Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

“Bull’s liver,” he announced. “Rock-and-sand mixture. Found just above the bedrock in Manhattan. Sodium silicate mixed in?”

Cooper ran the Chromatograph. “Yep. Plenty of it.”

“Then we’re looking for a downtown location within fifty yards of the water – ” Rhyme laughed at the astonished gaze on Sachs’s face. “It’s not magic, Sachs. I’ve just done my homework, that’s all. Contractors mix sodium silicate with bull’s liver to stabilize the earth when they dig foundations in deep-bedrock areas near the water. That means it’s got to be downtown. Now, let’s take a look at the leaf.”

She held up the bag.

“No clue what it is,” Rhyme said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like that. Not in Manhattan.”

“I’ve got a list of horticulture web sites,” Cooper said, staring at his computer screen. “I’ll do some surfing.”

Rhyme himself had spent some time on-line, cruising the Internet. As it had with books, movies and posters, his interest in the cyberworld had eventually paled. Perhaps because so much of his own world was virtual, the net was, in the end, a forlorn place for Lincoln Rhyme.

Cooper’s screen flicked and danced as he clicked on hyperlinks and disappeared deeper into the web. “I’m downloading some files. Should take ten, twenty minutes.”

Rhyme said, “All right. The rest of the clues Sachs found… Not the planted ones. The others. They might tell us about where he’s been. Let’s look at our secret weapon, Mel.”

“Secret weapon?” Sachs asked.

“The trace evidence.”

Special Agent Fred Dellray had put together a ten-man entry operation. Two teams plus search and surveillance. The flak-jacketed agents stood in the bushes, sweating madly. Across the street, upstairs in an abandoned brownstone, the S &S team had their Big Ears and video infrareds trained on the perp’s house.

The three snipers, with their big Remingtons strapped, loaded and locked, lay prone on rooftops. Their binoculared spotters crouched beside them like Lamaze coaches.

Dellray – wearing an FBI windbreaker and jeans instead of his Leprechaun-green outfit – listened through his clip-on earphone.

“Surveillance to Command. We’ve got infrared on the basement. Somebody moving down there.”

“What’sa view like?” Dellray asked.

“No view. Windows’re too dirty.”

“He all by his humble self? Maybe got a vic with him?” Knowing somehow that Officer Sachs was probably right; that he’d already ’napped somebody else now.

“Can’t tell. We’ve just got motion and heat.”

Dellray had sent other officers around to the sides of the house. They reported in. “No sign of anyone on the first or second floor. Garage is locked.”

“Snipers?” Dellray asked. “Report.”

“Shooter One to Command. I’ve acquired on front door. Over.”

The others were covering the hallway and a room on the first floor. “Loaded and locked,” they radioed in.

Dellray drew his large automatic.

“Okay, we got paper,” Dellray said. Meaning a warrant. They wouldn’t have to knock. “Lessgo! Teams one and two, deploy, deploy, deploy.”

The first team took out the front door with a battering ram while the second used the slightly more civilized approach of breaking in the back-door window and unlocking the dead bolt. They streamed inside, Dellray following the last of Team One’s officers into the old, filthy house. The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming and Dellray, no stranger to crime scenes, swallowed hard, struggling to keep from vomiting.

The second team secured the ground floor and then charged up the stairs toward the bedroom while the first sped down the basement stairs, boots thumping loudly on the old wood.

Dellray raced down into the foul-smelling basement. He heard a door being kicked in somewhere below and the shout of, “Don’t move! Federal agents. Freeze, freeze, freeze!”

But when he reached the basement doorway he heard the same agent blurt in a very different tone, “What the hell’s this? Oh, Jesus.”

“Fuck,” another one called. “That’s gross.”

“Shit in a flaming pile,” Dellray spat out, choking, as he stepped inside. Swallowing hard at the vile smell.

The man’s body lay on the floor, leaching black fluid. Throat cut. His dead, glazed eyes stared at the ceiling but his torso seemed to be moving – swelling and shifting. Dellray shuddered; he’d never developed much immunity to the sight of insect infestation. The number of bugs and worms suggested the vic’d been dead for at least three days.

“Why’d we get positive on the infrared?” one agent asked.

Dellray pointed out the rat and mouse teeth marks along the vic’s bloated leg and side. “They’re around here someplace. We interrupted dinner hour.”

“So what happened? One of the vics get him?”

“Watcha talkin’ about?” Dellray snapped.

“Isn’t that him?”

“No, it’s not him ,” Dellray exploded, gazing at one particular wound on the corpse.

One of the team was frowning. “Naw, Dellray. This’s the guy. We got mug shots. That’s Pietrs.”

“Of course it’s fucking Pietrs. But he ain’t the unsub. Don’tcha get it?”

“No? What do you mean?”

It was all clear to him now. “Sumvabitch.”

Dellray’s phone chirped and made him jump. He flipped it open, listened for a minute. “She did what? Oh, like I really need this too… No, we don’t have the fucking perp in fucking custody.”

He jammed the OFF button, pointed an angry finger at two SWAT agents. “You’re coming with me.”

“What’s up, Dellray?”

“We gonna pay ourselves a visit. And what ain’t we gonna be when we do it?” The agents looked at each other, frowning. But Dellray supplied the answer. “We ain’t gonna be very nice at all.”

Mel Cooper shook the contents of the envelopes out onto newsprint. Examined the dust with an eye loupe. “Well, there’s the brick dust. And some other kind of stone. Marble, I think.”

He put a sample on the slide and examined it under the compound ’scope. “Yep, marble. Rose-colored.”

“Was there any marble at the stockyard tunnel? Where you found the German girl?”

“None,” Sachs responded.

Cooper suggested it might have come from Monelle’s residence hall when Unsub 823 grabbed her.

“No, I know the block the Deutsche Haus is in. It’s just a converted East Village tenement. The best stone you’d find there’d be polished granite. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a fleck of his hidey-hole. Anything notable about it?”

“Chisel marks,” Cooper said, bending over the ’scope.

“Ah, good. How clean?”

“Not very. Ragged.”

“So an old steam stonecutter?”

“Yes, I’d guess.”

“Write, Thom,” Rhyme instructed, nodding at the poster. “There’s marble in his safe house. And it’s old.”

“But why do we care about his safe house?” Banks asked, looking at his watch. “The feds’ll be there by now.”

“You can never have too much information, Banks. Remember that. Now, what else’ve we got?”

“Another bit of the glove. That red leather. And what’s this?” he asked Sachs, holding up a plastic bag containing a plug of wood.

“The sample of the aftershave. Where he brushed up against a post.”

“Should I run an olfactory profile?” Cooper wondered.

“Let me smell it first,” Rhyme said.

Sachs brought the bag over to him. Inside was a tiny disk of wood. She opened it up and he inhaled the air.

“Brut. How could you miss it? Thom, add that our man uses drugstore cologne.”

Cooper announced, “Here’s that other hair.” The technician mounted it in a comparison ’scope. “Very similar to the one we found earlier. Probably the same source. Oh, hell, Lincoln, for you, I’ll say it is the same. Brown.”