The Bone Collector Read online

  But she appreciated their concern. After all, here she was, a widow with a three-year-old, heading to the toughest city on earth for the UN conference--more foreigners, hell, more people than she'd ever seen at one time.

  Carole found a pay phone and called the residence hotel to check on their reservations. The night manager said the room was ready and waiting for them. He'd see them in forty-five minutes or so.

  They walked through automatic doors and were socked breathless by the scalding summer air. Carole paused, looking around. Gripping Pammy firmly with one hand, the handle of the battered suitcase with the other. The heavy yellow knapsack was snug on her shoulder.

  They joined the line of passengers waiting at the taxi starter's booth.

  Carole glanced at a huge billboard across the highway. Welcome U.N. Delegates! it announced. The artwork was terrible, but she stared at it for a long moment; one of the men on the billboard looked like Ronnie.

  For a time, after he died, two years ago, virtually everything reminded her of her handsome, crew-cut husband. She'd drive past McDonald's and remember that he liked Big Macs. Actors in movies who didn't look a thing like him might cock their heads the way he used to. She'd see a flyer for a lawn-mower sale and remember how much he loved to cut their tiny square of grass in Arlington Heights.

  Then the tears would come. And she'd go back on Prozac or imipramine. She'd spend a week in bed. Reluctantly acquiesce in Kate's offer that she stay with her and Eddie for a night. Or a week. Or a month.

  But no tears anymore. She was here to jump-start her life. The sorrow was behind her now.

  Tossing her mass of dark-blond hair off her sweaty shoulders, Carole ushered Pammy forward and kicked the luggage ahead of them as the taxi queue moved up several places. She looked all around, trying to catch a glimpse of Manhattan. But she could see nothing except traffic and the tails of airplanes and a sea of people and cabs and cars. Steam rose like frantic ghosts from manholes and the night sky was black and yellow and hazy.

  Well, she'd see the city soon enough, she guessed. She hoped that Pammy was old enough to keep her first memory of the sight.

  "How do you like our adventure so far, honey?"

  "Adventure. I like adventures. I want some 'Waiin Punch. Can I please have some?"

  Please . . . That was new. The three-year-old was learning all the keys and buttons. Carole laughed. "We'll get you some soon."

  Finally they got their cab. The trunk popped open and Carole dumped the luggage inside, slammed the lid. They climbed into the back seat and closed the door.

  Pammy, Pooh, purse . . .

  The driver asked, "Where to?" And Carole gave him the address of the Midtown Residence Hotel, shouting through the Plexiglas divider.

  The driver pulled into traffic. Carole sat back and settled Pammy on her lap.

  "Will we go past the UN?" she called.

  But the man was concentrating on changing lanes and didn't hear her.

  "I'm here for the conference," she explained. "The UN conference."

  Still no answer.

  She wondered if he had trouble with English. Kate had warned her that the taxi drivers in New York were all foreigners. ("Taking American jobs," Eddie grumbled. "But don't get me started on that.") She couldn't see him clearly through the scuffed divider.

  Maybe he just doesn't want to talk.

  They swung onto another highway--and, suddenly, there it was in front of her, the jagged skyline of the city. Brilliant. Like the crystals that Kate and Eddie collected. A huge cluster of blue and gold and silver buildings in the middle of the island and another cluster way to the left. It was bigger than anything Carole had ever seen in her life and for a moment the island seemed like a massive ship.

  "Look, Pammy, that's where we're going. Is that beeaaautiful or what?"

  A moment later, though, the view was cut off as the driver turned off the expressway and made a fast turn at the bottom of the ramp. Then they were moving through hot, deserted streets, lined with dark brick buildings.

  Carole leaned forward. "Is this the right way to the city?"

  Again, no answer.

  She rapped hard on the Plexiglas. "Are you going the right way? Answer me. Answer me!"

  "Mommy, what's wrong?" Pammy said and started to cry.

  "Where are you going?" Carole shouted.

