The Coffin Dancer

by Jeffery Deaver

"We're under some time pressure here, Officer."

  "I said, a minute." She handily won the staring contest and Eliopolos and his trooper escort led Jodie down the stairs. "Wait," the little man shouted from the hallway. He returned, grabbed his self-help book, and trotted down the stairs.

  "Sachs . . . "

  He thought of saying something about avoiding heroics, about Jerry Banks, about being too hard on herself.

  About giving up the dead . . .

  But he knew that any words of caution or encouragement would ring like lead.

  And so he settled for "Shoot first."

  She placed her right hand on his left. He closed his eyes and tried so very hard to feel the pressure of her skin on his. He believed he did, if just in his ring finger.

  He looked up at her. She said, "And you keep a minder handy, okay?" Nodding at Sellitto and Dellray.

  Then an EMS medic appeared in the door, looking around the room at Rhyme, at the equipment, at the beautiful lady cop, trying to fathom why on earth he was doing what he'd been instructed to. "Somebody wanted a body?" he asked uncertainly.

  "In here!" Rhyme shouted. "Now! We need it now!"

  The van drove through a gate and then down a one-lane driveway. It extended for what seemed like miles.

  "If this's the driveway," Roland Bell muttered, "can't wait to see the house."

  He and Amelia Sachs flanked Jodie, who irritated everybody no end as he fidgeted nervously, his bulky bulletproof vest banging into them as he'd examined shadows and dark doorways and passing cars on the Long Island Expressway. In the back were two 32-E officers, armed with machine guns. Percey Clay was in the front passenger seat. When they'd picked up her and Bell at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia on their way to Suffolk County, Sachs had been shocked at the sight of the woman.

  Not exhaustion--though she was clearly tired. Not fear. No, it was Percey's complete resignation that troubled Sachs. As a patrol officer, she'd seen plenty of tragedy on the street. She'd delivered her share of bad news, but she'd never seen someone who'd given up so completely as Percey Clay.

  Percey was on the phone with Ron Talbot. Sachs deduced from the conversation that U.S. Medical hadn't even waited for the cinders of her airplane to cool before canceling the contract. When she hung up she stared at the passing scenery for a moment. She said absently to Bell, "The insurance company isn't even going to pay for the cargo. They're saying I assumed a known risk. So, that's it. That's it." She added briskly, "We're bankrupt."

  Pine trees swept past, scrub oaks, patches of sand. Sachs, a city girl, had come to Nassau and Suffolk Counties when she was a teenager not for the beaches or the shopping malls but to pop the clutch of her Charger and goose the maroon car up to sixty within five point nine seconds in the renegade drag races that made Long Island famous. She appreciated trees and grass and cows but enjoyed nature best when she was streaking past it at 110 miles per hour.

  Jodie crossed and uncrossed his arms and burrowed into the center seat, playing with the seat belt, knocking into Sachs again.

  "Sorry," he muttered.

  She wanted to slug him.

  The house didn't live up to the driveway.

  It was a rambling split-level, a combination of logs and clapboard. A ramshackle place, added on to over the years with plenty of federal money and no inspiration.

  The night was overcast, filled with dense swatches of mist, but Sachs could see enough to note that the house was set in a tight ring of trees. The grounds around it had been cleared for two hundred yards. Good cover for the residents of the house and good groomed open areas to pick off anyone trying an assault. A grayish band in the distance suggested the resumption of the forest. There was a large, still lake behind the house.

  Reggie Eliopolos climbed out of the lead van and motioned everyone out. He led them into the main entryway of the building. He handed them off to a round man, who seemed cheerful even though he never once smiled.

  "Welcome," he said. "I'm U.S. Marshal David Franks. Want to tell you a little about your home away from home here. The most secure witness-protection enclave in the country. We have weight and motion sensors built into the entire perimeter of the place. Can't be broken through without setting off all sorts of other alarms. The computer's programmed to sense human motion patterns, correlated to weight, so the alarm doesn't go off if a deer or dog happens to wander over the perimeter. Somebody--some human--steps where he shouldn't, this whole place lights up like Times Square on Christmas Eve. What if somebody tries to ride a horse into the perimeter? We thought of that. The computer picks up a weight anomaly correlated to the distance between the animal's hooves, the alarm goes off. And any motion at all--raccoon or squirrel--starts the infrared videos going.

