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The Bone Collector Excerpt
She wanted only to sleep.
The plane had touched down two hours late and there'd been a marathon wait for the luggage. And then the car service had messed up; the limo'd left an hour ago. So now they were waiting in line for a cab.
She stood in the line of passengers, her lean body listing against the weight of her laptop computer. John rattled on about interest rates and new ways of restructuring the deal
but all she could think was: Friday night, 10:30. I wanna pull on my sweats and climb into bed.
Gazing at the endless stream of yellow cabs. Something about the color and the
similarity of the cars . . . . they reminded her of insects. And she shivered with the creepy-crawly feeling she remembered from her childhood in the mountains when she and her brother'd find a
gut-killed badger or kick over a red ant nest and gaze at the wet mass of squirming bodies and legs.
T.J. Colfax shuffled forward as the cab pulled up and squealed to a stop.
The cabbie only popped the trunk and stayed in the cab. They had to load their own luggage, which ticked John off. He was used to people doing things for him. Tammie Jean didn't care;
she was still occasionally surprised to find that she had a secretary to type and file for her. She tossed her suitcase in, slammed the trunk and climbed inside.
John got in after
her, slammed the door and mopped his pudgy face and balding scalp as if the effort of pitching his suit bag in the trunk had exhausted him.
"First stop East Seventy
Second," John muttered through the divider.
"Then the Upper West Side," T.J. added. The plexiglass between the front and back seats was badly scuffed and she could
hardly see the driver. She wondered vaguely why he was wearing a stocking cap in this heat. He seemed thin and she wondered if maybe he was a cancer patient.
The cab shot away
from the curb and was soon cruising down the expressway toward Manhattan.
"Look, that's it," John said. "Why all the crowds."
He was
pointing at a billboard welcoming delegates to the U.N. conference, which was starting on Monday. There were going to be ten thousand visitors in town. T.J. gazed up at the billboard — blacks and whites
and Asians, waving and smiling. There was something wrong about the artwork, though. The proportions and the colors were off. And the faces were eerie.
T.J. muttered, "Body Snatchers."
They sped onto the broad expressway, uneasily yellow under the highway lights. Past the old Navy yard, past the
Brooklyn Piers.
John finally stopped talking and pulled out his Texas Instruments. He started crunching some numbers. T.J. sat back in the seat, looking at the steamy sidewalks and
sullen faces of people sitting on the brownstones overlooking the highway. They seemed half-comatose in the heat.
It was hot in the cab too and T.J. reached for the button to
lower the window. She wasn't surprised to find that it didn't work. She reached across John. His was broken too. It was then that she noticed that the door locks were missing.
And the door handles too.
Her hand slid over the door, feeling for the nub of the handle. No, it was as if someone had cut it off with a hacksaw.
"What?" John asked.
"Well, the doors. . . . How do we open them?"
John was looking from one to the other when the
sign for the Midtown Tunnel came and went.
"Hey," John rapped on the divider. "You missed the turn. Where're you going?"
"Maybe
he's going to take the Queensboro," T.J. suggested. The bridge meant a longer route but avoided the tunnel's toll. She sat forward and tapped on the plexiglass, using her ring to make more noise.
"Are you taking the bridge?"
He ignored them.
"Hey!"
And a moment later they sped past the
Queensboro turnoff.
"Shit," John cried. "Where're you taking us? Harlem. I'll bet he's taking us to Harlem."
T.J. looked out the window.
A car was moving parallel to them, passing slowly. She banged on the window hard.
"Help!" she shouted. "Please..."
The driver glanced at
her once, then again, frowning. He slowed and pulled behind them but with a hard jolt the cab skidded down at exit ramp into Queens, turned down an alley and sped through a deserted warehouse district.
They must've been doing sixty miles an hour."
"What're you doing?"
T.J. banged on the divider. "Slow down. Where are?—
"Oh, God, no," John muttered. "Look."
The driver had pulled the stocking cap down; it was really a ski mask.
"What do you want?" T.J. shouted.
"Money? We'll give you money."
Still, silence from the front of the cab.
T.J. ripped open her Targa bag and pulled out her black laptop. She reared back and slammed the corner of the computer into the window. The glass held though the sound of the bang
seemed to scare the hell out of the driver. The cab swerved and nearly hit the brick wall of the building they were speeding past.
"Money! How much? I can give you a lot of
money!" John sputtered, tears dripping down his fat cheeks.
T.J. rammed the window again with the laptop. The screen flew off under the force of the blow but the window was
uncracked.
She tried once more and the body of the computer split open and fell from her hands.
"Oh, shit..."
