The Bone Collector (37 page)

S
omething struck her forehead. Hard. She felt the thump but no pain.

What, what? His shovel? A brick? Maybe in an instant of compassion 823’d decided that this slow death was more than anyone could bear and was striking for her throat to sever her veins.

Another blow, and another. She couldn’t open her eyes, but she was aware of light growing around her. Colors. And air. She forced the mass of dirt from her mouth and sucked in tiny breaths, all she could manage. Began coughing in a loud bray, retching, spitting.

Her lids sprang open and through tearing eyes she found herself looking up at the muddy vision of Lon Sellitto, kneeling over her, beside two EMS medics, one of whom dug into her mouth with latex-clad fingers and pulled out more gunk, while the other readied an oxygen mask and green tank.

Sellitto and Banks continued to uncover her body, shoving the dirt away with their muscular hands. They pulled her up, leaving the robe behind like a shed skin. Sellitto, old divorcé that he was, looked chastely away from her body as he put his jacket around her shoulders. Young Jerry Banks did look of course but she loved him anyway.

“Did . . . you. . . ?” she wheezed, then surrendered to a racking cough.

Sellitto glanced expectantly at Banks, who was the more breathless of the two. He must’ve done the most running after the unsub. The young detective shook his head. “Got away.”

Sitting up, she inhaled oxygen for a moment.

“How?” she wheezed. “How’d you know?”

“Rhyme,” he answered. “Don’t ask me how. He called in 10-13s for everybody on the team. When he heard we were okay he sent us over here ASAP.”

Then the numbness left, snap, in a flash. And for the first time she realized what had nearly happened. She dropped the oxygen mask, backed away in panic, tears streaming, her panicky keening growing louder and louder. “No, no, no . . .”

Slapping her arms and thighs, frantic, trying to shake off the horror clinging to her like a teeming swarm of bees.

“Oh God oh God . . . No . . .”

“Sachs?” Banks asked, alarmed. “Hey, Sachs?”

The older detective waved his partner away. “It’s okay.” He kept his arm around her shoulders as she dropped to all fours and vomited violently, sobbing, sobbing, gripping the dirt desperately between her fingers as if she wanted to strangle it.

Finally Sachs calmed and sat back on her naked haunches. She began laughing, softly at first then louder and louder, hysterical, astonished to find that the skies had opened and it had been raining—huge hot summer drops—and she hadn’t even realized it.

Arm around his shoulders. Face pressed against his. They stayed that way for a long moment.

“Sachs . . . Oh, Sachs.”

She stepped away from the Clinitron and scooted an old armchair from the corner of the room. Sachs—wearing navy sweatpants and a Hunter College T-shirt—flopped down into the chair and dangled her exquisite legs over the arm like a schoolgirl.

“Why us, Rhyme? Why’d he come after us?” Her voice was a raspy whisper from the dirt she’d swallowed.

“Because the people he kidnapped aren’t the real victims. We are.”

“Who’s
we?
” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Society maybe. Or the city. Or the UN. Cops. I went back and reread his bible—the chapter on
James Schneider. Remember Terry’s theory about why the unsub’d been leaving the clues?”

Sellitto said, “Sort of making us accessories. To share the guilt. Make it easier for him to kill.”

Rhyme nodded but said, “I don’t think that’s the reason though. I think the clues were a way to attack
us.
Every dead vic was a loss for us.”

In her old clothes, hair pulled back in a ponytail, Sachs looked more beautiful than any time in the past two days. But her eyes were tin. She’d be reliving every shovelful of dirt, he supposed, and Rhyme found the thought of her living burial so disturbing he had to look away.

“What’s he got against us?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Schneider’s father was arrested by mistake and died in prison. Our unsub? Who knows why? I only care about evidence—”

“—not motives.” Amelia Sachs finished the sentence.

“Why’d he start going after us directly?” Banks asked, nodding at Sachs.

