Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

She took the flashlight from the medic and shining it low, started forward.

“It’s all right, miss,” Sachs called. “You’ll be all right.”

The girl’s eyes opened, head flipping from side to side.

“Bitte, bitte…”

She was very pale. Her blue eyes clung to Sachs, as if she was afraid to look away. “ Bitte, bitte… Pleece…” Her voice rose to a wild keening and she began to sob and thrash in terror as the medic pressed bandages on her wounds.

Sachs cradled her bloody blond head, whispering, “You’ll be all right, honey, you’ll be all right, you’ll be all right…”

THE OFFICE, HIGH ABOVE DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, looked out over Jersey. The crap in the air made the sunset absolutely beautiful.

“We gotta.”

“We can’t.”

“Gotta,” Fred Dellray repeated and sipped his coffee – even worse than in the restaurant where the Scruff and he’d been sitting not long before. “Take it away from ’em. They’ll live with it.”

“It’s a local case,” responded the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office. The ASAC was a meticulous man who could never work undercover – because when you saw him you thought, Oh, look, an FBI agent.

“It’s not local. They’re treating it local. But it’s a big case.”

“We’re down eighty men because of the UN thing.”

“And this’s related to it,” Dellray said. “I’m positive.”

“Then we’ll tell UN Security. Let everybody… Oh, don’t give me that look.”

“UN Security? UN Security? Say, you ever heara the words oxy-moron?… Billy, you see that picture? Of the scene this morning? The hand comin’ outa the dirt, and all the skin cut offa that finger? That’s a sick fuck out there.”

“NYPD’s keeping us informed,” the ASAC said smartly. “We’ve got Behavioral on call if they want.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ on the merry cross. ‘Behavioral on call’? We gotta catch this ripper, Billy. Catch him. Not figger out his tick-tocky workings.”

“Tell me what your snitch said again.”

Dellray knew a crack in a rock when he saw one. Wasn’t going to let it seal up again. Rapid fire now: about the Scruff and Jackie in Johannesburg or Monrovia and the hushed word throughout the illicit arms trade that something was going down at a New York airport this week so stay clear. “It’s him ,” Dellray said. “Gotta be.”

“NYPD’s got a task force together.”

“Not Anti-Terror. I made calls. Nobody at A-T there knows zippo about it. To NYPD it’s dead tourists equal bad public relations.’ I want this case, Billy.” And Fred Dellray said the one word he’d never uttered in his eight years of undercover work. “Please.”

“What grounds’re you talking?”

“Oh-oh, bullshit question,” Dellray said, stroking his index finger like a scolding teacher. “Lessee. We got ourselves that spiffy new anti-terrorism bill. But that’s not enough for you, you want jurisdiction? I’ll give you jurisdiction. A Port Authority felony. Kidnapping. I can fucking argue that this prick’s driving a taxi so he’s affecting interstate commerce. We don’t want to play those games, do we, Billy?”

“You’re not listening, Dellray. I can recite the U.S. Code in my sleep, thank you. I want to know if we’re going to take over, what we tell people and make everybody happy. ’Cause remember, after this unsub’s bagged and tagged we’re going to have to keep working with NYPD. I’m not going to send my big brother to beat up their big brother even though I can. Anytime I want. Lon Sellitto’s running the case and he’s a good man.”

“A lieutenant?” Dellray snorted. He tugged the cigarette out from behind his ear and held it under his nostrils for a moment.

“Jim Polling’s in charge.”

Dellray reared back with mock horror. “Polling? Little Adolph? The ‘You- have- the- right- to- remain- silent- ’cause- I’ma- hit- you- upside- the- motherfuckin’- head’ Polling? Him?”

The ASAC had no response for that. He said, “Sellitto’s good. A real workhorse. I’ve been with him on two OC task forces.”

“That unsub’s grabbing bodies right and left and this here boy’s betting he’s going to work his way up.”

“Meaning?”

“We got senators in town. We got congressmen, we got heads of state. I think these folk he’s grabbing now’re just for practice.”

“ You been talking to Behavioral and not telling me?”

“It’s what I smell.” Dellray couldn’t resist touching his lean nose.

The ASAC blew air from his clean-shaven federal agent cheeks. “Who’s the CI?”

Dellray had trouble thinking of the Scruff as a confidential informant, which sounded like something out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. Most CIs were skels, short for skeletons, meaning scrawny, disgusting little hustlers. Which fit the Scruff to a T.

“He’s a tick,” Dellray admitted. “But Jackie, this guy he heard it from’s solid.”

“I know you want it, Fred. I understand.” The ASAC said this with some sympathy. Because he knew exactly what was behind Dellray’s request.

Even as a boy in Brooklyn, Dellray had wanted to be a cop. It hadn’t mattered much to him what kind of cop as long as he could spend twenty-four hours a day doing it. But soon after joining the Bureau he found his calling – undercover work.

Teamed with his straight man and guardian angel Toby Dolittle, Dellray was responsible for sending a large number of perps away for a very long time – the sentences totaled close to a thousand years. (“They kin call us the Millennium Team, Toby-o,” he declared to his partner once.) The clue to Dellray’s success was his nickname: “the Chameleon.” Bestowed after – in the space of twenty-four hours – he played a brain-dead cluckhead in a Harlem crack house and a Haitian dignitary at a dinner in the Panamanian consulate, complete with diagonal red ribbon on his chest and impenetrable accent. The two of them were regularly loaned out to ATF or DEA and, occasionally, city police departments. Drugs and guns were their specialty though they had a minor in ’jacked merchandise.

The irony of undercover work is that the better you are, the earlier the retirement. Word gets around and the big boys, the perps worth going after, become harder to fox. Dolittle and Dellray found themselves working less in the field and more as handlers of informants and other undercover agents. And while it wasn’t Dellray’s first choice – nothing excited him like the street – it still got him out of the office more often than most SAs in the Bureau. It had never occurred to him to request a transfer.

Until two years ago – a warm April morning in New York. Dellray was just about to leave the office to catch a plane at La Guardia when he got a phone call from the assistant director of the Bureau in Washington. The FBI is a nest of hierarchy and Dellray couldn’t imagine why the big man himself was calling. Until he heard the AD’s somber voice break the news that Toby Dolittle, along with an assistant U.S. attorney from Manhattan, had been on the ground floor of the Oklahoma City, federal building that morning, preparing for the deposition session that Dellray himself was just about to depart for.

Their bodies were being flown back to New York the next day.

Which was the same day that Dellray put in the first of his RFT-2230 forms, requesting a transfer to the Bureau’s Anti-Terror Division.

The bombing had been the crime of crimes to Fred Dellray, who, when no one was looking, devoured books on politics and philosophy. He believed there was nothing essentially un-American about greed or lust – hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. And if people making a business of greed or lust sometimes stepped over the border of legality, Dellray was pleased to track them down – but he never did so with personal animosity. But to murder people for their beliefs – hell, to murder children before they even knew what they believed – my God, that was a stab at the heart of the country. Sitting in his two-room, sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment after Toby’s funeral, Dellray decided that this was the kind of crime he wanted a crack at.