The Coffin Dancer

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Here's a classy lady," Rhyme said. "I kill her partner and she still shares a drink with me. You didn't do that, Sachs."

  "Oh, Rhyme, you can be such an asshole," Sachs spat out. "Where's Mel?"

  "Sent him home. Nothing more to do . . . We're bundling her up and shipping her off to Long Island, where she'll be safe."

  "What?" Sachs asked.

  "Doing what we should've done at the beginning. Hit me again."

  Percey began to. Sachs said, "He's had enough."

  "Don't listen to her," Rhyme blurted. "She's mad at me. I don't do what she wants and so she gets mad."

  Oh, thank you, Rhyme. Let's air linen in public, why don't we? She turned her beautiful, cold eyes on him. He didn't even notice; he was gazing at Percey Clay.

  Who said, "You made a deal with me. The next thing I know there're two agents about to take me off to Long Island. I thought I could trust you."

  "But if you trust me, you'll die."

  "It was a risk," Percey said. "You told us there was a chance he'd get into the safe house."

  "Sure, but you didn't know that I figured it out."

  "You . . . what?"

  Sachs frowned, listened.

  Rhyme continued, "I figured out he was going to hit the safe house. I figured out he was in a fireman's uniform. I fucking figured out he'd use a cutting charge on the back door. I'll bet it was an Accuracy Systems Five Twenty or Five Twenty-one with an Instadet firing system. Am I right?"

  "I--"

  "Am I right?"

  "A Five Twenty-one," Sachs said.

  "See? I figured all that out. I knew it five minutes before he got in. It's just that I couldn't fucking call anyone and tell them! I couldn't . . . pick up . . . the fucking phone and tell anybody what was going to happen. And your friend died. Because of me."

  Sachs felt pity for him and it was sour. She was torn apart by his pain, yet she didn't have a clue what she might say to comfort him.

  There was moisture on his chin. Thom stepped forward with a tissue, but he waved the aide away with a furious nod of his handsome jaw. He nodded toward the computer. "Oh, I got cocky. I got to thinking I was pretty normal. Driving around like a race car driver in the Storm Arrow, flipping on lights and changing CDs . . . What bullshit!" He closed his eyes and pressed his head back in the pillow.

  A sharp laugh, surprising everyone, filled the room.

  Percey Clay poured some more scotch into her glass. Then a little more for Rhyme too. "There's bullshit here, that's for sure. But it's only what I'm hearing from you."

  Rhyme opened his eyes, glaring.

  Percey laughed again.

  "Don't," Rhyme warned ambiguously.

  "Oh, please," she muttered dismissingly. "Don't what?"

  Sachs watched Percey's eyes narrow. "What're you saying?" Percey began. "That somebody's dead because of . . . technical failure?"

  Sachs realized that Rhyme had been expecting her to say something else. He was caught off guard. After a moment he said, "Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. If I'd been able to pick up the phone--"

  She cut him off. "And, what? That gives you the right to have a goddamn tantrum? To renege on your promises?" She tossed back her liquor and gave an exasperated sigh. "Oh, for God's sake . . . Do you have any idea what I do for a living?"

  To her astonishment Sachs saw that Rhyme was calm now. He started to speak but Percey cut him off. "Think about this." Her drawl was back. "I sit in a little aluminum tube going four hundred knots an hour, six miles above the ground. It's sixty below zero outside and the winds are a hundred miles an hour. I'm not even talking about lightning, wind shear, and ice. Jesus Christ, I'm only alive because of machines." Another laugh. "How's that different from you?"

  "You don't understand," he said snippily.

  "You're not answering my question. How?" she demanded, unrelenting. "How's it different?"

  "You can walk around, you can pick up the phone--"

  "I can walk around? I'm at fifty thousand feet. I open that door and my blood boils in seconds."

  For the first time since she'd known him, Sachs thought, Rhyme's met his match. He's speechless.

  Percey continued, "I'm sorry, Detective, but I don't see a lick of difference between us. We're products of twentieth-century science. Goddamn it, if I had wings I'd be flying on my own. But I don't and never will. To do what we have to do, both of us . . . we rely."

  "Okay . . . " He grinned devilishly.

  Come on, Rhyme, Sachs thought. Let her have it! How badly Sachs wanted him to win, to boot this woman off to Long Island, have done with her forever.

