“COME ON, PEOPLE,” Rhyme called. “We’ve got to move on this one. Before he gets the girl to the next scene. I mean move!”
Thom did a sitting transfer to get Rhyme from the Storm Arrow back into bed, perching him momentarily on a sliding board and then easing him back into the Clinitron. Sachs glanced at the wheelchair elevator that had been built into one of the bedroom closets – it was the one he hadn’t wanted her to open when he was directing her to the stereo and CDs.
Rhyme lay still for a moment, breathing deeply from the exertion.
“The clues’re gone,” he reminded them. “There’s no way we can figure out where the next scene is. So we’re going for the big one – his safe house.”
“You think you can find it?” Sellitto asked.
Do we have a choice? Rhyme thought, and said nothing.
Banks hurried up the stairs. He hadn’t even stepped into the bedroom before Rhyme blurted, “What did they say? Tell me. Tell me.”
Rhyme knew that the tiny fleck of gold that Sachs had found was beyond the capabilities of Mel Cooper’s impromptu lab. He’d asked the young detective to speed it down to the FBI’s regional PERT office and have it analyzed.
“They’ll call us in the next half hour.”
“Half hour?” Rhyme muttered. “Didn’t they give it priority?”
“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should’ve seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if the metallurgy report wasn’t in your hands ASAP there’d be one mean mother – you get the picture – reaming their – you get the rest of the picture.”
“Rhyme,” Sachs said, “there’s something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he’d let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot.”
“Flail?”
“Cut the skin off it.”
“Flay,” Rhyme corrected.
“Oh. Anyway, he didn’t do anything. She said it was – in the end – like he couldn’t bring himself to cut her.”
“Just like the first scene – the man by the railroad tracks,” Sellitto offered.
“Interesting…” Rhyme reflected. “I thought he’d cut the vic’s finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl’s arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett ’s finger… There’s something about the way he sees his victims. Something…”
“Anatomical?”
“Exactly, Sachs.”
“Except the Ganz woman,” Sellitto said.
“My point,” Rhyme said. “He could’ve cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?”
Sellitto said, “What’s different about her? Can’t be that she’s a woman. Or she’s from out of town. So was the German girl.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to hurt her in front of her daughter,” Banks said.
“No,” Rhyme said, laughing grimly, “compassion isn’t his thing.”
Sachs said suddenly, “But that is one thing different about her – she’s a mother.”
Rhyme considered this, “That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn’t carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark.” He then asked Sachs, “Did she say anything else about the way he looked?”
Sachs flipped through her notebook.
“Same as before.” She read. “Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he -”
“Black gloves?” Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. “Not red?”
“She said black. I asked her if she was sure.”
“And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn’t it, Mel? Maybe that was from the gloves. So what’s the red leather from?”
Cooper shrugged. “I don’t know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it’s something close to him.”
Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. “What else did we find?”
“The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway.” Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. “Plenty o’ nothin’,” he announced. “Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar.”
Which was found throughout the city.
“Keep going.”
“Decomposed leaves. That’s about it.”
“How about the Ganz woman’s clothes?”
Cooper and Sachs opened the newspaper and examined the trace.
“Mostly soil,” Cooper said. “And a few bits of what look like stone.”
“Where did he keep her at his safe house? Exactly?”
“On the floor in the basement. She said it was a dirt floor.”
“Excellent!” Rhyme shouted. To Cooper: “Burn it. The soil.”
Cooper placed a sample in the GC-MS. They waited impatiently for the results. Finally the computer screen blinked. The grid resembled a lunar landscape.
“All right, Lincoln. Interesting. I’m reading off-the-charts for tannin and -”
“Sodium carbonate?”
“Ain’t he amazin’?” Cooper laughed. “How’d you know?”
“They were used in tanneries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tannic acid cures the hide and the alkaline fixes it. So, his safe house is near the site of an old tannery.”
He smiled. Couldn’t help himself. He thought: You hear footsteps, 823? That’s us behind you.
His eyes slipped to the Randel Survey map. “Because of the smell no one wanted tanneries in their neighborhoods so the commissioners restricted them. I know there were some on the Lower East Side. And in West Greenwich Village – when it literally was a village, a suburb of the city. And then on the far West Side in the Fifties – near the stockyard tunnel where we found the German girl. Oh, and in Harlem in the early 1900s.”
Rhyme glanced at the list of grocery stores – the locations of the ShopRites that sold veal shanks. “Chelsea’s out. No tanning there. Harlem too – no ShopRites there. So, it’s the West Village, Lower East Side or Midtown West Side – Hell’s Kitchen again. Which he seems to like.”
Only about ten square miles, Rhyme estimated cynically. He’d figured out on his first day on the job that it was easier to hide in Manhattan than in the North Woods.
“Let’s keep going. What about the stone in Carole’s clothes?”
Cooper was bent over the microscope. “Okay. Got it.”
“Patch it in to me, Mel.”
Rhyme’s computer screen burst to life and he watched the flecks of stone and crystal, like brilliant asteroids.
“Move it around,” Rhyme instructed. Three substances were bonded together.
“The one on the left is marble, pinkish,” Cooper said. “Like what we found before. And in between, that gray stuff…”
“It’s mortar. And the other is brownstone,” Rhyme announced. “It’s from a Federal-style building, like the 1812 City Hall. Only the front facade was marble; the rest was brownstone. They did it to save money. Well, they did it so the money appropriated for marble could find its way into various pockets. Now, what else do we have? The ash. Let’s find the arson accelerant.”
Cooper ran the ash sample through the GC-MS. He stared at the curve that appeared on the screen.
Newly refined gasoline, containing its manufacturer’s dyes and additives, was unique and could be traced back to a single source, as long as different batches of gas weren’t mixed together at the service station where the perp bought it. Cooper announced that the gasoline matched perfectly the brand sold by the Gas Exchange service stations.
Banks grabbed the Yellow Pages and flipped them open. “We’ve got six stations in Manhattan. Three downtown. One at Sixth Avenue and Houston. One on Delancey, 503 East. And one at Nineteenth and Eighth.”
“Nineteenth’s too far north,” Rhyme said. He stared at the profile chart. “East Side or West. Which is it?”
Grocery stores, gasoline…
A lanky figure suddenly filled the doorway.
“I still invited to this here party?” Frederick Dellray asked.