The Coffin Dancer (25 page)

Stephen moved fast. He leapt up, lifting the machine gun away and breaking off the man’s stalk microphone. Then he drove his k-bar knife up under the agent’s triceps, paralyzing his right arm. The man cried out in pain.

They’re green-lighted to kill! Stephen thought. No surrender pitch. They see me, they shoot. Armed or not.

Jodie cried, “Oh, my God!” He stepped forward uncertainly, hands still airborne—almost comically.

Stephen knocked the agent to his knees and pulled his Kevlar helmet over his eyes, gagged him with a rag.

“Oh, God, you stabbed him,” Jodie said, lowering his arms and walking forward.

“Shut up,” Stephen said. “What we talked about. The exit.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Jodie just stared.

“Now!” Stephen raged.

Jodie ran to the hole in the wall as Stephen pulled the agent to his feet and led him into the corridor.

Green-lighted to kill ...

Lincoln the Worm had decided he’d die. Stephen was furious.

“Wait there,” he ordered Jodie.

Stephen plugged the headset back into the man’s transceiver and listened. They were on the Special Operations channel and there must have been a dozen or so cops and agents, calling in as they searched different parts of the building.

He didn’t have much time, but he had to slow them up.

Stephen led the dazed agent out into the yellow hallway.

He pulled out his knife again.

chapter twenty

Hour 23 of 45

“Damn.
Damn!”
Rhyme snapped, flecking his chin with spittle. Thom stepped up to the chair and wiped it, but Rhyme angrily shook him away.

“Bo?” he called into his microphone.

“Go ahead,” Haumann said from the command van.

“I think somehow he made us and’s going to fight his way out. Tell your agents to form defensive teams. I don’t want anybody alone. Move everybody into the building. I think—”

“Hold on ... Hold on. Oh, no ...”

“Bo? Sachs? ... Anybody?”

But nobody answered.

Rhyme heard shouting voices through the radio. The transmission was cut off. Then staccato bursts: “... assistance. We’ve got a blood trail ... In the office building. Right, right ... no ... downstairs ... Basement. Innelman’s not reporting in. He was ... basement. All units move, move. Come on,
move!
...”

Rhyme called, “Bell, you hear me? Double up on the principals. Do not, repeat, do not leave them unguarded. The Dancer’s loose and we don’t know where he is.”

Roland Bell’s calm voice came over the line. “Got ’em under our wing. Nobody’s getting in here.”

An infuriating wait. Unbearable. Rhyme wanted to scream with frustration.

Where was he?

A snake in a dark room ...

Then one by one the troopers and agents called in, telling Haumann and Dellray that they’d secured one floor after another.

Finally, Rhyme heard: “Basement’s secure. But Jesus Lord there’s a lot of blood down here. And Innelman’s gone. We can’t find him! Jesus, all this blood!”

“Rhyme, can you hear me?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m in the basement of the office building,” Amelia Sachs said into her stalk mike, looking around her.

The walls were filthy yellow concrete and the floors were painted battleship gray. But you hardly noticed the decor of the dank place; blood spatter was everywhere, like a horrific Jackson Pollock painting.

The poor agent, she thought. Innelman. Better find him fast. Someone bleeding this much couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.

“You have the kit?” Rhyme asked her.

“We don’t have time! All the blood, we’ve got to find him!”

“Steady, Sachs. The kit. Open the kit.”

She sighed. “All right! Got it.”

The crime scene blood kit contained a ruler, protractor with string attached, tape measure, the Kastle-Meyer Reagent presumptive field test. Luminol too—which detects iron oxide residue of blood even when a perp scrubs away all visual trace.

“It’s just a mess, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to figure out anything.”

“Oh, the scene’ll tell us more than you think, Sachs. It’ll tell us plenty.”

Well, if anybody could make sense of this macabre setting, it would be Rhyme; she knew that he and Mel Cooper were long-standing members of the International Association of Blood Pattern Analysts. (She didn’t know which was more disturbing—the gruesome blood spatter at crime scenes or the fact that there was a group of people who specialized in the subject.) But this seemed hopeless.

“We’ve got to
find
him ...”

“Sachs, calm down ... You with me?”

After a moment she said, “Okay.”

