The Bone Collector

took over the case. But there hadn’t been much choice. Sellitto was a bulldog and Polling was a psycho—though Dellray could handle them. Rhyme was the one who made him uneasy. Sharp as a razor (hell, it had been his team that found Pietrs’s print, even if they didn’t jump on it as fast as they should’ve). In the old days, beforehis accident, you couldn’t beat Rhyme if he didn’t want to get beat. And you couldn’t fool him either.
    Now, Rhyme was a busted toy. It was a sad thing what could happen to a man, how you could die and still be alive. Dellray had walked into his room—his bedroom, no less—and hit him hard. Harder than he needed to.
    Maybe he’d call. He could—
    “Show time,” the driver called, and Dellray forgot all about Lincoln Rhyme.
    The vans turned onto the street where Pietrs lived. Most of the other streets they’d passed had been filled with sweating residents, clutching beer bottles and cigarettes, hoping for a breath or two of cool air. But this one was dark, empty.
    The vans cruised slowly to a stop. Two dozen agents climbed out, in black tactical outfits, carrying their H&Ks equipped with muzzle lights and laser sights. Two homeless men stared at them; one quickly hid his bottle of Colt 44 malt liquor under his shirt.
    Dellray gazed at a window in Pietrs’s building; it gave off a faint yellow glow.
    The driver backed the first van into a shadowy parking space and whispered to Dellray, “It’s Perkins.” Tapping his headset. “He’s got the director on the horn. They want to know who’s leading the assault.”
    “I am,” snapped the Chameleon. He turned to his team. “I want surveillance across the street and in the alleys. Snipers, there, there and there. An’ I want ever’body in place fi’ minutes ago. Are we all together on that?”
    * * *  
    Down the stairs, the old wood creaking.
    His arm around her, he guided the woman, half-conscious from the blow to her head, into the basement. At the foot of the stairs, he shoved her to the dirt floor and gazed down at her.
    Esther . . .
    Her eyes rose to meet his. Hopeless, begging. He didn’t notice. All he saw was her body. He began to remove her clothing, the purple jogging outfit. It was unthinkable that a woman would actually go outside inthis day and age wearing what was no more than, well, undergarments. He hadn’t thought that Esther Weinraub was a whore. She’d been a working girl, stitching shirts, five for a penny.
    The bone collector observed how her collarbone showed at her throat. And where some other man might glance over her breasts and dark areolae he stared at the indentation at the manubrium and the ribs blossoming from it like spider’s legs.
    “What’re you doing?” she asked, groggy from the blow to her head.
    The bone collector looked her over carefully but what he saw wasn’t a young, anorectic woman, nose too broad, lips too full, with skin like dirty sand. He saw beneath those imperfections the perfect beauty of her structure.
    He caressed her temple, stroked it gently. Don’t let it be cracked, please. . . .
    She coughed and her nostrils flared—the fumes were very strong down here though he hardly noticed them anymore.
    “Don’t hurt me again,” she whispered, her head lolling. “Just don’t hurt me. Please.”
    He took the knife from his pocket and bent down, cut her underwear off. She looked down at her naked body.
    “You want that?” she said breathlessly. “Okay, you can fuck me. Okay.”
    The pleasure of the flesh, he thought . . . it just doesn’t come close.
    He pulled her to her feet and madly she pushed away from him and began stumbling toward a small doorway in the corner of the basement. Not running, not really trying to escape. Just sobbing, reaching out a hand, weaving toward the door.
    The bone collector watched her, entranced by her slow, pathetic gait.
    The doorway, which had once opened onto a coal chute, now led to a narrow tunnel that connected to the basement of the abandoned building next door.
    Esther struggled to the metal door and pulled it open. She climbed inside.
    It was no more than a minute later that he heard the wailing scream. Followed by a breathless, wrenching, “God, no, no, no . . .” Other words too, lost in her boiling howls of terror.
    Then she was coming back through the tunnel, moving faster now, whipping her hands around her, as if she was trying to shake off what she’d just seen.
    Come to me, Esther.
    Stumbling