The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"It's a snake--well, a snake's skeleton," Sachs told Rhyme. "A rattlesnake. Fuck." Holstered the Glock. "It's mounted on a board."

"A snake? Interesting." Rhyme sounded intrigued.

"Yeah, real interesting," she muttered. She pulled on latex gloves and lifted the coiled bones. She turned it over. " 'Metamorphosis.' "

"What?"

"A label on the bottom. The name of the store it came from, I'd guess. 604 Broadway."

Rhyme said, "I'll have the Hardy Boys check it out. What've we got? Tell me the clues."

They were underneath the snake. In a Baggie. Her heart pounded as she crouched down over the bag.

"A book of matches," she said.

"Okay, maybe he's thinking arson. Anything printed on them?"

"Nope. But there's a smear of something. Like Vaseline. Only stinky."

"Good, Sachs--always smell evidence you're not sure about. Only be more precise."

She bent close. "Yuck."

"That's not precise."

"Sulfur maybe."

"Could be nitrate-based. Explosive. Tovex. Is it blue?"

"No, it's milky clear."

"Even if it could go bang I imagine it's a secondary explosive. They're the stable ones. Anything else?"

"Another scrap of paper. Something on it."

"What, Sachs? His name, his address, e-mail handle?"

"Looks like it's from a magazine. I can see a small black-and-white photo. Looks like part of a building but you can't see which one. And underneath that, all you can read is a date. May 20, 1906."

"Five, twenty, oh-six. I wonder if it's a code. Or an address. I'll have to think about it. Anything else?"

"Nope."

She heard him sigh. "All right, come on back, Sachs. What time is it? My God, almost one a.m. I haven't been up this late in years. Come on back and let's see what we have."

Of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Lower East Side has remained the most unchanged over the course of the city's history.

Much of it's gone of course: The rolling pastoral fields. The solid mansions of John Hancock and early government luminaries. Der Kolek, the large freshwater lake (its Dutch name eventually corrupted to "The Collect," which more accurately described the grossly polluted pond). The notorious Five Points neighborhood--in the early 1800s the most dangerous square mile on earth--where a single tenement, like the decrepit Gates of Hell, might be the site of two or three hundred murders every year.

But thousands of the old buildings remained--tenements from the nineteenth century and Colonial frame houses and Federal brick townhomes from the prior one, Baroque meeting halls, several of the Egyptian-style public buildings constructed by order of the regally corrupt Congressman Fernando Wood. Some were abandoned, their facades overgrown with weeds and floors cracked by persistent saplings. But many were still in use; this had been the land of Tammany Hall iniquity, of pushcarts and sweat-shops, of the Henry Street Settlement house, Minsky's burlesque and the notorious Yiddish Gomorra--the Jewish Mafia. A neighborhood that gives birth to institutions like these does not die easily.

It was toward this neighborhood that the bone collector now piloted the taxi containing the thin woman and her young daughter.

Observing that the constabulary was on to him, James Schneider went once again to ground like the serpent that he was, seeking accommodations--it is speculated--in the cellars of the city's many tenant-houses (which the reader may perchance recognize as the still-prevalent "tenements"). And so he remained, quiescent for some months.

As he drove home, the bone collector saw around him not the Manhattan of the 1990s--the Korean delis, the dank bagel shops, the X-rated-video stores, the empty clothing boutiques--but a dreamy world of bowler-clad men, women in rustling crinoline, hems and cuffs filthy with street refuse. Hordes of buggies and wagons, the air filled with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes repulsive scent of methane.

But such was the foul, indefatigable drive within him to start his collection anew that he was soon forced from his lair to waylay yet another good citizen;--this, a young man newly arrived in town to attend university.