The Bone Collector

ordered his young assistant, “Call EPA and city Environmental. Find out if there’re any sites where cleanup’s going on right now.”
    The detective made the call.
    “Bo,” Rhyme asked Haumann, “you have teams to deploy?”
    “Ready to roll,” the ESU commander confirmed. “Though I gotta tell you, we’ve got over half the force tied up with this UN thing. They’re on loan to the Secret Service and UN security.”
    “Got some EPA info here.” Banks gestured to Haumann and they retired to a corner of the room. They moved aside several stacks of books. As Haumann unfurled one of ESU’s tactical maps of New York something clattered to the floor.
    Banks jumped. “Jesus.”
    From the angle where he lay, Rhyme couldn’t see what had fallen. Haumann hesitated then bent down and retrieved the bleached piece of spinal column and replaced it on the table.
    Rhyme felt several pairs of eyes on him but he said nothing about the bone. Haumann leaned over the map, as Banks, on the phone, fed him information about asbestos-cleanup sites. The commander marked them in grease pencil. There appeared to be a lot of them, scattered all over the five boroughs of the city. It was discouraging.
    “We have to narrow it down more. Let’s see, the sand,” Rhyme said to Cooper. “’Scope it. Tell me what you think.”
    Sellitto handed the evidence envelope to the tech, who poured the contents out onto an enamel examinationtray. The glistening powder left a small cloud of dust. There was also a stone, worn smooth, which slid into the center of the pile.
    Lincoln Rhyme’s throat caught. Not at what he saw—he didn’t yet know what he was looking at—but at the flawed nerve impulse that shot from his brain and died halfway to his useless right arm, urging it to grab a pencil and to probe. The first time in a year or so he’d felt that urge. It nearly brought tears into his eyes and his only solace was the memory of the tiny bottle of Seconal and the plastic bag that Dr. Berger carried with him—images that hovered like a saving angel over the room.
    He cleared his throat. “Print it!”
    “What?” Cooper asked.
    “The stone.”
    Sellitto looked at him inquiringly.
    “The rock doesn’t belong there,” Rhyme said. “Apples and oranges. I want to know why. Print it.”
    Using porcelain-tipped forceps, Cooper picked up the stone and examined it. He slipped on goggles and hit the rock with a beam from a PoliLight—a power pack the size of a car battery with a light wand attached.
    “Nothing,” Cooper said.
    “VMD?”
    Vacuum metal deposition is the Cadillac of techniques for raising latent prints on nonporous surfaces. It evaporates gold or zinc in a vacuum chamber containing the object to be tested; the metal coats the latent print, making the whorls and peaks very visible.
    But Cooper didn’t have a VMD with him.
    “What do you have?” asked Rhyme, not pleased.
    “Sudan black, stabilized physical developer, iodine, amido black, DFO and gentian violet, Magna-Brush.”
    He’d also brought ninhydrin for raising prints on porous surfaces and a Super Glue frame for smooth surfaces. Rhyme recalled the stunning news that had swept the forensic community some years ago: A technician working in a U.S. Army forensic lab in Japan had used Super Glue to fix a broken camera and found to his amazement that the fumes from the adhesive raisedlatent fingerprints better than most chemicals made for that purpose.
    This was the method Cooper now used. With forceps he set the rock in a small glass box and put a dab of glue on the hot plate inside. A few minutes later he lifted the rock out.
    “We’ve got something,” he said. He dusted it with long-wavelength UV powder and hit it with the beam from the PoliLight wand. A print was clearly visible. Dead center. Cooper photographed it with Polaroid CU-5, a 1:1 camera. He showed the picture to Rhyme.
    “Hold it closer.” Rhyme squinted as he examined it. “Yes! He rolled it.”
    Rolling prints—rocking a finger onto a surface—produced an impression different from one made by picking up an object. It was a subtle difference—in the width of the friction ridges at various points on the pattern—but one that Rhyme now recognized clearly.
    “And look, what’s that?” he mused. “That line.” There was a faint crescent mark above the print itself.
    “It looks almost like—”
    “Yep,” Rhyme said, “her fingernail. You wouldn’t normally get that. But I’ll bet