The Bone Collector

working, she was safe.
    A final bang, then ringing silence.
    Git on outa thayr, girl. G’on.
    Mamma . . .
    T.J. cried for several minutes, thinking of her family back in Eastern Tennessee. Her nostrils clogged but as she began to choke she blew her nose violently, felt an explosion of tears and mucus. Then she was breathing again. It gave her confidence. Strength. She began to saw once more.
      * * *
    “I appreciate the urgency, detective. But I don’t know how I can help you. We use bolts all over the city. Oil lines, gas lines . . .”
    “All right,” Rhyme said tersely and asked the Con Ed supervisor at the company’s headquarters on Fourteenth Street, “Do you insulate wiring with asbestos?”
    A hesitation.
    “We’ve cleaned up ninety percent of that,” the woman said defensively. “Ninety- five. ”
    People could be so irritating. “I understand that. I just need to know if there’s still any asbestos used for insulation.”
    “No,” she said adamantly. “Well, never for electricity. Just the steam and that’s the smallest percentage of our service.”
    Steam!
    It was the least-known and the scariest of the city’s utilities. Con Ed heated water to 1,000 degrees then shot it through a hundred-mile network of pipes running under Manhattan. The blistering steam itself was superheated—about 380 degrees—and rocketed through the city at seventy-five miles an hour.
    Rhyme now recalled an article in the paper. “Didn’t you have a break in the line last week?”
    “Yessir. But there was no asbestos leak. That site had been cleaned years ago.”
    “But there is asbestos around some of your pipes in the system downtown?”
    She hesitated. “Well . . .”
    “Where was the break?” Rhyme continued quickly.
    “Broadway. A block north of Chambers.”
    “Wasn’t there an article in the Times about it?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
    “And did the article mention asbestos?”
    “It did,” she admitted, “but it just said that in the past asbestos contamination’d been a problem.”
    “The pipe that broke, was it . . . does it cross Pearl Street farther south?”
    “Well, let me see. Yes, it does. At Hanover Street. On the north side.”
    He pictured T.J. Colfax, the woman with the thin fingers and long nails, about to die.
    “And the steam’s going back on at three?”
    “That’s right. Any minute now.”
    “It can’t!” Rhyme shouted. “Somebody’s tampered with the line. You can’t turn that steam back on!”
    Cooper looked up uneasily from his microscope.
    The supervisor said, “Well, I don’t know . . .”
    Rhyme barked to Thom, “Call Lon, tell him she’s in a basement at Hanover and Pearl. The north side.” He told him about the steam. “Get the fire department there too. Heat-protective outfits.”
    Rhyme shouted into the speakerphone. “Call the workcrews! Now! They can’t turn that steam back on. They can’t! ” He repeated the words absently, detesting his exquisite imagination, which showed, in an endless loop, the woman’s flesh growing pink then red then splitting apart under the fierce clouds of sputtering white steam.
      * * *
    In the station wagon the radio crackled. It was three minutes to three by Sachs’s watch. She answered the call.
    “Portable 5885, K—”
    “Forget the officialese, Amelia,” Rhyme said. “We don’t have time.”
    “I—”
    “We think we know where she is. Hanover and Pearl.”
    She glanced over her shoulder and saw dozens of ESU officers running flat-out toward an old building.
    “Do you want me to—”
    “They’ll look for her. You have to get ready to work the scene.”
    “But I can help—”
    “No. I want you to go to the back of the station wagon. There’s a suitcase in it labeled zero two. Take it with you. And in a small black case there’s a PoliLight. You saw one in my room. Mel was using it. Take that too. In the suitcase marked zero three you’ll find a headset and stalk mike. Plug it into your Motorola and get over to the building where the officers are. Call me back when you’re rigged. Channel thirty-seven. I’ll be on a landline but you’ll be patched through to me.”
    Channel thirty-seven. The special ops citywide frequency. The priority frequency.
    “What?—” she asked. But the dead radio did not respond.
    She had a long black halogen flashlight on her utility belt so she left the bulky twelve-volter in the back of the wagon and grabbed the PoliLight and the