The Coffin Dancer

Not a problem, just a factor.

On with his mental stroll. Examining the common-room video cameras – which the marshal had “forgotten” to tell them about. They were in the Y configuration that a budget-conscious security designer would use for a government safe house. He knew this system too and that it harbored a serious design flaw – all you had to do was tap the middle of the lens hard. This misaligned all the optics; the image in the security monitor would go black but there’d be no alarm, which would happen if the coaxial cable were cut.

Thinking about the lighting… He could shut out six – no, five – of eight lights he’d seen in the safe house but no more than that. Not until all the marshals were dead. He noted the location of each lamp and light switch, then moved on, more phantom walking. The TV room, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Thinking of distances, angles of view from outside.

Not a problem…

Noting the location of each of his victims. Considering the possibility that they might have moved in the past fifteen minutes.

…just a factor.

Now his eyes opened. He nodded to himself, slipped the knife in his pocket, and stepped to the door.

Silently he eased into the kitchen, stole a slotted spoon from a rack over the sink. Walked to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. Then he walked into the common room and meandered from bookshelf to bookshelf, pretending to look for something to read. As he passed each of the video surveillance cameras he reached up with the spoon and slapped the lens. Then he set the milk and spoon on a table and headed into the security room.

“Hey, check out the monitors,” one marshal muttered, turning a knob on the TV screen in front of him.

“Yeah?” the other asked, not really interested.

Jodie walked past the first marshal, who looked up and started to ask, “Hey, sir, how you doing?” when swish, swish, Jodie tidily opened the man’s throat in a V, spraying his copious velvet blood in a high arc. His partner’s eyes flashed wide and he reached for his gun, but Jodie pulled it from his hand and stabbed him once in the throat and once in the chest. He dropped to the floor and thrashed for a moment. It was a noisy death – as Jodie’d known it would be. But he couldn’t do more knife work on the man; he needed the uniform and had to kill him with a minimum of blood.

As the marshal lay on the floor, shaking and dying, he gazed up at Jodie, who was stripping off his own blood-soaked clothes. The marshal’s eyes flickered to Jodie’s biceps. They focused on the tattoo.

As Jodie bent down and began to undress the marshal he noticed the man’s gaze and said, “It’s called ‘Dance Macabre.’ See? Death’s dancing with his next victim. That’s her coffin behind them. Do you like it?”

He asked this with genuine curiosity, though he expected no answer. And received none.

chapter thirty-six

Hour 43 of 45

MEL COOPER, CLAD IN LATEX GLOVES, was standing over the body of the young man they’d found in Central Park.

“I could try the plantars,” he suggested, discouraged.

The friction ridge prints on the feet were as unique as fingerprints, but they were of marginal value until you had samples from a suspect; they weren’t cataloged in AFIS databases.

“Don’t bother,” Rhyme muttered.

Who the hell is this? Rhyme wondered, looking at the savaged body in front of him. He’s the key to the Dancer’s next move. Oh, this was the worst feeling in the world: an unreachable itch. To have a piece of evidence in front of you, to know it was the key to the case, and yet to be unable to decipher it.

Rhyme’s eyes strayed to the evidence chart on the wall. The body was like the green fibers they’d found at the hangar – significant, Rhyme felt, but its meaning unknown.

“Anything else?” Rhyme asked the tour doctor from the medical examiner’s office. He’d accompanied the body here. He was a young man, balding, with dots of sweat in constellations on his crown. The doctor said, “He’s gay or, to be accurate, he’d lived a gay lifestyle when he was young. He’s had repeated anal intercourse though not for some years.”

Rhyme continued, “What does that scar tell you? Surgery?”

“Well, it’s a precise incision, but I don’t know of any reason to operate there. Maybe some intestinal blockage. But even then I’ve never heard of a procedure in that quadrant of the abdomen.”

Rhyme regretted Sachs was not here. He wanted to throw around ideas with her. She’d think of something he’d overlooked.

Who could he be? Rhyme racked his brain. Identification was a complex science. He’d established a man’s identity once with nothing more than a single tooth. But the procedure took time – usually weeks or months.

“Run blood type and DNA profile,” Rhyme said.

“Already ordered,” the tour doctor said. “I sent the samples downtown already.”

If he were HIV positive that might help them ID him through doctors or clinics. But without anything else to go on, the blood work wouldn’t be very helpful.

Fingerprint…

I’d give anything for a nice friction ridge print, Rhyme thought. Maybe -

“Wait!” Rhyme laughed out loud. “His dick!”

“What?” Sellitto blurted.

Dellray lifted an arching brow.

“He doesn’t have any hands, but what’s the one part of his anatomy he’d be sure to touch?”

“Penis,” Cooper called out. “If he peed in the last couple of hours we can probably get a print.”

“Who wants to do the honors?”

“No job too disgusting,” the tech said, do

“Perfect, Mel.”

“Don’t tell my girlfriend,” he said coyly. He fed the prints through the AFIS system.

The message came up on the screen: Please Wait… Please Wait…

Be on file, Rhyme thought desperately. Please be on file.

He was.

But when the results came back, Sellitto and Dellray, closest to Cooper’s computer, stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What the hell?” the detective said.

“What?” Rhyme cried. “Who is it?”

“It’s Kall.”

“What?”

“It’s Stephen Kall,” Cooper repeated. “It’s a twenty-point match. There’s no doubt.” Cooper found the composite print they’d constructed earlier to find the Dancer’s identity. He dropped it on the table next to the Kromekote. “It’s identical.”

How? Rhyme was wondering. How on earth?

“What if,” Sellitto said, “it’s Kall’s prints on this guy’s dick. What if Kall’s a bone smoker?”

“We’ve got genetic markers from Kall’s blood, right? From the water tower?”

“Right,” Cooper called.

“Compare them,” Rhyme called out. “I want a profile of the corpse’s markers. And I want it now.”

Poetry was not lost on him.

The “Coffin Dancer”… I like that, he thought. Much better than “Jodie” – the name he’d picked for this job because it was so unthreatening. A silly name, a diminutive name.

The Dancer…

Names were important, he knew. He read philosophy. The act of naming – of designating – is unique to humans. The Dancer now spoke silently to the late, dismembered Stephen Kall: It was me you heard about. I’m the one who calls my victims “corpses.” You call them Wives, Husbands, Friends, whatever you like.

But once I’m hired, they’re corpses. That’s all they are.

Wearing a U.S. marshal’s uniform, he started down the dim hallway from the bodies of the two officers. He hadn’t avoided the blood completely, of course, but in the murkiness of the enclave you couldn’t see that the navy blue uniform had patches of red on it.