The Bone Collector

chocolate. He hadn’t thought about them until just this moment. It was a great invention, he remembered. He always looked forward to his afternoon milk.
    Sachs pushed the straw close to his mouth. He took it between his lips. She put her hand on his arm.
    Light or dark, music or silence, dreams or the meditation of dreamless sleep? What will I find?
    He began to sip. The taste was really no different from straight liquor. A little more bitter maybe. It was like—
    From downstairs came a huge pounding on the door. Hands and feet both, it seemed. Voices shouting too.
    He lifted his lips away from the straw. Glanced into the dim stairwell.
    She looked at him, frowning.
    “Go see,” he said to her.
    She disappeared down the stairs and a moment later returned, looking unhappy. Lon Sellitto and Jerry Banks followed. Rhyme noticed that the young detective had done another butcher job on his face with a razor. He’d really have to get that under control.
    Sellitto glanced at the bottle and the bag. His eyes swayed toward Sachs but she crossed her arms and held her own, silently ordering him to leave. This was not an issue of rank, the look told the detective, and what was happening here was none of his business. Sellitto’s eyes acknowledged the message but he wasn’t about to go anywhere just yet.
    “Lincoln, I need to talk to you.”
    “Talk. But talk fast, Lon. We’re busy.”
    The detective sat heavily in the noisy rattan chair. “An hour ago a bomb went off at the United Nations. Right next to the banquet hall. During the welcome dinner for the peace conference delegates.”
    “Six dead, fifty-four hurt,” Banks added. “Twenty of them serious.”
    “My God,” Sachs whispered.
    “Tell him,” Sellitto muttered.
    Banks continued, “For the conference, the UN hired a bunch of temps. The perp was one of them—a receptionist. A half-dozen people saw her carrying a knapsack to work and putting it in a storeroom near the banquet hall. She left just before the bang. The bomb squad estimates we’re looking at about two pounds of C4 or Semtex.”
    Sellitto said, “Linc, the bomb, it was a yellow knapsack, the wits said.”
    “Yellow?” Why was that familiar?
    “UN human resources ID’d the receptionist as Carole Ganz.”
    “The mother,” Rhyme and Sachs said simultaneously.
    “Yeah. The woman you saved in the church. Only Ganz’s an alias. Her real name’s Charlotte Willoughby. She was married to a Ron Willoughby. Ring a bell?”
    Rhyme said it didn’t.
    “It was in the news a couple years ago. He was an Army sergeant assigned to a UN peacekeeping force in Burma.”
    “Keep going,” the criminalist said.
    “Willoughby didn’t want to go—thought an American soldier shouldn’t be wearing a UN uniform and taking orders from anybody except the U.S. Army. It’s a big right-wing issue nowadays. But he went anyway. Wasn’t there a week before he’s blown away by some little punk in Rangoon. Got shot in the back. Became a conservative martyr. Anti-Terror says his widow got recruited by an extremist group out in the Chicago burbs. Some U of C grads gone underground. Edward and Katherine Stone.”
    Banks took over the narrative. “The explosive was ina package of kid’s modeling clay, along with some other toys. We think she was going to take the little girl with her so security at the banquet-hall entrance wouldn’t think anything of the clay. But with Pammy in the hospital she didn’t have her cover story so she gave up on the hall and just planted it in the storeroom. Did enough damage as it was.”
    “Rabitted?”
    “Yep. Not a trace.”
    “What about the little girl,” Sachs asked, “Pammy?”
    “Gone. The woman checked her out of the hospital around the time of the bang. No sign of either of them.”
    Rhyme asked, “The cell?”
    “The group in Chicago? They’re gone too. Had a safe house in Wisconsin but it’s been hosed. We don’t know where they are.”
    “So that was the rumor Dellray’s snitch heard.” Rhyme laughed. “ Carole was the one coming into the airport. Had nothing to do with Unsub 823.”
    He found Banks and Sellitto staring at him.
    Oh, the old silent trick again.
    “Forget it, Lon.” Rhyme said, all too aware of the glass sitting inches from him, radiating a welcoming heat. “Impossible.”
    The older detective plucked his sweaty shirt away from his body, cringing. “God damn cold in here, Lincoln. Jesus. Look, just think about it. What’sa