Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“You’ll have to trust me.”

Jodie sighed. “Okay, okay…”

“Make sure your hands are up or he will shoot.”

“Like this?” He lifted his arms.

“Step back so your face is in the shadows. Yeah, like that. I don’t want him to see your face… Good. Perfect.”

The footsteps were coming closer now. Walking softly. Hesitating.

Stephen touched his fingers to his lips and went prone, disappearing into the floor.

The footsteps grew soft and then paused. The figure appeared in the doorway. He was in body armor and wore an FBI windbreaker.

He pushed into the room, scanning with the flashlight attached to the end of his H &K. When the beam caught Jodie’s midriff he did something that astonished Stephen.

He started to pull the trigger.

It was very subtle. But Stephen had shot so many animals and so many people that he knew the ripple of muscles, the tension of stance, just before you fired your weapon.

Stephen moved fast. He leapt up, lifting the machine gun away and breaking off the man’s stalk microphone. Then he drove his k-bar knife up under the agent’s triceps, paralyzing his right arm. The man cried out in pain.

They’re green-lighted to kill! Stephen thought. No surrender pitch. They see me, they shoot. Armed or not.

Jodie cried, “Oh, my God!” He stepped forward uncertainly, hands still airborne – almost comically.

Stephen knocked the agent to his knees and pulled his Kevlar helmet over his eyes, gagged him with a rag.

“Oh, God, you stabbed him,” Jodie said, lowering his arms and walking forward.

“Shut up,” Stephen said. “What we talked about. The exit.”

“But -”

“Now.”

Jodie just stared.

“Now!” Stephen raged.

Jodie ran to the hole in the wall as Stephen pulled the agent to his feet and led him into the corridor.

Green-lighted to kill…

Lincoln the Worm had decided he’d die. Stephen was furious.

“Wait there,” he ordered Jodie.

Stephen plugged the headset back into the man’s transceiver and listened. They were on the Special Operations channel and there must have been a dozen or so cops and agents, calling in as they searched different parts of the building.

He didn’t have much time, but he had to slow them up.

Stephen led the dazed agent out into the yellow hallway.

He pulled out his knife again.

Hour 23 of 45

“DAMN. DAMN!” Rhyme snapped, flecking his chin with spittle. Thom stepped up to the chair and wiped it, but Rhyme angrily shook him away.

“Bo?” he called into his microphone.

“Go ahead,” Haumann said from the command van.

“I think somehow he made us and’s going to fight his way out. Tell your agents to form defensive teams. I don’t want anybody alone. Move everybody into the building. I think – ”

“Hold on… Hold on. Oh, no…”

“Bo? Sachs?… Anybody?”

But nobody answered.

Rhyme heard shouting voices through the radio. The transmission was cut off. Then staccato bursts: “…assistance. We’ve got a blood trail… In the office building. Right, right… no… downstairs… Basement. Innelman’s not reporting in. He was… basement. All units move, move. Come on, move!… ”

Rhyme called, “Bell, you hear me? Double up on the principals. Do not, repeat, do not leave them unguarded. The Dancer’s loose and we don’t know where he is.”

Roland Bell’s calm voice came over the line. “Got ’em under our wing. Nobody’s getting in here.”

An infuriating wait. Unbearable. Rhyme wanted to scream with frustration.

Where was he?

A snake in a dark room…

Then one by one the troopers and agents called in, telling Haumann and Dellray that they’d secured one floor after another.

Finally, Rhyme heard: “Basement’s secure. But Jesus Lord there’s a lot of blood down here. And Innelman’s gone. We can’t find him! Jesus, all this blood!”

“Rhyme, can you hear me?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m in the basement of the office building,” Amelia Sachs said into her stalk mike, looking around her.

The walls were filthy yellow concrete and the floors were painted battleship gray. But you hardly noticed the decor of the dank place; blood spatter was everywhere, like a horrific Jackson Pollock painting.

The poor agent, she thought. Innelman. Better find him fast. Someone bleeding this much couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.

“You have the kit?” Rhyme asked her.

“We don’t have time! All the blood, we’ve got to find him!”

“Steady, Sachs. The kit. Open the kit.”

She sighed. “All right! Got it.”

The crime scene blood kit contained a ruler, protractor with string attached, tape measure, the Kastle-Meyer Reagent presumptive field test. Luminol too – which detects iron oxide residue of blood even when a perp scrubs away all visual trace.

“It’s just a mess, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to figure out anything.”

“Oh, the scene’ll tell us more than you think, Sachs. It’ll tell us plenty.”

Well, if anybody could make sense of this macabre setting, it would be Rhyme; she knew that he and Mel Cooper were long-standing members of the International Association of Blood Pattern Analysts. (She didn’t know which was more disturbing – the gruesome blood spatter at crime scenes or the fact that there was a group of people who specialized in the subject.) But this seemed hopeless.

“We’ve got to find him…”

“Sachs, calm down… You with me?”

After a moment she said, “Okay.”

“All you need for now is the ruler,” he said. “First, tell me what you see.”

“There’re drips all over the place here.”

“Blood spatter’s very revealing. But it’s meaningless unless the surface it’s on is uniform. What’s the floor like?”

“Smooth concrete.”

“Good. How big are the drops? Measure them.”

“He’s dying , Rhyme.”

“How big?” he snapped.

“All different sizes. There’re hundreds of them about three-quarters of an inch. Some are bigger. About an inch and a quarter. Thousands of very little ones. Like a spray.”

“Forget the little ones. They’re ‘overcast’ drops, satellites of the others. Describe the biggest ones. Shape?”

“Mostly round.”

“Scalloped edges?”

“Yes,” she muttered. “But there are some that just have smooth edges. Here’re some in front of me. They’re a little smaller, though.”

Where is he? she wondered. Innelman. A man she’d never met. Missing and bleeding like a fountain.

“Sachs?”

“What?” she snapped.

“What about the smaller drops? Tell me about them.”

“We don’t have time to do this!”

“We don’t have time not to,” he said calmly.

God damn you, Rhyme, she thought, then said, “All right.” She measured. “They’re about a half inch. Perfectly round. No scalloped edges.”

“Where are those?” he asked urgently. “At one end of the corridor, or the other?”

“Mostly in the middle. There’s a storeroom at the end of the hall. Inside there and near it they’re bigger and have ragged or scalloped edges. At the other end of the corridor, they’re smaller.”

“Okay, okay,” Rhyme said absently, then he announced, “here’s the story… What’s the agent’s name?”

“Innelman. John Innelman. He’s a friend of Dellray’s.”

“The Dancer got Innelman in the storeroom, stabbed him once, high. Debilitated him, probably arm or neck. Those are the big, uneven drops. Then he led him down the corridor, stabbing him again, lower. Those are the smaller, rounder ones. The shorter the distance blood falls, the more even the edges.”