The Bone Collector (4 page)

“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?”

Banks started to speak then shook his head.

“He
had
to put the body where it’d be seen,” Rhyme said. “He needed someone to find it. That’s why he left the hand in the air. He’s
waving
at us. To get our attention. Sorry, you may have only one unsub but he’s plenty smart enough for two. There’s an access door to a tunnel somewhere nearby. Get down there and dust it for prints. There won’t be any. But you’ll have to do it just the same. The press, you know. When the story starts coming out . . . Well, good luck, gentlemen. Now, you’ll have to excuse me. Lon?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget about the primary crime scene. Whatever happens, you’ll have to find it. And fast.”

“Thanks, Linc. Just read the report.”

Rhyme said of course he would and observed that they believed the lie. Completely.

H
e had the best bedside manner Rhyme had ever encountered. And if anyone had had experience with bedside manners it was Lincoln Rhyme. He’d once calculated he’d seen seventy-eight degreed, card-carrying doctors in the past three and a half years.

“Nice view,” Berger said, gazing out the window.

“Isn’t it? Beautiful.”

Though because of the height of the bed Rhyme could see nothing except a hazy sky sizzling over Central Park. That—and the birds—had been the essence of his view since he’d moved here from his last rehab hospital two and half years ago. He kept the shades drawn most of the time.

Thom was busy rolling his boss—the maneuver helped keep his lungs clear—and then catheterizing Rhyme’s bladder, which had to be done every five or six hours. After spinal cord trauma, sphincters can be stuck open or they can be stuck closed. Rhyme was fortunate that his got jammed closed—fortunate, that is, provided someone was around to open up the uncooperative little tube with a catheter and K-Y jelly four times a day.

Dr. Berger observed this procedure clinically and Rhyme paid no heed to the lack of privacy. One of the first things crips get over is modesty. While there’s sometimes a halfhearted effort at draping—shrouding the body when cleaning, evacuating and examining—serious crips, real crips,
macho
crips don’t care. At Rhyme’s first rehab center, after a patient had gone to a party or been on a date the night before, all the wardmates would wheel over to his bed to check the patient’s urine output, which was the barometer of how successful the outing
had been. One time Rhyme earned his fellow crips’ undying admiration by registering a staggering 1430 cc’s.

He said to Berger, “Check out the ledge, doctor. I have my own guardian angels.”

“Well. Hawks?”

“Peregrine falcons. Usually they nest higher. I don’t know why they picked me to live with.”

Berger glanced at the birds then turned away from the window, let the curtain fall back. The aviary didn’t interest him. He wasn’t a large man but he looked fit, a runner, Rhyme guessed. He seemed to be in his late forties but the black hair didn’t have a trace of gray in it and he was as good-looking as any news anchor. “That’s quite a bed.”

“You like it?”

The bed was a Clinitron, a huge rectangular slab. It was an air-fluidized support bed and contained nearly a ton of silicone-coated glass beads. Pressurized air flowed through the beads, which supported Rhyme’s body. If he had been able to feel, it would have felt as if he was floating.

Berger was sipping the coffee that Rhyme had ordered Thom to fetch and that the young man had brought, rolling his eyes, whispering, “Aren’t we suddenly social?” before retreating.

The doctor asked Rhyme, “You were a policeman, you were telling me.”

“Yes. I was head of forensics for the NYPD.”

“Were you shot?”

“Nope. Searching a crime scene. Some workmen’d found a body at a subway-stop construction site. It was a young patrolman who’d disappeared six months before—we had a serial killer shooting cops. I got a request to work the case personally and when I was searching it a beam collapsed. I was buried for about four hours.”

“Someone was actually going around murdering policemen?”

“Killed three and wounded another one. The perp was a cop himself. Dan Shepherd. A sergeant working Patrol.”

Berger glanced at the pink scar on Rhyme’s neck. The
telltale insignia of quadriplegia—the entrance wound for the ventilator tube that remains embedded in the throat for months after the accident. Sometimes for years, sometimes forever. But Rhyme had—thanks to his own mulish nature and his therapists’ herculean efforts—weaned himself off the ventilator. He now had a pair of lungs on him that he bet could keep him underwater for five minutes.

“So, a cervical trauma.”

“C4.”

“Ah, yes.”

