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He wore dark clothes, the ski mask and gloves black as oil.
Unsub 823 stood in the middle of her bedroom.
Her hand instinctively went toward the bedside table--her Glock and knife. But he was ready. The shovel swung fast and caught her on the side of her head. A yellow light exploded in her eyes.
She was on her hands and knees when the foot slammed into her rib cage and she collapsed to her stomach, struggling for breath. She felt her hands being cuffed behind her, a strip of duct tape slapped onto her mouth. Moving fast, efficiently. He rolled her onto her back; her robe fell open.
Kicking furiously, struggling madly to pull the cuffs apart.
Another blow to her stomach. She gagged and fell still as he reached for her. Gripped her at the armpits, dragged her out the back door and into the large private garden behind the apartment.
His eyes remained on her face, not even looking at her tits, her flat belly, her mound with its few red curls. She could easily have given that up to him if it would have saved her life.
But, no, Rhyme's diagnosis was right. It wasn't lust that drove 823. He had something else in mind. He dropped her willowy figure, face up, into a patch of black-eyed Susans and pachysandra, out of sight of the neighbors. He looked around, catching his breath. He picked up the shovel and plunged the blade into the dirt.
Amelia Sachs began to cry.
*
Rubbing the back of his head into the pillow.
Compulsive, a doctor had once told him after observing this behavior--an opinion Rhyme hadn't asked for. Or wanted. His nestling, Rhyme reflected, was just a variation on Amelia Sachs's tearing her flesh with her own nails.
He stretched his neck muscles, rolling his head around, as he stared at the profile chart on the wall. Rhyme believed that the full story of the man's madness was here in front of him. In the black, swoopy handwriting--and the gaps between the words. But he couldn't see the story's ending. Not yet.
He looked over the clues again. There were only a few left unexplained.
The scar on the finger.
The knot.
The aftershave.
The scar was useless to them unless they had a suspect whose fingers they could examine. And there'd been no luck in identifying the knot--only preppy Banks's opinion that it wasn't nautical.
What about the cheap aftershave? Assuming that most unsubs wouldn't spritz themselves to go on a kidnapping spree, why had he worn it? Rhyme could only conclude again that he was trying to obscure another, a telltale scent. He ran through the possibilities: Food, liquor, chemicals, tobacco . . .
He felt eyes on him and looked to his right.
The black dots of the bony rattlesnake's eye sockets gazed toward the Clinitron. This was the one clue that was out of place. It had no purpose, except to taunt them.
Something occurred to him. Using the painstaking turning frame Rhyme slowly flipped back through Crime in Old New York. To the chapter on James Schneider. He found the paragraphs he'd remembered.
It has been suggested by a well-known physician of the mind (a practitioner of the discipline of "psyche-logy," which has been much in the news of late) that James Schneider's ultimate intent had little to do withharming his victims. Rather--this learned doctor has suggested--the villain was seeking revenge against those that did him what he perceived to be harm: the city's constabulary, if not Society as a whole.
Who can say where the source of this hate lay? Perhaps, like the Nile of old, its wellsprings were hidden to the world;--and possibly even to the villain himself. Yet one reason may be found in a little-known fact: Young James Schneider, at the tender age of ten, saw his father dragged away by constables only to die in prison for a robbery which, it was later ascertained, he did not commit. Following this unfortunate arrest, the boy's mother fell into life on the street and abandoned her son, who grew up a ward of the state.
Did the madman perchance commit these crimes to fling derision into the face of the very constabulary which had inadvertently destroyed his family?
We will undoubtedly never know.
Yet what does seem clear is that by mocking the ineffectualness of the protectors of its citizenry, James Schneider--the "bone collector"--was wreaking his vengeance upon the city itself as much as upon his innocent victims.
Lincoln Rhyme lay back in his pillow and looked at the profile chart again.
Dirt is heavier than anything.
It's the earth itself, the dust of an iron core, and it doesn't kill by strangling the air from the lungs but by compressing the cells until they die from the panic of immobility.
