The Bone Collector

Cooper said. “It hasn’t been frozen. There’s no evidence of tissue damage from ice crystals. And it hasn’t been refrigerated that long. It’s not desiccated; modern refrigerators dehydrate food.”
    “It’s a good lead,” Rhyme said. “Let’s get to work on it.”
    “ ‘Get to work’?” Sachs laughed. “Are you saying we call up all the grocery stores in the city and find out who sold veal bones yesterday?”
    “No,” Rhyme countered. “In the past two days.”
    “You want the Hardy Boys?”
    “Let them keep doing what they’re doing. Call Emma, downtown, if she’s still working. And if she isn’t get her back to the office with the other dispatchers and put them on overtime. Get her a list of every grocery chain in town. I’ll bet our boy isn’t buying groceries for a family of four so have Emma limit the list to customers buying five items or less.”
    “Warrants?” Banks asked.
    “Anybody balks, we’ll get a warrant,” Sellitto said. “But let’s try without. Who knows? Some citizens might actually cooperate. I’m told it happens.”
    “But how are the stores going to know who bought veal shanks?” Sachs asked. She was no longer as aloof as she had been. There was an edge in her voice. Rhyme wondered if her frustration might be a symptom of what he himself had often felt—the burdensome weight of the evidence. The essential problem for the criminalist is not that there’s too little evidence but that there’s too much.
    “Checkout scanners,” Rhyme said. “They record purchases on computer. For inventory and restocking. Go ahead, Banks. I see something just crossed your mind. Speak up. I won’t send you to Siberia this time.”
    “Well, only the chains have scanners, sir,” the youngdetective offered. “There’re hundreds of independents and butcher shops that don’t.”
    “Good point. But I think he wouldn’t go to a small shop. Anonymity’s important to him. He’ll be doing his buying at big stores. Impersonal.”
    Sellitto called Communications and explained to Emma what they needed.
    “Let’s get a polarized shot of the cellophane,” Rhyme said to Cooper.
    The technician put the minuscule fragment in a polarizing ’scope, then fitted the Polaroid camera to the eyepiece and took a shot. It was a colorful picture, a rainbow with gray streaks through it. Rhyme examined it. This pattern told them nothing by itself but it could be compared with other cello samples to see if they came from a common source.
    Rhyme had a thought. “Lon, get a dozen Emergency Service officers over here. On the double.”
    “Here?” Sellitto asked.
    “We’re going to put an operation together.”
    “You’re sure about that?” the detective asked.
    “Yes! I want them now.”
    “All right.” He nodded to Banks, who made the call to Haumann.
    “Now, what about the other planted clue—those hairs Amelia found?”
    Cooper poked through them with a probe then mounted several in the phase-contrast microscope. This instrument shot two light sources at a single subject, the second beam delayed slightly—out of phase—so the sample was both illuminated and set off by shadow.
    “It’s not human,” Cooper said. “I’ll tell you that right now. And they’re guard hairs, not down.”
    Hairs from the animal’s coat, he meant.
    “What kind? Dog?”
    “Veal calf?” Banks suggested, once again youthfully enthusiastic.
    “Check the scales,” Rhyme ordered. Meaning the microscopic flakes that make up the outer sheath of a strand of hair.
    Cooper typed on his computer keyboard and a fewseconds later thumbnail images of scaly rods popped onto the screen. “This is thanks to you, Lincoln. Remember the database?”
    At IRD Rhyme had compiled a huge collection of micrographs of different types of hair. “I do, yes, Mel. But they were in three-ring binders when I saw ’em last. How’d you get them on the computer?”
    “ScanMaster of course. JPEG compressed.”
    Jay-peg? What was that? In a few years technology had soared beyond Rhyme. Amazing . . .
    And as Cooper examined the images, Lincoln Rhyme wondered again what he’d been wondering all day—the question that kept floating to the surface: Why the clues? The human creature is so astonishing but count on it before anything else to be just that—a creature. A laughing animal, a dangerous one, a clever one, a scared one, but always acting for a reason —a motive that will move the beast toward its desires.