He'd said words like these to her before, of course. But now--as with everything else about the Dancer--it seemed to her that Rhyme had more in mind than just finding obscure evidence. No, she sensed that he was desperate to know about this perp. Who he was, what made him kill.
Another shiver. An image in her thoughts: back to the other night. The lights of the airfield, the sound of airplane engines, the smell of jet exhaust.
"Come on, Amelia . . . You're him. You're the Coffin Dancer. You know Ed Carney's on the plane; you know you have to get the bomb on board. Just think about it for a minute or two."
And she did, summoning up from somewhere a need to kill.
He continued, speaking in an eerie, melodic voice. "You're brilliant," he said. "You have no morals whatsoever. You'll kill anyone, you'll do anything to get to your goal. You divert attention, you use people . . . Your deadliest weapon is deception."
I lay in wait.
My deadliest weapon . . .
She closed her eyes.
. . . is deception.
Sachs felt a dark hope, a vigilance, a hunt lust.
"I--"
He continued softly. "Is there any distraction, any diversion you can try?"
Eyes open now. "The whole area's empty. Nothing to distract the pilots with."
"Where are you hiding?"
"The hangars're all boarded up. The grass is too short for cover. There're no trucks or oil drums. No alleys. No nooks."
In her gut: desperation. What'm I going to do? I've got to plant the bomb. I don't have any time. Lights . . . there're lights everywhere. What? What should I do?
She said, "I can't hide around the other side of the hangars. There're lots of workers. It's too exposed. They'll see me."
For a moment, Sachs herself floated back into her mind and she wondered, as she often did, why Lincoln Rhyme had the power to conjure her into someone else. Sometimes it angered her. Sometimes it thrilled.
Dropping into a crouch, ignoring the pain in her knees from the arthritis that had tormented her off and on for the past ten of her thirty-three years. "It's all too open here. I feel exposed."
"What're you thinking?"
There're people looking for me. I can't let them find me. I can't!
This is risky. Stay hidden. Stay down.
Nowhere to hide.
If I'm seen, everything's ruined. They'll find the bomb; they'll know I'm after all three witnesses. They'll put them in protective custody. I'll never get them then. I can't let that happen.
Feeling his panic she turned back to the only possible place to hide. The hangar beside the taxiway. In the wall facing her was a single broken window, about three by four feet. She'd ignored it because it was covered with a sheet of rotting plywood, nailed to the frame on the inside.
She approached it slowly. The ground in front was gravel; there were no footprints.
"There's a boarded-up window, Rhyme. Plywood on the inside. The glass is broken."
"Is it dirty, the glass that's still in the window?"
"Filthy."
"And the edges?"
"No, they're clean." She understood why he'd asked the question. "The glass was broken recently!"
"Right. Push the board. Hard."
It fell inward without any resistance and hit the floor with a huge bang.
"What was that?" Rhyme shouted. "Sachs, are you all right?"
"Just the plywood," she answered, once more spooked by his uneasiness.
She shone her halogen flashlight through the hangar. It was deserted.
"What do you see, Sachs?"
"It's empty. A few dusty boxes. There's gravel on the floor--"
"That was him!" Rhyme answered. "He broke in the window and threw gravel inside, so he could stand on the floor and not leave footprints. It's an old trick. Any footprints in front of the window? Bet it's more gravel," he added sourly.
"Is."
"Okay. Search the window. Then climb inside. But be sure to look for booby traps first. Remember the trash can a few years ago."
Stop it, Rhyme! Stop it.
Sachs shined the light around the space again. "It's clean, Rhyme. No traps. I'm examining the window frame."
The PoliLight showed nothing other than a faint mark left by a finger in a cotton glove. "No fiber, just the cotton pattern."
"Anything in the hangar? Anything worth stealing?"
"No. It's empty."
"Good," Rhyme said.
"Why good?" she asked. "I said there's no print."
"Ah, but it means it's him, Sachs. It's not logical for someone to break in wearing cotton gloves when there's nothing to steal."
She searched carefully. No footprints, no fingerprints, no visible evidence. She ran the Dustbuster and bagged the trace.
