Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“Somebody killed him?” Sellitto muttered. His shirt was so wrinkled it looked like a fiber sample under five-hundred-times magnification. “Why?”

But why was not a criminalist’s question.

Evidence… Rhyme thought. Evidence was his only concern.

He glanced at the crime scene charts on his wall, scanning all the clues of the case. The fibers, the bullets, the broken glass…

Analyze! Think!

You know the procedure. You’ve done it a million times.

You identify the facts. You quantify and categorize them. You state your assumptions. And you draw your conclusions. Then you test -

Assumptions, Rhyme thought.

There was one glaring assumption that had been present in this case from the beginning. They’d based their entire investigation on the belief that Kall was the Coffin Dancer. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was the pawn and the Dancer’d been using him as a weapon?

Deception …

If so, there’d be some evidence that didn’t fit. Something that pointed to the real Dancer.

He pored over the charts carefully.

But there was nothing unaccounted for except the green fiber. And that told him nothing.

“We don’t have any of Kall’s clothes, right?”

“No, he was buck naked when we found him,” the tour doctor said.

“We have anything he came in contact with?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Well, Jodie.”

Rhyme asked, “He changed clothes here, didn’t he?”

“Right,” Sellitto said.

“Bring ’ em here. Jodie ’s clothes. I want to look at them.”

“Uck,” Dellray said. “They’re excessively unpleasant.”

Cooper found and produced them. He brushed them out over sheets of clean newsprint. He mounted samples of the trace on slides and set them in the compound ’scope.

“What do we have?” Rhyme asked, looking over the computer screen, a copycat image of what Cooper was seeing in his microscope.

“What’s that white stuff?” Cooper asked. “Those grains. There’s a lot of it. It was in the seams of his pants.”

Rhyme felt his face flush. Some of it was his erratic blood pressure from exhaustion, some of it was the phantom pain that still plagued him every now and then. But mostly it was the heat of the chase.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

“What, Lincoln?”

“It’s oolite,” he announced.

“The fuck’s that?” Sellitto asked.

“Eggstone. It’s a wind-borne sand. You find it in the Bahamas.”

“Bahamas?” Cooper asked, frowning. “What else did we just hear about the Bahamas?” He looked around the lab. “I don’t remember.”

But Rhyme did. His eyes were seated on the bulletin board, where was pinned the FBI analyst’s report on the sand Amelia Sachs had found last week in Tony Panelli’s car, the missing agent downtown.

He read:

“Substance submitted for analysis is not technically sand. It is coral rubble from reef formations and contains spicules, cross sections of marine worm tubes, gastropod shells, and foraminifers. Most likely source is the northern Caribbean: Cuba, the Bahamas.”

Dellray’s agent, Rhyme reflected… A man who’d know where the most secure federal safe house in Manhattan was. Who’d tell whoever was torturing him the address.

So that the Dancer could wait there, wait for Stephen Kall to show up, befriend him, and then arrange to get captured and get close to the victims.

“The drugs!” Rhyme cried.

“What?” Sellitto asked.

“What was I thinking of? Dealers don’t cut prescription drugs! It’s too much trouble. Only street drugs!”

Cooper nodded. “Jodie wasn’t cutting them with the baby formula. He just dumped out the drugs. He was popping placebos, so we’d think he was a druggie.”

“Jodie’s the Dancer,” Rhyme called. “Get on the phone! Call the safe house now!”

Sellitto picked up the phone and dialed.

Was it too late?

Oh, Amelia, what’ve I done? Have I killed you?

The sky was turning a metallic rosy color.

A siren sounded far away.

The peregrine falcon – the tiercel , he remembered – was awake and about to go hunting.

Lon Sellitto looked up desperately from the phone. “There’s no answer,” he said.

Hour 44 of 45

THEY’D TALKED FOR A WHILE, the three of them, in Percey’s room.

Talked about airplanes and cars and police work.

Then Bell went off to bed and Percey and Sachs had talked about men.

Finally Percey’d lain back on the bed, closed her eyes. Sachs lifted the bourbon glass from the sleeping woman’s hand and shut out the lights. Decided to try to sleep herself.

She now paused in the corridor to look out at the dim dawn sky – pink and orange – when she realized that the phone in the compound’s main hallway had been ringing for a long time.

Why wasn’t anybody answering it?

She continued down the corridor.

She couldn’t see the two guards nearby. The enclave seemed darker than before. Most of the lights had been shut off. A gloomy place, she thought. Spooky. Smelling of pine and mold. Something else? Another smell that was very familiar to her. What?

Something from crime scenes. In her exhaustion she couldn’t place it.

The phone continued to chirp.

She passed Roland Bell’s room. The door was partly open and she looked in. His back was to the door. He was sitting in an armchair that faced a curtained window, his head forward on his chest, arms crossed.

“Detective?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

Sound asleep. Just what she wanted to be. She closed his door softly and continued down the corridor, toward her room.

She thought about Rhyme. She hoped he was getting some sleep too. She’d seen one of his dysreflexia attacks. It had been terrifying and she didn’t want him to go through another one.

The phone went quiet, cut off in the middle of a ring. She glanced toward where she’d heard it, wondering if it was for her. She couldn’t hear whoever’d answered. She waited a moment, but no one summoned her.

Silence. Then a tap, a faint scrape. More silence.

She stepped into her room. It was dark. She turned to grope for the switch and found herself staring at two eyes that caught a sliver of reflected light from outside.

Right hand on the butt of her Glock, she swept her left up to the light switch. The eight-point buck stared at her with his shiny, false eyes.

“Dead animals,” she muttered. “Great idea in a safe house…”

She pulled her blouse off and removed the bulky American Body Armor suit. Not as bulky as Jodie’s, of course. What a kick he was. The little… what was Dellray’s street word? Skel. Short for “skeleton.” Scrawny little loser. What a mutt.

She reached under her mesh undershirt and scratched frantically. Her boobs, her back under the bra, her sides.

Ooooo, feels good.

Exhausted, sure, but could she sleep?

The bed looked pretty damn nice.

She pulled on her blouse again, buttoned it, and lay down on the comforter. Closed her eyes. Did she hear footsteps?

One of the guards making coffee, she supposed.

Sleep? Breathe deep…

No sleep.

Her eyes opened and she stared at the webby ceiling.

The Coffin Dancer, she mused. How would he come at them? What would his weapon be?

His deadliest weapon is deception…

Glancing out a crack in the curtain, she saw the beautiful fish-gray dawn. A haze of mist bleached the color from the distant trees.

Somewhere inside the compound she heard a thud. A footstep.

Sachs swung her feet around to the floor and sat up. May as well just give up and get some coffee. I’ll sleep tonight.