The Coffin Dancer

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Uhm . . . "

  Soldier, do men take a drink occasionally?

  Sir, I don't know, sir.

  Well, they do. Here, have one.

  I don't think I--

  Take a drink, Soldier. That's an order.

  Well, sir--

  You're not a pussy girl, are you, Soldier? You have titties?

  I . . . Sir, I do not, sir.

  Then drink, Soldier.

  Sir, yes sir.

  Jodie repeated, "You want one?"

  "No," Stephen whispered.

  Jodie closed his eyes and lay back. "Ten . . . thousand . . . " After a moment he asked, "You killed him, didn't you?"

  "Who?" Stephen asked.

  "Back there, that cop? Hey, you want some orange juice?"

  "That agent in the basement? Maybe I killed him. I don't know. That wasn't the point."

  "Was it hard to do? Like, I don't mean anything, I'm just curious. Orange juice? I drink a lot of it. Pills make you thirsty. Your mouth gets all dry."

  "No." The can looked dirty. Maybe worms had crawled on it. Maybe crawled inside. You could drink a worm and never know it . . . He shivered. "Do you have running water here?"

  "No. But I have some bottles. Poland Spring. I stole a case from A&P."

  Cringey.

  "I need to wash my hands."

  "You do?"

  "To get the blood off them. It soaked through the gloves."

  "Oh. It's right there. Why do you wear gloves all the time? Fingerprints?"

  "That's right."

  "You were in the army, right? I knew it."

  Stephen was about to lie, changed his mind suddenly. He said, "No. I was almost in the army. Well, the marines. I was going to join. My stepfather was a marine and I was going in like him."

  "Semper Fi."

  "Right."

  There was silence and Jodie was looking at him expectantly. "What happened?"

  "I tried to enlist but they wouldn't let me in."

  "That's stupid. Wouldn't let you? You'd make a great soldier." Jodie was looking Stephen up and down, nodding. "You're strong. Great muscles. I"--he laughed--"I don't hardly get any exercise, 'cept running from niggers or kids want to mug me. And they always catch me anyway. You're handsome too. Like soldiers ought to be. Like the soldiers in movies."

  Stephen felt the wormy feeling going away and, my God, he started blushing. He stared at the floor. "Well, I don't know about that."

  "Come on. Your girlfriend thinks you're handsome, bet."

  Little cringey here. Worms starting to move.

  "Well, I--"

  "Don't you have a girlfriend?"

  Stephen asked, "You got that water?"

  Jodie pointed to the box of Poland Spring. Stephen opened two bottles and began washing his hands. Normally he hated people watching him do this. When people watched him wash he kept being cringey and the worms never went away. But for some reason he didn't mind Jodie watching.

  "No girlfriend, huh?"

  "Not right now," Stephen explained carefully. "It's not like I'm a homo or anything, if you were wondering."

  "I wasn't."

  "I don't believe in that cult. Now, I don't think my stepfather was right--that AIDS is God's way of getting rid of homosexual people. Because if that's what God wanted to do he'd be smart and just get rid of them, the faggots, I mean. Not make there be a risk that normal people might get sick too."

  "That makes sense," Jodie said from his hazy plateau. "I don't have one either, a girlfriend." He laughed bitterly. "Well, how could I? Right? What've I got? I'm not good-looking like you, I don't have any money . . . I'm just a fucking junkie is all."

  Stephen felt his face burn hot and he washed harder.

  Scrub that skin, yes, yes, yes . . .

  Worms, worms, go away . . .

  Looking at his hands Stephen continued. "The fact is I've been in a situation lately where I haven't really . . . where I haven't been as interested in women as most men are. But it's just a temporary condition."

  "Temporary," Jodie repeated.

  Eyes watching the bar of soap, as if it were a prisoner trying to escape.

  "Temporary. Owing to my necessary vigilance. In my work, I mean."

  "Sure. Your vigilance."

  Scrub, scrub, the soap lathered like thunderheads.

  "Have you ever killed a faggot?" Jodie asked, curious.

  "I don't know. I'll tell you I've never killed anybody because he's a homosexual. That would make no sense." Stephen's hands tingled and buzzed. He scrubbed harder, not looking at Jodie. He suddenly felt swollen with an odd feeling--of talking to someone who might just understand him. "See, I don't kill people just to kill them."