“We found his hidey-hole and saved the little girl. I don’t think he expected us so soon. Maybe he just got pissed. Lon, we need twenty-four-hour babysitters for all of us. He could’ve just taken off after we saved the kid but he stuck around to do some damage. You and Jerry, me, Cooper, Haumann, Polling, we’re all on his list, betcha. Meanwhile, get Peretti’s boys over to Sachs’s. I’m sure he kept it clean but there might be something there. He left a lot faster than he’d planned to.”

“I better get over there,” Sachs said.

“No,” Rhyme said.

“I have to work the scene.”

“You have to get some rest,” he ordered. “
That’s
what you have to do, Sachs. You don’t mind my saying, you look lousy.”

“Yeah, officer,” Sellitto said. “ ‘S’an order. I told you to stand down for the rest of the day. We’ve got two hundred searchers looking for him. And Fred Dellray’s got another hundred and twenty feebies.”

“I got a crime scene in my own backyard and you’re not gonna let me walk the grid?”

“That’s it,” Rhyme said, “in a nutshell.”

Sellitto walked to the doorway. “Any problems with that, officer?”

“Nosir.”

“Come on, Banks, we got work to do. You need a lift, Sachs? Or’re they still trusting you with vehicles?”

“No thanks, got wheels downstairs,” she said.

The two detectives left. Rhyme heard their voices echoing through the empty hall. Then the door closed and they were gone.

Rhyme realized the glaring overhead lights were on. He clicked through several commands and dimmed them.

Sachs stretched.

“Well,” she said, just as Rhyme said, “So.”

She glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“Sure is.”

Rising, she walked to the table where her purse rested. She picked it up. Clicked it open, found her compact and examined her cut lip in the mirror.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Rhyme said.

“Frankenstein,” she said, prodding. “Why don’t they use flesh-colored stitches?” She put the mirror away, slung the purse over her shoulder. “You moved the bed,” she noticed. It was closer to the window.

“Thom did. I can look at the park. If I want to.”

“Well, that’s good.”

She walked to the window. Looked down.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rhyme thought to himself. Do it. What can happen? He blurted quickly, “You want to stay here? I mean, it’s getting late. And Latents’ll be dusting your place for hours.”

He felt a mad bolt of anticipation deep within him. Well, kill
that,
he thought, furious with himself. Until her face blossomed into a smile. “I’d like that.”

“Good.” His jaw shivered from the adrenaline. “Wonderful. Thom!”

Listening to music, drinking some Scotch. Maybe he’d tell her more about famous crime scenes. The historian in him was also curious about her father, about police work in the ’60s and ’70s. About the infamous Midtown South Precinct in the old days.

Rhyme shouted, “Thom! Get some sheets. And a blanket. Thom! I don’t know what the hell he’s doing.
Thom!
”

Sachs started to say something but the aide appeared in the doorway and said testily, “One rude shout would’ve been enough, you know, Lincoln.”

“Amelia’s staying over again. Could you get some blankets and pillows for the couch?”

“No, not the couch again,” she said. “It’s like sleeping on rocks.”

Rhyme was stabbed with a splinter of rejection. Thinking ruefully to himself: Been a few years since he’d felt
that
emotion. Resigned, he nonetheless smiled and said, “There’s a bedroom downstairs. Thom can make it up for you.”

But Sachs set down her purse. “That’s okay, Thom. You don’t have to.”

“It’s no bother.”

“It’s all right. Good night, Thom.” She walked to the door.

“Well, I—”

She smiled.

“But—” he began, looking from her to Rhyme, who frowned, shook his head.

“Good
night,
Thom,” she said firmly. “Watch your feet.” And closed the door slowly, as he stepped back out of the way into the hall. It closed with a loud click.

Sachs kicked off her shoes, pulled off the sweats and T-shirt. She wore a lace bra and baggy cotton panties. She climbed into the Clinitron beside Rhyme, showing every bit of the authority beautiful women wield when it comes to climbing into bed with a man.

