Sunday, 5:45 a.m., to Monday, 7:00 p.m. 4 page

William Everett was still in the hospital. The shattered finger was not a serious problem of course but his heart had been acting up again. Sachs was astonished to find that he’d owned a shop in Hell’s Kitchen years ago and thought he might have known her father. “I knew all the beat cops,” he said. She showed him her wallet picture of the man in his dress uniform. “I think so. Not sure. But I think so.”

The calls had been social but Sachs had gone armed with her watchbook. Neither of the vics, though, had been able to tell her anything more about Unsub 823.

In her apartment now Sachs glanced out her window. She saw the ginkgoes and maples shiver in the sharp wind. She stripped off her uniform, scratched under her boobs—where it always itched like mad from being squooshed under the body armor. She pulled on a bathrobe.

Unsub 823 hadn’t had much warning but it had been enough. The safe house on Van Brevoort had been hosed completely. Even though the landlord said he’d moved in a long time ago—last January (with a phony ID, no one was very surprised to learn)—823 had left with everything he’d brought, trash included. After Sachs had worked the scene, NYPD Latents had descended and was dusting every surface in the place. So far the preliminary reports weren’t encouraging.

“Looks like he even wore gloves when he crapped,” young Banks had reported to her.

A Mobile unit had found the taxi and the sedan. Unsub 823’d cleverly parked them near Avenue D and Ninth Street. Sellitto guessed it probably took a local gang seven or eight minutes to strip them down to their chassis. Any physical evidence the vehicles might’ve yielded was now in a dozen chop shops around the city.

Sachs turned on the tube and found the news. Nothing about the kidnappings. All the stories were about the opening ceremonies of the UN peace conference.

She stared at Bryant Gumbel, stared at the UN secretary-general, stared at some ambassador from the Middle East, stared far more intently than her interest warranted. She even studied the ads as if she were memorizing them.

Because there was something she definitely didn’t want to think about: her bargain with Lincoln Rhyme.

The deal was clear. Now that Carole and Pammy were safe, it was her turn to come through. To let him have his hour alone with Dr. Berger.

Now him, Berger ... She hadn’t liked the look of the doctor at all. You could see one big fucking ego in his compact, athletic frame, his evasive eyes. His black hair perfectly combed. Expensive clothes. Why couldn’t Rhyme have found someone like Kevorkian? He may have been quirky but at least seemed like a wise old grandfather.

Her lids closed.

Giving up the dead ...

A bargain was a bargain. But goddammit, Rhyme ...

Well, she couldn’t let him go without one last try. He’d caught her off guard in his bedroom. She was flustered. Hadn’t thought of any really good arguments. Monday. She had until tomorrow to try to convince him not to do it. Or at least to wait awhile. A month. Hell, a day.

What could she say to him? She’d jot down her arguments. Write a little speech.

Opening her eyes, she climbed out of bed to find a pen and some paper. I could—

Sachs froze, her breath whistling into her lungs like the wind outside.

He wore dark clothes, the ski mask and gloves black as oil.

Unsub 823 stood in the middle of her bedroom.

Her hand instinctively went toward the bedside table—her Glock and knife. But he was ready. The shovel swung fast and caught her on the side of her head. A yellow light exploded in her eyes.

She was on her hands and knees when the foot slammed into her rib cage and she collapsed to her stomach, struggling for breath. She felt her hands being cuffed behind her, a strip of duct tape slapped onto her mouth. Moving fast, efficiently. He rolled her onto her back; her robe fell open.

Kicking furiously, struggling madly to pull the cuffs apart.

Another blow to her stomach. She gagged and fell still as he reached for her. Gripped her at the armpits, dragged her out the back door and into the large private garden behind the apartment.

His eyes remained on her face, not even looking at her tits, her flat belly, her mound with its few red curls. She could easily have given that up to him if it would have saved her life.

