Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector

Banks looked horrified. Rhyme squelched the burst of laughter that felt alien inside him. His guard had slipped and irritation had dissolved into amusement. He momentarily regretted that he and Sellitto had drifted apart. Then he shot the feeling dead. He grumbled, “I can’t help you. Sorry.”

“We’ve got the peace conference starting on Monday. We -”

“What conference?”

“At the UN. Ambassadors, heads of state. There’ll be ten thousand dignitaries in town. You heard about that thing in London two days ago?”

“Thing?” Rhyme repeated caustically.

“Somebody tried to bomb the hotel where UNESCO was meeting. The mayor’s scared shitless somebody’s going to move on the conference here. He doesn’t want ugly Post headlines.”

“There’s also the little problem,” Rhyme said astringently, “that Miss Tammie Jean might not be enjoying her trip home either.”

“Jerry, tell him some details. Whet his appetite.”

Banks turned his attention from Rhyme’s legs to his bed, which was – Rhyme readily admitted – by far the more interesting of the two. Especially the control panel. It looked like something off the space shuttle and cost just about as much. “Ten hours after they’re snatched we find the male passenger – John Ulbrecht – shot and buried alive in the Amtrak roadbed near Thirty-seventh and Eleventh. Well, we find him dead. He’d been buried alive. Bullet was a.32.” Banks looked up and added, “The Honda Accord of slugs.”

Meaning there’d be no wily deductions about the unsub from exotic weaponry. This Banks seems smart, Rhyme thought, and all he suffers from is youth, which he might or might not outgrow. Lincoln Rhyme believed he himself had never been young.

“Rifling on the slug?” Rhyme asked.

“Six lands and grooves, left twist.”

“So he’s got himself a Colt,” Rhyme said and glanced over the crime scene diagram again.

“You said 'he,'” the young detective continued. “Actually it’s 'they.'”

“What?”

“Unsubs. There’re two of them. There were two sets of footprints between the grave and the base of an iron ladder leading up to the street,” Banks said, pointing to the CS diagram.

“Any prints on the ladder?”

“None. It was wiped. Did a good job of it. The footprints go to the grave and back to the ladder. Anyway, there had to be two of ’em to schlepp the vic. He weighed over two hundred pounds. One man couldn’t’ve done it.”

“Keep going.”

“They got him to the grave, dropped him in, shot him and buried him, went back to the ladder, climbed it and vanished.”

“Shot him in the grave?” Rhyme inquired.

“Yep. There was no blood trail anywhere around the ladder or the path to the grave.”

Rhyme found himself mildly interested. But he said, “What do you need me for?”

Sellitto grinned ragged yellow teeth. “We got ourselves a mystery, Linc. A buncha PE that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.”

“So?” It was a rare crime scene when every bit of physical evidence made sense.

“Naw, this is real weird. Read the report. Please. I’ll put it here. How’s this thing work?” Sellitto looked at Thom, who fitted the report in the page-turning frame.

“I don’t have time, Lon,” Rhyme protested.

“That’s quite a contraption,” Banks offered, looking at the frame. Rhyme didn’t respond. He glanced at the first page then read it carefully. Moved his ring finger a precise millimeter to the left. A rubber wand turned the page.

Reading. Thinking: Well, this is odd.

“Who was in charge of the scene?”

“Peretti himself. When he heard the vic was one of the taxi people he came down and took over.”

Rhyme continued to read. For a minute the unimaginative words of cop writing held his interest. Then the doorbell rang and his heart galloped with a great shudder. His eyes slipped to Thom. They were cold and made clear that the time for banter was over. Thom nodded and went downstairs immediately.

All thoughts of cabdrivers and PE and kidnapped bankers vanished from the sweeping mind of Lincoln Rhyme.

“It’s Dr. Berger,” Thom announced over the intercom.

At last. At long last.

“Well, I’m sorry, Lon. I’ll have to ask you to leave. It was good seeing you again.” A smile. “Interesting case, this one is.”

Sellitto hesitated then rose. “But will you read through the report, Lincoln? Tell us what you think?”

Rhyme said, “You bet,” then leaned his head back against the pillow. Quads like Rhyme, who had full head-and-neck movement, could activate a dozen controls just by three-dimensional movements of the head. But Rhyme shunned headrests. There were so few sensuous pleasures left to him that he was unwilling to abdicate the comfort of nestling his head against his two-hundred-dollar down pillow. The visitors had tired him out. Not even noon, and all he wanted to do was sleep. His neck muscles throbbed in agony.

When Sellitto and Banks were at the door Rhyme said, “Lon, wait.”

The detective turned.

“One thing you should know. You’ve only found half the crime scene. The important one is the other one – the primary scene. His house. That’s where he’ll be. And it’ll be hard as hell to find.”

“Why do you think there’s another scene?”

“Because he didn’t shoot the vic at the grave. He shot him there – at the primary scene. And that’s probably where he’s got the woman. It’ll be underground or in a very deserted part of the city. Or both… Because, Banks” – Rhyme preempted the young detective’s question – “he wouldn’t risk shooting someone and holding a captive there unless it was quiet and private.”

“Maybe he used a silencer.”

“No traces of rubber or cotton baffling on the slug,” Rhyme snapped.

“But how could the man’ve been shot there?” Banks countered. “I mean, there wasn’t any blood spatter at the scene.”

“I assume the victim was shot in the face,” Rhyme announced.

“Well, yes,” Banks answered, putting a stupid smile on his own. “How’d you know?”

“Very painful, very incapacitating, very little blood with a.32. Rarely lethal if you miss the brain. With the vic in that shape the unsub could lead him around wherever he wanted. I say unsub singular because there’s only one of them.”

A pause. “But… there were two sets of prints,” Banks nearly whispered, as if he were defusing a land mine.

Rhyme sighed. “The soles’re identical. They were left by the same man making the trip twice. To fool us. And the prints going north are the same depth as the prints going south. So he wasn’t carrying a two-hundred-pound load one way and not the other. Was the vic barefoot?”

Banks flipped through his notes. “Socks.”

“Okay, then the perp was wearing the vic’s shoes for his clever little stroll to the ladder and back.”

“If he didn’t come down the ladder how did he get to the grave?”

“He led the man along the train tracks themselves. Probably from the north.”

“There’re no other ladders to the roadbed for blocks in either direction.”

“But there are tunnels running parallel to the tracks,” Rhyme continued. “They hook up with the basements of some of the old warehouses along Eleventh Avenue. A gangster during Prohibition – Owney Madden – had them dug so he could slip shipments of bootleg whisky onto New York Central trains going up to Albany and Bridgeport.”

“But why not just bury the vic near the tunnel? Why risk being seen schlepping the guy all the way to the overpass?”

Impatient now. “You do get what he’s telling us, don’t you?”