The Skin Collector (24 page)

Then Sachs returned to the center of the octagon, where the victim lay. She looked up and shielded her eyes from the brilliant halogens the medics had set up.
‘Another flashlight, Rhyme. He sure wants to be certain nobody misses the vic.’

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Like Chloe, Samantha was handcuffed and her ankles duct-taped. She’d also been partially disrobed – but only to expose her abdomen, where the unsub had inked her. A fast examination revealed no apparent sexual contact here either. Indeed, there was something oddly chaste about the way
he’d left both victims. This was, she reflected, eerier than a straight-up sex crime – since it suggested the underlying mystery of the case: Why was he doing this? Rape, at least, was categorical. This?

She gazed down at the tattoo.

Rhyme’s
voice intruded on the quiet. ‘“forty”. Lowercase again. Part of the phrase. Cardinal number this time, not the ordinal “fortieth”. Why?’ Testily he added, ‘Well, no time to speculate. Let’s get going.’

She processed the body, scraping nails (nothing obvious this time, as with Chloe), taking samples of the blood, the body fluids and presumably the poison oozing from the wounds. Then scanning her
for prints, though he’d worn gloves again, of course.

Sachs walked the grid, collecting trace near the body and distant samples of dirt and trace too, for control. She studied the ground. ‘Booties again. No tread marks.’

‘He’s wearing new shoes,’ Rhyme said. ‘He’ll’ve pitched the others, the famous Bass size elevens. They’re in the sewer in the Bronx by now.’

As she walked the grid, she noticed
something against one of the far walls. At first she thought it was a rat lying on its side. The lump wasn’t moving so she speculated that the creature chewed a bit of Samantha’s flesh, ingested the poison and crawled away to die.

But as she got closer she noted that, no, it was a purse.

‘Got her handbag.’

‘Good. Maybe there’ll be trace on that.’

She collected it and dropped the leather purse
into an evidence bag.

This and all of the other samples of trace, also bagged in plastic or paper, she added to a milk crate.

Sachs wanded with the alternative light source – Samantha’s body, the ground of the octagon, the tunnels. Again, Unsub 11-5 had punched and probed her flesh. She noted from the bootie prints that the unsub had walked up and down the tunnel several times to and from the
debris pile, which seemed curious, and she told Rhyme. Maybe because he’d heard intruders, he suggested. Or maybe he’d left some of his gear at the mouth. She took pictures and finally returned to the access door, muttering thanks once more to no one in particular that there was nothing claustrophobic about this search.

Once on the outside again, she handed off to the other CS techs, who had
finished with the secondary scenes. Detective Jean Eagleston reported the not-surprising news that any of the perp’s movements around the train tracks and the entrance to the tunnel from the outside were obliterated by the rain and sleet.

Aside from what presumably had been a brief struggle in the women’s room, there were no signs that he’d touched anything. There were no tool marks in the screws
he’d removed to gain access to the bathroom. And no footprints either, except those of dozens of street shoes – from the people who’d used the toilet.

The sleet beat an irritating drum tap on the hood she wore and she told Rhyme she was disconnecting the video camera for fear the moisture would short out the expensive, high-def system.

She returned to her car, where she filled out chain-of-custody
cards for each item collected, working under the trunk lid to keep the cards and evidence bags dry. Stripping off the Tyvek suit, she slipped it into a burn bag in the crime scene van and returned to the street, pulling on her leather jacket.

Sachs noticed Nancy Simpson, the detective, speaking to Bo Haumann. The other officers who’d gone off in pursuit of the fish were straggling back.

Haumann
rubbed his grizzled crew cut as Sachs walked up. ‘Nothing. Nobody saw him. But—’ He glanced up at the inhospitable skies. ‘Not a lot of people out tonight.’

She nodded then headed over to Lon Sellitto, who was talking to a group of people about Samantha’s age. She told him about the pursuit – of the unsub or an innocent voyeur – the unsuccessful pursuit. He took the news with a grunt, then they
both turned to the others, who were, the detective reported, Samantha’s fellow diners. She’d deduced this earlier from their expressions.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Sachs said. One woman’s face was streaked with tears – a co-worker. The other woman, a blonde, looked put out and uneasy. Sachs guessed she had coke in her purse. Let it go.

The two men were angry and resolute. None of these had
been Samantha’s lover, it seemed. But one was her roommate; the greatest sorrow within the four resided in his eyes.

She and Sellitto both asked questions, learning the unsurprising news that Samantha Levine had no enemies that they’d ever heard of. She was a businesswoman and had never been in trouble with the law. No problems with former boyfriends.

Another random death. In some ways this
was the most tragic of all crimes: the happenstance victim.

And in many ways the most difficult to solve.

It was then that a man in an expensive suit – no overcoat – came hurrying up to them, oblivious to the sleet and cold. He was in his fifties, tanned, hair carefully cut. He wasn’t tall but was quite handsome and well proportioned.

‘Mr Clevenger!’ one of the women cried and hugged him. Samantha’s
co-worker. He gripped her hard and greeted the others in Samantha’s party with a somber nod.

‘Louise! Is it true? I just heard. I just got a call. Is she, Samantha? Is she gone?’ He stepped back and the woman he’d been embracing said, ‘Yes, I can’t believe it. She’s … I mean, she’s dead.’

The newcomer turned to Sachs, who asked, ‘So you knew Ms Levine?’

