Jeffery Deaver: The Coffin Dancer

As he waited, Carney and Tim went through the litany of the pre-landing check.

“Flaps approach… twenty degrees.”

“Twenty, twenty, green,” Carney responded.

“Speed check.”

“One hundred eighty knots.”

As Tim spoke into his mike – “Chicago, Niner Charlie Juliet , crossing the numbers; through five for four” – Carney heard the phone start to ring in their Manhattan town house, seven hundred miles away.

Come on, Percey. Pick up! Where are you?

Please…

ATC said, “Niner Charlie Juliet , reduce speed to one eight zero. Contact tower. Good evening.”

“Roger, Chicago. One eight zero knots. Evening.”

Three rings.

Where the hell is she? What’s wrong?

The knot in his gut grew tighter.

The turbofan sang, a grinding sound. Hydraulics moaned. Static crackled in Carney’s headset.

Tim sang out, “Flaps thirty. Gear down.”

“Flaps, thirty, thirty, green. Gear down. Three green.”

And then, at last – in his earphone – a sharp click.

His wife’s voice saying, “Hello?”

He laughed out loud in relief.

Carney started to speak but, before he could, the aircraft gave a huge jolt – so vicious that in a fraction of a second the force of the explosion ripped the bulky headset from his ears and the men were flung forward into the control panel. Shrapnel and sparks exploded around them.

Stunned, Carney instinctively grabbed the unresponsive yoke with his left hand; he no longer had a right one. He turned toward Tim just as the man’s bloody, rag-doll body disappeared out of the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.

“Oh, God. No, no…”

Then the entire cockpit broke away from the disintegrating plane and rose into the air, leaving the fuselage and wings and engines of the Lear behind, engulfed in a ball of gassy fire.

“Oh, Percey,” he whispered, “Percey…” Though there was no longer a microphone to speak into.

BIG AS ASTEROIDS, BONE YELLOW.

The grains of sand glowed on the computer screen. The man was sitting forward, neck aching, eyes in a hard squint – from concentration, not from any flaw in vision.

In the distance, thunder. The early morning sky was yellow and green and a storm was due at any moment. This had been the wettest spring on record.

Grains of sand.

“Enlarge,” he commanded, and dutifully the image on the computer doubled in size.

Strange, he thought.

“Cursor down… stop.”

Leaning forward again, straining, studying the screen.

Sand, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, is a criminalist’s delight: bits of rock, sometimes mixed with other material, ranging from.05 to 2 millimeters (larger than that is gravel, smaller is silt). It adheres to a perp’s clothing like sticky paint and conveniently leaps off at crime scenes and hideouts to link murderer and murdered. It also can tell a great deal about where a suspect has been. Opaque sand means he’s been in the desert. Clear means beaches. Hornblende means Canada. Obsidian, Hawaii. Quartz and opaque igneous rock, New England. Smooth gray magnetite, the western Great Lakes.

But where this particular sand had come from, Rhyme didn’t have a clue. Most of the sand in the New York area was quartz and feldspar. Rocky on Long Island Sound, dusty on the Atlantic, muddy on the Hudson. But this was white, glistening, ragged, mixed with tiny red spheres. And what are those rings? White stone rings like microscopic slices of calamari. He’d never seen anything like this.

The puzzle had kept Rhyme up till 4a.m. He’d just sent a sample of the sand to a colleague at the FBI’s crime lab in Washington. He’d had it shipped off with great reluctance – Lincoln Rhyme hated someone else’s answering his own questions.

Motion at the window beside his bed. He glanced toward it. His neighbors – two compact peregrine falcons – were awake and about to go hunting. Pigeons beware, Rhyme thought. Then he cocked his head, muttering, “Damn,” though he was referring not to his frustration with this uncooperative evidence but at the impending interruption.

Urgent footsteps were on the stairs. Thom had let visitors in and Rhyme didn’t want visitors. He glanced toward the hallway angrily. “Oh, not now, for God’s sake.”

But they didn’t hear, of course, and wouldn’t have paused even if they had.

Two of them…

One was heavy. One not.

A fast knock on the open door and they entered.

“ Lincoln.”

Rhyme grunted.

Lon Sellitto was a detective first grade, NYPD, and the one responsible for the giant steps. Padding along beside him was his slimmer, younger partner, Jerry Banks, spiffy in his pork gray suit of fine plaid. He’d doused his cowlick with spray – Rhyme could smell propane, isobutane, and vinyl acetate – but the charming spike still stuck up like Dagwood’s.

The rotund man looked around the second-floor bedroom, which measured twenty by twenty. Not a picture on the wall. “What’s different, Linc? About the place?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, hey, I know – it’s clean,” Banks said, then stopped abruptly as he ran into his faux pas.

“Clean, sure,” said Thom, immaculate in ironed tan slacks, white shirt, and the flowery tie that Rhyme thought was pointlessly gaudy though he himself had bought it, mail order, for the man. The aide had been with Rhyme for several years now – and though he’d been fired by Rhyme twice, and quit once, the criminalist had rehired the unflappable nurse/assistant an equal number of times. Thom knew enough about quadriplegia to be a doctor and had learned enough forensics from Lincoln Rhyme to be a detective. But he was content to be what the insurance company called a “caregiver,” though both Rhyme and Thom disparaged the term. Rhyme called him, variously, his “mother hen” or “nemesis,” both of which delighted the aide no end. He now maneuvered around the visitors. “He didn’t like it but I hired Molly Maids and got the place scrubbed down. Practically needed to be fumigated. He wouldn’t talk to me for a whole day afterwards.”

“It didn’t need to be cleaned. I can’t find anything.”

“But then he doesn’t have to find anything, does he?” Thom countered. “That’s what I’m for.”

No mood for banter. “Well?” Rhyme cast his handsome face toward Sellitto. “What?”

“Got a case. Thought you might wanta help.”

“I’m busy.”

“What’s all that?” Banks asked, motioning toward a new computer sitting beside Rhyme’s bed.

“Oh,” Thom said with infuriating cheer, “he’s state of the art now. Show them, Lincoln. Show them.”

“I don’t want to show them.”

More thunder but not a drop of rain. Nature, as often, was teasing today.

Thom persisted. “Show them how it works.”

“Don’t want to.”

“He’s just embarrassed.”

“Thom,” Rhyme muttered.

But the young aide was as oblivious to threats as he was to recrimination. He tugged his hideous, or stylish, silk tie. “I don’t know why he’s behaving this way. He seemed very proud of the whole setup the other day.”

“Did not.”

Thom continued. “That box there” – he pointed to a beige contraption – “that goes to the computer.”

“Whoa, two hundred megahertz?” Banks asked, nodding at the computer. To escape Rhyme’s scowl he’d grabbed the question like an owl snagging a frog.

“Yep,” Thom said.

But Lincoln Rhyme was not interested in computers. At the moment Lincoln Rhyme was interested only in microscopic rings of sculpted calamari and the sand they nestled in.

Thom continued. “The microphone goes into the computer. Whatever he says, the computer recognizes. It took the thing a while to learn his voice. He mumbled a lot.”