The Bone Collector (8 page)

“So it isn’t sand,” Rhyme muttered. “It’s something ground up. . . . Can you individuate it?”

Individuation . . . The goal of the criminalist. Most physical evidence can be
identified.
But even if you know what it is there are usually hundreds or thousands of sources it might have come from.
Individuated
evidence is something that could have come from only one source or a very limited number of sources. A fingerprint, a DNA profile, a paint chip that fits into a missing spot on the perp’s car like a jigsaw-puzzle piece.

“Maybe,” the tech responded, “if I can figure out
what
it is.”

“Ground glass?” Rhyme suggested.

Glass is essentially melted sand but the glassmaking process alters the crystalline structure. You don’t get birefringence with ground glass. Cooper examined the sample closely.

“No, I don’t think it’s glass. I don’t know what it is. I wish I had an EDX here.”

A popular crime lab tool was a scanning electron microscope married to an energy-dispersive X-ray unit; it determined what elements were in trace samples found at crime scenes.

“Get him one,” Rhyme ordered Sellitto, then looked around the room. “We need more equipment. I want a vacuum metal fingerprint unit too. And a GC-MS.” A gas chromatograph broke down substances into their component elements, and mass photospectrometry used light to identify each one of them. These instruments let criminalists test an unknown sample as small as one millionth of a gram and compare it against a database of a hundred thousand known substances, cataloged by identity
and
name brand.

Sellitto phoned the wish list in to the CSU lab.

“But we can’t wait for the fancy toys, Mel. You’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Tell me more about our phony sand.”

“It’s mixed with a little dirt. There’s loam, flecks of
quartz, feldspar and mica. But minimal leaf and decomposed-plant fragments. Flecks here of what could be bentonite.”

“Bentonite.” Rhyme was pleased. “That’s a volcanic ash that builders use in slurry when they’re digging foundations in watery areas of the city where the bedrock’s deep. It prevents cave-ins. So we’re looking for a developed area that’s on or near the water, probably south of Thirty-fourth Street. North of that the bedrock’s much closer to the surface and they don’t need slurry.”

Cooper moved the slide. “If I had to guess, I’d say this is mostly calcium. Wait, something fibrous here.”

The knob turned and Rhyme would’ve paid anything to be looking through that eyepiece. Flashed back to all the evenings he’d spent with his face pressed against the gray sponge rubber, watching fibers or flecks of humus or blood cells or metal shavings swim into and out of focus.

“Here’s something else. A larger granule. Three layers. One similar to horn, then two layers of calcium. Slightly different colors. The other one’s translucent.”

“Three layers?” Rhyme spat out angrily. “Hell, it’s a seashell!” He felt furious with himself. He should have thought of that.

“Yep, that’s it.” Cooper was nodding. “Oyster, I think.”

The oyster beds around the city were mostly off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey. Rhyme had hoped that the unsub would limit the geographic area of the search to Manhattan—where the victim that morning was found. He muttered, “If he’s opening up the whole metro area the search’ll be hopeless.”

Cooper said, “I’m looking at something else. I think it’s lime. But very old. Granular.”

“Concrete maybe?” Rhyme suggested.

“Possibly. Yes.

“I don’t get the shells then,” Cooper added reflectively. “Around New York the oyster beds’re full of vegetation and mud. This is mixed with concrete and there’s virtually no vegetable matter at all.”

Rhyme barked suddenly. “Edges! What are the edges of the shell like, Mel?”

The tech gazed into the eyepiece. “Fractured, not worn. This’s been pulverized by dry pressure. Not eroded by water.”

Rhyme’s eyes slipped over the Randel map, scanning right and left. Focusing on the leaping dog’s rump.

“Got it!” he cried.

In 1913 F. W. Woolworth built the sixty-story structure that still bears his name, terra-cotta-clad, covered with gargoyles and Gothic sculpture. For sixteen years it was the world’s tallest building. Because the bedrock in that part of Manhattan was more than a hundred feet below Broadway, workmen had to dig deep shafts to anchor the building. It wasn’t long after the groundbreaking that workmen discovered the remains of Manhattan industrialist Talbott Soames, who’d been kidnapped in 1906. The man’s body was found buried in a thick bed of what looked like white sand but was really ground oyster shells, a fact the tabloids had a hey-day with, noting the obese tycoon’s obsession with rich food. The shells were so common along the lower eastern tip of Manhattan they’d been used for landfill. They were what had given Pearl Street its name.

“She’s downtown somewhere,” Rhyme announced. “Probably the east side. And maybe near Pearl. She’ll be underground, about five to fifteen feet down. Maybe a construction site, maybe a basement. An old building or tunnel.”

“Cross-check the EPA diagram, Jerry,” Sellitto instructed. “Where they’re doing asbestos cleanup.”

