The Skin Collector (4 page)

‘An associate of Logan’s. Exactly who, I’m not sure. I’ll have to think it through. But it should be somebody inscrutable, dangerous.’ He scowled. ‘I wish you didn’t look like an altar boy. Were you one?’

‘My brother and I both.’

‘Well, practice looking scruffy.’

‘Don’t forget dangerous,’ Sachs said, ‘though
that’s going to be tougher than inscrutable.’

Thom brought Rhyme some coffee in a straw-fitted cup. Apparently the aide had noticed him glancing at Sachs’s. Rhyme thanked him with a nod.

Old married couple …

Thom said, ‘I feel better now, Lincoln. For a minute I really did think I was seeing a soft side. It was disorienting. But knowing that you’re just setting up a sting to spy on the family
of a corpse? It’s restored my faith in you.’

Rhyme grumbled, ‘It’s simply logical. You know, I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.’

Though ironically Rhyme
did
want to send the flowers in part for a sentimental reason: to pay his respects to a worthy adversary. He suspected the Watchmaker would have done the same for him.

Views of Death Number One and Number Two were not, of course,
mutually exclusive.

Rhyme then cocked his head.

‘What?’ Sachs asked.

‘What’s the temperature?’

‘Right around freezing.’

‘So there’s ice on the steps outside?’ Rhyme’s town house sported both stairs and a disabled-accessible ramp.

‘There was in the back,’ she said. ‘Front too, I assume.’

‘We’re about to have a visitor, I think.’

Though the evidence was largely anecdotal, Rhyme had come
to believe that, after the accident that deprived him of so many sensations, those that survived grew more discerning. Hearing in particular. He’d detected someone crunching up the front steps.

A moment later the buzzer sounded and Thom went to answer it.

The sound and pacing of the footsteps as the visitor entered the hallway and made for the parlor revealed who’d come a-callin’.

‘Lon.’

Detective First-Grade Lon Sellitto turned the corner and strode through the archway, pulling off his Burberry overcoat. It was tan and vivid with the creases that characterized most of Sellitto’s garb, thanks to his portly physique and careless posture. Rhyme wondered why he didn’t stick with dark clothing, which wouldn’t show the rumpling so much. Though once the overcoat was off and tossed over a
rattan chair, Rhyme noted that the navy-blue suit displayed its own troubled texture.

‘Bad out there,’ Sellitto muttered. He dusted his thinning gray-black hair, and a few dots of sleet bailed. His eyes followed them down. He’d tracked in muck and ice. ‘Sorry about that.’

Thom said not to worry and brought him a cup of coffee.

‘Bad,’ the detective repeated, toasting his hands on the mug the
way Sachs had. Eyes toward the window, on the other side of which, beyond the falcons, you could see sleet and mist and black branches. And little else of Central Park.

Rhyme didn’t get out much and in any event weather meant nothing to him, unless it was a factor in a crime scene.

Or it helped his early warning system detect visitors.

‘It’s pretty much finished,’ Rhyme said, nodding at the
City Hall mugging/murder crime scene report.

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s not why I’m here.’ Spoken nearly as one word.

Rhyme’s attention hovered. Sellitto was a senior officer in Major Cases and if he wasn’t here to pick up the report, then maybe something else, something more interesting, was on the horizon. More propitious was that Sellitto had seen a tray of pastry, homemade by Thom, and had turned
away as if the crullers were invisible. His mission here had to be urgent.

And, therefore, engaging.

‘We got a call, a homicide down in SoHo, Linc. Earlier today. We drew straws and you got picked. Hope you’re free.’

‘How can I get picked if I never drew a straw?’

A sip of coffee. Ignoring Rhyme. ‘It’s a tough one.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Woman was abducted from the basement of the store where
she worked. Some boutique. Killer dragged her through an access door and into a tunnel under the building.’

Rhyme knew that beneath SoHo was a warren of tunnels, dug years ago for transporting goods from one industrial building to another. He’d always believed it was just a matter of time before somebody used the place as a killing zone.

