Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“That’s right,” Percey said. “It’s Lauren. You met her yesterday.”

The brunette who’d been crying so hard.

“It tore me apart. Hell, it tore Ed apart too. He loved me but he needed his beautiful lovers. Always did. And, you know, I think it was harder on them. Because he always came home to me.” She paused for a moment and fought the tears. “That’s what love is, I think. Who you come home to.”

“And you?”

“Was I faithful?” Percey asked. She gave another of her wry laughs – the laugh of someone who has keen self-awareness but who doesn’t like all the insights. “I didn’t have a lot of opportunities. I’m hardly the kind of girl gets picked up walking down the street.” She examined a socket wrench absently. “But, yeah, after I found out about Ed and his girlfriends, a few years ago, I was mad. It hurt a lot. I saw some other men. Ron and I – Ron Talbot – spent some time together, a few months.” She smiled. “He even proposed to me. Said I deserved better than Ed. And I suppose I did. But even with those other women in his life, Ed was the man I had to be with. That never changed.”

Percey’s eyes grew distant for a moment. “We met in the navy, Ed and I. Both fighter pilots. When he proposed… See, the traditional way to propose in the military is you say, ‘You want to become my dependent?’ Sort of a joke. But we were both lieutenants j.g., so Ed said, ‘Let’s you and me become each other’s dependents.’ He wanted to get me a ring but my father’d disowned me -”

“For real?”

“Yep. Real soap opera, which I won’t go into now. Anyway, Ed and I were saving every penny to open our own charter company after we were discharged and we were completely broke. But one night he said, ‘Let’s go up.’ So we borrowed this old Norseman they had on the field. Tough plane. Big air-cooled rotary engine… You could do anything with that aircraft. Well, I was in the left-hand seat. I’d taken off and’d got us up to about six thousand feet. Suddenly he kissed me and wobbled the yoke, which meant he was taking over. I let him. He said, ‘I got you a diamond after all, Perce.’ ”

“He did?” Sachs asked.

Percey smiled. “He throttled up, all the way to the fire wall, and pulled the yoke back. The nose went straight up in the air.” Tears were coming fast now to Percey Clay’s eyes. “For a moment, before he kicked rudder and we started down out of the stall, we were looking straight up into the night sky. He leaned over and said, ‘Take your pick. All the stars of evening – you can have any one you want.’ ” Percey lowered her head, caught her breath. “All the stars of evening…”

After a moment she wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then turned back to the engine, “Believe me, you don’t have anything to worry about. Lincoln’s a fascinating man, but Ed was all I ever wanted.”

“There’s more to it than you know.” Sachs sighed. “You remind him of someone. Someone he was in love with. You show up and all of a sudden it’s like he’s with her again.”

Percey shrugged. “We have some things in common. We understand each other. But so what? That doesn’t mean anything. Take a look, Amelia. Rhyme loves you.”

Sachs laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

Percey gave her another look that said, Whatever … and began replacing the equipment in boxes as meticulously as she’d worked with the tools and computers.

Roland Bell ambled inside, checking windows and scanning the shadows.

“All quiet?” he asked.

“Not a peep.”

“Got a message to pass on. The folk from U.S. Medical just left Westchester Hospital. The shipment’ll be here in an hour. I’ve got a car of my people behind them just to be on the safe side. But don’t worry that it’ll spook ’em and be bad for business – my guys’re top-notch. The driver’ll never know he’s being followed.”

Percey looked at her watch. “Okay.” She glanced at Bell, who was looking uncertainly at the open engine compartment, like a snake at a mongoose. She asked, “We don’t need baby-sitters on the flight, do we?”

Bell’s sigh was loud. “After what happened at the safe house,” he said in a low, solemn voice, “I’m not letting you outa my sight.” He shook his head and, already looking airsick, he walked back to the front door and disappeared into the cool late afternoon air.

Her head in the engine compartment, studying her work carefully, Percey said in a reverberating voice, “Looking at Rhyme and looking at you, I wouldn’t give it much more than fifty-fifty, I’ve got to say.” She turned and looked down at Sachs. “But you know, I had this flight instructor a long time ago.”

“And?”

“When we’d fly multiengine he had this game of throttling back one engine to idle and feathering the prop, then telling us to land. Lot of instructors’ll cut power for a few minutes, with altitude, just to see how you can handle it. But they always throttled up again before landing. This instructor, though – uh-uh. He’d make us land on one engine. Students’d always be asking him, ‘Isn’t that risky?’ His answer was, ‘God don’t give out certain. Sometimes you just gotta play the odds.’ ”

Percey lowered the flap of the engine cowl and clamped it into place. “All right, this’s done. Damn aircraft may actually fly.” She swatted the glossy skin like a cowgirl patting a rodeo rider’s butt.

Hour 32 of 45

AT 6 P.M. ON SUNDAY they summoned Jodie from Rhyme’s downstairs bedroom, where he’d been under lock and key.

He trotted up the stairs reluctantly, clutching his silly book, Dependent No More , like a Bible. Rhyme remembered the title. It had been on the Times bestseller list for months. In a black mood at the time, he’d noticed the book and thought cynically, about himself, Dependent Forever.

A team of federal agents was flying from Quantico to Cumberland, West Virginia, Stephen Kall’s old residence, to pick up whatever leads they could, hoping they might track him to his present whereabouts from there. But Rhyme had seen how carefully he’d scoured his crime scenes and he had no reason to think the man would have been any less careful in covering his other tracks.

“You told us some things about him,” Rhyme said to Jodie. “Some facts , some nutritional information. I want to know more.”

“I -”

“Think hard.”

Jodie squinted. Rhyme supposed he was considering what he could say to mollify them, superficial impressions. But he was surprised when Jodie said, “Well, for one thing, he’s afraid of you.”

“Us?” Rhyme asked.

“No. Just you.”

“Me?” he asked, astonished. “He knows about me?”

“He knows your name’s Lincoln. And that you’re out to get him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, then added, “you know, he made a couple of calls on that cell phone. And he listened for a long time. I was thinking -”

“Oh, hellfire,” Dellray sang out. “He’s tapping somebody’s line.”

“Of course!” Rhyme cried. “Probably the Hudson Air office. That’s how he found out about the safe house. Why didn’t we think about that?”

Dellray said, “We gotta sweep the office. But the bug might be in a relay box somewheres. We’ll find it. We’ll find it.” He placed a call to the Bureau’s tech services.

To Jodie, Rhyme said, “Go on. What else does he know about me?”

“He knows you’re a detective. I don’t think he knows where you live, or your last name. But you scare the hell out of him.”

If Rhyme’s belly had been able to register the lub-dub of excitement – and pride – he’d have felt that now.