The Bone Collector

Thom had put on a CD – Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio for Strings. But Rhyme had snorted a derisive laugh, declared it a sorry cliché and ordered him to replace it with Gershwin.

Amelia Sachs climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom, noticed him looking outside. “What do you see?” she asked.

“Hot people.”

“And the birds? The falcons?”

“Ah, yes, they’re there.”

“Hot too?”

He examined the male. “I don’t think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing.”

She set the bag on the foot of the bed and lifted out the contents, a bottle of expensive brandy. He’d reminded her of the Scotch but Sachs said she’d contribute the liquor. She set it next to the pills and the plastic bag. Looking like a breezy professional wife, home from Balducci’s with piles of vegetables and seafood and too little time to whip them into di

She’d also bought some ice, at Rhyme’s request. He’d remembered what Berger had explained about the heat in the bag. She lifted the cap off the Courvoisier and poured herself a glass and filled his tumbler, arranged the straw toward his mouth.

“Where’s Thom?” she asked him.

“Out.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes.”

They sipped the brandy.

“Do you want me to say anything to your wife?”

Rhyme considered it for a long moment, thinking: We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets – and oh how we squander those moments. Here he’d known Amelia Sachs all of three days and they’d bared their hearts far more than he and Elaine had done in nearly a decade.

“No,” he said. “I’ve e-mailed her.” A chuckle. “That’s a comment on our times, I’d say.”

More brandy, the astringent bite on his palate was dissipating. Growing smoother, duller, lighter.

Sachs leaned over the bed and tapped her glass to his.

“I have some money,” Rhyme began. “I’m giving a lot of it to Blaine and to Thom. I -”

But she shushed him with a kiss to the forehead and shook her head.

A soft clatter of pebbles as she spilled the tiny Seconals into her hand.

Rhyme instinctively thought: The Dillie-Koppanyi color test reagent. Add 1 percent cobalt acetate in methanol to the suspect material followed by 5 percent isopropylamine in methanol. If the substance is a barbiturate the reagent turns a beautiful violet-blue color.

“How should we do it?” She asked, gazing at the pills. “I really don’t know.”

“Mix them in the booze,” he suggested.

She dropped them in his tumbler. They dissolved quickly.

How fragile they were. Like the dreams they induce.

She stirred the mixture with the straw. He glanced at her wounded nails but even that he couldn’t be sorrowful for. This was his night and it was a night of joy.

Lincoln Rhyme had a sudden recollection of childhood in suburban Illinois. He never drank his milk and to get him to do so his mother bought straws coated on the inside with flavoring. Strawberry, chocolate. He hadn’t thought about them until just this moment. It was a great invention, he remembered. He always looked forward to his afternoon milk.

Sachs pushed the straw close to his mouth. He took it between his lips. She put her hand on his arm.

Light or dark, music or silence, dreams or the meditation of dreamless sleep? What will I find?

He began to sip. The taste was really no different from straight liquor. A little more bitter maybe. It was like -

From downstairs came a huge pounding on the door. Hands and feet both, it seemed. Voices shouting too.

He lifted his lips away from the straw. Glanced into the dim stairwell.

She looked at him, frowning.

“Go see,” he said to her.

She disappeared down the stairs and a moment later returned, looking unhappy. Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks followed. Rhyme noticed that the young detective had done another butcher job on his face with a razor. He’d really have to get that under control.

Sellitto glanced at the bottle and the bag. His eyes swayed toward Sachs but she crossed her arms and held her own, silently ordering him to leave. This was not an issue of rank, the look told the detective, and what was happening here was none of his business. Sellitto’s eyes acknowledged the message but he wasn’t about to go anywhere just yet.

“Lincoln, I need to talk to you.”

“Talk. But talk fast, Lon. We’re busy.”

The detective sat heavily in the noisy rattan chair. “An hour ago a bomb went off at the United Nations. Right next to the banquet hall. During the welcome di

“Six dead, fifty-four hurt,” Banks added. “Twenty of them serious.”

“My God,” Sachs whispered.

“Tell him,” Sellitto muttered.

Banks continued, “For the conference, the UN hired a bunch of temps. The perp was one of them – a receptionist. A half-dozen people saw her carrying a knapsack to work and putting it in a storeroom near the banquet hall. She left just before the bang. The bomb squad estimates we’re looking at about two pounds of C4 or Semtex.”

Sellitto said, “Linc, the bomb, it was a yellow knapsack, the wits said.”

“Yellow?” Why was that familiar?

“UN human resources ID’d the receptionist as Carole Ganz.”

“The mother,” Rhyme and Sachs said simultaneously.

“Yeah. The woman you saved in the church. Only Ganz’s an alias. Her real name’s Charlotte Willoughby. She was married to a Ron Willoughby. Ring a bell?”

Rhyme said it didn’t.

“It was in the news a couple years ago. He was an Army sergeant assigned to a UN peacekeeping force in Burma.”

“Keep going,” the criminalist said.

“Willoughby didn’t want to go – thought an American soldier shouldn’t be wearing a UN uniform and taking orders from anybody except the U.S. Army. It’s a big right-wing issue nowadays. But he went anyway. Wasn’t there a week before he’s blown away by some little punk in Rangoon. Got shot in the back. Became a conservative martyr. Anti-Terror says his widow got recruited by an extremist group out in the Chicago burbs. Some U of C grads gone underground. Edward and Katherine Stone.”

Banks took over the narrative. “The explosive was in a package of kid’s modeling clay, along with some other toys. We think she was going to take the little girl with her so security at the banquet-hall entrance wouldn’t think anything of the clay. But with Pammy in the hospital she didn’t have her cover story so she gave up on the hall and just planted it in the storeroom. Did enough damage as it was.”

“Rabitted?”

“Yep. Not a trace.”

“What about the little girl,” Sachs asked, “Pammy?”

“Gone. The woman checked her out of the hospital around the time of the bang. No sign of either of them.”

Rhyme asked, “The cell?”

“The group in Chicago? They’re gone too. Had a safe house in Wisconsin but it’s been hosed. We don’t know where they are.”

“So that was the rumor Dellray’s snitch heard.” Rhyme laughed. “Carole was the one coming into the airport. Had nothing to do with Unsub 823.”

He found Banks and Sellitto staring at him.

Oh, the old silent trick again.

“Forget it, Lon.” Rhyme said, all too aware of the glass sitting inches from him, radiating a welcoming heat. “Impossible.”

The older detective plucked his sweaty shirt away from his body, cringing. “God damn cold in here, Lincoln. Jesus. Look, just think about it. What’sa harm?”

“I can’t help you.”

Sellitto said, “There was a note. Carole wrote it and sent it to the secretary-general by interoffice envelope. Harping on world government, taking away American liberties. Some shit like that. Claimed credit for the UNESCO bombing in London too and said there’d be more. We’ve gotta get ’em, Linc.”

Feeling his oats, scarface Banks said, “The secretary-general and the mayor both’ve asked for you. SAC Perkins too. And there’ll be a call from the White House, you need any more persuading. We sure hope you don’t, detective.”