  "Oh, and we're covered by radar from the Hampton Regional Airport, so any aerial assault gets picked up plenty early. Anything happens, you'll hear a siren and maybe see the lights. Just stay where you are. Don't go outside."

  "What kind of guards do you have?" Sachs asked.

  "We've got four marshals inside. Two outside at the front guard station, two in the back by the lake. And hit that panic button there and there'll be a Huey full of SWAT boys here in twenty minutes."

  Jodie's face said twenty minutes seemed like a very long time. Sachs had to agree with him.

  Eliopolos looked at his watch. He said, "We're going to have an armored van here at six to take you to the grand jury. Sorry you won't get much sleep." He glanced at Percey. "But if I'd had my way, you'd've been here all night, safe and sound."

  No one said a word of farewell as he walked out the door.

  Franks continued, "Few other things need mentioning. Don't look out windows. Don't go outside without an escort. That phone there"--he pointed to a beige phone in the corner of the living room--"is secure. It's the only one you should use. Shut off your cell phones and don't use them under any circumstances. So. That's it. Any questions?"

  Percey asked, "Yeah, you got any booze?"

  Franks bent to the cabinet beside him and pulled out a bottle of vodka and one of bourbon. "We like to keep our guests happy."

  He set the bottles on the table, then walked to the front door, slipping his windbreaker on. "I'm headed home. 'Night, Tom," he said to the marshal at the door and nodded to the quartet of guardees, standing incongruously in the middle of the varnished wood hunting lodge, two bottles of liquor between them and a dozen deer and elk heads staring down.

  The phone rang, startling them all. One of the marshals got it on the third ring. "Hello? . . . "

  He glanced at the two women. "Amelia Sachs?"

  She nodded and took the receiver.

  It was Rhyme. "Sachs, how safe is it?"

  "Pretty good," she said. "High tech. Any luck with the body?"

  "Nothing so far. Four missing males reported in Manhattan in the last four hours. We're checking them all out. Is Jodie there?"

  "Yes."

  "Ask him if the Dancer ever mentioned assuming a particular identity."

  She relayed the question.

  Jodie thought back. "Well, I remember him saying something once . . . I mean, nothing specific. He said if you're going to kill somebody you have to infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, then eliminate. Or something like that. I don't remember exactly. He meant delegate somebody else to do something, then when everybody's distracted, he'd move in. I think he mentioned like a delivery guy or shoe-shine boy."

  Your deadliest weapon is deception . . .

  After she relayed this to Rhyme he said, "We're thinking the body's a young businessman. Could be a lawyer. Ask Jodie if he ever mentioned trying to get into the courthouse for the grand jury."

  Jodie didn't think so.

  Sachs told Rhyme this.

  "Okay. Thanks." She heard him calling something to Mel Cooper. "I'll check in later, Sachs."

  After they hung up, Percey asked them, "You want a nightcap?"

  Sachs couldn't decide if she did or not. The memory of the scotch pr
eceding her fiasco in Lincoln Rhyme's bed made her cringe. But on impulse she said, "Sure."

  Roland Bell decided he could be off duty for a half hour.

  Jodie opted for a fast, medicinal shot of whiskey, then headed off to bed, toting his self-help book under his arm and staring with a city boy's fascination at a mounted moose head.

  Outside, in the thick spring air, cicadas chirped and bullfrogs belched their peculiar, unsettling calls.

  As he looked out the window into the early morning darkness Jodie could see the starbursts of searchlights radiating through the fog. Shadows danced sideways--the mist moving through the trees.

  He stepped away from his window and walked to the door of his room, looked out.

  Two marshals guarded this corridor, sitting in a small security room twenty feet away. They seemed bored and only moderately vigilant.

  He listened and heard nothing other than the snaps and ticks of an old house late in the evening.

  Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More.

  Let's get to work, he thought.

