The Coffin Dancer

by Jeffery Deaver

  Staring at the street. What was it?

  Then she understood.

  "There's something you should know," she said to the officers. "A black van."

  "A . . . ?"

  "A black van. There was this black van."

  One of the officers took out a notebook. "You better tell me about it."

  "Wait," Rhyme said.

  Lon Sellitto paused in his narration.

  Rhyme now heard another set of footsteps approaching, neither heavy nor light. He knew whose they were. This was not deduction. He'd heard this particular pattern many times.

  Amelia Sachs's beautiful face, surrounded by her long red hair, crested the stairs, and Rhyme saw her hesitate for a moment, then continue into the room. She was in full navy blue patrol uniform, minus only the cap and tie. She carried a Jefferson Market shopping bag.

  Jerry Banks flashed her a smile. His crush was adoring and obvious and only moderately inappropriate--not many patrol officers have a history of a Madison Avenue modeling career behind them, as did tall Amelia Sachs. But the gaze, like the attraction, was not reciprocated, and the young man, a pretty boy himself despite the badly shaved face and cowlick, seemed resigned to carrying his torch a bit longer.

  "Hi, Jerry," she said. To Sellitto she gave another nod and a deferential "sir." (He was a detective lieutenant and a legend in Homicide. Sachs had cop genes in her and had been taught over the dinner table as well as in the academy to respect elders.) "You look tired," Sellitto commented.

  "Didn't sleep," she said. "Looking for sand." She pulled a dozen Baggies out of the shopping bag. "I've been out collecting exemplars."

  "Good," Rhyme said. "But that's old news. We've been reassigned."

  "Reassigned?"

  "Somebody's come to town. And we have to catch him."

  "Who?"

  "A killer," Sellitto said.

  "Pro?" Sachs asked. "OC?"

  "Professional, yes," Rhyme said. "No OC connection that we know about." Organized crime was the largest purveyor of for-hire killers in the country.

  "He's freelance," Rhyme explained. "We call him the Coffin Dancer."

  She lifted an eyebrow, red from worrying with a fingernail. "Why?"

  "Only one victim's ever got close to him and lived long enough to give us any details. He's got--or had, at least--a tattoo on his upper arm: the Grim Reaper dancing with a woman in front of a coffin."

  "Well, that's something to put in the 'Distinguishing Marks' box on an incident report," she said wryly. "What else you know about him?"

  "White male, probably in his thirties. That's it."

  "You traced the tattoo?" Sachs asked.

  "Of course," Rhyme responded dryly. "To the ends of the earth." He meant this literally. No police department in any major city around the world could find any history of a tattoo like his.

  "Excuse me, gentlemen and lady," Thom said. "Work to do." Conversation came to a halt while the young man went through the motions of rotating his boss. This helped clear his lungs. To quadriplegics certain parts of their body become personified; patients develop special relationships with them. After his spine was shattered while searching a crime scene some years ago Rhyme's arms and legs had become his cruelest enemies and he'd spent desperate energy trying to force them to do what he wanted. But they'd won, no contest, and stayed as still as wood. Then he'd confronted the racking spasms that shook his body unmercifully. He'd tried to force them to stop. Eventually they had--on their own, it seemed. Rhyme couldn't exactly claim victory though he did accept their surrender. Then he'd turned to lesser challenges and had taken on his lungs. Finally, after a year of rehab, he weaned himself off the ventilator. Out came the trachea tube and he could breathe on his own. It was his only victory against his body and he harbored a dark superstition that the lungs were biding their time to get even. He figured he'd die of pneumonia or emphysema in a year or two.

  Lincoln Rhyme didn't necessarily mind the idea of dying. But there were too many ways to die; he was determined not to go unpleasantly.

  Sachs asked, "Any leads? LKA?"

  "Last known was down in the D.C. area," Sellitto said in his Brooklyn drawl. "That's it. Nothin' else. Oh, we hear about him some. Dellray more'n us, with all his skels and CIs, you know. The Dancer, he's like he's ten different people. Ear jobs, facial implants, silicon. Adds scars, removes scars. Gains weight, loses weight. Once he skinned this corpse--took some guy's hands off and wore 'em like gloves to fool CS about the prints."

  "Not me, though," Rhyme reminded. "I wasn't fooled."

