The Coffin Dancer (45 page)

“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.

“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.

chapter thirty-seven

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 ...”