The Skin Collector (34 page)

After joining the NYPD, things hadn’t got much better. Tired of the relentless pressure to go out, the filthy jokes, the juvenile looks and attitudes offered up by fellow cops, she’d continued to be a recluse. Ah, that was the answer, the
male officers understood, after she’d rejected their overtures. She was a dyke. Such a pretty one too. Fucking waste.

Then she’d met Nick. The first real love, true love, consuming love, complete love. Whatever tired adjective you wanted.

And, with Nick, it’d turned out to be betrayed love, too.

Not of the daily variety, no. But, to Sachs, perhaps worse. Nick had been a corrupt cop. And a corrupt
cop who hurt people.

Meeting Lincoln Rhyme had saved her. Professionally and personally. Though that relationship was obviously alternative, as well.

No, Sachs’s history and experience hardly qualified her to preach to Pam. Yet, like driving slowly, or hesitating before kicking in a door during a dynamic entry, Sachs was unable to stop herself from giving her opinion.

If the girl … the
young
woman
showed up at all.

Which finally she did, fifteen minutes late.

Sachs said nothing about the tardiness, just rose and gave her a hug. It wasn’t exactly rejected but Sachs could feel the stiffness rise to Pam’s shoulders. She noted too that the young woman wasn’t taking off her coat. She just tugged her stocking cap off and tossed her hair. The gloves too. But the message was: This’ll be
short. Whatever your agenda.

And no smiles. Pam had a beautiful smile and Sachs loved it when the girl’s face curled into a spontaneous crescent. But not here, not today.

‘How’re the Olivettis?’

‘Good. Howard got the kids a new dog for Jackson to play with. Marjorie lost ten pounds.’

‘I know she was trying. Hard.’

‘Yeah.’ Pam scanned a menu. Sachs knew she wasn’t going to order anything.
‘Is Lon doing okay?’

‘Still critical. Unconscious.’

‘Man, that’s bad,’ Pam said. ‘I’ll call Rachel.’

‘She’d like that.’

The young woman looked up. ‘Look, Amelia. There’s something I want to say.’

Was this going to be good or bad?

‘I’m sorry what I said, about you and my mother. That wasn’t fair.’

Sachs in fact hadn’t taken the comment particularly hard. It was clearly one of those weaponized
sentences that get flung out to hurt, to end conversations.

She held up a hand. ‘No, that’s okay. You were mad.’

The woman’s nod told Sachs that, yes, she’d been mad. And her eyes revealed that she still was, despite the apology.

Around them couples and families, parents with children of all ages, bundled in winter sweaters and flannel, sat over coffee and cocoa and soup and grilled cheese
sandwiches and chatted or laughed and whispered. It all seemed so normal. And so very far away from the drama of the table she and Pam sat at.

‘But I have to tell you, Amelia. Nothing’s changed. We’re leaving in a month.’

‘A month?’

‘The semester.’ Pam wasn’t going to be drawn into a debate beyond that. ‘Amelia. Please. This is good, what we’re doing. I’m happy.’

‘And I want to make sure you
stay that way.’

‘Well, we’re doing it. We’re leaving. India first, we’ve decided.’

Sachs didn’t even know if Pam had a passport. ‘Look.’ She lifted her hands. The gesture smelled of desperation and she lowered them. ‘Are you sure you want to … disrupt your life like that? I really don’t think you should.’

‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

‘I’m not telling you what to do. But I can give advice
to somebody I love.’

‘And I can reject it.’ A cool sigh. ‘I think it’s better if we don’t talk for a while. This is all … I’m upset. And it’s pretty clear that I’m pissing you off totally.’

‘No. Not at all.’ She started to reach for the girl’s hand but Pam had anticipated her and withdrew it. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘You don’t need to be.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Because to you I’m a child.’

Well,
if you’re fucking acting like one.

But Sachs held back for a moment. Then thought: Knuckle time.

‘You had a very hard time growing up. You’re … vulnerable. I don’t know how else to put it.’

‘Oh, that again. Naive?. A fool.’

‘Of course not. But it
was
a hard time.’