  Though I still didn't get him, he reflected bitterly.

  "He plans everything," the detective continued. "Sets up diversions then moves in. Does the job. And he fucking cleans up afterwards real efficient." Sellitto stopped talking, looking strangely uneasy for a man who hunts killers for a living.

  Eyes out the window, Rhyme didn't acknowledge his ex-partner's reticence. He merely continued the story. "That case--with the skinned hands--was the Dancer's most recent job in New York. Five, six years ago. He was hired by one Wall Street investment banker to kill his partner. Did the job nice and clean. My CS team got to the scene and started to walk the grid. One of them lifted a wad of paper out of the trash can. It set off a load of PETN. About eight ounces, gas enhanced. Both techs were killed and virtually every clue was destroyed."

  "I'm sorry," Sachs said. There was an awkward silence between them. She'd been his apprentice and his partner for more than a year--and had become his friend too. Had even spent the night here sometimes, sleeping on the couch or even, as chaste as a sibling, in Rhyme's half-ton Clinitron bed. But the talk was mostly forensic, with Rhyme's lulling her to sleep with tales of stalking serial killers and brilliant cat burglars. They generally steered clear of personal issues. Now she offered nothing more than, "It must have been hard."

  Rhyme deflected the taut sympathy with a shake of his head. He stared at the empty wall. For a time there'd been art posters taped up around the room. They were long gone but his eyes played a game of connect-the-dots with the bits of tape still stuck there. A lopsided star was the shape they traced, while within him somewhere, deep, Rhyme felt an empty despair, replaying the horrid crime scene of the explosion, seeing the burnt, shattered bodies of his officers.

  Sachs asked, "The guy who hired him, he was willing to dime the Dancer?"

  "Was willing to, sure. But there wasn't much he could say. He delivered cash to a drop box with written instructions. No electronic transfers, no account numbers. They never met in person." Rhyme inhaled deeply. "But the worst part was that the banker who'd paid for the hit changed his mind. He lost his nerve. But he had no way to get in touch with the Dancer. It didn't matter anyway. The Dancer'd told him right up front: 'Recall is not an option.' "

  Sellitto briefed Sachs about the case against Phillip Hansen, the witnesses who'd seen his plane make its midnight run, and the bomb last night.

  "Who are the other wits?" she asked.

  "Percey Clay, the wife of this Carney guy killed last night in the plane. She's the president of their company, Hudson Air Charters. Her husband was VP. The other wit's Britton Hale. He's a pilot works for them. I sent baby-sitters to keep an eye on 'em both."

  Rhyme said, "I've called Mel Cooper in. He'll be working the lab downstairs. The Hansen case is task-forced so we're getting Fred Dellray to represent the feds. He'll have agents for us if we need them and's clearing one of U.S. Marshal's wit-protection safe houses for the Clay woman and Hale."

  Lincoln Rhyme's opulent memory intruded momentarily and he lost track of what the detective was saying. An image of the office where the Dancer had left the bomb five years ago came to mind again.

  Remembering: The trash can, blown open like a black rose. The smell of the explosive--the choking chemical scent, nothing at all like wood-fire smoke. The silky alligatoring on the charred wood. The seared bodies of his techs, drawn into the pugilistic attitude by the flames.

  He was sav
ed from this horrid reverie by the buzz of the fax machine. Jerry Banks snagged the first sheet. "Crime scene report from the crash," he announced.

  Rhyme's head snapped toward the machine eagerly. "Time to go to work, boys and girls!"

  Wash 'em. Wash 'em off.

  Soldier, are those hands clean?

  Sir, they're getting there, sir.

  The solid man, in his mid-thirties, stood in the washroom of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, lost in his task.

  Scrub, scrub, scrub . . .

  He paused and looked out the men's room door. Nobody seemed interested that he'd been in here for nearly ten minutes.

  Back to scrubbing.

  Stephen Kall examined his cuticles and big red knuckles.

  Lookin' clean, lookin' clean. No worms. Not a single one.

  He'd been feeling fine as he moved the black van off the street and parked it deep in an underground garage. Stephen had taken what tools he needed from the back of the vehicle and climbed the ramp, slipping out onto the busy street. He'd worked in New York several times before but he could never get used to all the people, a thousand people on this block alone.

  Makes me feel cringey.

