The Bone Collector

shoes, pulled off the sweats and T-shirt. She wore a lace bra and baggy cotton panties. She climbed into the Clinitron beside Rhyme, showing every bit of the authority beautiful women wield when it comes to climbing into bed with a man.
    She wriggled down into the pellets and laughed. “This is one hell of a bed,” she said, stretching like a cat. Eyes closed, Sachs asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”
    “I don’t mind at all.”
    “Rhyme?”
    “What?”
    “Tell me more about your book, okay? Some more crime scenes?”
    He started to describe a clever serial killer in Queens but in less than one minute she was asleep.
    Rhyme glanced down and noted her breast against his chest, her knee resting on his thigh. A woman’s hair was banked against his face for the first time in years. It tickled. He’d forgotten that this happened. For someone who lived so in the past, with such a good memory, he was surprised to find he couldn’t exactly remember when he’d experienced this sensation last. What he could recall was an amalgam of evenings with Blaine, he supposed, before the accident. He did remember that he’d decided to endure the tickle, not push the strands away, so he wouldn’t disturb his wife.
    Now, of course, he couldn’t brush away Sachs’s hair if God Himself had asked. But he wouldn’t think of moving it aside. Just the opposite; he wanted to prolong the sensation until the end of the universe.

THIRTY-FIVE
    T he next morning Lincoln Rhyme was alone again.
    Thom had gone shopping and Mel Cooper was at the IRD lab downtown. Vince Peretti had completed the CS work at the mansion on East Van Brevoort and at Sachs’s. They’d found woefully few clues though Rhyme put the lack of PE down to the unsub’s ingenuity, not Peretti’s derivative talents.
    Rhyme was awaiting the crime scene report. But both Dobyns and Sellitto believed that 823 had gone to ground—temporarily at least. There’d been no more attacks on the police and no other victims had been kidnapped in the past twelve hours.
    Sachs’s minder—a large Patrol officer from MTS—had accompanied her to an appointment with an ear, nose and throat man at a hospital in Brooklyn; the dirt had done quite a number on her throat. Rhyme himself had a bodyguard too—a uniform from the Twentieth Precinct, stationed in front of his townhouse—a friendly cop he’d known for years and with whom Rhyme enjoyed a running argument on the merits of Irish peat versus Scottish in the production of whisky.
    Rhyme was in a great mood. He called downstairs on the intercom. “I’m expecting a doctor in a couple of hours. You can let him up.”
    The cop said he would.
    Dr. William Berger had assured Rhyme that today he’d be on time.
    Rhyme leaned back in the pillow and realized he wasn’t completely alone. On the windowsill, the falcons paced. Rarely skittish, they seemed uneasy. Another low front was approaching. Rhyme’s window revealed a calmsky but he trusted the birds; they were infallible barometers.

    He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 11:00 a.m. Here he was, just like two days ago, awaiting Berger’s arrival. That’s life, he thought: postponement upon postponement but ultimately, with some luck, we get to where we’re meant to be.
    He watched television for twenty minutes, trolling for stories about the kidnappings. But all the stations were doing specials on the opening day of the UN conference. Rhyme found it boring and turned to a rerun of Matlock, flipped back to a gorgeous CNN reporter standing outside UN headquarters and then shut the damn set off.
    The telephone rang and he went through the complicated gestures of answering it. “Hello.”
    There was a pause before a man’s voice said, “Lincoln?”
    “Yes?”
    “Jim Polling. How you doin’?”
    Rhyme realized that he hadn’t seen much of the captain since early yesterday, except for the news conference last night, where he’d whispered prompts to the mayor and Chief Wilson.
    “Okay. Any word on our unsub?” Rhyme asked.
    “Nothing yet. But we’ll get him.” Another pause. “Hey, you alone?”
    “Yep.”
    A longer pause.
    “Okay if I stop by?”
    “Sure.”
    “A half hour?”
    “I’ll be here,” Rhyme said jovially.
    He rested his head in the thick pillow and his eyes slipped to the knotted clothesline hanging beside the profile poster. Still no answer about the knot. It was—he laughed aloud at the joke—a loose end. He hated the idea of leaving the