C4 is the demilitarized zone of spinal cord injuries. An SCI above the fourth cervical vertebra might very well have killed him. Below C4 he would have regained some use of his arms and hands, if not his legs. But trauma to the infamous fourth kept him alive though virtually a total quadriplegic. He’d lost the use of his legs and arms. His abdominal and intercostal muscles were mostly gone and he was breathing primarily from his diaphragm. He could move his head and neck, his shoulders slightly. The only fluke was that the crushing oak beam had spared a single, minuscule strand of motor neuron. Which allowed him to move his left ring finger.

Rhyme spared the doctor the soap opera of the year following the accident. The month of skull traction: tongs gripping holes drilled into his head and pulling his spine straight. Twelve weeks of the halo device—the plastic bib and steel scaffolding around his head to keep the neck immobile. To keep his lungs pumping, a large ventilator for a year then a phrenic nerve stimulator. The catheters. The surgery. The paralytic ileus, the stress ulcers, hypotension and bradycardia, bedsores turning into decubitus ulcers, contractures as the muscle tissue began to shrink and threatened to steal away the precious mobility of his finger, the infuriating phantom pain—burns and aches in extremities that could feel no sensation.

He did, however, tell Berger about the latest wrinkle. “Autonomic dysreflexia.”

The problem had been occurring more often recently. Pounding heartbeat, off-the-charts blood pressure,
raging headaches. It could be brought on by something as simple as constipation. He explained that nothing could be done to prevent it except avoiding stress and physical constriction.

Rhyme’s SCI specialist, Dr. Peter Taylor, had become concerned with the frequency of the attacks. The last one—a month ago—was so severe that Taylor’d given Thom instructions in how to treat the condition without waiting for medical help and insisted that the aide program the doctor’s number into the phone’s speed dialer. Taylor had warned that a severe enough bout could lead to a heart attack or stroke.

Berger took in the facts with some sympathy then said, “Before I got into my present line I specialized in geriatric orthopedics. Mostly hip and joint replacements. I don’t know much neurology. What about chances for recovery?”

“None, the condition’s permanent,” Rhyme said, perhaps a little too quickly. He added, “You understand my problem, don’t you, doctor?”

“I think so. But I’d like to hear it in your words.”

Shaking his head to clear a renegade strand of hair, Rhyme said, “Everyone has the right to kill himself.”

Berger said, “I think I’d disagree with that. In most societies you may have the power but
not
the right. There’s a difference.”

Rhyme exhaled a bitter laugh. “I’m not much of a philosopher. But I don’t even have the power. That’s why I need you.”

Lincoln Rhyme had asked four doctors to kill him. They’d all refused. He’d said, okay, he’d do it himself and simply stopped eating. But the process of wasting himself to death became pure torture. It left him violently stomach-sick and racked with unbearable headaches. He couldn’t sleep. So he’d given up on that and, during the course of a hugely awkward conversation, asked Thom to kill him. The young man had grown tearful—the only time he’d shown that much emotion—and said he wished he could. He’d sit by and watch Rhyme die, he’d refuse to revive him. But he wouldn’t actually kill him.

Then, a miracle. If you could call it that.

After
The Scenes of the Crime
had come out, reporters had appeared to interview him. One article—in
The New York Times
—contained this stark quotation from author Rhyme:

“No, I’m not planning any more books. The fact is, my next big project is killing myself. It’s quite a challenge. I’ve been looking for someone to help me for the past six months.”

That screeching-stop line got the attention of the NYPD counseling service and several people from Rhyme’s past, most notably Blaine (who told him he was nuts to consider it, he had to quit thinking only about himself—just like when they’d been together—and, now that she was here, she thought she should mention that she was remarrying).

The quotation also caught the attention of William Berger, who’d called unexpectedly one night from Seattle. After a few moments of pleasant conversation Berger explained that he’d read the article about Rhyme. Then a hollow pause and he’d asked, “Ever hear of the Lethe Society?”

Rhyme had. It was a pro-euthanasia group he’d been trying to track down for months. It was far more aggressive than Safe Passage or the Hemlock Society. “Our volunteers are wanted for questioning in dozens of assisted suicides throughout the country,” Berger explained. “We have to keep a low profile.”