"The glass and gravel?" she asked. "Paper bag?"
"Yes."
Moisture often destroyed trace and though it looked unprofessional certain evidence was best transported in brown paper bags rather than in plastic.
"Okay, Rhyme. I'll have it back to you in forty minutes."
They disconnected.
As she packed the bags carefully into the RRV, Sachs felt edgy, as she often did just after searching a scene where she'd found no obvious evidence--guns or knives or the perp's wallet. The trace she'd collected might have a clue as to who the Dancer was and where he was hiding. But the whole effort could have been a bust too. She was anxious to get back to Rhyme's lab and see what he could find.
Sachs climbed into the station wagon and sped back to the Hudson Air office. She hurried into Ron Talbot's office. He was talking to a tall man whose back was to the door. Sachs said, "I found where he was, Mr. Talbot. The scene's released. You can have the tower--"
The man turned around. It was Brit Hale. He frowned, trying to think of her name, remembered it. "Oh. Officer Sachs. Hey. How you doing?"
She started to nod an automatic greeting, then stopped.
What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in the safe house.
She heard a soft crying and looked into the conference room. There was Percey Clay sitting next to Lauren, the pretty brunette who Sachs remembered was Ron Talbot's assistant. Lauren was crying and Percey, resolute in her own sorrow, was trying to comfort her. She glanced up, saw Sachs, and nodded to her.
No, no, no . . .
Then the third shock.
"Hi, Amelia," Jerry Banks said cheerfully, sipping coffee and standing by a window, where he'd been admiring the Learjet parked in the hangar. "That plane's something, isn't it?"
"What're they doing here?" Sachs snapped, pointing at Hale and Percey, forgetting that Banks outranked her.
"They had some problem or other about a mechanic," Banks said. "Percey wanted to stop by here. Try to find--"
"Rhyme," Sachs shouted into the microphone. "She's here!"
"Who?" he asked acerbically. "And where is there?"
"Percey. And Hale too. At the airport."
"No! They're supposed to be at the safe house."
"Well, they're not. They're right here in front of me."
"No, no, no!" Rhyme raged. A moment passed. Then he said, "Ask Banks if they followed evasive driving procedures."
Banks, uncomfortable, responded that they hadn't. "She was real insistent that they stop here first. I tried to talk her--"
"Jesus, Sachs. He's there someplace. The Dancer. I know he's there."
"How could he be?" Sachs's eyes strayed to the window.
"Keep 'em down," Rhyme said. "I'll have Dellray get an armored van from the Bureau's White Plains field office."
Percey heard the commotion. "I'll go to the safe house in an hour or so. I have to find a mechanic to work on--"
Sachs waved her silent, then said, "Jerry, keep them here." She ran to the door and looked out over the gray expanse of the airfield as a noisy prop plane charged down the runway. She pulled the stalk mike closer to her mouth. "How, Rhyme?" she asked. "How'll he come at us?"
; "I don't have a clue. He could do anything."
Sachs tried to reenter the Dancer's mind, but couldn't. All she thought was, Deception . . .
"How secure is the area?" Rhyme asked.
"Pretty tight. Chain-link fence. Troopers at a road-block at the entrance, checking tickets and IDs."
Rhyme asked, "But they're not checking IDs of police, right?"
Sachs looked at the uniformed officers, recalling how casually they'd waved her through. "Oh, hell, Rhyme, there're a dozen marked cars here. A couple unmarkeds too. I don't know the troopers or detectives . . . He could be any one of them."
"Okay, Sachs. Listen, find out if any local cops're missing. In the past two or three hours. The Dancer might've killed one and stolen his ID and uniform."
Sachs called a state trooper up to the door, examined him and his ID closely, and decided he was the real article. She said, "We think the killer may be nearby, maybe impersonating an officer. I need you to check out everybody here. If you don't recognize 'em, let me know. Also, find out from your dispatcher if any cops from around the area've gone missing in the past few hours."
"I'm on it, Officer."
She returned to the office. There were no blinds on the windows and Banks had moved Percey and Hale into an interior office.
"What's going on?" Percey asked.
