He took the knife from his pocket and bent down, cut her underwear off. She looked down at her naked body.
“You want that?” she said breathlessly. “Okay, you can fuck me. Okay.”
The pleasure of the flesh, he thought… it just doesn’t come close.
He pulled her to her feet and madly she pushed away from him and began stumbling toward a small doorway in the corner of the basement. Not running, not really trying to escape. Just sobbing, reaching out a hand, weaving toward the door.
The bone collector watched her, entranced by her slow, pathetic gait.
The doorway, which had once opened onto a coal chute, now led to a narrow tunnel that connected to the basement of the abandoned building next door.
Esther struggled to the metal door and pulled it open. She climbed inside.
It was no more than a minute later that he heard the wailing scream. Followed by a breathless, wrenching, “God, no, no, no…” Other words too, lost in her boiling howls of terror.
Then she was coming back through the tunnel, moving faster now, whipping her hands around her, as if she was trying to shake off what she’d just seen.
Come to me, Esther.
Stumbling over the dirt floor, sobbing.
Come to me.
Running straight into his patient, waiting arms, which wrapped around her. He squeezed the woman tight as a lover, felt that marvelous collarbone beneath his fingers, and slowly dragged the frantic woman back toward the tunnel doorway.
TWENTY
THE PHASES OF THE MOON, the leaf, the damp underwear, dirt. Their team was back in Rhyme’s bedroom – all except Polling and Haumann; it was straining NYPD loyalty to bring captains in on what was, no two ways about it, an unauthorized operation.
“You G-C’d the liquid in the underwear, right, Mel?”
“Have to do it again. They shut us down before we got the results.”
He blotted out a sample and injected it into the Chromatograph. As he ran the machine Sachs jockeyed to look at the peaks and valleys of the profile appearing on the screen. Like a stock index. Rhyme realized she was standing close to him, as if she’d edged near when he wasn’t looking. She spoke in a low voice. “I was…”
“Yes?”
“I was blunter than I meant to be. Before, I mean. I have a temper. I don’t know where I got it from. But I have it.”
“You were right,” Rhyme said.
They easily held each other’s eyes and Rhyme thought of the times he and Blaine had had serious discussions. As they talked they always focused on an object between them – one of the ceramic horses she collected, a book, a nearly empty bottle of Merlot or Chardonnay.
He said, “I work scenes differently than most criminalists. I needed somebody without any preconceived ideas. But I also needed somebody with a mind of her own.”
The contradictory qualities we seek in that elusive perfect lover. Strength and vulnerability, in equal measures.
“When I talked to Commissioner Eckert,” she said, “it was just to get my transfer through. That’s all I wanted. It never occurred to me that word’d get back to the feds and they’d take the case away.”
“I know that.”
“I still let my temper go. I’m sorry for that.”
“Don’t backpedal, Sachs. I need somebody to tell me I’m a jerk when I act like one. Thom does. That’s why I love him.”
“Don’t get sentimental on me, Lincoln,” Thom called from across the room.
Rhyme continued, “Nobody else ever tells me to go to hell. They’re always walking on eggshells. I hate it.”
“It doesn’t seem like there’ve been many people around here to say much of anything to you lately.”
After a moment he said, “That’s true.”
On the screen of the chromatograph-spectrometer the peaks and valleys stopped moving and became one of nature’s infinite signatures. Mel Cooper tapped on the computer keys and read the results. “Water, diesel oil, phosphate, sodium, trace minerals… No idea what it means.”
What, Rhyme wondered, was the message? The underwear itself? The liquid? He said, “Let’s move on. I want to see the dirt.”
Sachs brought him the bag. It contained pinkish sand, laced with chunks of clay and pebbles.
“Bull’s liver,” he announced. “Rock-and-sand mixture. Found just above the bedrock in Manhattan. Sodium silicate mixed in?”
Cooper ran the Chromatograph. “Yep. Plenty of it.”
“Then we’re looking for a downtown location within fifty yards of the water – ” Rhyme laughed at the astonished gaze on Sachs’s face. “It’s not magic, Sachs. I’ve just done my homework, that’s all. Contractors mix sodium silicate with bull’s liver to stabilize the earth when they dig foundations in deep-bedrock areas near the water. That means it’s got to be downtown. Now, let’s take a look at the leaf.”
She held up the bag.
“No clue what it is,” Rhyme said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like that. Not in Manhattan.”
“I’ve got a list of horticulture web sites,” Cooper said, staring at his computer screen. “I’ll do some surfing.”
Rhyme himself had spent some time on-line, cruising the Internet. As it had with books, movies and posters, his interest in the cyberworld had eventually paled. Perhaps because so much of his own world was virtual, the net was, in the end, a forlorn place for Lincoln Rhyme.
Cooper’s screen flicked and danced as he clicked on hyperlinks and disappeared deeper into the web. “I’m downloading some files. Should take ten, twenty minutes.”
Rhyme said, “All right. The rest of the clues Sachs found… Not the planted ones. The others. They might tell us about where he’s been. Let’s look at our secret weapon, Mel.”
“Secret weapon?” Sachs asked.
“The trace evidence.”
Special Agent Fred Dellray had put together a ten-man entry operation. Two teams plus search and surveillance. The flak-jacketed agents stood in the bushes, sweating madly. Across the street, upstairs in an abandoned brownstone, the S &S team had their Big Ears and video infrareds trained on the perp’s house.
The three snipers, with their big Remingtons strapped, loaded and locked, lay prone on rooftops. Their binoculared spotters crouched beside them like Lamaze coaches.
Dellray – wearing an FBI windbreaker and jeans instead of his Leprechaun-green outfit – listened through his clip-on earphone.
“Surveillance to Command. We’ve got infrared on the basement. Somebody moving down there.”
“What’sa view like?” Dellray asked.
“No view. Windows’re too dirty.”
“He all by his humble self? Maybe got a vic with him?” Knowing somehow that Officer Sachs was probably right; that he’d already ’napped somebody else now.
“Can’t tell. We’ve just got motion and heat.”
Dellray had sent other officers around to the sides of the house. They reported in. “No sign of anyone on the first or second floor. Garage is locked.”
“Snipers?” Dellray asked. “Report.”
“Shooter One to Command. I’ve acquired on front door. Over.”
The others were covering the hallway and a room on the first floor. “Loaded and locked,” they radioed in.
Dellray drew his large automatic.
“Okay, we got paper,” Dellray said. Meaning a warrant. They wouldn’t have to knock. “Lessgo! Teams one and two, deploy, deploy, deploy.”
The first team took out the front door with a battering ram while the second used the slightly more civilized approach of breaking in the back-door window and unlocking the dead bolt. They streamed inside, Dellray following the last of Team One’s officers into the old, filthy house. The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming and Dellray, no stranger to crime scenes, swallowed hard, struggling to keep from vomiting.
The second team secured the ground floor and then charged up the stairs toward the bedroom while the first sped down the basement stairs, boots thumping loudly on the old wood.
Dellray raced down into the foul-smelling basement. He heard a door being kicked in somewhere below and the shout of, “Don’t move! Federal agents. Freeze, freeze, freeze!”