Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Bell called on his walkie-talkie. “Principals in position.” A moment later two uniformed policemen appeared in the corridor. They nodded and one of them said, “We’ll be out here. Full-time.” Curiously, their New York twang didn’t seem that different from Bell ’s resonant drawl.

“That was good,” Bell said to Percey.

She raised an eyebrow.

“You checked his ID. Nobody’s gonna get the bulge on you.”

She smiled wanly.

Bell said to Percey, “Now, we’ve got two men with your mother-in-law in New Jersey. Any other family needs watching?”

Percey said she didn’t, not in the area.

He repeated the question to Hale, who answered, with a rueful grin, “Not unless an ex-wife’s considered family. Well, wives.”

“Okay. Cats’r dogs need watering?”

“Nope,” Percey said. Hale shook his head.

“Then we may’s well just ree-lax. No phone calls from cell phones if you’ve got one. Only use that line there. Remember the windows and curtains. Over there, that’s a panic button. Worse comes to worst, and it won’t, you hit it and drop to the ground. Now, you need anything, just give me a holler.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Percey said. She held up the silver flask.

“Well, now,” Bell drawled, “you want me to help you empty it, I’m afraid I’m still on duty. But ’preciate the offer. You want me to help you fill it, why, that’s a done deal.”

Their scam didn’t make the five o’clock news.

But three transmissions went out unscrambled on a citywide police channel, informing the precincts about a 10-66 secure operation at the Twentieth Precinct and broadcasting a 10-67 traffic advisory about street closures on the Upper West Side. All suspects apprehended within the borders of the Twentieth were to be taken directly to Central Booking and the Men’s or Women’s Detention Center downtown. No one would be allowed in or out of the precinct without a special okay from the FBI. Or the FAA – Dellray’s touch.

As this was being broadcast, Bo Haumann’s 32-E teams went into position around the station house.

Haumann was now in charge of that portion of the operation. Fred Dellray was putting together a federal hostage rescue team in case they discovered the cat lady’s identity and her apartment. Rhyme, along with Sachs and Cooper, continued to work the evidence from the crime scenes.

There were no new clues, but Rhyme wanted Sachs and Cooper to reexamine what they’d already found. This was criminalistics – you looked and looked and looked, and then, when you couldn’t find anything, you looked some more. And when you hit the inevitable brick wall, you kept right on looking.

Rhyme had wheeled up close to his computer and was ordering it to magnify images of the timer found in the wreckage of Ed Carney’s plane. The timer itself might have been useless, because it was so generic, but Rhyme wondered if it might not contain a little trace or even a partial latent print. Bombers often believe that fingerprints are destroyed in the detonation and will shun gloves when working with the tinier components of the devices. But the blast itself will not necessarily destroy prints. Rhyme now ordered Cooper to fume the timer in the SuperGlue frame and, when that revealed nothing, to dust it with the Magna-Brush, a technique for raising prints that uses fine magnetic powder. Once again he found nothing.

Finally he ordered that the sample be bombarded by the nit-yag, slang for a garnet laser that was state-of-the-art in raising otherwise invisible prints. Cooper was looking at the image under the ’scope while Rhyme examined it on his computer screen.

Rhyme gave a short laugh, squinted, then looked again, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“Is that?… Look. Lower right-hand corner!” Rhyme called.

But Cooper and Sachs could see nothing.

His computer-enhanced image had found something that Cooper’s optical ’scope had missed. On the lip of metal that had protected the timer from being blown to smithereens was a faint crescent of ridge endings, crossings, and bifurcations. It was no more than a sixteenth of an inch wide and maybe a half inch long.

“It’s a print,” Rhyme said.

“Not enough to compare,” Cooper said, gazing at Rhyme’s screen.

There are a total of about 150 individual ridge characteristics in a single fingerprint but an expert can determine a match with only eight to sixteen ridge matches. Unfortunately this sample didn’t even provide half that.

Still, Rhyme was excited. The criminalist who couldn’t twist the focus knob of a compound ’scope had found something that the others hadn’t. Something he probably would have missed if he’d been “normal.”

He ordered the computer to load a screen capture program and he saved the print as a.bmp file, not compressing it to.jpg, to avoid any risk of corrupting the image. He printed out a hard copy on his laser printer and had Thom tape it up next to the crash-site-scene evidence board.

The phone rang and, with his new system, Rhyme tidily answered the call and turned on the speaker-phone.

It was the Twins.

Also known by the affectionate handle “the Hardy Boys,” this pair of Homicide detectives worked out of the Big Building, One Police Plaza. They were interrogators and canvassers – the cops who interview residents, bystanders, and witnesses after a crime – and these two were considered the best in the city. Even Lincoln Rhyme, with his distrust of the powers of human observation and recall, respected them.

Despite their delivery.

“Hey, Detective. Hey, Lincoln,” said one of them. Their names were Bedding and Saul. In person, you could hardly tell them apart. Over the phone, Rhyme didn’t even try.

“What’ve you got?” he asked. “Find the cat lady?”

“This one was easy. Seven veterinarians, two boarding services -”

“Made sense to hit them too. And -”

“We did three pet-walking companies too. Even though -”

“Who walks cats, right? But they also feed and water and change the litter when you’re away. Figured it couldn’t hurt.”

“Three of the vets had a maybe, but they weren’t sure. They were pretty big operations.”

“Lotsa animals on the Upper East Side. You’d be surprised. Maybe you wouldn’t.”

“And so we had to call employees at home. You know, doctors, assistants, washers -”

“That’s a job. Pet washer. Anyway, a receptionist at a vet on Eighty-second was thinking it might be this customer Sheila Horowitz. She’s mid-thirties, short dark hair, heavyset. Has three cats. One black and the other blond. They don’t know the color on the third one. She lives on Lexington between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth.”

Five blocks from Percey’s town house.

Rhyme thanked them and told them to stay on call, then barked, “Get Dellray’s teams over there now! You too, Sachs. Whether he’s there or not, we’ll have a scene to search. I think we’re getting close. Can you feel it, everybody? We’re getting close!”

Percey Clay was telling Roland Bell about her first solo flight.

Which didn’t go quite as she planned.

She’d taken off from the small grass strip four miles outside of Richmond, feeling the familiar ka-thunk ka-thunk as the Cessna’s gear bounded over the rough spots just before she hit V1 speed. Then back on the yoke and the crisp little 150 took to the air. A humid spring afternoon, just like this one.

“Must’ve been exciting,” Bell offered, with a curiously dubious look.

“Got more so,” Percey said, then took a hit from the flask.

Twenty minutes later the engine quit over the Wilderness in eastern Virginia, a nightmare of brambles and loblolly pine. She set the staunch plane down on a dirt road, cleared the fuel line herself, and took off once again, returning home without incident.