  He opened the book wide, the glue cracking, and tore a small patch of tape off the bottom of the spine. A long knife slid onto the bed. It looked like black metal though it was made of ceramic-impregnated polymer and wouldn't register on a metal detector. It was stained and dull, sharp as a razor on one edge, serrated like a surgical saw on the other. The handle was taped. He'd designed and constructed it himself. Like most serious weapons it wasn't glitzy and it wasn't sexy and it did only one thing: it killed. And it did this very, very well.

  He had no qualms about picking up the weapon--or touching doorknobs or windows--because he was the owner of new fingerprints. The skin on the pads of eight fingers and two thumbs had been burned away chemically last month by a surgeon in Berne, Switzerland, and a new set of prints etched into the scar tissue by a laser used for microsurgery. His own prints would regenerate but not for some months.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, he pictured the common room and took a mental stroll through it, remembering the location of every door, every window, every piece of furniture, the bad landscapes on the walls, the elk antlers above the fireplace, ashtrays, weapons, and potential weapons. Jodie had such a good memory he would have been able to walk through the room blindfolded, never brushing a single chair or table.

  Lost in this meditation, he steered his imaginary self to the telephone in the corner and spent a moment considering the safe house's communications system. He was completely familiar with how it worked (he spent much of his free time reading operating manuals of security and communications systems) and he knew that if he cut the line the drop in voltage would send a signal to the marshals' panel here and probably to a field office as well. So he'd have to leave it intact.

  Not a problem, just a factor.

  On with his mental stroll. Examining the common-room video cameras--which the marshal had "forgotten" to tell them about. They were in the Y configuration that a budget-conscious security designer would use for a government safe house. He knew this system too and that it harbored a serious design flaw--all you had to do was tap the middle of the lens hard. This misaligned all the optics; the image in the security monitor would go black but there'd be no alarm, which would happen if the coaxial cable were cut.

  Thinking about the lighting . . . He could shut out six--no, five--of eight lights he'd seen in the safe house but no more than that. Not until all the marshals were dead. He noted the location of each lamp and light switch, then moved on, more phantom walking. The TV room, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Thinking of distances, angles of view from outside.

  Not a problem . . .

  Noting the location of each of his victims. Considering the possibility that they might have moved in the past fifteen minutes.

  . . . just a factor.

  Now his eyes opened. He nodded to himself, slipped the knife in his pocket, and stepped to the door.

  Silently he eased into the kitchen, stole a slotted spoon from a rack over the sink. Walked to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. Then he walked into the common room and meandered from bookshelf to bookshelf, pretending to look for something to read. As he passed each of the video surveillance cameras he reached up with the spoon and slapped the lens. Then he set the milk and spoon on a table and headed into the security room.

  "Hey, check out the monitors," one marshal muttered, turning a knob on the TV screen in front of him.

  "Yeah?" the other asked, not really interested.

  Jodie walked past the first marshal, who looked up and started to ask, "Hey, sir, how you doing?" when swish, swish, Jodie tidily opened the man's throat in a V, spraying his copious velvet blood in a high arc. His partner's eyes flashed wide and he reached for his gun, but Jodie pulled it from his hand and stabbed him once in the throat and once in the chest. He dropped to the floor and thrashed for a moment. It was a noisy death--as Jodie'd known it would be. But he couldn't do more knife work on the man; he needed the uniform and had to kill him with a minimum of blood.

  As the marshal lay on the floor, shaking and dying, he gazed up at Jodie, who was stripping off his own blood-soaked clothes. The marshal's eyes flickered to Jodie's biceps. They focused on the tattoo.

  As Jodie bent down and began to undress the marshal he noticed the man's gaze and said, "It's called 'Dance Macabre.' See? Death's dancing with his next victim. That's her coffin behind them. Do you like it?"

  He asked this with genuine curiosity, though he expected no answer. And received none.

  . . . Chapter Thirty-six

  Hour 43 of 45

  Mel Cooper, clad in latex gloves, was standing over the body of the young man they'd found in Central Park.

  "I could try the plantars," he suggested, discouraged.

  The friction ridge prints on the feet were as unique as fingerprints, but they were of marginal value until you had samples from a suspect; they weren't cataloged in AFIS databases.

