The Skin Collector

  The artist's eyes widened, the metal pins lifting dramatically. 'Jesus. No! Jesus.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Ever hear about anybody doing that?'

  'No way.' Gordon brushed the backs of his fingers across the complicated facial hair. 'That's just wrong. Man. See, we're ... what we do is we're sort of this hybrid of artist and cosmetic surgeon - people put their trust in us. We've got a special relationship with people.' Gordon's voice grew taut. 'Using inking to kill somebody. Oh, man.'

  The parlor phone rang and Gordon ignored it. But a few moments later the heavy-set tat artist - working on the motorcycle - stuck his head through the curtain of beads.

  'Hey, TT.' A nod to Sellitto.

  'What?'

  'Got a call. Can we ink a hundred-dollar bill on a guy's neck?' The accent was southern. Sellitto couldn't place where.

  'A hundred? Yeah, why not?'

  'I mean, ain't it illegal to reproduce money?'

  Gordon rolled his eyes. 'He's not going to feed himself into any slots in Atlantic City.'

  'I'm just asking.'

  'It's okay.'

  The artist said into his phone, 'Yessir, we'll do it.' Then disconnected. He started to turn but Gordon said, 'Hold on a sec.' To Sellitto he added, 'Eddie's been around. You might want to talk to him too.'

  The detective nodded, and Gordon introduced them. 'Eddie Beaufort, Detective Sellitto.'

  'Nice to meet you.' A Mid-Atlantic Southern lilt, Sellitto decided. The man had a genial face, which didn't fit with the elaborate sleeves - mostly of wild animals, it seemed. 'Detective. Police. Hm.'

  'Tell Eddie what you were telling me.'

  Sellitto explained the situation to Beaufort, whose look of astonishment and dismay matched Gordon's. The detective now asked, 'You ever heard of anybody using ink or tattoo guns as a weapon? Poison or otherwise? Either of you?'

  'No,' Beaufort whispered. 'Never.'

  Gordon said to his colleague, 'Good inking.'

  'Yup. Man knows what he's about. That's poison, hm?'

  'That's right.'

  Gordon asked, 'How'd he get her, I mean, how'd she stay still for that long?'

  'Knocked her out with drugs. But it didn't take him very long. We think he did that tat in about fifteen minutes.'

  'Fifteen?' Gordon asked, astonished.

  'That's unusual?'

  Beaufort said, 'Unusual? Church, man. I don't know anybody could lay a work like that in fifteen. It'd take an hour, at least.'

  'Yep,' Gordon offered.

  Beaufort nodded to the front of the shop. 'Got a half-nekkid man. Better git.'

  Sellitto nodded thanks. He asked Gordon, 'Well, looking at that, is there anything you can tell me about the guy did it?'

  Gordon leaned forward and examined the photos of the inking on Chloe Moore's body. His brows V'ed together. 'It's not all that clear. Do you have anything closer up? Or in better definition?'

  'We can get it.'

  'I could come to the station. Heh. Always wanted to do that.'

  'We're working out of a consultant's office. We-- Hold on.' Sellitto's phone was humming. He looked at the screen, read the text. Interesting. Responded briefly.

  He turned to Gordon. 'I've gotta be someplace but get over here.' Sellitto wrote down Rhyme's name and address. 'That's the consultant's place. I've gotta stop by headquarters then I'll meet you there.'

  'Okay. Like when?'

  'Like ASAP.'

  'Sure. Hey, you want a Glock or something?'

  'What?' Sellitto screwed up his face.

  'I'll ink you for free. A gun, a skull. Hey, how about an NYPD badge?'

  'No skulls, no badges.' He jabbed his finger at the card, containing the Central Park address. 'All I need is you to show up.'

  'ASAP.'

  'You got it, dude.'

  CHAPTER 12

  'How're we doing, rookie?'

  Sitting on a stool in Rhyme's parlor, Ron Pulaski was hunched over the computer keyboard. He was narrowing down the locations in the city from which the Inwood marble trace might have come. 'Moving slow. It's not just blasting for foundations. There's a lot of demolition going on in the city too. And it's November. In this weather. Who would've thought? I--'

  A mobile phone buzzed. The young officer fished into his pocket and removed the unit. It was the prepaid.

  The Watchmaker undercover assignment was heating up. Rhyme was encouraged that somebody had called the officer so quickly.

