Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

He asked this with genuine curiosity, though he expected no answer. And received none.

Hour 43 of 45

MEL COOPER, CLAD IN LATEX GLOVES, was standing over the body of the young man they’d found in Central Park.

“I could try the plantars,” he suggested, discouraged.

The friction ridge prints on the feet were as unique as fingerprints, but they were of marginal value until you had samples from a suspect; they weren’t cataloged in AFIS databases.

“Don’t bother,” Rhyme muttered.

Who the hell is this? Rhyme wondered, looking at the savaged body in front of him. He’s the key to the Dancer’s next move. Oh, this was the worst feeling in the world: an unreachable itch. To have a piece of evidence in front of you, to know it was the key to the case, and yet to be unable to decipher it.

Rhyme’s eyes strayed to the evidence chart on the wall. The body was like the green fibers they’d found at the hangar – significant, Rhyme felt, but its meaning unknown.

“Anything else?” Rhyme asked the tour doctor from the medical examiner’s office. He’d accompanied the body here. He was a young man, balding, with dots of sweat in constellations on his crown. The doctor said, “He’s gay or, to be accurate, he’d lived a gay lifestyle when he was young. He’s had repeated anal intercourse though not for some years.”

Rhyme continued, “What does that scar tell you? Surgery?”

“Well, it’s a precise incision, but I don’t know of any reason to operate there. Maybe some intestinal blockage. But even then I’ve never heard of a procedure in that quadrant of the abdomen.”

Rhyme regretted Sachs was not here. He wanted to throw around ideas with her. She’d think of something he’d overlooked.

Who could he be? Rhyme racked his brain. Identification was a complex science. He’d established a man’s identity once with nothing more than a single tooth. But the procedure took time – usually weeks or months.

“Run blood type and DNA profile,” Rhyme said.

“Already ordered,” the tour doctor said. “I sent the samples downtown already.”

If he were HIV positive that might help them ID him through doctors or clinics. But without anything else to go on, the blood work wouldn’t be very helpful.

Fingerprint…

I’d give anything for a nice friction ridge print, Rhyme thought. Maybe -

“Wait!” Rhyme laughed out loud. “His dick!”

“What?” Sellitto blurted.

Dellray lifted an arching brow.

“He doesn’t have any hands, but what’s the one part of his anatomy he’d be sure to touch?”

“Penis,” Cooper called out. “If he peed in the last couple of hours we can probably get a print.”

“Who wants to do the honors?”

“No job too disgusting,” the tech said, donning a double layer of latex gloves. He went to work with Kromekote skin-printing cards. He lifted two excellent prints – a thumb from the top of the corpse’s penis and an index finger from the bottom.

“Perfect, Mel.”

“Don’t tell my girlfriend,” he said coyly. He fed the prints through the AFIS system.

The message came up on the screen: Please Wait… Please Wait …

Be on file, Rhyme thought desperately. Please be on file.

He was.

But when the results came back, Sellitto and Dellray, closest to Cooper’s computer, stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What the hell?” the detective said.

“What?” Rhyme cried. “Who is it?”

“It’s Kall.”

“What?”

“It’s Stephen Kall,” Cooper repeated. “It’s a twenty-point match. There’s no doubt.” Cooper found the composite print they’d constructed earlier to find the Dancer’s identity. He dropped it on the table next to the Kromekote. “It’s identical.”

How? Rhyme was wondering. How on earth?

“What if,” Sellitto said, “it’s Kall’s prints on this guy’s dick. What if Kall’s a bone smoker?”

“We’ve got genetic markers from Kall’s blood, right? From the water tower?”

“Right,” Cooper called.

“Compare them,” Rhyme called out. “I want a profile of the corpse’s markers. And I want it now.”

Poetry was not lost on him.

The “Coffin Dancer”… I like that, he thought. Much better than “Jodie” – the name he’d picked for this job because it was so unthreatening. A silly name, a diminutive name.

The Dancer…

Names were important, he knew. He read philosophy. The act of naming – of designating – is unique to humans. The Dancer now spoke silently to the late, dismembered Stephen Kall: It was me you heard about. I’m the one who calls my victims “corpses.” You call them Wives, Husbands, Friends, whatever you like.

But once I’m hired, they’re corpses. That’s all they are.

Wearing a U.S. marshal’s uniform, he started down the dim hallway from the bodies of the two officers. He hadn’t avoided the blood completely, of course, but in the murkiness of the enclave you couldn’t see that the navy blue uniform had patches of red on it.

On his way to find corpse three.

The Wife, if you will, Stephen. What a mixed-up, nervous creature you were. With your scrubbed hands and your confused dick. The Husband, the Wife, the Friend…

Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, eliminate…

Ah, Stephen… I could have taught you there’s only one rule in this business: you stay one step ahead of every living soul.

He now had two pistols but wouldn’t use them yet. He wouldn’t think of acting prematurely. If he stumbled now he’d never have another chance to kill Percey Clay before the grand jury met later that morning.

Moving silently into a parlor where two more U.S. marshals sat, one reading a paper, one watching TV.

The first one glanced up at the Dancer, saw the uniform, and returned to the paper. Then looked up again.

“Wait,” the marshal said, suddenly realizing he didn’t recognize the face.

But the Dancer didn’t wait.

He answered with swish , swish to both carotid arteries. The man slid forward to die on page six of the Daily News so quietly that his partner never turned from the TV, where a blond woman wearing excessive gold jewelry was explaining how she met her boyfriend through a psychic.

“Wait? For what?” the second marshal asked, not looking away from the screen.

He died slightly more noisily than his partner but no one in the compound seemed to notice. The Dancer dragged the bodies flat, stowed them under a table.

At the back door he made certain there were no sensors on the door frame and then slipped outside. The two marshals in the front were vigilant, but their eyes were turned away from the house. One quickly glanced toward the Dancer, nodded a greeting, then turned back to his reconnaissance. The light of dawn was in the sky but it was still dim enough so that the man didn’t recognize him. They both died almost silently.

As for the two in the back, at the guard station overlooking the lake, the Dancer came up behind them. He tickled the heart of one marshal with a stab in the back and then, swish , swish , sliced apart the throat of the second guard. Lying on the ground, the first marshal gave a plaintive scream as he died. But once again no one seemed to notice; the sound, the Dancer decided, was very much like the call of a loon, waking to the beautiful pink and gray dawn.

Rhyme and Sellitto were deep in bureaucratic debt by the time the fax of the DNA profile arrived. The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.