Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

The bone collector cruised the streets for fifteen minutes around NYU, Washington Square. Plenty of people hanging out. But kids mostly. Students in summer school. Skateboarders. It was festive, weird. Singers, jugglers, acrobats. It reminded him of the “museums,” down on the Bowery, popular in the 1800s. They weren’t museums at all of course but arcades, teeming with burlesque shows, exhibits of freaks and daredevils, and vendors selling everything from French postcards to splinters of the True Cross.

He slowed once or twice but nobody wanted a cab, or could afford one. He turned south.

Schneider tied bricks to Señor Ortega’s feet and rolled him under a pier into the Hudson River so the foul water and the fish might reduce his body to mere bone. The corpse was found two weeks after he had vanished and so it was never known whether or not the unfortunate victim was alive or had full use of his senses when he was thrown into the drink. Yet it is suspected that this was so. For Schneider cruelly shortened the rope so that Señor Ortega’s face was inches below the surface of Davy Jones’s locker; – his hands undoubtedly thrashed madly about as he gazed upward at the air that would have been his salvation.

The bone collector saw a sickly young man standing by the curb. AIDS, he thought. But your bones are healthy – and so prominent. Your bones’ll last forever… The man didn’t want a cab and the taxi cruised past, the bone collector hungrily gazing at his thin frame in the rearview mirror.

He looked back to the street just in time to swerve around an elderly man who’d stepped off the curb, his thin arm raised to flag down the cab. The man leapt back, as best he could, and the cab skidded to a stop just past him.

The man opened the back door and leaned inside. “You should look where you’re going.” He said this instructionally. Not with anger.

“Sorry,” the bone collector muttered contritely.

The elderly man hesitated for a moment, looked up the street but saw no other taxis. He climbed in.

The door slammed shut.

Thinking: Old and thin. The skin would ride on his bones like silk.

“So, where to?” he called.

“East Side.”

“You got it,” he said as he pulled on the ski mask and spun the wheel sharply right. The cab sped west.

Saturday, 10:15 p.m., to Sunday, 5:30 a.m.

“HIT ME AGAIN, LON.”

Rhyme drank through a straw, Sellitto from a glass. Both took the smoky liquor neat. The detective sank down in the squeaky rattan chair and Rhyme decided he looked a little like Peter Lorre in Casablanca .

Terry Dobyns was gone – after offering some acerbic psychological insights about narcissism and those employed by the federal government. Jerry Banks had left too. Mel Cooper continued to painstakingly disassemble and pack up his equipment.

“This is good, Lincoln.” Sellitto sipped his Scotch. “Goddamn. I can’t afford this shit. How old’s it?”

“I think that one’s twenty.”

The detective eyed the tawny liquor. “Hell, this was a woman, she’d be legal and then some.”

“Tell me something, Lon. Polling? That little tantrum of his. What was that all about?”

“Little Jimmy?” Sellitto laughed. “He’s in trouble now. He’s the one ran interference to take Peretti off the case and keep it out of the feds’ hands. Really went out on a limb. Asking for you too, that took some doing. There were noses outa joint over that. I don’t mean you personally. Just a civilian in on a hot case like this.”

“Polling asked for me? I thought it was the chief.”

“Yeah, but it was Polling put the bug in his ear in the first place. He called soon as he heard there’d been a taking and there was some bogus PE on the scene.”

And wanted me? Rhyme wondered. This was curious. Rhyme hadn’t had any contact with Polling over the past few years – not since the cop-killer case in which Rhyme had been hurt. It had been Polling who’d run the case and eventually collared Dan Shepherd.

“You seem surprised,” Sellitto said.

“That he asked for me? I am. We weren’t on the best of terms. Didn’t used to be anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“I 14-43’d him.”

An NYPD complaint form.

“Five, six years ago, when he was a lieutenant, I found him interrogating a suspect right in the middle of a secure scene. Contaminated it. I blew my stack. Put in a report and it got cited at one of his IA reviews – the one where he popped the unarmed suspect.”

“Well, I guess all’s forgiven, ’cause he wanted you bad.”

“Lon, make a phone call for me, would you?”

“Sure.”

“No,” Thom said, lifting the phone out of the detective’s hand. “Make him do it himself.”

“I didn’t have time to learn how it works,” Rhyme said, nodding toward the dialing ECU Thom had hooked up earlier.

“You didn’t spend the time. Big difference. Who’re you calling?”

“Berger.”

“No, you’re not,” Thom said. “It’s late.”

“I’ve been reading clocks for a while now,” Rhyme replied coolly. “Call him. He’s staying at the Plaza.”

“No.”

“I asked you to call him.”

“Here.” The aide slapped a slip of paper down on the far edge of the table but Rhyme read it easily. God may have taken much from Lincoln Rhyme but He’d given him the eyesight of a young man. He went through the process of dialing with his cheek on the control stalk. It was easier than he’d thought but he purposely took a long time and muttered as he did it. Infuriatingly, Thom ignored him and went downstairs.

Berger wasn’t in his hotel room. Rhyme disconnected, mad that he wasn’t able to slam the phone down.

“Problem?” Sellitto asked.

“No,” Rhyme grumbled.

Where is he? Rhyme thought testily. It was late. Berger ought to be at his hotel room by now. Rhyme was stabbed with an odd feeling – jealousy that his death doctor was out helping someone else die.

Sellitto suddenly chuckled softly. Rhyme looked up. The cop was eating a candy bar. He’d forgotten that junk food’d been the staple of the big man’s diet when they were working together. “I was thinking. Remember Bennie Ponzo?”

“The OC Task Force ten, twelve years ago?”

“Yeah.”

Rhyme had enjoyed organized-crime work. The perps were pros. The crime scenes challenging. And the vics were rarely innocent.

“Who was that?” Mel Cooper asked.

“Hitman outa Bay Ridge,” Sellitto said. “Remember after we booked him, the candy sandwich?”

Rhyme laughed, nodding.

“What’s the story?” Cooper asked.

Sellitto said, “Okay, we’re down at Central Booking, Lincoln and me and a couple other guys. And Bennie, remember, he was a big guy, he was sitting all hunched over, feeling his stomach. All of a sudden he goes, ‘Yo, I’m hungry, I wanna candy sandwich.’ And we’re like looking at each other and I go, ‘What’s a candy sandwich?’ And he looks at me like I’m from Mars and goes, ‘What the fuck you think it is? Ya take a Hershey bar, ya put it between two slices of bread and ya eat it. That’s a fucking candy sandwich.’ ”

They laughed. Sellitto held out the bar to Cooper, who shook his head, then to Rhyme, who felt a sudden impulse to take a bite. It’d been over a year since he’d had chocolate. He avoided food like that – sugar, candy. Troublesome food. The little things about life were the biggest burdens, the ones that saddened and exhausted you the most. Okay, you’ll never scuba-dive or hike the Alps. So what? A lot of people don’t. But everybody brushes their teeth. And goes to the dentist, gets a filling, takes the train home. Everybody picks a hunk of peanut from out behind a molar when nobody’s looking.