The Coffin Dancer

Rhyme said softly, “He’s been here, you know.”

The assistant U.S. attorney stopped speaking. After a moment he asked, “Who?”

Though he knew who.

“He was right outside that window not an hour ago, pointing a sniper rifle, loaded with explosive shells, into this room.” Rhyme’s eyes dipped to the floor. “Probably the very spot where you’re standing.”

Eliopolos wouldn’t have stepped back for the world. But his eyes flickered to the windows to make certain the shades were closed.

“Why…?”

Rhyme finished the sentence. “Didn’t he shoot? Because he had a better idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Ah,” Rhyme said. “That’s the million-dollar question. All we know is he’s killed somebody else – some young man in Central Park – and stripped him. He’s ID-proofed the body and taken over his identity. I don’t doubt for one minute that he knows the bomb didn’t kill Percey and that he’s on his way to finish the job. And he’ll make you a co-conspirator.”

“He doesn’t even know I exist.”

“If that’s what you want to believe.”

“Jesus, Reggie Boy,” Dellray said. “Get with the picture!”

“Don’t call me that.”

Sachs joined in. “Aren’t you figuring it out? You’ve never been up against anybody like him.”

Eyes on her, Eliopolos spoke to Sellitto. “Guess you do things different on the city level. Federal, our people know their places.”

Rhyme snapped, “You’re a fool if you treat him like a gangsta or some has-been mafioso. Nobody can hide from him. The only way is to stop him.”

“Yeah, Rhyme, that’s been your war cry all along. Well, we’re not sacrificing any more troops because you’ve got a hard-on for a guy killed two of your techs five years ago. Assuming you can get a hard-on -”

Eliopoloswas a large man and so he was surprised to find himself slammed so lithely to the floor, gasping for breath and staring up into Sellitto’s purple face, the lieutenant’s fist drawn back.

“Do that, Officer,” the attorney wheezed, “and you’ll be arraigned within a half hour.”

“Lon,” Rhyme said, “let it go, let it go…”

The detective calmed, glared at the man, walked away. Eliopolos climbed to his feet.

The insult in fact meant nothing. He wasn’t even thinking of Eliopolos. Or the Dancer for that matter. For he’d happened to glance at Amelia Sachs, at the hollowness in her eyes, the despair. And he knew what she was feeling: the desperation at losing her prey. Eliopolos was stealing away her chance to get the Dancer. As with Lincoln Rhyme, the killer had come to be the dark focus of her life.

All because of a single misstep – the incident at the airport, her going for cover. A small thing, minuscule to everyone but her. But what was the expression? A fool can throw a stone into a pond that a dozen wise men can’t recover. And what was Rhyme’s Me now but the result of a piece of wood breaking a tiny piece of bone? Sachs’s life had been snapped in that single moment of what she saw as cowardice. But unlike Rhyme’s case, there was – he believed – a chance for her to mend.

Oh, Sachs, how it hurts to do this, but I have no choice. He said to Eliopolos, “All right, but you have to do one thing in exchange.”

“Or you’ll what?” Eliopolos snickered.

“Or I won’t tell you where Percey is,” Rhyme said simply. “We’re the only ones who know.”

Eliopolos’s face, no longer flushed from his World Wrestling pins gazed icily at Rhyme. “What do you want?”

Rhyme inhaled deeply. “The Dancer’s shown an interest in targeting the people looking for him. If you’re going to protect Percey, I want you to protect the chief forensic investigator in the case too.”

“You?” the lawyer asked.

“No, Amelia Sachs,” Rhyme replied.

“Rhyme, no,” she said, frowning.

Reckless Amelia Sachs… And I’m putting her square in the kill zone.

He motioned her over to him.

“I want to stay here,” she said. “I want to find him.”

He whispered, “Oh, don’t worry about that, Sachs. He’ll find you. We’ll try to figure out his new identity, Mel and me. But if he makes a move out on Long Island, I want you there. I want you with Percey. You’re the only one who understands him. Well, you and me. And I won’t be doing any shooting in the near future.”

“He could come back here -”

“I don’t think so. There’s a chance this is the first fish of his that’s going to get away and he doesn’t like that one bit. He’s going after Percey. He’s desperate to. I know it.”

She debated for a moment, then nodded.

“Okay,” Eliopolos said, “you’ll come with us. We’ve got a van waiting.”

Rhyme said, “Sachs?”

She paused.

Eliopolos said, “We really should move.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

“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.