  But the man just kept driving--leisurely, stopping at all the red lights, never going over the speed limit. And when he pulled into the deserted parking lot behind a dark, abandoned factory he made sure he signaled properly.

  Ohno. . .no!

  He pulled on a ski mask and climbed from the cab. Walking to the back, he reached for the door. But he hesitated and his hand dropped. He leaned forward, face against the window, and tapped on the glass. Once, twice, three times. Getting the attention of lizards in the reptile room at a zoo. He stared at the mother and daughter for a long moment before he opened the door.

  TWENTY-TWO

  How'd you do it, Sachs?"

  Standing beside the pungent Hudson River, she spoke into her stalk mike. "I remembered seeing the fireboat station at Battery Park. They scrambled a couple divers and were at the pier in about three minutes. Man, you should've seen that boat move! I want to try one of those someday."

  Rhyme explained to her about the fingerless cabbie.

  "Son of a bitch!" she said, clicking her tongue in disgust. "The weasel tricked us all."

  "Not all of us," Rhyme reminded her coyly.

  "So Dellray knows I boosted the evidence. Is he looking for me?"

  "He said he was heading back to the federal building. Probably to decide which one of us to collar first. How's the scene there, Sachs?"

  "Pretty bad," she reported. "He parked on gravel--"

  "So no footprints."

  "But it's worse than that. The tide backed out of this big drainpipe and where he parked's underwater."

  "Hell," Rhyme muttered. "No trace, no prints, no nothing. How's the vic?"

  "Not so good. Exposure, broken finger. He's had heart problems. They're going to keep him in the hospital for a day or two."

  "Can he tell us anything?"

  Sachs walked over to Banks, who was interviewing William Everett.

  "He wasn't big," the man said matter-of-factly, carefully examining the splint the medic was putting on his hand. "And he wasn't really strong, not a muscle man. But he was stronger'n me. I grabbed him and he just pulled my hands away."

  "Description?" Banks asked.

  Everett recounted the dark clothes and ski mask. That was all he could remember.

  "One thing I should tell you," Everett held up his bandaged hand. "He's got a mean streak. I grabbed him, like I said. I wasn't thinking--I just panicked. But he got real mad. That's when he busted my finger."

  "Retaliation, hm?" Banks asked.

  "I guess. But that's not the strange part."

  "No?"

  "The strange part is he listened to it."

  The young detective had stopped writing. Looked at Sachs.

  "He held my hand against his ear, real tight, and bent the finger until it broke. Like he was listening. And liking it."

  "Did you hear that, Rhyme?"

  "Yes. Thom's added it to our profile. I don't know what it means, though. We'll have to think about it."

  "Any sign of the planted PE?"

  "Not yet."

  "Grid it, Sachs. Oh, and get the vic's--"

  "Clothes? I've already asked him. I--Rhyme, you all right?" She heard a fit of coughing.

  The transmission was shut off momentarily. He came back on a moment later. "You there, Rhyme? Everything okay?"

  "Fine," he said quickly. "Get going. Walk the grid."

  She surveyed the scene, lit starkly by the ESU halogens. It was so frustrating. He'd been here. He'd walked on the gravel just a few feet away. But whatever PE he'd inadvertently left behind was lying inches below the surface of the dim water. She covered the ground slowly. Back and forth.


  "I can't see anything. The clues might've been washed away."

  "No, he's too smart not to've taken the tide into account. They'll be on dry land somewhere."

  "I've got an idea," she said suddenly. "Come on down here."

  "What?"

  "Work the scene with me, Rhyme."

  Silence.

  "Rhyme, did you hear me?"

  "Are you talking to me?" he asked.

  "You look like De Niro. You can't act as good as De Niro. You know? That scene from Taxi Driver?"

  Rhyme didn't laugh. He said, "The line's 'Are you looking at me?' Not 'talking to me.' "

  Sachs continued, unfazed, "Come on down. Work the scene with me."

  "I'll spread my wings. No, better yet, I'll project myself there. Telepathy, you know."