  And what would the substance of the conversation be?

  He heard some pleasantries. Then: 'Yes, about the remains. Richard Logan. Right.' He wandered off to the corner. Rhyme could hear no more.

  But he noted Pulaski's grave expression - a pun that Rhyme decided not to share, given that this assignment seemed to be weighing on the man.

  After two or three minutes Pulaski disconnected and jotted notes.

  'And?' Rhyme asked.

  Pulaski said, 'They transferred Logan's body to the Berkowitz Funeral Home.'

  'Where?' Rhyme asked. It sounded familiar.

  'Not far from here. Upper Broadway.'

  'A memorial service?'

  'No, just somebody's coming to pick up his ashes on Thursday.'

  Without looking up from the large computer monitor, Rhyme muttered, 'Nothing from the FBI on sources for the poisons and not a goddamn thing about "the second". Though I suppose we can't be too optimistic about that. Who?'

  Neither Pulaski nor Cooper responded. Sachs too was silent.

  'Well?' Rhyme called.

  'Well what?' From Cooper.

  'I'm asking Pulaski. Who'll be where? To pick up Logan's ashes? Did you ask the funeral director who'd be there?'

  'No.'

  'Well, why not?'

  'Because,' the patrol officer replied, 'it'd seem suspicious, don't you think, Lincoln? What if it's the Watchmaker's silent partner coming to pay his last respects and the director casually mentions that somebody was curious who's going to be there - which isn't really a question you'd ask--'

  'All right. Made your point.'

  'A good point,' Cooper said.

  A fair point.

  Then Rhyme was thinking again about the message of the tattoo on Chloe Moore's body. He doubted that 'the second' was part of a findable quotation at all. Maybe it was something that the unsub had spontaneously chosen and couldn't be tracked down. And maybe there was no meaning at all behind it.

  A distraction, a misdirection.

  Smoke and mirrors ...

  But if you do mean something, what could it be? Why are you playing your thoughts out like fishing line?

  'I don't know,' Cooper said.

  Apparently Rhyme had spoken the query to the cryptic perp aloud.

  'Damn message,' he muttered.

  Everyone in the room looked at it once more.

  '... the second, the second ...'

  'Anagram?' the tech suggested.

  Rhyme scanned the letters. Nothing significant appeared by rearranging them. 'Anyway, I have a feeling the message is mysterious enough. He doesn't need to play Scrabble with us. So, rookie, you'll be going undercover to the funeral home. You okay with that?'

  'Sure.'

  Spoken too quickly, Rhyme reflected. He knew this reluctance about the job had nothing to do with physical risk. Even if the late Watchmaker's mantle had been inherited by an associate, and he was the one collecting the ashes, he wasn't going to pull out a gun in a funeral parlor and start a shootout with an undercover cop. No, it was a fear of inadequacy that plagued the young officer, all thanks to the head injury he'd suffered some years ago. Pulaski was great in searching crime scenes. He was good, for a non-scientist, in the lab. But when he had to deal with people and make fast decisions, uncertainties and hesitations arose. 'We'll talk about what to wear, how to act, who to be, later.'

  Pulaski nodded, slipped away the phone, which he'd been kneading nervously in his hand, and returned to the Inwood marble job.

  Rhyme
now eased his Merits wheelchair close to the examination table on which rested evidence from the Chloe Moore murder in SoHo. Then he lifted his gaze to the monitor above it, the one displaying the photos Sachs had taken at the scene, glowing in difficult, high-definition glory. He studied the dead woman's face, the flecks of spittle, the rictus, the vomit, the wide, glazed eyes. The expression reflected her last moments on earth. The deadly toxin extracted from a water hemlock would have induced fierce seizures and excruciating abdominal pain.

  Why poison? Rhyme wondered again.

  And why a tattoo gun as a means of slipping it into her body?

  'Hell,' Sachs muttered, leaning away from her own work-station. She was helping Pulaski trace commercial blasting permits. 'The computer's down again. Happened twice in the past twenty minutes. Just like the phones earlier.'

  'Not just here,' Thom said. 'Outages all over the city. Slow download times. A real pain. About a dozen neighborhoods've been affected.'

  Rhyme snapped, 'Great. Just what we need.' You couldn't run a criminal investigation now without computers, from DMV to encrypted police and national security agency databases to Google. If the stream was choked off, cases ground to a halt. And you never thought about how dependent you were on those invisible bits and bytes until the flow of data choked to a stop.

