A CRIMINALIST IS A RENAISSANCE MAN.

He’s got to know botany, geology, ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature, engineering. If he knows facts – that ash with a high strontium content probably came from a highway flare, that faca is Portuguese for “knife,” that Ethiopian diners use no utensils and eat with their right hands exclusively, that a slug with five land-and-groove rifling marks, right twist, could not have been fired by a Colt pistol – if he knows these things he may just make the connection that places an unsub at the crime scene.

One subject all criminalists know is anatomy. And this was certainly a specialty of Lincoln Rhyme’s, for he had spent the past three and a half years enmeshed in the quirky logic of bone and nerve.

He now glanced at the evidence bag from the steam room, dangling in Jerry Banks’s hand, and announced, “Leg bone. Not human. So it’s not from the next vic.”

It was a ring of bone about two inches around, sawn through evenly. There was blood in the tracks left by the saw blade.

“A medium-sized animal,” Rhyme continued. “Large dog, sheep, goat. It’d support, I’d guess, a hundred to a hundred fifty pounds of weight. Let’s make sure the blood’s from an animal though. Still could be the vic’s.”

Perps had been known to beat or stab people to death with bones. Rhyme himself had had three such cases; the weapons had been a beef knuckle bone, a deer’s leg bone, and in one disturbing case the victim’s own ulna.

Mel Cooper ran a gel-diffusion test for blood origin. “We’ll have to wait a bit for the results,” he explained apologetically.

UNSUB 823

Appearance

•Caucasian male, slight build

•Dark clothing

Residence

•Prob. has safe house

Vehicle

•Yellow Cab

Other

•knows CS proc.

•possibly has record

•knows FR prints

•gun =.32 Colt

“Amelia,” Rhyme said, “maybe you could help us here. Use the eye loupe and look the bone over carefully. Tell us what you see.”

“Not the microscope?” she asked. He thought she’d protest but she stepped forward to the bone, peered at it with curiosity.

“Too much magnification,” Rhyme explained.

She put on the goggles and bent over the white enamel tray. Cooper turned on a gooseneck lamp.

“The cutting marks,” Rhyme said. “Is it hacked up or are they even?”

“They’re pretty even.”

“A power saw.”

Rhyme wondered if the animal had been alive when he’d done this.

“See anything unusual?”

She pored over the bone for a moment, muttered, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It just looks like a hunk of bone.”

It was then that Thom walked past and glanced at the tray. “That’s your clue? That’s funny.”

“Funny,” Rhyme said. “Funny?”

Sellitto asked, “You got a theory?”

“No theory.” He bent down and smelled it. “It’s osso bucco.”

“What?”

“Veal shank. I made it for you once, Lincoln. Osso bucco. Braised veal shank.” He looked at Sachs and grimaced. “He said it needed more salt.”

“Goddamn!” Sellitto cried. “He bought it at a grocery store!”

“If we’re lucky,” Rhyme said, “he bought it at his grocery store.”

Cooper confirmed that the precipitin test showed negative for human blood on the samples Sachs had collected. “Probably bovine,” he said.

“But what’s he trying to tell us?” Banks asked.

Rhyme had no idea. “Let’s keep going. Oh, anything on the chain and padlock?”

Cooper glanced at the hardware in a crisp plastic bag. “Nobody name-stamps chain anymore. So we’re out of luck there. The lock’s a Secure-Pro middle-of-the-line model. It isn’t very secure and definitely not professional. How long d’it take to break it?”

“Three whole seconds,” Sellitto said.

“See. No serial numbers and it’s sold in every hardware and variety store in the country.”

“Key or combination?” Rhyme asked.

“Combination.”

“Call the manufacturer. Ask them if we take it apart and reconstruct the combination from the tumblers, will that tell us which shipment it was in and where it went to?”

Banks whistled. “Man, that’s a long shot.”

Rhyme’s glare sent a ferocious blush across his face. “And the enthusiasm in your voice, detective, tells me you’re just the one to handle the job.”

“Yessir” – the young man held up his cellular phone defensively – “I’m on it.”

Rhyme asked, “Is that blood on the chain?”

Sellitto said, “One of our boys. Cut himself pretty bad trying to break the lock off.”

“So it’s contaminated.” Rhyme scowled.

“He was trying to save her,” Sachs said to him.

“I understand. That was good of him. It’s still contaminated.” Rhyme glanced back at the table beside Cooper. “Prints?”

Cooper said he’d checked it and found only Sellitto’s print on the links.

“All right, the splinter of wood Amelia found. Check for prints.”

“I did,” Sachs said quickly. “At the scene.”

P.D., Rhyme reflected. She didn’t seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were.

“Let’s try the heavy guns, just to be sure,” Rhyme said and instructed Cooper, “Use DFO or ninhydrin. Then hit it with the nit-yag.”

“The what?” Banks asked.

“A neodymium:yttrium aluminum garnet laser.”

The tech spritzed the splinter with liquid from a plastic spray bottle and trained the laser beam on the wood.

He slipped on tinted goggles and examined it carefully. “Nothing.”

He shut off the light and examined the splinter closely. It was about six inches long, dark wood. There were black smears on it, like tar, and it was impregnated with dirt. He held it with forceps.

“I know Lincoln likes the chopstick approach,” Cooper said, “but I always ask for a fork when I go to Ming Wa ’s.”

“You could be crushing the cells,” the criminalist grumbled.

“I could be but I’m not,” Cooper responded.

“What kind of wood?” Rhyme wondered. “Want to run a spodogram?”

“No, it’s oak. No question.”

“Saw or plane marks?” Rhyme leaned forward. Suddenly his neck spasmed and the cramp that bolted through the muscles was unbearable. He gasped, closed his eyes and twisted his neck, stretching. He felt Thom’s strong hands massaging the muscles. The pain finally faded.

“ Lincoln?” Sellitto asked. “You okay?”

Rhyme breathed deeply. “Fine. It’s nothing.”

“Here.” Cooper brought the piece of wood over to the bed, lowered the magnifying goggles over Rhyme’s eyes.

Rhyme examined the specimen. “Cut in the direction of the grain with a frame saw. There’re big variations in the cuts. So I’d guess it was a post or beam milled over a hundred years ago. Steam saw probably. Hold it closer, Mel. I want to smell it.”

He held the splinter under Rhyme’s nose.

“Creosote – coal-tar distillation. Used for weather-proofing wood before lumber companies started pressure-treating. Piers, docks, railroad ties.”

“Maybe we’ve got a train buff here,” Sellitto said. “Remember the tracks this morning.”

“Could be.” Rhyme ordered, “Check for cellular compression, Mel.”

The tech examined the splinter under the compound microscope. “It’s compressed all right. But with the grain. Not against it. Not a railroad tie. This is from a post or column. Weight-bearing.”

A bone… an old wooden post…

“I see dirt embedded in the wood. That tell us anything?”

Cooper set a large pad of newsprint on the table, tore the cover off. He held the splinter over the pad and brushed some dirt from cracks in the wood. He examined the speckles lying on the white paper – a reverse constellation.

“You have enough for a density-gradient test?” Rhyme asked.

In a D-G test, dirt is poured into a tube containing liquids of different specific gravities. The soil separates and each particle hangs suspended according to its own gravity. Rhyme had established a very extensive library of density-gradient profiles for dirt from all over the five boroughs. Unfortunately the test only worked with a fair amount of soil; Cooper didn’t think they had enough. “We could try it but we’d have to use the entire sample. And if it didn’t work we wouldn’t have anything left for other tests.”