The Skin Collector Read Free Page B

whom Rhyme had spoken to yesterday, reported that evenif they’d been able to bring Logan around he would have had permanent and severe brain damage. Though medicos did not use phrases like ‘his death was a blessing,’ that was the impression Rhyme took from the doctor’s tone.
    A blast of temperamental November wind shook the windows of Rhyme’s town house. He was in the building’s front parlor – the place in which he felt more comfortable than anywhereelse in the world. Created as a Victorian sitting room, it was now a fully decked-out forensic lab, with spotless tables for examining evidence, computers and high-def monitors, racks of instruments, sophisticated equipment like fume and particulate control hoods, latent fingerprint imaging chambers, microscopes – optical and scanning electron – and the centerpiece: a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer,the workhorse of forensic labs.
    Any small- or even medium-sized police department in the country might envy the setup, which had cost millions. All paid for by Rhyme himself. The settlement after the accident on a crime scene rendering him a quad had been quite substantial; so were the fees that he charged the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies that hired him. (There were occasional offersfrom other sources that might produce revenue, such as Hollywood’s proposals for TV shows based on the cases he’d worked.
The Man in the Chair
was one suggested title.
Rhyme and Reason
another. Thom had translated his boss’s response to these overtures – ‘Are they out of their fucking minds?’ – as, ‘Mr Rhyme has asked me to convey his appreciation for your interest. But he’s afraid he has toomany commitments at this point for a project like that.’)
    Rhyme now turned his chair around and stared at a delicate and beautiful pocket watch sitting in a holder on the mantelpiece. A Breguet. It happened to be a present from the Watchmaker himself.
    His mourning was complex and reflected the dual views of death he’d been thinking of. Certainly there were analytical – forensic – reasons tobe troubled by the loss. He’d now never be able to probe the man’s mind to his satisfaction. As the nickname suggested, Logan was obsessed with time and timepieces – he actually made watches and clocks – and that was how he plotted out his crimes, with painstaking precision. Ever since their paths first crossed, Rhyme had marveled at how Logan’s thought processes worked. He even hoped that the manwould allow him a prison visit so that they could talk about the chess-match-like crimes he’d planned out.
    Logan’s death also left some other, practical concerns. The prosecutor had offered Logan a plea bargain, a reduced sentence in exchange for giving up the names of some of the people who’d hired him and whom he’d worked with; the man clearly had an extensive network of criminal colleagueswhose identities the police would like to learn. There were rumors too of plots Logan had put together before he’d gone to prison.
    But Logan hadn’t bought the DA’s deal. And, more irritating, he’d pleaded guilty, denying Rhyme another chance to learn more about who he was and to identify his family members and associates. Rhyme had even planned to use facial recognition technology and undercoveragents to identify those attending the man’s trial.
    Ultimately, though, Rhyme understood he was taking the man’s demise hard because of the second view of death: that connection between them. We’re defined and enlivened by what opposes us. And when the Watchmaker died, Lincoln Rhyme died a bit too.
    He looked at the other two people in the room. One was the youngster on Rhyme’s team, NYPD patrolofficer Ron Pulaski, who was packing up the evidence in the City Hall mugging/homicide case.
    The other was Rhyme’s caregiver, Thom Reston, a handsome, slim man, dressed as immaculately as always. Today: dark-brown slacks with an enviable knife-blade crease, a pale-yellow