The Coffin Dancer (5 page)

He was saved from this horrid reverie by the buzz of the fax machine. Jerry Banks snagged the first sheet. “Crime scene report from the crash,” he announced.

Rhyme’s head snapped toward the machine eagerly. “Time to go to work, boys and girls!”

Wash ’em. Wash ’em off.

Soldier, are those hands clean?

Sir, they’re getting there, sir.

The solid man, in his mid-thirties, stood in the washroom of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, lost in his task.

Scrub, scrub, scrub ...

He paused and looked out the men’s room door. Nobody seemed interested that he’d been in here for nearly ten minutes.

Back to scrubbing.

Stephen Kall examined his cuticles and big red knuckles.

Lookin’ clean, lookin’ clean. No worms. Not a single one.

He’d been feeling fine as he moved the black van off the street and parked it deep in an underground garage. Stephen had taken what tools he needed from the back of the vehicle and climbed the ramp, slipping out onto the busy street. He’d worked in New York several times before but he could never get used to all the people, a thousand people on this block alone.

Makes me feel cringey.

Makes me feel
wormy.

And so he stopped here in the men’s room for a little scrub.

Soldier, aren’t you through with that yet? You’ve got two targets left to eliminate.

Sir, almost, sir. Have to remove the risk of any trace evidence prior to proceeding with the operation, sir.

Oh, for the luva Christ ...

The hot water pouring over his hands. Scrubbing with a brush he carried with him in a plastic Baggie. Squirting the pink soap from the dispenser. And scrubbing some more.

Finally he examined the ruddy hands and dried them under the hot air of the blower. No towels, no telltale fibers.

No worms either.

Stephen wore camouflage today though not military olive drab or Desert Storm beige. He was in jeans, Reeboks, a work shin, a gray windbreaker speckled with paint drips. On his belt was his cell phone and a large tape measure. He looked like any other contractor in Manhattan and was wearing this outfit today because no one would think twice about a workman wearing cloth gloves on a spring day.

Walking outside.

Still lots of people. But his hands were clean and he wasn’t cringey anymore.

He paused at the corner and looked down the street at the building that had been the Husband’s and Wife’s town house but was the Wife’s alone now because the Husband had been neatly blown into a million small pieces over the Land of Lincoln.

So, two witnesses were still alive and they both had to be dead before the grand jury convened on Monday. He glanced at his bulky stainless-steel watch. It was nine-thirty Saturday morning.

Soldier, is that enough time to get them both?

Sir, I may not get them both now but I still have nearly forty-eight hours, sir. That is more than sufficient time to locate and neutralize both targets, sir.

But, Soldier, do you mind challenges?

Sir, I
live for
challenges, sir.

There was a single squad car in front of the town house. Which he’d expected.

All right, we have a known kill zone in front of the house, an unknown one inside ...

He looked up and down the street, then started along the sidewalk, his scrubbed hands tingling. The backpack weighed close to sixty pounds but he hardly felt it. Crew-cut Stephen was mostly muscle.

As he walked he pictured himself as a local. Anonymous. He didn’t think of himself as Stephen or as Mr. Kall or Todd Johnson or Stan Bledsoe or any of the dozens of other aliases he’d used over the past ten years. His real name was like a rusty gym set in the backyard, something you were aware of but didn’t really see.

He turned suddenly and stepped into the doorway of the building opposite the Wife’s town house. Stephen pushed open the front door and looked out at the large glass windows in front, partially obscured by a flowering dogwood tree. He put on a pair of expensive yellow-tinted shooting glasses and the glare from the window vanished. He could see figures moving around inside. One cop ... no, two cops. A man with his back to the window. Maybe the Friend, the other witness he’d been hired to kill. And ... yes! There was the Wife. Short. Homely. Boyish. She was wearing a white blouse. It made a good target.

She stepped out of view.

Stephen bent down and unzipped his backpack.

chapter four

A sitting transfer into the Storm Arrow wheelchair.

Then Rhyme took over, gripping the plastic straw of the sip-and-puff controller in his mouth, and he drove into the tiny elevator, formerly a closet, that carried him unceremoniously down to the first floor of his town house.

