The Bone Collector

and a sliver of wood. The bone first,” Rhyme instructed.
      * * *
    Morgen  . . .
    Young Monelle Gerger opened her eyes and slowly sat up in the sagging bed. In her two years in east Greenwich Village she’d never gotten used to morning.
    Her round, twenty-one-year-old body eased forward and she got a blast of unrelenting August sunlight in her bleary eyes. “ Mein Gott  . . .”
    She’d left the club at five, home at six, made love with Brian until seven . . .
    What time was it now?
    Early morning, she was sure.
    She squinted at the clock. Oh. Four-thirty in the afternoon.
    Not so früh morgens after all.
    Coffee or laundry?
    It was around this time of day that she’d wander over to Dojo’s for a veggie-burger breakfast and three cups of their tough coffee. There she’d meet people she knew, clubbies like herself—downtown people.
    But she’d let a lot of things go lately, the domestic things. And so now she pulled on two baggy T-shirts to hide her chubby figure and jeans, hung five or six chains around her neck and grabbed the laundry basket, tossed the Wisk onto it.
    Monelle undid the three dead bolts barring the door. She hefted the laundry basket and walked down the dark staircase of the residence hall. At the basement level she paused.
    Irgendwas stimmt hier nicht.
    Feeling uneasy, Monelle looked around the deserted stairway, the murky corridors.
    What’s different?
    The light, that’s it! The bulbs in the hall’re burned out. No—she looked closely—they were missing. Fucking kids’ll steal anything. She’d moved in here, the Deutsche Haus—because it was supposedly a haven for German artists and musicians. It turned out to be just another filthy, way-overpriced East Village walkup, like all the other tenements around here. The only difference was that she could bitch to the manager in her native tongue.
    She continued through the basement door into the incinerator room, which was so dark she had to grope her way along the wall to make sure she didn’t trip over the junk on the floor.
    Pushing open the door, she stepped into the corridor that led to the laundry room.
    A shuffling. A skitter.
    She turned quickly and saw nothing but motionless shadows. All she heard was the sound of traffic, the groans of an old, old building.
    Through the dimness. Past stacks of boxes and discarded chairs and tables. Under wires caked with greasy dust. Monelle continued toward the laundry room. Nobulbs here either. She was uneasy, recalling something that hadn’t occurred to her for years. Walking with her father down a narrow alley off Lange Strasse, near the Obermain Brücke, on their way to the zoo. She must have been five or six. Her father had suddenly gripped her by the shoulder and pointed to the bridge and told her matter-of-factly that a hungry troll lived underneath it. When they crossed it on their way home, he warned, they’d have to walk quickly. She now felt a ripple of panic rise up her spine to her crew-cut blond hair.
    Stupid. Trolls . . .
    She continued down the dank corridor, listening to the humming of some electrical equipment. Far off she heard a song by the feuding brothers in Oasis.
    The laundry room was dark.
    Well, if those bulbs were gone, that was it. She’d go upstairs, and pound on Herr Neischen’s door until he came running. She’d given him hell for the broken latches on the front and back doors and for the beer-guzzling kids he never kicked off the front stoop. She’d give him hell for the missing bulbs too.
    She reached inside and flicked the switch.
    Brilliant white light. Three large bulbs glowed like suns, revealing a room that was filthy but empty. Monelle strode up to the bank of four machines and dumped the whites in one, the colors in the next. She counted out quarters, dropped them into slots and shoved the levers forward.
    Nothing.
    Monelle jiggled the lever. Then hit the machine itself. No response.
    “Shit. This gottverdammte building.”
    Then she saw the power cord. Some idiot had unplugged the machines. She knew who. Neischen had a twelve-year-old son who was responsible for most of the carnage around the building. When she’d complained about something last year the little shit’d tried to kick her.
    She picked up the cord and crouched, reaching behind the machine to find the outlet. She plugged it in.
    And felt the man’s breath on her neck.
    Nein!
    He was sandwiched between the wall and the back of the washer. Barking a fast scream, she