The Bone Collector

minutes. Rhyme lacked the mechanism most people have for bleeding off tension. He’d been a manic pacer when he was mobile, drove the officers in IRD crazy. Now, his eyes energetically scanned the Randel map of the city as Sachs dug beneath her Patrol cap and scratched at her scalp. Invisible Mel Cooper cataloged evidence, calm as a surgeon.
    All but one of the people in the room jumped inordinately when Sellitto’s phone brayed. He listened; his face broke into a grin.
    “Got it!” One of Haumann’s squads is at Eleventh and Sixtieth. They can hear a woman’s screams coming from somewhere around there. They dunno where for sure. They’re doing a door-to-door.”
    “Get your running shoes on,” Rhyme ordered Sachs.
    He saw her face sag. She glanced at Rhyme’s phone, as if it might be ringing with a reprieve call from the governor at any minute. Then a look at Sellitto, who was poring over the ESU tactical map of the West Side.
    “Amelia,” Rhyme said, “we lost one. That’s too bad. But we don’t have to lose any more.”
    “If you saw her,” she whispered. “If you only saw what he did to her—”
    “Oh, but I have, Amelia,” he said evenly, his eyesrelentless and challenging. “I’ve seen what happened to T.J. I’ve seen what happens to bodies left in hot trunks for a month. I’ve seen what a pound of C4 does to arms and legs and faces. I worked the Happy Land social club fire. Over eighty people burned to death. We took Polaroids of the vics’ faces, or what was left of them, for their families to identify—because there’s no way in hell a human being could walk past those rows of bodies and stay sane. Except us. We didn’t have any choice.” He inhaled against the excruciating pain that swept through his neck. “See, if you’re going to get by in this business, Amelia . . . If you’re going to get by in life, you’re going to have to learn to give up the dead.”
    One by one the others in the room had stopped what they were doing and were looking at the two of them.
    No pleasantries now from Amelia Sachs. No polite smiles. She tried for a moment to make her gaze cryptic. But it was transparent as glass. Her fury at him—out of proportion to his comment—roiled through her; her long face folded under the dark energy. She swept aside a lock of lazy red hair and snatched the headset from the table. At the top of the stairs she paused and looked at him with a withering glance, reminding Rhyme that there was nothing colder than a beautiful woman’s cold smile.
    And for some reason he found himself thinking: Welcome back, Amelia.
     
    “Whatcha got? You got goodies, you got a story, you got pictures?”
    The Scruff sat in a bar on the East Side of Manhattan, Third Avenue—which is to the city what strip malls are to the ’burbs. This was a dingy tavern, soon to be rockin’ with Yuppies on the make. But now it was the refuge of badly dressed locals, eating suppers of questionable fish and limp salads.
    The lean man, skin like knotty ebony, wore a very white shirt and a very green suit. He leaned closer to the Scruff. “You got news, you got secret codes, you got letters? You got shit?”
    “Man. Ha.”
    “You’re not laughing when you say ha,” said Fred Dellray, really D’Ellret but that had been generations ago. He was six foot four, rarely smiled despite the Jabberwocky banter, and was a star special agent in the Manhattan office of the FBI.
    “No, man. I’m not laughing.”
    “So what’ve you got? ” Dellray squeezed the end of a cigarette, which perched over his left ear.
    “It takes time, man.” The Scruff, a short man, scratched his greasy hair.
    “But you ain’t got time. Time is precious, time is fleeing, and time is one thing you. Ain’t. Got.”
    Dellray put his huge hand under the table, on which sat two coffees, and squeezed the Scruff’s thigh until he whined.
    Six months ago the skinny little guy had been caught trying to sell automatic M-16s to a couple of right-wing crazies, who—whether they actually were or not—also happened to be undercover BATF agents.
    The feds hadn’t wanted the Scruff himself of course, the greasy little wild-eyed thing. They wanted whoever was supplying the guns. ATF swam upstream a ways but no great busts were forthcoming and so they gave him to Dellray, the Bureau’s Número Uno snitch handler, to see if he might be some use. So far, though, he’d proved to be just an irritating, mousy little skel who