Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“Oh, it’s stable as clothesline,” Rhyme said absently, picturing what a thousand gallons of flaming gasoline would do to the neighborhood around the Twentieth Precinct.

I should’ve made them leave, he was thinking, Percey and Brit Hale. Put them into protective custody and sent them to Montana until the grand jury. This is damn nuts what I’m doing, this trap idea.

“ Lincoln?” Sellitto asked. “We’ve got to find that truck.”

“We’ve got a little time,” Rhyme said. “He’s not going to try to get in until the morning. He needs the cover story of a delivery. Anything else, Mel? Anything in the trace?”

Cooper scanned the vacuum filter. “Dirt and brick. Wait… here’re some fibers. Should I GC them?”

“Yes.”

The tech hunched over the screen as the results came up. “Okay, okay, it’s vegetable fiber. Consistent with paper. And I’m reading a compound… NH four OH.”

“Ammonium hydroxide,” Rhyme said.

“Ammonia?” Sellitto asked. “Maybe you’re wrong about the fertilizer bomb.”

“Any oil?” Rhyme asked.

“None.”

Rhyme asked, “The fiber with the ammonia – was it from the handle of the clipper?”

“No. It was on the clothes of the guard he beat up.”

Ammonia? Rhyme wondered. He asked Cooper to look at one of the fibers through the scanning electron microscope. “High magnification. How’s the ammonia attached?”

The screen clicked on. The strand of fiber appeared like a tree trunk.

“Heat fused, I’d guess.”

Another mystery. Paper and ammonia…

Rhyme looked at the clock. It was 2:40a.m.

Suddenly he realized Sellitto had asked him a question. He cocked his head.

“I said,” the detective repeated, “should we start evacuating everybody around the precinct? I mean, better now than wait till it’s closer to the time he might attack.”

For a long moment Rhyme gazed at the bluish tree trunk of fiber on the screen of the SEM. Then he said abruptly, “Yes. We have to get everybody out. Evacuate the buildings around the station house. Let’s think – the four apartments on either side and across the street.”

“That many?” Sellitto asked, giving a faint laugh. “You think we really gotta do that?”

Rhyme looked up at the detective and said, “No, I've changed my mind. The whole block. We’ve got to evacuate the whole block. Immediately. And get Haumann and Dellray over here. I don’t care where they are. I want them now.”

Hour 22 of 45

SOME OF THEM HAD SLEPT.

Sellitto in an armchair, waking more rumpled than ever, his hair askew. Cooper downstairs.

Sachs had apparently spent the night on a couch downstairs or in the other bedroom on the first floor. No interest in the Clinitron anymore.

Thom, himself bleary, was hovering, a dear busybody, taking Rhyme’s blood pressure. The smell of coffee filled the town house.

It was just after dawn and Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts. They’d been up till four, planning their strategy for snagging the Dancer – and responding to the legion of complaints about the evacuation.

Would this work? Would the Dancer step into their trap? Rhyme believed so. But there was another question, one that Rhyme didn’t like to think about but couldn’t avoid. How bad would springing the trap be? The Dancer was deadly enough on his own territory. What would he be like when he was cornered?

Thom brought coffee around and they looked over Dellray’s tactical map. Rhyme, back in the Storm Arrow, rolled into position and studied it too.

“Everybody in place?” he asked Sellitto and Dellray.

Both Haumann’s 32-E teams and Dellray’s federal pickup band of Southern and Eastern District FBI SWAT officers were ready. They’d moved in under cover of night, through sewers and basements and over rooftops, in full urban camouflage; Rhyme was convinced that the Dancer was surveiling his target.

“He won’t be sleeping tonight,” Rhyme had said.

“You sure he’s going in this way, Linc?” Sellitto’d asked uncertainly.

Sure? he thought testily. Who can be sure about anything with the Coffin Dancer?

His deadliest weapon is deception…

Rhyme said wryly, “Ninety-two point seven percent sure.”

Sellitto snorted a sour laugh.

It was then that the doorbell rang. A moment later a stocky, middle-aged man Rhyme didn’t recognize appeared in the doorway of the living room.

The sigh from Dellray suggested trouble brewing. Sellitto knew the man too, it seemed, and nodded cautiously.

He identified himself as Reginald Eliopolos, assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Rhyme recalled he was the prosecutor handling the Phillip Hansen case.

“You’re Lincoln Rhyme? Hear good things about you. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” He started forward, automatically offering his hand. Then he realized that the extended arm was wasted on Rhyme, so he simply pointed it toward Dellray, who shook it reluctantly. Eliopolos’s cheerful “Fred, good to see you” meant just the opposite and Rhyme wondered what was the source of the cold fusion between them.

The attorney ignored Sellitto and Mel Cooper. Thom instinctively sensed what was what and didn’t offer the visitor coffee.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Hear you’ve got quite an operation together. Not checking too much with the boys upstairs, but, hell, I know all about improvising. Sometimes you just can’t spend time waiting for signatures in triplicate.” Eliopolos walked up to a compound ’scope, peered through the eyepiece. “Uh-huh,” he said, though what he might be seeing was a mystery to Rhyme since the stage light was off.

“Maybe -” Rhyme began.

“The chase? Cut to the chase?” Eliopolos swung around. “Sure. Here it is. There’s an armored van at the Federal Building downtown. I want the witnesses in the Hansen case in it within the hour. Percey Clay and Brit Hale. They’ll be taken to the Shoreham federal protective reserve, on Long Island. They’ll be kept there until their grand jury testimony late on Monday. Period. End of chase. How’s that?”

“You think that’s a wise idea?”

“Uh-huh, we do. We think it’s wiser than using them as bait for some kind of personal vendetta by the NYPD.”

Sellitto sighed.

Dellray said, “Open your eyes little bit here, Reggie. You’re not exactly out of the loop. Do I see a joint operation? Do I see a task-forced operation?”

“And a good thing too,” Eliopolos said absently. His full attention was on Rhyme. “Tell me, did you really think that nobody downtown would remember that this was the perp killed your techs five years ago?”

Well, uh-huh , Rhyme had hoped that nobody would remember. And now that somebody had, he and the team were swimming in the soup pot.

“But, hey, hey,” the attorney said with jolly cheer, “I don’t want a turf war. Do I want that? Why would I want that? What I want is Phillip Hansen. What everybody wants is Hansen. Remember? He’s the big fish.”

As a matter of fact Rhyme had largely forgotten about Phillip Hansen and now that he’d been reminded he understood exactly what Eliopolos was doing. And the insight troubled him a great deal.

Rhyme snuck around Eliopolos like a coyote. “You’ve got yourself some good agents out there, do you,” he asked innocently, “who’ll protect the witnesses?”

“At Shoreham?” the attorney responded uncertainly. “Well, you bet we do. Uh-huh.”

“You’ve briefed them about security? About how dangerous the Dancer is?” Innocent as a babe.

A pause. “I’ve briefed them.”

“And what exactly are their orders?”