The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"Not yet," Rhyme said.

"Where's Polling?" Sellitto muttered. "He still hasn't answered his page."

"Haven't seen him," Rhyme said.

A figure appeared in the doorway.

"As I live and breathe," rumbled the stranger's smooth baritone.

Rhyme nodded the lanky man inside. He was somber-looking but his lean face suddenly cracked into a warm smile, as it tended to do at odd moments. Terry Dobyns was the sum total of the NYPD's behavioral science department. He'd studied with the FBI behaviorists down at Quantico and had degrees in forensic science and psychology.

The psychologist loved opera and touch football and when Lincoln Rhyme had awakened in the hospital after the accident three and a half years ago Dobyns had been sitting beside him listening to Aida on a Walkman. He'd then spent the next three hours conducting what turned out to be the first of many counseling sessions about Rhyme's injury.

"Now what's this I recall the textbooks sayin' 'bout people who don't return phone calls?"

"Analyze me later, Terry. You hear about our unsub?"

"A bit," Dobyns said, looking Rhyme over. He wasn't an M.D. but he knew physiology. "You all right, Lincoln? Looking a little peaked."

"I'm getting a bit of a workout today," Rhyme admitted. "And I could use a nap. You know what a lazy SOB I am."

"Yeah, right. You're the man'd call me at three in the morning with some question about a perp and couldn't understand why I was in the sack. So what's up? You fishin' for a profile?"

"Whatever you can tell us'll help."

Sellitto briefed Dobyns, who--as Rhyme recalled from the days they worked together--never took notes but managed to retain everything he heard inside a head crowned with dark-red hair.

The psychologist paced in front of the wall chart, glancing up at it occasionally as he listened to the detective's rumbling voice.

He held up a finger, interrupting Sellitto. "The victims, the victims . . . They've all been found underground. Buried, in a basement, in the stockyard tunnel."

"Right," Rhyme confirmed.

"Go on."

Sellitto continued, explaining about the rescue of Monelle Gerger.

"Fine, all right," Dobyns said absently. Then braked to a halt and turned to the wall again. He spread his legs and, hands on hips, gazed at the sparse facts about Unsub 823. "Tell me more about this idea of yours, Lincoln. That he likes old things."

"I don't know what to make of it. So far his clues have something to do with historical New York. Building materials from the turn of the century, the stockyards, the steam system."

Dobyns stepped forward suddenly and tapped the profile. "Hanna. Tell me about Hanna."

"Amelia?" Rhyme asked.

She told Dobyns how the unsub had referred to Monelle Gerger as Hanna for no apparent reason. "She said he seemed to like saying the name. And speaking to her in German."

"And he took a bit of a chance to 'nap her, didn't he?" Dobyns noted. "The cab, at the airport--that was safe for him. But hiding in a laundry room . . . He must've been real motivated to snatch somebody German."

Dobyns twined some ruddy hair around a lengthy finger and flopped down in one of the squeaky rattan chairs, stretched his feet out in front of him.

"Okay, try this on for size. The underground . . . that's the key. It tells me he's somebody who's hiding something and when I hear that I start thinking hysteria."

"He's not acting hysterical," Sellitto said. "He's pretty damn calm and calculating."

"Not hysteria in that sense. It's a category of mental disorders. The condition manifests when something traumatic happens in a patient's life and the subconscious converts that trauma into something else. It's an attempt to protect the patient. With traditional conversion hysteria you see physical symptoms--nausea, pain, paralysis. But I think here we're dealing with a related problem. Dissociation--that's what we call it when the reaction to the trauma affects the mind, not the physical body. Hysterical amnesia, fugue states. And multiple personalities."

"Jekyll and Hyde?" Mel Cooper played straight man this time, beating Banks to the punch.