The Skin Collector(Lincoln Rhyme)

Chapter 73





The medics had finished tending to Pam Willoughby, who walked outside her town house onto the chill, bright street.

From a spot on the curb, where he sat in his rugged Merits wheelchair, Lincoln Rhyme noted that Amelia Sachs started to step forward, arms extending slightly – to embrace her – but then slowed to a stop. She eased back, lowering her hands, when Pam gave no response, other than a formal nod of greeting.

Rhyme asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Getting by,’ said the somber-faced young woman – Rhyme could no longer think of her as a girl. He heard how she’d fought the unsub and he was proud of her.

For some reason Pam kept brushing at her legs – the front of her thighs. It reminded him of the compulsive way Amelia Sachs sometimes touched or scratched her own body. She noted him looking and stopped. ‘He tattooed me. But it wasn’t poison. It was a real tat. He had part of his name and mine on his legs, he did the other part on mine.’

Splitters, Rhyme recalled TT Gordon telling them. Lovers who mark portions of their names on each other.

‘I’m …’ She swallowed. ‘I feel pretty creepy.’

‘I know somebody who can get them removed. I’ve got his number.’

If TT Gordon knew how to ink he’d surely know how to de-ink.

Pam nodded and rubbed compulsively again. ‘He was telling me all these terrible things. He was, it sounded like he was planning to be a new Hitler. He was going to kill his aunt and uncle and start his own militia movement. You know, Mom wasn’t really all that smart. She’d ramble on and on and you couldn’t take her seriously. But Billy, he was in a different league. He’d been to college. He was going to start schools and indoctrinate kids. He talked about the Rule of Skin. I could see he was obsessed with it. Racism, pure and simple.’

‘Rule of Skin,’ Rhyme mused. It certainly jibed with the manifesto they planned to leave at the site of poisoning at the water pipe. He thought back to what Terry Dobyns had told them.

If you can find out why he’s so fascinated with skin, that’s key to understanding the case …

Pam continued, ‘And he’d been obsessing about me all these years.’ She explained about the betrothal, about Billy’s coming here a year ago to start planning his attack on the city – and his seduction of her. Pam shivered.

‘Do you want to get in the van?’ Rhyme asked, nodding toward the accessible vehicle Thom had driven here. Her place was sealed for the crime scene search and Pam was clearly cold; her nose and eyes red, fingertips too.

‘No,’ Pam said quickly. She seemed more comfortable with the sunlight, despite the frigid air. ‘You caught them all?’

‘Everybody who was here in New York, it seems,’ Rhyme explained. ‘Matthew and Harriet Stanton. Their son, Joshua.’

The search team had found a real ID on the unsub’s body. William Haven, twenty-five. A tattoo artist who lived in South Lakes, Illinois.

Rhyme continued, ‘We have people going through all of their documents now, notes, phones, computers. We’ve got a few conspirators in Southern Illinois but there’ll be others. The bombs weren’t set to detonate but they were real: gunpowder, detonators and cell phone triggers. Somebody who knew what they were doing put the IEDs together.’

‘If they were anything like my mother’s underground group, the Patriot Frontier, there’d be dozens of people involved. They were always meeting late at night, sitting in kitchens, drinking coffee, making their f*cking little plans …

Lincoln?’ Pam asked.

He raised an eyebrow.

‘How did you know? About Seth? To send the police here?’

‘I didn’t know. But I suspected it when it occurred to me: How did the unsub know about TT Gordon?’

‘Who?’

‘The tattoo artist that you and Seth met in my lab.’

‘Oh, the guy with the weird beard and the piercings.’

‘That’s him. Billy broke into his shop, killed one of his associates. I think he wanted to kill TT but he was out. He might’ve found out about the tattoo artist some other way but that was the simplest explanation – seeing TT in my town house.

‘Since we learned that the motive for the group was domestic terrorism and that there was a tentative connection with you and your mother – the Bone Collector – I just wondered if it wasn’t too much of a coincidence that Seth had appeared in your life.

‘Of course, the unsub had the tattoo of the centipede. Seth didn’t seem to have any inkings; I’d seen him in a short-sleeve shirt. What to make of that? And then I remembered the waterproof ink – red ink – on one of the evidence bags. TT told us that some artists use washable pens like that to outline a tattoo first. Maybe that’s what he’d done – a temporary tattoo on his arm to trick us.’

Pam nodded. ‘Yes, exactly. He told me he’d draw it to make people think he was somebody else. Then wash it off when he was playing the role of Seth. It was a homeless man he tattooed with the centipede and paid to drill the hole. He was the one who died in the tunnel. He said he didn’t trust you to turn off the water pressure. He wanted to be cautious.’

