The Coffin Dancer (38 page)

“For real?”

“Yep. Real soap opera, which I won’t go into now. Anyway, Ed and I were saving every penny to open our own charter company after we were discharged and we were completely broke. But one night he said, ‘Let’s go up.’ So we borrowed this old Norseman they had on the field. Tough plane. Big air-cooled rotary engine ... You could do anything with that aircraft. Well, I was in the left-hand seat. I’d taken off and’d got us up to about six thousand feet. Suddenly he kissed me and wobbled the yoke, which meant he was taking over. I let him. He said, ‘I got you a diamond after all, Perce.’ ”

“He did?” Sachs asked.

Percey smiled. “He throttled up, all the way to the fire wall, and pulled the yoke back. The nose went straight up in the air.” Tears were coming fast now to Percey Clay’s eyes. “For a moment, before he kicked rudder and we started down out of the stall, we were looking straight up into the night sky. He leaned over and said, ‘Take your pick. All the stars of evening—you can have any one you want.’ ” Percey lowered her head, caught her breath. “All the stars of evening ...”

After a moment she wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then turned back to the engine, “Believe me, you don’t have anything to worry about. Lincoln’s a fascinating man, but Ed was all I ever wanted.”

“There’s more to it than you know.” Sachs sighed. “You remind him of someone. Someone he was in love with. You show up and all of a sudden it’s like he’s with her again.”

Percey shrugged. “We have some things in common. We understand each other. But so what? That doesn’t mean anything. Take a look, Amelia. Rhyme loves you.”

Sachs laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

Percey gave her another look that said,
Whatever ...
and began replacing the equipment in boxes as meticulously as she’d worked with the tools and computers.

Roland Bell ambled inside, checking windows and scanning the shadows.

“All quiet?” he asked.

“Not a peep.”

“Got a message to pass on. The folk from U.S. Medical just left Westchester Hospital. The shipment’ll be here in an hour. I’ve got a car of my people behind them just to be on the safe side. But don’t worry that it’ll spook ’em and be bad for business—my guys’re top-notch. The driver’ll never know he’s being followed.”

Percey looked at her watch. “Okay.” She glanced at Bell, who was looking uncertainly at the open engine compartment, like a snake at a mongoose. She asked, “We don’t need baby-sitters on the flight, do we?”

Bell’s sigh was loud. “After what happened at the safe house,” he said in a low, solemn voice, “I’m not letting you outa my sight.” He shook his head and, already looking airsick, he walked back to the front door and disappeared into the cool late afternoon air.

Her head in the engine compartment, studying her work carefully, Percey said in a reverberating voice, “Looking at Rhyme and looking at you, I wouldn’t give it much more than fifty-fifty, I’ve got to say.” She turned and looked down at Sachs. “But you know, I had this flight instructor a long time ago.”

“And?”

“When we’d fly multiengine he had this game of throttling back one engine to idle and feathering the prop, then telling us to land. Lot of instructors’ll cut power for a few minutes, with altitude, just to see how you can handle it. But they always throttled up again before landing. This instructor, though—uh-uh. He’d make us land on one engine. Students’d always be asking him, ‘Isn’t that risky?’ His answer was, ‘God don’t give out certain. Sometimes you just gotta play the odds.’ ”

Percey lowered the flap of the engine cowl and clamped it into place. “All right, this’s done. Damn aircraft may actually fly.” She swatted the glossy skin like a cowgirl patting a rodeo rider’s butt.

chapter thirty

Hour 32 of 45

At 6 p.m. on Sunday they summoned Jodie from Rhyme’s downstairs bedroom, where he’d been under lock and key.

He trotted up the stairs reluctantly, clutching his silly book,
Dependent No More
, like a Bible. Rhyme remembered the title. It had been on the
Times
bestseller list for months. In a black mood at the time, he’d noticed the book and thought cynically, about himself, Dependent Forever.

A team of federal agents was flying from Quantico to Cumberland, West Virginia, Stephen Kall’s old residence, to pick up whatever leads they could, hoping they might track him to his present whereabouts from there. But Rhyme had seen how carefully he’d scoured his crime scenes and he had no reason to think the man would have been any less careful in covering his other tracks.