But, no, Rhyme’s diagnosis was right. It wasn’t lust that drove 823. He had something else in mind. He dropped her willowy figure, face up, into a patch of black-eyed Susans and pachysandra, out of sight of the neighbors. He looked around, catching his breath. He picked up the shovel and plunged the blade into the dirt.

Amelia Sachs began to cry.

Rubbing the back of his head into the pillow.

Compulsive, a doctor had once told him after observing this behavior—an opinion Rhyme hadn’t asked for. Or wanted. His nestling, Rhyme reflected, was just a variation on Amelia Sachs’s tearing her flesh with her own nails.

He stretched his neck muscles, rolling his head around, as he stared at the profile chart on the wall. Rhyme believed that the full story of the man’s madness was here in front of him. In the black, swoopy handwriting—and the gaps between the words. But he couldn’t see the story’s ending. Not yet.

He looked over the clues again. There were only a few left unexplained.

The scar on the finger.

The knot.

The aftershave.

The scar was useless to them unless they had a suspect whose fingers they could examine. And there’d been no luck in identifying the knot—only preppy Banks’s opinion that it wasn’t nautical.

What about the cheap aftershave? Assuming that most unsubs wouldn’t spritz themselves to go on a kidnapping spree, why had he worn it? Rhyme could only conclude again that he was trying to obscure another, a telltale scent. He ran through the possibilities: Food, liquor, chemicals, tobacco ...

He felt eyes on him and looked to his right.

The black dots of the bony rattlesnake’s eye sockets gazed toward the Clinitron. This was the one clue that was out of place. It had no purpose, except to taunt them.

Something occurred to him. Using the painstaking turning frame Rhyme slowly flipped back through Crime in Old New York. To the chapter on James Schneider. He found the paragraphs he’d remembered.

It has been suggested by a well-known physician of the mind (a practitioner of the discipline of “psyche-logy, “ which has been much in the news of late) that James Schneider’s ultimate intent had little to do with harming his victims. Rather—this learned doctor has suggested—the villain was seeking revenge against those that did him what he perceived to be harm: the city’s constabulary, if not Society as a whole.

Who can say where the source of this hate lay? Perhaps, like the Nile of old, its wellsprings were hidden to the world;—and possibly even to the villain himself. Yet one reason may be found in a little-known fact: Young James Schneider, at the tender age of ten, saw his father dragged away by constables only to die in prison for a robbery which, it was later ascertained, he did not commit. Following this unfortunate arrest, the boy’s mother fell into life on the street and abandoned her son, who grew up a ward of the state.

Did the madman perchance commit these crimes to fling derision into the face of the very constabulary which had inadvertently destroyed his family?

We will undoubtedly never know.

Yet what does seem clear is that by mocking the ineffectualness of the protectors of its citizenry, James Schneider—the “bone collector”—was wreaking his vengeance upon the city itself as much as upon his innocent victims.

Lincoln Rhyme lay back in his pillow and looked at the profile chart again.

Dirt is heavier than anything.

It’s the earth itself, the dust of an iron core, and it doesn’t kill by strangling the air from the lungs but by compressing the cells until they die from the panic of immobility.

Sachs wished that she had died. She prayed that she would. Fast. From fear or a heart attack. Before the first shovelful hit her face. She prayed for this harder than Lincoln Rhyme had prayed for his pills and liquor.

Lying in the grave the unsub had dug in her own backyard Sachs felt the progress of the rich earth, dense and wormy, moving along her body.

Sadistically, he was burying her slowly, casting only a shallow scoop at a time, scattering it carefully around her. He’d started with her feet. He was now up to her chest, the dirt slipping into her robe and around her breasts like a lover’s fingers.

Heavier and heavier, compressing, binding her lungs; she could suck only an ounce or two of air at a time. He paused once or twice to look at her then continued.

He likes to watch ...

Hands beneath her, neck straining to keep her head above the tide.