  "Quit joking. I'm serious."

  "I--"

  "We need you. I can't find the planted clues."

  "But they'll be there. You just have to try a little harder."

  "I've walked the entire grid twice."

  "Then you've defined the perimeter too narrowly. Add another few feet and keep going. Eight twenty-three's not finished yet, not by a long shot."

  "You're changing the subject. Come on down and help me."

  "How?" Rhyme asked. "How'm I supposed to do that?"

  "I had a friend who was challenged," she began. "And he--"

  "You mean he was a crip," Rhyme corrected. Softly but firmly.

  She continued, "His aide'd put him into this fancy wheelchair every morning and he drove himself all over the place. To the movies, to--"

  "Those chairs . . ." Rhyme's voice sounded hollow. "They don't work for me."

  She stopped speaking.

  He continued, "The problem's how I was injured. It'd be dangerous for me to be in a wheelchair. It could"--he hesitated--"make things worse."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

  After a moment he said, "Of course you didn't."

  Blew that one. Oh, boy. Brother . . .

  But Rhyme didn't seem any the worse for her faux pas. His voice was smooth, unemotional. "Listen, you've got to get on with the search. Our unsub's making it trickier. But it won't be impossible. . . . Here's an idea. He's the underground man, right? Maybe he buried them."

  She looked over the scene.

  Maybe there . . . She saw a mound of earth and leaves in a patch of tall grass near the gravel. It didn't look right; the mound seemed too assembled.

  Sachs crouched beside it, lowered her head and, using the pencils, began to clear away leaves.

  She turned her face slightly to the left and found she was staring at a rearing head, bared fangs. . . .

  "Jesus Lord," she shouted, stumbling backwards, falling hard on her butt, scrambling to draw her weapon.

  No. . .

  Rhyme shouted, "You all right?"

  Sachs drew a target and tried to steady the gun with very unsteady hands. Jerry Banks came running up, his own Glock drawn. He stopped. Sachs climbed to her feet, looking at what was in front of them.

  "Man," Banks whispered.

  "It's a snake--well, a snake's skeleton," Sachs told Rhyme. "A rattlesnake. Fuck." Holstered the Glock. "It's mounted on a board."

  "A snake? Interesting." Rhyme sounded intrigued.

  "Yeah, real interesting," she muttered. She pulled on latex gloves and lifted the coiled bones. She turned it over. " 'Metamorphosis.' "

  "What?"

  "A label on the bottom. The name of the store it came from, I'd guess. 604 Broadway."

  Rhyme said, "I'll have the Hardy Boys check it out. What've we got? Tell me the clues."

  They were underneath the snake. In a Baggie. Her heart pounded as she crouched down over the bag.

  "A book of matches," she said.

  "Okay, maybe he's thinking arson. Anything printed on them?"

  "Nope. But there's a smear of something. Like Vaseline. Only stinky."

  "Good, Sachs--always smell evidence you're not sure about. Only be more precise."

  She bent close. "Yuck."

  "That's not precise."

  "Sulfur maybe."

  "Could be nitrate-based. Explosive. Tovex. Is it blue?"

  "No, it's milky clear."

  "Even if it could go bang I imagine it's a secondary explosive. They're the stable ones. Anything else?"

  "Another scrap of paper. Something on it."

  "What, Sachs? His name, his address, e-mail handle?"

  "Looks like it's from a magazine. I can see a small black-and-white photo. Looks like part of a building but you can't see which one. And underneath that, all you can read is a date. May 20, 1906."

  "Five, twenty, oh-six. I wonder if it's a code. Or an address. I'll have to think about it. Anything else?"

  "Nope."

  She heard him sigh. "All right, come on back, Sachs. What time is it? My God, almost one a.m. I haven't been up this late in years. Come on back and let's see what we have."

  Of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Lower East Side has remained the most unchanged over the course of the city's history.

