The Bone Collector

’nappings he thought he should call. Her name’s Carole Ganz. From Chicago.”
    “Hell,” Banks muttered. “A little girl, too? Oughta just pull all the cabs off the streets till we nail his butt.”
    Rhyme was drenched with weariness. His head raged. He remembered working a crime scene at a bomb factory. Nitroglycerin had bled out of some dynamite and seeped into an armchair Rhyme had to search for trace. Nitro gave you blinding headaches.
    The screen of Cooper’s computer flickered. “E-mail,” he announced and called up the message. He read the fine type.
    “They’ve polarized all the samples of cello that ESUcollected. They think the scrap we found in the bone at the Pearl Street scene was from a ShopRite grocery store. It’s closest to the cello they use.”
    “Good,” Rhyme called. He nodded at the poster. “Cross off all the grocery stores but the ShopRites. What locations do we have?”
    He watched Thom ink through the stores, leaving four.
B’way & 82nd
    Greenwich & Bank
    8th Ave. & 24th
    Houston & Lafayette
    “That leaves us with the Upper West Side, West Village, Chelsea and the Lower East Side.”
    “But he could have gone anywhere to buy them.”
    “Oh, sure he could’ve, Sachs. He could’ve bought them in White Plains when he was stealing the car. Or in Cleveland visiting his mother. But see, there’s a point when unsubs feel comfortable in their deception and they stop bothering to cover their tracks. The stupid—or lazy—ones toss the smoking gun in the Dumpster behind their building and go on their merry way. The smarter ones drop it in a bucket of Spackle and pitch it into Hell Gate. The brilliant ones sneak into a refinery and vaporize it in a five-thousand-degree-centigrade furnace. Our unsub’s smart, sure. But he’s like every other perp in the history of the world. He’s got limits. I’m betting he thinks we won’t have the time or inclination to look for him or his safe house because we’ll be concentrating on the planted clues. And of course he’s dead wrong. This is exactly how we’ll find him. Now, let’s see if we can’t get a little closer to his lair. Mel, anything in the vic’s clothes from the last scene?”
    But the tidal water had washed away virtually everything from William Everett’s clothing.
    “You say they fought, Sachs? The unsub and this Everett?”
    “Wasn’t much of a fight. Everett grabbed his shirt.”
    Rhyme clicked his tongue. “I must be getting tired. IfI’d thought about it I would have had you scrape under his nails. Even if he was underwater that’s one place—”
    “Here you go,” she said, holding up two small plastic bags.
    “You scraped?”
    She nodded.
    “But why’re there two bags?”
    Holding up one bag then the other she said, “Left hand, right hand.”
    Mel Cooper broke into a laugh. “Even you never thought about separate bags for scraping, Lincoln. It’s a great idea.”
    Rhyme grunted. “Differentiating the hands might have some marginal forensic value.”
    “Whoa,” Cooper said, laughing still. “That means he thinks it’s a brilliant idea and he’s sorry he didn’t think of it first.”
    The tech examined the scrapings. “Got some brick here.”
    “There was no brick anywhere around the drainpipe or the field,” Sachs said.
    “It’s fragments. But there’s something attached to it. I can’t tell what.”
    Banks asked, “Could it’ve come from the stockyard tunnel? There was a lotta brick there, right?”
    “All that came from Annie Oakley here,” Rhyme said, nodding ruefully at Sachs. “No, remember, the unsub’d left before she pulled out her six-gun.” Then he frowned, found himself straining forward. “Mel, I want to see that brick. In the ’scope. Is there any way?”
    Cooper looked over Rhyme’s computer. “I think we can rig something up.” He ran a cable from the video-output port on the compound ’scope to his own computer and then dug into a large suitcase. He pulled out a long, thick gray wire. “This’s a serial cable.” He connected the two computers and transferred some software to Rhyme’s Compaq. In five minutes, Rhyme, delighted, was seeing exactly what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece.
    The criminalist’s eyes scanned the chunk of brick—hugely magnified. He laughed out loud. “He outfoxed himself. See those white blobs attached to the brick?”
    “What are they?” Sellitto asked.
    “Looks like glue,” Cooper offered.
    “Exactly. From