The Bone Collector

caught a glimpse of ski mask and dark clothes then his hand clamped down on her arm like an animal’s jaws. She was off balance and he easily jerked her forward. She tumbled to the floor, hitting her face on the rough concrete, and swallowed the scream forming in her throat.
    He was on her in an instant, pinning her arms to the concrete, slapping a piece of thick gray tape over her mouth.
    Hilfe!
    Nein, bitte nicht.
    Bitte nicht.
    He wasn’t large but he was strong. He easily rolled her over onto her stomach and she heard the ratcheting of the handcuffs closing on her wrists.
    Then he stood up. For a long moment, no sound but the drip of water, the rasp of Monelle’s breath, the click of a small motor somewhere in the basement.
    Waiting for the hands to touch her body, to tear off her clothes. She heard him walk to the doorway to make sure they were alone.
    Oh, he had complete privacy, she knew, furious with herself; she was one of the few residents who used the laundry room. Most of them avoided it because it was so deserted, so close to the back doors and windows, so far away from help.
    He returned and rolled her over onto her back. Whispered something she couldn’t make out. Then: “Hanna.”
    Hanna? It’s a mistake! He thinks I’m somebody else. She shook her head broadly, trying to make him understand this.
    But then, looking at his eyes, she stopped. Even though he wore a ski mask, it was clear that something was wrong. He was upset. He scanned her body, shaking his head. He closed his gloved fingers around her big arms. Squeezed her thick shoulders, grabbed a pinch of fat. She shivered in pain.
    That’s what she saw: disappointment. He’d caught her and now he wasn’t sure he wanted her after all.
    He reached into his pocket and slowly withdrew his hand. The click of the knife opening was like an electric shock. It started a jag of sobbing.
    Nein, nein, nein!
    A hiss of breath escaped from his teeth like wind through winter trees. He crouched over her, debating.
    “Hanna,” he whispered. “What am I going to do?”
    Then, suddenly, he made a decision. He put the knife away and yanked her to her feet then led her out to the corridor and through the rear door—the one with the broken lock she’d been hounding Herr Neischen for weeks to fix.

ELEVEN
    A criminalist is a renaissance man.
    He’s got to know botany, geology, ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature, engineering. If he knows facts—that ash with a high strontium content probably came from a highway flare, that faca is Portuguese for “knife,” that Ethiopian diners use no utensils and eat with their right hands exclusively, that a slug with five land-and-groove rifling marks, right twist, could not have been fired by a Colt pistol—if he knows these things he may just make the connection that places an unsub at the crime scene.
    One subject all criminalists know is anatomy. And this was certainly a specialty of Lincoln Rhyme’s, for he had spent the past three and a half years enmeshed in the quirky logic of bone and nerve.
    He now glanced at the evidence bag from the steam room, dangling in Jerry Banks’s hand, and announced, “Leg bone. Not human. So it’s not from the next vic.”
    It was a ring of bone about two inches around, sawn through evenly. There was blood in the tracks left by the saw blade.
    “A medium-sized animal,” Rhyme continued. “Large dog, sheep, goat. It’d support, I’d guess, a hundred to a hundred fifty pounds of weight. Let’s make sure the blood’s from an animal though. Still could be the vic’s.”
    Perps had been known to beat or stab people to death with bones. Rhyme himself had had three such cases; the weapons had been a beef knuckle bone, a deer’s leg bone, and in one disturbing case the victim’s own ulna.
    Mel Cooper ran a gel-diffusion test for blood origin. “We’ll have to wait a bit for the results,” he explained apologetically.

    “Amelia,” Rhyme said, “maybe you could help us here. Use the eye loupe and look the bone over carefully. Tell us what you see.”
    “Not the microscope?” she asked. He thought she’d protest but she stepped forward to the bone, peered at it with curiosity.
    “Too much magnification,” Rhyme explained.
    She put on the goggles and bent over the white enamel tray. Cooper turned on a gooseneck lamp.
    “The cutting marks,” Rhyme said. “Is it hacked up or are they even?”
    “They’re pretty even.”
    “A power saw.”
    Rhyme