Then her chest was buried completely. Her shoulders, her throat. The cold earth rose to the hot skin of her face, packing around her head so she couldn’t move. Finally he bent down and ripped the tape off her mouth. As Sachs tried to scream he spilled a handful of dirt into her face. She shivered, choked on the black earth. Ears ringing, hearing for some reason an old song from her infancy—“The Green Leaves of Summer,” a song her father played over and over again on the hi-fi. Sorrowful, haunting. She closed her eyes. Everything was going black. Opened her mouth once and got another cup’s worth of soil.

Giving up the dead ...

And then she was under.

Completely quiet. Not choking or gasping—the earth was a perfect seal. She had no air in her lungs, couldn’t make any sounds. Silence, except for the haunting melody and the growing roar in her ears.

Then the pressure on her face ceased as her body went numb, as numb as Lincoln Rhyme’s. Her mind began to shut down.

Blackness, blackness. No words from her father. Nothing from Nick ... No dreams of downshifting from five to four to goose the speedometer into three digits.

Blackness.

Giving up the ...

The mass sinking down onto her, pushing, pushing. Seeing only one image: The hand rising out of the grave yesterday morning, waving for mercy. When no mercy would be given.

Waving for her to follow.

Rhyme, I’ll miss you.

Giving up ...

THIRTY-FOUR

SOMETHING STRUCK HER FOREHEAD. Hard. She felt the thump but no pain.

What, what? His shovel? A brick? Maybe in an instant of compassion 823’d decided that this slow death was more than anyone could bear and was striking for her throat to sever her veins.

Another blow, and another. She couldn’t open her eyes, but she was aware of light growing around her. Colors. And air. She forced the mass of dirt from her mouth and sucked in tiny breaths, all she could manage. Began coughing in a loud bray, retching, spitting.

Her lids sprang open and through tearing eyes she found herself looking up at the muddy vision of Lon Sellitto, kneeling over her, beside two EMS medics, one of whom dug into her mouth with latex-clad fingers and pulled out more gunk, while the other readied an oxygen mask and green tank.

Sellitto and Banks continued to uncover her body, shoving the dirt away with their muscular hands. They pulled her up, leaving the robe behind like a shed skin. Sellitto, old divorcé that he was, looked chastely away from her body as he put his jacket around her shoulders. Young Jerry Banks did look of course but she loved him anyway.

“Did ... you ... ?” she wheezed, then surrendered to a racking cough.

Sellitto glanced expectantly at Banks, who was the more breathless of the two. He must’ve done the most running after the unsub. The young detective shook his head. “Got away.”

Sitting up, she inhaled oxygen for a moment.

“How?” she wheezed. “How’d you know?”

“Rhyme,” he answered. “Don’t ask me how. He called in 10-13s for everybody on the team. When he heard we were okay he sent us over here ASAP.”

Then the numbness left, snap, in a flash. And for the first time she realized what had nearly happened. She dropped the oxygen mask, backed away in panic, tears streaming, her panicky keening growing louder and louder. “No, no, no ...”

Slapping her arms and thighs, frantic, trying to shake off the horror clinging to her like a teeming swarm of bees.

“Oh God oh God ... No ...”

“Sachs?” Banks asked, alarmed. “Hey, Sachs?”

The older detective waved his partner away. “It’s okay.” He kept his arm around her shoulders as she dropped to all fours and vomited violently, sobbing, sobbing, gripping the dirt desperately between her fingers as if she wanted to strangle it.

Finally Sachs calmed and sat back on her naked haunches. She began laughing, softly at first then louder and louder, hysterical, astonished to find that the skies had opened and it had been raining—huge hot summer drops—and she hadn’t even realized it.

Arm around his shoulders. Face pressed against his. They stayed that way for a long moment.

“Sachs ... Oh, Sachs.”

She stepped away from the Clinitron and scooted an old armchair from the corner of the room. Sachs—wearing navy sweatpants and a Hunter College T-shirt—flopped down into the chair and dangled her exquisite legs over the arm like a schoolgirl.

“Why us, Rhyme? Why’d he come after us?” Her voice was a raspy whisper from the dirt she’d swallowed.

