The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

Billy + Lovely Girl 4 Ever

Interesting idea. But thinking about Lovely Girl made him sad and he returned to Chloe, finishing the last of the letters.

Good.

A Billy Mod.

But not quite finished yet. He extracted a scalpel from a dark-green toothbrush container and reached forward, stretching out the marvelous skin once more.

CHAPTER 3

One can view death in two ways.

In the discipline of forensic science an investigator looks at death abstractly, considers it to be merely an event that gives rise to a series of tasks. Good forensic cops view that event as if through the lens of history; the best see death as fiction, and the victim as someone who never existed at all.

Detachment is a necessary tool for crime scene work, just like latex gloves and alternative light sources.

As he sat in the red-and-gray Merits wheelchair in front of the window of his Central Park West town house, Lincoln Rhyme happened to be thinking of a recent death in just this way. Last week a man had been murdered downtown, a mugging gone wrong. Just after leaving his office in the city's Department of Environmental Protection, mid-evening, he'd been pulled into a deserted construction site across the street. Rather than give up his wallet, he'd chosen to fight and, no match for the perp, he'd been stabbed to death.

The case, whose file sat in front of him now, was mundane, and the sparse evidence typical of such a murder: a cheap weapon, a serrated-edge kitchen knife, dotted with fingerprints not on file at IAFIS or anywhere else, indistinct footprints in the slush that had coated the ground that night, and no trace or trash or cigarette butts that weren't day-or week-old trace or trash or cigarette butts. And therefore useless. To all appearances it was a random crime; there were no springboards to likely perps. The officers had interviewed the victim's fellow employees in the public works department and talked to friends and family. There'd been no drug connections, no dicey business deals, no jealous lovers, no jealous spouses of lovers.

Given the paltry evidence, the case, Rhyme knew, would be solved only one way: Someone would carelessly boast about scoring a wallet near City Hall. And the boastee, collared for drugs or domestic abuse or petty larce, would cut a deal by giving up the boaster.

This crime, a mugging gone wrong, was death observed from a distance, to Lincoln Rhyme. Historical. Fictional.

View number one.

The second way to regard death is from the heart: when a human being with whom you have a true connection is no longer of this earth. And the other death on Rhyme's mind on this blustery, grim day was affecting him as deeply as th

e mugging victim's killing was not.

Rhyme wasn't close to many people. This was not a function of his physical condition - he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down. No, he'd never been a people person. He was a science person. A mind person.

Oh, there'd been a few friends he'd been close to, some relatives, lovers. His wife, now ex.

Thom, his aide.

Amelia Sachs, of course.

But the second man who'd died several days ago had, in one sense, been closer than all of the others, and for this reason: He'd challenged Rhyme like no one else, forced him to think beyond the expansive boundaries where his own mind roamed, forced him to anticipate and strategize and question. Forced him to fight for his life too; the man had come very close to killing him.

The Watchmaker was the most intriguing criminal Rhyme had ever encountered. A man of shifting identities, Richard Logan was primarily a professional killer, though he'd orchestrated an alpha-omega of crimes, from terrorist attacks to robbery. He would work for whoever paid his hefty fee - provided the job was, yes, challenging enough. Which was the same criterion Rhyme used when deciding to take on a case as a consulting forensic scientist.

The Watchmaker was one of the few criminals able to outthink him. Although Rhyme had eventually set the trap that landed Logan in prison he still stung from his failure to stop several plots that were successful. And even when he failed, the Watchmaker sometimes managed to wreak havoc. In a case in which Rhyme had derailed the attempted killing of a Mexican officer investigating drug cartels, Logan had still provoked an international incident (it was finally agreed to seal the records and pretend the attempted hit had never happened).

But now the Watchmaker was gone.

The man had died in prison - not murdered by a fellow inmate or a suicide, which Rhyme had first suspected upon hearing the news. No, the COD was pedestrian - cardiac arrest, though massive. The doctor, whom Rhyme had spoken to yesterday, reported that even if they'd been able to bring Logan around he would have had permanent and severe brain damage. Though medicos did not use phrases like 'his death was a blessing,' that was the impression Rhyme took from the doctor's tone.

A blast of temperamental November wind shook the windows of Rhyme's town house. He was in the building's front parlor - the place in which he felt more comfortable than anywhere else in the world. Created as a Victorian sitting room, it was now a fully decked-out forensic lab, with spotless tables for examining evidence, computers and high-def monitors, racks of instruments, sophisticated equipment like fume and particulate control hoods, latent fingerprint imaging chambers, microscopes - optical and scanning electron - and the centerpiece: a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, the workhorse of forensic labs.

Any small-or even medium-sized police department in the country might envy the setup, which had cost millions. All paid for by Rhyme himself. The settlement after the accident on a crime scene rendering him a quad had been quite substantial; so were the fees that he charged the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies that hired him. (There were occasional offers from other sources that might produce revenue, such as Hollywood's proposals for TV shows based on the cases he'd worked. The Man in the Chair was one suggested title. Rhyme and Reason another. Thom had translated his boss's response to these overtures - 'Are they out of their fucking minds?' - as, 'Mr Rhyme has asked me to convey his appreciation for your interest. But he's afraid he has too many commitments at this point for a project like that.')

Rhyme now turned his chair around and stared at a delicate and beautiful pocket watch sitting in a holder on the mantelpiece. A Breguet. It happened to be a present from the Watchmaker himself.

His mourning was complex and reflected the dual views of death he'd been thinking of. Certainly there were analytical - forensic - reasons to be troubled by the loss. He'd now never be able to probe the man's mind to his satisfaction. As the nickname suggested, Logan was obsessed with time and timepieces - he actually made watches and clocks - and that was how he plotted out his crimes, with painstaking precision. Ever since their paths first crossed, Rhyme had marveled at how Logan's thought processes worked. He even hoped that the man would allow him a prison visit so that they could talk about the chess-match-like crimes he'd planned out.

Logan's death also left some other, practical concerns. The prosecutor had offered Logan a plea bargain, a reduced sentence in exchange for giving up the names of some of the people who'd hired him and whom he'd worked with; the man clearly had an extensive network of criminal colleagues whose identities the police would like to learn. There were rumors too of plots Logan had put together before he'd gone to prison.