“Thom, are you writing this down?”
“Yes, bwana.”
“But one question,” Rhyme began.
Dobyns whirled around. “I’d say it’s the question, Lincoln: Why is he leaving the clues? Right?”
“Yep. Why the clues?”
“Think about what he’s done… He’s talking to you. Not rambling incoherently like Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer. He’s not schizophrenic. He’s communicating – in your language. The language of forensics. Why?” More pacing, eyes flipping over the chart. “All I can think of is that he wants to share the guilt. See, it’s hard for him to kill. It becomes easier if he makes us accomplices. If we don’t save the vics in time their deaths are partly our fault.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Rhyme asked. “It means he’ll keep giving us clues that are solvable. Otherwise, if the puzzle’s too hard, he’s not sharing the burden.”
“Well, that’s true,” Dobyns said, smiling no longer. “But there’s another factor at work too.”
Sellitto supplied the answer. “Serial activity escalates.”
“Right,” Dobyns confirmed.
“How can he strike more often?” Banks muttered. “Every three hours isn’t fast enough?”
“Oh, he’ll find a way,” the psychologist continued. “Most likely, he’ll start targeting multiple victims.” The psychologist’s eyes narrowed. “Say, you all right, Lincoln?”
There were beads of sweat on the criminalist’s forehead and he’d been squinting his eyes hard. “Just tired. A lot of excitement for an old crip.”
“One last thing. The profile of the victims’s vital in serial crimes. But here we’ve got different sexes, ages and economic classes. All white but he’s been preying in a predominantly white pool so that’s not statistically significant. With what we know so far we can’t figure out why he’s taken these particular people. If you can, you might just get ahead of him.”
“Thanks, Terry,” Rhyme said. “Stick around for a while.”
“Sure, Lincoln. If you’d like.”
Then Rhyme ordered, “Let’s look at the PE from the stockyard scene. What’ve we got? The underwear?”
Mel Cooper assembled the bags that Sachs had brought back from the scene. He glanced at the one containing the underwear. “Katrina Fashion’s D’Amore line,” he announced. “One hundred percent cotton, elastic band. Cloth made in the U.S. They were cut and sewn in Taiwan.”
“You can tell that just by looking at them?” Sachs asked, incredulous.
“Naw, I was reading,” he answered, pointing at the label.
“Oh.”
The cops laughed.
“He’s telling us he’s got another woman then?” Sachs asked.
“Probably,” Rhyme said.
Cooper opened the bag. “Don’t know what the liquid is. I’ll do a Chromatograph.”
Rhyme asked Thom to hold up the scrap of paper with the phases of the moon on it. He studied it closely. A scrap like this was wonderful individuated evidence. You could fit it to the sheet it’d been torn from and link the two as closely as fingerprints. The problem here of course was that they had no original piece of paper. He wondered if they’d ever find it. The unsub might have destroyed it once he’d torn this bit out. Yet Lincoln Rhyme preferred to think not. He liked to picture it somewhere. Just waiting to be found. The way he always pictured source evidence: the automobile the paint chip had scraped off of, the finger that had lost the nail, the gun barrel that had discharged the rifled slug found in the victim’s body. These sources – always close to the unsub – took on personalities of their own in Rhyme’s mind. They could be imperious or cruel.
Or mysterious.
Phases of the moon.
Rhyme asked Dobyns if their unsub could be driven to act cyclically.
“No. The moon isn’t in a major phase right now. We’re four days past new.”
“So the moons mean something else.”
“If they’re even moons in the first place,” Sachs said. Pleased with herself, and rightly so, Rhyme thought. He said, “Good point, Amelia. Maybe he’s talking about circles. About ink. About paper. About geometry. The planetarium…”
Rhyme realized that she was staring at him. Maybe just realizing now that he’d shaved and his hair was combed, his clothes changed.
And what was her mood now? he wondered. Angry at him, or disengaged? He couldn’t tell. At the moment Amelia Sachs was as cryptic as Unsub 823.
The beeping of the fax machine sounded in the hallway. Thom went to get it and returned a moment later with two sheets of paper.
“It’s from Emma Rollins,” he announced. He held the sheets up for Rhyme to see.
“Our grocery scanner survey. Eleven stores in Manhattan sold veal shanks to customers buying fewer than five items in the last two days.” He started to write on the poster then glanced at Rhyme. “The names of the stores?”
“Of course. We’ll need them for cross-referencing later.”
Thom wrote them down on the profile chart.
B’way & 82nd,
ShopRite
B’way & 96th,
Anderson Foods
Greenwich & Bank,
ShopRite
2nd Ave., 72nd-73rd,
Grocery World
Battery Park City,
J &G’s Emporium
1709 2nd Ave.,
Anderson Foods
34th & Lex.,
Food Warehouse
8th Ave. & 24th,
ShopRite
Houston & Lafayette,
ShopRite
6th Ave. & Houston,
J &G’s Emporium
Greenwich & Franklin,
Grocery World
“That narrows it down,” Sachs said, “to the entire city.”
“Patience,” said restless Lincoln Rhyme.
Mel Cooper was examining the straw that Sachs had found. “Nothing unique here.” He tossed it aside.
“Is it new?” Rhyme asked. If it was they might cross-reference stores that had sold brooms and veal shanks on the same day.
But Cooper said, “Thought of that. It’s six months old or older.” He began shaking the trace evidence in the German girl’s clothing out over a piece of newsprint.
“Several things here,” he said, poring over the sheet. “Dirt.”
“Enough for a density-gradient?”
“Nope. Just dust really. Probably from the scene.”
Cooper looked over the rest of the effluence he’d brushed off the bloodstained clothing.
“Brick dust. Why’s there so much brick?”
“From the rats I shot. The wall was brick.”
“You shot them? At the scene?” Rhyme winced.
Sachs said defensively, “Well, yes. They were all over her.”
He was angry but he let it go. Adding just, “All kinds of contaminants from gunfire. Lead, arsenic, carbon, silver.”
“And here… another bit of reddish leather. From the glove. And… We’ve got another fiber. A different one.”
Criminalists love fibers. This was a tiny gray tuft barely visible to the naked eye.
“Excellent,” Rhyme announced. “And what else?”
“And here’s the photo of the scene,” Sachs said, “and the fingerprints. The one from her throat and from where he picked up the glove.” She held them up.
“Good,” Rhyme said, looking them over carefully.
There was a sheen of reluctant triumph on her face – the rush of winning, which is the flip side of hating yourself for being unprofessional.
Rhyme was studying the Polaroids of the prints when he heard footsteps on the stairs and Jim Polling arrived. He entered the room, did a double-take at the spiffed-up Lincoln Rhyme and strode to Sellitto.
“I was just at the scene,” he said. “You saved the vic. Great job, guys.” He nodded toward Sachs to show the noun included her too. “But the prick’s ’napped another one?”
“Or’s about to,” Rhyme muttered, gazing at the prints.
“We’re working on the clues right now,” Banks said.
“Jim, I’ve been trying to track you down,” Sellitto said. “I tried the mayor’s office.”
“I was with the chief. Had to fucking beg for some extra searchers. Got another fifty men pulled off UN security detail.”