Page 38 of The Skin Collector (Lincoln Rhyme 11)

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.'

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