  The criminalist said, "But if I screw up, people die."

  "Oh? And what happens if my deicer fails? What happens if my yaw damper goes? What if a pigeon flies into my pitot tube on an ILS approach? I . . . am . . . dead. Flameouts, hydraulic failures, mechanics who forget to replace bum circuit breakers . . . Redundant systems fail. In your case they might get a chance to recover from their gunshots. But my aircraft hits the ground at three hundred miles an hour, there ain't nothing left."

  Rhyme seemed completely sober now. His eyes were swiveling around the room as if looking for an infallible bit of evidence to refute Percey's argument.

  "Now," Percey said evenly, "I understand Amelia here has some evidence she found back at the safe house. My suggestion is you start looking at it and stop this asshole once and for all. Because I am on my way to Mamaroneck right now to finish repairing my aircraft and then I'm flying that job tonight. Now, I'll ask you point-blank: You going to let me go to the airport, like you agreed? Or do I have to call my lawyer?"

  He was still speechless.

  A moment passed.

  Sachs jumped when Rhyme called in his booming baritone, "Thom! Thom! Get in here."

  The aide peered around the doorway suspiciously.

  "I've made a mess here. Look, I knocked my glass over. And my hair's mussed. Would you mind straightening up a little? Please?"

  "Are you fooling with us, Lincoln?" he asked dubiously.

  "And Mel Cooper? Could you call him, Lon? He must have taken me seriously. I was kidding. He's such a goddamn scientist. No sense of humor. We'll need him back here."

  Amelia Sachs wanted to flee. To bolt out of here, get into her car, and tear up the roads in New Jersey or Nassau County at 120 miles an hour. She couldn't stand to be in the same room with this woman a moment longer.

  "All right, Percey," Rhyme said, "take Detective Bell with you and we'll make sure plenty of Bo's troopers are with you too. Get up to your airport. Do what you have to do."

  "Thank you, Lincoln." She nodded, and offered a smile.

  Just enough of one to make Amelia Sachs wonder if part of Percey Clay's speech wasn't meant for Sachs's benefit too, to make clear who the undisputed winner in this contest was. Well, some sports Sachs believed she was doomed to lose. Champion shooter, decorated cop, a demon of a driver, and pretty good criminalist, Sachs nonetheless possessed an unjacketed heart. Her father had sensed this about her; he'd been a romantic too. After she'd gone through a bad affair some years ago he'd said to her, "They oughta make body armor for the soul, Amie. They oughta do that."

  Good-bye, Rhyme, she thought. Good-bye.

  And his response to this tacit farewell? A minuscule glance and the gruff words "Let's look at that evidence, Sachs. Time's a-wasting."

  . . . Chapter Twenty-eight

  Hour 29 of 45

  Individuation is the goal of the criminalist.

  It's the process of tracing a piece of evidence back to a single source, to the exclusion of all other sources.

  Lincoln Rhyme now gazed at the most individuated evidence there was: blood from the Dancer's body. A restriction fragment length polymorphism DNA test could eliminate virtually any possibility that the blood had come from anyone else.

  Yet there was little that this evidence could tell him. CODIS--the Computer-Based DNA Information System--contained profiles of some convicted fel
ons, but it was a small database, made up primarily of sex offenders and a limited number of violent criminals. Rhyme wasn't surprised when the search of the Dancer's blood code came back negative.

  Still, Rhyme harbored a faint pleasure that they now had a piece of the killer himself, swabbed and stuck into a test tube. For most criminalists, the perps were usually "out there"; he rarely met them face-to-face, often never saw them at all unless it was at trial. So he felt a deep stirring to be in the presence of the man who'd caused so many people, himself included, so much pain.

  "What else did you find?" he asked Sachs.

  She'd vacuumed Brit Hale's room for trace but she and Cooper, donning magnifiers, had been through it all and found nothing except gunshot residue and fragments of bullets and brick and plaster from the shoot-outs.

  She'd found casings from the semiautomatic pistol he'd used. His weapon was a 7.62-millimeter Beretta. It was probably old; it showed breach spread. The casings, all of which Sachs had recovered, had been dipped in cleansers to eliminate even the prints of the employees of the ammunition company--so no one could trace the purchase back to a certain shift at one of the Remington plants and then forward to a shipment that ended up in a particular location. And the Dancer had apparently loaded them with his knuckles to avoid prints. An old trick.