  Sachs announced, 'Okay, it's back now.'

  But the concerns about the World Wide Web were sidelined when Lon Sellitto, tugging off his coat, burst into Rhyme's parlor. He tossed the Burberry onto a chair, piled his gloves atop the garment and pulled something out of his briefcase.

  Rhyme looked at him, frowning.

  Sellitto said defensively, 'I'll mop the fucking floor, Linc.'

  'I don't care about the floor. Why would I care about the floor? I want to know what you have in your hand.'

  Sellitto wiped sweat. His internal thermometer was unaffected, apparently, by the coldest, nastiest November in the past twenty-five years. 'First off, I found a tattoo artist who's going to help and he's on his way. Or he better be. TT Gordon. You should see the mustache.'

  'Lon.'

  'Now this.' He held up a book. 'Those guys at HQ? They tracked down where that scrap of paper came from.'

  Rhyme's heart beat faster - a sensation that most people would feel in their chest but that for him, of course, registered simply as an upped pulsing in his neck and head, the only sensate parts of his body.

  ies

  that his greatest skill was his ability to anticipate

  'How'd they do it, Lon?' Sachs asked.

  Sellitto continued, 'You know Marty Belson, Major Cases.'

  'Oh, the brainiac.'

  'Right. Loves his puzzles. Does Sudoku in his sleep.' Sellitto explained to Rhyme: 'Works financial crimes mostly. Anyway, he figured out the top letters were part of the title, you know how books have the author's name at the top of one side and the title at the top of the facing page?'

  'We know. Keep going.'

  'He was playing with what words end in "ies"?'

  Rhyme said, 'A word on the reverse page was "body", so that's an option, pluralized. We speculated it was a crime book. Or given the corpse theme, maybe Enemies.'

  'Nope. Cities. The full title is Serial Cities. That was on the short list of about six that Marty came up with. He called all the major book publishers in town - there aren't as many as there used to be - and read them the passages. One editor recognized it. He said his company'd published it a long time ago. Serial Cities. It's out of print now but he even knew the chapter that the passage was from. Number Seven. Had a copy messengered to us.'

  Excellent! Rhyme asked, 'And what's this special chapter about?'

  Sellitto wiped more sweat. 'You, Linc. It's all about you.'

  CHAPTER 13

  'And you too, Amelia.'

  Sellitto was opening the book. Rhyme noted the full title: Serial Cities: Famous Killers from Coast to Coast.

  'Let me guess: The theme is that every major city's had a serial killer.'

  'Boston Strangler, Charles Manson in LA, the I-5 Killer in Seattle.'

  'Sloppy journalism. Manson wasn't a serial killer.'

  'I don't think the public cares.'

  'And we made it into the book?' Sachs asked.

  'Chapter seven's titled, "The Bone Collector".'

  That was the popular name, courtesy of the press and an overblown novelization, of a serial kidnapper who taunted Rhyme and the NYPD some years ago by stashing his victims in places where they would die if he couldn't figure out in time where they'd been hidden.

  Some of the victims had been saved, some had not. The case had been significant for several reasons: It had brought Rhyme back from the dead - almost literally. He'd been planning to take his own life, so depressed had he been about his quadriplegia, but he'd decided to stick around for a while after the exhilaration of mentally wrestling with the brilliant killer.

  The case had also brought Rhyme and Sachs together.

  Rhyme now muttered, 'And we're not the first chapter?'

  Sellitto shrugged. 'Oh, sorry, Linc.'

  'But it's New York.'

  And it is me, Rhyme couldn't help thinking.

  'Can I see it?' Sachs asked. She opened the book to the chapter and began to read quickly.

  'Short,' Rhyme observed, even more irritated. Did the Boston Strangler investigation get more pages?

  'You know,' Sachs said, 'I seem to remember talking to a writer a while ago. He said he was working on a book and took me out for coffee to find out some details that weren't in the press or the official record.' She smiled. 'I think he said he called you too, Rhyme, and you chewed his head off and hung up on him.'

  'I don't recall,' he grumbled. 'Journalism. What's the point of it anyway?'

  'You wrote that,' Pulaski pointed out, nodding toward a bookshelf on which sat Rhyme's own nonfiction account of famous crime scenes in New York City.