"You're out of here in five minutes," Sachs said, glancing out the window, trying to guess how the Dancer would attack. She had no idea.
"Why?" the flier asked, frowning.
"We think the man who killed your husband's here. Or on his way here."
"Oh, come on. There're cops all over the field. It's perfectly safe. I need to--"
Sachs snapped to her, "No arguments."
But argue she did. "We can't leave. I've just had my chief mechanic quit. I have to--"
"Perce," Hale said uneasily, "maybe we ought to listen to her."
"We've got to get that aircraft--"
"Get back. In there. And be quiet."
Percey's mouth opened wide in shock. "You can't talk to me that way. I'm not a prisoner."
"Officer Sachs? Hellooo?" The trooper she'd spoken to outside stepped into the doorway. "I've done a fast visual of everybody here in uniform and the detectives too. No unknowns. And no reports of any state or Westchester officers missing. But our Central Dispatch told me something maybe you oughta know about. Might be nothing, but--"
"Tell me."
Percey Clay said, "Officer, I have to talk to you . . . "
Sachs ignored her and nodded to the trooper. "Go on."
"Traffic Patrol in White Plains, about two miles away. They found a body in a Dumpster. Think he was killed about an hour ago, maybe less."
"Rhyme, you hear?"
"Yes."
Sachs asked the cop, "Why d'you think that's important?"
"It's the way he was killed. Was a hell of a mess."
"Ask him if the hands and face were missing," Rhyme asked.
"What?"
"Ask him!"
She did, and everyone in the office stopped talking and stared at Sachs.
The trooper blinked in surprise and said, "Yes ma'am, Officer. Well, the hands at least. The dispatcher didn't say anything about the face. How'd you know . . . ?"
Rhyme blurted, "Where's it now? The body?"
She relayed the question.
"In a coroner's bus. They're taking it to the county morgue."
"No," Rhyme said. "Have them get it to you, Sachs. I want you to examine it."
"The--"
"Body," he said. "It's got the answer to how he's going to come at you. I don't want Percey and Hale moved until we know what we're up against."
She told the cop Rhyme's request.
"Okay," he said. "I'll get on it. That's . . . You mean you want the body here."
"Yes. Now."
"Tell 'em to get it there fast, Sachs," Rhyme said. He sighed. "Oh, this is bad. Bad."
And Sachs had the uneasy thought that Rhyme's urgent grief was not only for the man who had died so violently, whoever he was, but for those who, maybe, were just about to.
People believe that the rifle is the important tool for a sniper, but that's wrong. It's the telescope.
What do we call it, Soldier? Do we call it a telescopic sight? Do we call it a 'scope?
Sir, we do not. It's a telescope. This one is a Redfield, three-by-nine variable, with crosshair reticles. There is none better, sir.
The telescope Stephen was mounting on top of the Model 40 was twelve and three-quarters inches long and weighed just over twelve ounces. It had been matched to this particular rifle with corresponding serial numbers and had been painstakingly adjusted for focus. The parallax had been fixed by the optical engineer in the factory so that the crosshairs resting on the lip of a man's heart five hundred yards away would not move perceptibly when the sniper's head eased from left to right. The eye relief was so accurate that the recoil would knock the eyepiece back to within one millimeter of Stephen's eyebrow and yet never touch a hair.
The Redfield telescope was black and sleek, and Stephen kept it draped in velvet and nestled in a Styrofoam block in his guitar case.
Now, hidden in a nest of grass some three hundred yards from the Hudson Air hangar and office, Stephen fitted the black tube of the telescope into its mount, perpendicular to the gun (he always thought of his stepfather's crucifix when he mounted it), then he swung the heavy tube into position with a satisfying click. He screwed down the lug nuts.
Soldier, are you a competent sniper?
Sir, I am the best, sir.
What are your qualifications?
Sir, I am in excellent physical shape, I am fastidious, I am right-handed, I have 20/20 vision, I do not smoke or drink or take any kind of drugs, I can lie still for hours at a time, and I live to send bullets up the ass of my enemy.
He nestled farther into the pile of leaves and grass.
There might be worms here, he thought. But he wasn't feeling cringey at the moment. He had his mission and that was occupying his mind completely.
