The Bone Collector

conversations over the past seven or eight months. Today was their first meeting.
    “There’s no way you can pass, by yourself?”
    Pass  . . .
    “Short of Gene Harrod’s approach, no. And even that’s a little iffy.”
    Harrod was young man in Boston, a quad, who decided he wanted to kill himself. Unable to find anyone to help him he finally committed suicide the only way he was able to. With the little control he had he set a fire in his apartment and when it was blazing drove hiswheelchair into it, setting himself aflame. He died of third-degree burns.
    The case was often raised by right-to-deathers as an example of the tragedy that anti-euthanasia laws can cause.
    Berger was familiar with the case and shook his head sympathetically. “No, that’s no way for anyone to die.” He assayed Rhyme’s body, the wires, the control panels. “What are your mechanical skills?”
    Rhyme explained about the ECUs—the E&J controller that his ring finger operated, the sip-and-puff control for his mouth, the chin joysticks, and the computer dictation unit that could type out words on the screen as he spoke them.
    “But everything has to be set up by someone else?” Berger asked. “For instance, someone would have to go to the store, buy a gun, mount it, rig the trigger and hook it up to your controller?”
    “Yes.”
    Making that person guilty of a conspiracy to commit murder, as well as manslaughter.
    “What about your equipment?” Rhyme asked. “It’s effective?”
    “Equipment?”
    “What you use? To, uhm, do the deed?”
    “It’s very effective. I’ve never had a patient complain.”
    Rhyme blinked and Berger laughed. Rhyme joined him. If you can’t laugh about death what can you laugh about?
    “Take a look.”
    “You have it with you?” Hope blossomed in Rhyme’s heart. It was the first time he’d felt that warm sensation in years.
    The doctor opened his attaché case and—rather ceremonially, Rhyme thought—set out a bottle of brandy. A small bottle of pills. A plastic bag and a rubber band.
    “What’s the drug?”
    “Seconal. Nobody prescribes it anymore. In the old days suicide was a lot easier. These babies’d do the trick, no question. Now, it’s almost impossible to kill yourselfwith modern tranquilizers. Halcion, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax . . . You may sleep for a long time but you’re going to wake up eventually.”
    “And the bag?”
    “Ah, the bag.” Berger picked it up. “That’s the emblem of the Lethe Society. Unofficially, of course—it’s not like we have a logo. If the pills and the brandy aren’t enough then we use the bag. Over the head, with a rubber band around the neck. We add a little ice inside because it gets pretty hot after a few minutes.”
    Rhyme couldn’t take his eyes off the trio of implements. The bag, thick plastic, like a painter’s drop cloth. The brandy was cheap, he observed, and the drugs generic.
    “This’s a nice house,” Berger said, looking around. “Central Park West . . . Do you live on disability?”
    “Some. I’ve also done consulting for the police and the FBI. After the accident . . . the construction company that was doing the excavating settled for three million. They swore there was no liability but there’s apparently a rule of law that a quadriplegic automatically wins any lawsuits against construction companies, no matter who was at fault. At least if the plaintiff comes to court and drools.”
    “And you wrote that book, right?”
    “I get some money from that. Not a lot. It was a ‘better-seller.’ Not a best-seller.”
    Berger picked up a copy of The Scenes of the Crime, flipped through it. “Famous crime scenes. Look at all this.” He laughed. “There are, what, forty, fifty scenes?”
    “Fifty-one.”
    Rhyme had revisited—in his mind and imagination, since he’d written it after the accident—as many old crime scenes in New York City as he could recall. Some solved, some not. He’d written about the Old Brewery, the notorious tenement in Five Points, where thirteen unrelated murders were recorded on a single night in 1839. About Charles Aubridge Deacon, who murdered his mother on July 13, 1863, during the Civil War draft riots, claiming former slaves had killed her and fueling the rampage against blacks. About architect StanfordWhite’s love-triangle murder atop the original Madison Square Garden and about Judge Crater’s disappearance. About George Metesky, the mad bomber of the ’50s,