“All you need for now is the ruler,” he said. “First, tell me what you see.”

“There’re drips all over the place here.”

“Blood spatter’s very revealing. But it’s meaningless unless the surface it’s on is uniform. What’s the floor like?”

“Smooth concrete.”

“Good. How big are the drops? Measure them.”

“He’s
dying
, Rhyme.”

“How
big?”
he snapped.

“All different sizes. There’re hundreds of them about three-quarters of an inch. Some are bigger. About an inch and a quarter. Thousands of very little ones. Like a spray.”

“Forget the little ones. They’re ‘overcast’ drops, satellites of the others. Describe the biggest ones. Shape?”

“Mostly round.”

“Scalloped edges?”

“Yes,” she muttered. “But there are some that just have smooth edges. Here’re some in front of me. They’re a little smaller, though.”

Where
is
he? she wondered. Innelman. A man she’d never met. Missing and bleeding like a fountain.

“Sachs?”

“What?” she snapped.

“What about the smaller drops? Tell me about them.”

“We don’t have time to do this!”

“We don’t have time
not
to,” he said calmly.

God damn you, Rhyme, she thought, then said, “All right.” She measured. “They’re about a half inch. Perfectly round. No scalloped edges.”

“Where are those?” he asked urgently. “At one end of the corridor, or the other?”

“Mostly in the middle. There’s a storeroom at the end of the hall. Inside there and near it they’re bigger and have ragged or scalloped edges. At the other end of the corridor, they’re smaller.”

“Okay, okay,” Rhyme said absently, then he announced, “here’s the story ... What’s the agent’s name?”

“Innelman. John Innelman. He’s a friend of Dellray’s.”

“The Dancer got Innelman in the storeroom, stabbed him once, high. Debilitated him, probably arm or neck. Those are the big, uneven drops. Then he led him down the corridor, stabbing him again, lower. Those are the smaller, rounder ones. The shorter the distance blood falls, the more even the edges.”

“Why’d he do that?” she gasped.

“To slow us down. He knows we’ll look for a wounded agent before we start after him.”

He’s right, she thought, but we’re not looking
fast
enough!

“How long’s the corridor?”

She sighed, looked down it. “About fifty feet, give or take, and the blood trail covers the whole thing.”

“Any footprints in the blood?”

“Dozens. They go everywhere. Wait ... There’s a service elevator. I didn’t see it at first. That’s where the trail leads! He must be inside. We have to—”

“No, Sachs, wait. That’s too obvious.”

“We have to get the elevator door open. I’m calling the Fire Department for somebody with a Halligan tool or an elevator key. They can—”

Calmly Rhyme said, “Listen to me. Do the drops leading to the elevator look like teardrops? With the tails pointing in different directions?”

“He’s got to be in the elevator! There’re smears on the door. He’s dying, Rhyme! Will you listen to me!”

“Teardrops, Sachs?” he asked soothingly. “Do they look like tadpoles?”

She looked down. They did. Perfect tadpoles, with the tails pointing in a dozen different directions.

“Yeah, Rhyme. They do.”

“Backtrack until those stop.”

This was
crazy.
Innelman was bleeding out in the elevator shaft. She gazed at the metal door for a moment, thought about ignoring Rhyme, but then trotted back down the corridor.

To the place where they stopped.

“Here, Rhyme. They stop here.”

“It’s at a closet or door?”

“Yes, how’d you know?”

“And it’s bolted from the outside?”

“That’s right.”

How the hell does he
do
it?

“So the search team’d see the bolt and pass it by—the Dancer couldn’t very well bolt himself inside. Well, Innelman’s in there. Open the door, Sachs. Use the pliers on the handle, not the knob itself. There’s a chance we can lift a print. And Sachs?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he left a bomb. He hardly had time. But whatever shape the agent’s in, and it won’t be good, ignore him for a minute and look for any traps first.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

Pliers out ... unbolt the latch ... twist the knob.

Glock up. Apply poundage. Now!

The door flew outward.

But there was no bomb or other trap. Just the pale, blood-slicked body of John Innelman, unconscious, tumbling to her feet.

She barked a soft scream. “He’s here. Need medics! He’s cut bad.”

