The Coffin Dancer (10 page)

“ ‘Difficult to determine exact blast location,’ ” Sellitto read, “ ‘because of extensive fire and destruction of aircraft. Site of device seems to be underneath and behind the cockpit.’ ”

“Underneath and behind. I wonder if a cargo bay’s there. Maybe ...” Rhyme fell silent. His head swiveled back and forth, gazing at the evidence bags. “Wait, wait!” he shouted. “Mel, let me see those bits of metal there. Third bag from the left. The aluminum. Put it under a ’scope.”

Cooper had connected the video output of his compound microscope to Rhyme’s computer. What Cooper saw, Rhyme could see. The tech began mounting samples of the minuscule bits of debris on slides and running them under the ’scope.

A moment later Rhyme ordered, “Cursor down. Double click.”

The image on his computer screen magnified.

“There, look! The skin of the plane was blown inward.”

“Inward?” Sachs asked. “You mean the bomb was on the
outside?”

“I think so, yes. What about it, Mel?”

“You’re right. Those polished rivet heads are all bent inward. It was outside, definitely.”

“A rocket maybe?” Dellray asked. “SAM?”

Reading from the report Sellitto said, “No radar blips consistent with missiles.”

Rhyme shook his head. “No, everything points to a bomb.”

“But on the
outside?”
Sellitto asked. “Never heard of that before.”

“That explains this,” Cooper called. The tech, wearing magnifying goggles and armed with a ceramic probe, was looking over bits of metal as fast as a cowboy counts heads in a herd. “Fragments of ferrous metal. Magnets. Wouldn’t stick to the aluminum skin but there was steel under it. And I’ve got bits of epoxy resin. He stuck the bomb on the outside with the magnets to hold it until the glue hardened.”

“And look at the shock waves in the epoxy,” Rhyme pointed out. “The glue wasn’t completely set, so he planted it not long before takeoff.”

“Can we brand the epoxy?”

“Nope. Generic composition. Sold everywhere.”

“Any hope of prints? Tell me true, Mel.”

Cooper’s answer was a faint, skeptical laugh. But he went through the motions anyway and scanned the fragments with the PoliLight wand. Nothing was evident except the blast residue. “Not a thing.”

“I want to smell it,” Rhyme announced.

“Smell it?” Sachs asked.

“With the brisance, we know it’s high explosive. I want to know exactly what kind.”

Many bombers used low explosives—substances that burn quickly but don’t explode unless confined in, say, a pipe or box. Gunpowder was the most common of these. High explosives—like plastic or TNT—detonate in their natural state and don’t need to be packed inside anything. They were expensive and hard to come by. The type and source of explosive could tell a lot about the bomber’s identity.

Sachs brought a bag to Rhyme’s chair and opened it. He inhaled.

“RDX,” Rhyme said, recognizing it immediately.

“Consistent with the brisance,” Cooper said. “You thinking C three or C four?” Cooper asked. RDX was the main component of these two plastic explosives, which were military; they were illegal for a civilian to possess.

“Not C three,” Rhyme said, again smelling the explosive as if it were a vintage Bordeaux. “No sweet smell ... Not sure. And strange ... I smell something else ... GC it, Mel.”

The tech ran the sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. This machine isolated elements in compounds and identified them. It could analyze samples as small as a millionth of a gram and, once it had determined what they were, could run the information through a database to determine, in many cases, brand names.

Cooper examined the results. “You’re right, Lincoln. It’s RDX. Also oil. And this is weird—starch ...”

“Starch!” Rhyme cried. “That’s what I smelled. It’s guar flour ...”

Cooper laughed as those very words popped up on the computer screen. “How’d you know?”

“Because it’s military dynamite.”

“But there’s no nitroglycerine,” Cooper protested. The active ingredient in dynamite.

“No, no, it’s not real dynamite,” Rhyme said. “It’s a mixture of RDX, TNT, motor oil, and the guar flour. You don’t see it very often.”

“Military, huh?” Sellitto said. “Points to Hansen.”

“That it does.”

The tech mounted samples on his compound ’scope’s stage.

The images appeared simultaneously on Rhyme’s computer screen. Bits of fiber, wires, scraps, splinters, dust.

He was reminded of a similar image from years ago, though in circumstances very different. Looking through a heavy brass kaleidoscope he’d bought as a birthday present for a friend. Claire Trilling, beautiful and stylish. Rhyme had found the kaleidoscope in a store in SoHo. The two of them had spent an evening sharing a bottle of merlot and trying to guess what kind of exotic crystals or gemstones were making the astonishing images in the eyepiece. Finally, Claire, nearly as scientifically curious as Rhyme, had unscrewed the bottom of the tube and emptied the contents onto a table. They’d laughed. The objects were nothing more than scraps of metal, wood shavings, a broken paper clip, torn shreds from the Yellow Pages, thumbtacks.

