How the hell had they found out about his carriage? He’d known that stealing a car was a huge risk but he thought it would take Hertz days to notice the missing vehicle. And even if they did he was sure the constables would never connect him with the theft. Oh, they were good.
One of the mean-eyed cops happened to glance at his cab.
Staring forward, the bone collector turned slowly onto Houston Street, lost himself in a crowd of other cabs. A half hour later, he’d ditched the taxi and the Hertz Taurus and had returned on foot to the mansion.
Young Maggie looked up at him.
She was scared, yes, but she’d stopped crying. He wondered if he should just keep her. Take himself a daughter. Raise her. The idea glowed within him for a moment or two then it faded.
No, there’d be too many questions. Also, there was something eerie about the way the girl was looking at him. She seemed older than her years. She’d always remember what he’d done. Oh, for a while she might think it had been a dream. But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.
UNSUB 823 (page 1 of 4)
Appearance
•Caucasian male, slight build
•Dark clothing
•Old gloves, reddish kidskin
Residence
•Prob. has safe house
•Located near: B’way &82nd,
ShopRite Greenwich & Bank,
Vehicle
•Yellow Cab
•Recent model sedan
•Lt. gray, silver, beige
Other
•knows CS proc.
•possibly has record
•knows FR prints
•gun =.32 Colt
•Ties vics w/ unusual knots
•“Old” appeals to him
UNSUB 823 (page 2 of 4)
Appearance
•Aftershave; to cover up other scent?
•Ski mask? Navy blue?
Residence
•ShopRite
• 8th Ave. & 24th,
Vehicle
•Rental car: prob. stolen
Other
•Called one vic “Hanna”
•Knows basic German
•Underground appeals to him
•Dual personalities
UNSUB 823 (page 3 of 4)
Appearance
•Gloves are dark
•Aftershave = Brut
Residence
•ShopRite •Houston & Lafayette,
•Old building, pink marble
Vehicle
•Hertz, silver Taurus, this year’s model
Other
•Maybe priest, soc. worker, counselor
•Unusual wear on shoes, reads a lot?
•Listened as he broke vic’s finger
•Left snake as slap at investigators
UNSUB 823 (page 4 of 4)
Appearance
•Hair color not brown
Residence
•At least 100 years old, prob. mansion or institutional
•Federal-style building, Lower East Side
Vehicle
Other
•Wanted to flay vic’s foot
•Called one vic “Maggie”
•Mother & child, special meaning to him?
•Book “Crime in Old NY,” his model?
No, he couldn’t trust her any more than he trusted anyone else. Every human soul would let you down in the end. You could trust hate. You could trust bone. Everything else was betrayal.
He crouched beside Maggie and eased the tape off her mouth.
“Mommy!” she howled. “I want my mommy!”
He said nothing, just stood and looked down at her. At her delicate skull. At her twigs of arms.
She screamed like a siren.
He took off his glove. His fingers hovered over her for a moment. Then he caressed the soft hair on her head. (“Fingerprints can be lifted from flesh, if taken within 90 minutes of contact [See kromekote] but no one has as yet successfully lifted and reconstructed friction-ridge prints from human hair.” Lincoln Rhyme, Physical Evidence, 4th ed. [New York: Forensic Press, 1994].)
The bone collector slowly rose and walked upstairs, into the large living room of the building, past the paintings on the walls – the workers, the staring women and children. He cocked his head at a faint noise outside. Then louder – a clatter of metal. He grabbed his weapon and hurried to the back of the building. Unbolting the door he pushed it open suddenly, dropping into a two-handed shooting stance.
The pack of wild dogs glanced at him. They returned quickly to the trash can they’d knocked over. He slipped the gun into his pocket and returned to the living room.
He found himself next to the bottle-glass window again, looking out at the old graveyard. Oh, yes. There! There was the man again, wearing black, standing in the cemetery. In the distance the sky was spiked by the black masts of clipper ships and sloops docked in the East River along the Out Ward’s shore.
The bone collector felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow. He wondered if some tragedy had just occurred. Maybe the Great Fire of 1776 had just destroyed most of the buildings along Broadway. Or the yellow fever epidemic of 1795 had decimated the Irish community. Or the General Slocum excursion-boat fire in 1904 had killed over a thousand women and children, destroying the Lower East Side’s German neighborhood.
Or maybe he was sensing tragedies soon to occur.
After a few minutes Maggie’s screams grew quiet, replaced by the sounds of the old city, the roar of steam engines, the clang of bells, the pops of black-powder gunshots, the clop of hooves on resonant cobblestones.
He continued to stare, forgetting the constables who pursued him, forgetting Maggie, just watching the ghostly form stroll down the street.
Then and now.
His eyes remained focused out the window for a long moment, lost in a different time. And so he didn’t notice the wild dogs, who’d pushed through the back door he’d left ajar. They looked at him through the doorway of the living room and paused only momentarily before turning around and loping quietly into the back of the building.
Noses lifted at the smells, ears pricked at the sounds of the strange place. Particularly the faint wailing that rose from somewhere beneath them.
It was a sign of their desperation that even the Hardy Boys split up.
Bedding was working a half-dozen blocks around Delancey, Saul was farther south. Sellitto and Banks each had their search areas, and the hundreds of other officers, FBI agents and troopers made the door-to-door rounds, asking about a slight man, a young child crying, a silver Ford Taurus, a deserted Federal-style building, fronted in rose marble, the rest of it dark brownstone.
Huh? What the hell you mean, Federal?… Seen a kid? You asking if I ever seen a kid on the Lower East? Yo, Jimmy, you ever see any kids ’round here? Like not in the last, what, sixty seconds?
Amelia Sachs was flexing her muscle. She insisted that she be on Sellitto’s crew, the one hitting the ShopRite on East Houston that Had sold Unsub 823 the veal chop. And the gas station that had sold him the gasoline. The library from which he’d stolen Crime in Old New York.
But they’d found no leads there and scattered like wolves smelling a dozen different scents. Each picked a chunk of neighborhood to call his or her own.
As Sachs gunned the engine of the new RRV and tried another block she felt the same frustration she’d known when working the crime scenes over the past several days: too damn much evidence, too much turf to cover. The hopelessness of it. Here, on the hot, damp streets, branching into a hundred other streets and alleys running past a thousand buildings – all old – finding the safe house seemed as impossible as finding that hair that Rhyme had told her about, pasted to the ceiling by the blowback from a.38 revolver.