The Coffin Dancer

“We want you to help us find the killer. The guy Hansen hired. Stop him before he gets the other two wits.”

“And?” For Rhyme saw that Sellitto still had not mentioned what he was holding in reserve.

With a glance out the window the detective said, “Looks like it’s the Dancer, Lincoln.”

“The Coffin Dancer?”

Sellitto looked back and nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“We heard he’d done a job in D.C. a few weeks ago. Killed a congressional aide mixed up in arms deals. We got pen registers and found calls from a pay phone outside Hansen’s house to the hotel where the Dancer was staying. It’s gotta be him, Lincoln.”

On the screen the grains of sand, big as asteroids, smooth as a woman’s shoulders, lost their grip on Rhyme’s interest.

“Well,” he said softly, “that’s a problem now, isn’t it?”

chapter three

SHE REMEMBERED:

Last night, the cricket chirp of the phone intruding on the drizzle outside their bedroom window.

She’d looked at it contemptuously as if Bell Atlantic were responsible for the nausea and the suffocating pain in her head, the strobe lights flashing behind her eyelids.

Finally she’d rolled to her feet and snagged the receiver on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

Answered by the empty-pipe echo of a unicom radio-to-phone patch.

Then a voice. Perhaps.

A laugh. Perhaps.

A huge roar. A click. Silence.

No dial tone. Just silence, shrouded by the crashing waves in her ears.

Hello? Hello?…

She’d hung up the phone and returned to the couch, watched the evening rain, watched the dogwood bend and straighten in the spring storm’s breeze. She’d fallen asleep again. Until the phone rang again a half hour later with the news about Lear Niner Charlie Juliet going down on approach and carrying her husband and young Tim Randolph to their deaths.

Now, on this gray morning, Percey Rachael Clay knew that the mysterious phone call last night had been from her husband. Ron Talbot – the one who’d courageously called to deliver the news of the crash – had explained he’d patched a call through to her at around the time the Lear had exploded.

Ed’s laugh…

Hello? Hello?

Percey uncorked her flask, took a sip. She thought of the windy day years ago when she and Ed had flown a pontoon-equipped Cessna 180 to Red Lake, Ontario, setting down with about six ounces of fuel left in the tank, and celebrated their arrival by downing a bottle of label-less Canadian whiskey, which turned out to give them both the most dire hangovers of their lives. The thought brought tears to her eyes now, as the pain had then.

“Come on, Perce, enough of that, okay?” said the man sitting on the living room couch. “Please.” He pointed to the flask.

“Oh, right,” her gravelly voice responded with controlled sarcasm. “Sure.” And she took another sip. Felt like a cigarette but resisted. “What the hell was he doing calling me on final?” she asked.

“Maybe he was worried about you,” Brit Hale suggested. “Your migraine.”

Like Percey, Hale hadn’t slept last night. Talbot had called him too with the news of the crash and he’d driven down from his Bronxville apartment to be with Percey. He’d stayed with her all night, helped her make the calls that had to be made. It was Hale, not Percey, who’d delivered the news to her own parents in Richmond.

“He had no business doing that, Brit. A call on final.”

“That had nothing to do with what happened,” Hale said gently.

“I know,” she said.

They’d known each other for years. Hale had been one of Hudson Air’s first pilots and had worked for free for the first four months until his savings ran out and he had to approach Percey reluctantly with a request for some salary. He never knew that she’d paid it out of her own savings, for the company didn’t turn a profit for a year after incorporation. Hale resembled a lean, stern schoolteacher. In reality he was easygoing – the perfect antidote to Percey – and a droll practical joker who’d been known to roll a plane into inverted flight if his passengers were particularly rude and unruly and keep it there until they calmed down. Hale often took the right seat to Percey’s left and was her favorite copilot in the world. “Privilege to fly with you, ma’am,” he’d say, offering his imperfect Elvis Presley impersonation. “Thank you very much.”

The pain behind her eyes was nearly gone now. Percey had lost friends – to crashes mostly – and she knew that psychic loss was an anesthetic to physical pain.

So was whiskey.

Another hit from the flask. “Hell, Brit.” She slumped into the couch beside him. “Oh, hell.”

Hale slipped his strong arm around her. She dropped her head, covered with dark curls, to his shoulder. “Be okay, babe,” he said. “Promise. What can I do?”

She shook her head. It was an answerless question.

A sparse mouthful of bourbon, then she looked at the clock. Nine a.m. Ed’s mother would be here any minute. Friends, relatives… There was the memorial service to plan…

So much to do.

“I’ve got to call Ron,” she said. “We’ve got to do something. The Company…”

In airlines and charters the word “Company” didn’t mean the same as in any other businesses. The Company, cap C, was an entity, a living thing. It was spoken with reverence or frustration or pride. Sometimes with sorrow. Ed’s death had inflicted a wound in many lives, the Company’s included, and the injury could very well prove to be lethal.

So much to do…

But Percey Clay, the woman who never panicked, the woman who’d calmly controlled deadly Dutch rolls, the nemesis of Lear 23s, who’d recovered from graveyard spirals that would have sent many seasoned pilots into spins, now sat paralyzed on the couch. Odd, she thought, as if from a different dimension, I can’t move. She actually looked at her hands and feet to see if they were bone white and bloodless.

Oh, Ed…

And Tim Randolph too, of course. As good a copilot as you’d ever find, and good first officers were rare. She pictured his young, round face, like a younger Ed’s. Gri

“You need some coffee,” Hale a

One of their private jokes was about sissy coffees. Real pilots, they both felt, drink only Maxwell House or Folgers.

Today, though, Hale, bless his heart, wasn’t really talking about coffee. He meant: Lay off the booze. Percey took the hint. She corked the flask and dropped it on the table with a loud clink. “Okay, okay.” She rose and paced through the living room. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. The pug face. Black hair in tight, stubborn curls. (In her tormented adolescence, during a moment of despair, she’d given herself a crew cut. That’ll show ’em. Though naturally all this act of defiance did was to give the chahmin’ girls of the Lee School in Richmond even more ammunition against her.) Percey had a slight figure and marbles of black eyes that her mother repeatedly said were her finest quality. Meaning her only quality. And a quality that men, of course, didn’t give a shit about.

Dark lines under those eyes today and hopeless matte skin – smoker’s skin, she remembered from the years she went through two packs of Marlboros a day. The earring holes in her lobes had long ago grown closed.

A look out the window, past the trees, into the street in front of the town house. She caught sight of the traffic and something tugged at her mind. Something unsettling.

What? What is it?

The feeling vanished, pushed away by the ringing of the doorbell.

Percey opened the door and found two burly police officers in the entryway.