The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"Oh, no," Rhyme muttered.

The detective wiped his sweating face and nodded. "Central got a 9-1-1 from the night manager at this place? The Midtown Residence Hotel? Woman and her little girl called him from La Guardia, said they were just about to get a cab. That was a while ago; they never showed up. With all the news about the 'nappings he thought he should call. Her name's Carole Ganz. From Chicago."

"Hell," Banks muttered. "A little girl, too? Oughta just pull all the cabs off the streets till we nail his butt."

Rhyme was drenched with weariness. His head raged. He remembered working a crime scene at a bomb factory. Nitroglycerin had bled out of some dynamite and seeped into an armchair Rhyme had to search for trace. Nitro gave you blinding headaches.

The screen of Cooper's computer flickered. "E-mail," he announced and called up the message. He read the fine type.

"They've polarized all the samples of cello that ESU collected. They think the scrap we found in the bone at the Pearl Street scene was from a ShopRite grocery store. It's closest to the cello they use."

"Good," Rhyme called. He nodded at the poster. "Cross off all the grocery stores but the ShopRites. What locations do we have?"

He watched Thom ink through the stores, leaving four.

B'way & 82nd

Greenwich & Bank

8th Ave. & 24th

Houston & Lafayette

"That leaves us with the Upper West Side, West Village, Chelsea and the Lower East Side."

"But he could have gone anywhere to buy them."

"Oh, sure he could've, Sachs. He could've bought them in White Plains when he was stealing the car. Or in Cleveland visiting his mother. But see, there's a point when unsubs feel comfortable in their deception and they stop bothering to cover their tracks. The stupid--or lazy--ones toss the smoking gun in the Dumpster behind their building and go on their merry way. The smarter ones drop it in a bucket of Spackle and pitch it into Hell Gate. The brilliant ones sneak into a refinery and vaporize it in a five-thousand-degree-centigrade furnace. Our unsub's smart, sure. But he's like every other perp in the history of the world. He's got limits. I'm betting he thinks we won't have the time or inclination to look for him or his safe house because we'll be concentrating on the planted clues. And of course he's dead wrong. This is exactly how we'll find him. Now, let's see if we can't get a little closer to his lair. Mel, anything in the vic's clothes from the last scene?"

But the tidal water had washed away virtually everything from William Everett's clothing.

"You say they fought, Sachs? The unsub and this Everett?"

"Wasn't much of a fight. Everett grabbed his shirt."

Rhyme clicked his tongue. "I must be getting tired. If I'd thought about it I would have had you scrape under his nails. Even if he was underwater that's one place--"

"Here you go," she said, holding up two small plastic bags.

"You scraped?"

She nodded.

"But why're there two bags?"

Holding up one bag then the other she said, "Left hand, right hand."

Mel Cooper broke into a laugh. "Even you never thought about separate bags for scraping, Lincoln. It's a great idea."

Rhyme grunted. "Differentiating the hands might have some marginal forensic value."

"Whoa," Cooper said, laughing still. "That means he thinks it's a brilliant idea and he's sorry he didn't think of it first."

The tech examined the scrapings. "Got some brick here."

"There was no brick anywhere around the drainpipe or the field," Sachs said.

"It's fragments. But there's something attached to it. I can't tell what."