets, glancing right and left for the rosy-marble building. Doubt stabbed her. Had she missed the building in her haste? Or should she drive like lightning and cover more streets?

On and on. Another block, another. And still nothing.

After the villain’s death his effects were secured and perused by detectives. His diary showed that he had murdered eight good citizens of the city. Nor was he above grave robbery, for it was ascertained from his pages (if his claims be true) that he had violated several holy resting places in cemeteries around the city. None of his victims had accorded him the least affront;—nay, most were upstanding citizens, industrious and innocent. And yet he felt not a modicum of guilt. Indeed, he seems to have labored under the mad delusion that he was doing his victims a favor.

Lincoln Rhyme’s left ring finger twitched slightly and the frame turned the onion-skin page of
Crime in Old New York,
which had been delivered by two federal
officers ten minutes earlier, service expedited thanks to Fred Dellray’s inimitable style.

“Flesh withers and can be weak,”—(the villain wrote in his ruthless yet steady hand)—“Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone. It is a noble goal I had, and it is beyond me why any-one might quarrel with it. I did a kindness to them all. They are immortal now. I freed them. I took them down to the bone.”

Terry Dobyns had been right. Chapter 10, “James Schneider: the ‘Bone Collector,’ ” was a virtual blueprint for Unsub 823’s behavior. The MOs were the same—fire, animals, water, boiling alive. Eight twenty-three prowled the same haunts Schneider had. He’d confused a German tourist with Hanna Goldschmidt, a turn-of-the-century immigrant, and had been drawn to a German residence hall to find a victim. And he’d called little Pammy Ganz by a different name too—Maggie. Apparently thinking she was the young O’Connor girl, one of Schneider’s victims.

A very bad etching in the book, covered by tissue, showed a demonic James Schneider, sitting in a basement, examining a leg bone.

Rhyme stared at the Randel Survey map of the city.

Bones
. . .

Rhyme was recalling a crime scene he’d run once. He’d been called to a construction site in lower Manhattan where some excavators had discovered a skull a few feet below the surface of a vacant lot. Rhyme saw immediately that the skull was very old and brought a forensic anthropologist into the case. They continued to dig and discovered a number of bones and skeletons.

A little research revealed that in 1741 there’d been a slave rebellion in Manhattan and a number of slaves—and militant white abolitionists—had been hanged on a small island in the Collect. The island became a popular site for hangings and several informal cemeteries and potter’s fields sprang up in the area.

Where had the Collect been? Rhyme tried to recall.
Near where Chinatown and the Lower East Side meet. But it was hard to say for certain because the pond had been filled in so long ago. It had been—

Yes! he thought, his heart thudding: The Collect had been filled in because it had grown so polluted the city commissioners considered it a major health risk. And among the main polluters were the tanneries on the eastern shore!

Pretty good with the dialer now, Rhyme didn’t flub a single number and got put through to the mayor on the first try. Hizzoner, though, the man’s personal secretary said, was at a brunch at the UN. But when Rhyme identified himself the secretary said, “One minute, sir,” and in much less time than that he found himself on the line with a man who said, through a mouthful of food, “Talk to me, detective. How the fuck’re we doing?”

“Five-eight-eight-five, K,” Amelia Sachs said, answering the radio. Rhyme heard the edginess in her voice.

“Sachs.”

“This isn’t good,” she told him. “We’re not having any luck.”

“I think I’ve got him.”

“
What?
”

“The six-hundred block, East Van Brevoort. Near Chinatown.”

“How’d you know?”

“The mayor put me in touch with the head of the Historical Society. There’s an archaeologic dig down there. An old graveyard. Across the street from where a big tannery used to be. And there were some big Federal mansions in the area at one time. I think he’s nearby.”

“I’m rolling.”

Through the speakerphone he heard a squeal of tires, then the siren cut in.

“I’ve called Lon and Haumann,” he added. “They’re on their way over now.”

“Rhyme,” her urgent voice crackled. “I’ll get her out.”

Ah, you’ve got a cop’s good heart, Amelia, a
professional
heart, Rhyme thought. But you’re still just a rookie. “Sachs?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been reading this book. Eight twenty-three’s picked a bad one for this role model of his. Really bad.”

She said nothing.

“What I’m saying is,” he continued, “whether the girl’s there or not, if you find him and he so much as flinches, you nail him.”

“But we get him alive, he can lead us to her. We can—”

“No, Sachs. Listen to me. You take him out. Any sign he’s going for a weapon, anything . . . you take him out.”

Static clattered. Then he heard her steady voice, “I’m at Van Brevoort, Rhyme. You were right. Looks like his place.”

Eighteen unmarkeds, two ESU vans and Amelia Sachs’s RRV were clustered near a short, deserted street on the Lower East Side.

East Van Brevoort looked like it was in Sarajevo. The buildings were abandoned—two of them burned to the ground. On the east side of the street was a dilapidated hospital of some kind, its roof caved in. Next to it was a large hole in the ground, roped off, with a No Trespassing sign emblazoned with the County Court seal—the archaeologic dig Rhyme had mentioned. A scrawny dog had died and lay in the gutter, its corpse picked over by rats.