The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

Sachs said, 'Could we--?'

But she never got to finish her plea to the teenager, for just then her phone hummed. It was a text from Mel Cooper. He was asking her to get to Rhyme's town house as soon as she could.

Actually, she noted, the message wasn't a request at all.

It never really is when the word 'emergency' figures in the header.

CHAPTER 47

Upon examining the back door to Rhyme's town house, a gowned and gloved Amelia Sachs decided: The son of a bitch sure can pick locks.

Unsub 11-5 hadn't left more than a minute scratch when he'd broken into the town house to doctor a bottle of scotch on Rhyme's shelf - insidiously leaving it within the wheelchair-bound criminalist's reach. Sachs wasn't surprised the unsub had some skill at breaking and entering; his talent at skin art attested to his dexterity.

The sleet spattered and the wind blew. By now any evidence in the cul-de-sac and around the back door had probably been obliterated. Inside the door, where footprints would have been visible, she discovered nothing other than marks left by his booties.

The strategy behind the assault was now clear: 11-5 had called in a false alarm - an attempted rape in Central Park, near the town house. When Rhyme and the others inside went to the front door to see what was going on, the unsub had snuck through the back and found an open bottle of whisky, poured some poison inside, then escaped silently.

Sachs walked the grid on the route from the back door up the stairs, through the hall from the kitchen to the parlor. Rhyme had an alarm system, which was turned off when the town house was occupied, as now. Video cameras covered the front and back doors but they were real-time monitoring only; the images weren't recorded.

A sense of violation filled Sachs. Somebody had breached the castle, somebody stealthy and adroit. And deadly. Thom had already arranged for the locks to be changed and a drop bar put on both doors but once someone has intruded into your living area, you're never completely free from the taint of desecration. And from worry that it might happen again.

Finally she arrived at the main floor and handed the bagged trace off to Mel Cooper.

Lincoln Rhyme turned his Merits wheelchair around from the table where he'd been reviewing

evidence and asked, 'Well? Anything?'

'Not much,' Sachs told him. 'Not much at all.'

Rhyme wasn't surprised.

Not with Unsub 11-5.

Sachs looked him over carefully, as if he'd actually sipped some of the poisoned whisky.

Or maybe she was just troubled that the unsub had gotten inside, spiked the bottle and gotten out without anybody's knowing.

Lord knew Rhyme himself was. Actually more pissed off than troubled - because he hadn't deduced that the whisky was tainted, even though, looking back, he should have. It was obvious that Thom would never leave a nearly full bottle of forty-proof liquor within his boss's reach. Combine that with the facts that Lon Sellitto and Seth McGuinn had been attacked and that a police action had unfolded right outside his town house, a perfect diversion, and, yeah, Rhyme should have guessed.

But, on the contrary, the salvation had come from a call to 911. A passerby on the cross street had seen someone slip into the service area behind Rhyme's and pocket a hypodermic. 'Looking suspicious,' the Good Samaritan had reported. 'A drug thing, maybe going to break in, you know.'

The dispatcher had called Rhyme, who understood immediately that the mis-shelved Glenmorangie was Snow White's apple.

He'd glanced at the glass in his hands and realized that he'd come an instant away from a very unpleasant demise, though less unpleasant to him than to others, given that most of his body would not have felt the excruciating pain the poison causes.

But he'd tucked this shadow of mortality away because he was a man for whom death had been an easy option - voluntary and otherwise - for years. His condition, quadriplegia, brought with it many accessories that could dump him into a coffin at a moment's notice: dysreflexia and sepsis, for instance.

So, an attempted poisoning? Good news, as far as he was concerned. It might reveal new evidence to lead them a bit closer to the man who was the spiritual heir to the Bone Collector.

CHAPTER 48

Something was up.

Ron Pulaski had been told that there was no memorial service planned for Richard Logan.

But apparently that had changed.

Six people stood in the room he'd been directed to in the Berkowitz Funeral Home, Broadway and 96th.