Percey looked carefully at the mounting brackets on the pieces of metal. "I don't know."
"I do. You're talking to an expert."
The flier asked, "You've mounted a combustor in a Lear?"
"Nope. Spark plugs in a Chevy Monza. You have to jack up the engine to reach them. Well, only in the V-eight. But who'd buy a four-cylinder car? I mean, what's the point?"
Percey looked back at the engine.
"So?" Sachs persisted. "A jack?"
"It'll bend the outer housing."
"Not if you put it there." Sachs pointed to a structural member connecting the engine to the support that went to the fuselage.
Percey studied the fitting. "I don't have a jack. Not one small enough to fit."
"I do. I'll get it."
Sachs stepped outside to the RRV and returned with the accordion jack. She climbed up on the scaffolding, her knees protesting the effort.
"Try right there." She touched the base of the engine. "That's I-beam steel."
As Percey positioned the jack, Sachs admired the intricacies of the engine. "How much horsepower?"
Percey laughed. "We don't rate in horsepower. We rate in pounds of thrust. These're Garrett TFE Seven Three Ones. They give up about thirty-five hundred pounds each."
"Incredible." Sachs laughed. "Brother." She hooked the handle into the jack, then felt the familiar resistance as she started turning the crank. "I've never been this close to a turbine engine," she said. "Was always a dream of mine to take a jet car out to the salt flats."
"This isn't a pure turbine. There aren't many of those left anymore. Just the Concorde. Military jets, of course. These're turbofans. Like the airliners. Look in the front--see those blades? That's nothing more than a fixed-pitch propeller. Pure jets are inefficient at low altitudes. These're about forty percent more fuel efficient."
Sachs breathed hard as she struggled to turn the jack handle. Percey put her shoulder against the ring again and shoved. The part didn't seem large but it was very heavy.
"You know cars, huh?" Percey asked, also gasping.
"My father. He loved them. We'd spend the afternoon taking 'em apart and putting 'em back together. When he wasn't walking a beat."
"A beat?"
"He was a cop too."
"And you got the mechanic bug?" Percey asked.
"Naw, I got the speed bug. And when you get that you better get the suspension bug and the transmission bug and the engine bug or you ain't going anywhere fast."
Percey asked, "You ever driven an aircraft?"
" 'Driven'?" Sachs smiled at the word. "No. But maybe I'll think about it, knowing you've got that much oomph under the hood."
She cranked some more, her muscles aching. The ring groaned slightly and scraped as it rose into its fittings.
"I don't know," Percey said uncertainly.
"Almost there!"
With a loud metallic clang the ring popped on to the mounts perfectly. Percey's squat face broke into a faint smile.
"You torque 'em?" Sachs asked, fitting bolts into the slots on the ring and looking for a wrench.
"Yeah," Percey said. "The poundage I use is 'Till there's no way in hell they'll come loose.' "
Sachs tightened the bolts down with a ratcheting socket. The clicking of the tool took her back to high school, cool Saturday afternoons with her father. The smells of gasoline, of fall air, of meaty casseroles cooking in the kitchen of their Brooklyn attached house.
Percey checked Sachs's handiwork then said, "I'll do the rest." She started reconnecting wires and electronic components. Sachs was mystified but fascinated. Percey paused. She added a soft "Thanks." A few moments later: "What're you doing here?"
"We found some other materials we think might be from the bomb, but Lincoln didn't know if it was part of the plane or not. Bits of beige latex, circuit board? Sound familiar?"
Percey shrugged. "There're thousands of gaskets in a Lear. They could be latex, I don't have any idea. And circuit boards? There're probably another thousand of them." She nodded to a corner, toward a closet and workbench. "The boards are special orders, depending on the component. But there should be a good stock of gaskets over there. Take samples of whatever you need."
Sachs walked over to the bench, began slipping all the beige-colored bits of rubber she could find into an evidence bag.
Without glancing at Sachs, Percey said, "I thought you were here to arrest me. Haul me back to jail."
I ought to, the policewoman thought. But she said, "Just collecting exemplars." Then, after a moment: "What other work needs to be done? On the plane?"
