Sunday, 5:45 a.m., to Monday, 7:00 p.m. 2 page

“Here,” she said, examining the ground. “Treads. But I don’t know whether these’re the front or the rear tires. He might’ve backed in.”

“Are they clear or fuzzy? The treadmarks?”

“A little fuzzy.”

“Then those’re the front.” He laughed at her bewildered expression. “You’re the automotive expert, Sachs. Next time you get in a car and start it see if you don’t spin the wheel a little before you start moving. To see if the tires are pointed straight. The front treads’re always fuzzier than the rear. Now, the stolen car was a ’97 Ford Taurus. It measures 197.5 stem to stern, wheelbase 108.5. Approximately 45 inches from the center of the rear tire to the trunk. Measure that and vacuum.”

“Come on, Rhyme. How’d you know that?”

“Looked it up this morning. You do the vic’s clothing?”

“Yep. Nails and hair too. And, Rhyme, get this: the little girl’s name is Pam but he called her Maggie. Just like he did with the German girl—he called her Hanna, remember?”

“You mean his other persona did,” Rhyme said. “I wonder who the characters are in his little play.”

“I’m going to vacuum around the door too,” she announced. Rhyme watched her—face cut and hair uneven, singed short in spots. She vacuumed the base of the door and just as he was about to remind her that crime scenes were three-dimensional she ran the vacuum up and around the jamb.

“He probably looked inside before he took her in,” she said and began vacuuming the windowsills too.

Which would have been Rhyme’s next order.

He listened to the whine of the Dustbuster. But second by second he was fading away. Into the past, some hours before.

“I’m—” Sachs began.

“Shhh,” he said.

Like the walks he now took, like the concerts he now attended, like so many of the conversations he had, Rhyme was slipping deeper and deeper into his consciousness. And when he got to a particular place—even he had no idea where—he found he wasn’t alone. He was picturing a short man wearing gloves, dark sports clothes, a ski mask. Climbing out of the silver Ford Taurus sedan, which smelled of cleanser and new car. The woman—Carole Ganz—was in the trunk, her child captive in an old building made of pink marble and expensive brick. He saw the man dragging the woman from the car.

Almost a memory, it was that clear.

Popping the hinges, pulling open the door, dragging her inside, tying her up. He started to leave but paused. He walked to a place where he could look back and see Carole clearly. Just like he’d stared down at the man he’d buried at the railroad tracks yesterday morning.

Just like he’d chained Tammie Jean Colfax to the pipe in the center of the room. So he could get a good look at her.

But why? Rhyme wondered. Why does he look? To make sure the vics can’t escape? To make sure he hasn’t left anything behind? To—

His eyes sprang open; the indistinct apparition of Unsub 823 vanished. “Sachs! Remember the Colfax scene? When you found the glove print?”

“Sure.”

“You said he was watching her, that’s the reason he chained her out in the open. But you didn’t know why. Well, I figured it out. He watches the vics because he has to.”

Because it’s his nature.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on!”

Rhyme sipped twice into the straw control, which turned the Arrow wheelchair around. Then puffed hard and he started forward.

He wheeled to the sidewalk, sipped hard into the straw to stop. He squinted as he looked all around him. “He wants to see his victims. And I’m betting he wanted to see the parishioners too. From someplace he thought was safe. Where he didn’t bother to sweep up afterwards.”

He was gazing across the street at the only secluded vantage point on the block: the outdoor patio of a restaurant opposite the church.

“There! Sweep it clean, Sachs.”

She nodded, slipped a new clip into her Glock, grabbed evidence bags, a pair of pencils and the Dust-buster. He saw her run across the street and work her way up the steps carefully, examining them. “He was here,” she shouted. “There’s a glove print. And the shoeprint—it’s worn just like the other ones.”

Yes! Rhyme thought. Oh, this felt good. The warm sun, the air, the spectators. And the excitement of the chase.

When you move they can’t getcha.

Well, if we move faster, maybe we can.