In the 1890s, when the place had been built, the room into which Lincoln Rhyme now wheeled had been a parlor off the dining room. Plaster-and-lath construction, fleur-de-lis crown molding, domed icon recesses, and solid oak floorboards joined as tight as welded steel. An architect, though, would have been horrified to see that Rhyme had had the wall separating the two rooms demolished and large holes dug into the remaining walls to run additional electrical lines. The combined rooms were now a messy space filled not with Tiffany’s stained glass or moody landscapes by George Inness but with very different objets d’art: density-gradient tubes, computers, compound microscopes, comparison ’scopes, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a PoliLight alternative light source, fuming frames for raising friction ridge prints. A very expensive scanning electron microscope hooked to an energy dispersive X-ray unit sat prominently in the corner. Here too were the mundane tools of the criminalist’s trade: goggles, latex and cut-resistant gloves, beakers, screwdrivers and pliers, postmortem finger spoons, tongs, scalpels, tongue depressors, cotton swabs, jars, plastic bags, examining trays, probes. A dozen pairs of chopsticks (Rhyme ordered his assistants to lift evidence the way they picked up dim sum at Ming Wa’s).

Rhyme steered the sleek, candy-apple red Storm Arrow into position beside the worktable. Thom placed the microphone over his head and booted up the computer.

A moment later Sellitto and Banks appeared in the doorway, joined by another man who’d just arrived. He was tall and rangy, with skin as dark as tires. He was wearing a green suit and an unearthly yellow shirt.

“Hello, Fred.”

“Lincoln.”

“Hey.” Sachs nodded to Fred Dellray as she entered the room. She’d forgiven him for arresting her not long ago—an interagency squabble—and they now had a curious affinity, this tall, beautiful cop and the tall, quirky agent. They were both, Rhyme had decisively concluded,
people
cops (he himself being an
evidence
cop). Dellray trusted forensics as little as Rhyme trusted the testimony of witnesses. As for former beat cop Sachs, well, there was nothing Rhyme could do about her natural proclivities but he was determined that she push those talents aside and become the best criminalist in New York, if not the country. A goal that was easily within her grasp, even if she herself didn’t know it.

Dellray loped across the room, stationed himself beside the window, crossed his lanky arms. No one—Rhyme included—could peg the agent exactly. He lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn, loved to read literature and philosophy, and loved even more to play pool in tawdry bars. Once the jewel in the crown of the FBI’s undercover agents, Fred Dellray was still referred to occasionally by the nickname he’d had when he was in the field: “The Chameleon”—a tribute to his uncanny skill at being whoever his undercover role required he be. He had over a thousand arrests to his credit. But he’d spent too much time undercover and had become “overextended,” as the Bureauese went. It was only a matter of time before he’d be recognized by some dealer or warlord and killed. So he’d reluctantly agreed to take an administrative job running other undercover agents and CIs—confidential informants.

“So, mah boys tell me we got us the Dancer hisself,” the agent muttered, the patois less Ebonics than, well ... pure Dellray. His grammar and vocabulary, like his life, were largely improvised.

“Any word on Tony?” Rhyme asked.

“My boy gone missing?” Dellray asked, his face screwing up angrily. “Not. A. Thing.”

Tony Panelli, the agent who’d disappeared from the Federal Building several days before, had left behind a wife at home, a gray Ford with a running engine, and a number of grains of infuriatingly mysterious sand—the sensuous asteroids that promised answers but had so far delivered none.

“When we catch the Dancer,” Rhyme said, “we’ll get back on it, Amelia and me. Full-time. Promise.”

Dellray angrily tapped the unlit tip of a cigarette nestling behind his left ear. “The Dancer ... Shit. Better nail his ass this time. Shit.”

“What about the hit?” Sachs asked. “The one last night. Have any details?”

Sellitto read through the wad of faxes and some of his own handwritten notes. He looked up. “Ed Carney took off from Mamaroneck Airport around seven-fifteen last night. The company—Hudson Air—they’re a private charterer. They fly cargo, corporate clients, you know. Lease out planes. They’d just gotten a new contract to fly—get this—body parts for transplants to hospitals around the Midwest and East Coast. Hear it’s a real competitive business nowadays.”

“Cutthroat,” Banks offered and was the only one who smiled at his joke.

Sellitto continued. “The client was U.S. Medical and Healthcare. Based up in Somers. One of those for-profit hospital chains. Carney had a real tight schedule. Was supposed to fly to Chicago, Saint Louis, Memphis, Lexington, Cleveland, then lay over in Erie, Pennsylvania. Come back this morning.”