  Much of it's gone of course: The rolling pastoral fields. The solid mansions of John Hancock and early government luminaries. Der Kolek, the large freshwater lake (its Dutch name eventually corrupted to "The Collect," which more accurately described the grossly polluted pond). The notorious Five Points neighborhood--in the early 1800s the most dangerous square mile on earth--where a single tenement, like the decrepit Gates of Hell, might be the site of two or three hundred murders every year.

  But thousands of the old buildings remained--tenements from the nineteenth century and Colonial frame houses and Federal brick townhomes from the prior one, Baroque meeting halls, several of the Egyptian-style public buildings constructed by order of the regally corrupt Congressman Fernando Wood. Some were abandoned, their facades overgrown with weeds and floors cracked by persistent saplings. But many were still in use; this had been the land of Tammany Hall iniquity, of pushcarts and sweat-shops, of the Henry Street Settlement house, Minsky's burlesque and the notorious Yiddish Gomorra--the Jewish Mafia. A neighborhood that gives birth to institutions like these does not die easily.

  It was toward this neighborhood that the bone collector now piloted the taxi containing the thin woman and her young daughter.

  Observing that the constabulary was on to him, James Schneider went once again to ground like the serpent that he was, seeking accommodations--it is speculated--in the cellars of the city's many tenant-houses (which the reader may perchance recognize as the still-prevalent "tenements"). And so he remained, quiescent for some months.

  As he drove home, the bone collector saw around him not the Manhattan of the 1990s--the Korean delis, the dank bagel shops, the X-rated-video stores, the empty clothing boutiques--but a dreamy world of bowler-clad men, women in rustling crinoline, hems and cuffs filthy with street refuse. Hordes of buggies and wagons, the air filled with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes repulsive scent of methane.

  But such was the foul, indefatigable drive within him to start his collection anew that he was soon forced from his lair to waylay yet another good citizen;--this, a young man newly arrived in town to attend university.

  Driving through the notorious Eighteenth Ward, once the home of nearly fifty thousand people crammed into a thousand decrepit tenements. When most people thought of the nineteenth century they thought in sepia--because of old photographs. But this was wrong. Old Manhattan was the color of stone. With choking industrial smoke, paint prohibitively expensive and dim lighting, the city was many shades of gray and yellow.

  Schneider snuck up behind the fellow and was about to strike when Fortune's conscience, at last, cried out. Two constables chanced upon the assault. They recognized Schneider and gave chase. The killer fled east, across that engineering marvel, the Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909, two years before these events. But he stopped halfway across, seeing that three constables were approaching from Brooklyn, having
heard the alarm raised by the whistles and pistol reports of their confederates from Manhattan.

  Schneider, unarmed, as chance would have it, climbed onto the railing of the bridge as he was surrounded by the law. He shouted maniacal diatribes against the constables, condemning them for having ruined his life. His words grew ever madder. As the constabulary moved closer, he leapt from the rail into the River. A week later a pilot discovered his body on the shore of Welfare Island, near Hell Gate. There was little left, for the crabs and turtles had been diligently working to reduce Schneider to the very bone which he, in his madness, cherished.

  He turned the taxi onto his deserted cobblestoned street, East Van Brevoort, and paused in front of the building. He checked the two filthy strings he'd run low across the doors to make certain that no one had entered. A sudden motion startled him and he heard the guttural snarling of the dogs again, their eyes yellow, teeth brown, bodies dotted with scars and sores. His hand strayed to his pistol but they suddenly turned and, yelping, charged after a cat or rat in the alley.

  He saw no one on the hot sidewalks and opened the padlock securing the carriage-house door then climbed back inside the car and drove into the garage, parked beside his Taurus.

  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 hisvictims 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.

  He paused, wiped sweat from his mouth. The ski mask itched. He dragged the woman and her daughter out of the trunk and through the garage. She was strong and fought hard. At last he managed to get the cuffs on them.

  "You prick!" she howled. "Don't you dare touch my daughter. You touch her and I'll kill you."

  He gripped her hard around the chest and taped her mouth. Then he did the little girl's too.

  "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."