Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“AIN’T KOSHER, LINCOLN. CAN’T DO IT.”

Lon Sellitto was insistent.

But so was Lincoln Rhyme. “Give me a half hour with him.”

“They’re not comfy with it.” Which really meant what the detective added: “They shit when I suggested it. You’re civilian.”

It was nearly ten on Monday morning. Percey’s appearance before the grand jury had been postponed until tomorrow. The navy divers had found the duffel bags that Phillip Hansen had sunk deep in Long Island Sound. They were being raced to an FBI PERT team in the Federal Building downtown for analysis. Eliopolos had delayed the grand jury to be able to present as much damning evidence against Hansen as possible.

“What’re they worried about?” Rhyme asked petulantly. “It’s not as if I can beat him up.”

He thought about lowering his offer to twenty minutes. But that was a sign of weakness. And Lincoln Rhyme did not believe in showing weakness. So he said, “ I caught him. I deserve a chance to talk to him.”

And fell silent.

Blaine, his ex-wife, had told him in a moment of very uncharacteristic perception that Rhyme’s eyes, dark as night, argued better than his words did. And so he stared at Sellitto until the detective sighed, then glanced at Dellray.

“Aw, give him a little time,” the agent said. “What’s it gonna hurt? Bring the billy-boy up here. And if he tries to run, hell, gimme a golden excuse for some target practice.”

Sellitto said, “Oh, all right. I’ll make the call. Only, don’t fuck up this case.”

The criminalist barely heard the words. His eyes turned toward the doorway, as if the Coffin Dancer were about to materialize magically.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if that had happened.

“What’s your real name? Is it really Joe or Jodie?”

“Ah, what’s it matter? You caught me. You can call me what you want.”

“How ’bout a first name?” Rhyme asked. “How ’bout what you call me? The Dancer. I like that.”

The small man examined Rhyme carefully with his good eye. If he was in pain from the wounds, or groggy from medication, he didn’t show it. His left arm was in a shoulder cast but he still wore thick cuffs attached to a waist shackle. His feet were chained too.

“Whatever you like,” Rhyme said pleasantly, and continued to study the man as if he were an unusual pollen spore picked up at a crime scene.

The Dancer smiled. Because of the damaged facial nerves and the bandages, his expression was grotesque. Tremors occasionally shook his body, and his fingers twitched; his broken shoulder rose and fell involuntarily. Rhyme had a curious feeling – that he himself was healthy and it was the prisoner who was the cripple.

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The Dancer smiled at him. “You’re just dying to know, aren’t you?” he asked Rhyme.

“Know what?”

“To know all… That’s why you brought me here. You were lucky – catching me, I mean – but you don’t really have a clue as to how I did it.”

Rhyme clucked his tongue. “Oh, but I know exactly how you did it.”

“Do you now?”

“I just asked you here to talk to you,” Rhyme replied. “That’s all. To talk to the man who almost out-thought me.”

“ ‘Almost.’ ” The Dancer laughed. Another twisted smile. It was really quite eerie. “Okay, then tell me.”

Rhyme sipped from his straw. It was fruit juice. He’d astonished Thom by asking him to dump out the scotch and replace it with Hawaiian Punch. Rhyme now said agreeably, “All right. You were hired to kill Ed Carney, Brit Hale, and Percey Clay. You were paid a lot, I’d guess. Six figures.”

“Seven,” the Dancer said proudly.

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. “Lucrative line of work.”

“If you’re good.”

“You deposited the money in the Bahamas. You’d gotten Stephen Kall’s name from somewhere – I don’t know where exactly, probably a mercenary network” – the Dancer nodded – “and you hired him as a subcontractor. Anonymously, maybe by E-mail, maybe fax, using references he’d trust. You’d never meet him face-to-face, of course. And I assume you tried him out?”

“Of course. A hit outside of Washington, D.C. I was hired to kill a congressional aide sneaking secrets out of Armed Services Committee files. It was an easy job, so I subcontracted it to Stephen. Gave me a good chance to check him out. I watched him every step of the way. I checked the entrance wound on the body myself. Very professional. I think he saw me watching him and he came after me to take care of witnesses. That was good too.”

Rhyme continued. “You left him his cash and the key to Phillip Hansen’s hangar – where he waited to plant the bomb on Carney’s plane. You knew he was good but you weren’t sure he was good enough to kill all three of them. You probably thought he could get one at the most but would provide enough diversion for you to get close to the other two.”

The Dancer nodded, reluctantly impressed. “Him killing Brit Hale surprised me. Oh, yes. And it surprised me even more that he got away afterward and got the second bomb onto Percey Clay’s plane.”

“You guessed that you’d have to kill at least one of the victims yourself, so last week you became Jodie, started hawking your drugs everywhere so that people on the street’d know about you. You kidnapped the agent in front of the Federal Building, found out which safe house they’d be in. You waited in the most logical place for Stephen to make his attack and let him kidnap you. You left plenty of clues to your subway hideout so we’d be sure to find you… and use you to get to Kall. We all trusted you. Sure we did – Stephen didn’t have a clue you’d hired him. All he knew was that you betrayed him and he wanted to kill you. Perfect cover for you. But risky.”

“But what’s life without risk?” the Dancer asked playfully. “Makes it all worthwhile, don’t you think? Besides, when we were together I built in a few… let’s call them countermeasures, so that he’d hesitate to shoot me. Latent homosexuality is always helpful.”

“But,” Rhyme added, piqued that his narrative had been interrupted, “when Kall was in the park, you slipped out of the alley where you were hiding, found him, and killed him… You disposed of the hands, teeth, and clothes – and his guns – in the sewer interceptor pipes. And then we invited you out to Long Island… Fox in the henhouse.” Rhyme added flippantly, “That’s the schematic… That’s the bare bones. But I think it tells the story.”

The man’s good eye closed momentarily, then opened again. Red and wet, it stared at Rhyme. He gave a faint nod of concession, or perhaps admiration. “What was it?” the Dancer finally asked. “What tipped you?”

“Sand,” Rhyme answered. “From the Bahamas.”

He nodded, winced at the pain. “I turned my pockets out. I vacuumed.”

“In the folds of the seams. The drugs too. Residue and the baby formula.”

“Yes. Sure.” After a moment the Dancer added, “He was right to be scared of you. Stephen, I mean.” The eye was still scanning Rhyme, like a doctor looking for a tumor. He added, “Poor man. What a sad creature. Who buggered him, d’you think? Stepdad or the boys in reform? Or all of the above?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Rhyme said. On the windowsill the male falcon landed and folded his wings.

“Stephen got scared,” the Dancer mused. “And when you get scared it’s all over. He thought the worm was looking for him. Lincoln the Worm. I heard him whisper that a few times. He was scared of you.”

“But you weren’t scared.”