The Bone Collector

Berger was familiar with the case and shook his head sympathetically. “No, that’s no way for anyone to die.” He assayed Rhyme’s body, the wires, the control panels. “What are your mechanical skills?”

Rhyme explained about the ECUs – the E &J controller that his ring finger operated, the sip-and-puff control for his mouth, the chin joysticks, and the computer dictation unit that could type out words on the screen as he spoke them.

“But everything has to be set up by someone else?” Berger asked. “For instance, someone would have to go to the store, buy a gun, mount it, rig the trigger and hook it up to your controller?”

“Yes.”

Making that person guilty of a conspiracy to commit murder, as well as manslaughter.

“What about your equipment?” Rhyme asked. “It’s effective?”

“Equipment?”

“What you use? To, uhm, do the deed?”

“It’s very effective. I’ve never had a patient complain.”

Rhyme blinked and Berger laughed. Rhyme joined him. If you can’t laugh about death what can you laugh about?

“Take a look.”

“You have it with you?” Hope blossomed in Rhyme’s heart. It was the first time he’d felt that warm sensation in years.

The doctor opened his attaché case and – rather ceremonially, Rhyme thought – set out a bottle of brandy. A small bottle of pills. A plastic bag and a rubber band.

“What’s the drug?”

“Seconal. Nobody prescribes it anymore. In the old days suicide was a lot easier. These babies’d do the trick, no question. Now, it’s almost impossible to kill yourself with modern tranquilizers. Halcion, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax… You may sleep for a long time but you’re going to wake up eventually.”

“And the bag?”

“Ah, the bag.” Berger picked it up. “That’s the emblem of the Lethe Society. Unofficially, of course – it’s not like we have a logo. If the pills and the brandy aren’t enough then we use the bag. Over the head, with a rubber band around the neck. We add a little ice inside because it gets pretty hot after a few minutes.”

Rhyme couldn’t take his eyes off the trio of implements. The bag, thick plastic, like a painter’s drop cloth. The brandy was cheap, he observed, and the drugs generic.

“This’s a nice house,” Berger said, looking around. “ Central Park West… Do you live on disability?”

“Some. I’ve also done consulting for the police and the FBI. After the accident… the construction company that was doing the excavating settled for three million. They swore there was no liability but there’s apparently a rule of law that a quadriplegic automatically wins any lawsuits against construction companies, no matter who was at fault. At least if the plaintiff comes to court and drools.”

“And you wrote that book, right?”

“I get some money from that. Not a lot. It was a ‘better-seller.’ Not a best-seller.”

Berger picked up a copy of The Scenes of the Crime, flipped through it. “Famous crime scenes. Look at all this.” He laughed. “There are, what, forty, fifty scenes?”

“Fifty-one.”

Rhyme had revisited – in his mind and imagination, since he’d written it after the accident – as many old crime scenes in New York City as he could recall. Some solved, some not. He’d written about the Old Brewery, the notorious tenement in Five Points, where thirteen unrelated murders were recorded on a single night in 1839. About Charles Aubridge Deacon, who murdered his mother on July 13, 1863, during the Civil War draft riots, claiming former slaves had killed her and fueling the rampage against blacks. About architect Stanford White’s love-triangle murder atop the original Madison Square Garden and about Judge Crater’s disappearance. About George Metesky, the mad bomber of the ’50s, and Murph the Surf, who boosted the Star of India diamond.

“Nineteenth-century building supplies, underground streams, butler’s schools,” Berger recited, flipping through the book, “gay baths, Chinatown whorehouses, Russian Orthodox churches… How d’you learn all this about the city?”

Rhyme shrugged. In his years as head of IRD he’d studied as much about the city as he had about forensics. Its history, politics, geology, sociology, infrastructure. He said, “Criminalistics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply -”

Just as he heard the enthusiasm creep into his voice he stopped abruptly.

Furious with himself that he’d been foxed so easily.

“Nice try, Dr. Berger,” Rhyme said stiffly.

“Ah, come on. Call me Bill. Please.”

Rhyme wasn’t going to be derailed. “I’ve heard it before. Take a big, clean, smooth piece of paper and write down all the reasons why I should kill myself. And then take another big, clean smooth piece of paper and write all the reasons why I shouldn’t. Words like productive, useful, interesting, challenging come to mind. Big words. Ten-dollar words. They don’t mean shit to me. Besides, I couldn’t pick up a fucking pencil to save my soul.”

“ Lincoln,” Berger continued kindly, “I have to make sure you’re the appropriate candidate for the program.”

“'Candidate'? 'Program'? Ah, the tyra

“Why today?”

Rhyme’s eyes had returned to the bottles and the bag. He whispered, “Why not? What’s today? August twenty-third? That’s as good a day to die as any.”

The doctor tapped his narrow lips. “I have to spend some time talking to you, Lincoln. If I’m convinced that you really want to go ahead -”

“I do,” Rhyme said, noting as he often did how weak our words sound without the body gestures to accompany them. He wanted desperately to lay his hand on Berger’s arm or lift his palms beseechingly.

Without asking if he could, Berger pulled out a packet of Marlboros and lit a cigarette. He took a folding metal ashtray from his pocket and opened it up. Crossed his thin legs. He looked like a foppish frat boy at an Ivy League smoker. “ Lincoln, you understand the problem here, don’t you?”

Sure, he understood. It was the very reason why Berger was here and why one of Rhyme’s own doctors hadn’t “done the deed.” Hastening an inevitable death was one thing; nearly one-third of practicing doctors who treated terminal patients had prescribed or administered fatal doses of drugs. Most prosecutors turned a blind eye toward them unless a doctor flaunted it – like Kevorkian.

But a quad? A hemi? A para? A crip? Oh, that was different. Lincoln Rhyme was forty years old. He’d been weaned off the ventilator. Barring some insidious gene in the Rhyme stock, there was no medical reason why he couldn’t live to eighty.

Berger added, “Let me be blunt, Lincoln. I also have to be sure this isn’t a setup.”

“Setup?”

“Prosecutors. I’ve been entrapped before.”

Rhyme laughed. “The New York attorney general’s a busy man. He’s not going to wire a crip to bag himself a euthanasist.”

Glancing absently at the crime scene report.

… ten feet southwest of victim, found in a cluster on a small pile of white sand: a ball of fiber, approximately six centimeters in diameter, off-white in color. The fiber was sampled in the energy-dispersive X-ray unit and found to consist of A2B5(Si, Al)8O22(OH)2. No source was indicated and the fibers could not be individuated. Sample sent to FBI PERT office for analysis.

“I just have to be careful,” Berger continued. “This is my whole professional” life now. I gave up orthopedics completely. Anyway, it’s more than a job. I’ve decided to devote my life to helping others end theirs.”

Adjacent to this fiber, approximately three inches away were found two scraps of paper. One was common newsprint, with the words “three p.m.” printed in Times Roman type, in ink consistent with that used in commercial newspapers. The other scrap appeared to be the corner of a page from a book with the page number “ 823” printed on it. The typeface was Garamond and the paper was calendared. ALS and subsequent ninhydrin analysis reveal no latent friction-ridge prints on either… Individuation was not possible.