The Bone Collector

wrinkled only about the eyes, seemed sincere for the first time since she’d met him. “Best thing you ever did, going into Public Affairs. You’ll do some good there and it won’t turn you to dust. That’s what happens, you bet. This job turns you to dust.”
    * * *  
        One of the last victims of James Schneider’s mad compulsion, a young man named Ortega, had come to Manhattan from Mexico City, where political unrest (the much-heralded populist uprising, which had begun the year before) had made commerce difficult at best. Yet the ambitious entrepreneur had been in the city no more than one week when he vanished from sight. It was learned that he was last seen in front of a West Side tavern and authorities immediately suspected that he was yet another victim of Schneider’s. Sadly, this was discovered to be the case.
    The bone collector cruised the streets for fifteen minutes around NYU, Washington Square. Plenty of peoplehanging out. But kids mostly. Students in summer school. Skateboarders. It was festive, weird. Singers, jugglers, acrobats. It reminded him of the “museums,” down on the Bowery, popular in the 1800s. They weren’t museums at all of course but arcades, teeming with burlesque shows, exhibits of freaks and daredevils, and vendors selling everything from French postcards to splinters of the True Cross.
    He slowed once or twice but nobody wanted a cab, or could afford one. He turned south.
        Schneider tied bricks to Señor Ortega’s feet and rolled him under a pier into the Hudson River so the foul water and the fish might reduce his body to mere bone. The corpse was found two weeks after he had vanished and so it was never known whether or not the unfortunate victim was alive or had full use of his senses when he was thrown into the drink. Yet it is suspected that this was so. For Schneider cruelly shortened the rope so that Señor Ortega’s face was inches below the surface of Davy Jones’s locker;—his hands undoubtedly thrashed madly about as he gazed upward at the air that would have been his salvation.
    The bone collector saw a sickly young man standing by the curb. AIDS, he thought. But your bones are healthy—and so prominent. Your bones’ll last forever. . . . The man didn’t want a cab and the taxi cruised past, the bone collector hungrily gazing at his thin frame in the rearview mirror.
    He looked back to the street just in time to swerve around an elderly man who’d stepped off the curb, his thin arm raised to flag down the cab. The man leapt back, as best he could, and the cab skidded to a stop just past him.
    The man opened the back door and leaned inside. “You should look where you’re going.” He said this instructionally. Not with anger.
    “Sorry,” the bone collector muttered contritely.
    The elderly man hesitated for a moment, looked up the street but saw no other taxis. He climbed in.
    The door slammed shut.
    Thinking: Old and thin. The skin would ride on his bones like silk.
    “So, where to?” he called.
    “East Side.”
    “You got it,” he said as he pulled on the ski mask and spun the wheel sharply right. The cab sped west.

III
THE PORTABLE’S
DAUGHTER
    Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York. . . . The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century, and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those which preceded them.
    —PHILIP HONE,
MAYOR OF NEW YORK, DIARY, 1845

EIGHTEEN
    Saturday, 10:15 p.m., to Sunday, 5:30 a.m.
     
    H it me again, Lon.”
    Rhyme drank through a straw, Sellitto from a glass. Both took the smoky liquor neat. The detective sank down in the squeaky rattan chair and Rhyme decided he looked a little like Peter Lorre in Casablanca.
    Terry Dobyns was gone—after offering some acerbic psychological insights about narcissism and those employed by the federal government. Jerry Banks had left too. Mel Cooper continued to painstakingly disassemble and pack up his equipment.
    “This is good, Lincoln.” Sellitto sipped his Scotch. “Goddamn. I can’t afford this shit. How old’s it?”
    “I think that one’s twenty.”
    The detective eyed the tawny liquor. “Hell, this was a woman, she’d be legal and then some.”
    “Tell me something, Lon. Polling? That little tantrum of his. What was that all about?”
    “Little Jimmy?” Sellitto laughed. “He’s in trouble now. He’s the one ran interference to take Peretti off the case and keep it