The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

She shot him a coy glance. 'Rhyme, if I were to look over your phone log would I find any outgoing calls to Pam recently?'

'When would I possibly have had time to chat with anybody? Anyway, I'm hardly a chatterer. Do I seem like a chatterer to you?'

'That's evading the question.'

'If you looked at my log, no, you wouldn't find any calls to Pam. Recently or unrecently.'

This was true; he'd deleted them.

Of course, he'd forgotten that Sachs might pick up on the conspiracy after he'd messengered Pam the new key a few days ago, after their, all right, 'chat'.

Sachs gave a laugh, leaned forward and kissed him hard, then headed out the door to help with the move.

Leaving Rhyme to do what he'd been looking forward to for some hours. He wheeled back to the examination table.

On a sterile tray sat a small bit of off-white resin or plastic or clay, which had been discovered lodged in the

wristwatch band of a banker murdered last night on the Upper East Side. The murder itself wasn't remarkable - Rhyme was solidly in View of Death Number One mode here - but what struck him as unusual was that the body was found near a construction site between Madison and Park Avenues: The western wall of the foundation was about ten feet from an underground tunnel that led, after some maze-like twists, directly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's underground archives.

The crime scene indicated that there had been a fierce struggle. It seemed likely that the source of the beige evidence in the watchband had been the killer and that it could tell reams about the man or woman who'd taken the victim's life.

But until the material was identified and its source determined, that tentative conclusion was a mere wisp of supposition. It had to be either proven valid and recorded on a whiteboard, or proven false and discarded like the autumn leaves now largely stripped from the trees outside his window. Rhyme now prepared a sample for the chromatograph and wheeled to the humming machine, to see which of those two alternatives might prove to be the case.