‘Ah, so that’s who it was.’ Rhyme continued, ‘Then he broke into my town house and tried to poison me. We thought he was an expert with lock picks; there was no sign of jimmying the lock. But of course—’

‘He took the key to your town house off my keychain,’ Pam said, grimacing. ‘Had a copy made.’

‘That’s what I was thinking, yes. Was he the unsub? I couldn’t say for sure, of course, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I called Dispatch and had some patrolmen get over here right away.’

Sachs said, ‘And the attack here yesterday. He faked it.’

‘Injected himself with a bit of propofol, then cuffed himself. He dropped the bottle of poison and the syringe on the floor and lay down to take a nap until the police showed up.’

‘Why?’ Pam asked.

Sachs added, ‘Wanted to keep suspicion off him. What better way than becoming a victim himself?’

Rhyme said, ‘And, I have to admit, our profilers contributed. Did some research that said centipedes in art and fiction represent an invasion of a safe, comfortable space. They lie in wait, invisible. That was Seth. Well, Billy.’

‘Sure was.’ Pam’s still eyes swiveled back to her apartment. She frowned, pulled a tissue from her pocket and licked it. She scrubbed away a smear of blood on her cheek.

Sachs, the lead investigator on the case, now that Lon Sellitto was out of commission, spent about twenty minutes debriefing the girl, with Rhyme nearby. They learned that Billy, with Pam in tow, had planned to escape to a militia group in upstate New York, the Patriot Assembly, which Rhyme and Sachs had tangled with before.

Ron Pulaski finished walking the grid in Pam’s apartment – even if you stop the perp in the most absolute sense possible, as here, you still go through the formalities. When he was finished he bundled up the evidence, signed the chain-of-custody cards and told Rhyme he’d get everything to the town house. The ME team carted away the body. With eyes cool as the air, Pam watched the gurney wheeled to the van.

Rhyme, then, was concentrating on Sachs. When she and Pam had been talking about what had just happened, the policewoman had occasionally tried to joke or offer words of sympathy. Pam responded with a formal smile that might as well have been a sneer. The expression cut Sachs deeply, it was clear.


A pause as Sachs stood, hands on hips, looking over the town house. She said to Pam, ‘The scene’s clear. Help you clean up, you want.’

Rhyme noted that she was hesitating, and the tone in her voice told him that she regarded this question as perilous.

‘Think I’ll just head over to the Olivettis, you know. And maybe sometime this week I’ll borrow Howard’s car, come over to the town house and pick up what’s left. That okay, Lincoln?’

‘Sure.’

‘Wait,’ Sachs said firmly.

Pam regarded her defiantly.

The detective continued, ‘I want you to see somebody about this. Talk to them.’ She dug into her purse. ‘This’s Terry Dobyns. He works for the NYPD but he can hook you up with somebody.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Please. Do it.’

A shrug. The card disappeared into her back pocket, where her cell phone rested.

Sachs said, ‘You need anything, give me a call. Anytime.’ A whiff of desperation that was hard to hear.

The girl said nothing but walked inside and returned with a backpack and a computer bag. White wires ran from ears to iPod and were tucked up under a bulky hat.

The girl waved in the direction of Rhyme and Sachs but to neither in particular.

Sachs stared after her.

After a moment Rhyme said, ‘People hate to be proven wrong, Sachs, even when it’s for their own good. Especially then maybe.’

‘So it seems.’ In the cold she was rocking back and forth, watching Pam disappear in the distance. ‘I broke it, Rhyme.’

It was moments like this when Rhyme detested his disability the most. He wanted nothing more than to walk up to Sachs and wrap his arms around her shivering shoulders, hold her as tightly as he could.

‘How’s Lon?’ Rhyme asked.

‘He came out of the crisis. But still unconscious. Rachel’s in bad shape. Lon’s son is there.’

‘I talked to him,’ Rhyme told her.

‘He’s a rock. Really come into his own.’

‘Headed back to the town house?’

Sachs replied, ‘In a bit. I’ve got to meet with a witness about the Metropolitan Museum investigation.’

Sellitto’s other case, the break-in at the museum on Fifth Avenue. With the detective in the hospital, other Major Cases officers were taking over. Now that the AFFC terror plot had been stopped, it was time to resurrect the politically important, if mysterious, case.

Sachs walked to her Torino. The engine fired up with a blast of horsepower and she peeled away from the curb, raising smoke whose blue tint turned violet in the red light from the low sun.