“You told us some things about him,” Rhyme said to Jodie. “Some
facts
, some
nutritional
information. I want to know more.”

“I—”

“Think hard.”

Jodie squinted. Rhyme supposed he was considering what he could say to mollify them, superficial impressions. But he was surprised when Jodie said, “Well, for one thing, he’s afraid of you.”

“Us?” Rhyme asked.

“No. Just you.”

“Me?” he asked, astonished. “He knows about me?”

“He knows your name’s Lincoln. And that you’re out to get him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, then added, “you know, he made a couple of calls on that cell phone. And he listened for a long time. I was thinking—”

“Oh, hellfire,” Dellray sang out. “He’s tapping somebody’s line.”

“Of course!” Rhyme cried. “Probably the Hudson Air office. That’s how he found out about the safe house. Why didn’t we think about that?”

Dellray said, “We gotta sweep the office. But the bug might be in a relay box somewheres. We’ll find it. We’ll find it.” He placed a call to the Bureau’s tech services.

To Jodie, Rhyme said, “Go on. What else does he know about me?”

“He knows you’re a detective. I don’t think he knows where you live, or your last name. But you scare the hell out of him.”

If Rhyme’s belly had been able to register the lub-dub of excitement—and pride—he’d have felt that now.

Let’s see, Stephen Kall, if we can’t give you a little more to be afraid of.

“You helped us once, Jodie. I need you to help us again.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dellray barked. “And listen t’what the man’s sayin’, hokay?
Hokay?”

“I did what I said I would. I’m not doing anything more.” The whine really was too much. Rhyme glanced at Sellitto. This called for people skills.

“It’s in your interest,” Sellitto said reasonably, “to help us.”

“Gettin’ shot in the
back’s
in my interest? Gettin’ shot in the
head’s
in my interest? Uh-huh. I see. You wanna explain that?”

“Sure, I’ll fucking explain it,” Sellitto grumbled. “The Dancer knows you dimed him. He didn’t
have
to target you back there at the safe house, right? Am I right?”

Always get the mutts to talk. To
participate.
Sellitto had often explained the ways of interrogation to Lincoln Rhyme.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Sellitto motioned Jodie closer with a crooked finger. “It woulda been the smart thing for him just to take off. But he went to the trouble to take up a sniper position and try to cap your ass. Now, what’s that tell us?”

“I—”

“It tells us that he ain’t gonna rest till he clips you.”

Dellray, happy to play straight man for a change, said, “And he’s the sort I don’t think you wanna have knocking on yo’ door at three in the morning—this week, next month, or next year. We all together on that?”

“So,” Sellitto resumed snappily, “agreed that it’s in your
interest
to help us?”

“But you’ll give me, like, witness protection?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Yes and no.”

“Huh?”

“If you help us, yes. If you don’t, no.”

Jodie’s eyes were red and watery. He seemed so afraid. In the years since his accident Rhyme had been fearful for others—Amelia and Thom and Lon Sellitto. But he himself didn’t believe he’d ever been afraid to die, certainly not since the accident. He wondered what it must be like to live so timidly. A mouse’s life.

Too many ways to die ...

Sellitto, slipping into his good-cop persona, offered a faint smile to Jodie. “You were there when he killed that agent, in the basement, right?”

“I was there, yeah.”

“That man could be alive now. And Brit Hale could be alive now. A lot of other people could too ...
if
somebody’d helped us stop this asshole a coupla years ago. Well, you can help us stop him now. You can keep Percey alive, maybe dozens of others.
You
can do that.”

This was Sellitto’s genius at work. Rhyme would have bullied and coerced and, in a pinch, bribed the little man. But it never occurred to him to appeal to the splinter of decency that the detective, at least, could see within him.

Jodie absently riffled the pages in his book with a filthy thumb. Finally he looked up and—with surprising sobriety—said, “When I was taking him to my place, in the subway, a couple times I thought I’d maybe push him into a sewer interceptor pipe. The water goes real fast there. Wash him right down to the Hudson. Or I know where they have these piles of tie spikes in the subway. I could grab one and hit him over the head when he wasn’t looking. I really, really thought about doing that. But I got scared.” He held up the book. “ ‘Chapter Three. Confronting your Demons.’ I’ve always run, you know. I never stood up to anything. I thought maybe I could stand up to him, but I couldn’t.”

