The Skin Collector Read Free Page A

crime scenework, just like latex gloves and alternative light sources.
    As he sat in the red-and-gray Merits wheelchair in front of the window of his Central Park West town house, Lincoln Rhyme happened to be thinking of a recent death in just this way. Last week a man had been murdered downtown, a mugging gone wrong. Just after leaving his office in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, mid-evening,he’d been pulled into a deserted construction site across the street. Rather than give up his wallet, he’d chosen to fight and, no match for the perp, he’d been stabbed to death.
    The case, whose file sat in front of him now, was mundane, and the sparse evidence typical of such a murder: a cheap weapon, a serrated-edge kitchen knife, dotted with fingerprints not on file at IAFIS or anywhere else,indistinct footprints in the slush that had coated the ground that night, and no trace or trash or cigar-ette butts that weren’t day- or week-old trace or trash or cigarette butts. And therefore useless. To all appearances it was a random crime; there were no springboards to likely perps. The officers had interviewed the victim’s fellow employees in the public works department and talked to friendsand family. There’d been no drug connections, no dicey business deals, no jealous lovers, no jealous spouses of lovers.
    Given the paltry evidence, the case, Rhyme knew, would be solved only one way: Someone would carelessly boast about scoring a wallet near City Hall. And the boastee, collared for drugs or domestic abuse or petty larce, would cut a deal by giving up the boaster.
    This crime,a mugging gone wrong, was death observed from a distance, to Lincoln Rhyme. Historical. Fictional.
    View number one.
    The second way to regard death is from the heart: when a human being with whom you have a true connection is no longer of this earth. And the other death on Rhyme’s mind on this blustery, grim day was affecting him as deeply as the mugging victim’s killing was not.
    Rhyme wasn’tclose to many people. This was not a function of his physical condition – he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down. No, he’d never been a people person. He was a science person. A mind person.
    Oh, there’d been a few friends he’d been close to, some relatives, lovers. His wife, now ex.
    Thom, his aide.
    Amelia Sachs, of course.
    But the second man who’d died several days agohad, in one sense, been closer than all of the others, and for this reason: He’d challenged Rhyme like no one else, forced him to think beyond the expansive boundaries where his own mind roamed, forced him to anticipate and strategize and question. Forced him to fight for his life too; the man had come very close to killing him.
    The Watchmaker was the most intriguing criminal Rhyme had ever encountered.A man of shifting identities, Richard Logan was primarily a professional killer, though he’d orchestrated an alpha-omega of crimes, from terrorist attacks to robbery. He would work for whoever paid his hefty fee – provided the job was, yes, challenging enough. Which was the same criterion Rhyme used when deciding to take on a case as a consulting forensic scientist.
    The Watchmaker was one ofthe few criminals able to outthink him. Although Rhyme had eventually set the trap that landed Logan in prison he still stung from his failure to stop several plots that were successful. And even when he failed, the Watchmaker sometimes managed to wreak havoc. In a case in which Rhyme had derailed the attempted killing of a Mexican officer investigating drug cartels, Logan had still provoked an internationalincident (it was finally agreed to seal the records and pretend the attempted hit had never happened).
    But now the Watchmaker was gone.
    The man had died in prison – not murdered by a fellow inmate or a suicide, which Rhyme had first suspected upon hearing the news. No, the COD was pedestrian – cardiac arrest, though massive. The doctor,