Sachs bent over him. Two EMS techs and more agents ran up, Dellray with them, grim faced.

“What’d he do to you, John? Oh, man.” The lanky agent stood back while the medics went to work. They cut off much of his clothing and examined the stab wounds. Innelman’s eyes were half open, glazed.

“Is he ... ?” Dellray asked.

“Alive, just barely.”

The medics slapped pads on the slashes, put a tourniquet on his leg and arm, and then ran a plasma line. “Get him in the bus. We gotta move. I mean, move!”

They placed the agent on a gurney and hurried down the corridor, Dellray with him, head down, muttering to himself and squeezing his dead cigarette between his fingers.

“Could he talk?” Rhyme asked. “Any clue where the Dancer went?”

“No. He was unconscious. I don’t know if they can save him. Jesus.”

“Don’t get raided, Sachs. We’ve got a crime scene to analyze. We
have
to find out where the Dancer is, if he’s still around. Go back to the storeroom. See if there are exterior doors or windows.”

As she walked to it she asked, “How’d you know about the closet?”

“Because of the direction of the drops. He shoved Innelman inside and soaked a rag in the cop’s blood. He walked to the elevator, swinging the rag. The drops were moving in different directions when they fell. So they had a teardrop appearance. And since he tried leading us to the elevator, we should look in the opposite direction for his escape route. The storeroom. Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Describe it.”

“There’s a window looking out on the alley. Looks like he started to open it. But it’s puttied shut. No doors.” She looked out the window. “I can’t see any of the trooper’s positions, though. I don’t know what tipped him.”

“
You
can’t see any of the troopers,” Rhyme said cynically. “He could. Now, walk the grid and let’s see what we find.”

She searched the scene carefully, walking the grid, then vacuumed for trace and carefully bagged the filters.

“What do you see? Anything?”

She shone her light on the walls and she found two mismatched blocks. A tight squeeze, but someone Umber could have fit through there.

“Got his exit route, Rhyme. He went through the wall. Some loose concrete blocks.”

“Don’t open it. Get SWAT there.”

She called several agents down to the room and they pulled the blocks out, sweeping the inner chamber with flashlights mounted on the barrels of their H&K submachine guns.

“Clear,” one agent called. Sachs drew her weapon and slipped into the cool, dank space.

It was a narrow declining ramp filled with rubble, leading through a hole in the foundation. Water dripped. She was careful to step on large chunks of concrete and leave the damp earth untouched.

“What do you see, Sachs? Tell me!”

She waved the PoliLight wand over the places where the Dancer would logically have gripped with his hands and stepped with his feet. “Whoa, Rhyme.”

“What?”

“Fingerprints. Fresh latents ... Wait. But here’re the glove prints too. In blood. From holding the rag. I don’t get it. It’s like a cave ... Maybe he took the gloves off for some reason. Maybe he thought he was safe in the tunnel.”

Then she looked down and shone the eerie glow of yellow-green light at her feet. “Oh.”

“What?”

“They’re not his prints. He’s with somebody else.”

“Somebody else? How do you know?”

“There’s another set of footprints too. They’re both fresh. One bigger than the other. They go off in the same direction, running. Jesus, Rhyme.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It means he’s got a partner.”

“Come on, Sachs. The glass is half full.” Rhyme added cheerfully, “It means we’ll have twice as much evidence to help us track him down.”

“I was thinking,” she said darkly, “that it meant he’d be twice as dangerous.”

“What’ve you got?” Lincoln Rhyme asked.

Sachs had returned to his town house and she and Mel Cooper were looking over the evidence collected at the scene. Sachs and SWAT had followed the footsteps into a Con Ed access tunnel, where they lost track of both the Dancer and his companion. It looked as if the men had climbed to the street and escaped through a manhole.

She gave Cooper the print she’d found in the entrance to the tunnel. He scanned it into the computer and sent it off to the feds for an AFIS search.

Then she held up two electrostatic prints for Rhyme to examine. “These’re the footprints in the tunnel. This one’s the Dancer’s.” She lifted one of the prints—transparent, like an X ray. “It matches a print in the shrink’s office he broke into on the first floor.”

“Wearing average ordinary factory shoes,” Rhyme said.