The Bone Collector

paper with the phases of the moon on it. He studied it closely. A scrap like this was wonderful individuated evidence. You could fit it to the sheet it’d been torn from and link the two as closely as fingerprints. The problem here of course was that they had no original piece of paper. He wondered if they’d ever find it. The unsub might have destroyed it once he’d torn this bit out. Yet Lincoln Rhyme preferred to think not. He liked to picture it somewhere. Just waiting to be found. The way he always pictured source evidence: the automobile the paint chip had scraped off of, the finger that had lost the nail, the gun barrel that had discharged the rifled slug found in the victim’s body. These sources—always close to the unsub—took on personalities of their own in Rhyme’s mind. They could be imperious or cruel.
    Or mysterious.
    Phases of the moon.
    Rhyme asked Dobyns if their unsub could be driven to act cyclically.
    “No. The moon isn’t in a major phase right now. We’re four days past new.”
    “So the moons mean something else.”
    “If they’re even moons in the first place,” Sachs said. Pleased with herself, and rightly so, Rhyme thought. He said, “Good point, Amelia. Maybe he’s talking about circles. About ink. About paper. About geometry. The planetarium . . .”
    Rhyme realized that she was staring at him. Maybe just realizing now that he’d shaved and his hair was combed, his clothes changed.
    And what was her mood now? he wondered. Angry at him, or disengaged? He couldn’t tell. At the moment Amelia Sachs was as cryptic as Unsub 823.
    The beeping of the fax machine sounded in the hallway. Thom went to get it and returned a moment later with two sheets of paper.
    “It’s from Emma Rollins,” he announced. He held the sheets up for Rhyme to see.
    “Our grocery scanner survey. Eleven stores in Manhattan sold veal shanks to customers buying fewer than five items in the last two days.” He started to write on the poster then glanced at Rhyme. “The names of the stores?”
    “Of course. We’ll need them for cross-referencing later.”
    Thom wrote them down on the profile chart.
     
    B’way & 82nd,
ShopRite
    B’way & 96th,
Anderson Foods
    Greenwich & Bank,
ShopRite
    2nd Ave., 72nd–73rd,
Grocery World
    Battery Park City,
J&G’s Emporium
    1709 2nd Ave.,
Anderson Foods
    34th & Lex.,
Food Warehouse
    8th Ave. & 24th,
ShopRite
    Houston & Lafayette,
ShopRite
    6th Ave. & Houston,
J&G’s Emporium
    Greenwich & Franklin,
Grocery World
     
    “That narrows it down,” Sachs said, “to the entire city.”
    “Patience,” said restless Lincoln Rhyme.
    Mel Cooper was examining the straw that Sachs had found. “Nothing unique here.” He tossed it aside.
    “Is it new?” Rhyme asked. If it was they might cross-reference stores that had sold brooms and veal shanks on the same day.
    But Cooper said, “Thought of that. It’s six months old or older.” He began shaking the trace evidence in the German girl’s clothing out over a piece of newsprint.
    “Several things here,” he said, poring over the sheet. “Dirt.”
    “Enough for a density-gradient?”
    “Nope. Just dust really. Probably from the scene.”
    Cooper looked over the rest of the effluence he’d brushed off the bloodstained clothing.
    “Brick dust. Why’s there so much brick?”
    “From the rats I shot. The wall was brick.”
    “You shot them? At the scene?” Rhyme winced.
    Sachs said defensively, “Well, yes. They were all over her.”
    He was angry but he let it go. Adding just, “All kinds of contaminants from gunfire. Lead, arsenic, carbon, silver.”
    “And here . . . another bit of reddish leather. From the glove. And . . . We’ve got another fiber. A different one.”
    Criminalists love fibers. This was a tiny gray tuft barely visible to the naked eye.
    “Excellent,” Rhyme announced. “And what else?”
    “And here’s the photo of the scene,” Sachs said, “and the fingerprints. The one from her throat and from where he picked up the glove.” She held them up.
    “Good,” Rhyme said, looking them over carefully.
    There was a sheen of reluctant triumph on her face—the rush of winning, which is the flip side of hating yourself for being unprofessional.
    Rhyme was studying the Polaroids of the prints when he heard footsteps on the stairs and Jim Polling arrived. He entered the room, did a double-take at the spiffed-up Lincoln Rhyme and strode to Sellitto.
    “I was just at the