  "Okay," Jodie said. "But what if some drunk came up to you on the street and pushed you around and called you, I don't know, a motherfucking faggot? You'd kill him, right? Say you could get away with it."

  "But . . . well, a faggot wouldn't want to have sex with his mother now, would he?"

  Jodie blinked then laughed. "That's pretty good."

  Did I just make a joke? Stephen wondered. He smiled, pleased that Jodie'd been impressed.

  Jodie continued, "Okay, let's say he just called you a motherfucker."

  "Of course I wouldn't kill him. And I'll tell you this, if you're talking about faggots let's talk about Negroes and Jewish people too. I wouldn't kill a Negro unless I'd been hired to kill somebody who happened to be a Negro. There are probably reasons why Negroes shouldn't live, or at least shouldn't live here in this country. My stepfather had a lot of reasons for that. I'm pretty much in accord with him. He felt the same about Jewish people but there I disagree. Jewish people make very good soldiers. I respect them."

  He continued. "See, killing's a business, that's all it is. Look at Kent State. I was just a kid then but my stepfather told me about it. You know Kent State? Those students got shot by the National Guard?"

  "Sure. I know."

  "Now, come on, nobody really cared that those students died, right? But to me it was stupid shooting them. Because what purpose did it serve? None. If you wanted to stop the movement, or whatever it was, you should've targeted the leaders and taken them out. It would've been so easy. Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, isolate, eliminate."

  "That's how you kill people?"

  "You infiltrate the area. Evaluate the difficulty of the kill and the defenses. You delegate the job of diverting everyone's attention from the victim--make it look like you're coming at them from one way but it turns out that it's just a delivery boy or shoe-shine boy or something, and meanwhile you've come up behind the victim. Then you isolate him, and eliminate him."

  Jodie sipped his orange juice. There were dozens of empty orange juice cans piled in the corner. It seemed to be all he lived on. "You know," he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, "you think professional killers'd be crazy. But you don't seem crazy."

  "I don't think I'm crazy," Stephen said matter-of-factly.

  "The people you kill, are they bad? Like crooks and Mafia people and things?"

  "Well, they've done something bad to people who pay me to kill them."

  "Which means they're bad?"

  "Sure."

  Jodie laughed dopily, eyelids half closed. "Well, some people'd say that's not exacly how you, you know, figure out what's good or bad."

  "Okay, what is good and bad?" Stephen responded. "I don't do anything different than God does. Good people die and bad people die in a train wreck and nobody gets on God's case because of it. Some professional killers call their victims 'targets' or 'subjects.' One guy I heard about calls them 'corpses.' Even before he kills them. Like, 'The corpse is leaving his car. I'm targeting him.' It's easier for him to think of the victims that way, I guess. Me, I don't care. I call 'em what they are. Who I'm after now are the Wife and the Friend. I already killed the Husband. That's how I think of them. They're people I kill, is all. No big deal."

  Jodie considered what he'd heard and said, "You know some
thing? I don't think you're evil. You know why?"

  "Why's that?"

  "Because evil is something that looks innocent but turns out to be bad. The thing about you is you're exactly what you are. I think that's good."

  Stephen flicked his scrubbed fingernails with a click. He felt himself blushing again. Finally, he asked, "I scare you, don't I?"

  "No," Jodie said. "I wouldn't want to have you against me. No sir, I wouldn't want that. But I feel like we're friends. I don't think you'd hurt me."

  "No," Stephen said. "We're partners."

  "You talked about your stepfather. He still alive?"

  "No, he died."

  "I'm sorry. When you mentioned him I was thinking about my father--he's dead too. He said the thing he respected most in the world was craftsmanship. He liked watching a talented man do what he did best. That's kind of like you."

  "Craftsmanship," Stephen repeated, feeling swollen with inexplicable feelings. He watched Jodie hide the cash in a slit in his filthy mattress. "What're you going to do with the money?"

  Jodie sat up and looked at Stephen with dumb but earnest eyes. "Can I show you something?" The drugs made his voice slurred.

  "Sure."

  He lifted a book out of his pocket. The title was Dependent No More.

