Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

“Jekyll and Hyde?” Mel-Cooper played straight man this time, beating Banks to the punch.

“Well, I don’t think he’s got true multiple personalities,” Dobyns continued. “That’s a very rare diagnosis and the classic mult pers is young and has a lower IQ than your boy.” He nodded at the profile chart. “He’s slick and he’s smart. Clearly an organized offender.” Dobyns stared out the window for a moment. “This is interesting, Lincoln. I think your unsub pulls on his other personality when it suits him – when he wants to kill – and that’s important.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, it tells us something about his main personality. He’s someone who’s been trained – maybe at his job, maybe his upbringing – to help people, not hurt them. A priest, a counselor, politician, social worker. And, two, I think it means he’s found himself a blueprint. If you can find out what it is, maybe you can get a lead to him.”

“What kind of blueprint?”

“He may have wanted to kill for a long time. But he didn’t act until he found himself a role model. Maybe from a book or movie. Or somebody he actually knows. It’s someone he can identify with, someone whose own crimes in effect give him permission to kill. Now, I’m going out on a limb here -”

“Climb,” Rhyme said. “Climb.”

“His obsession with history tells me that his personality is a character from the past.”

“Real life?”

“That I couldn’t say. Maybe fictional, maybe not. Hanna, whoever she is, figures in the story somewhere. Germany too. Or German Americans.”

“Any idea what might’ve set him off?”

“Freud felt it was caused by – what else? – sexual conflict at the Oedipal stage. Nowadays, the consensus is that developmental glitches’re only one cause – any trauma can trigger it. And it doesn’t have to be a single event. It could be a personality flaw, a long series of personal or professional disappointments. Hard to say.” His eyes glowed as they gazed at the profile. “But I sure hope you bag him alive, Lincoln. I’d love the chance to get him on the couch for a few hours.”

“Thom, are you writing this down?”

“Yes, bwana.”

“But one question,” Rhyme began.

Dobyns whirled around. “I’d say it’s the question, Lincoln: Why is he leaving the clues? Right?”

“Yep. Why the clues?”

“Think about what he’s done… He’s talking to you. Not rambling incoherently like Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer. He’s not schizophrenic. He’s communicating – in your language. The language of forensics. Why?” More pacing, eyes flipping over the chart. “All I can think of is that he wants to share the guilt. See, it’s hard for him to kill. It becomes easier if he makes us accomplices. If we don’t save the vics in time their deaths are partly our fault.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Rhyme asked. “It means he’ll keep giving us clues that are solvable. Otherwise, if the puzzle’s too hard, he’s not sharing the burden.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dobyns said, smiling no longer. “But there’s another factor at work too.”

Sellitto supplied the answer. “Serial activity escalates.”

“Right,” Dobyns confirmed.

“How can he strike more often?” Banks muttered. “Every three hours isn’t fast enough?”

“Oh, he’ll find a way,” the psychologist continued. “Most likely, he’ll start targeting multiple victims.” The psychologist’s eyes narrowed. “Say, you all right, Lincoln?”

There were beads of sweat on the criminalist’s forehead and he’d been squinting his eyes hard. “Just tired. A lot of excitement for an old crip.”

“One last thing. The profile of the victims’s vital in serial crimes. But here we’ve got different sexes, ages and economic classes. All white but he’s been preying in a predominantly white pool so that’s not statistically significant. With what we know so far we can’t figure out why he’s taken these particular people. If you can, you might just get ahead of him.”

“Thanks, Terry,” Rhyme said. “Stick around for a while.”

“Sure, Lincoln. If you’d like.”

Then Rhyme ordered, “Let’s look at the PE from the stockyard scene. What’ve we got? The underwear?”

Mel Cooper assembled the bags that Sachs had brought back from the scene. He glanced at the one containing the underwear. “Katrina Fashion’s D’Amore line,” he announced. “One hundred percent cotton, elastic band. Cloth made in the U.S. They were cut and sewn in Taiwan.”

“You can tell that just by looking at them?” Sachs asked, incredulous.

“Naw, I was reading,” he answered, pointing at the label.

“Oh.”

The cops laughed.

“He’s telling us he’s got another woman then?” Sachs asked.

“Probably,” Rhyme said.

Cooper opened the bag. “Don’t know what the liquid is. I’ll do a Chromatograph.”

Rhyme asked Thom to hold up the scrap of paper with the phases of the moon on it. He studied it closely. A scrap like this was wonderful individuated evidence. You could fit it to the sheet it’d been torn from and link the two as closely as fingerprints. The problem here of course was that they had no original piece of paper. He wondered if they’d ever find it. The unsub might have destroyed it once he’d torn this bit out. Yet Lincoln Rhyme preferred to think not. He liked to picture it somewhere. Just waiting to be found. The way he always pictured source evidence: the automobile the paint chip had scraped off of, the finger that had lost the nail, the gun barrel that had discharged the rifled slug found in the victim’s body. These sources – always close to the unsub – took on personalities of their own in Rhyme’s mind. They could be imperious or cruel.

Or mysterious.

Phases of the moon .

Rhyme asked Dobyns if their unsub could be driven to act cyclically.

“No. The moon isn’t in a major phase right now. We’re four days past new.”

“So the moons mean something else.”

“If they’re even moons in the first place,” Sachs said. Pleased with herself, and rightly so, Rhyme thought. He said, “Good point, Amelia. Maybe he’s talking about circles. About ink. About paper. About geometry. The planetarium…”

Rhyme realized that she was staring at him. Maybe just realizing now that he’d shaved and his hair was combed, his clothes changed.

And what was her mood now? he wondered. Angry at him, or disengaged? He couldn’t tell. At the moment Amelia Sachs was as cryptic as Unsub 823.

The beeping of the fax machine sounded in the hallway. Thom went to get it and returned a moment later with two sheets of paper.

“It’s from Emma Rollins,” he announced. He held the sheets up for Rhyme to see.

“Our grocery scanner survey. Eleven stores in Manhattan sold veal shanks to customers buying fewer than five items in the last two days.” He started to write on the poster then glanced at Rhyme. “The names of the stores?”

“Of course. We’ll need them for cross-referencing later.”

Thom wrote them down on the profile chart.

B’way & 82nd,

ShopRite

B’way & 96th,

Anderson Foods

Greenwich & Bank,

ShopRite

2nd Ave., 72nd-73rd,

Grocery World

Battery Park City,

J &G’s Emporium

1709 2nd Ave.,

Anderson Foods

34th & Lex.,

Food Warehouse

8th Ave. & 24th,

ShopRite

Houston & Lafayette,

ShopRite

6th Ave. & Houston,

J &G’s Emporium

Greenwich & Franklin,

Grocery World

“That narrows it down,” Sachs said, “to the entire city.”

“Patience,” said restless Lincoln Rhyme.