After they’d escaped from New York following the terrorist plot Pam’s mother had orchestrated, the two of them had gone underground
in a small community of militiamen and ‘their women’ in Larchwood, Missouri, northwest of St Louis. The girl’s life had been hell – indoctrination into white supremacist politics and bare-butt whippings in public for being disrespectful. While militia homeschooled boys learned farming, real estate and construction, Pammy, as a girl, could look forward to mastering only cooking and sewing and
homeschooling.

She’d spent her formative years there, miserable but also resolute in defying the ultra-right, fundamentalist militia community. At middle school age she’d sneak out of the enclave to buy ‘demonic’ Harry Potter books and
Lord of the Rings
and the
New York Times.
And she wouldn’t put up with what many of the other girls were expected to. (When one of the lay ministers tried to touch
her chest to see if ‘yer heart’s beatin’ for Jesus’, Pam delivered a silent ‘hands off’ in the form of a deep slash to his forearm with a box cutter, which she still often carried.)

‘I told you, that’s in the past. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It
does
matter, Pam. Those were very hard years for you. They affected you – in ways you don’t even know. It’ll take time to work through all that.
And you need to tell Seth everything about your time underground.’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t need to do anything.’

Sachs said evenly, ‘I think you’re jumping at the first chance for a normal relationship that’s come along. And you’re hungry for that. I understand.’

‘You understand. That sounds condescending. And you make me sound desperate. I told you, I’m not getting married. I’m not having his
baby. I want to travel with a guy I love. What’s the big fucking deal?’

This was going so wrong. How did I lose control? This was the same conversation they’d had the other day. Except that the tone was darker.

Pam pulled her hat back on. Started to rise.

‘Please. Just wait a minute.’ Sachs’s mind was racing. ‘Let me say one more thing. Please.’

Impatient, Pam dropped back into her seat. A
waitress came by. She waved the woman away.

Sachs said, ‘Could we—?’

But she never got to finish her plea to the teenager, for just then her phone hummed. It was a text from Mel Cooper. He was asking her to get to Rhyme’s town house as soon as she could.

Actually, she noted, the message wasn’t a request at all.

It never really is when the word ‘emergency’ figures in the header.

Upon examining the back door to Rhyme’s town house, a gowned and gloved Amelia Sachs decided: The son of a bitch sure can pick locks.

Unsub 11-5 hadn’t left more than a minute scratch when he’d broken into the town house to doctor a bottle of scotch on Rhyme’s shelf – insidiously leaving it within the wheelchair-bound criminalist’s reach. Sachs wasn’t surprised the unsub had some skill
at breaking and entering; his talent at skin art attested to his dexterity.

The sleet spattered and the wind blew. By now any evidence in the cul-de-sac and around the back door had probably been obliterated. Inside the door, where footprints would have been visible, she discovered nothing other than marks left by his booties.

The strategy behind the assault was now clear: 11-5 had called in
a false alarm – an attempted rape in Central Park, near the town house. When Rhyme and the others inside went to the front door to see what was going on, the unsub had snuck through the back and found an open bottle of whisky, poured some poison inside, then escaped silently.

Sachs walked the grid on the route from the back door up the stairs, through the hall from the kitchen to the parlor.
Rhyme had an alarm system, which was turned off when the town house was occupied, as now. Video cameras covered the front and back doors but they were real-time monitoring only; the images weren’t recorded.

A sense of violation filled Sachs. Somebody had breached the castle, somebody stealthy and adroit. And deadly. Thom had already arranged for the locks to be changed and a drop bar put on both
doors but once someone has intruded into your living area, you’re never completely free from the taint of desecration. And from worry that it might happen again.

Finally she arrived at the main floor and handed the bagged trace off to Mel Cooper.

Lincoln Rhyme turned his Merits wheelchair around from the table where he’d been reviewing evidence and asked, ‘Well? Anything?’

‘Not much,’ Sachs
told him. ‘Not much at all.’

Rhyme wasn’t surprised.

Not with Unsub 11-5.

Sachs looked him over carefully, as if he’d actually sipped some of the poisoned whisky.

Or maybe she was just troubled that the unsub had gotten inside, spiked the bottle and gotten out without anybody’s knowing.

Lord knew Rhyme himself was. Actually more pissed off than troubled – because he hadn’t deduced that the
whisky was tainted, even though, looking back, he should have. It was obvious that Thom would never leave a nearly full bottle of forty-proof liquor within his boss’s reach. Combine that with the facts that Lon Sellitto and Seth McGuinn had been attacked and that a police action had unfolded right outside his town house, a perfect diversion, and, yeah, Rhyme should have guessed.