"Just recalibration. Then a run-up to check the power settings. I have to take a look at the window too, the one Ron replaced. You don't want to lose a window at four hundred miles an hour. Could you hand me that hex set? No, the metric one."
"I lost one at a hundred once," Sachs said, passing over the tools.
"A what?"
"A window. A perp I was chasing had a shotgun. Double-ought buckshot. I ducked in time. But it blew the windshield clean out . . . I'll tell you, I caught a few bugs in my teeth before I collared him."
"And I thought I lived an adventurous life," Percey said.
"Most of it's dull. They pay you for the five percent that's adrenaline."
"I hear that," Percey said. She hooked up a laptop computer to components in the engine itself. She typed on the keyboard, read the screen. Without looking down she asked, "So, what is it?"
Eyes on the computer, the numbers flicking past, Sachs asked, "What do you mean?"
"This, uhm, tension. Between us. You and me."
"You nearly got a friend of mine killed."
Percey shook her head. She said reasonably, "That's not it. There're risks in your job. You decide if you're going to assume them or not. Jerry Banks wasn't a rookie. It's something else--I felt it before Jerry got shot. When I first saw you, in Lincoln Rhyme's room."
Sachs said nothing. She lifted the jack out of the engine compartment and set it on a table, absently wound it closed.
Three pieces of metal slipped into place around the engine and Percey applied her screwdriver like a conductor's baton. Her hands were truly magic. Finally she said, "It's about him, isn't it?"
"Who?"
"You know who I mean. Lincoln Rhyme."
"You think I'm jealous?" Sachs laughed.
"Yes, I do."
"Ridiculous."
"It's more than just work between you. I think you're in love with him."
"Of course I'm not. That's crazy."
Percey offered a telling glance and then carefully twined excess wire into a bundle and nestled it into a cutout in the engine compartment. "Whatever you saw is just respect for his talent, that's all." She lifted a grease-stained hand toward herself. "Come on, Amelia, look at me. I'd make a lousy lover. I'm short, I'm bossy, I'm not good looking."
"You're--" Sachs began.
Percey interrupted. "The ugly duckling story? You know, the bird that everybody thought was ugly until it turned out to be a swan? I read that a million times when I was little. But I never turned into a swan. Maybe I learned to fly like one," she said with a cool smile, "but it isn't the same. Besides," Percey continued, "I'm a widow. I just lost my husband. I'm not the least interested in anyone else."
"I'm sorry," Sachs began slowly, feeling unwillingly drawn into this conversation, "but I've got to say . . . well, you don't really seem to be in mourning."
"Why? Because I'm trying my hardest to keep my company going?"
"No, there's more than that," Sachs replied cautiously. "Isn't there?"
Percey examined Sachs's face. "Ed and I were incredibly close. We were husband and wife and friends and business partners . . . And yes, he was seeing someone else."
Sachs's eyes swiveled toward the Hudson Air office.
"That's right," Percey said. "It's Lauren. You met her yesterday."
The brunette who'd been crying so hard.
"It tore m
e apart. Hell, it tore Ed apart too. He loved me but he needed his beautiful lovers. Always did. And, you know, I think it was harder on them. Because he always came home to me." She paused for a moment and fought the tears. "That's what love is, I think. Who you come home to."
"And you?"
"Was I faithful?" Percey asked. She gave another of her wry laughs--the laugh of someone who has keen self-awareness but who doesn't like all the insights. "I didn't have a lot of opportunities. I'm hardly the kind of girl gets picked up walking down the street." She examined a socket wrench absently. "But, yeah, after I found out about Ed and his girlfriends, a few years ago, I was mad. It hurt a lot. I saw some other men. Ron and I--Ron Talbot--spent some time together, a few months." She smiled. "He even proposed to me. Said I deserved better than Ed. And I suppose I did. But even with those other women in his life, Ed was the man I had to be with. That never changed."
Percey's eyes grew distant for a moment. "We met in the navy, Ed and I. Both fighter pilots. When he proposed . . . See, the traditional way to propose in the military is you say, 'You want to become my dependent?' Sort of a joke. But we were both lieutenants j.g., so Ed said, 'Let's you and me become each other's dependents.' He wanted to get me a ring but my father'd disowned me--"
"For real?"
