The Coffin Dancer

“Sorry,” he muttered.

She wanted to slug him.

The house didn’t live up to the driveway.

It was a rambling split-level, a combination of logs and clapboard. A ramshackle place, added on to over the years with plenty of federal money and no inspiration.

The night was overcast, filled with dense swatches of mist, but Sachs could see enough to note that the house was set in a tight ring of trees. The grounds around it had been cleared for two hundred yards. Good cover for the residents of the house and good groomed open areas to pick off anyone trying an assault. A grayish band in the distance suggested the resumption of the forest. There was a large, still lake behind the house.

Reggie Eliopolos climbed out of the lead van and motioned everyone out. He led them into the main entryway of the building. He handed them off to a round man, who seemed cheerful even though he never once smiled.

“Welcome,” he said. “I’m US. Marshal David Franks. Want to tell you a little about your home away from home here. The most secure witness-protection enclave in the country. We have weight and motion sensors built into the entire perimeter of the place. Can’t be broken through without setting off all sorts of other alarms. The computer’s programmed to sense human motion patterns, correlated to weight, so the alarm doesn’t go off if a deer or dog happens to wander over the perimeter. Somebody – some human – steps where he shouldn’t, this whole place lights up like Times Square on Christmas Eve. What if somebody tries to ride a horse into the perimeter? We thought of that. The computer picks up a weight anomaly correlated to the distance between the animal’s hooves, the alarm goes off. And any motion at all – raccoon or squirrel – starts the infrared videos going.

“Oh, and we’re covered by radar from the Hampton Regional Airport, so any aerial assault gets picked up plenty early. Anything happens, you’ll hear a siren and maybe see the lights. Just stay where you are. Don’t go outside.”

“What kind of guards do you have?” Sachs asked.

“We’ve got four marshals inside. Two outside at the front guard station, two in the back by the lake. And hit that panic button there and there’ll be a Huey full of SWAT boys here in twenty minutes.”

Jodie’s face said twenty minutes seemed like a very long time. Sachs had to agree with him.

Eliopolos looked at his watch. He said, “We’re going to have an armored van here at six to take you to the grand jury. Sorry you won’t get much sleep.” He glanced at Percey. “But if I’d had my way, you’d’ve been here all night, safe and sound.”

No one said a word of farewell as he walked out the door.

Franks continued, “Few other things need mentioning. Don’t look out windows. Don’t go outside without an escort. That phone there” – he pointed to a beige phone in the corner of the living room – “is secure. It’s the only one you should use. Shut off your cell phones and don’t use them under any circumstances. So. That’s it. Any questions?”

Percey asked, “Yeah, you got any booze?”

Franks bent to the cabinet beside him and pulled out a bottle of vodka and one of bourbon. “We like to keep our guests happy.”

He set the bottles on the table, then walked to the front door, slipping his windbreaker on. “I’m headed home. ‘Night, Tom,” he said to the marshal at the door and nodded to the quartet of guardees, standing incongruously in the middle of the varnished wood hunting lodge, two bottles of liquor between them and a dozen deer and elk heads staring down.

The phone rang, startling them all. One of the marshals got it on the third ring. “Hello?…”

He glanced at the two women. “Amelia Sachs?”

She nodded and took the receiver.

It was Rhyme. “Sachs, how safe is it?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “High tech. Any luck with the body?”

“Nothing so far. Four missing males reported in Manhattan in the last four hours. We’re checking them all out. Is Jodie there?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him if the Dancer ever mentioned assuming a particular identity.”

She relayed the question.

Jodie thought back. “Well, I remember him saying something once… I mean, nothing specific. He said if you’re going to kill somebody you have to infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, then eliminate. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. He meant delegate somebody else to do something, then when everybody’s distracted, he’d move in. I think he mentioned like a delivery guy or shoe-shine boy.”

Your deadliest weapon is deception…

After she relayed this to Rhyme he said, “We’re thinking the body’s a young businessman. Could be a lawyer. Ask Jodie if he ever mentioned trying to get into the courthouse for the grand jury.”

Jodie didn’t think so.

Sachs told Rhyme this.

“Okay. Thanks.” She heard him calling something to Mel Cooper. “I’ll check in later, Sachs.”

After they hung up, Percey asked them, “You want a nightcap?”

Sachs couldn’t decide if she did or not. The memory of the scotch preceding her fiasco in Lincoln Rhyme’s bed made her cringe. But on impulse she said, “Sure.”

Roland Bell decided he could be off duty for a half hour.

Jodie opted for a fast, medicinal shot of whiskey, then headed off to bed, toting his self-help book under his arm and staring with a city boy’s fascination at a mounted moose head.

Outside, in the thick spring air, cicadas chirped and bullfrogs belched their peculiar, unsettling calls.

As he looked out the window into the early morning darkness Jodie could see the starbursts of searchlights radiating through the fog. Shadows danced sideways – the mist moving through the trees.

He stepped away from his window and walked to the door of his room, looked out.

Two marshals guarded this corridor, sitting in a small security room twenty feet away. They seemed bored and only moderately vigilant.

He listened and heard nothing other than the snaps and ticks of an old house late in the evening.

Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More.

Let’s get to work, he thought.

He opened the book wide, the glue cracking, and tore a small patch of tape off the bottom of the spine. A long knife slid onto the bed. It looked like black metal though it was made of ceramic-impregnated polymer and wouldn’t register on a metal detector. It was stained and dull, sharp as a razor on one edge, serrated like a surgical saw on the other. The handle was taped. He’d designed and constructed it himself. Like most serious weapons it wasn’t glitzy and it wasn’t sexy and it did only one thing: it killed. And it did this very, very well.

He had no qualms about picking up the weapon – or touching doorknobs or windows – because he was the owner of new fingerprints. The skin on the pads of eight fingers and two thumbs had been burned away chemically last month by a surgeon in Berne, Switzerland, and a new set of prints etched into the scar tissue by a laser used for microsurgery. His own prints would regenerate but not for some months.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, he pictured the common room and took a mental stroll through it, remembering the location of every door, every window, every piece of furniture, the bad landscapes on the walls, the elk antlers above the fireplace, ashtrays, weapons, and potential weapons. Jodie had such a good memory he would have been able to walk through the room blindfolded, never brushing a single chair or table.

Lost in this meditation, he steered his imaginary self to the telephone in the corner and spent a moment considering the safe house’s communications system. He was completely familiar with how it worked (he spent much of his free time reading operating manuals of security and communications systems) and he knew that if he cut the line the drop in voltage would send a signal to the marshals’ panel here and probably to a field office as well. So he’d have to leave it intact.