The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

A criminalist is a renaissance man.

He's got to know botany, geology, ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature, engineering. If he knows facts--that ash with a high strontium content probably came from a highway flare, that faca is Portuguese for "knife," that Ethiopian diners use no utensils and eat with their right hands exclusively, that a slug with five land-and-groove rifling marks, right twist, could not have been fired by a Colt pistol--if he knows these things he may just make the connection that places an unsub at the crime scene.

One subject all criminalists know is anatomy. And this was certainly a specialty of Lincoln Rhyme's, for he had spent the past three and a half years enmeshed in the quirky logic of bone and nerve.

He now glanced at the evidence bag from the steam room, dangling in Jerry Banks's hand, and announced, "Leg bone. Not human. So it's not from the next vic."

It was a ring of bone about two inches around, sawn through evenly. There was blood in the tracks left by the saw blade.

"A medium-sized animal," Rhyme continued. "Large dog, sheep, goat. It'd support, I'd guess, a hundred to a hundred fifty pounds of weight. Let's make sure the blood's from an animal though. Still could be the vic's."

Perps had been known to beat or stab people to death with bones. Rhyme himself had had three such cases; the weapons had been a beef knuckle bone, a deer's leg bone, and in one disturbing case the victim's own ulna.

Mel Cooper ran a gel-diffusion test for blood origin. "We'll have to wait a bit for the results," he explained apologetically.

"Amelia," Rhyme said, "maybe you could help us here. Use the eye loupe and look the bone ov

er carefully. Tell us what you see."

"Not the microscope?" she asked. He thought she'd protest but she stepped forward to the bone, peered at it with curiosity.

"Too much magnification," Rhyme explained.

She put on the goggles and bent over the white enamel tray. Cooper turned on a gooseneck lamp.

"The cutting marks," Rhyme said. "Is it hacked up or are they even?"

"They're pretty even."

"A power saw."

Rhyme wondered if the animal had been alive when he'd done this.

"See anything unusual?"

She pored over the bone for a moment, muttered, "I don't know. I don't think so. It just looks like a hunk of bone."

It was then that Thom walked past and glanced at the tray. "That's your clue? That's funny."

"Funny," Rhyme said. "Funny?"

Sellitto asked, "You got a theory?"

"No theory." He bent down and smelled it. "It's osso bucco."

"What?"

"Veal shank. I made it for you once, Lincoln. Osso bucco. Braised veal shank." He looked at Sachs and grimaced. "He said it needed more salt."

"Goddamn!" Sellitto cried. "He bought it at a grocery store!"

"If we're lucky," Rhyme said, "he bought it at his grocery store."

Cooper confirmed that the precipitin test showed negative for human blood on the samples Sachs had collected. "Probably bovine," he said.

"But what's he trying to tell us?" Banks asked.

Rhyme had no idea. "Let's keep going. Oh, anything on the chain and padlock?"