The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"Will do," Sellitto said, though uneasily, perhaps smelling the faint stench of burned federal evidence wafting through the air.

"The footprints?" Sachs asked.

Rhyme looked over the electrostatic impressions she'd lifted.

"Unusual wear on the soles. See the rubbed-down portion on the outsides of each shoe at the b

all of the foot?"

"Pigeon-toed?" Thom wondered aloud.

"Possibly but there's no corresponding heel wear, which you'd expect to see." Rhyme studied the prints. "What I think is, he's a reader."

"A reader?"

"Sit in a chair there," Rhyme said to Sachs. "And hunch over the table, pretend you're reading."

She sat, then looked up. "And?"

"Pretend you're turning pages."

She did, several times. Looked up again.

"Keep going. You're reading War and Peace."

The pages kept turning, her head was bowed. After a moment, without thinking, she crossed her ankles. The outside edges of her shoes were the only part that met the floor.

Rhyme pointed this out. "Put that in the profile, Thom. But add a question mark.

"Now let's look at the friction ridges."

Sachs said she didn't have the good fingerprint, the one they'd ID'd the unsub with. "It's still at the federal building."

But Rhyme wasn't interested in that print. It was the other one, the Kromekote Sachs had lifted from the German girl's skin, he wanted to look at.

"Not scannable," Cooper announced. "Isn't even C grade. I wouldn't give an opinion about this if I had to."

Rhyme said, "I'm not interested in identity. I'm interested in that line there." It was crescent-shaped and sat right in the middle of the pad of the finger.

"What is it?" Sachs asked.

"A scar, I think," Cooper said. "From an old cut. A bad one. Looks like it went all the way to the bone."

Rhyme thought back to other markings and defects he'd seen on skin over the years. In the days before jobs became mostly paper shuffling and computer keyboarding it was far easier to tell people's jobs by examining their hands: distorted finger pads from manual typewriters, punctures from sewing machines and cobbler's needles, indentations and ink stains from stenographers' and accountants' pens, paper cuts from printing presses, scars from die cutters, distinctive calluses from various types of manual labor. . . .

But a scar like this told them nothing.

Not yet at any rate. Not until they had a suspect whose hands they might examine.

"What else? The knee print. This is good. Give us an idea of what he's wearing. Hold it up, Sachs. Higher! Baggy slacks. It retained that deep crease there so it's natural fiber. In this weather, I'll bet cotton. Not wool. You don't see silk slacks much nowadays."

"Lightweight, not denim," Cooper said.

"Sports clothes," Rhyme concluded. "Add that to our profile, Thom."

Cooper looked back at the computer screen and typed some more. "No luck with the leaf. Doesn't match anything at the Smithsonian."

Rhyme stretched back into his pillow. How much time would they have? An hour? Two?