Rhyme happened to glance at the crowd and saw that some people were staring at him. But far more were watching Amelia Sachs.

For fifteen minutes she pored over the scene and when she returned she held up a small evidence bag.

“What did you find, Sachs? His driver’s license? His birth certificate?”

“Gold,” she said, smiling. “I found some gold.”

THIRTY

“COME ON, PEOPLE,” Rhyme called. “We’ve got to move on this one. Before he gets the girl to the next scene. I mean move!”

Thom did a sitting transfer to get Rhyme from the Storm Arrow back into bed, perching him momentarily on a sliding board and then easing him back into the Clinitron. Sachs glanced at the wheelchair elevator that had been built into one of the bedroom closets—it was the one he hadn’t wanted her to open when he was directing her to the stereo and CDs.

Rhyme lay still for a moment, breathing deeply from the exertion.

“The clues’re gone,” he reminded them. “There’s no way we can figure out where the next scene is. So we’re going for the big one—his safe house.”

“You think you can find it?” Sellitto asked.

Do we have a choice? Rhyme thought, and said nothing.

Banks hurried up the stairs. He hadn’t even stepped into the bedroom before Rhyme blurted, “What did they say? Tell me. Tell me.”

Rhyme knew that the tiny fleck of gold that Sachs had found was beyond the capabilities of Mel Cooper’s impromptu lab. He’d asked the young detective to speed it down to the FBI’s regional PERT office and have it analyzed.

“They’ll call us in the next half hour.”

“Half hour?” Rhyme muttered. “Didn’t they give it priority?”

“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should’ve seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if the metallurgy report wasn’t in your hands ASAP there’d be one mean mother—you get the picture—reaming their—you get the rest of the picture.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs said, “there’s something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he’d let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot.”

“Flail?”

“Cut the skin off it.”

“Flay,” Rhyme corrected.

“Oh. Anyway, he didn’t do anything. She said it was—in the end—like he couldn’t bring himself to cut her.”

“Just like the first scene—the man by the railroad tracks,” Sellitto offered.

“Interesting ...” Rhyme reflected. “I thought he’d cut the vic’s finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl’s arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett’s finger ... There’s something about the way he sees his victims. Something ...”

“Anatomical?”

“Exactly, Sachs.”

“Except the Ganz woman,” Sellitto said.

“My point,” Rhyme said. “He could’ve cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?”

Sellitto said, “What’s different about her? Can’t be that she’s a woman. Or she’s from out of town. So was the German girl.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her in front of her daughter,” Banks said.

“No,” Rhyme said, laughing grimly, “compassion isn’t his thing.”

Sachs said suddenly, “But that is one thing different about her—she’s a mother.”

Rhyme considered this, “That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn’t carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark.” He then asked Sachs, “Did she say anything else about the way he looked?”

Sachs flipped through her notebook.

“Same as before.” She read. “Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he—”

“Black gloves?” Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. “Not red?”

“She said black. I asked her if she was sure.”

“And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn’t it, Mel? Maybe that was from the gloves. So what’s the red leather from?”

Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it’s something close to him.”

Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. “What else did we find?”

“The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway.” Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. “Plenty o’ nothin’,” he announced. “Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar.”

Which was found throughout the city.

“Keep going.”

“Decomposed leaves. That’s about it.”

“How about the Ganz woman’s clothes?”

Cooper and Sachs opened the newspaper and examined the trace.

“Mostly soil,” Cooper said. “And a few bits of what look like stone.”

“Where did he keep her at his safe house? Exactly?”

“On the floor in the basement. She said it was a dirt floor.”

“Excellent!” Rhyme shouted. To Cooper: “Burn it. The soil.”

Cooper placed a sample in the GC-MS. They waited impatiently for the results. Finally the computer screen blinked. The grid resembled a lunar landscape.

“All right, Lincoln. Interesting. I’m reading off-the-charts for tannin and—”

“Sodium carbonate?”

“Ain’t he amazin’?” Cooper laughed. “How’d you know?”