“Because the people he kidnapped aren’t the real victims. We are.”

“Who’s we?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Society maybe. Or the city. Or the UN. Cops. I went back and reread his bible—the chapter on James Schneider. Remember Terry’s theory about why the unsub’d been leaving the clues?”

Sellitto said, “Sort of making us accessories. To share the guilt. Make it easier for him to kill.”

Rhyme nodded but said, “I don’t think that’s the reason though. I think the clues were a way to attack us. Every dead vic was a loss for us.”

In her old clothes, hair pulled back in a ponytail, Sachs looked more beautiful than any time in the past two days. But her eyes were tin. She’d be reliving every shovelful of dirt, he supposed, and Rhyme found the thought of her living burial so disturbing he had to look away.

“What’s he got against us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Schneider’s father was arrested by mistake and died in prison. Our unsub? Who knows why? I only care about evidence—”

“—not motives.” Amelia Sachs finished the sentence.

“Why’d he start going after us directly?” Banks asked, nodding at Sachs.

“We found his hidey-hole and saved the little girl. I don’t think he expected us so soon. Maybe he just got pissed. Lon, we need twenty-four-hour babysitters for all of us. He could’ve just taken off after we saved the kid but he stuck around to do some damage. You and Jerry, me, Cooper, Haumann, Polling, we’re all on his list, betcha. Meanwhile, get Peretti’s boys over to Sachs’s. I’m sure he kept it clean but there might be something there. He left a lot faster than he’d planned to.”

“I better get over there,” Sachs said.

“No,” Rhyme said.

“I have to work the scene.”

“You have to get some rest,” he ordered. “That’s what you have to do, Sachs. You don’t mind my saying, you look lousy.”

“Yeah, officer,” Sellitto said. “ ‘S’an order. I told you to stand down for the rest of the day. We’ve got two hundred searchers looking for him. And Fred Dellray’s got another hundred and twenty feebies.”

“I got a crime scene in my own backyard and you’re not gonna let me walk the grid?”

“That’s it,” Rhyme said, “in a nutshell.”

Sellitto walked to the doorway. “Any problems with that, officer?”

“Nosir.”

“Come on, Banks, we got work to do. You need a lift, Sachs? Or’re they still trusting you with vehicles?”

“No thanks, got wheels downstairs,” she said.

The two detectives left. Rhyme heard their voices echoing through the empty hall. Then the door closed and they were gone.

Rhyme realized the glaring overhead lights were on. He clicked through several commands and dimmed them.

Sachs stretched.

“Well,” she said, just as Rhyme said, “So.”

She glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“Sure is.”

Rising, she walked to the table where her purse rested. She picked it up. Clicked it open, found her compact and examined her cut lip in the mirror.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Rhyme said.

“Frankenstein,” she said, prodding. “Why don’t they use flesh-colored stitches?” She put the mirror away, slung the purse over her shoulder. “You moved the bed,” she noticed. It was closer to the window.

“Thom did. I can look at the park. If I want to.”

“Well, that’s good.”

She walked to the window. Looked down.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rhyme thought to himself. Do it. What can happen? He blurted quickly, “You want to stay here? I mean, it’s getting late. And Latents’ll be dusting your place for hours.”

He felt a mad bolt of anticipation deep within him. Well, kill that, he thought, furious with himself. Until her face blossomed into a smile. “I’d like that.”

“Good.” His jaw shivered from the adrenaline. “Wonderful. Thom!”

Listening to music, drinking some Scotch. Maybe he’d tell her more about famous crime scenes. The historian in him was also curious about her father, about police work in the ’60s and ’70s. About the infamous Midtown South Precinct in the old days.

Rhyme shouted, “Thom! Get some sheets. And a blanket. Thom! I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. Thom!”

Sachs started to say something but the aide appeared in the doorway and said testily, “One rude shout would’ve been enough, you know, Lincoln.”

“Amelia’s staying over again. Could you get some blankets and pillows for the couch?”