  "Don't bother," Rhyme muttered.

  Who the hell is this? Rhyme wondered, looking at the savaged body in front of him. He's the key to the Dancer's next move. Oh, this was the worst feeling in the world: an unreachable itch. To have a piece of evidence in front of you, to know it was the key to the case, and yet to be unable to decipher it.

  Rhyme's eyes strayed to the evidence chart on the wall. The body was like the green fibers they'd found at the hangar--significant, Rhyme felt, but its meaning unknown.

  "Anything else?" Rhyme asked the tour doctor from the medical examiner's office. He'd accompanied the body here. He was a young man, balding, with dots of sweat in constellations on his crown. The doctor said, "He's gay or, to be accurate, he'd lived a gay lifestyle when he was young. He's had repeated anal intercourse though not for some years."

  Rhyme continued, "What does that scar tell you? Surgery?"

  "Well, it's a precise incision, but I don't know of any reason to operate there. Maybe some intestinal blockage. But even then I've never heard of a procedure in that quadrant of the abdomen."

  Rhyme regretted Sachs was not here. He wanted to throw around ideas with her. She'd think of something he'd overlooked.

  Who could he be? Rhyme racked his brain. Identification was a complex science. He'd established a man's identity once with nothing more than a single tooth. But the procedure took time--usually weeks or months.

  "Run blood type and DNA profile," Rhyme said.

  "Already ordered," the tour doctor said. "I sent the samples downtown already."

  If he were HIV positive that might help them ID him through doctors or clinics. But without anything else to go on, the blood work wouldn't be very helpful.

  Fingerprint . . .

  I'd give anything for a nice friction ridge print, Rhyme thought. Maybe--

  "Wait!" Rhyme laughed out loud. "His dick!"

  "What?" Sellitto blurted.

  Dellray lifted
an arching brow.

  "He doesn't have any hands, but what's the one part of his anatomy he'd be sure to touch?"

  "Penis," Cooper called out. "If he peed in the last couple of hours we can probably get a print."

  "Who wants to do the honors?"

  "No job too disgusting," the tech said, donning a double layer of latex gloves. He went to work with Kromekote skin-printing cards. He lifted two excellent prints--a thumb from the top of the corpse's penis and an index finger from the bottom.

  "Perfect, Mel."

  "Don't tell my girlfriend," he said coyly. He fed the prints through the AFIS system.

  The message came up on the screen: Please Wait . . . Please Wait . . .

  Be on file, Rhyme thought desperately. Please be on file.

  He was.

  But when the results came back, Sellitto and Dellray, closest to Cooper's computer, stared at the screen in disbelief.

  "What the hell?" the detective said.

  "What?" Rhyme cried. "Who is it?"

  "It's Kall."

  "What?"

  "It's Stephen Kall," Cooper repeated. "It's a twenty-point match. There's no doubt." Cooper found the composite print they'd constructed earlier to find the Dancer's identity. He dropped it on the table next to the Kromekote. "It's identical."

  How? Rhyme was wondering. How on earth?

  "What if," Sellitto said, "it's Kall's prints on this guy's dick. What if Kall's a bone smoker?"

  "We've got genetic markers from Kall's blood, right? From the water tower?"

  "Right," Cooper called.

  "Compare them," Rhyme called out. "I want a profile of the corpse's markers. And I want it now."

  Poetry was not lost on him.

  The "Coffin Dancer" . . . I like that, he thought. Much better than "Jodie"--the name he'd picked for this job because it was so unthreatening. A silly name, a diminutive name.

  The Dancer . . .

  Names were important, he knew. He read philosophy. The act of naming--of designating--is unique to humans. The Dancer now spoke silently to the late, dismembered Stephen Kall: It was me you heard about. I'm the one who calls my victims "corpses." You call them Wives, Husbands, Friends, whatever you like.

  But once I'm hired, they're corpses. That's all they are.

  Wearing a U.S. marshal's uniform, he started down the dim hallway from the bodies of the two officers. He hadn't avoided the blood completely, of course, but in the murkiness of the enclave you couldn't see that the navy blue uniform had patches of red on it.