Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Sachs walked into the room and glanced at Percey and Rhyme.

He introduced them.

“Amelia?” Percey asked. “Your name’s Amelia?”

Sachs nodded.

A faint smile passed over Percey’s face. She turned slightly and shared it with Rhyme.

“I wasn’t named after her – the flier,” Sachs said, recalling, Rhyme guessed, that Percey was a pilot. “One of my grandfather’s sisters. Was Amelia Earhart a hero?”

“No,” Percey said. “Not really. It’s just kind of a coincidence.”

Hale said, “You’re going to have guards for her, aren’t you? Full-time?” He nodded at Percey.

“Sure, you bet,” Dellray said.

“Okay,” Hale announced. “Good… One thing. I was thinking you really ought to have a talk with that guy. Phillip Hansen.”

“A talk?” Rhyme queried.

“With Hansen?” Sellitto asked. “Sure. But he’s denying everything and won’t say a word more’n that.” He looked at Rhyme. “Had the Twins on him for a while.” Then back to Hale. “They’re our best interrogators. And he stonewalled completely. No luck so far.”

“Can’t you threaten him… or something?”

“Uhm, no,” the detective said. “Don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rhyme continued. “There’s nothing Hansen could tell us anyway. The Dancer never meets his clients face-to-face and he never tells them how he’s going to do the job.”

“The Dancer?” Percey asked.

“That’s the name we have for the killer. The Coffin Dancer.”

“Coffin Dancer?” Percey gave a faint laugh, as if the phrase meant something to her. But she didn’t elaborate.

“Well, that’s a little spooky,” Hale said dubiously, as if cops shouldn’t have eerie nicknames for their bad guys. Rhyme supposed he was right.

Percey looked into Rhyme’s eyes, nearly as dark as hers. “So what happened to you? You get shot?”

Sachs – and Hale too – stirred at these blunt words but Rhyme didn’t mind. He preferred people like himself – those with no use for pointless tact. He said equably, “I was searching a crime scene at a construction site. A beam collapsed. Broke my neck.”

“Like that actor. Christopher Reeve.”

“Yes.”

Hale said, “That was tough. But, man, he’s brave. I’ve seen him on TV. I think I would’ve killed myself if that’d happened.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who caught his eye. He turned back to Percey. “We need your help. We have to figure out how he got that bomb on board. Do you have any idea?”

“None,” Percey said, then looked at Hale, who shook his head.

“Did you see anyone you didn’t recognize near the plane before the flight?”

“I was sick last night,” Percey said. “I didn’t even go to the airport.”

Hale said, “I was upstate, fishing. I had the day off. Didn’t get home till late.”

“Where exactly was the plane before it took off?”

“It was in our hangar. We were outfitting it for the new charter. We had to take seats out, install special racks with heavy-duty power outlets. For the refrigeration units. You know what the cargo was, don’t you?”

“Organs,” Rhyme said. “Human organs. Do you share the hangar with any other company?”

“No, it’s ours. Well, we lease it.”

“How easy is it to get inside?” Sellitto asked.

“It’s locked if nobody’s around but the past couple days we’ve had crews working twenty-four hours to outfit the Lear.”

“You know the crew?” Sellitto asked.

“They’re like family,” Hale said defensively.

Sellitto rolled his eyes at Banks. Rhyme supposed that the detective was thinking that family members were always the first suspects in a murder case.

“We’ll take the names anyway, you don’t mind. Check ’em out.”

“Sally Anne, she’s our office manager,’ll get you a list.”

“You’ll have to seal the hangar,” Rhyme said. “Keep everybody out.”

Percey was shaking her head. “We can’t -”

“Seal it,” he repeated. “Everybody out. Every… body.”

“But -”

Rhyme said, “We have to.”

“Whoa,” Percey said, “hold up there.” She looked at Hale. “Foxtrot Bravo?”

He shrugged. “Ron said it’ll take another day at least.”

Percey sighed. “The Learjet that Ed was flying was the only one outfitted for the charter. There’s another flight scheduled for tomorrow night. We’ll have to work nonstop to get the other plane ready. We can’t close the hangar.”

Rhyme said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t an option.”

Percey blinked. “Well, I don’t know who you are to give me options…”

“I’m somebody trying to save your life,” Rhyme snapped.

“I can’t risk losing this contract.”

“Hold up, miss,” Dellray said. “You’re not understandin’ this bad guy…”

“He killed my husband,” she responded in a flinty voice. “I understand him perfectly. But I’m not being bullied into losing this job.”

Sachs’s hands went to her hips. “Hey, hold up there. If there’s anybody who can save your skin, it’s Lincoln Rhyme. I don’t think we need an attitude here.”

Rhyme’s voice broke into the argument. He asked calmly, “Can you give us an hour for the search?”

“An hour?” Percey considered this.

Sachs gave a laugh and turned her surprised eyes on her boss. She asked, “Search a hangar in an hour? Come on, Rhyme.” Her face said: Here I am defending you and now you’re pulling this? Whose side are you on?

Some criminalists assigned teams to search crime scenes. But Rhyme always insisted that Amelia Sachs search alone, just as he’d done. A single CS searcher had a focus that couldn’t be achieved with other people on the scene. An hour was an extraordinarily brief time for a single person to cover a large scene. Rhyme knew this but he didn’t respond to Sachs. He kept his eyes on Percey. She said, “An hour? All right. I can live with that.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs protested, “I’ll need more time.”

“Ah, but you’re the best, Amelia,” he joshed. Which meant the decision had already been made.

“Who can help us up there?” Rhyme asked Percey.

“Ron Talbot. He’s a partner in the company and our operations manager.”

Sachs jotted the name in her watch book. “Should I go now?” she asked.

“No,” Rhyme responded. “I want you to wait until we have the bomb from the Chicago flight. I need you to help me analyze it.”

“I only have an hour,” she said testily. “Remember?”

“You’ll have to wait,” he grumbled. Then asked Fred Dellray, “What about the safe house?”

“Oh, we got a place you’ll like,” the agent said to Percey. “In Manhattan. Your taxpayer dollars be working hard. Yep, yep. U.S. marshals use it for the crème de la crème in witness protection. Only thing is, we need somebody from NYPD for baby-sitting detail. Somebody who knows and appreciates the Dancer.”

And just then Jerry Banks looked up, wondering why everybody was staring at him. “What?” he asked. “What?” And tried in vain to pat down his persistent cowlick.

Stephen Kall, talker of soldier talk, shooter of soldier guns, had never in fact been a soldier.

But he now said to Sheila Horowitz, “I’m proud of my military heritage. And that’s the truth.”

“Some people don’t -”

“No,” he interrupted, “some people don’t respect you for it. But that’s their problem.”

“It is their problem,” Sheila echoed.

“You have a nice place here.” He looked around the dump, filled with Conran’s markdowns.

“Thank you, friend. Uhm, you, like, want something to drink? Oopsie, there I go using that old preposition the wrong way. Mom’s always after me. Watching too much TV. Like, like, like. Shamie shamie.”