“No, not the couch again,” she said. “It’s like sleeping on rocks.”

Rhyme was stabbed with a splinter of rejection. Thinking ruefully to himself: Been a few years since he’d felt that emotion. Resigned, he nonetheless smiled and said, “There’s a bedroom downstairs. Thom can make it up for you.”

But Sachs set down her purse. “That’s okay, Thom. You don’t have to.”

“It’s no bother.”

“It’s all right. Good night, Thom.” She walked to the door.

“Well, I—”

She smiled.

“But—” he began, looking from her to Rhyme, who frowned, shook his head.

“Good night, Thom,” she said firmly. “Watch your feet.” And closed the door slowly, as he stepped back out of the way into the hall. It closed with a loud click.

Sachs kicked off her shoes, pulled off the sweats and T-shirt. She wore a lace bra and baggy cotton panties. She climbed into the Clinitron beside Rhyme, showing every bit of the authority beautiful women wield when it comes to climbing into bed with a man.

She wriggled down into the pellets and laughed. “This is one hell of a bed,” she said, stretching like, a cat. Eyes closed, Sachs asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Rhyme?”

“What?”

“Tell me more about your book, okay? Some more crime scenes?”

He started to describe a clever serial killer in Queens but in less than one minute she was asleep.

Rhyme glanced down and noted her breast against his chest, her knee resting on his thigh. A woman’s hair was banked against his face for the first time in years. It tickled. He’d forgotten that this happened. For someone who lived so in the past, with such a good memory, he was surprised to find he couldn’t exactly remember when he’d experienced this sensation last. What he could recall was an amalgam of evenings with Elaine, he supposed, before the accident. He did remember that he’d decided to endure the tickle, not push the strands away, so he wouldn’t disturb his wife.

Now, of course, he couldn’t brush away Sachs’s hair if God Himself had asked. But he wouldn’t think of moving it aside. Just the opposite; he wanted to prolong the sensation until the end of the universe.

THIRTY-FIVE

THE NEXT MORNING LINCOLN RHYME was alone again.

Thom had gone shopping and Mel Cooper was at the IRD lab downtown. Vince Peretti had completed the CS work at the mansion on East Van Brevoort and at Sachs’s. They’d found woefully few clues though Rhyme put the lack of PE down to the unsub’s ingenuity, not Peretti’s derivative talents.

Rhyme was awaiting the crime scene report. But both Dobyns and Sellitto believed that 823 had gone to ground—temporarily at least. There’d been no more attacks on the police and no other victims had been kidnapped in the past twelve hours.

Sachs’s minder—a large Patrol officer from MTS—had accompanied her to an appointment with an ear, nose and throat man at a hospital in Brooklyn; the dirt had done quite a number on her throat. Rhyme himself had a bodyguard too—a uniform from the Twentieth Precinct, stationed in front of his townhouse—a friendly cop he’d known for years and with whom Rhyme enjoyed a running argument on the merits of Irish peat versus Scottish in the production of whisky.

Rhyme was in a great mood. He called downstairs on the intercom. “I’m expecting a doctor in a couple of hours. You can let him up.”

The cop said he would.

Dr. William Berger had assured Rhyme that today he’d be on time.

Rhyme leaned back in the pillow and realized he wasn’t completely alone. On the windowsill, the falcons paced. Rarely skittish, they seemed uneasy. Another low front was approaching. Rhyme’s window revealed a calm sky but he trusted the birds; they were infallible barometers.

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

• Located near archaeologic dig

• 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?

• Bases crimes on James Schneider, the“ Bone Collector”

• Has hatred of police

He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 11:00 a.m. Here he was, just like two days ago, awaiting Berger’s arrival. That’s life, he thought: postponement upon postponement but ultimately, with some luck, we get to where we’re meant to be.

He watched television for twenty minutes, trolling for stories about the kidnappings. But all the stations were doing specials on the opening day of the UN conference. Rhyme found it boring and turned to a rerun of Matlock, flipped back to a gorgeous CNN reporter standing outside UN headquarters and then shut the damn set off.

