Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

The computer screen filled.

She couldn’t believe that Dellray actually crossed his stickish fingers.

Utter silence throughout the room.

“Got him!” the agent at the keyboard shouted.

“Ain’t no unsub anymore,” Dellray sang melodically, bending over the screen. “Listen up, people. We gotta name: Victor Pietrs. Born here, 1948. His parents were from Belgrade. So, we got a Serbian connection. ID brought to us courtesy of New York D of C. Convictions for drugs, assault, one with a deadly. Two sentences served. Okay, listen to this – psychiatric history, committed three times on involuntary orders. Intake at Bellevue and Manhattan Psychiatric. Last release date three years ago. LKA Washington Heights.”

He looked up. “Who’s got the phone companies?”

Several agents raised their hands.

“Make the calls,” Dellray ordered.

An interminable five minutes.

“Not there. No current New York Telephone listing.”

“Nothing in Jersey,” another agent echoed.

“Negative, Connecticut.”

“Fuck-all,” Dellray muttered. “Mix the names up. Try variations. An’ lookit phone-service accounts canceled in the past year for nonpayment.”

For several minutes voices rose and fell like the tide.

Dellray paced manically and Sachs understood why his frame was so scrawny.

Suddenly an agent shouted, “Found him!”

Everyone turned to look.

“I’m on with NY DMV,” another agent called. “They’ve got him. It’s coming through now… He’s a cabbie. Got a hack license.”

“Why don’ that s’prise me,” Dellray muttered. “Shoulda thoughta that. Where’s home sweet home?”

“Morningside Heights. A block from the river.” The agent wrote down the address and held it aloft as Dellray swept past and took it. “Know the neighborhood. Pretty deserted. Lotta druggies.”

Another agent typed the address into his computer terminal. “Okay, checking deeds… Property’s an old house. A bank’s got title. He must be renting.”

“You want HRT?” one agent called across the bustling room. “I got Quantico on the line.”

“No time,” Dellray announced. “Use the field office SWAT. Get ’em suited up.”

Sachs asked, “And what about the next victim?”

“What next victim?”

“He’s already taken somebody. He knows we’ve had the clues for an hour or two. He’d’ve planted the vic awhile ago. He had to.”

“No reports of anybody missing,” the agent said. “And if he did snatch ’em they’re probably at his house.”

“No, they wouldn’t be.”

“Why not?”

“They’d pick up too much PE,” she said. “Lincoln Rhyme said he has a safe house.”

“Well, then we’ll get him to tell us where they are.”

Another agent said, “We can be real persuasive.”

“Let’s move it,” Dellray called. “Yo, ever’body, let’s thank Officer Amelia Sachs here. She’s the one found that print and lifted it.”

She was blushing. Could feel it, hated it. But she couldn’t help herself. As she glanced down she noticed strange lines on her shoes. Squinting, she realized she was still wearing the rubber bands.

When she looked up she saw a room full of unsmiling federal agents checking weapons and heading for the door as they glanced at her. The same way, she thought, lumberjacks look at logs.

IN 1911 A TRAGEDY OF MASSIVE DIMENSION befell our fair city.

On March 25, hundreds of industrious young women were hard at work in a garment factory, one of the many, known notoriously as “sweat-shops”, in Greenwich Village in down-town Manhattan.

So enamored of profits were the owners of this company that they denied the poor girls in their employ even the rudimentary facilities that slaves might enjoy. They believed the laborers could not be trusted to make expeditious visits to the rest-room facilities and so kept the doors to the cutting and sewing rooms under lock and key.

The bone collector was driving back to his building. He passed a squad car but he kept his eyes forward and the constables never noticed him.

On the day in question a fire started on the eighth floor of the building and within minutes swept through the factory, from which the young employees tried to flee. They were unable to escape, however, owing to the chained state of the door. Many died on the spot and many more, some horribly afire, leapt into the air a hundred feet above the cobblestones and died from the collision with unyielding Mother Earth.

There numbered 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The police, however, were confounded by the inability to locate one of the victims, a young woman, Esther Weinraub, whom several witnesses had seen leap in desperation from the eighth floor window. None of the other girls who similarly leapt survived the fall. Was it possible that she, miraculously, had? For when the bodies were laid out in the street for bereaved family member to identify, poor Miss Weinraub‘s was not to be found.

Reports began to circulate of a ghoul, a man seen carting off a large bundle from the scene of the fire. So incensed were the constables that someone might violate the sacred remains of an innocent young woman that they put on a still search for the man.

After several weeks, their diligent efforts bore fruit. Two residents of Greenwich Village reported seeing a man leaving the scene of the fire and carrying a heavy bundle “like a carpet” over his shoulder. The constables picked up his trail and tracked him to the West Side of the city, where they interviewed neighbors and learned that the man fit the description of James Schneider, who was still at large.

They narrowed their search to a decrepit abode in an alley in Hell’s Kitchen, not far from the 60th Street stockyards. As they entered the alleyway they were greeted with a revolting stench…

He was now driving past the very site of the Triangle fire itself – maybe he’d even been subconsciously prompted to come here. The Asch Building – the ironic name of the structure that had housed the doomed factory – was gone and the site was now a part of NYU. Then and now … The bone collector would not have been surprised to see white-bloused working girls, trailing sparks and faint smoke, tumbling gracefully to their deaths, falling around him like snow.

Upon breaking into Schneider’s habitation, the authorities found a sight that sent even the most seasoned of them reeling with horror. The body of wretched Esther Weinraub – (or what remained of it) – was found in the basement. Schneider was bent on completing the work of the tragic fire and was slowly removing the woman’s flesh through means too shocking to recount here.

A search of this loathsome place revealed a secret room, off the basement, filled with bones that had been stripped clean of flesh.

Beneath Schneider’s bed, a constable found a diary, in which the madman chronicled his history of evil. “Bone” – (Schneider wrote) – “is the ultimate core of a human being. It alters not, deceives not, yields not. Once the facade of our intemperate ways of the flesh, the flaws of the lesser Races, and the weaker gender, are burnt or boiled away, we are – all of us – noble bone. Bone does not lie. It is immortal.”

The lunatic writings set forth a chronicle of gruesome experimentation as he sought to ascertain the most effective way of cleansing his victims of their flesh. He tried boiling the bodies, burning them, rendering with lye, staking them out for animals, and immersing them in water.

But one method above all he favored for this macabre sport. “It is best, I have concluded” – (his diary continues) – “simply to bury the body in rich earth and let Nature do the tedious work. This is the most time-consuming method but the least likely to arouse suspicion as the odors are kept to a minimum. I prefer to inter the individuals while still alive, though why that might be I cannot say with any certainty.”