  "I stole it from this bookstore on Saint Marks Place. It's for people who don't want to be, you know, alcoholics or drug addicts anymore. It's pretty good. It mentions these clinics you can go to. I found this place in New Jersey. You go in there and you spend a month--a whole month--but you come out and you're clean. They say it really works."

  "That's good of you," Stephen said. "I approve of that."

  "Yeah, well," Jodie curled up his face. "It costs fourteen thousand."

  "No shit."

  "For one month. Can you believe that?"

  "Somebody's making some bucks there." Stephen made $150,000 for a hit, but he didn't share this information with Jodie, his newfound friend and partner.

  Jodie sighed, wiped his eyes. The drugs had made him weepy, it seemed. Like Stephen's stepfather when he drank. "My whole life's been so messed up," he said. "I went to college. Oh, yeah. Didn't do too bad either. I taught for a while. Worked for a company. Then I lost my job. Everything went bad. Lost my apartment . . . I'd always had a pill problem. Started stealing . . . Oh, hell . . . "

  Stephen sat down next to him. "You'll get your money and go into that clinic there. Get your life turned around."

  Jodie smiled blearily at him. "My father had this thing he said, you know? When there was something you had to do that was hard. He said don't think about the hard part as a problem, just think about it as a factor. Like something to consider. He'd look me in the eye and say, 'It's not a problem, it's just a factor.' I keep trying to remember that."

  "Not a problem, just a factor," Stephen repeated. "I like that."

  Stephen put his hand on Jodie's leg to prove that he really did like it.

  Soldier, what the fuck are you doing?

  Sir, busy at the moment, sir. Will report in later.

  Soldier--

  Later, sir!

  "Here's to you," Jodie said.

  "No, to you," Stephen said.

  And they toasted, spring water and orange juice, to their strange alliance.

  . . . Chapter Twenty-two

  Hour 24 of 45

  Alabyrinth.

  The New York City subway system extends for over 250 miles and incorporates more than a dozen separate tunnels that crisscross four of the five boroughs (Staten Island only being excluded, though the islanders, of course, have a famous ferry of their very own).

  A satellite could find a sailboat adrift in the North Atlantic quicker than Lincoln Rhyme's team could locate two men hiding in the New York subway.

  The criminalist, Sellitto, Sachs, and Cooper were poring over a map of the system taped inelegantly to Lincoln Rhyme's wall. Rhyme's eyes scanned the different-colored lines representing the various routes, blue for Eighth Avenue, green for Lex, red for Broadway.

  Rhyme had a special relationship with the cantankerous system. It was in the pit of a subway construction site that an oak beam had split and crushed Rhyme's spine--just as he'd said, "Ah," and leaned forward to lift a fiber, golden as an angel's hair, from the body of a murder victim.

  Yet even before the accident, subways played an important role in NYPD forensics. Rhyme studied them diligently when he was running IRD: because they covered so much terrain and incorporated so many different kinds of building materials over the years, you could often link a perp to a particular subway line, if not his neighborhood and station, on the basis of good trace evidence alone. Rhyme had collected subway exemplars for years--some of the samples dating to the prior century. (It had been in the 1860s that Alfred Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun and Scientific American, decided to adapt his idea of transmitting mail via small pneumatic tubes to moving people in large ones.)

  Rhyme now ordered his computer to dial a number and in a few moments was connected with Sam Hoddleston, chief of the Transit Authority Police. Like the Housing Police, they were regular New York City cops, no different from NYPD, merely assigned to the transportation system. Hoddleston knew Rhyme from the old days and the criminalist could hear in the silence after he identified himself some fast mental tap-dancing; Hoddleston, like many of Rhyme's former colleagues, didn't know that Rhyme had returned from the near dead.

  "Should we power-off any of the lines?" Hoddleston asked after Rhyme briefed him about the Dancer and his partner. "Do a field search?"

  Sellitto heard the question on the speakerphone and shook his head.

  Rhyme agreed. "No, we don't want to tip our hand. Anyway, I think he's in an abandoned area."