‘Sexual assault?’

‘No, Amelia,’ Sellitto said. ‘The perp’s
a tattoo artist, seems. And from what the respondings said a pretty fucking good one. He gave her a tat. Only he didn’t use ink. He used poison.’

Rhyme had been a forensic scientist for many years; his mind often made accurate deductions from scant preliminary details. But inferences work only when the facts presented echo those from the past. This information was unique in Rhyme’s memory and
didn’t become a springboard for any theories whatsoever.

‘What was the toxin he used?’

‘They don’t know. This just happened, I was saying. We’re holding the scene.’

‘More, Lon. The design? That he tattooed on her?’

‘It was some words, they said.’

The intrigue factor swelled. ‘Do you know what they were?’

‘The respondings didn’t say. But they told me it looked like only part of a sentence.
And you can guess what that means.’

‘He’s going to need more victims,’ Rhyme said, glancing Sachs’s way. ‘So he can send the rest of his message.’

Sellitto was explaining:

‘Her name was Chloe Moore, twenty-six. Part-time actress – had a few roles in commercials and some walk-ons in thrillers. Working in the boutique to pay the bills.’

Sachs asked the standard questions: Boyfriend trouble, husband trouble, triangle troubles?

‘Naw, none of the above that we could tell. I just started uniforms canvassing around the area but the
prelim from the clerks in the store and her roommate is that she hung with a good crowd. Was pretty conservative. No boyfriend presently and no bad breakups.’

Rhyme was curious. ‘Any tattoos, other than the one he killed her with?’

‘I dunno. First responders scooted as soon as the ME’s team declared DCDS.’

Deceased, declared dead at scene. The official pronouncement by the city’s medical examiner
that got the crime scene clock running and started all kinds of procedures. Once DCDS was called, there was no reason for anybody to remain on the scene; Rhyme insisted that responders get the hell out to avoid contamination. ‘Good,’ he told Sellitto. He realized he was fully in View of Death Number One mode.

‘All right, Sachs. Where are we with the city worker?’ A glance at the City Hall report.

‘I’d say it’s done. Still awaiting customer records about people who bought that brand of knife. But I’m betting the perp didn’t use his credit card or fill out a questionnaire about customer service. Not much else to do.’

‘Agreed. Okay, Lon, we’ll take it. Though I can’t help but note you didn’t really ask. You just drew a straw on my behalf and stomped slush in here, assuming I’d get on board.’

‘What the fuck else’d you be doing, Linc? Cross-country skiing through Central Park?’

Rhyme liked it when people didn’t shrink from his condition, when they weren’t afraid to make jokes like Sellitto’s. He grew furious when people treated him like a broken doll.

There, there, poor you …

Sellitto said, ‘I’ve called Crime Scene in Queens. There’s an RRV en route. They’ll let you take the lead,
Amelia.’

‘On my way.’ She pulled on a wool scarf and gloves. She picked another leather jacket from the hook, longer, mid-thigh. In all their years together Rhyme had never seen her wear a full overcoat. Leather jackets or sport, that was about it. Rarely a windbreaker, either, unless she was undercover or on a tac op.

The wind again blasted the ancient windows, rattling the frames, and Rhyme
nearly told Sachs to drive carefully – she piloted a classic rear-wheel-drive muscle car that behaved badly on ice – but telling Sachs to be cautious was like telling Rhyme to be patient; it just wasn’t going to happen.

‘You want help?’ Pulaski asked.

Rhyme debated. He asked Sachs, ‘You need him?’

‘Don’t know. Probably not. Single victim, confined area.’

‘For the time being, rookie, you’ll
be our undercover mourner. Stay here. We’ll think about your cover story.’

‘Sure, Lincoln.’

‘I’ll call in from the scene,’ Sachs said, grabbing the black canvas bag that contained the com unit she used to talk with Rhyme from the field, and hurried out the door. There was a brief howl of wind, then silence after the creak and slam.

