The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 60





‘Bomb Squads are rolling,’ Pulaski called.

‘Good. So, did you find it, Mel?’

Cooper had a Bible pulled up on the main monitor. He was reading. ‘Just like you said, Lincoln. In the book of Genesis.’

‘Read it.’

‘“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”’ Cooper looked up. ‘We’ve got “the six hundredth”, “the second”, “seventeenth” and “forty”. They’re all there.’

‘The other book! I need the other book!’

‘Serial Cities?’ Cooper asked.

‘What else, Mel? I’m hardly in the mood for Proust, Anna Karenina or Fifteen Shades of Grey.’

‘It’s Fifty,’ Pulaski said and received a withering glance in exchange. ‘I’m just saying. It’s not like I read it or anything.’

Amelia Sachs found the true crime book and flipped the slim volume open. ‘What should I look up, Rhyme?’

Rhyme said, ‘The footnote. I’m interested in the footnote about our investigation of Charlotte, Pam’s mother, and her right-wing militia cell.’

The bombing in New York that Charlotte had planned out.

Sachs read the lengthy passage. It detailed how Rhyme, the NYPD and the FBI had investigated the case.


Rhyme blurted, ‘Okay, our unsub maybe does have some affection, if you will, for the Bone Collector. But that’s not why Eleven-Five was looking for the book – he wanted to see our techniques in tracking down domestic terror cells. Not psychotics. That was an assumption I made,’ Rhyme said, spitting out the noun as if it were an obscenity.

‘A cell hired him to do this?’ Pulaski asked.

‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s part of the group himself. And the target?’ Rhyme gestured at the pictures of the underground crime scenes: ‘See the pipes. The ones stamped with DEP. Environmental Protection. Water pipes.’

Sachs said, ‘Waves, the biblical flood. Of course. They want to blow the city’s water mains.’

‘Exactly. The crime scenes are in places where the flooding would cause the most damage if the pipes blew.’

Rhyme turned to Pulaski. ‘Thanks, rookie.’

‘You’re welcome. I’m still not sure what I did.’

‘You thought those scars around the numbers were waves, not scallops. And they were. Waves! That put me in mind of the flood and Noah. Now we’ve got an apocalyptic theme going. This changes everything.’ Rhyme scanned the evidence chart. His thoughts fell hard, clattering like the sleet outside. Good, good. Moving along.’

Mel Cooper asked, ‘How would the unsub know where the vulnerable spots would be, though? The water grid charts’re classified.’

It was then that Rhyme’s mind made one of its unaccountable leaps. They didn’t happen often; most deductions are inevitable if you have enough facts. But occasionally, rarely, an insight gelled from the most gossamer of connections.

‘The bit of beard – the one you found here, by the shelf when Eleven-Five ruined my favorite single-malt.’

Eyes bright, Sachs said, ‘We thought it was cross-contamination. But it wasn’t. The beard came from Unsub Eleven-Five himself when he broke in here. Because he was the one who killed the worker last week.’

‘To get the keys to his office,’ Rhyme said.

‘Why? Where did he work?’ From Ron Pulaski.

‘Public works, specifically, Environmental Protection,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘Which runs the water supply system. The unsub broke in and stole the water grid charts to know where to plant the IEDs. Ah, and the blueprint fiber that the perp left at the scene in Pam’s apartment, when he attacked Seth? That was from the plans.’

Rhyme looked again at the map of the city. He pointed to massive Water Tunnel 3, the biggest public works project in the history of the city. It was one of the most massive sources of water in the world. The tunnel itself was too far underground to be vulnerable. But there were huge distribution lines running from it throughout the city. If they were to blow, billions of gallons of water would gush through Midtown and lower Manhattan. The results would be far worse than any hurricane could produce.

‘Call Major Cases,’ Rhyme ordered. ‘And Environmental Protection and the mayor. I want the water supply shut down now.’