  "Keep going," Rhyme said to Sachs.

  "Pistol slugs."

  Cooper looked over the bullets. Three flattened. And one in pretty good shape. Two were covered with Brit Hale's black, cauterized blood.

  "Scan them for prints," Rhyme ordered.

  "I did," she said, her voice clipped.

  "Try the laser."

  Cooper did.

  "Nothing, Lincoln." The tech looked at a piece of cotton in a plastic bag. He asked, "What's that?"

  Sachs said, "Oh, I got one of his rifle slugs too."

  "What?"

  "He took a couple shots at Jodie. Two of them hit the wall and exploded. This one hit dirt--a bed of flowers--and didn't go off. I found a hole in one of the geraniums and--"

  "Wait." Cooper blinked. "That's one of the explosive rounds?"

  Sachs said, "Right, but it didn't go off."

  He gingerly set the bag on the table and stepped back, pulling Sachs--two inches taller than he was--along with him.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Explosive bullets're very unstable. Powder grains could be smoldering right now . . . It could go off at any minute. A piece of shrapnel could kill you."

  "You saw the fragments of the other ones, Mel," Rhyme said. "How's it made?"

  "It's nasty, Lincoln," the tech said uneasily, his bald crown dotted with sweat. "A PETN filling, smokeless powder as the primary. That makes it unstable."

  Sachs asked, "Why didn't it go off?"

  "The dirt'd be soft impact. And he makes them himself. Maybe his quality control wasn't so good for that one."

  "He makes them himself?" Rhyme asked. "How?"

  Eye fixed on the plastic bag, the tech said, "Well, the usual way is to tap a hole from the point almost through the base. Drop in a BB and some black or smokeless powder. You roll a thread of plastic and feed it inside. Then seal it up again--in his case with a ceramic nose cone. When it hits, the BB slams into the powder. That sets off the PETN."

  "Rolls the plastic?" Rhyme asked. "Between his fingers?"

  "Usually."

  Rhyme looked at Sachs and for a moment the rift between them vanished. They smiled and said simultaneously, "Fingerprints!"

  Mel Cooper said, "Maybe. But how're you going to find out? You'd have to take it apart."

  "Then," Sachs said, "we'll take it apart."

  "No, no, no, Sachs," Rhyme said curtly. "Not you. We'll wait for the bomb squad."

  "We don't have time."

  She bent over the bag, started to open it.

  "Sachs, what the hell're you trying to prove?"

  "Not trying to prove anything," she responded coolly. "I'm trying to catch the killer."

  Cooper stood by helplessly.

  "Are you trying to save Jerry Banks? Well, it's too late for that. Give him up. Get on with your job."

  "This is my job."

  "Sachs, it wasn't your fault!" Rhyme shouted. "Forget it. Give up the dead. I've told you that a dozen times."

  Calmly she said, "I'll put my vest on top of it, work from behind it." She stripped her blouse off and ripped the Velcro straps of her American Body Armor vest. She set this up like a tent over the plastic bag containing the bullet.

  Cooper said, "You're behind the armor but your hands won't be."

  "Bomb suits don't have hand protection either," she pointed out, and pulled her shooting earplugs from her pocket, screwed them into her ears. "You'll have to shout," she said to Cooper. "What do I do?"

  No, Sachs, no, Rhyme thought.

  "If you don't tell me I'll just cut it apart." She picked up a forensic razor saw. The blade hovered over the bag. She paused.

  Rhyme sighed, nodded to Cooper. "Tell her what to do."

  The tech swallowed. "All right. Unwrap it. But carefully. Here, put it on this towel. Don't jar it. That's the worst thing you can do."

  She exposed the bullet, a surprisingly tiny piece of metal with an off-white tip.

  "That cone?" Cooper continued. "If the bullet goes off the cone'll go right through the body armor and at least one or two walls. It's Teflon-coated."

  "Okay." She turned it aside, toward the wall.

  "Sachs," Rhyme said soothingly. "Use forceps, not your fingers."

  "It won't make any difference if it blows, Rhyme. And I need the control."

  "Please."

  She hesitated and took the hemostat that Cooper offered her. She gripped the base of the slug.

