The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

As much as she wanted to go with them - she considered handing off the crime scene - Sachs finished dressing for the grid.

When she was gowned, bootied and hooded, she grabbed the collection kit and, with a glance back at the street down which the fish had swum away, Sachs started for the door of the restaurant.

CHAPTER 30

Sachs was grateful that, as at the previous scene, she didn't have to lug the heavy halogen spots down to the murder site; they were already set up and burning brightly.

Thank you, first responders.

She glanced at the diagram from Rhyme's database of underground New York to orient herself.

There were some similarities to the prior scene: the waterpipe, the utility conduits, the yellow boxes marked IFON. But there was a major difference too. This space was much bigger. And she could climb directly into it through the access doorway in the bathroom. No circular coffin breadbaskets.

Thank you ...

From the ancient wooden pens surrounding the dirt floor, she deduced that it had been part of a passageway to move animals to and from one of the stockyards that used to operate near here, in Hell's Kitchen. She remembered that the perp seemed to be influenced by the Bone Collector; that killer too had used a former slaughterhouse as a place to stash one of his victims - and staked her down, bloody, so she would be devoured alive by rats.

Unsub 11-5 certainly had learned at the feet of a master.

The access door in the restroom opened into a large octagon, from

which three tunnels disappeared into the darkness.

Sachs clicked on the video and audio feed. 'Rhyme? You there?'

'Ah, Sachs. I was wondering.'

'He might've come back again. Like on Elizabeth Street.'

'Returned to the scene?'

'Or never left. I saw someone on the street, matching. Bo Haumann's got officers checking it out.'

'Anything?'

'Not yet.'

'Why's he coming back?' Rhyme mused. Not expecting an answer.

The camera was pointed in the direction she was looking - toward the dimness of a tunnel's end. Before turning to the body, though, she slipped rubber bands over her booties and tracked along the unsub's footprints, also muted by protective plastic, which led down one of the tunnels.

'That's how he got in? I can't see clearly.'

'Looks that way, Rhyme. I see some lights up ahead.'

The perp hadn't used a manhole to gain access. This tunnel, one of three, opened onto a train track - the line running north from Penn Station. The opening was largely obscured by a pile of debris but there was plenty of room for a person to climb over it. The unsub had simply walked up or down the tracks, from a spot near the West Side Highway, and then scaled the rubble and made his way to the octagon-shaped space where Samantha had died. She radioed Jean Eagleston and told her about the secondary crime scene - the entrance/exit route.

Then Sachs returned to the center of the octagon, where the victim lay. She looked up and shielded her eyes from the brilliant halogens the medics had set up. 'Another flashlight, Rhyme. He sure wants to be certain nobody misses the vic.'

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Like Chloe, Samantha was handcuffed and her ankles duct-taped. She'd also been partially disrobed - but only to expose her abdomen, where the unsub had inked her. A fast examination revealed no apparent sexual contact here either. Indeed, there was something oddly chaste about the way he'd left both victims. This was, she reflected, eerier than a straight-up sex crime - since it suggested the underlying mystery of the case: Why was he doing this? Rape, at least, was categorical. This?

She gazed down at the tattoo.

Rhyme's voice intruded on the quiet. '"forty". Lowercase again. Part of the phrase. Cardinal number this time, not the ordinal "fortieth". Why?' Testily he added, 'Well, no time to speculate. Let's get going.'

She processed the body, scraping nails (nothing obvious this time, as with Chloe), taking samples of the blood, the body fluids and presumably the poison oozing from the wounds. Then scanning her for prints, though he'd worn gloves again, of course.