Cooper moved the slide. “If I had to guess, I’d say this is mostly calcium. Wait, something fibrous here.”
The knob turned and Rhyme would’ve paid anything to be looking through that eyepiece. Flashed back to all the evenings he’d spent with his face pressed against the gray sponge rubber, watching fibers or flecks of humus or blood cells or metal shavings swim into and out of focus.
“Here’s something else. A larger granule. Three layers. One similar to horn, then two layers of calcium. Slightly different colors. The other one’s translucent.”
“Three layers?” Rhyme spat out angrily. “Hell, it’s a seashell!” He felt furious with himself. He should have thought of that.
“Yep, that’s it.” Cooper was nodding. “Oyster, I think.”
The oyster beds around the city were mostly off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey. Rhyme had hoped that the unsub would limit the geographic area of the search to Manhattan – where the victim that morning was found. He muttered, “If he’s opening up the whole metro area the search’ll be hopeless.”
Cooper said, “I’m looking at something else. I think it’s lime. But very old. Granular.”
“Concrete maybe?” Rhyme suggested.
“Possibly. Yes.
“I don’t get the shells then,” Cooper added reflectively. “Around New York the oyster beds’re full of vegetation and mud. This is mixed with concrete and there’s virtually no vegetable matter at all.”
Rhyme barked suddenly: “Edges! What are the edges of the shell like, Mel?”
The tech gazed into the eyepiece. “Fractured, not worn. This’s been pulverized by dry pressure. Not eroded by water.”
Rhyme’s eyes slipped over the Randel map, scanning right and left. Focusing on the leaping dog’s rump.
“Got it!” he cried.
In 1913 F. W. Woolworth built the sixty-story structure that still bears his name, terra-cotta-clad, covered with gargoyles and Gothic sculpture. For sixteen years it was the world’s tallest building. Because the bedrock in that part of Manhattan was more than a hundred feet below Broadway, workmen had to dig deep shafts to anchor the building. It wasn’t long after the groundbreaking that workmen discovered the remains of Manhattan industrialist Talbott Soames, who’d been kidnapped in 1906. The man’s body was found buried in a thick bed of what looked like white sand but was really ground oyster shells, a fact the tabloids had a hey-day with, noting the obese tycoon’s obsession with rich food. The shells were so common along the lower eastern tip of Manhattan they’d been used for landfill. They were what had given Pearl Street its name.
“She’s downtown somewhere,” Rhyme announced. “Probably the east side. And maybe near Pearl. She’ll be underground, about five to fifteen feet down. Maybe a construction site, maybe a basement. An old building or tunnel.”
“Cross-check the EPA diagram, Jerry,” Sellitto instructed. “Where they’re doing asbestos cleanup.”
“Along Pearl? Nothing.” The young officer held up the map he and Haumann were working from. “There’re three-dozen cleanup sites – in Midtown, Harlem and the Bronx. But nothing downtown.”
“Asbestos… asbestos…” Rhyme mused again. What was so familiar about it?
It was 2:05 p.m.
“Bo, we’ve got to move. Get your people down there and start a search. All the buildings along Pearl Street. Water Street too.”
“Man,” the cop sighed, “that’s beaucoup buildings.” He started for the door.
Rhyme said to Sellitto, “Lon, you better go too. This’s going to be a photo finish. They’ll need all the searchers they can get. Amelia, I want you down there too.”
“Look, I’ve been thinking -”
“Officer,” Sellitto snapped, “you got your orders.”
A faint glower crossed her beautiful face.
Rhyme said to Cooper, “Mel, you drive over here in a bus?”
“An RRV,” he answered.
The city’s big crime scene buses were large vans – filled with instruments and evidence-collection supplies, better equipped than the entire labs of many small towns. But when Rhyme was running IRD he’d ordered smaller crime scene vehicles – station wagons basically – containing the essential collection-and-analysis equipment. The Rapid Response Vehicles looked placid but Rhyme had bullied Transportation into getting them fitted with turbocharged Police Interceptor engines. They often beat Patrol’s squad cars to the scene; on more than one occasion the first officer was a seasoned crime scene tech. Which is every prosecutor’s dream.
“Give Amelia the keys.”
Cooper handed them to Sachs, who stared briefly at Rhyme then wheeled and hurried down the stairs. Even her footsteps sounded angry.
“All right, Lon. What’s on your mind?”
Sellitto glanced at the empty hallway and walked up close to Rhyme. “You really want P.D. for this?”
“P.D.?”
“I mean her. Sachs. P.D.’s a nickname.”
“For what?”
“Don’t say it around her. Ticks her off. Her dad was a beat cop for forty years. So they call her the Portable’s Daughter.”
“You don’t think I should’ve picked her?”
“Naw, I don’t. Why d’you want her?”
“Because she climbed down a thirty-foot embankment so she wouldn’t contaminate the scene. She closed a major avenue and an Amtrak line. That’s initiative.”
“Come on, Linc. I know a dozen CS cops’d do something like that.”
“Well, she’s the one I wanted.” And Rhyme gave Sellitto a grave look, reminding him, subtly but without debate, what the terms of this bargain had been.
“All I’ll say is,” the detective muttered, “I just talked to Polling. Peretti’s fucking outa joint about being flanked and if – no, I’ll say when – the brass finds out somebody from Patrol’s walking the grid at the scene, there’ll be fucking trouble.”
“Probably,” Rhyme said softly, gazing at the profile poster, “but I have a feeling that’s going to be the least of our trouble today.”
And let his weary head ease back into the thick down pillow.
SEVEN
THE STATION WAGON RACED toward the dark, sooty canyons of Wall Street, downtown New York.
Amelia Sachs’s fingers danced lightly on the steering wheel as she tried to imagine where T.J. Colfax might be held captive. Finding her seemed hopeless. The approaching financial district had never looked so enormous, so full of alleys, so filled with manholes and doorways and buildings peppered with black windows.
So many places to hide a hostage.
In her mind she saw the hand sticking out of the grave beside the railroad tracks. The diamond ring sitting on the bloody bone of a finger. Sachs recognized the type of jewelry. She called them consolation rings – the sort lonely rich girls bought themselves. The sort she’d be wearing if she were rich.
Speeding south, dodging bicycle messengers and cabs.
Even on this glaring afternoon, under a choked sun, this was a spooky part of town. The buildings cast grim shadows and were coated with grime dark as dried blood.
Sachs took a turn at forty, skidding on the spongy asphalt, and punched the pedal to bring the station wagon back up to sixty.
Excellent engine, she thought. And decided to see how well the wagon handled at seventy.
Years before, while her old man slept – he worked the three-to-eleven watch usually – teenage Amie Sachs would palm the keys to his Camaro and tell her mother Rose she was going shopping, did she want anything from the Fort Hamilton pork store? And before her mother could say, “No, but you take the train, you’re not driving,” the girl would disappear out the door, fire up the car and race west.
UNSUB 823:
Appearance