They
both pitched forward violently as the driver skidded to a stop in a dingy, unlit alcove.
The driver climbed out of the cab, a small pistol in his hand.
"Please, no..." she muttered.
He walked to the back of the cab and leaned down, peering into the greasy glass. He stood there for a long time, as she
and John slid backwards, against the opposite door. Their sweating bodies pressed together.
He cupped his hands against the glare from the streetlights and looked at them closely.
A sudden crack resonated through the air. John gave a short scream and T.J. flinched.
In the distance, behind the driver, the sky filled with red and blue
fiery streaks. More pops and whistles. He turned and gazed up as a huge, orange spider spread over the city.
Fireworks, T.J. recalled reading in the Times. A present from
the mayor and the secretary general for the U.N. conference delegates, welcoming them to the greatest city on earth.
The driver turned back to the cab. With a loud snap he pulled
up on the latch and slowly opened the door.
* * *
The call was anonymous. As usual.
So there was no way of checking back to see which vacant lot the RP meant. Central had radioed, "He said Thirty-seven near Eleven. That's all."
Reporting parties weren't known for their articulate directions to crime scenes.
Already sweating though it was just nine in the morning, Amelia Sachs
pushed through a stand of tall grass. She was walking the strip search — what the crime scene people called it — an S-shaped pattern. Nothing. She bent her head to the speaker/mike pinned to her
navy-blue uniform blouse.
"Portable five eight eight five. Can't find anything, Central. You have a further-to?"
Through crisp static the
dispatcher replied, "Nothing more on location, 5885. But one thing. . . . the RP said he hoped the vic was dead. K."
"Say again, Central."
"The RP said he hoped the victim was dead. For his sake. K."
"K."
Hoped the vic was dead?
Sachs struggled
over a wilted chain-link and searched another empty lot. Nothing.
She wanted to quit. Call in a 10-90, unfounded report, and go back to the Deuce, which was her regular beat. Her
knees hurt and she was hot as stew in this lousy August weather. She wanted to slip into the Port Authority, hang with the kids and have a tall can of Arizona iced tea. Then, at 11:30 — just a couple of
hours away — she'd clean out her locker at the precinct and head downtown for the training session.
But she didn't — couldn't — blow off the call. She kept going: along the hot
sidewalk, through the gap between two abandoned tenements, through another vegetation-filled field.
Her long index finger pushed into her flat-top uniform cap, through the layers
of long red hair piled high on her head. She scratched compulsively then reached up underneath the cap and scratched some more. Sweat ran down her forehead and tickled and she dug into her eyebrow too.
Thinking: My last two hours on the street. I can live with it.
As Sachs stepped further into the brush she felt the first uneasiness of the morning.
Somebody's watching me.
The hot wind pushed noisily against the dry brush and cars and trucks sped noisily to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. She thought what
Patrol officers often did: This city is so damn noisy somebody could come up right behind me, knife range away, and I'd never know it.
Or line up iron sights on my back...
She spun around quickly. Nothing but leaves and rusting machinery and trash.
Climbing a pile of stones, wincing. Amelia Sachs, thirty-one — a mere thirty-one, her mother would say — was plagued by arthritis. Inherited from her grandfather as clearly as she'd received her mother's willowy build and her father's good looks and career (the red hair was anybody's guess). Another jolt of pain as she eased through a tall curtain of dying bushes. She was fortunate to stop herself one pace from a sheer 30-foot drop.
Below her was a gloomy canyon — cut deep into the bedrock of the West Side. Through it ran the Amtrak roadbed for trains bound north.
She squinted, looking
at the floor of the canyon, not far from the railroad bed.
What is that?
A circle of overturned earth, a small tree branch sticking out of the top? It
looked like—
Oh, my good Lord...
She shivered at the sight. Felt the nausea rise, prickling her skin like a wave of flame. She managed to step on that tiny
part inside her that wanted to turn away and pretend she hadn't seen this.
He hoped the victim was dead. For his sake.
She ran toward an iron ladder
that led down from the sidewalk to the roadbed. She reached for the railing but stopped just in time. Shit. The perp might've booked this way. If she touched it she might screw up any prints he'd left.
Okay, we do it the hard way. Breathing hard to dull the pain in her joints, she began climbing down the rock face itself, slipping her issue shoes — polished like steel for the first day of her new
assignment — into crevices cut in the stone. She jumped the last four feet to the roadbed and ran to the grave.
"Oh, man..."
It wasn't a branch
sticking out of the ground; it was a human hand. The body'd been buried vertical and the dirt piled on until just the forearm, wrist and hand protruded. She stared at the ring finger; all the flesh had
been whittled away and a woman's diamond cocktail ring had been replaced on the bloody, stripped bone.
