The Bone Collector

looked over the clues again. There were only a few left unexplained.
    The scar on the finger.
    The knot.
    The aftershave.
    The scar was useless to them unless they had a suspect whose fingers they could examine. And there’d been no luck in identifying the knot—only preppy Banks’s opinion that it wasn’t nautical.
    What about the cheap aftershave? Assuming that most unsubs wouldn’t spritz themselves to go on a kidnapping spree, why had he worn it? Rhyme could only conclude again that he was trying to obscure another, a telltale scent. He ran through the possibilities: Food, liquor, chemicals, tobacco . . .
    He felt eyes on him and looked to his right.
    The black dots of the bony rattlesnake’s eye sockets gazed toward the Clinitron. This was the one clue that was out of place. It had no purpose, except to taunt them.
    Something occurred to him. Using the painstaking turning frame Rhyme slowly flipped back through Crime in Old New York. To the chapter on James Schneider. He found the paragraphs he’d remembered.
It has been suggested by a well-known physician of the mind (a practitioner of the discipline of “psyche-logy,” which has been much in the news of late) that James Schneider’s ultimate intent had little to do with harming his victims. Rather—this learnéd doctor has suggested—the villain was seeking revenge against those that did him what he perceived to be harm: the city’s constabulary, if not Society as a whole.
    Who can say where the source of this hate lay? Perhaps, like the Nile of old, its wellsprings were hidden to the world;—and possibly even to the villain himself. Yet one reason may be found in a little-known fact: Young James Schneider, at the tender age of ten, saw his father dragged away by constables only to die in prison for a robbery which, it was later ascertained, he did not commit. Following this unfortunate arrest, the boy’s mother fell into life on the street and abandoned her son, who grew up a ward of the state.
    Did the madman perchance commit these crimes to fling derision into the face of the very constabulary which had inadvertently destroyed his family?
    We will undoubtedly never know.
    Yet what does seem clear is that by mocking the ineffectualness of the protectors of its citizenry, James Schneider—the “bone collector”—was wreaking his vengeance upon the city itself as much as upon his innocent victims.
    Lincoln Rhyme lay back in his pillow and looked at the profile chart again.
      * * *
    Dirt is heavier than anything.
    It’s the earth itself, the dust of an iron core, and it doesn’t kill by strangling the air from the lungs but by compressing the cells until they die from the panic of immobility.
    Sachs wished that she had died. She prayed that she would. Fast. From fear or a heart attack. Before the first shovelful hit her face. She prayed for this harder than Lincoln Rhyme had prayed for his pills and liquor.
    Lying in the grave the unsub had dug in her own backyard Sachs felt the progress of the rich earth, dense and wormy, moving along her body.
    Sadistically, he was burying her slowly, casting only a shallow scoop at a time, scattering it carefully aroundher. He’d started with her feet. He was now up to her chest, the dirt slipping into her robe and around her breasts like a lover’s fingers.
    Heavier and heavier, compressing, binding her lungs; she could suck only an ounce or two of air at a time. He paused once or twice to look at her then continued.
    He likes to watch  . . .
    Hands beneath her, neck straining to keep her head above the tide.
    Then her chest was buried completely. Her shoulders, her throat. The cold earth rose to the hot skin of her face, packing around her head so she couldn’t move. Finally he bent down and ripped the tape off her mouth. As Sachs tried to scream he spilled a handful of dirt into her face. She shivered, choked on the black earth. Ears ringing, hearing for some reason an old song from her infancy—“The Green Leaves of Summer,” a song her father played over and over again on the hi-fi. Sorrowful, haunting. She closed her eyes. Everything was going black. Opened her mouth once and got another cup’s worth of soil.
    Giving up the dead  . . .
    And then she was under.
    Completely quiet. Not choking or gasping—the earth was a perfect seal. She had no air in her lungs, couldn’t make any sounds. Silence, except for the haunting melody and the growing roar in her ears.
    Then the pressure