The Bone Collector

he picked it up he brushed against the floor.”
    “Where is it?” Dellray asked quickly.
    “Jesus,” one agent called. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
    “Well, I—”
    “Find it, find it!” somebody else called.
    A murmur ran through the room.
    Her hands shaking, Sachs dug through the evidence bags and handed Dellray the Polaroid of the fingerprint. He held it up, looked carefully. Showed it to someone who, she guessed, was a friction-ridge expert. “Good,” the agent offered. “It’s definitely A-grade.”
    Sachs knew that prints were rated A, B and C, the lower category being unacceptable to most law enforcement agencies. But whatever pride she felt in her evidence-gathering skills was crushed by their collective dismay that she hadn’t mentioned it before this.
    Then everything started to happen at once. Dellray handed off to an agent who jogged to an elaborate computer in the corner of the office and rested the Polaroid on a large, curved bed of something called an Opti-Scan. Another agent turned on the computer and started typing in commands as Dellray snatched up the phone. He tapped his foot impatiently and then lowered his head as, somewhere, the call was answered.
    “Ginnie, s’Dellray. This’s gonna be a true-blue pain but I needya to shut down all AFIS Northeast Region requests and give the one I’m sending priority. . . . I got Perkins here. He’ll okay it and if that ain’t enough I’ll call the man in Washington himself. . . . It’s the UN thing.”
    Sachs knew the Bureau’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System was used by police departments throughout the country. That’s what Dellray would be braking to a halt at the moment.
    The agent at the computer said, “It’s scanned. We’re transmitting now.”
    “How long’s it gonna take?”
    “Ten, fifteen minutes.”
    Dellray pressed his dusty fingers together. “Please, please, please.”
    All around her was a cyclone of activity. Sachs heard voices talking about weapons, helicopters, vehicles, anti-terror negotiators. Phone calls, clattering keyboards, maps unrolling, pistols being checked.
    Perkins was on the phone, talking to the hostage-rescue people, or the director, or the mayor. Maybe the president. Who knew? Sachs said to Dellray, “I didn’t know the print was that big a deal.”
    “S’always a big deal. Least, with AFIS now it is. Used to be you dusted for prints mostly for show. Let the vics and the press know you were doing something. ”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Naw, not a bit. Take New York City. You do a cold search—that’s when you don’t have any suspects—you do a cold search manually, it’d take a tech fifty years to go through all the print cards. No foolin’. An automated search? Fifteen minutes. Used to be you’d ID a suspect maybe two, three percent of the time. Now we’re running close to twenty, twenty-two percent. Oh, yup, prints’re golden. Dincha tell Rhyme about it?”
    “He knew, sure.”
    “And he didn’t get all hands on board? My oh my, the man’s slipping.”
    “Say, officer,” SAC Perkins called, holding his hand over the phone, “I’ll ask you to complete those chain-of-custody cards now. I want to get the PE off to PERT.”
    The Physical Evidence Response Team. Sachs remembered that Lincoln Rhyme had been the one the feds hired to help put it together.
    “I’ll do that. Sure.”
    “Mallory, Kemple, take that PE to an office and get our guest some COC cards. You have a pen, officer?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    She followed the two men into a small office, clicking her ballpoint nervously while they hunted down and returned with a pack of federal-issue chain-of-custody cards. She sat down and broke the package open.
    The voice behind her was the hip Dellray, the persona that seemed the eagerest to break out. In the car on the way here someone had referred to him as the Chameleon and she was beginning to see why.
    “We call Perkins the Big Dict. Nyup—not ‘dick’ like you’re thinking. ‘Dict’ like dictionary. But don’ worry over him. He’s smarter’n an agent sandwich. And better’n that he’s pulled strings all the way to D.C., which is where strings gotta be pulled in cases like this.” Dellray ran his cigarette beneath his nose as if it were a fine cigar. “You know, officer, you’re foxy smart doing whatch’re doing.”
    “Which is?”
    “Getting out of Major Crimes. You don’t want it.” The lean black face, glossy and