Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

She sprayed it with ninhydrin and shone the light on it.

“No. But the smell’s very strong.”

“Sample a portion of the post where it’s the strongest. There’s a MotoTool in the case. Black. A portable drill. Take a sampling bit – it’s like a hollow drill bit – and mount it in the tool. There’s something called a chuck. It’s a -”

“I own a drill press,” she said tersely.

“Oh,” Rhyme said.

She drilled a piece of the post out, then flicked sweat from her forehead. “Bag it in plastic?” she asked. He told her yes. She felt faint, lowered her head and caught her breath. No fucking air in here.

“Anything else?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing that I can see.”

“I’m proud of you, Amelia. Come on back and bring your treasures with you.”

CAREFUL,” RHYME BARKED.

“I’m an expert at this.”

“Is it new or old?”

“Shhh,” Thom said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. The blade, is it old or new?”

“Don’t breathe… Ah, there we go. Smooth as a baby’s butt.”

The procedure was not forensic but cosmetic.

Thom was giving Rhyme his first shave in a week. He had also washed his hair and combed it straight back.

A half hour before, waiting for Sachs and the evidence to arrive, Rhyme had sent Cooper out of the room while Thom slicked up a catheter with K-Y and wielded the tube. After that business had been completed Thom had looked at him and said, “You look like shit. You realize that?”

“I don’t care. Why would I care?”

Realizing suddenly that he did.

“How ’bout a shave?” the young man had asked.

“We don’t have time.”

Rhyme’s real concern was that if Dr. Berger saw him groomed he’d be less inclined to go ahead with the suicide. A disheveled patient is a despondent patient.

“And a wash.”

“No.”

“We’ve got company now, Lincoln,”

Finally Rhyme had grumbled, “All right.”

“And let’s lose those pajamas, what do you say?”

“There’s nothing wrong with them.”

But that meant all right too.

Now, scrubbed and shaved, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, Rhyme ignored the mirror his aide held in front of him.

“Take that away.”

“Remarkable improvement.”

Lincoln Rhyme snorted derisively. “I’m going for a walk until they get back,” he announced and settled his head back into the pillow. Mel Cooper turned to him with a perplexed expression.

“In his head,” Thom explained.

“Your head?”

“I imagine it,” Rhyme continued.

“That’s quite a trick,” Cooper said.

“I can walk through any neighborhood I want and never get mugged. Hike in the mountains and never get tired. Climb a mountain if I want. Go window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. Of course the things I see aren’t necessarily there. But so what? Neither are the stars.”

“How’s that?” Cooper asked.

“The starlight we see is thousands or millions of years old. By the time it gets to Earth the stars themselves’ve moved. They’re not where we see them.” Rhyme sighed as the exhaustion flooded over him. “I suppose some of them have already burned out and disappeared.” He closed his eyes.

“He’s making it harder.”

“Not necessarily,” Rhyme answered Lon Sellitto.

Sellitto, Banks and Sachs had just returned from the stockyard scene.

“Underwear, the moon and a plant,” cheerfully pessimistic Jerry Banks said. “That’s not exactly a road map.”

“Dirt too,” Rhyme reminded, ever appreciative of soil.

“Have any idea what they mean?” Sellitto asked.

“Not yet,” Rhyme said.

“Where’s Polling?” Sellitto muttered. “He still hasn’t answered his page.”

“Haven’t seen him,” Rhyme said.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

“As I live and breathe,” rumbled the stranger’s smooth baritone.

Rhyme nodded the lanky-man inside. He was somber-looking but his lean face suddenly cracked into a warm smile, as it tended to do at odd moments. Terry Dobyns was the sum total of the NYPD’s behavioral science department. He’d studied with the FBI behaviorists down at Quantico and had degrees in forensic science and psychology.

The psychologist loved opera and touch football and when Lincoln Rhyme had awakened in the hospital after the accident three and a half years ago Dobyns had been sitting beside him listening to Aïda on a Walkman. He’d then spent the next three hours conducting what turned out to be the first of many counseling sessions about Rhyme’s injury.

“Now what’s this I recall the textbooks sayin’ ’bout people who don’t return phone calls?”

“Analyze me later, Terry. You hear about our unsub?”

“A bit,” Dobyns said, looking Rhyme over. He wasn’t an M.D. but he knew physiology. “You all right, Lincoln? Looking a little peaked.”

“I’m getting a bit of a workout today,” Rhyme admitted. “And I could use a nap. You know what a lazy SOB I am.”

“Yeah, right. You’re the man’d call me at three in the morning with some question about a perp and couldn’t understand why I was in the sack. So what’s up? You fishin’ for a profile?”

“Whatever you can tell us’ll help.”

Sellitto briefed Dobyns, who – as Rhyme recalled from the days they worked together – never took notes but managed to retain everything he heard inside a head crowned with dark-red hair.

The psychologist paced in front of the wall chart, glancing up at it occasionally as he listened to the detective’s rumbling voice.

He held up a finger, interrupting Sellitto. “The victims, the victims… They’ve all been found underground. Buried, in a basement, in the stockyard tunnel.”

“Right,” Rhyme confirmed.

“Go on.”

Sellitto continued, explaining about the rescue of Monelle Gerger.

“Fine, all right,” Dobyns said absently. Then braked to a halt and turned to the wall again. He spread his legs and, hands on hips, gazed at the sparse facts about Unsub 823. “Tell me more about this idea of yours, Lincoln. That he likes old things.”

“I don’t know what to make of it. So far his clues have something to do with historical New York. Building materials from the turn of the century, the stockyards, the steam system.”

Dobyns stepped forward suddenly and tapped the profile. “Hanna. Tell me about Hanna.”

“Amelia?” Rhyme asked.

She told Dobyns how the unsub had referred to Monelle Gerger as Hanna for no apparent reason. “She said he seemed to like saying the name. And speaking to her in German.”

“And he took a bit of a chance to ’nap her, didn’t he?” Dobyns noted. “The cab, at the airport – that was safe for him. But hiding in a laundry room… He must’ve been real motivated to snatch somebody German.”

Dobyns twined some ruddy hair around a lengthy finger and flopped down in one of the squeaky rattan chairs, stretched his feet out in front of him.

“Okay, try this on for size. The underground… that’s the key. It tells me he’s somebody who’s hiding something and when I hear that I start thinking hysteria.”

“He’s not acting hysterical,” Sellitto said. “He’s pretty damn calm and calculating.”

“Not hysteria in that sense. It’s a category of mental disorders. The condition manifests when something traumatic happens in a patient’s life and the subconscious converts that trauma into something else. It’s an attempt to protect the patient. With traditional conversion hysteria you see physical symptoms – nausea, pain, paralysis. But I think here we’re dealing with a related problem. Dissociation – that’s what we call it when the reaction to the trauma affects the mind, not the physical body. Hysterical amnesia, fugue states. And multiple personalities.”