The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"Look, I've been thinking--"

"Officer," Sellitto snapped, "you got your orders."

A faint glower crossed her beautiful face.

Rhyme said to Cooper, "Mel, you drive over here in a bus?"

"An RRV," he answered.

The city's big crime scene buses were large vans--filled with instruments and evidence-collection supplies, better equipped than the entire labs of many small towns. But when Rhyme was running IRD he'd ordered smaller crime scene vehicles--station wagons basically--containing the essential collection-and-analysis equipment. The Rapid Response Vehicles looked placid but Rhyme had bullied Transportation into getting them fitted with turbocharged Police Interceptor engines. They often beat Patrol's squad cars to the scene; on more than one occasion the first officer was a seasoned crime scene tech. Which is every prosecutor's dream.

"Give Amelia the keys."

Cooper handed them to Sachs, who stared briefly at Rhyme then wheeled and hurried down the stairs. Even her footsteps sounded angry.

"All right, Lon. What's on your mind?"

Sellitto glanced at the empty hallway and walked up close to Rhyme. "You really want P.D. for this?"

"P.D.?"

"I mean her. Sachs. P.D.'s a nickname."

"For what?"

"Don't say it around her. Ticks her off. Her dad was a beat cop for forty years. So they call her the Portable's Daughter."

"You don't think I should've picked her?"

"Naw, I don't. Why d'you want her?"

"Because she climbed down a thirty-foot embankment so she wouldn't contaminate the scene. She closed a major avenue and an Amtrak line. That's initiative."

"Come on, Linc. I know a dozen CS cops'd do something like that."

"Well, she's the one I wanted." And Rhyme gave Sellitto a grave look, reminding him, subtly but without debate, what the terms of this bargain had been.

"All I'll say is," the detective muttered, "I just talked to Polling. Peretti's fucking outa joint about being flanked and if--no, I'll say when--the brass finds out somebody from Patrol's walking the grid at the scene, there'll be fucking trouble."

"Probably," Rhyme said softly, gazing at the profile poster, "but I have a feeling that's going to be the least of our trouble today."

And let his weary head ease back into the thick down pillow.

SEVEN

The station wagon raced toward the dark, sooty canyons of Wall Street, downtown New York.

Amelia Sachs's fingers danced lightly on the steering wheel as she tried to imagine where T.J. Colfax might be held captive. Finding her seemed hopeless. The approaching financial district had never looked so enormous, so full of alleys, so filled with manholes and doorways and buildings peppered with black windows.

So many places to hide a hostage.

In her mind she saw the hand sticking out of the grave beside the railroad tracks. The diamond ring sitting on the bloody bone of a finger. Sachs recognized the type of jewelry. She called them consolation rings--the sort lonely rich girls bought themselves. The sort she'd be wearing if she were rich.

Speeding south, dodging bicycle messengers and cabs.

Even on this glaring afternoon, under a choked sun, this was a spooky part of town. The buildings cast grim shadows and were coated with grime dark as dried blood.

Sachs took a turn at forty, skidding on the spongy asphalt, and punched the pedal to bring the station wagon back up to sixty.