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The dep com was looking out his window. "He's not on the force anymore. What's he doing involved in this?"
"Consultant, I guess. It's Lon Sellitto's case. Captain Polling's overseeing it. I've been waiting for this reassignment for eight months. But they've got me working crime scene. I've never done crime scene. It doesn't make any sense and frankly I resent being assigned to a job I've had no training for."
"Crime scene?"
"Rhyme ordered me to run the whole scene. By myself."
Eckert didn't understand this. The words weren't registering. "Why is a civilian ordering uniformed officers to do anything?"
"My point, sir." She set the hook. "I mean, I'll help up to a point. But I'm just not prepared to dismember victims . . ."
"What?"
She blinked as if surprised he hadn't heard. She explained about the handcuffs.
"Lord in heaven, what the hell're they thinking of? Pardon my French. Don't they know the whole country's watching? It's been on CNN all day, this kidnapping. Cutting off her hands? Say, you're Herman Sachs's daughter."
"That's right."
"Good officer. Excellent officer. I gave him one of his commendations. The man was what a beat cop ought to be. Midtown South, right?"
"Hell's Kitchen. My beat."
My former beat.
"Herman Sachs probably prevented more crime than the entire detective division solves in a year. Just calming everything down, you know."
"That was Pop. Sure."
"Her hands?" Eckert snorted. "The girl's family'll sue us. As soon as they find out about it. They sue us for everything. There's a rapist suing us now 'cause he got shot in the leg coming at an officer with a knife. His lawyer's got this theory he's calling the 'least deadly alternative.' Instead of shooting, we're supposed to taze them or use Mace. Or ask them politely, I don't know. I better give the chief and the mayor a heads-up on this one. I'll make some calls, officer." He looked at a wall clock. It was a little after four. "Your watch over for the day?"
"I have to report back to Lincoln Rhyme's house. That's where we're working out of." She thought of the hacksaw. She said coolly, "His bedroom really. That's our CP."
"A civilian's bedroom is your command post?"
"I'd appreciate anything you can do, sir. I've waited a long time for that transfer."
"Cut her hands off. My good Lord."
She stood and walked to the door and out into one of the corridors that would soon be her new assignment. The feeling of relief took only a little longer to arrive than she'd expected.
He stood at the bottle-glass window, watching a pack of wild dogs prowl though the lot across the street.
He was on the first floor of this old building, a marble-clad Federal dating to the early 1800s. Surrounded by vacant lots and tenements--some abandoned, some occupied by paying tenants though most by squatters--this old mansion had been empty for years.
The bone collector took the piece of emery paper in his hand once more and continued to rub. He looked down at his handiwork. Then out the window again.
His hands, in their circular motion, precise. The tiny scrap of sandpaper whispering, shhhhh, shhhhh . . . Like a mother hushing her child.
A decade ago, the days of promise in New York, some crazy artist had moved in here. He'd filled the dank, two-story place with broken and rusting antiques. Wrought-iron grilles, hunks of crown molding and framed squares of spidered stained glass, scabby columns. Some of the artist's work remained on the walls. Frescoes on the old plaster: murals, never completed, of workers, children, angst-ridden lovers. Round, emotionless faces--the man's motif--stared blankly, as if the souls had been nipped out of their smooth bodies.
The painter was never very successful, even after the most ironclad of marketing ideas--his own suicide--and the bank foreclosed on the building several years ago.
Shhhhh. . . .
The bone collector had stumbled across the place last year and he'd known immediately that this was home. The desolation of the neighborhood was certainly important to him--it was obviously practical. But there was another appeal, more personal: the lot across the street. During some excavation several years ago a backhoe had unearthed a load of human bones. It turned out this had been one of the city's old cemeteries. Newspaper articles about it suggested the graves might contain the remains not only of Federal and Colonial New Yorkers but Manate and Lenape Indians as well.
He now set aside what he'd been smoothing with the emery paper--a carpal, the delicate palm bone--and picked up the wrist, which he'd carefully detached from the radius and ulna last night just before leaving for Kennedy Airport to collect the first victims. It had been drying for over a week and most of the flesh was gone but it still took some effort to separate the elaborate cluster of bones. They snapped apart with faint plops, like fish breaking the surface of a lake.