She wriggled down into the pellets and laughed. “This is one hell of a bed,” she said, stretching like a cat. Eyes closed, Sachs asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Rhyme?”

“What?”

“Tell me more about your book, okay? Some more crime scenes?”

He started to describe a clever serial killer in Queens but in less than one minute she was asleep.

Rhyme glanced down and noted her breast against his chest, her knee resting on his thigh. A woman’s hair was banked against his face for the first time in years. It tickled. He’d forgotten that this happened. For someone who lived so in the past, with such a good memory, he was surprised to find he couldn’t exactly remember when he’d experienced this sensation last. What he could recall was an amalgam of evenings with Blaine, he supposed, before the accident. He
did
remember that he’d decided to endure the tickle, not push the strands away, so he wouldn’t disturb his wife.

Now, of course, he couldn’t brush away Sachs’s hair if God Himself had asked. But he wouldn’t think of moving it aside. Just the opposite; he wanted to prolong the sensation until the end of the universe.

T
he next morning Lincoln Rhyme was alone again.

Thom had gone shopping and Mel Cooper was at the IRD lab downtown. Vince Peretti had completed the CS work at the mansion on East Van Brevoort and at Sachs’s. They’d found woefully few clues though Rhyme put the lack of PE down to the unsub’s ingenuity, not Peretti’s derivative talents.

Rhyme was awaiting the crime scene report. But both Dobyns and Sellitto believed that 823 had gone to ground—temporarily at least. There’d been no more attacks on the police and no other victims had been kidnapped in the past twelve hours.

Sachs’s minder—a large Patrol officer from MTS—had accompanied her to an appointment with an ear, nose and throat man at a hospital in Brooklyn; the dirt had done quite a number on her throat. Rhyme himself had a bodyguard too—a uniform from the Twentieth Precinct, stationed in front of his townhouse—a friendly cop he’d known for years and with whom Rhyme enjoyed a running argument on the merits of Irish peat versus Scottish in the production of whisky.

Rhyme was in a great mood. He called downstairs on the intercom. “I’m expecting a doctor in a couple of hours. You can let him up.”

The cop said he would.

Dr. William Berger had assured Rhyme that today he’d be on time.

Rhyme leaned back in the pillow and realized he wasn’t completely alone. On the windowsill, the falcons paced. Rarely skittish, they seemed uneasy. Another low front was approaching. Rhyme’s window revealed a calm
sky but he trusted the birds; they were infallible barometers.

He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 11:00 a.m. Here he was, just like two days ago, awaiting Berger’s arrival. That’s life, he thought: postponement upon postponement but ultimately, with some luck, we get to where we’re meant to be.

He watched television for twenty minutes, trolling for stories about the kidnappings. But all the stations were doing specials on the opening day of the UN conference. Rhyme found it boring and turned to a rerun of
Matlock,
flipped back to a gorgeous CNN reporter standing outside UN headquarters and then shut the damn set off.

The telephone rang and he went through the complicated gestures of answering it. “Hello.”

There was a pause before a man’s voice said, “Lincoln?”

“Yes?”

“Jim Polling. How you doin’?”

Rhyme realized that he hadn’t seen much of the captain since early yesterday, except for the news conference last night, where he’d whispered prompts to the mayor and Chief Wilson.

“Okay. Any word on our unsub?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing yet. But we’ll get him.” Another pause. “Hey, you alone?”

“Yep.”

A longer pause.

“Okay if I stop by?”

“Sure.”

“A half hour?”

“I’ll be here,” Rhyme said jovially.

He rested his head in the thick pillow and his eyes slipped to the knotted clothesline hanging beside the profile poster. Still no answer about the knot. It was—he laughed aloud at the joke—a loose end. He hated the idea of leaving the case without finding out what kind of knot it was. Then he remembered that Polling was a fisherman. Maybe he’d recognize—

Polling, Rhyme reflected.

James Polling . . .

