Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

Monelle spread her jaws and heard the wonderful sound of the ripping tape. She sucked air deep into her lungs. She could breathe again!

And she could shout for help.

“ Bitte, helfen Sie mir! Please help me!”

Schwarzie backed away, startled by her ragged howl, dropping his precious silver tape. But he didn’t go very far. He stopped and turned back, rose on his pudgy haunches.

Ignoring his black, humped body she kicked the post she was tied to. Dust and dirt floated down like gray snow but the wood didn’t give a bit. She screamed until her throat burned.

“ Bitte . Help me!”

The sticky rush of traffic swallowed the sound.

Stillness for a moment. Then Schwarzie started toward her again. He wasn’t alone this time. The slimy pack followed his lead. Twitching, nervous. But drawn steadily by the tempting smell of her blood.

Bone and wood, wood and bone.

“Mel, what do you have there?” Rhyme was nodding toward the computer attached to the chromatograph- spectrometer. Cooper had once more retested the dirt they’d found in the splinter of wood.

“It’s still nitrogen-rich. Off the charts.”

Three separate tests, the results all the same. A diagnostic check of the unit showed it was working fine. Cooper reflected and said, “That much nitrogen – maybe a firearms or ammunition manufacturer.”

“That’d be Connecticut, not Manhattan.” Rhyme looked at the clock. 6:30. How fast time had raced past today. How slowly it had moved for the past three and a half years. He felt as if he’d been awake for days and days.

The young detective pored over the map of Manhattan, moving aside the pale vertebra that had fallen to the floor earlier.

The disk had been left here by Rhyme’s SCI specialist, Peter Taylor. An early appointment with the man. The doctor had examined him expertly then sat back in the rustling rattan chair and pulled something out of his pocket.

“Show-and-tell time,” the doctor had said.

Rhyme had glanced at Taylor ’s open hand.

“This’s a fourth cervical vertebra. Just like the one in your neck. The one that broke. See the little tails on the end?” The doctor turned it over and over for a moment then asked, “What do you think of when you see it?”

Rhyme respected Taylor – who didn’t treat him like a child or a moron or a major inconvenience – but that day he hadn’t been in the mood to play the inspiration game. He hadn’t answered.

Taylor continued anyway, “Some of my patients think it looks like a stingray. Some say it’s a spaceship. Or an airplane. Or a truck. Whenever I ask that question people usually compare it to something big. Nobody ever says, ‘Oh, a hunk of calcium and magnesium.’ See, they don’t like the idea that something so insignificant has made their lives pure hell.”

Rhyme had glanced back at the doctor skeptically but the placid, gray-haired medico was an old hand at SCI patients and he said kindly, “Don’t tune me out, Lincoln.”

Taylor had held the disk up close to Rhyme’s face. “You’re thinking it’s unfair this little thing causing you so much grief. But forget that. Forget it. I want you to remember what it was like before the accident. The good and bad in your life. Happiness, sadness… You can feel that again.” The doctor’s face had grown still. “But frankly all I see now is somebody who’s given up.”

Taylor had left the vertebra on the bedside table. Accidentally, it seemed. But then Rhyme realized the act was calculated. Over the past months while Rhyme was trying to decide whether or not to kill himself he’d stared at the tiny disk. It became an emblem for Taylor ’s argument – the pro-living argument. But in the end that side lost; the doctor’s words, as valid as they might be, couldn’t overcome the burden of pain and heartache and exhaustion Lincoln Rhyme felt day after day after day.

He now looked away from the disk – to Amelia Sachs – and said, “I want you to think about the scene again.”

“I told you everything I saw.”

“Not saw , I want to know what you felt.”

Rhyme remembered the thousands of times he’d run crime scenes. Sometimes a miracle would happen. He’d be looking around and somehow ideas about the unsub would come to him. He couldn’t explain how. The behaviorists talked about profiling as if they’d invented it. But criminalists had been profiling for hundreds of years. Walk the grid, walk where he’s walked, find what he’s left behind, figure out what he’s taken with him – and you’ll come away from the scene with a profile as clear as a portrait.

“Tell me,” he prodded. “What did you feel?”

“Uneasy. Tense. Hot.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Sorry.”

If he’d been mobile Rhyme would have leapt from the bed, grabbed her shoulders and shaken her. Shouted: But you know what I’m talking about! I know you do. Why won’t you work with me?… Why are you ignoring me?

Then he understood something… That she was there, in the steamy basement. Hovering over T.J.’s ruined body. Smelling the vile smell. He saw it in the way her thumb flicked a bloody cuticle, he saw it in the way she maintained the no-man’s-land of politeness between the two of them. She detested being in that vile basement, and she hated him for reminding her that part of her was still there.

“You’re walking through the room,” he said.

“I really don’t think I can be any more help.”

“Play along,” he said, forcing his temper down. He smiled. “Tell me what you thought.”

Her face went still and she said, “It’s… just thoughts. Impressions everybody’d have.”

“But you were there. Everybody wasn’t. Tell us.”

“It was scary or something…” She seemed to regret the clumsy word.

Unprofessional .

“I felt -”

“Somebody watching you?” he asked.

This surprised her. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

Rhyme had felt it himself. Many times. He’d felt it three and a half years ago, bending down over the decomposing body of the young policeman, picking a fiber off the uniform. He’d been positive that someone was nearby. But there was no one – just a large oak beam that chose that moment to groan and splinter and come crashing down on the fulcrum of Lincoln Rhyme’s fourth cervical vertebra with the weight of the earth.

“What else did you think, Amelia?”

She wasn’t resisting anymore. Her lips were relaxed, her eyes drifting over the curled Nighthawks poster – the diners, lonely or contentedly alone. She said, “Well, I remember saying to myself, ‘Man, this place is old.’ It was like those pictures you see of turn-of-the-century factories and things. And I -”

“Wait,” Rhyme barked. “Let’s think about that. Old…”

His eyes strayed to the Randel Survey map. He’d commented before on the unsub’s interest in historical New York. The building where T.J. Colfax had died was old too. And so was the tunnel for the railroad where they’d found the first body. The New York Central trains used to run aboveground. There’d been so many crossing fatalities that Eleventh Avenue had earned the name Death Avenue and the railroad had finally been forced to move the tracks belowground.

“And Pearl Street,” he mused to himself, “was a major byway in early New York. Why’s he so interested in old things?” He asked Sellitto, “Is Terry Dobyns still with us?”

“Oh, the shrink? Yeah. We worked a case last year. Come to think of it, he asked about you. Said he called you a couple times and you never -”

“Right, right, right,” Rhyme said. “Get him over here. I want his thoughts on 823’s patterns. Now, Amelia, what else did you think?”