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The driver backed the first van into a shadowy parking space and whispered to Dellray, "It's Perkins." Tapping his headset. "He's got the director on the horn. They want to know who's leading the assault."
"I am," snapped the Chameleon. He turned to his team. "I want surveillance across the street and in the alleys. Snipers, there, there and there. An' I want ever'body in place fi' minutes ago. Are we all together on that?"
Down the stairs, the old wood creaking.
His arm around her, he guided the woman, half-conscious from the blow to her head, into the basement. At the foot of the stairs, he shoved her to the dirt floor and gazed down at her.
Esther . . .
Her eyes rose to meet his. Hopeless, begging. He didn't notice. All he saw was her body. He began to remove her clothing, the purple jogging outfit. It was unthinkable that a woman would actually go outside in this day and age wearing what was no more than, well, undergarments. He hadn't thought that Esther Weinraub was a whore. She'd been a working girl, stitching shirts, five for a penny.
The bone collector observed how her collarbone showed at her throat. And where some other man might glance over her breasts and dark areolae he stared at the indentation at the manubrium and the ribs blossoming from it like spider's legs.
"What're you doing?" she asked, groggy from the blow to her head.
The bone collector looked her over carefully but what he saw wasn't a young, anorectic woman, nose too broad, lips too full, with skin like dirty sand. He saw beneath those imperfections the perfect beauty of her structure.
He caressed her temple, stroked it gently. Don't let it be cracked, please. . . .
She coughed and her nostrils flared--the fumes were very strong down here though he hardly noticed them anymore.
"Don't hurt me again," she whispered, her head lolling. "Just don't hurt me. Please."
He took the knife from his pocket and bent down, cut her underwear off. She looked down at her naked body.
"You want that?" she said breathlessly. "Okay, you can fuck me. Okay."
The pleasure of the flesh, he thought . . . it just doesn't come close.
He pulled her to her feet and madly she pushed away from him and began stumbling toward a small doorway in the corner of the basement. Not running, not really trying to escape. Just sobbing, reaching out a hand, weaving toward the door.
The bone collector watched her, entranced by her slow, pathetic gait.
The doorway, which had once opened onto a coal chute, now led to a narrow tunnel that connected to the basement of the abandoned building next door.
Esther struggled to the metal door and pulled it open. She climbed inside.
It was no more than a minute later that he heard the wailing scream. Followed by a breathless, wrenching, "God, no, no, no . . ." Other words too, lost in her boiling howls of terror.
Then she was coming back through the tunnel, moving faster now, whipping her hands around her, as if she was trying to shake off what she'd just seen.
Come to me, Esther.
Stumbling over the dirt floor, sobbing.
Come to me.
Running straight into his patient, waiting arms, which wrapped around her. He squeezed the woman tight as a lover, felt that marvelous collarbone beneath his fingers, and slowly dragged the frantic woman back toward the tunnel doorway.
TWENTY
The phases of the moon, the leaf, the damp underwear, dirt. Their team was back in Rhyme's bedroom--all except Polling and Haumann; it was straining NYPD loyalty to bring captains in on what was, no two ways about it, an unauthorized operation.
"You G-C'd the liquid in the underwear, right, Mel?"
"Have to do it again. They shut us down before we got the results."
He blotted out a sample and injected it into the chromatograph. As he ran the machine Sachs jockeyed to look at the peaks and valleys of the profile appearing on the screen. Like a stock index. Rhyme realized she was standing close to him, as if she'd edged near when he wasn't looking. She spoke in a low voice. "I was . . ."
