Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

The New York City subway system extends for over 250 miles and incorporates more than a dozen separate tunnels that crisscross four of the five boroughs (Staten Island only being excluded, though the islanders, of course, have a famous ferry of their very own).

A satellite could find a sailboat adrift in the North Atlantic quicker than Lincoln Rhyme’s team could locate two men hiding in the New York subway.

The criminalist, Sellitto, Sachs, and Cooper were poring over a map of the system taped inelegantly to Lincoln Rhyme’s wall. Rhyme’s eyes scanned the different-colored lines representing the various routes, blue for Eighth Avenue, green for Lex, red for Broadway.

Rhyme had a special relationship with the cantankerous system. It was in the pit of a subway construction site that an oak beam had split and crushed Rhyme’s spine – just as he’d said, “Ah,” and leaned forward to lift a fiber, golden as an angel’s hair, from the body of a murder victim.

Yet even before the accident, subways played an important role in NYPD forensics. Rhyme studied them diligently when he was running IRD: because they covered so much terrain and incorporated so many different kinds of building materials over the years, you could often link a perp to a particular subway line, if not his neighborhood and station, on the basis of good trace evidence alone. Rhyme had collected subway exemplars for years – some of the samples dating to the prior century. (It had been in the 1860s that Alfred Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun and Scientific American , decided to adapt his idea of transmitting mail via small pneumatic tubes to moving people in large ones.)

Rhyme now ordered his computer to dial a number and in a few moments was connected with Sam Hoddleston, chief of the Transit Authority Police. Like the Housing Police, they were regular New York City cops, no different from NYPD, merely assigned to the transportation system. Hoddleston knew Rhyme from the old days and the criminalist could hear in the silence after he identified himself some fast mental tap-dancing; Hoddleston, like many of Rhyme’s former colleagues, didn’t know that Rhyme had returned from the near dead.

“Should we power-off any of the lines?” Hoddleston asked after Rhyme briefed him about the Dancer and his partner. “Do a field search?”

Sellitto heard the question on the speakerphone and shook his head.

Rhyme agreed. “No, we don’t want to tip our hand. Anyway, I think he’s in an abandoned area.”

“There aren’t many empty stations,” Hoddleston said. “But there’re a hundred deserted spurs and yards, work areas. Say, Lincoln, how’re you doing? I-”

“Fine, Sam. I’m fine,” Rhyme said briskly, deflecting the question as he always did. Then added, “We were talking – we think they’re probably going to stick to foot. Stay off the trains themselves. So we’re guessing they’re in Manhattan. We’ve got a map here and we’re going to need your help in narrowing it down some.”

“Whatever I can do,” the chief said. Rhyme couldn’t remember what he looked like. From his voice he sounded fit and athletic, but then Rhyme supposed he himself might seem like an Olympian to someone who couldn’t see his destroyed body.

Rhyme now considered the rest of the evidence that Sachs had found in the building next to the safe house – the evidence left by the Dancer’s partner.

He said to Hoddleston, “The dirt has a high moisture content and’s loaded with feldspar and quartz sand.”

“I remember you always like your dirt, Lincoln.”

“Useful, soil is,” he said, then continued. “Very little rock and none of it blasted or chipped, no limestone or Manhattan mica schist. So we’re looking at downtown. And from the amount of old wood particles, probably closer to Canal Street.”

North of Twenty-seventh Street the bedrock lies close to the surface of Manhattan. South of that, the ground is dirt, sand, and clay, and it’s very damp. When the sandhogs were digging the subways years ago the soupy ground around Canal Street would flood the shaft. Twice a day all work had to cease while the tunnel was pumped out and the walls shored up with timber, which over the years had rotted away into the soil.

Hoddleston wasn’t optimistic. Although Rhyme’s information limited the geographic area, he explained, there were dozens of connecting tunnels, transfer platforms, and portions of stations themselves that had been closed off over the years. Some of them were as sealed and forgotten as Egyptian tombs. Years after Alfred Beach died workmen building another subway line broke through a wall and discovered his original tunnel, long abandoned, with its opulent waiting room, which had included murals, a grand piano, and a goldfish tank.

“Any chance he’s just sleeping in active stations or between stations in a cutout?” Hoddleston asked.

Sellitto shook his head. “Not his profile. He’s a druggie. He’d be worried about his stash.”

Rhyme then told Hoddleston about the turquoise mosaic.

“Impossible to say where that came from, Lincoln. We’ve done so much work retiling, there’s tile dust and grout everywhere. Who knows where he could’ve picked it up.”

“So give me a number, Chief,” Rhyme said. “How many spots we looking at?”

“I’d guess twenty locations,” Hoddleston’s athletic voice said. “Maybe a few less.”

“Ouch,” Rhyme muttered. “Well, fax us a list of the most likely ones.”

“Sure. When do you need it?” But before Rhyme could answer, Hoddleston said, “Never mind. I remember you from the old days, Lincoln. You want it yesterday.”

“Last week,” Rhyme joked, impatient the chief was bantering and not writing.

Five minutes later the fax machine buzzed. Thom set the piece of paper in front of Rhyme. It listed fifteen locations in the subway system. “Okay, Sachs, get going.”

She nodded as Sellitto called Haumann to have the S &S teams get started. Rhyme added emphatically, “Amelia, you stay in the rear now, okay? You’re Crime Scene, remember? Only Crime Scene.”

On a curb in downtown Manhattan sat Leon the Shill. Beside him was the Bear Man – so named because he wheeled around a shopping cart filled with dozens of stuffed animals, supposedly for sale, though only the most psychotic of parents would buy one of the tattered, licey little toys for their child.

Leon and the Bear Man lived together – that is, they shared an alley near Chinatown – and survived on bottle deposits and handouts and a little harmless petty larceny.

“He dying, man,” Leon said.

“Naw, bad dream’s what it is,” Bear Man responded, rocking his shopping cart as if trying to put the bears to sleep.

“Oughta spenda dime, get a ambulance here.”

Leon and the Bear Man were looking across the street, into an alley. There lay another homeless man, black and sick looking, with a twitchy and mean – though currently unconscious – face. His clothes were in tatters.

“Oughta call somebody.”

“Les take a look.”

They crossed the street, skittish as mice.

The man was skinny – AIDS, probably, which told them he probably used smack – and filthy. Even Leon and Bear Man bathed occasionally in the Washington Square Park fountain or the lagoon in Central Park, despite the turtles. He wore ragged jeans, caked socks, no shoes, and a torn, filthy jacket that said Cats…The Musical on it.

They stared at him for a moment. When Leon tentatively touched Cats’s leg the man jerked awake and sat up, freezing them with a weird glare. “The fuck’re you? The fuck’re you?”

“Hey, man, you okay?” They backed away a few feet.

Cats shivered, clutching his abdomen. He coughed long and Leon whispered, “Looks too fucking mean to be sick, you know?”