The Bone Collector

female falcon inched into view. Blue-gray like a fish, iridescent. Her head scanned the sky.
    “They’re always together. Do they mate for life?” Thom wondered aloud. “Like geese?”
    Rhyme’s eyes returned to Thom, who was bent forward at his trim, youthful waist, gazing at the nest through the spattered window.
    “Who was it?” Rhyme repeated. The young man was stalling now and it irritated Rhyme.
    “A visitor.”
    “A visitor? Ha.” Rhyme snorted. He tried to recall when his last visitor had been here. It must have been three months ago. Who’d it been? That reporter maybe or some distant cousin. Well, Peter Taylor, one of Rhyme’s spinal cord specialists. And Blaine had been here several times. But she of course was not a vis-i-tor.
    “It’s freezing,” Thom complained. His reaction was to open the window. Immediate gratification. Youth.
    “Don’t open the window,” Rhyme ordered. “And tell me who the hell’s here.”
    “It’s freezing.”
    “You’ll disturb the bird. You can turn the air conditioner down. I’ll turn it down.”
    “We were here first,” Thom said, further lifting the huge pane of window. “The birds moved in with full knowledge of you.” The falcons glanced toward the noise, glaring. But then they always glared. They remained on the ledge, lording over their domain of anemic ginkgo trees and alternate-side-of-the-street parkers.
    Rhyme repeated. “Who is it?”
    “Lon Sellitto.”
    “Lon?”
    What was he doing here?
    Thom examined the room. “The place is a mess.”
    Rhyme didn’t like the fuss of cleaning. He didn’t like the bustle, the noise of the vacuum—which he found particularly irritating. He was content here, as it was. This room, which he called his office, was on the second floor of his gothic townhouse on the Upper West Side of the city, overlooking Central Park. The room was large, twenty-by-twenty, and virtually every one of those feet was occupied. Sometimes he closed his eyes, playing a game, and tried to detect the smell of the different objects in the room here. The thousands of books and magazines, the Tower of Pisa stacks of photocopies, the hot transistors of the TV, the dust-frosted lightbulbs, the cork bulletin boards. Vinyl, peroxide, latex, upholstery.
    Three different kinds of single-malt Scotch.
    Falcon shit.
    “I don’t want to see him. Tell him I’m busy.”
    “And a young cop. Ernie Banks. No, he was a baseball player, right? You really should let me clean. You never notice how filthy someplace is till people come to call.”
    “Come to call? My, that sounds quaint. Victorian. How does this sound? Tell ’em to get the hell out. How’s that for fin-de-siècle etiquette?”
    A mess . . .
    Thom was speaking of the room but Rhyme supposed he meant his boss too.
    Rhyme’s hair was black and thick as a twenty-year-old’s—though he was twice that age—but the strands were wild and bushy, desperately in need of a wash and cut. His face sprouted a dirty-looking three days’ growth of black beard and he’d wakened with an incessant tickle in his ear, which meant that those hairs needed trimming as well. Rhyme’s nails were long, finger and toe, and he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week—polka-dotted pajamas, god-awful ugly. His eyes were narrow, deep brown, and set in a face that Blaine had told him on a number of occasions, passionate and otherwise, was handsome.
    “They want to talk to you,” Thom continued. “They say it’s very important.”
    “Well, bully for them.”
    “You haven’t seen Lon for nearly a year.”
    “Why does that mean I want to see him now? Have you scared off the bird? I’ll be pissed if you have.”
    “It’s important, Lincoln.”
    “ Very important, I recall you saying. Where’s that doctor? He might’ve called. I was dozing earlier. And you were out.”
    “You’ve been awake since six a.m.”
    “No.” He paused. “I woke up, yes. But then I dozed off. I was sound asleep. Did you check messages?”
    Thom said, “Yes. Nothing from him.”
    “He said he’d be here midmorning.”
    “And it’s just past eleven. Maybe we’ll hold off notifying air-sea rescue. What do you say?”
    “Have you been on the phone?” Rhyme asked abruptly. “Maybe he tried to call while you were on.”
    “I was talking to—”
    “Did I say anything?” Rhyme asked. “Now you’re angry. I didn’t say you shouldn’t be making phone calls. You can do that. You’ve always been able