  Makes me feel wormy.

  And so he stopped here in the men's room for a little scrub.

  Soldier, aren't you through with that yet? You've got two targets left to eliminate.

  Sir, almost, sir. Have to remove the risk of any trace evidence prior to proceeding with the operation, sir.

  Oh, for the luva Christ . . .

  The hot water pouring over his hands. Scrubbing with a brush he carried with him in a plastic Baggie. Squirting the pink soap from the dispenser. And scrubbing some more.

  Finally he examined the ruddy hands and dried them under the hot air of the blower. No towels, no telltale fibers.

  No worms either.

  Stephen wore camouflage today though not military olive drab or Desert Storm beige. He was in jeans, Reeboks, a work shirt, a gray windbreaker speckled with paint drips. On his belt was his cell phone and a large tape measure. He looked like any other contractor in Manhattan and was wearing this outfit today because no one would think twice about a workman wearing cloth gloves on a spring day.

  Walking outside.

  Still lots of people. But his hands were clean and he wasn't cringey anymore.

  He paused at the corner and looked down the street at the building that had been the Husband's and Wife's town house but was the Wife's alone now because the Husband had been neatly blown into a million small pieces over the Land of Lincoln.

  So, two witnesses were still alive and they both had to be dead before the grand jury convened on Monday. He glanced at his bulky stainless-steel watch. It was nine-thirty Saturday morning.

  Soldier, is that enough time to get them both?

  Sir, I may not get them both now but I still have nearly forty-eight hours, sir. That is more than sufficient time to locate and neutralize both targets, sir.

  But, Soldier, do you mind challenges?

  Sir, I live for challenges, sir.

  There was a single squad car in front of the town house. Which he'd expected.

  All right, we have a known kill zone in front of the house, an unknown one inside . . .

  He looked up and down the street, then started along the sidewalk, his scrubbed hands tingling. The backpack weighed close to sixty pounds but he hardly felt it. Crew-cut Stephen was mostly muscle.

  As he walked he pictured himself as a local. Anonymous. He didn't think of himself as Stephen or as Mr. Kall or Todd Johnson or Stan Bledsoe or any of the dozens of other aliases he'd used over the past ten years. His real name was like a rusty gym set in the backyard, something you were aware of but didn't really see.

  He turned suddenly and stepped into the doorway of the building opposite the Wife's town house. Stephen pushed open the front door and looked out at the large glass windows in front, partially obscured by a flowering dogwood tree. He put on a pair of expensive yellow-tinted shooting glasses and the glare from the window vanished. He could see figures moving around inside. One cop . . . no, two cops. A man with his back to the window. Maybe the Friend, the other witness he'd been hired to kill. And . . . yes! There was the Wife. Short. Homely. Boyish. She was wearing a white blouse. It made a good target.

  She stepped out of view.

  Stephen bent down and unzipped his backpack.

  . . . Chapter Four

  A sitting transfer into the Storm Arrow wheelchair.

  Then Rhyme took over, gripping the plastic straw of the sip-and-puff controller in his mouth, and he drove into the tiny elevator, formerly a closet, that carried him unceremoniously down to the first floor of his town house.

  In the 1890s, when the place had been built, the room into which Lincoln Rhyme now wheeled had been a parlor off the dining room. Plaster-and-lath construction, fleur-de-lis crown molding, domed icon recesses, and solid oak floorboards joined as tight as welded steel. An architect, though, would have been horrified to see that Rhyme had had the wall separating the two rooms demolished and large holes dug into the remaining walls to run additional electrical lines. The combined rooms were now a messy space filled not with Tiffany's stained glass or moody landscapes by George Inness but with very different objets d'art: density-gradient tubes, computers, compound microscopes, comparison 'scopes, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a PoliLight alternative light source, fuming frames for raising friction ridge prints. A very expensive scanning electron microscope hooked to an energy dispersive X-ray unit sat prominently in the corner. Here too were the mundane tools of the criminalist's trade: goggles, latex and cut-resistant gloves, beakers, screwdrivers and pliers, postmortem finger spoons, tongs, scalpels, tongue depressors, cotton swabs, jars, plastic bags, examining trays, probes. A dozen pairs of chopsticks (Rhyme ordered his assistants to lift evidence the way they picked up dim sum at Ming Wa's).

