Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Franks bent to the cabinet beside him and pulled out a bottle of vodka and one of bourbon. “We like to keep our guests happy.”

He set the bottles on the table, then walked to the front door, slipping his windbreaker on. “I’m headed home. ‘Night, Tom,” he said to the marshal at the door and nodded to the quartet of guardees, standing incongruously in the middle of the varnished wood hunting lodge, two bottles of liquor between them and a dozen deer and elk heads staring down.

The phone rang, startling them all. One of the marshals got it on the third ring. “Hello?…”

He glanced at the two women. “Amelia Sachs?”

She nodded and took the receiver.

It was Rhyme. “Sachs, how safe is it?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “High tech. Any luck with the body?”

“Nothing so far. Four missing males reported in Manhattan in the last four hours. We’re checking them all out. Is Jodie there?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him if the Dancer ever mentioned assuming a particular identity.”

She relayed the question.

Jodie thought back. “Well, I remember him saying something once… I mean, nothing specific. He said if you’re going to kill somebody you have to infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, then eliminate. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. He meant delegate somebody else to do something, then when everybody’s distracted, he’d move in. I think he mentioned like a delivery guy or shoe-shine boy.”

Your deadliest weapon is deception…

After she relayed this to Rhyme he said, “We’re thinking the body’s a young businessman. Could be a lawyer. Ask Jodie if he ever mentioned trying to get into the courthouse for the grand jury.”

Jodie didn’t think so.

Sachs told Rhyme this.

“Okay. Thanks.” She heard him calling something to Mel Cooper. “I’ll check in later, Sachs.”

After they hung up, Percey asked them, “You want a nightcap?”

Sachs couldn’t decide if she did or not. The memory of the scotch preceding her fiasco in Lincoln Rhyme’s bed made her cringe. But on impulse she said, “Sure.”

Roland Bell decided he could be off duty for a half hour.

Jodie opted for a fast, medicinal shot of whiskey, then headed off to bed, toting his self-help book under his arm and staring with a city boy’s fascination at a mounted moose head.

Outside, in the thick spring air, cicadas chirped and bullfrogs belched their peculiar, unsettling calls.

As he looked out the window into the early morning darkness Jodie could see the starbursts of searchlights radiating through the fog. Shadows danced sideways – the mist moving through the trees.

He stepped away from his window and walked to the door of his room, looked out.

Two marshals guarded this corridor, sitting in a small security room twenty feet away. They seemed bored and only moderately vigilant.

He listened and heard nothing other than the snaps and ticks of an old house late in the evening.

Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More.

Let’s get to work, he thought.

He opened the book wide, the glue cracking, and tore a small patch of tape off the bottom of the spine. A long knife slid onto the bed. It looked like black metal though it was made of ceramic-impregnated polymer and wouldn’t register on a metal detector. It was stained and dull, sharp as a razor on one edge, serrated like a surgical saw on the other. The handle was taped. He’d designed and constructed it himself. Like most serious weapons it wasn’t glitzy and it wasn’t sexy and it did only one thing: it killed. And it did this very, very well.

He had no qualms about picking up the weapon – or touching doorknobs or windows – because he was the owner of new fingerprints. The skin on the pads of eight fingers and two thumbs had been burned away chemically last month by a surgeon in Berne, Switzerland, and a new set of prints etched into the scar tissue by a laser used for microsurgery. His own prints would regenerate but not for some months.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, he pictured the common room and took a mental stroll through it, remembering the location of every door, every window, every piece of furniture, the bad landscapes on the walls, the elk antlers above the fireplace, ashtrays, weapons, and potential weapons. Jodie had such a good memory he would have been able to walk through the room blindfolded, never brushing a single chair or table.

Lost in this meditation, he steered his imaginary self to the telephone in the corner and spent a moment considering the safe house’s communications system. He was completely familiar with how it worked (he spent much of his free time reading operating manuals of security and communications systems) and he knew that if he cut the line the drop in voltage would send a signal to the marshals’ panel here and probably to a field office as well. So he’d have to leave it intact.

Not a problem, just a factor.

On with his mental stroll. Examining the common-room video cameras – which the marshal had “forgotten” to tell them about. They were in the Y configuration that a budget-conscious security designer would use for a government safe house. He knew this system too and that it harbored a serious design flaw – all you had to do was tap the middle of the lens hard. This misaligned all the optics; the image in the security monitor would go black but there’d be no alarm, which would happen if the coaxial cable were cut.

Thinking about the lighting… He could shut out six – no, five – of eight lights he’d seen in the safe house but no more than that. Not until all the marshals were dead. He noted the location of each lamp and light switch, then moved on, more phantom walking. The TV room, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Thinking of distances, angles of view from outside.

Not a problem…

Noting the location of each of his victims. Considering the possibility that they might have moved in the past fifteen minutes.

… just a factor.

Now his eyes opened. He nodded to himself, slipped the knife in his pocket, and stepped to the door.

Silently he eased into the kitchen, stole a slotted spoon from a rack over the sink. Walked to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. Then he walked into the common room and meandered from bookshelf to bookshelf, pretending to look for something to read. As he passed each of the video surveillance cameras he reached up with the spoon and slapped the lens. Then he set the milk and spoon on a table and headed into the security room.

“Hey, check out the monitors,” one marshal muttered, turning a knob on the TV screen in front of him.

“Yeah?” the other asked, not really interested.

Jodie walked past the first marshal, who looked up and started to ask, “Hey, sir, how you doing?” when swish , swish , Jodie tidily opened the man’s throat in a V, spraying his copious velvet blood in a high arc. His partner’s eyes flashed wide and he reached for his gun, but Jodie pulled it from his hand and stabbed him once in the throat and once in the chest. He dropped to the floor and thrashed for a moment. It was a noisy death – as Jodie’d known it would be. But he couldn’t do more knife work on the man; he needed the uniform and had to kill him with a minimum of blood.

As the marshal lay on the floor, shaking and dying, he gazed up at Jodie, who was stripping off his own blood-soaked clothes. The marshal’s eyes flickered to Jodie’s biceps. They focused on the tattoo.

As Jodie bent down and began to undress the marshal he noticed the man’s gaze and said, “It’s called ‘Dance Macabre.’ See? Death’s dancing with his next victim. That’s her coffin behind them. Do you like it?”