"Yep. Real soap opera, which I won't go into now. Anyway, Ed and I were saving every penny to open our own charter company after we were discharged and we were completely broke. But one night he said, 'Let's go up.' So we borrowed this old Norseman they had on the field. Tough plane. Big air-cooled rotary engine . . . You could do anything with that aircraft. Well, I was in the left-hand seat. I'd taken off and'd got us up to about six thousand feet. Suddenly he kissed me and wobbled the yoke, which meant he was taking over. I let him. He said, 'I got you a diamond after all, Perce.' "
"He did?" Sachs asked.
Percey smiled. "He throttled up, all the way to the fire wall, and pulled the yoke back. The nose went straight up in the air." Tears were coming fast now to Percey Clay's eyes. "For a moment, before he kicked rudder and we started down out of the stall, we were looking straight up into the night sky. He leaned over and said, 'Take your pick. All the stars of evening--you can have any one you want.' " Percey lowered her head, caught her breath. "All the stars of evening . . . "
After a moment she wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then turned back to the engine. "Believe me, you don't have anything to worry about. Lincoln's a fascinating man, but Ed was all I ever wanted."
"There's more to it than you know." Sachs sighed. "You remind him of someone. Someone he was in love with. You show up and all of a sudden it's like he's with her again."
Percey shrugged. "We have some things in common. We understand each other. But so what? That doesn't mean anything. Take a look, Amelia. Rhyme loves you."
Sachs laughed. "Oh, I don't think so."
Percey gave her another look that said, Whatever . . . and began replacing the equipment in boxes as meticulously as she'd worked with the tools and computers.
Roland Bell ambled inside, checking windows and scanning the shadows.
"All quiet?" he asked.
"Not a peep."
"Got a message to pass on. The folk from U.S. Medical just left Westchester Hospital. The shipment'll be here in an hour. I've got a car of my people behind them just to be on the safe side. But don't worry that it'll spook 'em and be bad for business--my guys're top-notch. The driver'll never know he's being followed."
Percey looked at her watch. "Okay." She glanced at Bell, who was looking uncertainly at the open engine compartment, like a snake at a mongoose. She asked, "We don't need baby-sitters on the flight, do we?"
Bell's sigh was loud. "After what happened at the safe house," he said in a low, solemn voice, "I'm not letting you outa my sight." He shook his head and, already looking airsick, he walked back to the front door and disappeared into the cool late afternoon air.
Her head in the engine compartment, studying her work carefully, Percey said in a reverberating voice, "Looking at Rhyme and looking at you, I wouldn't give it much more than fifty-fifty, I've got to say." She turned and looked down at Sachs. "But you know, I had this flight instructor a long time ago."
"And?"
"When we'd fly multiengine he had this game of throttling back one engine to idle and feathering the prop, then telling us to land. Lot of instructors'll cut power for a few minutes, with altitude, just to see how you can handle it. But they always throttled up again before landing. This instructor, though--uh-uh. He'd make us land on one engine. Students'd always be asking him, 'Isn't that risky?' His answer was, 'God don't give out certain. Sometimes you just gotta play the odds.' "
Percey lowered the flap of the engine cowl and clamped it into place. "All right, this's done. Damn aircraft may actually fly." She swatted the glossy skin like a cowgirl patting a rodeo rider's butt.
. . . Chapter Thirty
Hour 32 of 45
At 6 P.M. on Sunday they summoned Jodie from Rhyme's downstairs bedroom, where he'd been under lock and key.
He trotted up the stairs reluctantly, clutching his silly book, Dependent No More, like a Bible. Rhyme remembered the title. It had been on the Times bestseller list for months. In a black mood at the time, he'd noticed the book and thought cynically, about himself, Dependent Forever.
A team of federal agents was flying from Quantico to Cumberland, West Virginia, Stephen Kall's old residence, to pick up whatever leads they could, hoping they might track him to his present whereabouts from there. But Rhyme had seen how carefully he'd scoured his crime scenes and he had no reason to think the man would have been any less careful in covering his other tracks.
"You told us some things about him," Rhyme said to Jodie. "Some facts, some nutritional information. I want to know more."
"I--"
"Think hard."
