The Bone Collector

Annual. American College of Forensic Examiners Journal. Report of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors. CRC Press Forensics. Journal of the International Institute of Forensic Science.
    “Look at them,” Rhyme said. “The subscriptions lapsed ages ago. And they’re all dusty.”
    “ Everything in here’s fucking dusty, Linc. Why don’t you get off your lazy ass and clean this pigsty up?”
    Banks looked horrified. Rhyme squelched the burst oflaughter that felt alien inside him. His guard had slipped and irritation had dissolved into amusement. He momentarily regretted that he and Sellitto had drifted apart. Then he shot the feeling dead. He grumbled, “I can’t help you. Sorry.”
    “We’ve got the peace conference starting on Monday. We—”
    “What conference?”
    “At the UN. Ambassadors, heads of state. There’ll be ten thousand dignitaries in town. You heard about that thing in London two days ago?”
    “ Thing? ” Rhyme repeated caustically.
    “Somebody tried to bomb the hotel where UNESCO was meeting. The mayor’s scared shitless somebody’s going to move on the conference here. He doesn’t want ugly Post headlines.”
    “There’s also the little problem,” Rhyme said astringently, “that Miss Tammie Jean might not be enjoying her trip home either.”
    “Jerry, tell him some details. Whet his appetite.”
    Banks turned his attention from Rhyme’s legs to his bed, which was—Rhyme readily admitted—by far the more interesting of the two. Especially the control panel. It looked like something off the space shuttle and cost just about as much. “Ten hours after they’re snatched we find the male passenger—John Ulbrecht—shot and buried alive in the Amtrak roadbed near Thirty-seventh and Eleventh. Well, we find him dead. He’d been buried alive. Bullet was a .32.” Banks looked up and added, “The Honda Accord of slugs.”
    Meaning there’d be no wily deductions about the unsub from exotic weaponry. This Banks seems smart, Rhyme thought, and all he suffers from is youth, which he might or might not outgrow. Lincoln Rhyme believed he himself had never been young.
    “Rifling on the slug?” Rhyme asked.
    “Six lands and grooves, left twist.”
    “So he’s got himself a Colt,” Rhyme said and glanced over the crime scene diagram again.
    “You said ‘he,’ ” the young detective continued. “Actually it’s ‘they.’ ”
    “What?”
    “Unsubs. There’re two of them. There were two sets of footprints between the grave and the base of an iron ladder leading up to the street,” Banks said, pointing to the CS diagram.
    “Any prints on the ladder?”
    “None. It was wiped. Did a good job of it. The footprints go to the grave and back to the ladder. Anyway, there had to be two of ’em to schlepp the vic. He weighed over two hundred pounds. One man couldn’t’ve done it.”
    “Keep going.”
    “They got him to the grave, dropped him in, shot him and buried him, went back to the ladder, climbed it and vanished.”
    “Shot him in the grave?” Rhyme inquired.
    “Yep. There was no blood trail anywhere around the ladder or the path to the grave.”
    Rhyme found himself mildly interested. But he said, “What do you need me for?”
    Sellitto grinned ragged yellow teeth. “We got ourselves a mystery, Linc. A buncha PE that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.”
    “So?” It was a rare crime scene when every bit of physical evidence made sense.
    “Naw, this is real weird. Read the report. Please. I’ll put it here. How’s this thing work?” Sellitto looked at Thom, who fitted the report in the page-turning frame.
    “I don’t have time, Lon,” Rhyme protested.
    “That’s quite a contraption,” Banks offered, looking at the frame. Rhyme didn’t respond. He glanced at the first page then read it carefully. Moved his ring finger a precise millimeter to the left. A rubber wand turned the page.
    Reading. Thinking: Well, this is odd.
    “Who was in charge of the scene?”
    “Peretti himself. When he heard the vic was one of the taxi people he came down and took over.”
    Rhyme continued to read. For a minute the unimaginative words of cop writing held his interest. Then the doorbell rang and his heart galloped with a greatshudder. His eyes slipped to Thom. They were cold and made clear that the time for banter was over. Thom nodded and went downstairs immediately.
    All thoughts of cabdrivers and PE and kidnapped bankers vanished from the sweeping