The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

He walked from terrarium to terrarium. Foxglove, hemlock, tobacco, angel's trumpets. He'd developed a fondness for the plants and the toxins they produced. He flipped through some of the sketches he'd done.

He slipped them away in his backpack, along with the Modification Commandment notebook. Although he'd written at the end of the Commandments an instruction that amounted to: Thou shalt destroy this holy book itself, he couldn't bring himself to do so. He wasn't sure where this reluctance to shred the pages came from. Perhaps it was that the Commandments were the means to fix the pain he'd endured because of the loss of Lovely Girl.

Or maybe because it was simply a marvelous work of art, the sentences so carefully written in Billy's elegant script - as intricate as a ten-color mod on virgin white skin using a dozen different lining needles and six or seven shaders. Too beautiful to hide from the world.

He zipped up his backpack and then walked to the workbench and packed a half-dozen tools and a heavy-duty extension cord into a canvas gear bag. He added a large, sealed thermos. Then pulled on a tan leather jacket and a dark-green Mets cap.

His watch hummed. Then, the second reminder.

Time to make right all the wrongs of this troubled world.

CHAPTER 52

Lincoln Rhyme was back in his parlor.

He'd awakened several times, wrestling with the puzzle of the tattoos. No insights had blossomed. Then he'd fallen back to a sleep filled with dreams as pointless as most were. He was fully awake at six a.m. and summoned Thom for an expedited morning routine.

Pulaski, Cooper and Sachs were back too and they huddled in the parlor, wrestling with the same mysteries that had refused to unravel when the hour hit midnight.

Rhyme heard the buzz of a mobile and looked across the room to see Pulaski pulling his phone from his pocket. It was the prepaid, not his own iPhone, that was humming.

Which meant the undercover operation.

The young man looked down at the screen. And that deer-in-the-headlights look formed. The officer had changed from his funereal outfit but had dressed undercover nonetheless: jeans, a T-shirt and a V-neck sweater, dark blue. Running shoes. Not exactly a Mafia thug attire but better than a Polo shirt and Dockers.

The criminalist said, 'It's the lawyer? From the funeral home?'

Pulaski said, 'Right. Should I let him leave a message?'

'He won't. Answer it. Ever

ybody else, quiet!'

For a moment Rhyme thought Pulaski was going to freeze. But the young man's eyes grew focused and he lifted the phone. For some reason he turned away from the others so he could carry on a more or less private conversation.

Rhyme wanted to hear but he'd delegated the job of finding the deceased Watchmaker's associates - whether innocent or lethal - to Pulaski and it was no longer Rhyme's job to micromanage. It wasn't even his position to tell the officer what to do or how to do it. Rhyme was merely a civilian consultant; Pulaski was the official law enforcer.

After a few minutes Pulaski disconnected and turned back. 'Weller wants to see me. One of his clients, too.'

Rhyme lifted his eyebrow. That was even better.

'He's staying at the Huntington Arms. West Fifty-Sixth.'

Rhyme shook his head. He didn't know the hotel. But Mel Cooper looked up the place. 'One of those boutiques on the West Side.'

It was just north of Hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood of the city - named after a dangerous 'hood in Victorian London - that had at one point been a thug-infested den of crime. Now it was gentrification personified, though occasional blocks of decrepit color remained. The hotel the man described, Cooper explained, was in a block in which were tucked overpriced restaurants and hotels.

Pulaski said, 'We're going to meet in a half hour. How should I handle it?'

'Mel, what's the layout of the neighborhood and the hotel?'

The tech went to Google Earth on one computer and the New York Department of Buildings on another. In less than sixty seconds he slapped onto the main monitor an overhead view of the street and a blueprint of the hotel itself.

There was an outdoor patio, on 56th, which would have been a great place for surveillance if the weather had been less Arctic, but the meeting would take place inside today.

'Sachs, can we get a surveillance team in the lobby?'

'I'll call. See what I can do.' After a few minutes on the phone, she said, 'No time to go through channels. But I pulled some strings at Major Cases. There'll be two undercovers inside in twenty minutes.'