“Along Pearl? Nothing.” The young officer held up the map he and Haumann were working from. “There’re three-dozen cleanup sites—in Midtown, Harlem and the Bronx. But nothing downtown.”

“Asbestos . . . asbestos . . .” Rhyme mused again.
What
was so familiar about it?

It was 2:05 p.m.

“Bo, we’ve got to move. Get your people down there and start a search. All the buildings along Pearl Street. Water Street too.”

“Man,” the cop sighed, “that’s beaucoup buildings.” He started for the door.

Rhyme said to Sellitto, “Lon, you better go too. This’s going to be a photo finish. They’ll need all the searchers they can get. Amelia, I want you down there too.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking—”

“Officer,” Sellitto snapped, “you got your orders.”

A faint glower crossed her beautiful face.

Rhyme said to Cooper, “Mel, you drive over here in a bus?”

“An RRV,” he answered.

The city’s big crime scene buses were large vans—filled with instruments and evidence-collection supplies, better equipped than the entire labs of many small towns. But when Rhyme was running IRD he’d ordered smaller crime scene vehicles—station wagons basically—containing the essential collection-and-analysis equipment. The Rapid Response Vehicles looked placid but Rhyme had bullied Transportation into getting them fitted with turbocharged Police Interceptor engines. They often beat Patrol’s squad cars to the scene; on more than one occasion the first officer was a seasoned crime scene tech. Which is every prosecutor’s dream.

“Give Amelia the keys.”

Cooper handed them to Sachs, who stared briefly at Rhyme then wheeled and hurried down the stairs. Even her footsteps sounded angry.

“All right, Lon. What’s on your mind?”

Sellitto glanced at the empty hallway and walked up close to Rhyme. “You really want P.D. for this?”

“P.D.?”

“I mean her. Sachs. P.D.’s a nickname.”

“For what?”

“Don’t say it around her. Ticks her off. Her dad was a beat cop for forty years. So they call her the Portable’s Daughter.”

“You don’t think I should’ve picked her?”

“Naw, I don’t. Why d’you want her?”

“Because she climbed down a thirty-foot embankment so she wouldn’t contaminate the scene. She closed a major avenue and an Amtrak line. That’s initiative.”

“Come on, Linc. I know a dozen CS cops’d do something like that.”

“Well, she’s the one I wanted.” And Rhyme gave Sellitto a grave look, reminding him, subtly but without debate, what the terms of this bargain had been.

“All I’ll say is,” the detective muttered, “I just talked to Polling. Peretti’s fucking outa joint about being flanked and if—no, I’ll say
when
—the brass finds out somebody from Patrol’s walking the grid at the scene, there’ll be fucking trouble.”

“Probably,” Rhyme said softly, gazing at the profile poster, “but I have a feeling that’s going to be the least of our trouble today.”

And let his weary head ease back into the thick down pillow.

T
he station wagon raced toward the dark, sooty canyons of Wall Street, downtown New York.

Amelia Sachs’s fingers danced lightly on the steering wheel as she tried to imagine where T.J. Colfax might be held captive. Finding her seemed hopeless. The approaching financial district had never looked so enormous, so full of alleys, so filled with manholes and doorways and buildings peppered with black windows.

So many places to hide a hostage.

In her mind she saw the hand sticking out of the grave beside the railroad tracks. The diamond ring sitting on the bloody bone of a finger. Sachs recognized the type of jewelry. She called them consolation rings—the sort lonely rich girls bought themselves. The sort she’d be wearing if she were rich.

Speeding south, dodging bicycle messengers and cabs.

Even on this glaring afternoon, under a choked sun, this was a spooky part of town. The buildings cast grim shadows and were coated with grime dark as dried blood.

Sachs took a turn at forty, skidding on the spongy asphalt, and punched the pedal to bring the station wagon back up to sixty.

Excellent engine, she thought. And decided to see how well the wagon handled at seventy.

Years before, while her old man slept—he worked the three-to-eleven watch usually—teenage Amie Sachs would palm the keys to his Camaro and tell her mother Rose she was going shopping, did she want anything from the Fort Hamilton pork store? And before her mother could say, “No, but you take the train, you’re
not driving,” the girl would disappear out the door, fire up the car and race west.

Coming home three hours later, pork-less, Amie would sneak up the stairs to be confronted by a mother frantic and angry, who—to her daughter’s amusement—would lecture her about the risks of getting pregnant and how that would ruin her chances to use her beautiful face to make a million dollars at modeling. And when finally the woman learned that her daughter wasn’t sleeping around but was merely driving a hundred mph on Long Island highways, she grew frantic and angry and would lecture the girl about smashing up her beautiful face and ruining her chances to make a million dollars at modeling.

Things grew even worse when she got her driver’s license.

Sachs now sliced between two double-parked trucks, hoping that neither a passenger nor a driver would open his door. In a Doppler whisper she was past them.

