The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

'Yessir.'

They disconnected and a moment later the parlor phone rang once more. It was Pulaski's undercover phone.

'Rookie.'

'I'm sorry, Lincoln. I--'

'Don't apologize.'

'I didn't handle it very well.'

'I'm not so sure it worked out badly.'

There was a pause. 'What do you mean?'

'We learned one thing: Weller and his clients - the Logan family - don't have any connection with any of the Watchmaker's associates or any planned crimes. Otherwise, they wouldn't've dimed you out.'

'I guess.'

'You're free to go?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, the good news is we can let the Watchmaker rest in peace. No more distractions. We've got an unsub to catch. Get your ass back here. Now.'

He disconnected before the young officer said anything more.

It was then that Rhyme's phone rang and he received the news that there'd been a fourth attack.

And when he heard that the killing had been in a tattoo parlor in downtown Manhattan, he asked immediately which one.

Upon hearing that - not surprisingly - it was TT Gordon's shop, Rhyme sighed and lowered his head. 'No, no,' he whispered. For a moment Views of Death No. One and Two vied. Then the first prevailed and Rhyme called Sachs to tell her she had yet another scene to run.

CHAPTER 55

Amelia Sachs returned from the most recent crime scene in the Unsub 11-5 case. TT Gordon's tattoo parlor in the East Village.

It turned out, though, that Gordon himself was not the victim. He'd been out of the parlor when the unsub snuck inside, locked the door and proceeded into the back room for the lethal tattooing session. The body was that of one of the artists who worked in the parlor, a man named Eddie Beaufort. He was a transplant from South Carolina who'd moved to New York a few years ago and was, Sachs had learned from Gordon, making a name for himself in the inking world.

'We should've had somebody on the tattoo parlor, Rhyme,' she said.

'Who would've thought he'd be at risk?' Rhyme was truly surprised that the unsub had tracked the artist down. How? It seemed unlikely but possible that he'd followed Gordon from Rhyme's. But the tat community would be a small one and word must've gotten back to the killer that Gordon was helping with the case. The unsub would have heard and gone to the parlor to kill him. Finding he wasn't there, maybe he had just decided to make clear that it was a bad idea to assist the police and picked for a victim the first employee he found.

It was also time to send another message.

Sachs described the scene: Beaufort, lying on his back. His shirt was off and the unsub had tattooed another part of the puzzle on his abdomen. She slid the SD card from her camera and displayed the pictures on the screen.

Ron Pulaski, back from his car wreck of an undercover assignment, stood in front of the display with his arms crossed. 'They're not numerical order: the second, forty, seventeenth and the six hundredth.'

Rhyme said, 'Good point. He could have gone numerically if he'd wanted to. Either the order is significant - or he wanted to scramble them for some reason. And we're ordinal again, not cardinal. "Fort"Y is the only cardinal number.'

Mel Cooper now suggested, 'An encryption?'

That was a possibility. But there were far too many combinations and no common reference point. In breaking a simple code in which letters are converted to numbers, you can start with the knowledge that the letter 'e' appears most frequently in the English language and preliminarily assign that value to the most commonly occurring numbers in the code. But here, they had far too few numbers - and they were combined with words, which suggested that the numbers did not mean anything other than what they appeared to be, cryptic though that meaning was.

It could still be a location, but this number eliminated longitude or latitude. One or more addresses?

Pulaski said, 'Beaufort wasn't killed underground.'