The Bone Collector

What else do you feel?”
    “I. . .”
    A thought formed in her mind, vague. She saw thewoman struggling to free herself. Saw something else . . . some one else. Him, she thought. Unsub 823. But what about him? She was close to understanding. What . . . what? But suddenly the thought vanished. Gone.
    “I don’t know,” she whispered.
    “Do you feel any urgency? Or are you pretty cool about what you’re doing?”
    “I’m in a hurry. I have to leave. The cops could be here at any minute. But I still . . .”
    “What?”
    “Shhhh,” she ordered, and scanned the room again, looking for whatever had put the seed of the vanished thought in her mind.
    The room was swimming, a black, starry night. Swirls of darkness and distant, jaundiced lights. Lord, don’t let me faint!
    Maybe he—
    There! That’s it. Sachs’s eyes were following the steam pipe. She was looking at another access plate in a shadowy alcove of the room. It would have been a better hiding place for the girl—you couldn’t see it from the doorway if you were walking past—and the second plate had only four bolts on it, not eight, like the one he chose.
    Why not that pipe?
    Then she understood.
    “He doesn’t want . . . I don’t want to leave just yet because I want to keep an eye on her.”
    “Why do you think that?” he inquired, echoing her own words just moments before.
    “There’s another pipe I could’ve chained her to but I picked the one that was in the open.”
    “So you could see her?”
    “I think so.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe to make sure she can’t get away. Maybe to make sure the gag’s tight. . . . I don’t know.”
    “Good, Amelia. But what does it mean? How can we use that fact?”
    Sachs looked around the room for the place where he’d have the best view of the girl without being seen.It turned out to be a shadowy spot between two large heating-oil tanks.
    “Yes!” she said excitedly, looking at the floor. “He was here.” Forgetting the role-playing. “He swept up.”
    She scanned the area with the bile glow of the PoliLight wand.
    “No footprints,” she said, disappointed. But as she lifted the light to shut it off, a smudge glowed on one of the tanks.
    “I’ve got a print!” she announced.
    “A print?”
    “You get a better view of the girl if you lean forward and support yourself on a tank. That’s what he did, I’m sure. Only, it’s weird, Lincoln. It’s . . . deformed. His hand.” She shivered looking at the monstrous palm.
    “In the suitcase there’s an aerosol bottle labeled DFO. It’s a fluorescent stain. Spray that on the print, hit the PoliLight and shoot the image with the one-to-one Polaroid.”
    She told him when she’d finished this and he said, “Now Dust-bust the floor between the tanks. If we’re lucky he scratched off a hair or chewed a fingernail.”
    My habits, Sachs thought. It was one of the things that had finally ruined her modeling career—the bloody nail, the worried eyebrow. She’d tried and tried and tried to stop. Finally gave up, discouraged, bewildered that a tiny habit could change the direction of your life so dramatically.
    “Bag the vacuum filter.”
    “In paper?”
    “Yes, paper. Now, the body, Amelia.”
    “What?”
    “Well, you’ve got to process the body.”
    Her heart sank. Somebody else, please. Have somebody else do it. She said, “Not until the ME’s finished. That’s the rule.”
    “No rules today, Amelia. We’re making up our own. The medical examiner’ll get her after us.”
    Sachs approached the woman.
    “You know the routine?”
    “Yes.” She stepped close to the destroyed body.
    Then froze. Hands inches from the victim’s skin.
    I can’t do it. She shuddered. Told herself to keep going. But she couldn’t; the muscles weren’t responding.
    “Sachs? You there?”
    She couldn’t answer.
    I can’t do this. . . . It was as simple as that. Impossible. I can’t.
    “Sachs?”
    And then she looked into herself and, somehow, saw her father, in uniform, stooping low on the hot, pitted sidewalk of West Forty-second Street, sliding his arm around a scabby drunk to help him home. Then was seeing her Nick as he laughed and drank beer in a Bronx tavern with a hijacker who’d kill him in a second if he knew the young cop was working undercover. The two men in her life, doing what they had to do.
    “Amelia?”
    These two images bobbed in her thoughts, and why they calmed her, or where that calm came from,