Funny how the captain had insisted Rhyme handle the case. How he’d fought to keep him on it, rather than Peretti—who was the better choice, politically, for Polling. Remembering too how he’d lost his temper at Dellray when the feebie tried to strong-arm the investigation away from the NYPD.

Now that he thought about it, Polling’s whole involvement in the case was a mystery. Eight twenty-three wasn’t the kind of perp you took on voluntarily—even if you were looking for juicy cases to hang on your collar record. Too many chances to lose vics, too many opportunities for the press—and the brass—to snipe at you for fucking up.

Polling . . . Recalling how he’d breeze into Rhyme’s bedroom, check out their progress and leave.

Sure, he was reporting to the mayor and the chief. But—the thought slipped unexpectedly into Rhyme’s mind—was there someone
else
Polling was reporting back to?

Someone who wanted to keep tabs on the investigation? The unsub himself?

But how on earth could Polling have any connection with 823? It seemed—

And then it struck him.

Could Polling
be
the unsub?

Of course not. It was ridiculous. Laughable. Even apart from motive and means, there was the question of opportunity. The captain had been here, in Rhyme’s room, when some of the kidnappings had occurred. . . .

Or had he?

Rhyme looked up at the profile chart.

Dark clothing and wrinkled cotton slacks. Polling’d been wearing dark sports clothes over the past several days. But so what? So did a lot of—

Downstairs a door opened and closed.

“Thom?”

No answer. The aide wasn’t due back for hours.

“Lincoln?”

Oh, no. Hell. He started to dial on the ECU.

9—1—

With his chin he bumped the cursor to 2.

Footsteps on the stairs.

He tried to redial but he knocked the joystick out of reach in his desperation.

And Jim Polling walked into the room. Rhyme had counted on the babysitter’s calling upstairs first. But of course a beat cop would let a police captain inside without thinking twice.

Polling’s dark jacket was unbuttoned and Rhyme got a look at the automatic on his hip. He couldn’t see if it was his issue weapon. But he knew that .32 Colts were on the NYPD list of approved personal weapons.

“Lincoln,” Polling said. He was clearly uneasy, cautious. His eyes fell to the bleached bit of spinal cord.

“How you doing, Jim?”

“Not bad.”

Polling the outdoorsman. Had the scar on the fingerprint been left by years of casting a fishing line? Or an accident with a hunting knife? Rhyme tried to look but Polling kept his hands jammed into his pockets. Was he holding something in there? A knife?

Polling certainly knew forensics and crime scenes—he knew how
not
to leave evidence.

The ski mask? If Polling was the unsub he’d have to wear the mask of course—because one of the vics might see him later. And the aftershave . . . what if the unsub hadn’t
worn
the scent at all but had just carried a bottle with him and sprayed some at the scenes to make them
believe
he wore Brut? So when Polling showed up here, not wearing any, no one would suspect him.

“You’re alone?” Polling asked.

“My assistant—”

“The cop downstairs said he wouldn’t be back for a while.”

Rhyme hesitated. “That’s right.”

Polling was slight but strong, sandy-haired. Terry Dobyns’s words came back: Someone helpful, upstanding. A social worker, counselor, politician. Somebody helping other people.

Like a cop.

Rhyme wondered now if he was about to die. And to
his shock he realized that he didn’t want to. Not this way, not on somebody else’s terms.

Polling walked to the bed.

Yet there was nothing he could do. He was at this man’s complete mercy.

“Lincoln,” Polling repeated gravely.

Their eyes met and the feeling of electrical connection went through them. Dry sparks. The captain looked quickly out the window. “You’ve been wondering, haven’t you?”

“Wondering?”

“Why I wanted you on the case.”

“I figured it was my personality.”

This drew no smile from the captain.

“Why
did
you want me, Jim?”

The captain’s fingers knitted together. Thin but strong. The hands of a fisherman, a sport that, yes, may be genteel but whose purpose is nonetheless to wrench a poor beast from his home and slice through its smooth belly with a thin knife.

