The Coffin Dancer

On his way to find corpse three.

The Wife, if you will, Stephen. What a mixed-up, nervous creature you were. With your scrubbed hands and your confused dick. The Husband, the Wife, the Friend…

Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, eliminate…

Ah, Stephen… I could have taught you there’s only one rule in this business: you stay one step ahead of every living soul.

He now had two pistols but wouldn’t use them yet. He wouldn’t think of acting prematurely. If he stumbled now he’d never have another chance to kill Percey Clay before the grand jury met later that morning.

Moving silently into a parlor where two more U.S. marshals sat, one reading a paper, one watching TV.

The first one glanced up at the Dancer, saw the uniform, and returned to the paper. Then looked up again.

“Wait,” the marshal said, suddenly realizing he didn’t recognize the face.

But the Dancer didn’t wait.

He answered with swish, swish to both carotid arteries. The man slid forward to die on page six of the Daily News so quietly that his partner never turned from the TV, where a blond woman wearing excessive gold jewelry was explaining how she met her boyfriend through a psychic.

“Wait? For what?” the second marshal asked, not looking away from the screen.

He died slightly more noisily than his partner but no one in the compound seemed to notice. The Dancer dragged the bodies flat, stowed them under a table.

At the back door he made certain there were no sensors on the door frame and then slipped outside. The two marshals in the front were vigilant, but their eyes were turned away from the house. One quickly glanced toward the Dancer, nodded a greeting, then turned back to his reco

As for the two in the back, at the guard station overlooking the lake, the Dancer came up behind them. He tickled the heart of one marshal with a stab in the back and then, swish, swish, sliced apart the throat of the second guard. Lying on the ground, the first marshal gave a plaintive scream as he died. But once again no one seemed to notice; the sound, the Dancer decided, was very much like the call of a loon, waking to the beautiful pink and gray dawn.

Rhyme and Sellitto were deep in bureaucratic debt by the time the fax of the DNA profile arrived. The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.

“Somebody killed him?” Sellitto muttered. His shirt was so wrinkled it looked like a fiber sample under five-hundred-times magnification. “Why?”

But why was not a criminalist’s question.

Evidence… Rhyme thought. Evidence was his only concern.

He glanced at the crime scene charts on his wall, sca

Analyze! Think!

You know the procedure. You’ve done it a million times.

You identify the facts. You quantify and categorize them. You state your assumptions. And you draw your conclusions. Then you test -

Assumptions, Rhyme thought.

There was one glaring assumption that had been present in this case from the begi

Deception…

If so, there’d be some evidence that didn’t fit. Something that pointed to the real Dancer.

He pored over the charts carefully.

But there was nothing unaccounted for except the green fiber. And that told him nothing.

“We don’t have any of Kall’s clothes, right?”

“No, he was buck naked when we found him,” the tour doctor said.

“We have anything he came in contact with?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Well, Jodie.”

Rhyme asked, “He changed clothes here, didn’t he?”

“Right,” Sellitto said.

“Bring ’ em here. Jodie ’s clothes. I want to look at them.”

“Uck,” Dellray said. “They’re excessively unpleasant.”

Cooper found and produced them. He brushed them out over sheets of clean newsprint. He mounted samples of the trace on slides and set them in the compound ’scope.

“What do we have?” Rhyme asked, looking over the computer screen, a copycat image of what Cooper was seeing in his microscope.

“What’s that white stuff?” Cooper asked. “Those grains. There’s a lot of it. It was in the seams of his pants.”

Rhyme felt his face flush. Some of it was his erratic blood pressure from exhaustion, some of it was the phantom pain that still plagued him every now and then. But mostly it was the heat of the chase.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

“What, Lincoln?”

“It’s oolite,” he a

“The fuck’s that?” Sellitto asked.

“Eggstone. It’s a wind-borne sand. You find it in the Bahamas.”

“Bahamas?” Cooper asked, frowning. “What else did we just hear about the Bahamas?” He looked around the lab. “I don’t remember.”

But Rhyme did. His eyes were seated on the bulletin board, where was pi

He read:

“Substance submitted for analysis is not technically sand. It is coral rubble from reef formations and contains spicules, cross sections of marine worm tubes, gastropod shells, and foraminifers. Most likely source is the northern Caribbean: Cuba, the Bahamas.”

Dellray’s agent, Rhyme reflected… A man who’d know where the most secure federal safe house in Manhattan was. Who’d tell whoever was torturing him the address.

So that the Dancer could wait there, wait for Stephen Kall to show up, befriend him, and then arrange to get captured and get close to the victims.

“The drugs!” Rhyme cried.

“What?” Sellitto asked.

“What was I thinking of? Dealers don’t cut prescription drugs! It’s too much trouble. Only street drugs!”

Cooper nodded. “Jodie wasn’t cutting them with the baby formula. He just dumped out the drugs. He was popping placebos, so we’d think he was a druggie.”

“Jodie’s the Dancer,” Rhyme called. “Get on the phone! Call the safe house now!”

Sellitto picked up the phone and dialed.

Was it too late?

Oh, Amelia, what’ve I done? Have I killed you?

The sky was turning a metallic rosy color.

A siren sounded far away.

The peregrine falcon – the tiercel, he remembered – was awake and about to go hunting.

Lon Sellitto looked up desperately from the phone. “There’s no answer,” he said.

chapter thirty-seven

Hour 44 of 45

THEY’D TALKED FOR A WHILE, the three of them, in Percey’s room.

Talked about airplanes and cars and police work.

Then Bell went off to bed and Percey and Sachs had talked about men.

Finally Percey’d lain back on the bed, closed her eyes. Sachs lifted the bourbon glass from the sleeping woman’s hand and shut out the lights. Decided to try to sleep herself.

She now paused in the corridor to look out at the dim dawn sky – pink and orange – when she realized that the phone in the compound’s main hallway had been ringing for a long time.

Why wasn’t anybody answering it?

She continued down the corridor.

She couldn’t see the two guards nearby. The enclave seemed darker than before. Most of the lights had been shut off. A gloomy place, she thought. Spooky. Smelling of pine and mold. Something else? Another smell that was very familiar to her. What?

Something from crime scenes. In her exhaustion she couldn’t place it.