He said he wanted to follow up on Rhyme’s request. Berger refused to act quickly and they’d had several conversations over the past seven or eight months. Today was their first meeting.

“There’s no way you can pass, by yourself?”

Pass
 . . .

“Short of Gene Harrod’s approach, no. And even that’s a little iffy.”

Harrod was young man in Boston, a quad, who decided he wanted to kill himself. Unable to find anyone to help him he finally committed suicide the only way he was able to. With the little control he had he set a fire in his apartment and when it was blazing drove his
wheelchair into it, setting himself aflame. He died of third-degree burns.

The case was often raised by right-to-deathers as an example of the tragedy that anti-euthanasia laws can cause.

Berger was familiar with the case and shook his head sympathetically. “No, that’s no way for anyone to die.” He assayed Rhyme’s body, the wires, the control panels. “What are your mechanical skills?”

Rhyme explained about the ECUs—the E&J controller that his ring finger operated, the sip-and-puff control for his mouth, the chin joysticks, and the computer dictation unit that could type out words on the screen as he spoke them.

“But everything has to be set up by someone else?” Berger asked. “For instance, someone would have to go to the store, buy a gun, mount it, rig the trigger and hook it up to your controller?”

“Yes.”

Making that person guilty of a conspiracy to commit murder, as well as manslaughter.

“What about your equipment?” Rhyme asked. “It’s effective?”

“Equipment?”

“What you use? To, uhm, do the deed?”

“It’s very effective. I’ve never had a patient complain.”

Rhyme blinked and Berger laughed. Rhyme joined him. If you can’t laugh about death what can you laugh about?

“Take a look.”

“You have it with you?” Hope blossomed in Rhyme’s heart. It was the first time he’d felt that warm sensation in years.

The doctor opened his attaché case and—rather ceremonially, Rhyme thought—set out a bottle of brandy. A small bottle of pills. A plastic bag and a rubber band.

“What’s the drug?”

“Seconal. Nobody prescribes it anymore. In the old days suicide was a lot easier. These babies’d do the trick, no question. Now, it’s almost impossible to kill yourself
with modern tranquilizers. Halcion, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax . . . You may sleep for a long time but you’re going to wake up eventually.”

“And the bag?”

“Ah, the bag.” Berger picked it up. “That’s the emblem of the Lethe Society. Unofficially, of course—it’s not like we have a logo. If the pills and the brandy aren’t enough then we use the bag. Over the head, with a rubber band around the neck. We add a little ice inside because it gets pretty hot after a few minutes.”

Rhyme couldn’t take his eyes off the trio of implements. The bag, thick plastic, like a painter’s drop cloth. The brandy was cheap, he observed, and the drugs generic.

“This’s a nice house,” Berger said, looking around. “Central Park West . . . Do you live on disability?”

“Some. I’ve also done consulting for the police and the FBI. After the accident . . . the construction company that was doing the excavating settled for three million. They swore there was no liability but there’s apparently a rule of law that a quadriplegic automatically wins any lawsuits against construction companies, no matter who was at fault. At least if the plaintiff comes to court and drools.”

“And you wrote that book, right?”

“I get some money from that. Not a lot. It was a ‘better-seller.’ Not a best-seller.”

Berger picked up a copy of
The Scenes of the Crime,
flipped through it. “Famous crime scenes. Look at all this.” He laughed. “There are, what, forty, fifty scenes?”

“Fifty-one.”

Rhyme had revisited—in his mind and imagination, since he’d written it after the accident—as many old crime scenes in New York City as he could recall. Some solved, some not. He’d written about the Old Brewery, the notorious tenement in Five Points, where thirteen unrelated murders were recorded on a single night in 1839. About Charles Aubridge Deacon, who murdered his mother on July 13, 1863, during the Civil War draft riots, claiming former slaves had killed her and fueling the rampage against blacks. About architect Stanford
White’s love-triangle murder atop the original Madison Square Garden and about Judge Crater’s disappearance. About George Metesky, the mad bomber of the ’50s, and Murph the Surf, who boosted the Star of India diamond.

“Nineteenth-century building supplies, underground streams, butler’s schools,” Berger recited, flipping through the book, “gay baths, Chinatown whorehouses, Russian Orthodox churches . . . How d’you learn all this about the city?”