Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

Thirty agents watching her. Two women among them.

“Just tell us whatcha saw,” Dellray said, gripping an unlit cigarette between prominent teeth.

She gave them a synopsis of her searches of the crime scenes and the conclusions Rhyme and Terry Dobyns had come to. Most of the agents were troubled by the unsub’s curious MO.

“Like a goddamn game,” an agent muttered.

One asked if the clues had any political messages they could decipher.

“Well, sir, we really don’t think he’s a terrorist,” Sachs persisted.

Perkins turned his high-powered attention toward her. “Let me ask you, officer, you concede he’s smart, this unsub?”

“Very smart.”

“Couldn’t he be double-bluffing?”

“How do you mean?”

“You… I should say the NYPD’s thinking is that he’s just a nutcase. I mean, a criminal personality. But isn’t it possible he’s smart enough to make you think that. When something else’s going on.”

“Like what?”

“Take those clues he left. Couldn’t they be diversions?”

“No, sir, they’re directions,” Sachs said. “Leading us to the vics.”

“I understand that,” quick Thomas Perkins said. “But by doing that he’s also leading us away from other targets, right?”

She hadn’t considered that. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“And Chief Wilson’s been pulling men off UN security detail right and left to work the kidnapping. This unsub might be keeping everyone distracted, which leaves him free for his real mission.”

Sachs remembered that she’d had a similar thought herself earlier in the day, watching all the searchers along Pearl Street. “And that’d be the UN?”

“We think so,” Dellray said. “The perps behind the UNESCO bombing attempt in London might want to try again.”

Meaning Rhyme was going off in the completely wrong direction. It eased the weight of her guilt somewhat.

“Now, officer, could you itemize the evidence for us?” Perkins asked.

Dellray gave her an inventory sheet of everything she’d found and she went through it item by item. As she spoke Sachs was aware of bustling activity around her – some agents taking calls, some standing and whispering to other agents, some taking notes. But when, glancing down at the sheet, she added, “Then I picked up this fingerprint of his at the last scene,” she realized that the room had fallen utterly silent. She looked up. Every face in the office was staring at her in what could pass for shock – if federal agents were capable of that.

She glanced helplessly at Dellray, who cocked his head, “You saying you gotchaself a print?”

“Well, yes. His glove fell off in a struggle with the last vic and when he picked it up he brushed against the floor.”

“Where is it?” Dellray asked quickly.

“Jesus,” one agent called. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Well, I -”

“Find it, find it!” somebody else called.

A murmur ran through the room.

Her hands shaking, Sachs dug through the evidence bags and handed Dellray the Polaroid of the fingerprint. He held it up, looked carefully. Showed it to someone who, she guessed, was a friction-ridge expert. “Good,” the agent offered. “It’s definitely A-grade.”

Sachs knew that prints were rated A, B and C, the lower category being unacceptable to most law enforcement agencies. But whatever pride she felt in her evidence-gathering skills was crushed by their collective dismay that she hadn’t mentioned it before this.

Then everything started to happen at once. Dellray handed off to an agent who jogged to an elaborate computer in the corner of the office and rested the Polaroid on a large, curved bed of something called an Opti-Scan. Another agent turned on the computer and started typing in commands as Dellray snatched up the phone. He tapped his foot impatiently and then lowered his head as, somewhere, the call was answered.

“Ginnie, s’Dellray. This’s gonna be a true-blue pain but I needya to shut down all AFIS Northeast Region requests and give the one I’m sending priority… I got Perkins here. He’ll okay it and if that ain’t enough I’ll call the man in Washington himself… It’s the UN thing.”

Sachs knew the Bureau’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System was used by police departments throughout the country. That’s what Dellray would be braking to a halt at the moment.

The agent at the computer said, “It’s scanned. We’re transmitting now.”

“How long’s it gonna take?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

Dellray pressed his dusty fingers together. “Please, please, please.”

All around her was a cyclone of activity. Sachs heard voices talking about weapons, helicopters, vehicles, anti-terror negotiators. Phone calls, clattering keyboards, maps unrolling, pistols being checked.

Perkins was on the phone, talking to the hostage-rescue people, or the director, or the mayor. Maybe the president. Who knew? Sachs said to Dellray, “I didn’t know the print was that big a deal.”

“S’always a big deal. Least, with AFIS now it is. Used to be you dusted for prints mostly for show. Let the vics and the press know you were doing something .”

“You’re kidding.”

“Naw, not a bit. Take New York City. You do a cold search – that’s when you don’t have any suspects – you do a cold search manually, it’d take a tech fifty years to go through all the print cards. No foolin’. An automated search? Fifteen minutes. Used to be you’d ID a suspect maybe two, three percent of the time. Now we’re running close to twenty, twenty-two percent. Oh, yup, prints’re golden. Dincha tell Rhyme about it?”

“He knew, sure.”

“And he didn’t get all hands on board? My oh my, the man’s slipping.”

“Say, officer,” SAC Perkins called, holding his hand over the phone, “I’ll ask you to complete those chain-of-custody cards now. I want to get the PE off to PERT.”

The Physical Evidence Response Team. Sachs remembered that Lincoln Rhyme had been the one the feds hired to help put it together.

“I’ll do that. Sure.”

“Mallory, Kemple, take that PE to an office and get our guest some COC cards. You have a pen, officer?”

“Yes, I do.”

She followed the two men into a small office, clicking her ballpoint nervously while they hunted down and returned with a pack of federal-issue chain-of-custody cards. She sat down and broke the package open.

The voice behind her was the hip Dellray, the persona that seemed the eagerest to break out. In the car on the way here someone had referred to him as the Chameleon and she was beginning to see why.

“We call Perkins the Big Dict. Nyup – not ‘dick’ like you’re thinking. ‘Dict’ like dictionary . But don’ worry over him. He’s smarter’n an agent sandwich. And better’n that he’s pulled strings all the way to D.C., which is where strings gotta be pulled in cases like this.” Dellray ran his cigarette beneath his nose as if it were a fine cigar. “You know, officer, you’re foxy smart doing whatch’re doing.”

“Which is?”

“Getting out of Major Crimes. You don’t want it.” The lean black face, glossy and wrinkled only about the eyes, seemed sincere for the first time since she’d met him. “Best thing you ever did, going into Public Affairs. You’ll do some good there and it won’t turn you to dust. That’s what happens, you bet. This job turns you to dust.”

O ne of the last victims of James Schneider’s mad compulsion, a young man named Ortega, had come to Manhattan from Mexico City, where political unrest (the much-heralded populist uprising, which had begun the year before) had made commerce difficult at best. Yet the ambitious entrepreneur had been in the city no more than one week when he vanished from sight. It was learned that he was last seen in front of a West Side tavern and authorities immediately suspected that he was yet another victim of Schneider’s. Sadly, this was discovered to be the case.