Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

Polling said, “The press is calling him a serial kidnapper.”

If the bootie fits, Rhyme reflected.

“And the mayor’s going nuts. Wants to call in the feds. I talked the chief into sitting tight on that one. But we can’t lose another vic.”

“We’ll do our best,” Rhyme said caustically.

Polling sipped the black coffee and stepped close to the bed. “You okay, Lincoln?”

Rhyme said, “Fine.”

Polling appraised him for a moment longer then nodded to Sellitto. “Brief me. We got another press conference in a half hour. You see the last one? Hear what that reporter asked? What did we think the vic’s family felt about her being scalded to death?”

Banks shook his head. “Man.”

“I nearly decked the fucker,” Polling said.

Three and a half years ago, Rhyme recalled, during the cop-killer investigation, the captain had smashed a news crew’s videocam when the reporter wondered if Polling was being too aggressive in his investigations just because the suspect, Dan Shepherd, was a member of the force.

Polling and Sellitto retired to a corner of Rhyme’s room and the detective filled him in. When the captain descended the stairs this time, Rhyme noticed, he wasn’t half as buoyant as he had been.

“Okay,” Cooper announced. “We’ve got a hair. It was in her pocket.”

“The whole shaft?” Rhyme asked, without much hope, and was not surprised when Cooper sighed. “Sorry. No bulb.”

Without a bulb attached, hair isn’t individuated evidence; it’s merely class evidence. You can’t run a DNA test and link it to a specific person. Still, it has good probative value. The famous Canadian Mounties study a few years ago concluded that if a hair found at the scene matches a suspect’s hair the odds are around 4,500 to 1 that he’s the one who left it. The problem with hair, though, is that you can’t deduce much about the person it belonged to. Sex is almost impossible to determine, and race can’t be reliably established. Age can be estimated only with infant hair. Color is deceptive because of wide pigmentation variations and cosmetic dyes, and since everybody loses dozens of hairs every day you can’t even tell if the suspect is going bald.

“Check it against the vic’s. Do a scale count and medulla pigmentation comparison,” Rhyme ordered.

A moment later Cooper looked up from the ’scope. “It’s not hers, the Colfax woman’s.”

“Description?” asked Rhyme.

“Light brown. No kink so I’d say not Negroid. Pigmentation suggests it’s not Mongoloid.”

“So Caucasian,” Rhyme said, nodding at the chart on the wall. “Confirms what the wit said. Head or body hair?”

“There’s little diameter variation and a uniform pigment distribution. It’s head hair.”

“Length?”

“Three centimeters.”

Thom asked if he should add to the profile that the kidnapper had brown hair.

Rhyme said no. “We’ll wait for some corroboration. Just write down that we know he wears a ski mask, navy blue. Fingernail scrapings, Mel?”

Cooper examined the trace but found nothing useful.

“The print you found. The one on the wall. Let’s take a look at it. Could you show it to me, Amelia?”

Sachs hesitated then carried the Polaroid over to him.

“Your monster,” Rhyme said. It was a large deformed palm, indeed grotesque, not with the elegant swirls and bifurcations of friction ridges but a mottled pattern of tiny lines.

“It’s a wonderful picture – you’re a virtual Edward Weston, Amelia. But unfortunately it’s not a hand. Those aren’t ridges. It’s a glove. Leather. Old. Right, Mel?”

The technician nodded.

“Thom, write down that he has an old pair of gloves.” Rhyme said to the others, “We’re starting to get some ideas about him. He’s not leaving his FR prints at the scene. But he is leaving glove prints. If we find the glove in his possession we can still place him at the scene. He’s smart. But not brilliant.”

Sachs asked, “And what do brilliant criminals wear?”

“Cotton-lined suede,” Rhyme said. Then asked, “Where’s the filter? From the vacuum?”

The technician emptied the cone filter – like one from a coffee-maker – onto a sheet of white paper.

Trace evidence…

DAs and reporters and juries loved obvious clues. Bloody gloves, knives, recently fired guns, love letters, semen and fingerprints. But Lincoln Rhyme’s favorite evidence was trace – the dust and effluence at crime scenes, so easily overlooked by perps.

But the vacuum had captured nothing helpful.

“All right,” Rhyme said, “let’s move on. Let’s look at the handcuffs.”

Sachs stiffened as Cooper opened the plastic bag and slid the cuffs out onto a sheet of newsprint. There was, as Rhyme had predicted, minimal blood. The tour doctor from the medical examiner’s office had done the honors with the razor saw, after an NYPD lawyer had faxed a release to the ME.

Cooper examined the cuffs carefully. “Boyd & Keller. Bottom of the line. No serial number.” He sprayed the chrome with DFO and hit the PoliLight. “No prints, just a smudge from the glove.”

“Let’s open them up.”

Cooper used a generic cuff key to click them open. With a lens-cleaning air puffer he blew into the mechanism.

“You’re still mad at me, Amelia,” Rhyme said. “About the hands.”

The question caught her off guard. “I wasn’t mad,” she said after a moment. “I thought it was unprofessional. What you were suggesting.”

“Do you know who Edmond Locard was?”

She shook her head.

“A Frenchman. Born in 1877. He founded the University of Lyons ’ Institute of Criminalistics. He came up with the one rule I lived by when I ran IRD. Locard’s Exchange Principle. He thought that whenever two human beings come into contact, something from one is exchanged to the other, and vice versa. Maybe dust, blood, skin cells, dirt, fibers, metallic residue. It might be tough to find exactly what’s been exchanged, and even harder to figure out what it means. But an exchange does occur – and because of that we can catch our unsubs.”

This bit of history didn’t interest her in the least.

“You’re lucky,” Mel Cooper said to Sachs, not looking up. “He was going to have you and the medic do a spot autopsy and examine the contents of her stomach.”

“It would’ve been helpful,” Rhyme said, avoiding her eyes.

“I talked him out of it,” Cooper said.

“Autopsy,” Sachs said, sighing, as if nothing about Rhyme could surprise her.

Why, she isn’t even here , he thought angrily. Her mind’s a thousand miles away.

“Ah,” Cooper said. “Found something. I think it’s a bit of the glove.”

Cooper mounted a fleck on the compound microscope. Examined it.

“Leather. Reddish-colored. Polished on one side.”

“Red, that’s good,” Sellitto said. To Sachs he explained, “The wilder their clothes, the easier it is to find the perp. They don’t teach you that at the academy, bet. Sometime I’ll tell you ’bout the time we collared Jimmy Plaid, from the Gambino crew. You remember that, Jerry?”

“You could spot those pants a mile away,” the young detective said.

Cooper continued, “The leather’s desiccated. Not much oil in the grain. You were right too about them being old.”

“What kind of animal?”

“I’d say kidskin. High quality.”

“If they were new it might mean he was rich,” Rhyme grumbled. “But since they’re old he might’ve found them on the street or bought them secondhand. No snappy deductions from 823’s accessorizing, looks like. Okay. Thom, just add to the profile that the gloves are reddish kidskin. What else do we have?”