The Bone Collector

there’s the brick dust. And some other kind of stone. Marble, I think.”
    He put a sample on the slide and examined it under the compound ’scope. “Yep, marble. Rose-colored.”
    “Was there any marble at the stockyard tunnel? Where you found the German girl?”
    “None,” Sachs responded.
    Cooper suggested it might have come from Monelle’s residence hall when Unsub 823 grabbed her.
    “No, I know the block the Deutsche Haus is in. It’s just a converted East Village tenement. The best stone you’d find there’d be polished granite. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a fleck of his hidey-hole. Anything notable about it?”
    “Chisel marks,” Cooper said, bending over the ’scope.
    “Ah, good. How clean?”
    “Not very. Ragged.”
    “So an old steam stonecutter?”
    “Yes, I’d guess.”
    “Write, Thom,” Rhyme instructed, nodding at the poster. “There’s marble in his safe house. And it’s old.”
    “But why do we care about his safe house?” Banks asked, looking at his watch. “The feds’ll be there by now.”
    “You can never have too much information, Banks. Remember that. Now, what else’ve we got?”
    “Another bit of the glove. That red leather. And what’s this?” he asked Sachs, holding up a plastic bag containing a plug of wood.
    “The sample of the aftershave. Where he brushed up against a post.”
    “Should I run an olfactory profile?” Cooper wondered.
    “Let me smell it first,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs brought the bag over to him. Inside was a tiny disk of wood. She opened it up and he inhaled the air.
    “Brut. How could you miss it? Thom, add that our man uses drugstore cologne.”
    Cooper announced, “Here’s that other hair.” The technician mounted it in a comparison ’scope. “Very similar to the one we found earlier. Probably the same source. Oh, hell, Lincoln, for you, I’ll say it is the same. Brown.”
    “Are the ends cut or fractured naturally?”
    “Cut.”
    “Good, we’re closing in on hair color,” Rhyme said.
    Thom wrote brown just as Sellitto said, “Don’t write that!”
    “What?”
    “Obviously it’s not brown,” Rhyme continued.
    “I thought—”
    “It’s anything but brown. Blond, sandy, black, red . . .”
    The detective explained, “ ‘S’an old trick. You go into an alley behind a barbershop, cop some hairs from the garbage. Drop ’em around the scene.”
    “Oh.” Banks filed this somewhere in his enthusiastic brain.
    Rhyme said, “Okay. The fiber.”
    Cooper mounted it in the polarizing ’scope. As he adjusted knobs he said, “Birefringence of .053.”
    Rhyme blurted, “Nylon 6. What’s it look like, Mel?”
    “Very coarse. Lobed cross-section. Light gray.”
    “Carpet.”
    “Right. I’ll check the database.” A moment later he looked up from the computer. “It’s a Hampstead Textile 118B fiber.”
    Rhyme exhaled a disgusted sigh.
    “What?” Sachs asked.
    “The most common trunk liner used by U.S. automakers. Found in over two hundred different makes going back fifteen years. Hopeless . . . Mel, is there anything on the fiber? Use the SEM.”
    The tech cranked up the scanning electron microscope. The screen burst to life with an eerie blue-green glow. The strand of fiber looked like a huge rope.
    “Got something here. Crystals. A lot of ’em. They use titanium dioxide to deluster shiny carpet. That might be it.”
    “Gas it. It’s important.”
    “There’s not enough here, Lincoln. I’d have to burn the whole fiber.”
    “So, burn it.”
    Sellitto said delicately, “Borrowing federal evidence is one thing. Destroying it? I don’t know ’bout that, Lincoln. If there’s a trial . . .”
    “We have to.”
    “Oh, man,” Banks said.
    Sellitto nodded reluctantly and Cooper mounted the sample. The machine hissed. A moment later the screen flickered and columns appeared. “There, that’s the long-chained polymer molecule. The nylon. But that smallwave, that’s something else. Chlorine, detergent . . . It’s cleanser.”
    “Remember,” Rhyme said, “the German girl said the car smelled clean. Find out what kind it is.”
    Cooper ran the information through a brand-name database. “Pfizer Chemicals makes it. It’s sold under the name Tidi-Kleen by Baer Automotive Products in Teterboro.”
    “Perfect!” cried Lincoln Rhyme. “I know the company. They sell in bulk to fleets. Mostly rental-car companies. Our unsub’s driving a rental.”
    “He wouldn’t be crazy enough to drive a