  'It was a lark. I don't devote my life to regurgitating lurid stories to a bloodsucking audience.'

  Though perhaps he should have been more lurid, he reflected; The Scenes of the Crime had been remaindered years ago.

  'The important question is, what's Unsub Eleven-Five's interest in the Bone Collector case?' He nodded at the book. 'What's the nature of my chapter? Does it have a theme? Does the author have an ax to grind?'

  How long was it, for God's sake? Only ten pages? Rhyme grew even more offended.

  Sachs continued skimming. 'Don't worry. You come off well. I do too, I have to say ... It's mostly a description of the kidnapping incidents and the investigation techniques.'

  She flipped more pages. 'A lot of procedural details about the crime scene work. Some footnotes. There's a long one about your condition.'

  'Oh, that must be some truly compelling reading.'

  'Another one about the politics of the case.'

  Sachs had gotten into hot water by closing down a train line to preserve evidence - which resulted in a rift all the way up to Albany.

  'And one more footnote - about Pam's mother,' Sachs said.

  A young girl named Pam Willoughby and her mother had been kidnapped by the Bone Collector. Rhyme and Sachs had saved them - only to have Mom turn out to be someone other than an innocent victim. After learning this, Sachs and Rhyme had tried desperately to find the child. A few years ago they'd managed to rescue her. Pam was now nineteen, in college and working in New York. She'd become Sachs's de facto younger sister.

  Sachs read to the end. 'The author's mostly concerned with the perp's psychological makeup: Why was he so interested in bones?'

  The kidnapper had stolen human bones and carved, sanded and polished them. His obsession, it seemed, stemmed from the fact that he had suffered a loss in the past, loved ones killed, and he found subconscious comfort in the permanence of bones.

  His crimes were revenge for that loss.

  Rhyme said, 'First, I think we need to see if our unsub's got any connection to the Bone Collector himself. Lo
ok up the files. Track down any family members of the perp, where they lived, what they're up to.'

  It took some time to unearth the files - the official reports and evidence were at the NYPD, in the archives. The case was quite old. Rhyme had some material on his computer but the word processing files weren't compatible with his new system. Some of the info was on three-and-a-half-inch disks, which Thom unearthed from the basement - the verb appropriate since the boxes were so dust-covered.

  'What're those?' asked Pulaski, a representative of the generation that measured data storage in gigabytes.

  'Floppy disks,' Sellitto said.

  'Heard of them. Never seen one.'

  'No kidding? And you know, Ron, they used to have big round black vinyl things you listened to music on. Oh, and we roasted our mastodon steaks over real fire, rookie. Before microwaves.'

  'Ha.'

  The disks proved useless but Thom also managed to find hard copies of the files in the basement. Rhyme and the others were able to piece together a bio of the Bone Collector and use the Internet (now working at a fine clip) to determine that the perp from back then had no living relatives, none close at least.

  Rhyme was quiet for a moment as he thought: And I know why he doesn't have any family.

  Sachs caught his troubled gaze. She gave a reassuring nod, which Rhyme didn't respond to.

  'How about the survivors?'

  More online research, more phone calls.

  It turned out that aside from Pam none of the victims saved from the Bone Collector were still alive or living in the city.

  Rhyme said brusquely, 'All right, doesn't sound like there's any direct connection to the Bone Collector case. Revenge might be a dish best served cold but too much time has elapsed for somebody to come after us for that.'

  'Let's talk to Terry,' Sachs suggested.

  The NYPD's chief psychologist, Terry Dobyns. He was the one who'd formulated the theory that the Bone Collector's obsession with bones was rooted in their permanence and reflected some loss in the perp's past.

  Dobyns was also the doctor who'd been a pit bull after Rhyme's accident some years ago. He'd refused to accept Rhyme's withdrawal from life and his flirtation with suicide. He'd helped the criminalist adjust to the world of the disabled. And no 'How does that make you feel' crap. Dobyns knew how you felt and he guided the conversation in directions that took the hard edges off what you were going through while not shying from the truth that, yeah, sometimes life fucks with you.

  The doctor was smart, no question. And a talented shrink. But Sachs's suggestion for enlisting him now was another matter altogether; she wanted a psychological profile of Unsub 11-5 and profiling was an art - not a science, mind you - that Rhyme found dubious at best.