Stephen cradled the gun, smelling the machine oil from the bolt-action receiver and the neat's-foot oil from the sling, so worn and soft it was like angora. The Model 40 was a 7.62 millimeter NATO rifle and weighed eight pounds, ten ounces. The trigger pull generally ranged from three to five pounds, but Stephen set it a bit higher because his fingers were very strong. The weapon had a rated effective range of a thousand yards, though he had made kills at more than 1300.
Stephen knew this gun intimately. In sniper teams, his stepfather had told him, the snipers themselves have no disassemble authority, and the old man wouldn't let him strip the weapon himself. But that was one rule of the old man's that hadn't seemed right to Stephen and so, in a moment of uncharacteristic defiance, he'd secretly taught himself how to dismantle the rifle, clean it, repair it, and even machine parts that needed adjustment or replacement.
Through the telescope he scanned Hudson Air. He couldn't see the Wife, though he knew she was there or soon would be. Listening to the tape of the phone tap on the Hudson Air office lines, Stephen had heard her tell someone named Ron that they were changing their plans; rather than going to the safe house they were driving to the airport to find some mechanics who could work on the airplane.
Using the low-crawl technique, Stephen now moved forward until he was on a slight ridge, still hidden by trees and grass but with a better view of the hangar, the office, and the parking lot in front of it, separated from him by flat grass fields and two runways.
It was a glorious kill zone. Wide. Very little cover. All entrances and exits easily targeted from here.
Two people stood outside at the front door. One was a county or state trooper. The other was a woman--red hair dipping beneath a baseball cap. Very pretty. She was a cop, plainclothes. He could see the boxy outline of a Glock or Sig-Sauer high on her hip. He lifted his range finder and put the split image on the woman's red hair. He twisted a ring u
ntil the images moved together seamlessly.
Three hundred and sixteen yards.
He replaced the range finder, lifted the rifle, and sighted on the woman, centering the reticles on her hair once more. He glanced at her beautiful face. It troubled him, her attractiveness. He didn't like it. Didn't like her. He wondered why.
The grass rustled around him. He thought: Worms.
Was starting to feel cringey.
The face in the window . . .
He put the crosshairs on her chest.
The cringey feeling went away.
Soldier, what is the sniper's motto?
Sir, it is "One chance, one shot, one kill."
The conditions were excellent. There was a slight right-to-left crosswind, which he guessed was four miles an hour. The air was humid, which would buoy the slug. He was shooting over unvaried terrain with only moderate thermals.
He slid back down the knoll and ran a cleaning rod, tipped with a soft cotton cloth, through the Model 40. You always cleaned your weapon before firing. The slightest bit of moisture or oil could put a shot off by an inch or so. Then he made a loop sling and lay down in his nest.
Stephen loaded five rounds into the chamber. They were M-118 match-quality rounds, manufactured at the renowned Lake City arsenal. The bullet itself was a 173-grain boattail and it struck its target at a speed of a half mile a second. Stephen had altered the slugs somewhat, however. He'd drilled into the core and filled them with a small explosive charge and replaced the standard jacket with a ceramic nose that would pierce most kinds of body armor.
He unfolded a thin dish towel and spread it out on the ground to catch the ejected cartridges. Then he doubled the sling around his left biceps and planted that elbow firmly on the ground, keeping the forearm absolutely perpendicular to the ground--a bone support. He "spot-welded" his cheek and right thumb to the stock above the trigger.
Then slowly he began scanning the kill zone.
It was hard to see inside the offices but Stephen thought he caught a glimpse of the Wife.
Yes! It was her.
She was standing behind a big curly-haired man in a wrinkled white shirt. He held a cigarette. A young blond man in a suit, a badge on his belt, ushered them back out of sight.
Patience . . . she'll present again. They don't have a clue that you're here. You can wait all day. As long as the worms--
Flashing lights again.
Into the parking lot sped a county ambulance. The red-haired cop saw it. Her eyes grew excited. She ran toward the vehicle.
Stephen breathed deeply.
One chance . . .
The Coffin Dancer Page 9