The Bone Collector

and Murph the Surf, who boosted the Star of India diamond.
    “Nineteenth-century building supplies, underground streams, butler’s schools,” Berger recited, flipping through the book, “gay baths, Chinatown whorehouses, Russian Orthodox churches . . . How d’you learn all this about the city?”
    Rhyme shrugged. In his years as head of IRD he’d studied as much about the city as he had about forensics. Its history, politics, geology, sociology, infrastructure. He said, “Criminalistics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply—”
    Just as he heard the enthusiasm creep into his voice he stopped abruptly.
    Furious with himself that he’d been foxed so easily.
    “Nice try, Dr. Berger,” Rhyme said stiffly.
    “Ah, come on. Call me Bill. Please.”
    Rhyme wasn’t going to be derailed. “I’ve heard it before. Take a big, clean, smooth piece of paper and write down all the reasons why I should kill myself. And then take another big, clean smooth piece of paper and write all the reasons why I shouldn’t. Words like productive, useful, interesting, challenging come to mind. Big words. Ten-dollar words. They don’t mean shit to me. Besides, I couldn’t pick up a fucking pencil to save my soul.”
    “Lincoln,” Berger continued kindly, “I have to make sure you’re the appropriate candidate for the program.”
    “ ‘Candidate’? ‘Program’? Ah, the tyranny of euphemism,” Rhyme said bitterly. “Doctor, I’ve made up my mind. I’d like to do it today. Now, as a matter of fact.”
    “Why today?”
    Rhyme’s eyes had returned to the bottles and the bag. He whispered, “Why not? What’s today? August twenty-third? That’s as good a day to die as any.”
    The doctor tapped his narrow lips. “I have to spend some time talking to you, Lincoln. If I’m convinced that you really want to go ahead—”
    “I do,” Rhyme said, noting as he often did how weak our words sound without the body gestures to accompany them. He wanted desperately to lay his hand on Berger’s arm or lift his palms beseechingly.
    Without asking if he could, Berger pulled out a packet of Marlboros and lit a cigarette. He took a folding metal ashtray from his pocket and opened it up. Crossed his thin legs. He looked like a foppish frat boy at an Ivy League smoker. “Lincoln, you understand the problem here, don’t you?”
    Sure, he understood. It was the very reason why Berger was here and why one of Rhyme’s own doctors hadn’t “done the deed.” Hastening an inevitable death was one thing; nearly one-third of practicing doctors who treated terminal patients had prescribed or administered fatal doses of drugs. Most prosecutors turned a blind eye toward them unless a doctor flaunted it—like Kevorkian.
    But a quad? A hemi? A para? A crip? Oh, that was different. Lincoln Rhyme was forty years old. He’d been weaned off the ventilator. Barring some insidious gene in the Rhyme stock, there was no medical reason why he couldn’t live to eighty.
    Berger added, “Let me be blunt, Lincoln. I also have to be sure this isn’t a setup.”
    “Setup?”
    “Prosecutors. I’ve been entrapped before.”
    Rhyme laughed. “The New York attorney general’s a busy man. He’s not going to wire a crip to bag himself a euthanasist.”
    Glancing absently at the crime scene report.
. . . ten feet southwest of victim, found in a cluster on a small pile of white sand: a ball of fiber, approximately six centimeters in diameter, off-white in color. The fiber was sampled in the energy-dispersive X-ray unit and found to consist of A 2 B 5 (Si, Al) 8 O 22 (OH) 2 . No source was indicated and the fibers could not be individuated. Sample sent to FBI PERT office for analysis.
    “I just have to be careful,” Berger continued. “Thisis my whole professional life now. I gave up orthopedics completely. Anyway, it’s more than a job. I’ve decided to devote my life to helping others end theirs.”
Adjacent to this fiber, approximately three inches away were found two scraps of paper. One was common newsprint, with the words “three p.m.” printed in Times Roman type, in ink consistent with that used in commercial newspapers. The other scrap appeared to be the corner of a page from a book with the page number “823” printed on it. The typeface was Garamond and the paper was calendared. ALS and subsequent ninhydrin analysis reveal no latent friction-ridge prints on