“They were used in tanneries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tannic acid cures the hide and the alkaline fixes it. So, his safe house is near the site of an old tannery.”

He smiled. Couldn’t help himself. He thought: You hear footsteps, 823? That’s us behind you.

His eyes slipped to the Randel Survey map. “Because of the smell no one wanted tanneries in their neighborhoods so the commissioners restricted them. I know there were some on the Lower East Side. And in West Greenwich Village—when it literally was a village, a suburb of the city. And then on the far West Side in the Fifties—near the stockyard tunnel where we found the German girl. Oh, and in Harlem in the early 1900s.”

Rhyme glanced at the list of grocery stores—the locations of the ShopRites that sold veal shanks. “Chelsea’s out. No tanning there. Harlem too—no ShopRites there. So, it’s the West Village, Lower East Side or Midtown West Side—Hell’s Kitchen again. Which he seems to like.”

Only about ten square miles, Rhyme estimated cynically. He’d figured out on his first day on the job that it was easier to hide in Manhattan than in the North Woods.

“Let’s keep going. What about the stone in Carole’s clothes?”

Cooper was bent over the microscope. “Okay. Got it.”

“Patch it in to me, Mel.”

Rhyme’s computer screen burst to life and he watched the flecks of stone and crystal, like brilliant asteroids.

“Move it around,” Rhyme instructed. Three substances were bonded together.

“The one on the left is marble, pinkish,” Cooper said. “Like what we found before. And in between, that gray stuff ...”

“It’s mortar. And the other is brownstone,” Rhyme announced. “It’s from a Federal-style building, like the 1812 City Hall. Only the front facade was marble; the rest was brownstone. They did it to save money. Well, they did it so the money appropriated for marble could find its way into various pockets. Now, what else do we have? The ash. Let’s find the arson accelerant.”

Cooper ran the ash sample through the GC-MS. He stared at the curve that appeared on the screen.

Newly refined gasoline, containing its manufacturer’s dyes and additives, was unique and could be traced back to a single source, as long as different batches of gas weren’t mixed together at the service station where the perp bought it. Cooper announced that the gasoline matched perfectly the brand sold by the Gas Exchange service stations.

Banks grabbed the Yellow Pages and flipped them open. “We’ve got six stations in Manhattan. Three downtown. One at Sixth Avenue and Houston. One on Delancey, 503 East. And one at Nineteenth and Eighth.”

“Nineteenth’s too far north,” Rhyme said. He stared at the profile chart. “East Side or West. Which is it?”

Grocery stores, gasoline ...

A lanky figure suddenly filled the doorway.

“I still invited to this here party?” Frederick Dellray asked.

“Depends,” Rhyme countered. “You bearing gifts?”

“Ah got presents galore,” the agent said, waving a folder emblazoned with the familiar disk of the FBI emblem.

“You ever knock, Dellray?” Sellitto asked.

“Got outa the habit, you know.”

“Come on in,” Rhyme said. “What’ve you got?”

“Dunno for sure. Doesn’t make any sense to this boy. But then, whatta I know?”

Dellray read from the report for a moment then said, “We had Tony Farco at PERT—said ‘Hey’ to you by the way, Lincoln—analyze that bit of PE you found. Turns out it’s gold leaf. Probably sixty to eighty years old. He found a few cellulose fibers attached so he thinks it’s from a book.”

“Of course! Gold topstain from a page,” Rhyme said.

“Now he also found some particles of ink on it. He said, I’m quotin’ the boy now: ‘It’s not inconsistent with the type of ink the New York Public Library uses to stamp the ends of their books.’ Don’t he talk funny?”

“A library book,” Rhyme mused.

Amelia Sachs said, “A red-leather-bound library book.”

Rhyme stared at her. “Right!” he shouted. “That’s what the bits of red leather’re from. Not the glove. It’s a book he carries around with him. Could be his bible.”

“Bible?” Dellray asked. “You thinkin’ he’s some kinda religious nutzo?”

