Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“Is poor Buddy sicky-wicky?”

“Just a checkup.”

“Oh, good for you. Watch out for those worms.”

“How’s that?” he asked, alarmed.

“You know, like heartworm.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Uhm, if you’re good, friend,” Sheila said, sing-songy again, “maybe I’ll introduce you to Garfield, Andrea, and Essie. Well, it’s really Esmeralda but she’d never approve of that, of course.”

“They sound so wonderful,” he said, gazing at the pictures Sheila’d dug from her wallet. “I’d love to meet them.”

“You know,” she blurted, “I only live three blocks away.”

“Hey, got an idea.” He looked bright. “Maybe I could drop this stuff off and meet your babies. Then you could help me collect Buddy.”

“Neat-o,” Sheila said.

“Let’s go.”

Outside, she said, “Ooo, look at all the police. What’s going on?”

“Wow. Dunno.” Stephen slung the backpack over his shoulder. Something metal clinked. Maybe a flash grenade banged against his Beretta.

“What’s in there?”

“Musical instruments. For the kids.”

“Oh, like triangles?”

“Yeah, like triangles.”

“You want me to carry your guitar?”

“You mind?”

“Uhm, I think it’d be neat.”

She took the Fender case and slipped her arm through his and they walked past a cluster of cops, blind to the loving couple, and continued down the street, laughing and talking about those crazy cats.

Hour 1 of 45

THOM APPEARED IN LINCOLN RHYME’S doorway and motioned someone inside.

A trim, crew-cut man in his fifties. Captain Bo Haumann, head of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit – the police’s SWAT team. Grizzled and tendony, Haumann looked like the drill sergeant he’d been in the service. He spoke slowly and reasonably, and he looked you dead in the eye, with a faint smile, when he talked. In tactical operations he was often suited up in flak jacket and Nomex hood and was usually one of the first officers through the door in a dynamic barricade entry.

“It’s really him?” the captain asked. “The Dancer?”

“S’what we heard,” Sellitto said.

The slight pause, which from the gray-haired cop was like a loud sigh from anyone else. Then he said, “I’ve got a couple of Thirty-two-E teams dedicated.”

Thirty-two-E officers, nicknamed after their operations room at Police Plaza, were an unkept secret Officially called Special Procedures Officers of the Emergency Services Unit, the men and women were mostly ex-military and had been relentlessly instructed in full S &S procedures – search and surveillance – as well as assault, sniping, and hostage rescue. There weren’t many of them. The city’s tough reputation notwithstanding, there were relatively few tactical operations in New York and the city’s hostage negotiators – considered the best in the country – usually resolved standoffs before an assault was necessary. Haumann’s committing two teams, which totaled ten officers, to the Dancer would have used up most of the 32-Es.

A moment later a slight, balding man wearing very unstylish glasses entered the room. Mel Cooper was the best lab man in IRD, the department’s Investigation and Resources Division, which Rhyme used to head. He’d never searched a crime scene, never arrested a perp, had probably forgotten how to fire the slim pistol he grudgingly wore on the back of his old leather belt. Cooper had no desire to be anywhere in the world except sitting on a lab stool, peering into microscopes and analyzing friction ridge prints (well, there and on the ballroom dance floor, where he was an award-winning tango dancer).

“Detective,” Cooper said, using the title that Rhyme had carried when he’d hired Cooper away from Albany PD some years ago, “thought I was going to be looking at sand. But I hear it’s the Dancer.” There’s only one place the word travels faster than on the street, Rhyme reflected, and that’s inside the Police Department itself. “We’ll get him this time, Lincoln. We’ll get him.”

As Banks briefed the newcomers Rhyme happened to look up. He saw a woman in the doorway of the lab. Dark eyes scanning the room, taking it all in. Not cautious, not uneasy.

“Mrs. Clay?” he asked.

She nodded. A lean man appeared in the doorway beside her. Britton Hale, Rhyme assumed.

“Please come in,” the criminalist said.

She stepped into the middle of the room, glancing at Rhyme, then at the wall of forensic equipment near Mel Cooper.

“Percey,” she said. “Call me Percey. You’re Lincoln Rhyme?”

“That’s right. I’m very sorry about your husband.”

She nodded briskly, seemed uncomfortable with the sympathy.

Just like me, Rhyme thought.

He asked the man standing beside Percey, “And you’re Mr. Hale?”

The lanky pilot nodded and stepped forward to shake hands, then noticed Rhyme’s arms were strapped to the wheelchair. “Oh,” he muttered, then blushed. He stepped back.

Rhyme introduced them to the rest of the team, everyone except Amelia Sachs, who – at Rhyme’s insistence – was changing out of her uniform and putting on the jeans and sweatshirt that happened to be hanging upstairs in Rhyme’s closet. He’d explained that the Dancer often killed or wounded cops as a diversion; he wanted her to look as civilian as possible.

Percey pulled a flask from her slacks pocket, a silver flask, and took a short sip. She drank the liquor – Rhyme smelled expensive bourbon – as if it were medicine.

Betrayed by his own body, Rhyme rarely paid attention to the physical qualities in others, except victims and perps. But Percey Clay was hard to ignore. She wasn’t much over five feet tall. Yet she radiated a distilled intensity. Her eyes, black as midnight, were captivating. Only after you managed to look away from them did you notice her face, which was un-pretty – pug and tomboyish. She had a tangle of black curly hair, cropped short, though Rhyme thought that long tresses would soften the angular shape of her face. She didn’t adopt the cloaking mannerisms of some short people – hands on hips, crossed arms, hands hovering in front of the mouth. She offered as few gratuitous gestures as Rhyme did, he realized.

A sudden thought came to him: she’s like a Gypsy.

He realized that she was studying him too. And hers seemed to be a curious reaction. Seeing him for the first time, most people slap a dumb grin on their faces, blush red as fruit, and force themselves to stare fixedly at Rhyme’s forehead so their eyes won’t drop accidentally to his damaged body. But Percey looked once at his face – handsome with its trim lips and Tom Cruise nose, a face younger than its forty-some years – and once at his motionless legs and arms and torso. But her attention focused immediately on the crip equipment – the glossy Storm Arrow wheelchair, the sip-and-puff controller, the headset, the computer.

Thom entered the room and walked up to Rhyme to take his blood pressure.

“Not now,” his boss said.

“Yes now.”

“No.”

“Be quiet,” Thom said and took the pressure reading anyway. He pulled off the stethoscope. “Not bad. But you’re tired and you’ve been way too busy lately. You need some rest.”

“Go away,” Rhyme grumbled. He turned back to Percey Clay. Because he was a crip, a quad, because he was merely a portion of a human being, visitors often seemed to think he couldn’t understand what they were saying; they spoke slowly or even addressed him through Thom. Percey now spoke to him conversationally and earned many points from him for doing this. “You think we’re in danger, Brit and me?”

“Oh, you are. Serious danger.”