  Rhyme steered the sleek, candy-apple red Storm Arrow into position beside the worktable. Thom placed the microphone over his head and booted up the computer.

  A moment later Sellitto and Banks appeared in the doorway, joined by another man who'd just arrived. He was tall and rangy, with skin as dark as tires. He was wearing a green suit and an unearthly yellow shirt.

  "Hello, Fred."

  "Lincoln."

  "Hey." Sachs nodded to Fred Dellray as she entered the room. She'd forgiven him for arresting her not long ago--an interagency squabble--and they now had a curious affinity, this tall, beautiful cop and the tall, quirky agent. They were both, Rhyme had decisively concluded, people cops (he himself being an evidence cop). Dellray trusted forensics as little as Rhyme trusted the testimony of witnesses. As for former beat cop Sachs, well, there was nothing Rhyme could do about her natural proclivities but he was determined that she push those talents aside and become the best criminalist in New York, if not the country. A goal that was easily within her grasp, even if she herself didn't know it.

  Dellray loped across the room, stationed himself beside the window, crossed his lanky arms. No one--Rhyme included--could peg the agent exactly. He lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn, loved to read literature and philosophy, and loved even more to play pool in tawdry bars. Once the jewel in the crown of the FBI's undercover agents, Fred Dellray was still referred to occasionally by the nickname he'd had when he was in the field: "The Chameleon"--a tribute to his uncanny skill at being whoever his undercover role required he be. He had over a thousand arrests to his credit. But he'd spent too much time undercover and had become "overextended," as the Bureau-ese went. It was only a matter of time before he'd be recognized by some dealer or warlord and killed. So he'd reluctantly agreed to take an administrative job running other undercover agents and CIs--confidential informants.

  "So, mah boys tell me we got us the Dancer hisself," the agent muttered, the patois less Ebonics than, well . . . pure Dellray. His grammar and vocabulary, like his life, were largely improvised.

>   "Any word on Tony?" Rhyme asked.

  "My boy gone missing?" Dellray asked, his face screwing up angrily. "Not. A. Thing."

  Tony Panelli, the agent who'd disappeared from the Federal Building several days before, had left behind a wife at home, a gray Ford with a running engine, and a number of grains of infuriatingly mysterious sand--the sensuous asteroids that promised answers but had so far delivered none.

  "When we catch the Dancer," Rhyme said, "we'll get back on it, Amelia and me. Full-time. Promise."

  Dellray angrily tapped the unlit tip of a cigarette nestling behind his left ear. "The Dancer . . . Shit. Better nail his ass this time. Shit."

  "What about the hit?" Sachs asked. "The one last night. Have any details?"

  Sellitto read through the wad of faxes and some of his own handwritten notes. He looked up. "Ed Carney took off from Mamaroneck Airport around seven-fifteen last night. The company--Hudson Air--they're a private charterer. They fly cargo, corporate clients, you know. Lease out planes. They'd just gotten a new contract to fly--get this--body parts for transplants to hospitals around the Midwest and East Coast. Hear it's a real competitive business nowadays."

  "Cutthroat," Banks offered and was the only one who smiled at his joke.

  Sellitto continued. "The client was U.S. Medical and Healthcare. Based up in Somers. One of those for-profit hospital chains. Carney had a real tight schedule. Was supposed to fly to Chicago, Saint Louis, Memphis, Lexington, Cleveland, then lay over in Erie, Pennsylvania. Come back this morning."

  "Any passengers?" Rhyme asked.

  "Not whole ones," Sellitto muttered. "Just the cargo. Everything's routine about the flight. Then about ten minutes out of O'Hare, a bomb goes off. Blows the shit out of the plane. Killed both Carney and his copilot. Four injuries on the ground. His wife, by the way, was supposed to be flying with him but she got sick and had to cancel."

  "There an NTSB report?" Rhyme asked. "No, of course not, there wouldn't be. Not yet."

  "Report won't be ready for two, three days."

  "Well, we can't wait two or three days!" Rhyme griped loudly. "I need it now!"

  A pink scar from the ventilator hose was visible on his throat. But Rhyme had weaned himself off the fake lung and could breathe like nobody's business. Lincoln Rhyme was a C4 quad who could sigh, cough, and shout like a sailor. "I need to know everything about the bomb."