The Bone Collector

transferring out of Patrol. Today. I’ve got a medical transfer. Effective an hour ago.”
    “Medical?” Rhyme inquired.
    She hesitated, glancing unwilling at his legs again. “I have arthritis.”
    “Do you?” Rhyme asked.
    “Chronic arthritis.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    She continued quickly, “I only took that call this morning because someone was home sick. I didn’t plan on it.”
    “Yes, well, I had other plans too,” Lincoln Rhyme said. “Now, let’s look at some evidence.”

SIX
    T he bolt.”
    Remembering the classic crime scene rule: Analyze the most unusual evidence first.
    Thom turned the plastic bag over and over in his hands as Rhyme studied the metal rod, half rusted, half not. Dull. Worn.
    “You’re sure about the prints? You tried small-particle reagent? That’s the best for PE exposed to the elements.”
    “Yup,” Mel Cooper confirmed.
    “Thom,” Rhyme ordered, “get this hair out of my eyes! Comb it back. I told you to comb it back this morning.”
    The aide sighed and brushed at the tangled black strands. “Watch it,” he whispered ominously to his boss and Rhyme jerked his head dismissively, mussing his hair further. Amelia Sachs sat sullenly in the corner. Her legs rested under the chair in a sprinter’s starting position and, sure enough, she looked like she was just waiting for the gun.
    Rhyme turned back to the bolt.
    When he headed IRD, Rhyme had started assembling databases. Like the federal auto-paint-chip index or the BATF’s tobacco files. He’d set up a bullet-standards file, fibers, cloth, tires, shoes, tools, motor oil, transmission fluid. He’d spent hundreds of hours compiling lists, indexed and cross-referenced.
    Even during Rhyme’s obsessive tenure, though, IRD had never gotten around to cataloging hardware. He wondered why not and he was angry at himself for not taking the time to do it and angrier still at Vince Peretti for not thinking of it either.
    “We need to call every bolt manufacturer and jobber in the Northeast. No, in the country. Ask if they make a model like this and who they sell to. Fax a description and picture of the bolt to our dispatchers at Communications.”
    “Hell, there could be a million of them,” Banks said. “Every Ace Hardware and Sears in the country.”
    “I don’t think so,” Rhyme responded. “It’s got to be a viable clue. He wouldn’t have left it if it was useless. There’s a limited source of these bolts. I bet you.”
    Sellitto made a call and looked up a few minutes later. “I’ve got you dispatchers, Lincoln. Four of them. Where do we get a list of manufacturers?”
    “Get a patrolman down to Forty-second Street,” Rhyme replied. “Public Library. They have corporate directories there. Until we get one, have the dispatchers start working through the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages.”
    Sellitto repeated this into the phone.
    Rhyme glanced at the clock. It was one-thirty.
    “Now, the asbestos.”
    For an instant, the word glowed in his mind. He felt a jolt—in places where no jolts could be felt. What was familiar about asbestos? Something he’d read or heard about—recently, it seemed, though Lincoln Rhyme no longer trusted his sense of time. When you lie on your back frozen in place month after month after month, time slows to near-death. He might be thinking of something he’d read two years ago.
    “What do we know about asbestos?” he mused. No one answered but that didn’t matter; he answered himself. As he preferred to do anyway. Asbestos was a complex molecule, silicate polymer. It doesn’t burn because, like glass, it’s already oxidized.
    When he’d run crime scenes of old murders—working with forensic anthropologists and odontologists—Rhyme often found himself in asbestos-insulated buildings. He remembered the peculiar taste of the face masks they’d had to wear during the excavation. In fact, he now recalled, it’d been during an asbestos-removal cleanup at the City Hall subway stop three and a half years agothat crews found the body of one of the policemen murdered by Dan Shepherd dumped in a generator room. As Rhyme had bent down over it slowly to lift a fiber from the officer’s light-blue blouse, he’d heard the crack and groan of the oak beam. The mask had probably saved him from choking to death on the dust and dirt that caved in around him.
    “Maybe he’s got her at a cleanup site,” Sellitto said.
    “Could be,” Rhyme agreed.
    Sellitto