The Bone Collector

a German residence hall to find a victim. And he’d called little Pammy Ganz by a different name too—Maggie. Apparently thinking she was the young O’Connor girl, one of Schneider’s victims.
    A very bad etching in the book, covered by tissue, showed a demonic James Schneider, sitting in a basement, examining a leg bone.
    Rhyme stared at the Randel Survey map of the city.
    Bones . . .
    Rhyme was recalling a crime scene he’d run once. He’d been called to a construction site in lower Manhattan where some excavators had discovered a skull a few feet below the surface of a vacant lot. Rhyme saw immediately that the skull was very old and brought a forensic anthropologist into the case. They continued to dig and discovered a number of bones and skeletons.
    A little research revealed that in 1741 there’d been a slave rebellion in Manhattan and a number of slaves—and militant white abolitionists—had been hanged on a small island in the Collect. The island became a popular site for hangings and several informal cemeteries and potter’s fields sprang up in the area.
    Where had the Collect been? Rhyme tried to recall.Near where Chinatown and the Lower East Side meet. But it was hard to say for certain because the pond had been filled in so long ago. It had been—
    Yes! he thought, his heart thudding: The Collect had been filled in because it had grown so polluted the city commissioners considered it a major health risk. And among the main polluters were the tanneries on the eastern shore!
    Pretty good with the dialer now, Rhyme didn’t flub a single number and got put through to the mayor on the first try. Hizzoner, though, the man’s personal secretary said, was at a brunch at the UN. But when Rhyme identified himself the secretary said, “One minute, sir,” and in much less time than that he found himself on the line with a man who said, through a mouthful of food, “Talk to me, detective. How the fuck’re we doing?”
    * * *  
    “Five-eight-eight-five, K,” Amelia Sachs said, answering the radio. Rhyme heard the edginess in her voice.
    “Sachs.”
    “This isn’t good,” she told him. “We’re not having any luck.”
    “I think I’ve got him.”
    “ What? ”
    “The six-hundred block, East Van Brevoort. Near Chinatown.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “The mayor put me in touch with the head of the Historical Society. There’s an archaeologic dig down there. An old graveyard. Across the street from where a big tannery used to be. And there were some big Federal mansions in the area at one time. I think he’s nearby.”
    “I’m rolling.”
    Through the speakerphone he heard a squeal of tires, then the siren cut in.
    “I’ve called Lon and Haumann,” he added. “They’re on their way over now.”
    “Rhyme,” her urgent voice crackled. “I’ll get her out.”
    Ah, you’ve got a cop’s good heart, Amelia, a professional heart, Rhyme thought. But you’re still just a rookie. “Sachs?” he said.
    “Yes?”
    “I’ve been reading this book. Eight twenty-three’s picked a bad one for this role model of his. Really bad.”
    She said nothing.
    “What I’m saying is,” he continued, “whether the girl’s there or not, if you find him and he so much as flinches, you nail him.”
    “But we get him alive, he can lead us to her. We can—”
    “No, Sachs. Listen to me. You take him out. Any sign he’s going for a weapon, anything . . . you take him out.”
    Static clattered. Then he heard her steady voice, “I’m at Van Brevoort, Rhyme. You were right. Looks like his place.”
    * * *  
    Eighteen unmarkeds, two ESU vans and Amelia Sachs’s RRV were clustered near a short, deserted street on the Lower East Side.
    East Van Brevoort looked like it was in Sarajevo. The buildings were abandoned—two of them burned to the ground. On the east side of the street was a dilapidated hospital of some kind, its roof caved in. Next to it was a large hole in the ground, roped off, with a No Trespassing sign emblazoned with the County Court seal—the archaeologic dig Rhyme had mentioned. A scrawny dog had died and lay in the gutter, its corpse picked over by rats.
    In the middle of the other side of the street was a marble-fronted townhouse, faintly pink, with an attached carriage house, marginally nicer than the other decrepit tenements along Van Brevoort.
    Sellitto, Banks and Haumann stood beside the ESU van, as a dozen officers suited up in Kevlar and racked their M-16s. Sachs