“Any passengers?” Rhyme asked.

“Not whole ones,” Sellitto muttered. “Just the cargo. Everything’s routine about the flight Then about ten minutes out of O’Hare, a bomb goes off. Blows the shit out of the plane. Killed both Carney and his copilot. Four injuries on the ground. His wife, by the way, was supposed to be flying with him but she got sick and had to cancel.”

“There an NTSB report?” Rhyme asked. “No, of course not, there wouldn’t be. Not yet.”

“Report won’t be ready for two, three days.”

“Well, we can’t
wait
two or three days!” Rhyme griped loudly. “I need it now!”

A pink scar from the ventilator hose was visible on his throat. But Rhyme had weaned himself off the fake lung and could breathe like nobody’s business. Lincoln Rhyme was a C4 quad who could sigh, cough, and shout like a sailor. “I need to know everything about the bomb.”

“I’ll call a buddy in the Windy City,” Dellray said. “He owes me major. Tell ’im what’s what and have ’im ship us whatever they got, pronto.”

Rhyme nodded to the agent, then considered what Sellitto had told him. “Okay, we’ve got two scenes. The crash site in Chicago. That one’s too late for you, Sachs. Contaminated as hell. We’ll just have to hope the folks in Chicago do a halfway decent job. The other scene’s the airport in Mamaroneck—where the Dancer got the bomb on board.”

“How do we know he did it at the airport?” Sachs said. She was rolling her brilliant red hair in a twist, then pinning it on top of her head. Magnificent strands like these were a liability at crime scenes; they threatened to contaminate the evidence. Sachs went about her job armed with a Glock 9 and a dozen bobby pins.

“Good point, Sachs.” He loved her outguessing him. “We
don’t
know and we won’t until we find the seat of the bomb. It might’ve been planted in the cargo, in a flight bag, a coffeepot.”

Or a wastebasket, he thought grimly, again recalling the Wall Street bombing.

“I want every single bit of that bomb here as soon as possible. We have to have it,” Rhyme said.

“Well, Linc,” Sellitto said slowly, “the plane was a mile up when it blew. The wreckage’s scattered over a whole fucking subdivision.”

“I don’t care,” Rhyme said, neck muscles aching. “Are they still searching?”

Local rescue workers searched crash sites but investigations were federal, so it was Fred Dellray who placed a call to the FBI special agent at the site.

“Tell him we need every piece of wreckage that tests positive for explosive. I’m talking nanograms. I want that bomb.”

Dellray relayed this. Then he looked up, shook his head. “Scene’s released.”

“What?” Rhyme snapped. “After twelve hours? Ridiculous. Inexcusable!”

“They had to get the streets open. He said—”

“Fire trucks!” Rhyme called.

“What?”

“Every fire truck, ambulance, police car ... every emergency vehicle that responded to the crash. I want the tires scraped.”

Dellray’s long, black face stared at him. “You wanna repeat that? For my ex-good friend here?” The agent pushed the phone at him.

Rhyme ignored the receiver and said to Dellray, “Emergency vehicle tires’re one of the best sources for good evidence at contaminated crime scenes. They were first on the scene, they usually have new tires with deep tread grooves, and they probably didn’t drive anywhere but to and from the crash site. I want all the tires scraped and the trace sent here.”

Dellray managed to get a promise from Chicago that the tires of as many emergency vehicles as they could get to would be scraped.

“Not ‘as many as’ ” Rhyme called.
“All
of them.”

Dellray rolled his eyes and relayed that information too, then hung up.

Suddenly Rhyme cried, “Thom! Thom, where are you?”

The belabored aide appeared at the door a moment later. “In the laundry room, that’s where.”

“Forget laundry. We need a time chart. Write, write ...”

“Write
what
, Lincoln?”

“On that chalkboard, right there. The big one.” Rhyme looked at Sellitto. “When’s the grand jury convening?”

“Nine on Monday.”

“The prosecutor’ll want them there a couple hours early—the van’ll pick ’em up between six and seven.” He looked at the wall clock. It was now 10 a.m. Saturday.

“We’ve got exactly forty-five hours. Thom, write, ‘Hour one of forty-five.’ ”