The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"They'll call us in the next half hour."

"Half hour?" Rhyme muttered. "Didn't they give it priority?"

"You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if the metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother--you get the picture--reaming their--you get the rest of the picture."

"Rhyme," Sachs said, "there's something else the Ganz woman said that might be important. He told her he'd let her go if she agreed to let him flail her foot."

"Flail?"

"Cut the skin off it."

"Flay," Rhyme corrected.

"Oh. Anyway, he didn't do anything. She said it was--in the end--like he couldn't bring himself to cut her."

"Just like the first scene--the man by the railroad tracks," Sellitto offered.

"Interesting . . ." Rhyme reflected. "I thought he'd cut the vic's finger to discourage anybody from stealing the ring. But maybe not. Look at his behavior: Cutting the finger off the cabbie and carrying it around. Cutting the German girl's arm and leg. Stealing the bones and the snake skeleton. Listening while he broke Everett's finger . . . There's something about the way he sees his victims. Something . . ."

"Anatomical?"

"Exactly, Sachs."

"Except the Ganz woman," Sellitto said.

"My point," Rhyme said. "He could've cut her and still kept her alive for us. But something stopped him. What?"

Sellitto said, "What's different about her? Can't be that she's a woman. Or she's from out of town. So was the German girl."

"Maybe he didn't want to hurt her in front of her daughter," Banks said.

"No," Rhyme said, laughing grimly, "compassion isn't his thing."

Sachs said suddenly, "But that is one thing different about her--she's a mother."

Rhyme considered this. "That could be it. Mother and daughter. It didn't carry enough weight for him to let them go. But it stopped him from torturing her. Thom, jot that down. With a question mark." He then asked Sachs, "Did she say anything else about the way he looked?"

Sachs flipped through her notebook.

"Same as before." She read. "Ski mask, slight build, black gloves, he--"

"Black gloves?" Rhyme looked at the chart on the wall. "Not red?"

"She said black. I asked her if she was sure."

"And that other bit of leather was black too, wasn't it, Mel? Maybe that was from the gloves. So what's the red leather from?"

Cooper shrugged. "I don't know but we found a couple pieces of it. So it's something close to him."

Rhyme looked over the evidence bags. "What else did we find?"

"The trace we vacuumed in the alley and by the doorway." Sachs tapped the filter over a sheet of newsprint and Cooper went over it with a loupe. "Plenty o' nothin'," he announced. "Mostly soil. Bits of minerals. Manhattan mica schist. Feldspar."

Which was found throughout the city.

"Keep going."

"Decomposed leaves. That's about it."