The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

'But that woman was killed underground too. Right? In a tunnel. It was on the news.'

The scrawny young artistic-looking man, who'd identified himself as Raoul, Samantha's roommate, said, 'That's right. It was the same thing. The, you know, MO.'

Sachs again demurred. She and Sellitto asked a few more questions but it was soon clear there was nothing more these people could help them with.

Wrong place, wrong time.

A happenstance victim ...

Ultimately, in cases where the victim had been alone with the perpetrator, no witnesses, the truth would have to be revealed through the evidence.

And this was what Sachs and the other Crime Scene officers now packed carefully into the trunk of her Torino.

In five minutes she was racing up the West Side Highway, blue light on the dash pulsing madly, as she skidded around cars and trucks - the slaloming more a function of her powerful engine and her comfort in high revs than the inclement weather.

CHAPTER 31

At close to eleven p.m. Rhyme heard Sachs enter the hallway, her arrival announced by the modulating hiss of sleet-filled wind.

'Ah, finally.'

She stepped into the parlor a moment later, holding a large milk crate containing a dozen plastic and paper bags. She nodded a greeting to Mel Cooper, who sagged with fatigue but seemed game to start on the analysis.

Rhyme asked quickly, 'Sachs, you said you thought he might be around the scene?'

'That's right.'

'What came of that?'

'Nothing. Bo sent a half-dozen ESU boys and girls after him. But he was gone. And I didn't get a good look at him. It was maybe nothing. But my gut told me it was him.' She called up a map of Hell's Kitchen on the main computer monitor and pointed out the restaurant, Provence2, and on the corner an office building. 'He went down there but, see? It's only a few blocks from Times Square. He got lost in the crowd. Not sure it was him but it's too much of a coincidence to ignore completely. He seems curious about the investigation; after all, the perp did come back to Elizabeth Street and spied on me through the manhole cover.'

Eye-to-eye ...

'Well, let's get to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?'

Thom Reston said firmly, 'Find out - what she has, that is - but find out quickly. Y

ou're going to bed soon, Lincoln. It's been a long day.'

Rhyme scowled. But he also accepted that the caregiver's job was to keep him healthy and alive. Quadriplegics were susceptible to a number of troublesome conditions, the most dangerous of which was autonomic dysreflexia - a spike in blood pressure brought on by physical stress. It wasn't clear that exhaustion was a precipitating factor but Thom had never been one to take anything for granted.

'Yes, yes, yes. Just a few minutes.'

'Nothing spectacular,' Sachs said, nodding at the evidence.

But then, Rhyme reflected, there rarely were any smoking guns. Crime scene work was incremental. And obvious finds, he felt, were automatically suspect; they might be planted evidence. Which happened more than one might suspect.

First, Sachs displayed the photographs of the tattoo.

Surrounded by the scalloped border that, according to TT Gordon, was in some way significant.

Which made its cryptic nature all the more infuriating.

'First "the second" and now "forty". No article preceding this one but, again, no punctuation.'

What the hell was he saying? A gap of thirty-eight from two to forty. And why the switch from ordinal to cardinal? Rhyme mused, 'Smells like a place to me, an address. GPS or longitude and latitude coordinates. But not enough to go on yet.'

He gave up speculating and turned back to the evidence she'd collected. Sachs selected a bag and gave it to Cooper. He extracted the cotton ball inside.