When you move they can’t getcha
. . . .

Lon Sellitto kneaded his rotund face with blunt fingertips and paid no attention to the Indy 500 driving. He talked with his partner about the case like an accountant discussing a balance sheet. As for Banks, though, he was no longer stealing infatuated glances at Sachs’s eyes and lips and had taken to checking the speedometer every minute or so.

They skidded in a frantic turn past the Brooklyn Bridge. She thought again of the woman captive, picturing T.J.’s long, elegant nails, while she tapped her own picked fingers on the wheel. She saw again in her mind the image that refused to go away: the white birch branch of a hand, sticking up out of the moist grave. The single bloody bone.

“He’s kind of loony,” she blurted suddenly, to change the direction of her thoughts.

“Who?” Sellitto asked.

“Rhyme.”

Banks added, “Ask me, he looks like Howard Hughes’s kid brother.”

“Yeah, well, that surprised me,” the older detective
admitted. “Wasn’t looking too good. Used to be a handsome guy. But, well, you know. After what he’s been through. How come if you drive like this, Sachs, you’re a portable?”

“Where I got assigned. They didn’t ask, they
told
me.” Just like you did, she reflected. “Was he really as good as that?”

“Rhyme? Better. Most CSU guys in New York handle two hundred bodies a year. Tops. Rhyme did double that. Even when he was running IRD. Take Peretti, he’s a good man but he gets out once every two weeks or so and only on media cases. You’re not hearing this from me, officer.”

“Nosir.”

“But Rhyme’d run the scenes himself. And when he wasn’t running scenes he’d be out walking around.”

“Doing what?”

“Just walking around. Looking at stuff. He walked miles. All over the city. Buying things, picking up things,
collecting
things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Evidence standards. Dirt, food, magazines, hubcaps, shoes, medical books, drugs, plants . . . You name it, he’d find it and catalog it. You know—so when some PE came in he’d have a better idea where the perp might’ve been or what he’d been doing. You’d page him and he’d be in Harlem or the Lower East Side or Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Police in his blood?”

“Naw. Father was some kind of scientist at a national laboratory or something.”

“Is that what Rhyme studied? Science?”

“Yeah. Went to school at Champaign-Urbana, got a coupla fancy degrees. Chemistry and history. Which I have no idea why. His folks’re gone since I knew him, that’d be, hell, coming on fifteen years now. And he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters. He grew up in Illinois. That’s why the name, Lincoln.”

She wanted to ask if he was, or had been, married but didn’t. She settled for: “Is he really that much of a . . .”

“You can say it, officer.”

“A shit?”

Banks laughed.

Sellitto said, “My ma had this expression. She said somebody was ‘of a mind.’ Well, that describes Rhyme. He’s of a mind. One time this dumb-ass tech sprayed luminol—that’s a blood reagent—on a fingerprint, instead of ninhydrin. Ruined the print. Rhyme fired him on the spot. Another time a cop took a leak at a scene and flushed the toilet. Man, Rhyme went ballistic, told him to get his ass down to the basement and bring back whatever was in the sewer trap.” Sellitto laughed. “The cop, he had rank, he said, ‘I’m not doing that, I’m a lieutenant.’ And Rhyme said, ‘Got news. You’re a plumber now.’ I could go on and on. Fuck, officer, you doing eighty?”

They streaked past the Big Building and she thought, achingly, That’s where I oughta be right now. Meeting fellow information officers, sitting through the training session, soaking up the air-conditioning.

She steered expertly around a taxi that was oozing through a red light.

Jesus, this is hot. Dust hot, stink hot, gas hot. The ugly hours of the city. Tempers spurted like gray water shooting from hydrants up in Harlem. Two Christmases ago, she and her boyfriend had an abbreviated holiday celebration—from 11:00 p.m. to midnight, the only mutual free time their watches allowed—in the four-degree night. She and Nick, sitting at Rockefeller Center, outside, near the skating rink, drinking coffee and brandy. They’d agreed they’d rather have a week of cold than a single hot August day.

Finally, streaking down Pearl she spotted Haumann’s command post. Leaving eight-foot skid marks, Sachs put the RRV into a slot between his car and an EMS bus.

“Damn, you drive good.” Sellitto climbed out. For some reason Sachs was delighted to notice Jerry Banks’s sweaty fingerprints remained prominently on the window when he pushed the rear door open.

EMS officers and Patrol uniforms were everywhere, fifty or sixty of them. And more were on their way. It seemed as if the entire attention of Police Plaza was
focused on downtown New York. Sachs found herself thinking idly that if anybody wanted to try an assassination or to take over Gracie Mansion or a consulate, this’d be the time to do it.

Haumann trotted up to the station wagon. He said to Sellitto, “We’re doing door-to-door, seeing about construction along Pearl. Nobody knows anything about asbestos work and nobody’s heard any calls for help.”