Rhyme noticed that Sellitto was rubbing his eyes. His face
was gray and he radiated exhaustion.

The detective saw that Rhyme was looking his way. He said, ‘That fucking Met case. Not getting any sleep. Who breaks into someplace where you got a billion dollars’ worth of art, pokes around and walks out empty-handed? Doesn’t make sense.’

Last week at least three very clever perps had broken into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue after hours.
Video cameras were disabled and alarms suspended – no easy matter – but an exhaustive crime scene search had revealed that the perps had spent time in two areas: the antique arms hall of the museum, which was open to the public – a schoolboy’s delight, filled with swords, battle-axes, armor and hundreds of other clever devices meant to excise body parts; and the museum’s basement archives, storage
and restoration areas. They’d left after several hours and remotely reactivated the alarms. The intrusion had been pieced together by computer analysis of the security shutdowns and physical examinations of the rooms after discovering the alarm breaches.

It was almost as if the burglars were like many tourists who visit the museum: They’d seen enough, grown bored and headed for a nearby restaurant
or bar.

A complete inventory revealed that while some items in both areas had been moved, the intruders hadn’t perped a single painting, collectible or packet of Post-it notes. Crime Scene investigators – Rhyme and Sachs hadn’t worked that one – had been overwhelmed by the amount of space to search; the arms and armor displays were bad enough but the network of archives and storage rooms extended
underground, far east, well past Fifth Avenue.

The case had been demanding time-wise but Sellitto had admitted that wasn’t the worst of it. ‘Politics. Fucking politics.’ He’d gone on to explain, ‘Hizzoner thinks it looks bad his prize jewel got busted into. Which translates: My crew’s working overtime and hell with everything else. We’ve got terror threats in the city, Linc. Code red or orange
or whatever color means we’re fucked. We got Tony Soprano wannabes. And what’m I doing? I’m looking through every dusty room, at every weird canvas and every naked statue in the basement. I mean, every. You wanna know my feeling about art, Linc?’

‘What, Lon?’ Rhyme had asked.

‘Fuck art. That’s my feeling.’

But now the new case – the poison tat artist – had derailed the old, to the detective’s
apparent relief. ‘You got a killer like this, the papers ain’t gonna be happy we’re spending our time worried about paintings of water lilies and statues of Greek gods with little dicks. You see those statues, Linc? Some of those guys … Really, you’d think the model’d tell the sculptor to add an inch or two.’

He sat heavily in a chair, sipped more coffee. Still no interest in the pastry.

Rhyme
then frowned. ‘One thing, Lon?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When did this tattoo killing happen exactly?’

‘TOD was about an hour ago. Ninety minutes maybe.’

Rhyme was confused. ‘You couldn’t get the tox screen back in that time.’

‘Naw, the ME said a couple hours.’

‘Then how’d they’d know she was poisoned?’

‘Oh, one of the medics ran a tox case a couple years ago. He said you could tell from the rictus on
the face and the posture. The pain, you know. It’s one hell of a way to die. We gotta get this son of a bitch, Linc.’

Great. Just great.

Standing in the basement of the SoHo boutique where Chloe Moore had been abducted, Amelia Sachs grimaced, leaning down and peering into the utility room. She was staring at the narrow tunnel that led from that room to the crime scene itself, apparently a larger tunnel, where Chloe had been killed.

The body was just visible and brightly lit by lamps the first responders
had set up.

Palms sweating, Sachs continued to peer through the tiny shaft she’d have to crawl through.

Just great.

She stepped back into the cellar and inhaled two or three times, sucking moldy, fuel-oil-scented air deep into her lungs. Years ago, Lincoln Rhyme had created a database of layouts of underground areas in New York, assembled from the Department of Buildings and other city government
agencies. She’d downloaded one through a secure app on her iPhone and – with dismay – reviewed the layout before her.

Where did phobias come from? Sachs wondered. Some childhood trauma, some genetic imprinting that discourages us from petting poisonous snakes or cavorting on mountain ledges?