Jeffery Deaver: The Coffin Dancer

In truth Rhyme was quite pleased with the system – the lightning-fast computer, a specially made ECU box – environmental control unit – and voice-recognition software. Merely by speaking he could command the cursor to do whatever a person using a mouse and keyboard could do. And he could dictate too. Now, with words, he could turn the heat up or down and the lights on or off, play the stereo or TV, write on his word processor, and make phone calls and send faxes.

“He can even write music,” Thom said to the visitors. “He tells the computer what notes to mark down on the staff.”

“Now that’s useful,” Rhyme said sourly. “Music.”

For a C4 quad – Rhyme’s injury was at the fourth cervical vertebra – nodding was easy. He could also shrug, though not as dismissingly as he’d have liked. His other circus trick was moving his left ring finger a few millimeters in any direction he chose. That had been his entire physical repertoire for the past several years; composing a sonata for the violin was probably not in the offing.

“He can play games too,” Thom said.

“I hate games. I don’t play games.”

Sellitto, who reminded Rhyme of a large unmade bed, gazed at the computer and seemed unimpressed. “ Lincoln,” he began gravely. “There’s a task-forced case. Us ’n’ the feds. Ran into a problem last night.”

“Ran into a brick wall,” Banks ventured to say.

“We thought… well, I thought you’d want to help us out on this one.”

Want to help them out?

“I’m working on something now,” Rhyme explained. “For Perkins, in fact.” Thomas Perkins, special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI. “One of Fred Dellray’s runners is missing.”

Special Agent Fred Dellray, a longtime veteran with the Bureau, was a handler for most of the Manhattan office’s undercover agents. Dellray himself had been one of the Bureau’s top undercover ops. He’d earned commendations from the director himself for his work. One of Dellray’s agents, Tony Panelli, had gone missing a few days earlier.

“Perkins told us,” Banks said. “Pretty weird.”

Rhyme rolled his eyes at the unartful phrase. Though he couldn’t dispute it. The agent had disappeared from his car across from the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan around 9p.m. The streets weren’t crowded but they weren’t deserted either. The engine of the Bureau’s Crown Victoria was running, the door open. There was no blood, no gunshot residue, no scuff marks indicating struggle. No witnesses – at least no witnesses willing to talk.

Pretty weird indeed.

Perkins had a fine crime scene unit at his disposal, including the Bureau’s Physical Evidence Response Team. But it had been Rhyme who’d set up PERT and it was Rhyme whom Dellray had asked to work the scene of the disappearance. The crime scene officer who worked as Rhyme’s partner had spent hours at Panelli’s car and had come away with no unidentified fingerprints, ten bags of meaningless trace evidence, and – the only possible lead – a few dozen grains of this very odd sand.

The grains that now glowed on his computer screen, as smooth and huge as heavenly bodies.

Sellitto continued. “Perkins’s gonna put other people on the Panelli case, Lincoln, if you’ll help us. Anyway, I think you’ll want this one.”

That verb again – want. What was this all about?

Rhyme and Sellitto had worked together on major homicide investigations some years ago. Hard cases – and public cases. He knew Sellitto as well as he knew any cop. Rhyme generally distrusted his own ability to read people (his ex-wife, Elaine, had said – often, and heatedly – that Rhyme could spot a shell casing a mile away and miss a human being standing in front of him) but he could see now that Sellitto was holding back.

“Okay, Lon. What is it? Tell me.”

Sellitto nodded toward Banks.

“Phillip Hansen,” the young detective said significantly, lifting a puny eyebrow.

Rhyme knew the name only from newspaper articles. Hansen – a large, hard-living businessman originally from Tampa, Florida – owned a wholesale company in Armonk, New York. It was remarkably successful and he’d become a multimillionaire thanks to it. Hansen had a good deal for a small-time entrepreneur. He never had to look for customers, never advertised, never had receivables problems. In fact, if there was any downside to PH Distributors, Inc., it was that the federal government and New York State were expending great energy to shut it down and throw its president in jail. Because the product Hansen’s company sold was not, as he claimed, secondhand military surplus vehicles but weaponry, more often than not stolen from military bases or imported illegally. Earlier in the year two army privates had been killed when a truckload of small arms was hijacked near the George Washington Bridge on its way to New Jersey. Hansen was behind it – a fact the U.S. attorney and the New York attorney general knew but couldn’t prove.

“Perkins and us’re hammering together a case,” Sellitto said. “Working with the army CID. But it’s been a bitch.”

“And nobody ever dimes him,” said Banks. “Ever.”

Rhyme supposed that, no, no one would dare snitch on a man like Hansen.

The young detective continued. “But finally, last week, we got a break. See, Hansen’s a pilot. His company’s got warehouses at Mamaroneck Airport – that one near White Plains? A judge issued paper to check ’ em out. Naturally we didn’t find anything. But then last week, it’s midnight? The airport’s closed but there’re some people there, working late. They see a guy fitting Hansen’s description drive out to this private plane, load some big duffel bags into it, and take off. Unauthorized. No flight plan, just takes off. Comes back forty minutes later, lands, gets back into his car, and burns rubber out of there. No duffel bags. The witnesses give the registration number to the FAA. Turns out it’s Hansen’s private plane, not his company’s.”

Rhyme said, “So he knew you were getting close and he wanted to ditch something linking him to the killings.” He was beginning to see why they wanted him. Some seeds of interest here. “Air Traffic Control track him?”

“LaGuardia had him for a while. Straight out over Long Island Sound. Then he dropped below radar for ten minutes or so.”

“And you drew a line to see how far he could get over the Sound. There’re divers out?”

“Right. Now, we knew that soon as Hansen heard we had the three witnesses he was gonna rabbit. So we managed to put him away till Monday. Federal Detention.”

Rhyme laughed. “You got a judge to buy probable cause on that?”

“Yeah, with the risk of flight,” Sellitto said. “And some bullshit FAA violations and reckless endangerment thrown in. No flight plan, flying below FAA minimums.”

“What’d Mis-ter Han-sen say?”

“He knows the drill. Not a word to the arrestings, not a word to the prosecutors. Lawyer denies everything and’s preparing suit for wrongful arrest, yadda, yadda, yadda… So if we find the fucking bags we go to the grand jury on Monday and, bang, he’s away.”

“Provided,” Rhyme pointed out, “there’s anything incriminating in the bags.”

“Oh, there’s something incriminating.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Hansen’s scared. He’s hired somebody to kill the witnesses. He’s already got one of ’em. Blew up his plane last night outside of Chicago.”

And, Rhyme thought, they want me to find the duffel bags… Fascinating questions were now floating into his mind. Was it possible to place the plane at a particular location over the water because of a certain type of precipitation or saline deposit or insect found crushed on the leading edge of the wing? Could one calculate the time of death of an insect? What about salt concentrations and pollutants in the water? Flying that low to the water, would the engines or wings pick up algae and deposit it on the fuselage or tail?