Sachs started to climb out but Haumann said, “No, officer. Your orders’re to stay here with the CS vehicle.”

She got out anyway.

“Yessir. Who exactly said that?”

“Detective Rhyme. I just talked to him. You’re supposed to call in to Central when you’re at the CP.”

Haumann was walking away. Sellitto and Banks hurried toward the command post.

“Detective Sellitto,” Sachs called.

He turned. She said, “Excuse me, detective. The thing is, who’s my watch commander? Who’m I reporting to?”

He said shortly, “You’re reporting to Rhyme.”

She laughed. “But I can’t be
reporting
to him.”

Sellitto gazed at her blankly.

“I mean, aren’t there liability issues or something? Jurisdiction? He’s a
civilian.
I need somebody, a shield, to report to.”

Sellitto said evenly, “Officer, listen up. We’re
all
reporting to Lincoln Rhyme. I don’t care whether he’s a civilian or he’s the chief or he’s the fucking Caped Crusader. Got that?”

“But—”

“You wanna complain, do it in writing and do it tomorrow.”

And he was gone. Sachs stared after him for a moment then returned to the front seat of the wagon and called in to Central that she was 10-84 at the scene. Awaiting instructions.

She laughed grimly as the woman reported, “Ten-four, Portable 5885. Be advised. Detective Rhyme will be in touch shortly, K.”

Detective
Rhyme.

“Ten-four, K,” Sachs responded and looked in the
back of the wagon, wondering idly what was in the black suitcases.

Two-forty p.m.

The phone rang in Rhyme’s townhouse. Thom answered. “It’s a dispatcher from headquarters.”

“Put ’em through.”

The speakerphone burst to life. “Detective Rhyme, you don’t remember me but I worked at IRD when you were there. Civilian. Did phone detail then. Emma Rollins.”

“Of course. How’re the youngsters, Emma?” Rhyme had a memory of a large, cheerful black woman, supporting five children with two jobs. He recalled her blunt finger stabbing buttons so hard she once actually broke one of the government-issue phones.

“Jeremy’s starting college in a couple weeks and Dora’s still acting, or she thinks she is. The little ones’re doing just fine.”

“Lon Sellitto recruited you, did he?”

“Nosir. I heard you were working on the case and I booted some child back to 911. Emma’s taking this job, I told her.”

“What’ve you got for us?”

“We’re working out of a directory of companies making bolts. And a book that lists places wholesaling them. Here’s what we found. It was the letters did it. The ones stamped on the bolt. The
CE.
They’re made special for Con Ed.”

Hell. Of course.

“They’re marked that way because they’re a different size than most bolts this company sells—fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, and a lot more threads than most other bolts. That’d be Michigan Tool and Die in Detroit. They use ’em in old pipes only in New York. Ones made sixty, seventy years ago. The way the parts of the pipe fit together they have to be real close seals. Fit closer’n a bride and groom on their wedding night’s what the man told me. Trying to make me blush.”

“Emma, I love you. You stay on call, will you?”

“You bet I will.”

“Thom!” Rhyme shouted. “This phone isn’t going to work. I need to make calls myself. That voice-activation thing in the computer. Can I use it?”

“You never ordered it.”

“I didn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I need it.”

“Well, we don’t have it.”

“Do
something.
I want to be able to make calls.”

“I think there’s a manual ECU somewhere.” Thom dug through a box against the wall. He found a small electronic console and plugged one end into the phone and the other into a stalk control that mounted next to Rhyme’s cheek.

“That’s too awkward!”

“Well, it’s all we’ve got. If we’d hooked up the infrared above your eyebrow like I suggested, you could’ve been making phone-sex calls for the past two years.”

“Too many fucking wires,” Rhyme spat out.

His neck spasmed suddenly and knocked the controller out of reach. “Fuck.”

Suddenly this minute task—not to mention their mission—seemed impossible to Lincoln Rhyme. He was exhausted, his neck hurt, his head. His eyes particularly. They stung and—this was
more
painful to him—he felt a chip of urge to rub the backs of his fingers across his closed lids. A tiny gesture of relief, something the rest of the world did every day.

Thom replaced the joystick. Rhyme summoned patience from somewhere and asked his aide, “How does it work?”

“There’s the screen. See it on the controller? Just move the stick till it’s on a number, wait one second and it’s programmed in. Then do the next number the same way. When you’ve got all seven, push the stick here to dial.”

He snapped, “It’s not working.”

“Just practice.”

“We don’t have time!”

Thom snarled, “I’ve been answering the phone for you way too long.”

“All right,” Rhyme said, lowering his voice—his way of apology. “I’ll practice later. Could you please get me Con Ed? And I need to speak to a supervisor.”

The rope hurt and the cuffs hurt but it was the noise that scared her the most.