‘Yes, yes. She works for me. She was
… I was talking to her a few hours ago. We had a meeting … just a few hours ago.’ He nodded at the glossy building beside the restaurant. ‘There. I’m Todd Clevenger.’ He handed her a card. International Fiber Optic Networks. He was the company’s president and CEO.

Sellitto asked, ‘Was there any reason anybody would want to hurt her? Anything about her job that was sensitive? That might’ve exposed
her to threats?’

‘Can’t imagine it. All we do is lay fiber optic for broadband Internet … just communications. Anyway, she never said anything, like she was in danger. I can’t imagine. She was the sweetest person in the world. Smart. Really smart.’

The woman named Louise said to Sachs, ‘I was thinking about something. There was that woman killed the other day. In SoHo. Is this the same psycho?’

‘I can’t really comment. It’s an ongoing investigation.’

‘But that woman was killed underground too. Right? In a tunnel. It was on the news.’

The scrawny young artistic-looking man, who’d identified himself as Raoul, Samantha’s roommate, said, ‘That’s right. It was the same thing. The, you know, MO.’

Sachs again demurred. She and Sellitto asked a few more questions but it was soon clear there
was nothing more these people could help them with.

Wrong place, wrong time.

A happenstance victim …

Ultimately, in cases where the victim had been alone with the perpetrator, no witnesses, the truth would have to be revealed through the evidence.

And this was what Sachs and the other Crime Scene officers now packed carefully into the trunk of her Torino.

In five minutes she was racing up
the West Side Highway, blue light on the dash pulsing madly, as she skidded around cars and trucks – the slaloming more a function of her powerful engine and her comfort in high revs than the inclement weather.

At close to eleven p.m. Rhyme heard Sachs enter the hallway, her arrival announced by the modulating hiss of sleet-filled wind.

‘Ah, finally.’

She stepped into the parlor a moment later, holding a large milk crate containing a dozen plastic and paper bags. She nodded a greeting to Mel Cooper, who sagged with fatigue but seemed game to start on the analysis.

Rhyme asked quickly, ‘Sachs,
you said you thought he might be around the scene?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What came of that?’

‘Nothing. Bo sent a half-dozen ESU boys and girls after him. But he was gone. And I didn’t get a good look at him. It was maybe nothing. But my gut told me it was him.’ She called up a map of Hell’s Kitchen on the main computer monitor and pointed out the restaurant, Provence
²
, and on the corner an office
building. ‘He went down there but, see? It’s only a few blocks from Times Square. He got lost in the crowd. Not sure it was him but it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore completely. He seems curious about the investigation; after all, the perp did come back to Elizabeth Street and spied on me through the manhole cover.’

Eye-to-eye …

‘Well, let’s get to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?’

Thom Reston said firmly, ‘Find out – what she has, that is – but find out
quickly
. You’re going to bed soon, Lincoln. It’s been a long day.’

Rhyme scowled. But he also accepted that the caregiver’s job was to keep him healthy and alive. Quadriplegics were susceptible to a number of troublesome conditions, the most dangerous of which was autonomic dysreflexia – a spike in blood pressure brought
on by physical stress. It wasn’t clear that exhaustion was a precipitating factor but Thom had never been one to take anything for granted.

‘Yes, yes, yes. Just a few minutes.’

‘Nothing spectacular,’ Sachs said, nodding at the evidence.

But then, Rhyme reflected, there rarely were any smoking guns. Crime scene work was incremental. And obvious finds, he felt, were automatically suspect; they
might be planted evidence. Which happened more than one might suspect.

First, Sachs displayed the photographs of the tattoo.

Surrounded by the scalloped border that, according to TT Gordon, was in some way significant.

Which made its cryptic
nature all the more infuriating.

‘First “the second” and now “forty”. No article preceding this one but, again, no punctuation.’

What the hell was he saying? A gap of thirty-eight from two to forty. And why the switch from ordinal to cardinal? Rhyme mused, ‘Smells like a place to me, an address. GPS or longitude and latitude coordinates. But not enough to go on yet.’

He gave up speculating
and turned back to the evidence she’d collected. Sachs selected a bag and gave it to Cooper. He extracted the cotton ball inside.

‘The poison,’ Sachs said. ‘One sample’s gone to the ME’s Office but I want a head start. Burn it, Mel.’

He ran the materials through the chromatograph and a few minutes later had the mass spectrum. ‘It’s a combination of atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.’

Rhyme
was staring at the ceiling. ‘That comes from some plant … yes, yes … Hell, I can’t remember what.’

Cooper typed the cocktail of ingredients into the toxin database and reported a moment later, ‘Angel’s trumpet:
Brugmansia
.’

‘Yes,’ Rhyme called. ‘Of course that’s it. But I don’t know the details.’

Cooper explained that it was a South American plant, particularly popular among criminals in Colombia,
who called it devil’s breath. They blew it into the faces of their victims and the paralyzing, amnesiac drug rendered them unconscious or, if they remained awake, unable to fight their assailants.

And with the right dose, as with Samantha Levine, the drug could induce death in a matter of minutes.

Coincidentally, at that moment, the parlor landline rang: the medical examiner’s office.

Cooper
lifted an eyebrow, looking toward Sachs. ‘Must be a slow night. Or you scared them into prioritizing us, Amelia.’

Rhyme knew which.

The ME official on call confirmed that devil’s breath was the poison that had been used on Samantha Levine’s abdomen in the tattooed message. He added that it was a highly concentrated version of the toxin. And there was residue of propofol in her bloodstream. Cooper
thanked him.