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Noses lifted at the smells, ears pricked at the sounds of the strange place. Particularly the faint wailing that rose from somewhere beneath them.
It was a sign of their desperation that even the Hardy Boys split up.
Bedding was working a half-dozen blocks around Delancey, Saul was farther south. Sellitto and Banks each had their search areas, and the hundreds of other officers, FBI agents and troopers made the door-to-door rounds, asking about a slight man, a young child crying, a silver Ford Taurus, a deserted Federal-style building, fronted in rose marble, the rest of it dark brownstone.
Huh? What the hell you mean, Federal? . . . Seen a kid? You asking if I ever seen a kid on the Lower
East? Yo, Jimmy, you ever see any kids 'round here? Like not in the last, what, sixty seconds?
Amelia Sachs was flexing her muscle. She insisted that she be on Sellitto's crew, the one hitting the ShopRite on East Houston that had sold Unsub 823 the veal chop. And the gas station that had sold him the gasoline. The library from which he'd stolen Crime in Old New York.
But they'd found no leads there and scattered like wolves smelling a dozen different scents. Each picked a chunk of neighborhood to call his or her own.
As Sachs gunned the engine of the new RRV and tried another block she felt the same frustration she'd known when working the crime scenes over the past several days: too damn much evidence, too much turf to cover. The hopelessness of it. Here, on the hot, damp streets, branching into a hundred other streets and alleys running past a thousand buildings--all old--finding the safe house seemed as impossible as finding that hair that Rhyme had told her about, pasted to the ceiling by the blowback from a .38 revolver.
She'd intended to hit every street but as time wore on and she thought of the child buried underground, near death, she began to search more quickly, speeding down streets, glancing right and left for the rosy-marble building. Doubt stabbed her. Had she missed the building in her haste? Or should she drive like lightning and cover more streets?
On and on. Another block, another. And still nothing.
After the villain's death his effects were secured and perused by detectives. His diary showed that he had murdered eight good citizens of the city. Nor was he above grave robbery, for it was ascertained from his pages (if his claims be true) that he had violated several holy resting places in cemeteries around the city. None of his victims had accorded him the least affront;--nay, most were upstanding citizens, industrious and innocent. And yet he felt not a modicum of guilt. Indeed, he seems to have labored under the mad delusion that he was doing his victims a favor.
Lincoln Rhyme's left ring finger twitched slightly and the frame turned the onion-skin page of Crime in Old New York, which had been delivered by two federal officers ten minutes earlier, service expedited thanks to Fred Dellray's inimitable style.
"Flesh withers and can be weak,"--(the villain wrote in his ruthless yet steady hand)--"Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone. It is a noble goal I had, and it is beyond me why any-one might quarrel with it. I did a kindness to them all. They are immortal now. I freed them. I took them down to the bone."
Terry Dobyns had been right. Chapter 10, "James Schneider: the 'Bone Collector,' " was a virtual blueprint for Unsub 823's behavior. The MOs were the same--fire, animals, water, boiling alive. Eight twenty-three prowled the same haunts Schneider had. He'd confused a German tourist with Hanna Goldschmidt, a turn-of-the-century immigrant, and had been drawn to a German residence hall to find a victim. And he'd called little Pammy Ganz by a different name too--Maggie. Apparently thinking she was the young O'Connor girl, one of Schneider's victims.
A very bad etching in the book, covered by tissue, showed a demonic James Schneider, sitting in a basement, examining a leg bone.
Rhyme stared at the Randel Survey map of the city.
Bones. . .
Rhyme was recalling a crime scene he'd run once. He'd been called to a construction site in lower Manhattan where some excavators had discovered a skull a few feet below the surface of a vacant lot. Rhyme saw immediately that the skull was very old and brought a forensic anthropologist into the case. They continued to dig and discovered a number of bones and skeletons.
A little research revealed that in 1741 there'd been a slave rebellion in Manhattan and a number of slaves--and militant white abolitionists--had been hanged on a small island in the Collect. The island became a popular site for hangings and several informal cemeteries and potter's fields sprang up in the area.
Where had the Collect been? Rhyme tried to recall. Near where Chinatown and the Lower East Side meet. But it was hard to say for certain because the pond had been filled in so long ago. It had been--
Yes! he thought, his heart thudding: The Collect had been filled in because it had grown so polluted the city commissioners considered it a major health risk. And among the main polluters were the tanneries on the eastern shore!
Pretty good with the dialer now, Rhyme didn't flub a single number and got put through to the mayor on the first try. Hizzoner, though, the man's personal secretary said, was at a brunch at the UN. But when Rhyme identified himself the secretary said, "One minute, sir," and in much less time than that he found himself on the line with a man who said, through a mouthful of food, "Talk to me, detective. How the fuck're we doing?"
"Five-eight-eight-five, K," Amelia Sachs said, answering the radio. Rhyme heard the edginess in her voice.
"Sachs."
"This isn't good," she told him. "We're not having any luck."
"I think I've got him."
"What?"
"The six-hundred block, East Van Brevoort. Near Chinatown."
"How'd you know?"
"The mayor put me in touch with the head of the Historical Society. There's an archaeologic dig down there. An old graveyard. Across the street from where a big tannery used to be. And there were some big Federal mansions in the area at one time. I think he's nearby."
