The Bone Collector

the crime scene?”
    “Yessir. I didn’t think the perp would park on the cross street. He could be seen too easily from those apartments. See, there? Eleventh seemed like a better choice.”
    “Well, it was a wrong choice. There were no footprints on that side of the tracks, and two sets going to the ladder that leads up to Thirty-seven.”
    “I closed Thirty-seven too.”
    “That’s my point. That’s all that needed to be closed. And the train?” he asked. “Why’d you stop that?”
    “Well, sir. I thought that a train going through the scene might disturb evidence. Or something.”
    “Or something, officer?”
    “I didn’t express myself very well, sir. I meant—”
    “What about Newark Airport?”
    “Yessir.” She looked around for help. There were officers nearby but they were busily ignoring the dressing-down. “What exactly about Newark?”
    “Why didn’t you shut that down too?”
    Oh, wonderful. A schoolmarm. Her Julia Roberts lips grew taut but she said reasonably, “Sir, in my judgment, it seemed likely that—”
    “The New York Thruway would’ve been a good choice too. And the Jersey Pike and Long Island Expressway. I-70, all the way to St. Louis. Those are likely means of escape.”
    She lowered her head slightly and stared back at Peretti. The two of them were exactly the same height, though his heels were higher.
    “I’ve gotten calls from the commissioner,” he continued, “the head of the Port Authority, the UN secretary-general’s office, the head of that expo—” He nodded toward the Javits Center. “We’ve fucked up the conference schedule, a U.S. senator’s speech and traffic on the entire West Side. The train tracks were fifty feet from the vic and the street you closed was a good two hundred feet away and thirty above. I mean, even Hurricane Eva didn’t fuck up Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor like this.”
    “I just thought—”
    Peretti smiled. Because Sachs was a beautiful woman—her “foundering” before attending the academy had involved steady assignments for the Chantelle Modeling Agency on Madison Avenue—the cop chose to forgive her.
    “Patrolwoman Sachs”—he glanced at the name tag on her chest, flattened chastely by the American Body Armor vest—“an object lesson. Crime scene work is a balance. It’d be nice if we could cordon off the wholecity after every homicide and detain about three million people. But we can’t do that. I say this constructively. For your edification.”
    “Actually, sir,” she said brusquely, “I’m transferring out of Patrol. Effective as of noon today.”
    He nodded, smiled cheerfully. “Then, enough said. But for the record, it was your decision to stop the train and close the street.”
    “Yessir, it was,” she said smartly. “No mistake about that.”
    He jotted this into a black watchbook with slashing strokes of his sweaty pen.
    Oh, please . . .
    “Now, remove those garbage cans. You direct traffic until the street’s clear again. You hear me?”
    Without a yessir or nosir or any other acknowledgment she wandered to Eleventh Avenue and slowly began removing the garbage cans. Every single driver who passed her scowled or muttered something. Sachs glanced at her watch.
    An hour to go.
    I can live with it.

TWO
    W ith a terse flutter of wings the peregrine dropped onto the window ledge. The light outside, midmorning, was brilliant and the air looked fiercely hot.
    “There you are,” the man whispered. Then cocked his head at the sound of the buzzer of the door downstairs.
    “Is that him?” he shouted toward the stairs. “Is it?”
    Lincoln Rhyme heard nothing in response and turned back to the window. The bird’s head swiveled, a fast, jerky movement that the falcon nevertheless made elegant. Rhyme observed that its talons were bloody. A piece of yellow flesh dangled from the black nutshell beak. It extended a short neck and eased to the nest in movements reminiscent not of a bird’s but a snake’s. The falcon dropped the meat into the upturned mouth of the fuzzy blue hatchling. I’m looking, Rhyme thought, at the only living creature in New York City with no predator. Except maybe God Himself.
    He heard the footsteps come up the stairs slowly.
    “Was that him?” he asked Thom.
    The young man answered, “No.”
    “Who was it? The doorbell rang, didn’t it?”
    Thom’s eyes went to the window. “The bird’s back. Look, bloodstains on your windowsill. Can you see them?”
    The