The Bone Collector

challenged,” she began. “And he—”
    “You mean he was a crip, ” Rhyme corrected. Softly but firmly.
    She continued, “His aide’d put him into this fancy wheelchair every morning and he drove himself all over the place. To the movies, to—”
    “Those chairs . . .” Rhyme’s voice sounded hollow. “They don’t work for me.”
    She stopped speaking.
    He continued, “The problem’s how I was injured. It’d be dangerous for me to be in a wheelchair. It could”—he hesitated—“make things worse.”
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
    After a moment he said, “Of course you didn’t.”
    Blew that one. Oh, boy. Brother . . .
    But Rhyme didn’t seem any the worse for her faux pas. His voice was smooth, unemotional. “Listen, you’ve got to get on with the search. Our unsub’s making it trickier. But it won’t be impossible. . . . Here’s an idea. He’s the underground man, right? Maybe he buried them.”
    She looked over the scene.
    Maybe there . . . She saw a mound of earth and leaves in a patch of tall grass near the gravel. It didn’t look right; the mound seemed too assembled.
    Sachs crouched beside it, lowered her head and, using the pencils, began to clear away leaves.
    She turned her face slightly to the left and found she was staring at a rearing head, bared fangs. . . .
    “Jesus Lord,” she shouted, stumbling backwards, falling hard on her butt, scrambling to draw her weapon.
    No. . .
    Rhyme shouted, “You all right?”
    Sachs drew a target and tried to steady the gun with very unsteady hands. Jerry Banks came running up, his own Glock drawn. He stopped. Sachs climbed to her feet, looking at what was in front of them.
    “Man,” Banks whispered.
    “It’s a snake—well, a snake’s skeleton,” Sachs told Rhyme. “A rattlesnake. Fuck.” Holstered the Glock. “It’s mounted on a board.”
    “A snake? Interesting.” Rhyme sounded intrigued.
    “Yeah, real interesting,” she muttered. She pulled on latex gloves and lifted the coiled bones. She turned it over. “ ‘Metamorphosis.’ ”
    “What?”
    “A label on the bottom. The name of the store it came from, I’d guess. 604 Broadway.”
    Rhyme said, “I’ll have the Hardy Boys check it out. What’ve we got? Tell me the clues.”
    They were underneath the snake. In a Baggie. Her heart pounded as she crouched down over the bag.
    “A book of matches,” she said.
    “Okay, maybe he’s thinking arson. Anything printed on them?”
    “Nope. But there’s a smear of something. Like Vaseline. Only stinky.”
    “Good, Sachs—always smell evidence you’re not sure about. Only be more precise.”
    She bent close. “Yuck.”
    “That’s not precise.”
    “Sulfur maybe.”
    “Could be nitrate-based. Explosive. Tovex. Is it blue?”
    “No, it’s milky clear.”
    “Even if it could go bang I imagine it’s a secondary explosive. They’re the stable ones. Anything else?”
    “Another scrap of paper. Something on it.”
    “What, Sachs? His name, his address, e-mail handle?”
    “Looks like it’s from a magazine. I can see a small black-and-white photo. Looks like part of a building but you can’t see which one. And underneath that, all you can read is a date. May 20, 1906.”
    “Five, twenty, oh-six. I wonder if it’s a code. Or an address. I’ll have to think about it. Anything else?”
    “Nope.”
    She heard him sigh. “All right, come on back, Sachs. What time is it? My God, almost one a.m. I haven’t been up this late in years. Come on back and let’s see what we have.”
    * * *  
    Of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Lower East Side has remained the most unchanged over the course of the city’s history.
    Much of it’s gone of course: The rolling pastoral fields. The solid mansions of John Hancock and early government luminaries. Der Kolek, the large freshwater lake (its Dutch name eventually corrupted to “The Collect,” which more accurately described the grossly polluted pond). The notorious Five Points neighborhood—in the early 1800s the most dangerous square mile on earth—where a single tenement, like the decrepit Gates of Hell, might be the site of two or three hundred murders every year.
    But thousands of the old buildings remained—tenements from the nineteenth century and Colonial frame houses and Federal brick townhomes from the prior one, Baroque meeting halls, several of the Egyptian-style public buildings constructed by order of the regally corrupt