Sachs dropped to her knees and began to dig.
Dirt
flying under her dogpaddling hands, she noticed that the uncut fingers were splayed, stretched beyond where they could normally bend. Which told her that the vic had been alive when the last shovelful of
dirt was spooned onto the face.
And maybe still was.
Sachs dug furiously into the loosely packed earth, cutting her hand on a bottle shard, her dark blood
mixing into the darker earth. And then she came to the hair and a forehead below it, a cyanotic bluish-gray from the lack of oxygen. Digging further until she could see the dull eyes and the mouth, which
had twisted into a horrible grin as the vic had tried in the last few seconds to stay above the rising tide of black earth.
It wasn't a woman. Despite the ring. He was a heavy-set
man in his fifties. As dead as the soil he floated in.
Backing away, she couldn't take her eyes off his and nearly stumbled over a railroad track. She could think of absolutely
nothing for a full minute. Except what it must've been like to die that way.
Then: Come on, honey. You got yourself a homicide crime scene and you're first officer.
You know what to do.
ADAPT
A is for arrest a known perp.
D is for detain material witnesses and suspects.
ADAPT
A is for assess the crime scene.
P is for...
What was P again?
She
lowered her head to the mike. "Portable 5885 to Central. Further to. I've got a 10-29 by the train tracks at Three-eight and Eleven. Homicide, K. Need detectives, CS, bus and tour doctor. K."
"Roger, 5885. Perp in custody, K?"
"No perp."
"Five eight eight five, K."
Sachs
stared at the finger, the one whittled down to the bone. The incongruous ring. The eyes. And the grin...oh, that fucking grin. A shudder roamed through her body. Amelia Sachs had swum among snakes in the
summer camp rivers and had boasted truthfully she'd have no problem bungee jumping from a hundred-foot bridge. But let her think of confinement... think of being trapped, immobile, and the panic attack'd
grab her like an electric shock. Which was why Sachs walked fast when she walked and why she drove cars like light itself.
When you move they can't getcha...
She heard a sound and cocked her head.
A rumble, deep, getting louder.
Scraps of papers blowing along the roadbed of the tracks. Dust
dervishes swirled about her like angry ghosts.
Then a low wail...
Five-foot-nine Patrol officer Amelia Sachs found herself facing down a 30-ton Amtrak
locomotive, the red, white and blue slab of steel approaching at a determined ten miles an hour.
"Hold up, there!" she shouted.
The engineer ignored her.
Sachs jogged onto the roadbed and planted herself right in the middle of the track, spread her stance and waved her arms, signalling
him to stop. The locomotive squealed to a halt. The engineer stuck his head out the window.
"You can't go through here," she told him.
He asked
her what she meant. She thought he looked woefully young to be driving such a big train.
"It's a crime scene. Please shut off the engine."
"Lady, I don't see any crimes."
But Sachs wasn't listening. She was looking up at a gap in the chain link on the west side of the train viaduct, at
the top, near Eleventh Avenue.
That would have been one way to get the body here without being seen — parking on Eleventh and dragging the body through the narrow alley to the
cliff. On 37th, the cross street, he could be seen from two dozen apartment windows.
"That train, sir. Just leave it right there."
"I can't leave it here."
"Please shut off the engine."
"We don't shut off the engines of trains like this. They
run all the time."
"And call the dispatcher. Or somebody. Have them stop the southbound trains too."
"We can't do that."
"Now, sir. I've got the number of that vehicle of yours."
"Vehicle?"
"I'd suggest you do it immediately," Sachs barked.
"What're you going to do? Give me a ticket?"
But Amelia Sachs was
once again climbing back up the stone walls, her poor joints creaking, her plentiful lips tasting limestone dust, clay and her own sweat. She jogged to the alley she'd noticed from the roadbed and then
turned around, studying Eleventh Avenue and the Javits Center across it. The hall was bustling with crowds — spectators and press. A huge banner proclaimed, Welcome U.N. Delegates! But earlier this morning, when the street was deserted he could easily have found a parking space along here and carried the body to the tracks undetected. Sachs strode to Eleventh, surveyed the six-lane avenue, which was jammed with traffic.
Let's do it.
She waded into the sea of cars and trucks and stopped the northbound lanes cold. Several drivers tried end runs and she had to issue two
citations and finally drag trash cans out into the middle of the street as a barricade to make sure the good residents did their civic duty.
Sachs had remembered the next of the
first officer's ADAPT rules.
P is for Protect the crime scene.
The sound of angry horns began to fill the hazy morning sky, soon supplemented by the
drivers' angrier shouts. A short time later she heard the sirens join the cacophony as the first of the emergency vehicles arrived.