The telephone rang and he went through the complicated gestures of answering it. “Hello.”

There was a pause before a man’s voice said, “Lincoln?”

“Yes?”

“Jim Polling. How you doin’?”

Rhyme realized that he hadn’t seen much of the captain since early yesterday, except for the news conference last night, where he’d whispered prompts to the mayor and Chief Wilson.

“Okay. Any word on our unsub?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing yet. But we’ll get him.” Another pause. “Hey, you alone?”

“Yep.”

A longer pause.

“Okay if I stop by?”

“Sure.”

“A half hour?”

“I’ll be here,” Rhyme said jovially.

He rested his head in the thick pillow and his eyes slipped to the knotted clothesline hanging beside the profile poster. Still no answer about the knot. It was—he laughed aloud at the joke—a loose end. He hated the idea of leaving the case without finding out what kind of knot it was. Then he remembered that Polling was a fisherman. Maybe he’d recognize—

Polling, Rhyme reflected.

James Polling ...

Funny how the captain had insisted Rhyme handle the case. How he’d fought to keep him on it, rather than Peretti—who was the better choice, politically, for Polling. Remembering too how he’d lost his temper at Dellray when the feebie tried to strong-arm the investigation away from the NYPD.

Now that he thought about it, Polling’s whole involvement in the case was a mystery. Eight twenty-three wasn’t the kind of perp you took on voluntarily—even if you were looking for juicy cases to hang on your collar record. Too many chances to lose vics, too many opportunities for the press—and the brass—to snipe at you for fucking up.

Polling ... Recalling how he’d breeze into Rhyme’s bedroom, check out their progress and leave.

Sure, he was reporting to the mayor and the chief. But—the thought slipped unexpectedly into Rhyme’s mind—was there someone else Polling was reporting back to?

Someone who wanted to keep tabs on the investigation? The unsub himself?

But how on earth could Polling have any connection with 823? It seemed—

And then it struck him.

Could Polling be the unsub?

Of course not. It was ridiculous. Laughable. Even apart from motive and means, there was the question of opportunity. The captain had been here, in Rhyme’s room, when some of the kidnappings had occurred. ...

Or had he?

Rhyme looked up at the profile chart.

Dark clothing and wrinkled cotton slacks. Polling’d been wearing dark sports clothes over the past several days. But so what? So did a lot of—

Downstairs a door opened and closed.

“Thom?”

No answer. The aide wasn’t due back for hours.

“Lincoln?”

Oh, no. Hell. He started to dial on the ECU.

9—1—

With his chin he bumped the cursor to 2.

Footsteps on the stairs.

He tried to redial but he knocked the joystick out of reach in his desperation.

And Jim Polling walked into the room. Rhyme had counted on the babysitter’s calling upstairs first. But of course a beat cop would let a police captain inside without thinking twice.

Polling’s dark jacket was unbuttoned and Rhyme got a look at the automatic on his hip. He couldn’t see if it was his issue weapon. But he knew that .32 Colts were on the NYPD list of approved personal weapons.

“Lincoln,” Polling said. He was clearly uneasy, cautious. His eyes fell to the bleached bit of spinal cord.

“How you doing, Jim?”

“Not bad.”

Polling the outdoorsman. Had the scar on the fingerprint been left by years of casting a fishing line? Or an accident with a hunting knife? Rhyme tried to look but Polling kept his hands jammed into his pockets. Was he holding something in there? A knife?

Polling certainly knew forensics and crime scenes—he knew how not to leave evidence.

The ski mask? If Polling was the unsub he’d have to wear the mask of course—because one of the vics might see him later. And the aftershave ... what if the unsub hadn’t worn the scent at all but had just carried a bottle with him and sprayed some at the scenes to make them believe he wore Brut? So when Polling showed up here, not wearing any, no one would suspect him.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 712