But, on the contrary,
the salvation had come from a call to 911. A passerby on the cross street had seen someone slip into the service area behind Rhyme’s and pocket a hypodermic. ‘Looking suspicious,’ the Good Samaritan had reported. ‘A drug thing, maybe going to break in, you know.’

The dispatcher had called Rhyme, who understood immediately that the mis-shelved Glenmorangie was Snow White’s apple.

He’d glanced
at the glass in his hands and realized that he’d come an instant away from a very unpleasant demise, though less unpleasant to him than to others, given that most of his body would not have felt the excruciating pain the poison causes.

But he’d tucked this shadow of mortality away because he was a man for whom death had been an easy option – voluntary and otherwise – for years. His condition,
quadriplegia, brought with it many accessories that could dump him into a coffin at a moment’s notice: dysreflexia and sepsis, for instance.

So, an attempted poisoning? Good news, as far as he was concerned. It might reveal new evidence to lead them a bit closer to the man who was the spiritual heir to the Bone Collector.

Something was up.

Ron Pulaski had been told that there was no memorial service planned for Richard Logan.

But apparently that had changed.

Six people stood in the room he’d been directed to in the Berkowitz Funeral Home, Broadway and 96th.

He hadn’t gone inside yet. The patrol officer stood in the hallway, off to the side, peering in. He was thinking: Tough to blend comfortably
when you’re a stranger facing a half-dozen people who know each other – one or all of whom might have a very good incentive to suspect you’re an intruder and shoot you dead.

And the name of the place! Wasn’t Berkowitz the Son of Sam? That serial killer from the 1970s or ’80s?

Bad sign.

Even though Ron Pulaski tried hard to be like Lincoln Rhyme and not believe in signs or superstitions, he
kind of did.

He started forward. Stopped.

Pulaski had been spending a lot of nerves on the idea that he was going undercover. He was a street cop, a beat cop – he and his twin brother, also blue, used to say. He was thinking of bad hip-hop riff the bros threw together.

A beat cop, a street cop, write you up a ticket and send you on your way.

Or let your know your rights and put your ass away
…

In Rikers, the island, in the bay.

He knew next to nothing about the art of sets and covert work – so brilliantly played by people like Fred Dellray, the tall, lean African American FBI agent who could be anyone from a Caribbean drug dealer to a Charles Taylor–style warlord to a Fortune 500 CEO.

Man was a born actor. Voices, postures, expressions … everything. And apparently this Gielgud
guy too (maybe Dellray worked with him). And Serpico. Even if he got shot.

Beat cop, street cop, walking through the sleet cop …

The rap riff skipped through his head, somehow stilling the uneasiness.

Why’re you so damn nervous?

Not like he was having to pass with druggies or gangbangers. Richard Logan’s family or friends, whoever these visitors were, seemed like your average law-abiding Manhattanites.
The Watchmaker had moved in a different circle, a higher level than most criminals. Oh, he’d been guilty of murder. But it was impossible to picture Logan, the Watchmaker, the sophisticate, in a crack house or in the double-wide of a meth cooker. Fine restaurants, chess matches, museums had been more his thing. Still, he was aware that the Watchmaker
had
tried to kill Rhyme the last time they’d
met. Maybe he’d left instructions in his will for a hit man associate of his to do just what Pulaski was doing at the moment: hang out in the funeral home, identify any nervous undercover cops, drag ’em into the alley afterward.

All right. Jesus. Get real.

There is a risk, he reflected, but not a bullet in the back of the head. It’s that you’ll fuck up and disappoint Lincoln and Amelia.

That
damn uncertainty, the questioning. They never go away. Not completely.

At least he thought he looked the part. Black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. (He’d almost worn his dress NYPD tie but decided: Are you out of your fucking mind? It didn’t have little badges on it but one of these people might’ve known cops in the past. Be smart.) He had scruffed up, per Lincoln Rhyme’s request. A one-day growth
of beard (a bit pathetic since you had to get close to see the blond stubble), shirt stained, shoes scuffed. And he’d been practicing his cold stare.