Forty minutes later, the scene was swarming
with uniforms and investigators, dozens of them — a lot more than a hit in Hell's Kitchen, however gruesome the COD, seemed to warrant. But, Sachs learned from another cop, this was a hot case, a media
groper. The vic was one of two passengers who'd arrived at JFK, gotten into a cab and headed for the city, only to vanish.
"CNN's watching," he whispered, a scary warning.
So Amelia Sachs wasn't surprised to see the blonde head of Vince Peretti, head of IRD, which oversaw
the crime scene unit, crest the top of the embankment and pause as he brushed dust from his thousand-dollar suit.
She was, however, surprised to see him notice her and gesture her
over, a faint smile on his clean-cut face. It occurred to her that she was about to receive a nod of gratitude for her Cliffhanger routine. Saved the prints on that ladder, boys. Maybe even a commendation. On the last hour of the last day of Patrol. Going out in that blaze of glory.
He looked her up and down. "Patrolwoman, you're no rookie, are you? I'm safe in making that assumption."
"I'm sorry, sir?"
"You're not a rookie, I assume."
She wasn't, not technically, though she had only three years service under her belt, unlike most of the other Patrol
officers her age; they had nine or ten years'. Sachs had foundered for a few years before attending the academy. "I'm not sure what you're asking."
He looked exasperated
and the smile vanished. "You were first officer?"
"Yessir."
"Why'd you close down Eleventh Avenue? What were you thinking of?"
She looked along the broad street, which was still blocked by her trash-can barricade. She'd gotten used to the honking but realized now it was really quite loud; the line of cars
extended for miles.
"Sir, the first officer's job is to arrest a perp, detain any witnesses, protect—"
"I know the ADAPT rule, officer. You
closed the street to protect the crime scene?"
"Yessir. I didn't think the perp would park on the cross street. He could be seen too easily from those apartments. See,
there? Eleventh seemed like a better choice."
"Well, it was a wrong choice. There were no footprints on that side of the tracks, and two sets going to the ladder that led up to Thirty-Seven."
"I closed Thirty-Seven too."
"That's my point. That's all that needed to be closed. And the train?" he asked. "Why'd you stop
that?"
"Well, sir, I thought that a train going through the scene might disturb evidence. Or something."
"Or something, officer?"
"I didn't express myself very well, sir. I meant—"
"What about Newark Airport?"
"Yessir." She looked
around for help. There were officers nearby but they were busily ignoring the dressing down. "What exactly about Newark?"
"Why didn't you shut that down too?"
Oh, wonderful. A school-marm. Her Julia Roberts lips grew taut but she said reasonably, "Sir, in my judgment, it seemed likely that—"
"The
New York Thruway would've been a good choice too. And the Jersey Pike and Long Island Expressway. I-70, all the way to St. Louis. Those are likely means of escape."
She
lowered her head slightly and stared back at Peretti. The two of them were exactly the same height though his heels were higher.
"I've gotten calls from the commissioner," he
continued, "the head of the Port Authority, the Secretary General's office, the head of that expo—" He nodded toward the Javits Center. "We've fucked up the conference schedule, a U.S.
senator's speech and traffic on the entire west side. The train tracks were 50 feet from the vic and the street you closed was a good 200 feet away and 30 above. I mean, even Hurricane Eva didn't fuck up
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor like this."
"I just thought—"
Peretti smiled. Because Sachs was a beautiful woman — her 'foundering' before
attending the academy had involved steady assignments for the Chantelle Modeling Agency on Madison Avenue — the cop chose to forgive her.
"Patrolwoman Sachs," he glanced
at the name tag on her chest, flattened chastely by the American Body Armor vest. "An object lesson. Crime scene work is a balance. It'd be nice if we could cordon off the whole city after every
homicide and detain about three million people. But we can't do that. I say this constructively. For your edification."
"Actually, sir," she said brusquely,
"I'm transferring out of Patrol. Effective as of noon today."
He nodded, smiled cheerfully. "Then, enough said. But for the record, it was your decision to stop the trains and close the street."
"Yessir, it was," she said
smartly. "No mistake about that."
He jotted this into a black watch book with slashing stokes of his sweaty pen.
Oh, please...
"Now, remove those garbage cans. You direct traffic until the street's clear again. You hear me?"
Without a yessir or nosir or any other acknowledgment she
wandered to Eleventh Avenue and slowly began removing the garbage cans. Every single driver who passed her scowled or muttered. Sachs glanced at her watch.
An hour to go.
I can live with it.
Copyright © 1997 Jeffery Deaver
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