The Bone Collector

hands moved down, along her arms, and then under them and around the front of her body. But he didn’t touch her breasts. No, as the hands spidered across her skin they seemed to be searching for her ribs. He prodded them and stroked. T.J. shivered and tried to pull away. He gripped her tight and caressed some more, pressing hard, feeling the give of the bone.
    He stood. She heard receding footsteps. For a long moment there was silence except for the groans of air conditioners and elevators. Then she barked a frightened grunt at a sound right behind her. A repetitive noise. Wsssh. Wsssh. Very familiar but something she couldn’t place. She tried to turn to see what he was doing but couldn’t. What was it? Listening to the rhythmic sound, over and over and over. It took her right back to her mother’s house.
    Wsssh. Wsssh.
    Saturday morning in the small bungalow in Bedford, Tennessee. It was the only day her mother didn’t work and she devoted most of it to housecleaning. T.J. would wake up to a hot sun and stumble downstairs to help her. Wsssh. As she cried at this memory she listened tothe sound and wondered why on earth he was sweeping the floor and with such careful, precise strokes of the broom.
    * * *  
    He saw surprise and discomfort on their faces.
    Something you don’t find very often with New York City homicide cops.
    Lon Sellitto and young Banks (Jerry, not Ernie) sat where Rhyme gestured with his bush-crowned head: twin dusty, uncomfortable rattan chairs.
    Rhyme had changed considerably since Sellitto had last been here and the detective didn’t hide his shock very well. Banks had no benchmark against which to judge what he was seeing but he was shocked nonetheless. The sloppy room, the vagrant gazing at them suspiciously. The smell too certainly—the visceral aroma surrounding the creature Lincoln Rhyme now was.
    He immensely regretted letting them up.
    “Why didn’t you call first, Lon?”
    “You would’ve told us not to come.”
    True.
    Thom crested the stairs and Rhyme preempted him. “No, Thom, we won’t be needing you.” He’d remembered that the young man always asked guests if they wanted something to drink or eat.
    Such a goddamn Martha Stewart.
    Silence for a moment. Large, rumpled Sellitto—a twenty-year vet—glanced down into a box beside the bed and started to speak. Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off by the sight of disposable adult diapers.
    Jerry Banks said, “I read your book, sir.” The young cop had a bad hand when it came to shaving, lots of nicks. And what a charming cowlick in his hair! My good Lord, he can’t be more than twelve. The more worn the world gets, Rhyme reflected, the younger its inhabitants seem to be.
    “Which one?”
    “Well, your crime scene manual, of course. But I meant the picture book. The one a couple years ago.”
    “There were words too. It was mostly words, in fact. Did you read them?”
    “Oh, well, sure,” Banks said quickly.
    A huge stack of remaindered volumes of The Scenes of the Crime sat against one wall of his room.
    “I didn’t know you and Lon were friends,” Banks added.
    “Ah, Lon didn’t trot out the yearbook? Show you the pictures? Strip his sleeve and show his scars and say these wounds I had with Lincoln Rhyme?”
    Sellitto wasn’t smiling. Well, I can give him even less to smile about if he likes. The senior detective was digging through his attaché case. And what does he have in there?
    “How long were you partnered?” Banks asked, making conversation.
    “There’s a verb for you,” Rhyme said. And looked at the clock.
    “We weren’t partners,” Sellitto said. “I was Homicide, he was head of IRD.”
    “Oh,” Banks said, even more impressed. Running the Central Investigation and Resource Division was one of the most prestigious jobs in the department.
    “Yeah,” Rhyme said, looking out the window, as if his doctor might be arriving via falcon. “The two musketeers.”
    In a patient voice, which infuriated Rhyme, Sellitto said, “Seven years, off and on, we worked together.”
    “And good years they were,” Rhyme intoned.
    Thom scowled but Sellitto missed the irony. Or more likely ignored it. He said, “We have a problem, Lincoln. We need some help.”
    Snap. The stack of papers landed on the bedside table.
    “Some help?” The laugh exploded from the narrow nose Blaine had always suspected was the product of a surgeon’s vision though it was not. She also thought his lips were