Sellitto wiped sweat. His internal thermometer was unaffected, apparently, by the coldest, nastiest November in the past twenty-five years. ‘First off, I found a tattoo artist who’s going to help and he’s on his way. Or he better be. TT Gordon. You should see the mustache.’

‘Lon.’

‘Now this.’ He held up a book. ‘Those guys at HQ? They tracked down where that scrap of paper came from.’

Rhyme’s heart beat faster – a sensation that most people would feel in their chest but that for him, of course, registered simply as an upped pulsing in his neck and head, the only sensate parts of his body.

ies

that his greatest skill was his ability to anticipate

‘How’d they do it, Lon?’ Sachs asked.

Sellitto continued, ‘You know Marty Belson, Major Cases.’

‘Oh, the brainiac.’

‘Right. Loves his puzzles. Does Sudoku in his sleep.’ Sellitto explained to Rhyme: ‘Works financial crimes mostly. Anyway, he figured out the top letters were part of the title, you know how books have the author’s name at the top of one side and the title at the top of the facing page?’

‘We know. Keep going.’

‘He was playing with what words end in “ies”?’

Rhyme said, ‘A word on the reverse page was “body”, so that’s an option, pluralized. We speculated it was a crime book. Or given the corpse theme, maybe Enemies.’

‘Nope. Cities. The full title is Serial Cities. That was on the short list of about six that Marty came up with. He called all the major book publishers in town – there aren’t as many as there used to be – and read them the passages. One editor recognized it. He said his company’d published it a long time ago. Serial Cities. It’s out of print now but he even knew the chapter that the passage was from. Number Seven. Had a copy messengered to us.’

Excellent! Rhyme asked, ‘And what’s this special chapter about?’

Sellitto wiped more sweat. ‘You, Linc. It’s all about you.’

CHAPTER 13

‘And you too, Amelia.’

Sellitto was opening the book. Rhyme noted the full title: Serial Cities: Famous Killers from Coast to Coast.

‘Let me guess: The theme is that every major city’s had a serial killer.’

‘Boston Strangler, Charles Manson in LA, the I-5 Killer in Seattle.’

‘Sloppy journalism. Manson wasn’t a serial killer.’

‘I don’t think the public cares.’

‘And we made it into the book?’ Sachs asked.

‘Chapter seven’s titled, “The Bone Collector”.’

That was the popular name, courtesy of the press and an overblown novelization, of a serial kidnapper who taunted Rhyme and the NYPD some years ago by stashing his victims in places where they would die if he couldn’t figure out in time where they’d been hidden.