“Four years ago, the Shepherd case. We were on it together.”

Rhyme nodded.

“The workers found the body of that cop in the subway stop.”

A groan, Rhyme recalled, like the sound of the
Titanic
sinking in
A Night to Remember.
Then an explosion loud as a gunshot as the beam came down on his hapless neck, and dirt packed around his body.

“And you ran the scene. You yourself, like you always did.”

“I did, yes.”

“Did you know how we convicted Shepherd? We had a wit.”

A witness? Rhyme hadn’t heard that. After the accident he’d lost all track of the case, except for learning that Shepherd had been convicted and, three months later, stabbed to death on Riker’s Island by an assailant who was never captured.

“An eyewitness,” Polling continued. “He could place Shepherd at one of the victims’ homes with the murder
weapon.” The captain stepped closer to the bed, crossed his arms. “We had the wit a day
before
we found the last body—the one in the subway. Before I put in the request that you run the scene.”

“What’re you saying, Jim?”

The captain’s eyes rooted themselves to the floor. “We didn’t need you. We didn’t
need
your report.”

Rhyme said nothing.

Polling nodded. “You understand what I’m saying? I wanted to nail that fuck Shepherd so bad. . . . I wanted an airtight case. And you know what a Lincoln Rhyme crime scene report does to defense lawyers. It scares the everlovin’ shit out of them.”

“But Shepherd would’ve been convicted even without my report from the subway scene.”

“That’s right, Lincoln. But it’s worse than that. See, I got word from MTA Engineering that the site wasn’t safe.”

“The subway site. And you had me work the scene before they shored it up?”

“Shepherd was a cop-killer.” Polling’s face twisted up in disgust. “I wanted him so bad. I woulda done anything to nail him. But . . .” He lowered his head to his hands.

Rhyme said nothing. He heard the groan of the beam, the explosion of the breaking wood. Then the rustle of the dirt nestling around him. A curious, warm peace in his body while his heart stuttered with terror.

“Jim—”

“That’s why I wanted you on this case, Lincoln. You see?” A miserable look crossed the captain’s tough face; he stared at the disk of spinal column on the table. “I kept hearing these stories that your life was crap. You were wasting away here. Talking about killing yourself. I felt so fucking guilty. I wanted to try to give you some of your life back.”

Rhyme said, “And you’ve been living with this for the last three and a half years.”

“You know about me, Lincoln.
Everybody
knows about me. I collar somebody, he gives me any shit, he goes
down.
I get a hard-on for some perp, I don’t stop till the prick’s bagged and tagged. I can’t control it. I
know I’ve fucked over people sometimes. But they were perps—or suspects, at least. They weren’t my own, they weren’t cops. What happened to you . . . that was a sin. It was just fucking wrong.”

“I wasn’t a rookie,” Rhyme said. “I didn’t
have
to work a scene I thought wasn’t safe.”

“But—”

“Bad time?” another voice said from the doorway.

Rhyme glanced up, expecting to see Berger. But it was Peter Taylor who’d come up the stairs. Rhyme recalled that he was coming by today to check on his patient after the dysreflexia attack. He supposed too that the doctor was planning to give him hell about Berger and the Lethe Society. He wasn’t in the mood for that; he wanted time alone—to digest Polling’s confession. At the moment it just sat there, numb as Rhyme’s thigh. But he said, “Come on in, Peter.”

“You’ve got a very funny security system, Lincoln. The guard asked if I was a doctor and he let me up. What? Do lawyers and accountants get booted?”

Rhyme laughed. “I’ll only be a second.” Rhyme turned back to Polling. “Fate, Jim. That’s what happened to me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens.”

“Thanks, Lincoln.” Polling put his hand on Rhyme’s right shoulder and squeezed it gently.

Rhyme nodded and, to deflect the uneasy gratitude, introduced the men. “Jim, this is Pete Taylor, one of my doctors. And this is Jim Polling, we used to work together.”