The Bone Collector

to occur.
    After a few minutes Maggie’s screams grew quiet, replaced by the sounds of the old city, the roar of steam engines, the clang of bells, the pops of black-powder gunshots, the clop of hooves on resonant cobblestones.
    He continued to stare, forgetting the constables who pursued him, forgetting Maggie, just watching the ghostly form stroll down the street.
    Then and now.
    His eyes remained focused out the window for a long moment, lost in a different time. And so he didn’t notice the wild dogs, who’d pushed through the back door he’d left ajar. They looked at him through the doorway of the living room and paused only momentarily before turning around and loping quietly into the back of the building.
    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 ShopRiteon 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 federalofficers 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