The Skin Collector (39 page)

‘Got it. But your officer was really pushing the bounds of undercover ops.’

‘He hasn’t done that kind of thing before.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. Attorney Weller wasn’t too happy about the whole thing, as you can imagine. But he’s not going to pursue any
complaint.’

‘Tell him we appreciate that. Can you have Ron call me?’

‘Yessir.’

They disconnected and a moment later the parlor phone rang once more. It was Pulaski’s undercover phone.

‘Rookie.’

‘I’m sorry, Lincoln. I—’

‘Don’t apologize.’

‘I didn’t handle it very well.’

‘I’m not so sure it worked out badly.’

There was a pause. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We learned one thing: Weller and his
clients – the Logan family –
don’t
have any connection with any of the Watchmaker’s associates or any planned crimes. Otherwise, they wouldn’t’ve dimed you out.’

‘I guess.’

‘You’re free to go?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, the good news is we can let the Watchmaker rest in peace. No more distractions. We’ve got an unsub to catch. Get your ass back here. Now.’

He disconnected before the young officer said
anything more.

It was then that Rhyme’s phone rang and he received the news that there’d been a fourth attack.

And when he heard that the killing had been in a tattoo parlor in downtown Manhattan, he asked immediately which one.

Upon hearing that – not surprisingly – it was TT Gordon’s shop, Rhyme sighed and lowered his head. ‘No, no,’ he whispered. For a moment Views of Death No. One and Two
vied. Then the first prevailed and Rhyme called Sachs to tell her she had yet another scene to run.

Amelia Sachs returned from the most recent crime scene in the Unsub 11-5 case. TT Gordon’s tattoo parlor in the East Village.

It turned out, though, that Gordon himself was not the victim. He’d been out of the parlor when the unsub snuck inside, locked the door and proceeded into the back room for the lethal tattooing session. The body was that of one of the artists who worked in the
parlor, a man named Eddie Beaufort. He was a transplant from South Carolina who’d moved to New York a few years ago and was, Sachs had learned from Gordon, making a name for himself in the inking world.

‘We should’ve had somebody on the tattoo parlor, Rhyme,’ she said.

‘Who would’ve thought he’d be at risk?’ Rhyme was truly surprised that the unsub had tracked the artist down. How? It seemed
unlikely but possible that he’d followed Gordon from Rhyme’s. But the tat community would be a small one and word must’ve gotten back to the killer that Gordon was helping with the case. The unsub would have heard and gone to the parlor to kill him. Finding he wasn’t there, maybe he had just decided to make clear that it was a bad idea to assist the police and picked for a victim the first employee
he found.

It was also time to send another message.

Sachs described the scene: Beaufort, lying on his back. His shirt was off and the unsub had tattooed another part of the puzzle on his abdomen. She slid the SD card from her camera and displayed the pictures on the screen.

Ron Pulaski, back from his car wreck of an undercover assignment, stood in front of the display with his arms crossed. ‘They’re not numerical order: the second, forty, seventeenth and the six hundredth.’

Rhyme said, ‘Good point. He could have gone numerically if he’d wanted to. Either the order is significant – or he wanted to scramble them for some reason. And we’re ordinal again, not cardinal.
“Fort”Y is the only cardinal number.’

Mel Cooper now suggested, ‘An encryption?’

That was a possibility. But there were far too many combinations and no common reference point. In breaking a simple code in which letters are converted to numbers, you can start with the knowledge that the letter ‘e’ appears most frequently in the English language and preliminarily assign that value to the most
commonly occurring numbers in the code. But here, they had far too few numbers – and they were combined with words, which suggested that the numbers did not mean anything other than what they appeared to be, cryptic though that meaning was.

It could still be a location, but this number eliminated longitude or latitude. One or more addresses?

Pulaski said, ‘Beaufort wasn’t killed underground.’

Rhyme pointed out, ‘No, the unsub’s motive was different here: to kill TT Gordon specifically or at least somebody in the parlor. He didn’t need to follow his standard MO. Now, let’s look at what else you collected, Sachs.’

She and Cooper walked to the examination table. Both donned gloves and face masks.

‘No prints, finger or footwear,’ she said. ‘ME has the blood workup. I told him we needed
the results yesterday. He said it was all hands on deck.’

‘Other trace?’ Rhyme asked.

Sachs nodded at several bags.

The criminalist barked, ‘Mel, get on that.’

As Cooper picked up and examined each one, then analyzed the contents, Sachs ran through the other pictures of the scene. Eddie Beaufort, hands cuffed behind him and lying on his back, like the others. It was obvious he’d suffered gastrointestinal
symptoms and severe vomiting.

The phone rang with a familiar number.

Sachs gave a laugh. ‘That’s as ASAP as it gets.’

‘Doctor, it’s Lincoln Rhyme,’ he said to the medical examiner. ‘What do you have?’

‘Odd, Captain.’ Using Rhyme’s old title. It never failed to be both jarring and familiar.

‘How? Exactly.’

‘The victim was killed by amatoxin alpha-amanitin.’

‘Death cap mushroom,’ Cooper said.
‘
Amanita phalloides
.’

‘That’s it,’ the medical examiner said.

Rhyme knew them well. Amanitas are known for three things: a smell like honey, a very pleasant taste and the ability to kill more efficiently than any other fungus on earth.

‘And the odd part?’

‘The dosage. I’ve never seen a concentration this high. Usually it takes days to die, but he lasted about an hour I’d guess.’

‘And a pretty
bad hour,’ Sachs said.

‘Well, that’s right,’ said the medical examiner, as if this had never occurred to him.

‘Any other substances?’

