The Bone Collector

Crying, pleading through the tape.

Knowing what was coming.

The hands moved down, along her arms, and then under them and around the front of her body. But he didn’t touch her breasts. No, as the hands spidered across her skin they seemed to be searching for her ribs. He prodded them and stroked. T.J. shivered and tried to pull away. He gripped her tight and caressed some more, pressing hard, feeling the give of the bone.

He stood. She heard receding footsteps. For a long moment there was silence except for the groans of air conditioners and elevators. Then she barked a frightened grunt at a sound right behind her. A repetitive noise. Wsssh. Wsssh. Very familiar but something she couldn’t place. She tried to turn to see what he was doing but couldn’t. What was it? Listening to the rhythmic sound, over and over and over. It took her right back to her mother’s house.

Wsssh. Wsssh.

Saturday morning in the small bungalow in Bedford, Te

He saw surprise and discomfort on their faces.

Something you don’t find very often with New York City homicide cops.

Lon Sellitto and young Banks (Jerry, not Ernie) sat where Rhyme gestured with his bush-crowned head: twin dusty, uncomfortable rattan chairs.

Rhyme had changed considerably since Sellitto had last been here and the detective didn’t hide his shock very well. Banks had no benchmark against which to judge what he was seeing but he was shocked nonetheless. The sloppy room, the vagrant gazing at them suspiciously. The smell too certainly – the visceral aroma surrounding the creature Lincoln Rhyme now was.

He immensely regretted letting them up.

“Why didn’t you call first, Lon?”

“You would’ve told us not to come.”

True.

Thom crested the stairs and Rhyme preempted him. “No, Thom, we won’t be needing you.” He’d remembered that the young man always asked guests if they wanted something to drink or eat.

Such a goddamn Martha Stewart.

Silence for a moment. Large, rumpled Sellitto – a twenty-year vet – glanced down into a box beside the bed and started to speak. Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off by the sight of disposable adult diapers.

Jerry Banks said, “I read your book, sir.” The young cop had a bad hand when it came to shaving, lots of nicks. And what a charming cowlick in his hair! My good Lord, he can’t be more than twelve. The more worn the world gets, Rhyme reflected, the younger its inhabitants seem to be.

“Which one?”

“Well, your crime scene manual, of course. But I meant the picture book. The one a couple years ago.”

“There were words too. It was mostly words, in fact. Did you read them?”

“Oh, well, sure,” Banks’ said quickly.

A huge stack of remaindered volumes of The Scenes of the Crime sat against one wall of his room.

“I didn’t know you and Lon were friends,” Banks added.

“Ah, Lon didn’t trot out the yearbook? Show you the pictures? Strip his sleeve and show his scars and say these wounds I had with Lincoln Rhyme?”

Sellitto wasn’t smiling. Well, I can give him even less to smile about if he likes. The senior detective was digging through his attaché case. And what does he have in there?

“How long were you partnered?” Banks asked, making conversation.

“There’s a verb for you,” Rhyme said. And looked at the clock.

“We weren’t partners,” Sellitto said. “I was Homicide, he was head of IRD.”

“Oh,” Banks said, even more impressed. Ru

“Yeah,” Rhyme said, looking out the window, as if his doctor might be arriving via falcon. “The two musketeers.”

In a patient voice, which infuriated Rhyme, Sellitto said, “Seven years, off and on, we worked together.”

“And good years they were,” Rhyme intoned.

Thom scowled but Sellitto missed the irony. Or more likely ignored it. He said, “We have a problem, Lincoln. We need some help.”

Snap. The stack of papers landed on the bedside table.

“Some help?” The laugh exploded from the narrow nose Elaine had always suspected was the product of a surgeon’s vision though it was not. She also thought his lips were too perfect (Add a scar, she’d once joked and during one of their fights she nearly had). And why, he wondered, does her voluptuous apparition keep rising today? He’d wakened thinking about his ex and had felt compelled to write her a letter, which was on the computer screen at that moment. He now saved the document on the disk. Silence filled the room as he entered the commands with a single finger.

“ Lincoln?” Sellitto asked.

“Yessir. Some help. From me. I heard.”

Banks kept an inappropriate smile on his face while he shuffled his butt uneasily in the chair.

“I’ve got an appointment in, well, any minute now,” Rhyme said.

“An appointment.”

“A doctor.”

“Really?” Banks asked, probably to murder the silence that loomed again.

Sellitto, not sure where the conversation was going, asked, “And how’ve you been?”

Banks and Sellitto hadn’t asked about his health when they’d arrived. It was a question people tended to avoid when they saw Lincoln Rhyme. The answer risked being a very complicated, and almost certainly an unpleasant, one.

He said simply, “I’ve been fine, thanks. And you? Betty?”

“We’re divorced,” Sellitto said quickly.

“Really?”

“She got the house and I got half a kid.” The chunky cop said this with forced cheer, as if he’d used the line before, and Rhyme supposed there was a painful story behind the breakup. One he had no desire to hear. Still, he wasn’t surprised that the marriage had tanked. Sellitto was a workhorse. He was one of the hundred or so first-grade detectives on the force and had been for years – he got the grade when they were handed out for merit not just time served. He’d worked close to eighty hours a week. Rhyme hadn’t even known he was married for the first few months they’d worked together.

“Where you living now?” Rhyme asked, hoping a nice social conversation would tucker them out and send them on their way.

“ Brooklyn. The Heights. I walk to work sometimes. You know those diets I was always on? The trick’s not dieting. It’s exercise.”

He didn’t look any fatter or thi

“So,” collegiate Banks said, “a doctor, you were saying. For a…”

“A new form of treatment?” Rhyme finished the dwindling question. “Exactly.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you so much.”

It was 11:36 a.m. Well past midmorning. Tardiness is inexcusable in a man of medicine.

He watched Banks’s eyes twice scan his legs. He caught the pimply boy a second time and wasn’t surprised to see the detective blush.

“So,” Rhyme said. “I’m afraid I don’t really have time to help you.”

“But he’s not here yet, right, the doctor?” asked Lon Sellitto in the same bulletproof tone he’d used to puncture homicide suspects’ cover stories.

Thom appeared at the doorway with a coffeepot.

Prick, Rhyme mouthed.

“ Lincoln forgot to offer you gentlemen something.”

“Thom treats me like a child.”

“If the bootie fits,” the aide retorted.

“All right,” Rhyme snapped. “Have some coffee. I’ll have some mother’s milk.”

“Too early,” Thom said. “The bar isn’t open.” And weathered Rhyme’s glowering face quite well.