Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

“It’s not human,” Cooper said. “I’ll tell you that right now. And they’re guard hairs, not down.”

Hairs from the animal’s coat, he meant.

“What kind? Dog?”

“Veal calf?” Banks suggested, once again youthfully enthusiastic.

“Check the scales,” Rhyme ordered. Meaning the microscopic flakes that make up the outer sheath of a strand of hair.

Cooper typed on his computer keyboard and a few seconds later thumbnail images of scaly rods popped onto the screen. “This is thanks to you, Lincoln. Remember the database?”

At IRD Rhyme had compiled a huge collection of micrographs of different types of hair. “I do, yes, Mel. But they were in three-ring binders when I saw ’ em last. How ’d you get them on the computer?”

“ScanMaster of course. JPEG compressed.”

Jay-peg? What was that? In a few years technology had soared beyond Rhyme. Amazing…

And as Cooper examined the images, Lincoln Rhyme wondered again what he’d been wondering all day – the question that kept floating to the surface: Why the clues? The human creature is so astonishing but count on it before anything else to be just that – a creature. A laughing animal, a dangerous one, a clever one, a scared one, but always acting for a reason – a motive that will move the beast toward its desires. Scientist Lincoln Rhyme didn’t believe in chance, or randomness, or frivolity. Even psychopaths had their own logic, twisted though it may have been, and he knew there was a reason Unsub 823 spoke to them only in this cryptic way.

Cooper called, “Got it. Rodent. Probably a rat. And the hairs were shaved off.”

“That’s a hell of a clue,” Banks said. “There’re a million rats in the city. That doesn’t pin down anyplace. What’s the point of telling us that?”

Sellitto closed his eyes momentarily and muttered something under his breath. Sachs didn’t notice the look. She glanced at Rhyme curiously. He was surprised that she hadn’t figured out what the kidnapper’s message was but he said nothing. He saw no reason to share this horrifying bit of knowledge with anyone else for the time being.

James Schneider’s seventh victim, or eighth, should you choose to number poor, angelic little Maggie O’Connor among them, was the wife of a hardworking immigrant, who had established the family’s modest habitation near Hester Street on the Lower East Side of the City.

It was thanks to the courage of this unfortunate woman that the constables and the police discovered the identity of the criminal. Hanna Goldschmidt was of German-Jewish extraction and was held in high esteem by the close-knit community in which she, her husband and their six children (one had died at birth) lived.

The bone collector drove through the streets slowly, careful to remain under the speed limit though he knew perfectly well that the traffic cops in New York wouldn’t stop you for something as minor as speeding.

He paused at a light and glanced up at another UN billboard. His eyes took in the bland, smiling faces – like the eerie faces painted on the walls of the mansion – and then looked beyond it, at the city around him. He was, occasionally, surprised to look up and find the buildings so massive, the stone cornices so high aloft, the glass so smooth, the cars so sleek, the people so scrubbed. The city he knew was dark, low, smoky, smelling of sweat and mud. Horses would trample you, roving gangs of hoodlums – some as young as ten or eleven – would knock you on the head with a shillelagh or sap and make off with your pocket watch and billfold… This was the bone collector’s city.

Sometimes, though, he found himself just like this – driving a spiffy silver Taurus XL along a smooth asphalt road, listening to WNYC and irritated, like all New Yorkers, when he missed a green light, wondering why the hell didn’t the city let you make right turns on red.

He cocked his head, heard several thumps from the trunk of the car. But there was so much ambient noise that no one would hear Hanna’s protests.

The light changed.

It is, of course, exceptional even in these enlightened times for a woman to venture forth into the city streets in the evening, unaccompanied by a gentleman; and in those days it was more exceptional still. Yet on this unfortunate night Hanna had no choice but to quit her abode for a brief time. Her youngest had a fever, and, with her husband praying devoutly at a nearby synagogue, she issued forth into the night to secure a poultice for the child’s fiery forehead. As she closed the door she said to her eldest daughter, -

“Lock tight the bolt behind me. I shall return soon.”

But, alas, she would not be true to those words. For only moments later she chanced to encounter James Schneider.

The bone collector looked around at the shabby streets here. This area – near where he’d buried the first victim – was Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side of the city, once the bastion of Irish gangs, now populated more and more with young professionals, ad agencies, photo studios and stylish restaurants.

He smelled manure and wasn’t the least surprised when suddenly a horse reared in front of him.

Then he noticed that the animal wasn’t an apparition from the 1800s but was being hitched to one of the hansom cabs that cruised Central Park charging very twentieth-century fees. Their stables were located here.

He laughed to himself. Though it was a hollow sound.

One can only speculate as to what occurred, for there were no witnesses. But we can picture the horror all too clearly. The villain drew the struggling woman into an alley and stabbed her with a dagger, his cruel intent not to kill but to subdue, as was his wont. But such was the strength in good Mrs. Goldschmidt’s soul, thinking as she surely was of her fledglings back in the nest, that she surprised the monster by assaulting him ferociously: – she struck him repeatedly about the face and ripped hair from his head.

She freed herself momentarily and from her mouth issued an horrendous scream. The cowardly Schneider struck her several times more and fled.

The brave woman staggered to the sidewalk and collapsed, where she died in the arms of a constable who had responded to the alarm neighbors had raised.

This story appeared in a book, which was with the bone collector now, resting in his hip pocket. Crime in Old New York . He couldn’t explain his overwhelming attraction to the slim volume. If he had to describe his relation to this book he would have to say he was addicted to it. Seventy-five years old and still in remarkable shape, a bookbinding jewel. It was his good-luck charm and his talisman. He’d found it at a small branch of the public library and committed one of the few larcenies of his life by slipping it into his raincoat one day and strolling out of the building.

He’d read the chapter on Schneider a hundred times and virtually had it memorized.

Driving slowly. They were almost there.

When Hanna’s poor, weeping husband huddled over her lifeless body, he looked upon her face: – one last time before she was taken to the funeral home (for in the Jewish faith it is dictated that the dead must be interred as quickly as possible). And he noticed upon her porcelain cheek a bruise in the shape of a curious emblem. It was a round symbol and appeared to be a crescent moon and a cluster of what might be taken to be stars hovering over the same.

The constable exclaimed that this must have been an imprint made by the ring of the heinous butcher himself when he struck the poor victim. Detectives enlisted the aid of an artist and he sketched a picture of the impression. (The good reader is referred to plate XXII.) Rounds were made of jewelers in, the city, and several names and addresses were secured of men who had bought such rings in the recent past. Two of the gentlemen purchasing these rings were beyond suspicion, being as they were a deacon of a church and another a learned professor at a fine university. Yet the third was a man of whom the constables had long harbored suspicion of nefarious activity. To wit: – one James Schneider.