The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

Excellent engine, she thought. And decided to see how well the wagon handled at seventy.

Years before, while her old man slept--he worked the three-to-eleven watch usually--teenage Amie Sachs would palm the keys to his Camaro and tell her mother Rose she was going shopping, did she want anything from the Fort Hamilton pork store? And before her mother could say, "No, but you take the train, you're not driving," the girl would disappear out the door, fire up the car and race west.

Coming home three hours later, pork-less, Amie would sneak up the stairs to be confronted by a mother frantic and angry, who--to her daughter's amusement--would lecture her about the risks of getting pregnant and how that would ruin her chances to use her beautiful face to make a million dollars at modeling. And when finally the woman learned that her daughter wasn't sleeping around but was merely driving a hundred mph on Long Island highways, she grew frantic and angry and would lecture the girl about smashing up her beautiful face and ruining her chances to make a million dollars at modeling.

Things grew even worse when she got her driver's license.

Sachs now sliced between two double-parked trucks, hoping that neither a passenger nor a driver would open his door. In a Doppler whisper she was past them.

When you move they can't getcha. . . .

Lon Sellitto kneaded his rotund face with blunt fingertips and paid no attention to the Indy 500 driving. He talked with his partner about the case like an accountant discussing a balance sheet. As for Banks, though, he was no longer stealing infatuated glances at Sachs's eyes and lips and had taken to checking the speedometer every minute or so.

They skidded in a frantic turn past the Brooklyn Bridge. She thought again of the woman captive, picturing T.J.'s long, elegant nails, while she tapped her own picked fingers on the wheel. She saw again in her mind the image that refused to go away: the white birch branch of a hand, sticking up out of the moist grave. The single bloody bone.

"He's kind of loony," she blurted suddenly, to change the direction of her thoughts.

"Who?" Sellitto asked.

"Rhyme."

Banks added, "Ask me, he looks like Howard Hughes's kid brother."

"Yeah, well, that surprised me," the older detective admitted. "Wasn't looking too good. Used to be a handsome guy. But, well, you know. After what he's been through. How come if you drive like this, Sachs, you're a portable?"

"Where I got assigned. They didn't ask, they told me." Just like you did, she reflected. "Was he really as good as that?"

"Rhyme? Better. Most CSU guys in New York handle two hundred bodies a year. Tops. Rhyme did double that. Even when he was running IRD. Take Peretti, he's a good man but he gets out once every two weeks or so and only on media cases. You're not hearing this from me, officer."

"Nosir."

"But Rhyme'd run the scenes himself. And when he wasn't running scenes he'd be out walking around."

"Doing what?"

"Just walking around. Looking at stuff. He walked miles. All over the city. Buying things, picking up things, collecting things."

"What kinds of things?"

"Evidence standards. Dirt, food, magazines, hubcaps, shoes, medical books, drugs, plants . . . You name it, he'd find it and catalog it. You know--so when some PE came in he'd have a better idea where the perp might've been or what he'd been doing. You'd page him and he'd be in Harlem or the Lower East Side or Hell's Kitchen."

"Police in his blood?"

"Naw. Father was some kind of scientist at a national laboratory or something."

"Is that what Rhyme studied? Science?"

"Yeah. Went to school at Champaign-Urbana, got a coupla fancy degrees. Chemistry and history. Which I have no idea why. His folks're gone since I knew him, that'd be, hell, coming on fifteen years now. And he doesn't have any brothers or sisters. He grew up in Illinois. That's why the name, Lincoln."

She wanted to ask if he was, or had been, married but didn't. She settled for: "Is he really that much of a . . ."

"You can say it, officer."

"A shit?"

Banks laughed.

Sellitto said, "My ma had this expression. She said somebody was 'of a mind.' Well, that describes Rhyme. He's of a mind. One time this dumb-ass tech sprayed luminol--that's a blood reagent--on a fingerprint, instead of ninhydrin. Ruined the print. Rhyme fired him on the spot. Another time a cop took a leak at a scene and flushed the toilet. Man, Rhyme went ballistic, told him to get his ass down to the basement and bring back whatever was in the sewer trap." Sellitto laughed. "The cop, he had rank, he said, 'I'm not doing that, I'm a lieutenant.' And Rhyme said, 'Got news. You're a plumber now.' I could go on and on. Fuck, officer, you doing eighty?"