‘More propofol. Just like the others.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Nope.’

Rhyme grimaced and began to hit disconnect. Sachs called, ‘Thanks.’

‘You’re—’

Click.

‘Keep going, Mel,’ Rhyme said.

Cooper ran another sample of trace through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.
‘This is—’

‘Don’t say “odd”,’ Rhyme snapped. ‘I’ve had enough odd.’

‘Troubling. That was the word.’

‘Go on.’

‘Nitrocellulose, di-ethylene glycol dinitrate, dibutyl phthalate, diphenylamine, potassium chloride, graphite.’

Rhyme frowned. ‘How much?’

‘A lot.’

‘What is it, Lincoln?’ Pulaski asked.

‘Explosives. Gunpowder, specifically. Smokeless – modern formulation.’

Sachs asked the tech,
‘From a discharged weapon?’

‘No. Some actual grains. Pre-burn.’

Pulaski asked, ‘He reloads his own ammunition?’

It was a reasonable suggestion. But Rhyme considered this for a moment and then said, ‘No, I don’t think so. Usually it’s only snipers and hunters who reload. And our unsub hasn’t left any evidence that he’s either. Not much interest in firearms at all.’ Rhyme stared at the computer
printout of the GC/MS. ‘No, I think he’s using the raw powder for an improvised explosive device.’ He sighed. ‘Poison’s not enough. Now he wants to blow something up.’

• Victim: Eddie Beaufort, 38
  

  –
  Employee at TT Gordon’s tattoo parlor
  

  –
  Probably not intended victim
  

• Perpetrator: Presumably Unsub 11-5
  
• COD: Poisoning with amatoxin alpha-amanitin (from Amanita phalloides,
  death cap mushroom), introduced via tattooing
  
• Tattoo reads: ‘the six hundredth’
  
• Sedated with propofol
  

  –
  How obtained? Access to medical supplies? (No local thefts)
  

• Handcuffs
  

  –
  Generic, unable to source
  

• Trace
  

  –
  Nitrocellulose, di-ethylene glycol dinitrate, dibutyl phthalate, diphenylamine, potassium chloride, graphite: smokeless gunpowder
  

     
  Planning to use improvised explosive
  device?
  

‘You know how skeptical I am of motives.’

Sachs said nothing, but a cresting smile told her reaction.

Easing his wheelchair up to the evidence boards, Rhyme continued, ‘But there’s a time when it’s appropriate to ask about them – particularly when we’ve built up a solid evidentiary base. Which we have. The possibility of a bomb – possibility, mind you – may take this out of psychotic-perp
world. There’s a rational motive at work possibly. Our unsub’s not necessarily satisfying deep-seated yearnings to do the Bone Collector one better. I think he may have something more calculated in mind. Yes, yes, this could be good,’ he added enthusiastically. ‘I want to look at the victims again.’

The team perused the charts. Rhyme said, ‘We can take Eddie Beaufort out of the equation. He was
killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lon and Seth and I were attacked to slow us down. There were four intended attacks as part of his plan: We ruined two of them – Harriet Stanton at the hospital and Braden Alexander at the Belvedere Apartments. And two were successful. Chloe and Samantha. Why those four?’ Rhyme whispered, ‘What about them beckoned?’

Sachs said, ‘I don’t
know, Rhyme. They seemed purely random … happenstance victims.’

Rhyme stared up at the board in front of him. ‘Yes, the victims
themselves
are random. But what if—’

Pulaski blurted, ‘The
places
aren’t? Did he pretend to be psycho to take attention away from the fact that there’s something at the scenes he wants to blow up?’

‘Ex-actly, rookie!’ Rhyme scanned the boards. ‘Location, location,
location.’

Cooper said, ‘But blow up what? And how?’

Rhyme scanned the crime scene photos again. Then: ‘Sachs!’

She lifted an eyebrow.

‘When we weren’t sure where the hypochlorous acid came from we sent patrolmen to the scenes, remember? To see if there were chlorine distribution systems there.’

‘Right. The boutique in SoHo and the restaurant. They didn’t find any.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, but it’s
not the acid I’m thinking of.’ Rhyme wheeled closer to the monitor, studying the images. ‘Look at those pictures you took, Sachs. The spotlights and batteries. Did
you
set them up?’

‘No, the first responders did.’ She was frowning. ‘I
assumed
they did. They were there when I arrived. Both scenes.’

‘And the officer who searched the tunnel for chlorine later said he was standing by the spotlights.
They were still there. Why?’ He frowned and said to Sachs, ‘Find out who set them up.’

Sachs grabbed her phone and called the Crime Scene Unit in Queens. ‘Joey, it’s Amelia. When your people were running the Unsub Eleven-Five scenes, did you bring halogens to any of them? … No.’ She was nodding. ‘Thanks.’ Disconnected.

‘They never set them up, Rhyme. They weren’t our lights.’ She then called
a friend at the fire department and asked the same question. After a brief conversation she disconnected and reported, ‘Uh-uh. They weren’t the FD’s either. And patrol doesn’t carry around spots in their RMPs. Only Emergency Service does and they didn’t respond until later.’

‘And, hell,’ Rhyme snapped, ‘I’ll bet there’re lights in the tunnel under the Belvedere.’

Sachs: ‘That’s what the bombs’re
in, right? The batteries.’

Rhyme looked over the images. ‘The batteries look like twelve-volt. You can run halogens on batteries that’re a lot smaller. The rest of the casing’s filled with gunpowder, I’m sure. It’s brilliant. Nobody’d question spotlights and batteries sitting in a crime scene perimeter. Any other mysterious packages’d be reported and examined by the Bomb Squad.’