“Not the Bible, Fred. Call the library again, Banks. Maybe that’s how he wore down his shoes—in the reading room. I know, it’s a long shot. But we don’t have a lot of options here. I want a list of all the antiquarian books stolen from Manhattan locations in the past year.”

“Will do.” The young man rubbed a shaving scar as he called the mayor at home and bluntly asked hizzoner to contact the director of the public library and tell them what they needed.

A half hour later the fax machine buzzed and spewed out two pages. Thom ripped the transmission out of the machine. “Whoa, readers sure have sticky fingers in this city,” he said as he brought it to Rhyme.

Eighty-four books fifty years old or older had disappeared from the public library branches in the past twelve months, thirty-five of them in Manhattan.

Rhyme scanned the list. Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Dreiser ... Books about music, philosophy, wine, literary criticism, fairy tales. Their value was surprisingly low. Twenty, thirty dollars. He supposed that none of them were first editions but perhaps the thieves hadn’t known that.

He continued to scan the list.

Nothing, nothing. Maybe—

And then he saw it.

Crime in Old New York, by Richard Wille Stephans, published by Bountiful Press in 1919. Its value was listed at sixty-five dollars, and it had been stolen from the Delancey Street branch of the New York Public Library nine months earlier. It was described as five by seven inches in size, bound in red kidskin, with marbleized endpapers, gilded edges.

“I want a copy of it. I don’t care how. Get somebody to the Library of Congress if you have to.”

Dellray said, “I’ll take care of that one.”

Grocery stores, gasoline, the library ...

Rhyme had to make a decision. There were three hundred searchers available—cops and state troopers and federal agents—but they’d be spread microscopically thin if they had to search both the West and East sides of downtown New York.

Gazing at the profile chart.

Is your house in the West Village? Rhyme silently asked 823. Did you buy the gas and steal the book on the East Side to fox us? Or is that your real neighborhood? How clever are you? No, no, the question’s not how clever you are but how clever you think you are. How confident were you that we’d never find those minuscule bits of yourself that M. Locard assures us you’d leave behind?

Finally Rhyme ordered, “Go with the Lower East. Forget the Village. Get everybody down there. All of Bo’s troops, all of yours, Fred. Here’s what you’re looking for: A large Federal-style building, close to two hundred years old, rose-colored marble front, brownstone sides and back. May have been a mansion or a public building at one time. With a garage or carriage house attached. A Taurus sedan and a Yellow Cab coming and going for the past few weeks. More often in the last few days.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs.

Giving up the dead ...

Sellitto and Dellray made their calls.

Sachs said to Rhyme, “I’m going too.”

“I hadn’t expected anything else.”

When the door had closed downstairs he whispered, “Godspeed, Sachs. Godspeed.”

THIRTY-ONE

THREE 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.

UNSUB 823

Appearance

Residence

Vehicle

Other

• Caucasian male, slight build

• Dark clothing

• Old gloves, reddish kidskin

• Aftershave; to cover up other scent?

• Ski mask? Navy blue?

• Gloves are dark

• Aftershave = Brut

• Hair color not brown

• Deep scar, index finger

• Casual clothes

• Gloves are black

• Prob. has safe house

• Located near:

B’way &82nd,

ShopRite

Greenwich & Bank,

ShopRite

8th Ave. & 24th,

ShopRite

Houston & Lafayette,

ShopRite

• Old building, pink marble

• At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional

• Federal-style building, Lower East Side

• Yellow Cab

• Recent model sedan

• Lt. gray, silver, beige

• Rental car: prob. stolen

• Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model

• knows CS proc.

• possibly has record

• knows FR prints

• gun = .32 Colt

• Ties vics w/ unusual knots

• “Old” appeals to him

• Called one vic “Hanna”

• Knows basic German

• Underground appeals to him

• Dual personalities

• Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor

• Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?

• Listened as he broke vic’s finger

• Left snake as slap at investigators

• Wanted to flay vic’s foot

• Called one vic “Maggie”

• Mother & child, special meaning to him?

•Book “Crime in Old NY,” his model?

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—

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 761