Jeffery Deaver: The Coffin Dancer

Rhyme steered the sleek, candy-apple red Storm Arrow into position beside the worktable. Thom placed the microphone over his head and booted up the computer.

A moment later Sellitto and Banks appeared in the doorway, joined by another man who’d just arrived. He was tall and rangy, with skin as dark as tires. He was wearing a green suit and an unearthly yellow shirt.

“Hello, Fred.”

“ Lincoln.”

“Hey.” Sachs nodded to Fred Dellray as she entered the room. She’d forgiven him for arresting her not long ago – an interagency squabble – and they now had a curious affinity, this tall, beautiful cop and the tall, quirky agent. They were both, Rhyme had decisively concluded, people cops (he himself being an evidence cop). Dellray trusted forensics as little as Rhyme trusted the testimony of witnesses. As for former beat cop Sachs, well, there was nothing Rhyme could do about her natural proclivities but he was determined that she push those talents aside and become the best criminalist in New York, if not the country. A goal that was easily within her grasp, even if she herself didn’t know it.

Dellray loped across the room, stationed himself beside the window, crossed his lanky arms. No one – Rhyme included – could peg the agent exactly. He lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn, loved to read literature and philosophy, and loved even more to play pool in tawdry bars. Once the jewel in the crown of the FBI’s undercover agents, Fred Dellray was still referred to occasionally by the nickname he’d had when he was in the field: “The Chameleon” – a tribute to his uncanny skill at being whoever his undercover role required he be. He had over a thousand arrests to his credit. But he’d spent too much time undercover and had become “overextended,” as the Bureauese went. It was only a matter of time before he’d be recognized by some dealer or warlord and killed. So he’d reluctantly agreed to take an administrative job running other undercover agents and CIs – confidential informants.

“So, mah boys tell me we got us the Dancer hisself,” the agent muttered, the patois less Ebonics than, well… pure Dellray. His grammar and vocabulary, like his life, were largely improvised.

“Any word on Tony?” Rhyme asked.

“My boy gone missing?” Dellray asked, his face screwing up angrily. “Not. A. Thing.”

Tony Panelli, the agent who’d disappeared from the Federal Building several days before, had left behind a wife at home, a gray Ford with a running engine, and a number of grains of infuriatingly mysterious sand – the sensuous asteroids that promised answers but had so far delivered none.

“When we catch the Dancer,” Rhyme said, “we’ll get back on it, Amelia and me. Full-time. Promise.”

Dellray angrily tapped the unlit tip of a cigarette nestling behind his left ear. “The Dancer… Shit. Better nail his ass this time. Shit.”

“What about the hit?” Sachs asked. “The one last night. Have any details?”

Sellitto read through the wad of faxes and some of his own handwritten notes. He looked up. “Ed Carney took off from Mamaroneck Airport around seven-fifteen last night. The company – Hudson Air – they’re a private charterer. They fly cargo, corporate clients, you know. Lease out planes. They’d just gotten a new contract to fly – get this – body parts for transplants to hospitals around the Midwest and East Coast. Hear it’s a real competitive business nowadays.”

“Cutthroat,” Banks offered and was the only one who smiled at his joke.

Sellitto continued. “The client was U.S. Medical and Healthcare. Based up in Somers. One of those for-profit hospital chains. Carney had a real tight schedule. Was supposed to fly to Chicago, Saint Louis, Memphis, Lexington, Cleveland, then lay over in Erie, Pennsylvania. Come back this morning.”

“Any passengers?” Rhyme asked.

“Not whole ones,” Sellitto muttered. “Just the cargo. Everything’s routine about the flight. Then about ten minutes out of O’Hare, a bomb goes off. Blows the shit out of the plane. Killed both Carney and his copilot. Four injuries on the ground. His wife, by the way, was supposed to be flying with him but she got sick and had to cancel.”

“There an NTSB report?” Rhyme asked. “No, of course not, there wouldn’t be. Not yet.”

“Report won’t be ready for two, three days.”

“Well, we can’t wait two or three days!” Rhyme griped loudly. “I need it now!”

A pink scar from the ventilator hose was visible on his throat. But Rhyme had weaned himself off the fake lung and could breathe like nobody’s business. Lincoln Rhyme was a C4 quad who could sigh, cough, and shout like a sailor. “I need to know everything about the bomb.”

“I’ll call a buddy in the Windy City,” Dellray said. “He owes me major. Tell ’im what’s what and have ’im ship us whatever they got, pronto.”

Rhyme nodded to the agent, then considered what Sellitto had told him. “Okay, we’ve got two scenes. The crash site in Chicago. That one’s too late for you, Sachs. Contaminated as hell. We’ll just have to hope the folks in Chicago do a halfway decent job. The other scene’s the airport in Mamaroneck – where the Dancer got the bomb on board.”

“How do we know he did it at the airport?” Sachs said. She was rolling her brilliant red hair in a twist, then pinning it on top of her head. Magnificent strands like these were a liability at crime scenes; they threatened to contaminate the evidence. Sachs went about her job armed with a Glock 9 and a dozen bobby pins.

“Good point, Sachs.” He loved her outguessing him. “We don’t know and we won’t until we find the seat of the bomb. It might’ve been planted in the cargo, in a flight bag, a coffeepot.”

Or a wastebasket, he thought grimly, again recalling the Wall Street bombing.

“I want every single bit of that bomb here as soon as possible. We have to have it,” Rhyme said.

“Well, Linc,” Sellitto said slowly, “the plane was a mile up when it blew. The wreckage’s scattered over a whole fucking subdivision.”

“I don’t care,” Rhyme said, neck muscles aching. “Are they still searching?”

Local rescue workers searched crash sites but investigations were federal, so it was Fred Dellray who placed a call to the FBI special agent at the site.

“Tell him we need every piece of wreckage that tests positive for explosive. I’m talking nanograms. I want that bomb.”

Dellray relayed this. Then he looked up, shook his head. “Scene’s released.”

“What?” Rhyme snapped. “After twelve hours? Ridiculous. Inexcusable!”

“They had to get the streets open. He said -”

“Fire trucks!” Rhyme called.

“What?”

“Every fire truck, ambulance, police car… every emergency vehicle that responded to the crash. I want the tires scraped.”

Dellray’s long, black face stared at him. “You wanna repeat that? For my ex-good friend here?” The agent pushed the phone at him.

Rhyme ignored the receiver and said to Dellray, “Emergency vehicle tires’re one of the best sources for good evidence at contaminated crime scenes. They were first on the scene, they usually have new tires with deep tread grooves, and they probably didn’t drive anywhere but to and from the crash site. I want all the tires scraped and the trace sent here.”

Dellray managed to get a promise from Chicago that the tires of as many emergency vehicles as they could get to would be scraped.

“Not ‘as many as’ ” Rhyme called. “All of them.”

Dellray rolled his eyes and relayed that information too, then hung up.

Suddenly Rhyme cried, “Thom! Thom, where are you?”