Jodie squinted. Rhyme supposed he was considering what he could say to mollify them, superficial impressions. But he was surprised when Jodie said, "Well, for one thing, he's afraid of you."
"Us?" Rhyme asked.
"No. Just you."
"Me?" he asked, astonished. "He knows about me?"
"He knows your name's Lincoln. And that you're out to get him."
"How?"
"I don't know," the man said, then added, "you know, he made a couple of calls on that cell phone. And he listened for a long time. I was thinking--"
"Oh, hellfire," Dellray sang out. "He's tapping somebody's line."
"Of course!" Rhyme cried. "Probably the Hudson Air office. That's how he found out about the safe house. Why didn't we think about that?"
Dellray said, "We gotta sweep the office. But the bug might be in a relay box somewheres. We'll find it. We'll find it." He placed a call to the Bureau's tech services.
To Jodie, Rhyme said, "Go on. What else does he know about me?"
"He knows you're a detective. I don't think he knows where you live, or your last name. But you scare the hell out of him."
If Rhyme's belly had been able to register the lub-dub of excitement--and pride--he'd have felt that now.
Let's see, Stephen Kall, if we can't give you a little more to be afraid of.
"You helped us once, Jodie. I need you to help us again."
"Are you crazy?"
"Shut the fuck up," Dellray barked. "And listen t'what the man's sayin', hokay? Hokay?"
"I did what I said I would. I'm not doing anything more." The whine really was too much. Rhyme glanced at Sellitto. This called for people skills.
"It's in your interest," Sellitto said reasonably, "to help us."
"Gettin' shot in the back's in my interest? Gettin' shot in the head's in my interest? Uh-huh. I see. You wanna explain that?"
"Sure, I'll fucking explain it," Sellitto grumbled. "The Dancer knows you dimed him. He didn't have to target you back there at the safe house, right? Am I right?"
Always get the mutts to talk. To participate. Sellitto had oft
en explained the ways of interrogation to Lincoln Rhyme.
"Yeah. I guess."
Sellitto motioned Jodie closer with a crooked finger. "It woulda been the smart thing for him just to take off. But he went to the trouble to take up a sniper position and try to cap your ass. Now, what's that tell us?"
"I--"
"It tells us that he ain't gonna rest till he clips you."
Dellray, happy to play straight man for a change, said, "And he's the sort I don't think you wanna have knocking on yo' door at three in the morning--this week, next month, or next year. We all together on that?"
"So," Sellitto resumed snappily, "agreed that it's in your interest to help us?"
"But you'll give me, like, witness protection?"
Sellitto shrugged. "Yes and no."
"Huh?"
"If you help us, yes. If you don't, no."
Jodie's eyes were red and watery. He seemed so afraid. In the years since his accident Rhyme had been fearful for others--Amelia and Thom and Lon Sellitto. But he himself didn't believe he'd ever been afraid to die, certainly not since the accident. He wondered what it must be like to live so timidly. A mouse's life.
Too many ways to die . . .
Sellitto, slipping into his good-cop persona, offered a faint smile to Jodie. "You were there when he killed that agent, in the basement, right?"
"I was there, yeah."
"That man could be alive now. And Brit Hale could be alive now. A lot of other people could too . . . if somebody'd helped us stop this asshole a coupla years ago. Well, you can help us stop him now. You can keep Percey alive, maybe dozens of others. You can do that."
This was Sellitto's genius at work. Rhyme would have bullied and coerced and, in a pinch, bribed the little man. But it never occurred to him to appeal to the splinter of decency that the detective, at least, could see within him.
Jodie absently riffled the pages in his book with a filthy thumb. Finally he looked up and--with surprising sobriety--said, "When I was taking him to my place, in the subway, a couple times I thought I'd maybe push him into a sewer interceptor pipe. The water goes real fast there. Wash him right down to the Hudson. Or I know where they have these piles of tie spikes in the subway. I could grab one and hit him over the head when he wasn't looking. I really, really thought about doing that. But I got scared." He held up the book. " 'Chapter Three. Confronting your Demons.' I've always run, you know. I never stood up to anything. I thought maybe I could stand up to him, but I couldn't."
The Coffin Dancer Page 28
