She’d intended to hit every street but as time wore on and she thought of the child buried underground, near death, she began to search more quickly, speeding down streets, glancing right and left for the rosy-marble building. Doubt stabbed her. Had she missed the building in her haste? Or should she drive like lightning and cover more streets?
On and on. Another block, another. And still nothing.
After the villain’s death his effects were secured and perused by detectives. His diary showed that he had murdered eight good citizens of the city. Nor was he above grave robbery, for it was ascertained from his pages (if his claims be true) that he had violated several holy resting places in cemeteries around the city. None of his victims had accorded him the least affront; – nay, most were upstanding citizens, industrious and innocent. And yet he felt not a modicum of guilt. Indeed, he seems to have labored under the mad delusion that he was doing his victims a favor.
Lincoln Rhyme’s left ring finger twitched slightly and the frame turned the onion-skin page of Crime in Old New York, which had been delivered by two federal officers ten minutes earlier, service expedited thanks to Fred Dellray’s inimitable style.
“Flesh withers and can be weak,” – (the villain wrote in his ruthless yet steady hand) – “Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone. It is a noble goal I had, and it is beyond me why any-one might quarrel with it. I did a kindness to them all. They are immortal now. I freed them. I took them down to the bone.”
Terry Dobyns had been right. Chapter 10, “James Schneider: the ‘Bone Collector,’ ” was a virtual blueprint for Unsub 823’s behavior. The MOs were the same – fire, animals, water, boiling alive. Eight twenty-three prowled the same haunts Schneider had. He’d confused a German tourist with Hanna Goldschmidt, a turn-of-the-century immigrant, and had been drawn to a German residence hall to find a victim. And he’d called little Pammy Ganz by a different name too – Maggie. Apparently thinking she was the young O’Connor girl, one of Schneider’s victims.
A very bad etching in the book, covered by tissue, showed a demonic James Schneider, sitting in a basement, examining a leg bone.
Rhyme stared at the Randel Survey map of the city.
Bones…
Rhyme was recalling a crime scene he’d run once. He’d been called to a construction site in lower Manhattan where some excavators had discovered a skull a few feet below the surface of a vacant lot. Rhyme saw immediately that the skull was very old and brought a forensic anthropologist into the case. They continued to dig and discovered a number of bones and skeletons.
A little research revealed that in 1741 there’d been a slave rebellion in Manhattan and a number of slaves – and militant white abolitionists – had been hanged on a small island in the Collect. The island became a popular site for hangings and several informal cemeteries and potter’s fields sprang up in the area.
Where had the Collect been? Rhyme tried to recall. Near where Chinatown and the Lower East Side meet. But it was hard to say for certain because the pond had been filled in so long ago. It had been -
Yes! he thought, his heart thudding: The Collect had been filled in because it had grown so polluted the city commissioners considered it a major health risk. And among the main polluters were the tanneries on the eastern shore!
Pretty good with the dialer now, Rhyme didn’t flub a single number and got put through to the mayor on the first try. Hizzoner, though, the man’s personal secretary said, was at a brunch at the UN. But when Rhyme identified himself the secretary said, “One minute, sir,” and in much less time than that he found himself on the line with a man who said, through a mouthful of food, “Talk to me, detective. How the fuck’re we doing?”
“Five-eight-eight-five, K,” Amelia Sachs said, answering the radio. Rhyme heard the edginess in her voice.
“Sachs.”
“This isn’t good,” she told him. “We’re not having any luck.”
“I think I’ve got him.”
“What?”
“The six-hundred block, East Van Brevoort. Near Chinatown.”
“How’d you know?”
“The mayor put me in touch with the head of the Historical Society. There’s an archaeologic dig down there. An old graveyard. Across the street from where a big tannery used to be. And there were some big Federal mansions in the area at one time. I think he’s nearby.”
“I’m rolling.”
Through the speakerphone he heard a squeal of tires, then the siren cut in.
“I’ve called Lon and Haumann,” he added. “They’re on their way over now.”
“Rhyme,” her urgent voice crackled. “I’ll get her out.”
Ah, you’ve got a cop’s good heart, Amelia, a professional heart, Rhyme thought. But you’re still just a rookie. “Sachs?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been reading this book. Eight twenty-three’s picked a bad one for this role model of his. Really bad.”
She said nothing.
“What I’m saying is,” he continued, “whether the girl’s there or not, if you find him and he so much as flinches, you nail him.”
“But we get him alive, he can lead us to her. We can -”
“No, Sachs. Listen to me. You take him out. Any sign he’s going for a weapon, anything… you take him out.”
Static clattered. Then he heard her steady voice, “I’m at Van Brevoort, Rhyme. You were right. Looks like his place.”
Eighteen unmarkeds, two ESU vans and Amelia Sachs’s RRV were clustered near a short, deserted street on the Lower East Side.
East Van Brevoort looked like it was in Sarajevo. The buildings were abandoned – two of them burned to the ground. On the east side of the street was a dilapidated hospital of some kind, its roof caved in. Next to it was a large hole in the ground, roped off, with a No Trespassing sign emblazoned with the County Court seal – the archaeologic dig Rhyme had mentioned. A scrawny dog had died and lay in the gutter, its corpse picked over by rats.
In the middle of the other side of the street was a marble-fronted townhouse, faintly pink, with an attached carriage house, marginally nicer than the other decrepit tenements along Van Brevoort.
Sellitto, Banks and Haumann stood beside the ESU van, as a dozen officers suited up in Kevlar and racked their M-16s. Sachs joined them and, without asking, tucked her hair under a helmet and started to vest up.
Sellitto said, “Sachs, you’re not tactical.”
Slapping the Velcro strap down, she stared at the detective, eyebrow lifted high, until he relented and said, “Okay. But you’re rear guard. That’s an order.”
Haumann said, “You’ll be Team Two.”
“Yessir. I can live with that.”
One ESU cop offered her an MP-5 machine gun. She thought about Nick – their date on the range at Rodman’s Neck. They’d spent two hours practicing with automatic weapons, firing Z-patterns through doors, flip-reloading with taped banana clips and field-stripping M-16s to clear the sand jams that plagued the Colts. Nick loved the staccato clutter but Sachs didn’t much like the messy firepower of the big weapons. She’d suggested a match between them with Glocks and had whupped him three straight at fifty feet. He laughed and kissed her hard as the last of her empty casings spun, ringing, onto the firing range.
“I’ll just use my sidearm,” she told the ESU officer.