  "There aren't many empty stations," Hoddleston said. "But there're a hundred deserted spurs and yards, work areas. Say, Lincoln, how're you doing? I--"

  "Fine, Sam. I'm fine," Rhyme said briskly, deflecting the question as he always did. Then added, "We were talking--we think they're probably going to stick to foot. Stay off the trains themselves. So we're guessing they're in Manhattan. We've got a map here and we're going to need your help in narrowing it down some."

  "Whatever I can do," the chief said. Rhyme couldn't remember what he looked like. From his voice he sounded fit and athletic, but then Rhyme supposed he himself might seem like an Olympian to someone who couldn't see his destroyed body.

  Rhyme now considered the rest of the evidence that Sachs had found in the building next to the safe house--the evidence left by the Dancer's partner.

  He said to Hoddleston, "The dirt has a high moisture content and's loaded with feldspar and quartz sand."

  "I remember you always like your dirt, Lincoln."

  "Useful, soil is," he said, then continued. "Very little rock and none of it blasted or chipped, no limestone or Manhattan mica schist. So we're looking at downtown. And from the amount of old wood particles, probably closer to Canal Street."

  North of Twenty-seventh Street the bedrock lies close to the surface of Manhattan. South of that, the ground is dirt, sand, and clay, and it's very damp. When the sandhogs were digging the subways years ago the soupy ground around Canal Street would flood the shaft. Twice a day all work had to cease while the tunnel was pumped out and the walls shored up with timber, which over the years had rotted away into the soil.

  Hoddleston wasn't optimistic. Although Rhyme's information limited the geographic area, he explained, there were dozens of connecting tunnels, transfer platforms, and portions of stations themselves that had been closed off over the years. Some of them were as sealed and forgotten as Egyptian tombs. Years after Alfred Beach died workmen building another subway line broke through a wall and discovered his original tunnel, long abandoned, with its opulent waiting room, which had included murals, a grand piano, and a goldfish tank.

  "Any chance he's just sleeping in active stations or between stations in a cutout?" Hoddleston asked.

  Sellitto
shook his head. "Not his profile. He's a druggie. He'd be worried about his stash."

  Rhyme then told Hoddleston about the turquoise mosaic.

  "Impossible to say where that came from, Lincoln. We've done so much work retiling, there's tile dust and grout everywhere. Who knows where he could've picked it up."

  "So give me a number, Chief," Rhyme said. "How many spots we looking at?"

  "I'd guess twenty locations," Hoddleston's athletic voice said. "Maybe a few less."

  "Ouch," Rhyme muttered. "Well, fax us a list of the most likely ones."

  "Sure. When do you need it?" But before Rhyme could answer, Hoddleston said, "Never mind. I remember you from the old days, Lincoln. You want it yesterday."

  "Last week," Rhyme joked, impatient the chief was bantering and not writing.

  Five minutes later the fax machine buzzed. Thom set the piece of paper in front of Rhyme. It listed fifteen locations in the subway system. "Okay, Sachs, get going."

  She nodded as Sellitto called Haumann to have the S&S teams get started. Rhyme added emphatically, "Amelia, you stay in the rear now, okay? You're Crime Scene, remember? Only Crime Scene."

  On a curb in downtown Manhattan sat Leon the Shill. Beside him was the Bear Man--so named because he wheeled around a shopping cart filled with dozens of stuffed animals, supposedly for sale, though only the most psychotic of parents would buy one of the tattered, licey little toys for their child.

  Leon and the Bear Man lived together--that is, they shared an alley near Chinatown--and survived on bottle deposits and handouts and a little harmless petty larceny.

  "He dying, man," Leon said.

  "Naw, bad dream's what it is," Bear Man responded, rocking his shopping cart as if trying to put the bears to sleep.

  "Oughta spenda dime, get a ambulance here."

  Leon and the Bear Man were looking across the street, into an alley. There lay another homeless man, black and sick looking, with a twitchy and mean--though currently unconscious--face. His clothes were in tatters.

  "Oughta call somebody."

  "Les take a look."

  They crossed the street, skittish as mice.

  The man was skinny--AIDS, probably, which told them he probably used smack--and filthy. Even Leon and Bear Man bathed occasionally in the Washington Square Park fountain or the lagoon in Central Park, despite the turtles. He wore ragged jeans, caked socks, no shoes, and a torn, filthy jacket that said Cats . . . The Musical on it.