The Bone Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 1)

"How about the Ganz woman's clothes?"

Cooper and Sachs opened the newspaper and examined the trace.

"Mostly soil," Cooper said. "And a few bits of what look like stone."

"Where did he keep her at his safe house? Exactly?"

"On the floor in the basement. She said it was a dirt floor."

"Excellent!" Rhyme shouted. To Cooper: "Burn it. The soil."

Cooper placed a sample in the GC-MS. They waited impatiently for the results. Finally the computer screen blinked. The grid resembled a lunar landscape.

"All right, Lincoln. Interesting. I'm reading off-the-charts for tannin and--"

"Sodium carbonate?"

"Ain't he amazin'?" Cooper laughed. "How'd you know?"

"They were used in tanneries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tannic acid cures the hide and the alkaline fixes it. So, his safe house is near the site of an old tannery."

He smiled. Couldn't help himself. He thought: You hear footsteps, 823? That's us behind you.

His eyes slipped to the Randel Survey map. "Because of the smell no one wanted tanneries in their neighborhoods so the commissioners restricted them. I know there were some on the Lower East Side. And in West Greenwich Village--when it literally was a village, a suburb of the city. And then on the far West Side in the Fifties--near the stockyard tunnel where we found the German girl. Oh, and in Harlem in the early 1900s."

Rhyme glanced at the list of grocery stores--the locations of the ShopRites that sold veal shanks. "Chelsea's out. No tanning there. Harlem too--no ShopRites there. So, it's the West Village, Lower East Side or Midtown West Side--Hell's Kitchen again. Which he seems to like."

Only about ten square miles, Rhyme estimated cynically. He'd figured out on his first day on the job that it was easier to hide in Manhattan than in the North Woods.

"Let's keep going. What about the stone in Carole's clothes?"

Cooper was bent over the microscope. "Okay. Got it."

"Patch it in to me, Mel."

Rhyme's computer screen burst to life and he watched the flecks of stone and crystal, like brilliant asteroids.

"Move it around," Rhyme instructed. Three substances were bonded together.

"The one on the left is marble, pinkish," Cooper said. "Like what we found before. And in between, that gray stuff . . ."

"It's mortar. And the other is

brownstone," Rhyme announced. "It's from a Federal-style building, like the 1812 City Hall. Only the front facade was marble; the rest was brownstone. They did it to save money. Well, they did it so the money appropriated for marble could find its way into various pockets. Now, what else do we have? The ash. Let's find the arson accelerant."

Cooper ran the ash sample through the GC-MS. He stared at the curve that appeared on the screen.

Newly refined gasoline, containing its manufacturer's dyes and additives, was unique and could be traced back to a single source, as long as different batches of gas weren't mixed together at the service station where the perp bought it. Cooper announced that the gasoline matched perfectly the brand sold by the Gas Exchange service stations.

Banks grabbed the Yellow Pages and flipped them open. "We've got six stations in Manhattan. Three downtown. One at Sixth Avenue and Houston. One on Delancey, 503 East. And one at Nineteenth and Eighth."

"Nineteenth's too far north," Rhyme said. He stared at the profile chart. "East Side or West. Which is it?"

Grocery stores, gasoline . . .

A lanky figure suddenly filled the doorway.

"I still invited to this here party?" Frederick Dellray asked.