  "How do I open it up? Cut it?"

  "You can't cut through the lead," Cooper called. "The heat from the friction'll set off the black powder. You'll have to work the cone off and pull the wad of plastic out."

  Sweat was rolling down her face. "Okay. With pliers?"

  Cooper picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers from the worktable and walked to her side. He put them in her right hand, then retreated.

  "You'll have to grip it and twist hard. He glued it on with epoxy. That doesn't bond well with lead, so it should just pop off. But don't squeeze too hard. If it fractures you'll never get it off without drilling. And that'll set it off."

  "Hard but not too hard," she muttered.

  "Think of all those cars you worked on, Sachs," Rhyme said.

  "What?"

  "Trying to get those old spark plugs out. Hard enough to unseat them, not so hard you broke the ceramic."

  She nodded absently and he didn't know if she'd heard him. Sachs lowered her head behind the tepee of her body armor.

  Rhyme saw her eyes squinting shut.

  Oh, Sachs . . .

  He never saw any motion. He just heard a very faint snap. She froze for a moment, then looked over the armor. "It came off. It's open."

  Cooper said, "Do you see the explosive?"

  She looked inside. "Yes."

  He handed her a can of light machine oil. "Drip some of this inside then tilt it. The plastic should fall out. We can't pull it or the fingerprints'll be ruined."

  She added the oil, then tilted the slug, open end down, toward the towel.

  Nothing happened.

  "Damn," she muttered.

  "Don't--"

  She shook it. Hard.

  "--shake it!" Cooper shouted.

  "Sachs!" Rhyme gasped.

  She shook harder. "Damn it."

  "No!"

  A tiny white thread fell out, followed by some grains of black powder.

  "Okay," Cooper said, exhaling. "It's safe."

  He walked over, and using a needle probe, rolled the plastic onto a glass slide. He walked in the smooth gait of criminalists around the world--back straight, hand buoyed and carrying the sample rock steady--to the microscope. He mounted the explosive.

  "Magn
a-Brush?" Cooper asked, referring to a fine gray fingerprint powder.

  "No," Rhyme responded. "Use gentian violet. It's a plastic print. We just need a little contrast."

  Cooper sprayed it, then mounted the slide in the 'scope.

  The image popped onto the screen of Rhyme's computer simultaneously.

  "Yes!" he shouted. "There it is."

  The whorls and bifurcations were very visible.

  "You nailed it, Sachs. Good job."

  As Cooper slowly rotated the plug of explosive, Rhyme made progressive screen captures--bitmap images--and saved them on the hard drive. He then assembled them and printed out a single, two-dimensional sliver of print.

  But when the tech examined it he sighed.

  "What?" Rhyme asked.

  "Still not enough for a match. Only a quarter inch by five-eighths. No AFIS in the world could pick up anything from this."

  "Jesus," Rhyme spat out. All that effort . . . wasted.

  A sudden laugh.

  From Amelia Sachs. She was staring at the wall, the evidence charts. CS-1, CS-2 . . .

  "Put them together," she said.

  "What?"

  "We've got three partials," she explained. "They're probably all from his index finger. Can't you fit them together?"

  Cooper looked at Rhyme. "I've never heard of doing that."

  Neither had Rhyme. The bulk of forensic work was analyzing evidence for presentation at trial--"forensic" means "relating to legal proceedings"--and a defense lawyer'd go to town if cops started assembling fragments of perps' fingerprints.

  But their priority was finding the Dancer, not making a case against him.

  "Sure," Rhyme said. "Do it!"

  Cooper grabbed the other pictures of the Dancer's prints from the wall and rested them on the table in front of him.

  They started to work, Sachs and the tech. Cooper made photocopies of the prints, reducing two so they were all the same size. Then he and Sachs began fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. They were like children, trying variations, rearranging, arguing playfully. Sachs went so far as to take out a pen and connect several lines over a gap in the print.

  "Cheating," Cooper joked.

  "But it fits," she said triumphantly.

  Finally they cut and pasted a print together. It represented about three-quarters of a friction ridge print, probably the right index finger.

  Cooper held it up. "I have my doubts about this, Lincoln."

  But Rhyme said, "It's art, Mel. It's beautiful!"

  "Don't tell anyone at the identification association or they'll drum us out."