Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

He examined the luggage tag. Carole Ganz. Carole with an E . Why the extra letter? he wondered. The suitcase contained nothing but clothes. He started through the knapsack. He found the cash right away. There must have been four or five thousand. He put it back in the zippered compartment.

There were a dozen child’s toys: a doll, a tin of water-colors, a package of modeling clay, a Mr. Potato Head kit. There were also an expensive Discman, a half-dozen CDs and a Sony travel clock radio.

He looked through some pictures. Photos of Carole and her girl. In most of the pictures the woman seemed very somber. In a few others, she seemed happier. There were no photos of Carole and her husband even though she wore a wedding ring. Many were of the mother and daughter with a couple – a heavyset woman wearing one of those old granny dresses and a bearded, balding man in a flannel shirt.

For a long time the bone collector gazed at a portrait of the little girl.

The fate of poor Maggie O’Connor, the young slip of a girl, merely eight years of age, was particularly sad. It was her misfortune, the police speculate, that she stumbled across the path of James Schneider as he was disposing of one of his victims.

The girl, a resident of the notorious “Hell’s Kitchen,” had gone out to pluck horsehairs from one of the many dead animals found in that impoverished part of the city. It was the custom of youngsters to wind tail-hairs into bracelets and rings – the only trinkets such urchins might have to adorn themselves with.

Skin and bone, skin and bone.

He propped the photo on the mantelpiece, beside the small pile of bones he’d been working on that morning and some that he’d stolen from the store where he’d found the snake.

It is surmised that Schneider found young Maggie near his lair, witnessing the macabre spectacle of his murdering one of his victims. Whether he dispatched her quickly or slowly we cannot guess. But unlike his other victims, whose remains were ultimately discovered, – of frail, becurled Maggie O’Connor, nought was ever found.

The bone collector walked downstairs.

He ripped the tape off the mother’s mouth and the woman gasped for air, eyed him with cold fury. “What do you want?” she rasped. “What?”

She wasn’t as thin as Esther but, thank God, she was nothing at all like fat Hanna Goldschmidt. He could see so much of her soul. The narrow mandible, the clavicle. And, through the thin blue skirt, the hint of the innominate bone – a fusion of the ilium, the ischium, the pubis. Names like Roman gods’.

The little girl squirmed. He leaned forward and placed his hand on her head. Skulls don’t grow from a single piece of bone but from eight separate ones, and the crown rises up like the triangular slabs of the Astrodome roof. He touched the girl’s occipital bone, the parietal bones of the cap of the skull. And two of his favorites, the sensuous bones around the eye sockets – the sphenoid and the ethmoid.

“Stop it!” Carole shook her head, furious. “Keep away from her.”

“Shhhh,” he said, holding his gloved finger to his lips. He looked at the little girl, who cried and pressed close to her mother.

“Maggie O’Connor,” he cooed, looking at the shape of the girl’s face. “My little Maggie.”

The woman glared at him.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, child. What did you see me do?”

Young in the bone .

“What are you talking about?” Carole whispered. He turned his attention to her.

The bone collector had always wondered about Maggie O’Connor’s mother.

“Where’s your husband?”

“He’s dead,” she spat out. Then glanced at the little girl and said more softly, “He was killed two years ago. Look, just let my daughter go. She can’t tell them anything about you. Are you… listening to me? What are you doing?”

He gripped Carole’s hands and lifted them.

He fondled the metacarpals of the wrists. The phalanges – the tiny fingers. Squeezing the bones.

“No, don’t do that. I don’t like that. Please!” Her voice crackled with panic.

He felt out of control and didn’t like the sensation one bit. If he was going to succeed here, with the victims, with his plans, he had to fight down the encroaching lust – the madness was driving him further and further into the past, confusing the now with the then.

Before and after…

He needed all of his intelligence and craftiness to finish what he’d started.

And yet… yet…

She was so thin, she was so taut. He closed his eyes and imagined how a knife blade scraping over her tibia would sing like the bowing of an old violin.

His breathing was fast, he was sweating rivers.

When finally he opened his eyes he found he was looking at her sandals. He didn’t have many foot bones in good condition. The homeless people he’d been preying on in the past months… well, they’d suffered from rickets and osteoporosis, their toes were impacted by badly fitting shoes.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he heard himself saying.

She looked down at her daughter. Wriggled closer to her.

“I’ll make a deal. I’ll let you go if you let me do something.”

“What?” Carole whispered.

“Let me take your skin off.”

She blinked.

He whispered, “Let me. Please? A foot. Just one of your feet. If you do that I’ll let you go.”

“What…?”

“Down to the bone.”

She gazed at him with horror. Swallowed.

What would it matter? he thought. She was so nearly there anyway, so thin, so angular. Yes, there was something different about her – different from the other victims.

He put the pistol away and took the knife out of his pocket. Opened it with a startling click.

She didn’t move, her eyes slid to the little girl. Back to him.

“You’ll let us go?”

He nodded. “You haven’t seen my face. You don’t know where this place is.”

A long moment. She stared around her at the basement. She muttered a word. A name, he thought. Ron or Rob.

And with her eyes firmly on his, she extended her legs and pushed her feet toward him. He slipped her shoe off the right foot.

He took her toes. Kneaded the fragile twigs.

She leaned back, the cables of her tendons rising beautifully from her neck. Her eyes squeezed shut. He caressed her skin with the blade.

A firm grip on the knife.

She closed her eyes, inhaled and gave a faint whimper. “Go ahead,” she whispered. And turned the girl’s face away. Hugged her tightly.

The bone collector imagined her in a Victorian outfit, crinoline and black lace. He saw the three of them, sitting together at Delmonico’s or strolling down Fifth Avenue. He saw little Maggie with them, dressed in frothy lace, rolling a hoop with a stick as they walked over the Canal bridge.

Then and now …

He nestled the stained blade in the arch of her foot.

“Mommy!” the girl screamed.

Something popped within him. For a moment he was overwhelmed with revulsion at what he was doing. At himself.

No! He couldn’t do it. Not to her . Esther or Hanna, yes. Or the next one. But not her.

The bone collector shook his head sadly and touched her cheekbone with the back of his hand. He slapped the tape over Carole’s mouth again and cut the cord binding her feet.

“Come on,” he muttered.

She struggled fiercely but he gripped her head hard and pinched her nostrils till she passed out. Then he hefted her over his shoulder and started up the stairs, carefully lifting the bag that sat nearby. Very carefully. It was not the sort of thing he wanted to drop. Up the stairs. Pausing only once, to look at young, curly-haired Maggie O’Connor, sitting in the dirt, looking hopelessly up at him.