The Bone Collector

Let’s look at our secret weapon, Mel.”
    “Secret weapon?” Sachs asked.
    “The trace evidence.”
    * * *  
    Special Agent Fred Dellray had put together a ten-man entry operation. Two teams plus search and surveillance. The flak-jacketed agents stood in the bushes, sweating madly. Across the street, upstairs in an abandoned brownstone, the S&S team had their Big Ears and video infrareds trained on the perp’s house.
    The three snipers, with their big Remingtons strapped, loaded and locked, lay prone on rooftops. Their binoculared spotters crouched beside them like Lamaze coaches.
    Dellray—wearing an FBI windbreaker and jeans instead of his Leprechaun-green outfit—listened through his clip-on earphone.
    “Surveillance to Command. We’ve got infrared on the basement. Somebody moving down there.”
    “What’sa view like?” Dellray asked.
    “No view. Windows’re too dirty.”
    “He all by his humble self? Maybe got a vic with him?” Knowing somehow that Officer Sachs was probably right; that he’d already ’napped somebody else now.
    “Can’t tell. We’ve just got motion and heat.”
    Dellray had sent other officers around to the sides of the house. They reported in. “No sign of anyone on the first or second floor. Garage is locked.”
    “Snipers?” Dellray asked. “Report.”
    “Shooter One to Command. I’ve acquired on front door. Over.”
    The others were covering the hallway and a room on the first floor. “Loaded and locked,” they radioed in.
    Dellray drew his large automatic.
    “Okay, we got paper,” Dellray said. Meaning a warrant. They wouldn’t have to knock. “Lessgo! Teams one and two, deploy, deploy, deploy.”
    The first team took out the front door with a battering ram while the second used the slightly more civilized approach of breaking in the back-door window and unlocking the dead bolt. They streamed inside, Dellray following the last of Team One’s officers into the old, filthy house. The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming and Dellray, no stranger to crime scenes, swallowed hard, struggling to keep from vomiting.
    The second team secured the ground floor and then charged up the stairs toward the bedroom while the first sped down the basement stairs, boots thumping loudly on the old wood.
    Dellray raced down into the foul-smelling basement. He heard a door being kicked in somewhere below and the shout of, “Don’t move! Federal agents. Freeze, freeze, freeze!”
    But when he reached the basement doorway he heard the same agent blurt in a very different tone, “What the hell’s this? Oh, Jesus.”
    “Fuck,” another one called. “That’s gross.”
    “Shit in a flaming pile,” Dellray spat out, choking, as he stepped inside. Swallowing hard at the vile smell.
    The man’s body lay on the floor, leaching black fluid. Throat cut. His dead, glazed eyes stared at the ceiling but his torso seemed to be moving—swelling and shifting. Dellray shuddered; he’d never developed much immunity to the sight of insect infestation. The number ofbugs and worms suggested the vic’d been dead for at least three days.
    “Why’d we get positive on the infrared?” one agent asked.
    Dellray pointed out the rat and mouse teeth marks along the vic’s bloated leg and side. “They’re around here someplace. We interrupted dinner hour.”
    “So what happened? One of the vics get him? ”
    “Watcha talkin’ about?” Dellray snapped.
    “Isn’t that him?”
    “No, it’s not him, ” Dellray exploded, gazing at one particular wound on the corpse.
    One of the team was frowning. “Naw, Dellray. This’s the guy. We got mug shots. That’s Pietrs.”
    “Of course it’s fucking Pietrs. But he ain’t the unsub. Don’tcha get it?”
    “No? What do you mean?”
    It was all clear to him now. “Sumvabitch.”
    Dellray’s phone chirped and made him jump. He flipped it open, listened for a minute. “She did what? Oh, like I really need this too. . . . No, we don’t have the fucking perp in fucking custody.”
    He jammed the OFF button, pointed an angry finger at two SWAT agents. “You’re coming with me.”
    “What’s up, Dellray?”
    “We gonna pay ourselves a visit. And what ain’t we gonna be when we do it?” The agents looked at each other, frowning. But Dellray supplied the answer. “We ain’t gonna be very nice at all.”
    * * *  
    Mel Cooper shook the contents of the envelopes out onto newsprint. Examined the dust with an eye loupe. “Well,