Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Good-bye, Rhyme, she thought. Good-bye.

And his response to this tacit farewell? A minuscule glance and the gruff words “Let’s look at that evidence, Sachs. Time’s a-wasting.”

Hour 29 of 45

INDIVIDUATION IS THE GOAL OF THE CRIMINALIST.

It’s the process of tracing a piece of evidence back to a single source, to the exclusion of all other sources.

Lincoln Rhyme now gazed at the most individuated evidence there was: blood from the Dancer’s body. A restriction fragment length polymorphism DNA test could eliminate virtually any possibility that the blood had come from anyone else.

Yet there was little that this evidence could tell him. CODIS – the Computer-Based DNA Information System – contained profiles of some convicted felons, but it was a small database, made up primarily of sex offenders and a limited number of violent criminals. Rhyme wasn’t surprised when the search of the Dancer’s blood code came back negative.

Still, Rhyme harbored a faint pleasure that they now had a piece of the killer himself, swabbed and stuck into a test tube. For most criminalists, the perps were usually “out there”; he rarely met them face-to-face, often never saw them at all unless it was at trial. So he felt a deep stirring to be in the presence of the man who’d caused so many people, himself included, so much pain.

“What else did you find?” he asked Sachs.

She’d vacuumed Brit Hale’s room for trace but she and Cooper, donning magnifiers, had been through it all and found nothing except gunshot residue and fragments of bullets and brick and plaster from the shoot-outs.

She’d found casings from the semiautomatic pistol he’d used. His weapon was a 7.62-millimeter Beretta. It was probably old; it showed breach spread. The casings, all of which Sachs had recovered, had been dipped in cleansers to eliminate even the prints of the employees of the ammunition company – so no one could trace the purchase back to a certain shift at one of the Remington plants and then forward to a shipment that ended up in a particular location. And the Dancer had apparently loaded them with his knuckles to avoid prints. An old trick.

“Keep going,” Rhyme said to Sachs.

“Pistol slugs.”

Cooper looked over the bullets. Three flattened. And one in pretty good shape. Two were covered with Brit Hale’s black, cauterized blood.

“Scan them for prints,” Rhyme ordered.

“I did,” she said, her voice clipped.

“Try the laser.”

Cooper did.

“Nothing, Lincoln.” The tech looked at a piece of cotton in a plastic bag. He asked, “What’s that?”

Sachs said, “Oh, I got one of his rifle slugs too.”

“What?”

“He took a couple shots at Jodie. Two of them hit the wall and exploded. This one hit dirt – a bed of flowers – and didn’t go off. I found a hole in one of the geraniums and – ”

“Wait.” Cooper blinked. “That’s one of the explosive rounds?”

Sachs said, “Right, but it didn’t go off.”

He gingerly set the bag on the table and stepped back, pulling Sachs – two inches taller than he was – along with him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Explosive bullets’re very unstable. Powder grains could be smoldering right now… It could go off at any minute. A piece of shrapnel could kill you.”

“You saw the fragments of the other ones, Mel,” Rhyme said. “How’s it made?”

“It’s nasty, Lincoln,” the tech said uneasily, his bald crown dotted with sweat. “A PETN filling, smokeless powder as the primary. That makes it unstable.”

Sachs asked, “Why didn’t it go off?”

“The dirt’d be soft impact. And he makes them himself. Maybe his quality control wasn’t so good for that one.”

“He makes them himself?” Rhyme asked. “How?”

Eye fixed on the plastic bag, the tech said, “Well, the usual way is to tap a hole from the point almost through the base. Drop in a BB and some black or smokeless powder. You roll a thread of plastic and feed it inside. Then seal it up again – in his case with a ceramic nose cone. When it hits, the BB slams into the powder. That sets off the PETN.”

“Rolls the plastic?” Rhyme asked. “Between his fingers?”

“Usually.”

Rhyme looked at Sachs and for a moment the rift between them vanished. They smiled and said simultaneously, “Fingerprints!”

Mel Cooper said, “Maybe. But how’re you going to find out? You’d have to take it apart.”

“Then,” Sachs said, “we’ll take it apart.”

“No, no, no, Sachs,” Rhyme said curtly. “Not you. We’ll wait for the bomb squad.”

“We don’t have time.”

She bent over the bag, started to open it.

“Sachs, what the hell’re you trying to prove?”

“Not trying to prove anything,” she responded coolly. “I’m trying to catch the killer.”

Cooper stood by helplessly.

“Are you trying to save Jerry Banks? Well, it’s too late for that. Give him up. Get on with your job.”

“This is my job.”

“Sachs, it wasn’t your fault!” Rhyme shouted. “Forget it. Give up the dead. I’ve told you that a dozen times.”

Calmly she said, “I’ll put my vest on top of it, work from behind it.” She stripped her blouse off and ripped the Velcro straps of her American Body Armor vest. She set this up like a tent over the plastic bag containing the bullet.

Cooper said, “You’re behind the armor but your hands won’t be.”

“Bomb suits don’t have hand protection either,” she pointed out, and pulled her shooting earplugs from her pocket, screwed them into her ears. “You’ll have to shout,” she said to Cooper. “What do I do?”

No, Sachs, no, Rhyme thought.

“If you don’t tell me I’ll just cut it apart.” She picked up a forensic razor saw. The blade hovered over the bag. She paused.

Rhyme sighed, nodded to Cooper. “Tell her what to do.”

The tech swallowed. “All right. Unwrap it. But carefully. Here, put it on this towel. Don’t jar it. That’s the worst thing you can do.”

She exposed the bullet, a surprisingly tiny piece of metal with an off-white tip.

“That cone?” Cooper continued. “If the bullet goes off the cone’ll go right through the body armor and at least one or two walls. It’s Teflon-coated.”

“Okay.” She turned it aside, toward the wall.

“Sachs,” Rhyme said soothingly. “Use forceps, not your fingers.”

“It won’t make any difference if it blows, Rhyme. And I need the control.”

“Please.”

She hesitated and took the hemostat that Cooper offered her. She gripped the base of the slug.

“How do I open it up? Cut it?”

“You can’t cut through the lead,” Cooper called. “The heat from the friction’ll set off the black powder. You’ll have to work the cone off and pull the wad of plastic out.”

Sweat was rolling down her face. “Okay. With pliers?”

Cooper picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers from the worktable and walked to her side. He put them in her right hand, then retreated.

“You’ll have to grip it and twist hard. He glued it on with epoxy. That doesn’t bond well with lead, so it should just pop off. But don’t squeeze too hard. If it fractures you’ll never get it off without drilling. And that’ll set it off.”

“Hard but not too hard,” she muttered.

“Think of all those cars you worked on, Sachs,” Rhyme said.

“What?”

“Trying to get those old spark plugs out. Hard enough to unseat them, not so hard you broke the ceramic.”

She nodded absently and he didn’t know if she’d heard him. Sachs lowered her head behind the tepee of her body armor.