“Hey, now’s your chance to,” Sellitto said.

Flipping through the tattered pages again. Sighing. “Whatta l gotta do?”

Dellray pointed an alarmingly long thumb toward the ceiling. His mark of approval.

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” Rhyme said, looking around the room. Suddenly he shouted, “Thom! Thom! Come
here.
I need you.”

The handsome, exasperated face of the aide poked around the corner. “Yessss?”

“I’m feeling vain,” Rhyme announced dramatically.

“What?”

“I’m feeling vain. I need a mirror.”

“You want a mirror?”

“A big one. And would you please comb my hair. I keep asking you and you keep forgetting.”

The U.S. Medical and Healthcare van pulled onto the tarmac. If the two white-jacketed employees, carting a quarter million dollars’ worth of human organs, were concerned about the machine-gun-armed cops ringing the field, they gave no indication of it.

The only time they flinched was when King, the bomb squad German shepherd, sniffed the cargo cases for explosives.

“Uhm, I’d watch that dog there,” one of the deliverymen said uneasily. “I imagine to them liver’s liver and heart’s heart.”

But King behaved like a thorough professional and signed off on the cargo without sampling any. The men carried the containers on board, loaded them into the refrigeration units. Percey returned to the cockpit where Brad Torgeson, a sandy-haired young pilot who flew occasional freelance jobs for Hudson Air, was going through the pre-flight check.

They’d both already done the walkaround, accompanied by Bell, three troopers, and King. There was no way the Dancer could have gotten to the plane in the first place, but the killer now had a reputation of materializing out of thin air; this was the most meticulous pre-flight visual in the history of aviation.

Looking back into the passenger compartment, Percey could see the lights of the refrigeration units. She felt that tug of satisfaction she always felt when inanimate machinery, built and honed by humans, came to life. The proof of God, for Percey Clay, could be found in the hum of servomotors and the buoyancy of a sleek metal wing at that instant when the airfoil creates negative top pressure and you become weightless.

Continuing with the pre-flight checklist, Percey was startled by the sound of heavy breathing next to her.

“Whoa,” Brad said as King decided there were no explosives in his crotch and continued his examination of the inside of the plane.

Rhyme had spoken to Percey not long ago and told her that he and Amelia Sachs had examined the gaskets and tubing and found no match for the latex discovered at the crash site in Chicago. Rhyme got the idea that he might have used the rubber to seal the explosives so that the dogs couldn’t smell it. So he had Percey and Brad stand down for a few minutes while Tech Services went through the entire plane, inside and out, with hypersensitive microphones, listening for a detonator timer.

Clean.

When the plane rolled out, the taxiway would be guarded by uniformed patrolmen. Fred Dellray had contacted the FAA to arrange that the flight plan be sealed, so that the Dancer couldn’t learn where the plane was going—if he even knew that Percey was at the helm. The agent had also contacted the FBI field offices in each of the arrival cities and arranged for tactical agents to be on the tarmac when the shipments were delivered.

Now, engines started, Brad in the right-hand seat and Roland Bell shifting uneasily in one of the two remaining passenger seats, Percey Clay spoke to the tower, “Lear Six Miner Five
Foxtrot Bravo
at Hudson Air. Ready for taxi.”

“Roger, Niner Five
Foxtrot Bravo.
Cleared onto taxiway zero nine right.”

“Zero nine right, Niner Five
Foxtrot Bravo.
”

A touch to the smooth throttles and the spritely plane turned onto the taxiway and proceeded through the gray, early spring evening. Percey was driving. Copilots have flight authority but only the pilot can steer the plane on the ground.

“You having fun, Officer?” she called back to Bell.

“I’m just tickled,” he said, looking sourly out the large round window. “You know, you can see straight down. I mean, the windows go so far round. Why’d they make it that way?”

Percey laughed. She called out, “On airliners, they try to keep you from realizing you’re flying. Movies, food, small windows. Where’s the fun? What’s the point?”

“I can see a point or two,” he said, chewing his Wrigley’s with energetic teeth. He closed the curtain.