The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"Fuck-all," Dellray muttered. "Mix the names up. Try variations. An' lookit phone-service accounts canceled in the past year for nonpayment."

For several minutes voices rose and fell like the tide.

Dellray paced manically and Sachs understood why his frame was so scrawny.

Suddenly an agent shouted, "Found him!"

Everyone turned to look.

"I'm on with NY DMV," another agent called. "They've got him. It's coming through now. . . . He's a cabbie. Got a hack license."

"Why don' that s'prise me," Dellray muttered. "Shoulda thoughta that. Where's home sweet home?"

"Morningside Heights. A block from the river." The agent wrote down the address and held it aloft as Dellray swept past and took it. "Know the neighborhood. Pretty deserted. Lotta druggies."

Another agent typed the address into his computer terminal. "Okay, checking deeds . . . Property's an old house. A bank's got title. He must be renting."

"You want HRT?" one agent called across the bustling room. "I got Quantico on the line."

"No time," Dellray announced. "Use the field office SWAT. Get 'em suited up."

Sachs asked, "And what about the next victim?"

"What next victim?"

"He's already taken somebody. He knows we've had the clues for an hour or two. He'd've planted the vic awhile ago. He had to."

"No reports of anybody missing," the agent said. "And if he did snatch 'em they're probably at his house."

"No, they wouldn't be."

"Why not?"

"They'd pick up too much PE," she said. "Lincoln Rhyme said he has a safe house."

"Well, then we'll get him to tell us where they are."

Another agent said, "We can be real persuasive."

"Let's move it," Dellray called. "Yo, ever'body, let's thank Officer Amelia Sachs here. She's the one found that print and lifted it."

She was blushing. Could feel it, hated it. But she couldn't help herself. As she glanced down she noticed strange lines on her shoes. Squinting, she realized she was still wearing the rubber bands.

When she looked up she saw a room full of unsmiling federal agents checking weapons and heading for the door as they glanced at her. The same way, she thought, lumberjacks look at logs.

NINETEEN

In 1911 a tragedy of massive dimension befell our fair city.

On March 25, hundreds of industrious young women were hard at work in a garment factory, one of the many, known notoriously as "sweat-shops", in Greenwich Village in downtown Manhattan.

So enamored of profits were the owners of this company that they denied the poor girls in their employ even the rudimentary facilities that slaves might enjoy. They believed the laborers could not be trusted to make expeditious visits to the rest-room facilities and so kept the doors to the cutting and sewing rooms under lock and key.

The bone collector was driving back to his building. He passed a squad car but he kept his eyes forward and the constables never noticed him.

On the day in question a fire started on the eighth floor of the building and within minutes swept through the factory, from which the young employees tried to flee. They were unable to escape, however, owing to the chained state of the door. Many died on the spot and many more, some horribly afire, leapt into the air a hundred feet above the cobblestones and died from the collision with unyielding Mother Earth.

There numbered 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The police, however, were confounded by the inability to locate one of the victims, a young woman, Esther Weinraub, whom several witnesses had seen leap in desperation from the eighth floor window. None of the other girls who similarly leapt survived the fall. Was it possible that she, miraculously, had? For when the bodies were laid out in the street for bereaved family member to identify, poor Miss Weinraub's was not to be found.