Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Rhyme saw her eyes squinting shut.

Oh, Sachs…

He never saw any motion. He just heard a very faint snap. She froze for a moment, then looked over the armor. “It came off. It’s open.”

Cooper said, “Do you see the explosive?”

She looked inside. “Yes.”

He handed her a can of light machine oil. “Drip some of this inside then tilt it. The plastic should fall out. We can’t pull it or the fingerprints’ll be ruined.”

She added the oil, then tilted the slug, open end down, toward the towel.

Nothing happened.

“Damn,” she muttered.

“Don’t -”

She shook it. Hard.

“- shake it!” Cooper shouted.

“Sachs!” Rhyme gasped.

She shook harder. “Damn it.”

“No!”

A tiny white thread fell out, followed by some grains of black powder.

“Okay,” Cooper said, exhaling. “It’s safe.”

He walked over, and using a needle probe, rolled the plastic onto a glass slide. He walked in the smooth gait of criminalists around the world – back straight, hand buoyed and carrying the sample rock steady – to the microscope. He mounted the explosive.

“Magna-Brush?” Cooper asked, referring to a fine gray fingerprint powder.

“No,” Rhyme responded. “Use gentian violet. It’s a plastic print. We just need a little contrast.”

Cooper sprayed it, then mounted the slide in the ’scope.

The image popped onto the screen of Rhyme’s computer simultaneously.

“Yes!” he shouted. “There it is.”

The whorls and bifurcations were very visible.

“You nailed it, Sachs. Good job.”

As Cooper slowly rotated the plug of explosive, Rhyme made progressive screen captures – bitmap images – and saved them on the hard drive. He then assembled them and printed out a single, two-dimensional sliver of print.

But when the tech examined it he sighed.

“What?” Rhyme asked.

“Still not enough for a match. Only a quarter inch by five-eighths. No AFIS in the world could pick up anything from this.”

“Jesus,” Rhyme spat out. All that effort… wasted.

A sudden laugh.

From Amelia Sachs. She was staring at the wall, the evidence charts. CS-1, CS-2…

“Put them together,” she said.

“What?”

“We’ve got three partials,” she explained. “They’re probably all from his index finger. Can’t you fit them together?”

Cooper looked at Rhyme. “I’ve never heard of doing that.”

Neither had Rhyme. The bulk of forensic work was analyzing evidence for presentation at trial – “forensic” means “relating to legal proceedings” – and a defense lawyer’d go to town if cops started assembling fragments of perps’ fingerprints.

But their priority was finding the Dancer, not making a case against him.

“Sure,” Rhyme said. “Do it!”

Cooper grabbed the other pictures of the Dancer’s prints from the wall and rested them on the table in front of him.

They started to work, Sachs and the tech. Cooper made photocopies of the prints, reducing two so they were all the same size. Then he and Sachs began fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. They were like children, trying variations, rearranging, arguing playfully. Sachs went so far as to take out a pen and connect several lines over a gap in the print.

“Cheating,” Cooper joked.

“But it fits,” she said triumphantly.

Finally they cut and pasted a print together. It represented about three-quarters of a friction ridge print, probably the right index finger.

Cooper held it up. “I have my doubts about this, Lincoln.”

But Rhyme said, “It’s art, Mel. It’s beautiful!”

“Don’t tell anyone at the identification association or they’ll drum us out.”

“Put it through AFIS. Authorize a priority search. All states.”

“Oooo,” Cooper said. “That’ll cost my annual salary.”

He scanned the print into the computer.

“It could take a half hour,” said Cooper, more realistic than pessimistic.

But it didn’t take that long at all. Five minutes later – long enough only for Rhyme to speculate whom he could con into pouring him a drink, Sachs or Cooper – the screen fluttered and a new image came up.

Your request has found… 1 match. 14 points of comparison. Statistical probability of identity: 97%.

“Oh, my God,” Sachs muttered. “We’ve got him.”

“Who is he, Mel?” Rhyme asked, softly, as if he were afraid the words would blow the fragile electrons off the computer screen.

“He’s not the Dancer anymore,” Cooper said. “He’s Stephen Robert Kall. Thirty-six. Present whereabouts unknown. LKA, fifteen years ago, an RFD number in Cumberland, West Virginia.”

Such a mundane name. Rhyme found himself experiencing an unreasonable tug of disappointment. Kall.

“Why was he on file?”

Cooper read. “What he was telling Jodie… He did twenty months for manslaughter when he was fifteen.” A faint laugh. “Apparently the Dancer didn’t bother to tell him that the victim was his stepfather.”

“Stepfather, hm?”

“Tough reading,” Cooper said, poring over the screen. “Man.”

“What?” Sachs asked.

“Notes from the police reports. Here’s what happened. Seems like there’d been a history of domestic disputes. The boy’s mother was dying of cancer and her husband – Kall’s stepfather – hit her for doing something or other. She fell and broke her arm. She died a few months later and Kall got it into his head her death was Lou’s fault.”

Cooper continued to read and he actually seemed to shiver. “Want to hear what happened?”

“Go ahead.”

“A couple months after she died Stephen and his stepfather were out hunting. The kid knocked him out, stripped him naked, and tied him to a tree in the woods. Left him there for a few days. Just wanted to scare him, his lawyer said. By the time the police got to him, well, let’s just say the infestation was pretty bad. Maggots, mostly. Lived for two days after that. Delirious.”

“Man,” Sachs whispered.

“When they found him, the boy was there, just sitting next to him, watching.” Cooper read, “ ‘The suspect surrendered without resistance. Appeared in a disoriented state. Kept repeating, “Anything can kill, anything can kill…” Taken to Cumberland Regional Mental Health Center for evaluation.’ ”

The psychological makeup didn’t interest Rhyme very much. He trusted his forensic profiling techniques far more than the behavioral law enforcers’. He knew the Dancer was a sociopath – all professional killers were – and the sorrows and traumas that made him who he was weren’t much help at the moment. He asked, “Picture?”

“No pictures in juvie.”

“Right. Hell. How ’bout military?”

“Nope. But there’s another conviction,” Cooper said. “He tried to enlist in the marines but the psych profile got him rejected. He hounded the recruiting officers in D.C. for a couple months and finally assaulted a sergeant. Pled a suspended.”

Sellitto said, “We’ll run the name through FINEST, the alias list, and NCIC.”

“Have Dellray get some people to Cumberland and start tracing him,” Rhyme ordered.

“Will do.”

Stephen Kall…

After all these years. It was like finally visiting a shrine you’d read about all your life but never seen in person.

There was a startling knock on the door. Sachs and Sellitto’s hands both twitched impulsively toward their weapons.

But the visitor was just one of the cops from downstairs. He had a large satchel. “Delivery.”

“What is it?” Rhyme asked.

“A trooper from Illinois. Said this was from DuPage County Fire and Rescue.”