Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

The telephone rang and Rhyme ordered the computer to shut off the radio and answer the phone.

“Yes,” he said.

“Lincoln.” It was Lon Sellitto. “I’m landline,” he said, referring to the phone. “Want to keep Special Ops free for the chase.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“He blew the bomb.”

“I know.” Rhyme had heard it; the safe house was more than two miles from his bedroom, but his windows had rattled and the peregrines outside his window had taken off and flown a slow circle, angry at the disturbance.

“Everybody okay?”

“The mutt’s freaking out, Jodie. But ’side from that everything’s okay. ’Cept for the feds’re looking at more damage to the safe house than they’d planned on. Already bitching about it.”

“Tell ’em we’ll pay our taxes early this year.”

What had tipped Rhyme to the cell phone bomb had been tiny fingernails of polystyrene that Sachs had found in the trace at the subway station. That and more residue of plastic explosive, a slightly different formula from that of the AP bomb in Sheila Horowitz’s apartment. Rhyme had simply matched the polystyrene fragments to the phone the Dancer’d given to Jodie and realized that somebody had unscrewed the casing.

Why? Rhyme had wondered. There was only one logical reason that he could see and so he’d called the bomb squad down at the Sixth Precinct. Two detectives had rendered the phone safe, removed the large wad of plastic explosive and the firing circuit from the phone, then mounted a much smaller bit of explosive and the same circuit in an oil drum near one of the windows, pointed into the alley like a mortar. They’d filled the room with bomb blankets and stepped into the corridor, handing the harmless phone back to Jodie, who held it with shaking hands, demanding that they prove to him all the explosive had been taken out.

Rhyme had guessed that the Dancer’s tactic was to use the bomb to divert attention away from the van and give him a better chance to assault it. The killer had also probably guessed that Jodie would turn and, when he made the call, that the little man would be close to the cops who were mounting the operation. If he took out the leaders the Dancer would have an even better chance of success.

Deception…

There was no perp Rhyme hated more than the Coffin Dancer, no one he wanted more to run to ground and skewer through his hot heart. Still, Rhyme was a criminalist before anything else and he had a secret admiration for the man’s brilliance.

Sellitto explained, “We’ve got two tail cars behind the Nissan. We’re going to -”

There was a long pause.

“Stupid,” Sellitto muttered.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just nobody called Central. We’ve got fire trucks coming in. Nobody called to tell ’em to ignore the reports of the blast.”

Rhyme had forgotten about that too.

Sellitto continued. “Just got word. The decoy van’s turning east, Linc. The Nissan’s following. Maybe forty yards behind the van. It’s about four blocks to the parking lot by the FDR.”

“Okay, Lon. Is Amelia there? I want to talk to her.”

“Jesus,” he heard someone call in the background. Bo Haumann, Rhyme thought. “We got fire trucks all over the place here.”

“Didn’t somebody…?” another voice began to ask, then faded.

No, somebody didn’t, Rhyme thought. You can’t think of -

“Have to call you back, Lincoln,” Sellitto said. “We gotta do something. There’re fire trucks up on the goddamn sidewalks.”

“I’ll call Amelia myself,” Rhyme said.

Sellitto hung up.

The room darkened, curtains drawn.

Percey Clay was afraid.

Thinking of her haggard, the falcon , captured by the snare, flapping her muscular wings. The talons and beak slicing the air like honed blades, the mad screech. But the most horrifying of all to Percey, the bird’s frightened eyes. Denied her sky, the bird was lost in terror. Vulnerable.

Percey felt the same. She detested it here in the safe house. Closed in. Looking at – hating – the foolish pictures on the wall. Crap from Woolworth or JCPenney. The limp rug. The cheap water basin and pitcher. A ratty pink chenille bedspread, a dozen threads pulled out in long loops from a particular corner; maybe a mob informant had sat there, tugging compulsively on the pink knobby cloth.

Another sip from the flask. Rhyme had told her about the trap. That the Dancer would be following the van he believed Percey and Hale were in. They’d stop his car and arrest or kill him. Her sacrifice was now going to pay off. In ten minutes they’d have him, the man who’d killed Ed. The man who’d changed her life forever.

She trusted Lincoln Rhyme, and believed him. But she believed him the same way she believed Air Traffic Control when they reported no wind shear and you suddenly found your aircraft dropping at three thousand feet a minute when you were only two thousand feet in the air.

Percey tossed her flask on the bed, stood up and paced. She wanted to be flying, where it was safe, where she had control. Roland Bell had ordered her lights out, had ordered her to stay locked in her room. Everyone was upstairs on the top floor. She’d heard the bang of the explosion. She’d been expecting it. But she hadn’t been expecting the fear that it brought. Unbearable. She’d have given anything to look out the window.

She walked to the door, unlocked it, stepped into the corridor.

It too was dark. Like night… All the stars of evening.

She smelled a pungent chemical scent. From whatever had made the bang, she guessed. The hallway was deserted. There was slight motion at the end of the hall. A shadow from the stairwell. She looked at it. It wasn’t repeated.

Brit Hale’s room was only ten feet away. She wanted badly to talk to him, but she didn’t want him to see her this way, pale, hands shaking. Eyes watering in fear… My God, she’d pulled a seven three seven out of a wing-ice nosedive more calmly than this: looking into that dark corridor.

She stepped back into her room.

Did she hear footsteps?

She closed the door, returned to the bed.

More footsteps.

“Command mode,” Lincoln Rhyme instructed. The box dutifully came up on-screen.

He heard a faint siren in the distance.

And it was then that Rhyme realized his mistake.

Fire trucks…

No! I didn’t think about that.

But the Dancer did. Of course! He’d have stolen a fireman’s or medic’s uniform and was strolling into the safe house at this moment!

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “No! How could I be so far off?”

And the computer heard the last word of Rhyme’s sentence and dutifully shut off his communications program.

“No!” Rhyme cried. “No!”

But the system couldn’t understand his loud, frantic voice and with a silent flash the message came up, Do you really want to shut off your computer?

“No,” he whispered desperately.

For a moment nothing happened, but the system didn’t shut down. A message popped up. What would you like to do now?

“Thom!” he shouted. “Somebody… please. Mel!”

But the door was closed; there was no response from downstairs.

Rhyme’s left ring finger twitched dramatically. At one time he’d had a mechanical ECU controller and he could use his one working finger to dial the phone. The computer system had replaced that and he now had to use the dictation program to call the safe house and tell them that the Dancer was on his way there, dressed as a fireman or rescue worker.

“Command mode,” he said into the microphone. Fighting to stay calm.

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