Rhyme pushed those memories aside and concentrated on the objects he was seeing on the screen: A fragment of waxed manila paper—what the military dynamite had been wrapped in. Fibers—rayon and cotton—from the detonating cord the Dancer had tied around the dynamite, which would crumble too easily to mold around the cord. A fragment of aluminum and a tiny colored wire—from the electric blasting cap. More wire and an eraser-size piece of carbon from the battery.

“The timer,” Rhyme called. “I want to see the timer.”

Cooper lifted a small plastic bag from the table.

Inside was the still, cold heart of the bomb.

It was in nearly perfect shape, surprising Rhyme. Ah, your first slipup, he thought, speaking silently to the Dancer. Most bombers will pack explosives around the detonating system to destroy clues. But here the Dancer had accidentally placed the timer behind a thick steel lip in the metal housing that held the bomb. The lip had protected the timer from the blast.

Rhyme’s neck stung as he strained forward, looking at the bent clock face.

Cooper scrutinized the device. I’ve got the model number and manufacturer.”

“Run everything through ERC.”

The FBI’s Explosives Reference Collection was the most extensive database on explosive devices in the world. It included information on all bombs reported in the United States as well as actual physical evidence from many of them. Certain items in the collection were antiques, dating back to the 1920s.

Cooper typed on his computer keyboard. Five seconds later his modem whistled and crackled.

A few moments later the results of the request came back.

“Not good,” the bald man said, grimacing slightly, about as emotional as the technician ever got. “No specific profiles match this particular bomb.”

Nearly all bombers fall into a pattern when they make their devices—they learn a technique and stick pretty close to it. (Given the nature of their product it’s a good idea not to experiment too much.) If the parts of the Dancer’s bomb matched an earlier IED in, say, Florida or California, the team might be able to pick up additional clues from those bomb sites that could lead them to the man’s whereabouts. The rule of thumb is that if two bombs share at least four points of construction—soldered leads instead of taped, for instance, or analog versus digital timers—they were probably made by the same person or under his tutelage. The Dancer’s bomb several years ago in Wall Street was different from this one. But, Rhyme knew, this one was intended to serve a different purpose. That bomb was planted to hamper a crime scene investigation; this one, to blow a large airplane out of the sky. And if Rhyme knew anything about the Coffin Dancer, it was that he tailored his tools to the job.

“Gets worse?” Rhyme asked, reading Cooper’s face as the tech stared at the computer screen.

“The timer.”

Rhyme sighed. He understood. “How many billions and billions in production?”

“The Daiwana Corporation in Seoul sold a hundred and forty-two thousand of them last year. To retail stores, OEMs, and licensees. There’s no coding on them to tell where they were shipped.”

“Great. Just great.”

Cooper continued to read the screen. “Hm. The folks at ERC say they’re very interested in the device and hope we’ll add it to their database.”

“Oh, our number one priority,” Rhyme grumbled.

His shoulder muscles suddenly cramped and he had to lean back into the headrest of the wheelchair. He breathed deeply for a few minutes until the nearly unbearable pain subsided, then vanished. Sachs, the only one who noticed, stepped forward, but Rhyme shook his head toward her, said, “How many wires you make out, Mel?”

“Just two, it looks like.”

“Multichannel or fiber optic?”

“Nope. Just average-ordinary bell wire.”

“No shunts?”

“None.”

A shunt is a separate wire that completes the connection if a battery or timer wire is cut in an attempt to render the bomb safe. All sophisticated bombs have shunting mechanisms.

“Well,” Sellitto said, “that’s good news, isn’t it? Means he’s getting careless.”

But Rhyme believed just the opposite. “Don’t think so, Lon. The only point of a shunt is to make rendering safe tougher. Not having a shunt means he was confident enough the bomb wouldn’t be found and would blow up just like he’d planned—in the air.”

“This thing,” Dellray asked contemptuously, looking over the bomb components. “What kind of people’d our boy have to rub shoulders with to make something like this? I got good CIs knowing ’bout bomb suppliers.”

Fred Dellray too had learned more about bombs than he’d ever intended. His longtime partner and friend, Toby Doolittle, had been on the ground floor of the Oklahoma City federal building several years ago. He’d been killed instantly in the fertilizer bomb explosion..

But Rhyme shook his head. “It’s all off-the-shelf stuff, Fred. Except for the explosives and the detonator cord. Hansen probably supplied them. Hell, the Dancer could’ve gotten everything he needed at Radio Shack.”

“What?” Sachs asked, surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Cooper said, adding, “we call it the Bomber’s Store.”

Rhyme wheeled along the table over to a piece of steel housing twisted like crumpled paper, stared at it for a long moment.

Then he backed up and looked at the ceiling. “But why plant it outside?” he pondered. “Percey said there were always lots of people around. And doesn’t the pilot walk around the plane before they take off, look at the wheels and things?”

“I think so,” Sellitto said.

“Why didn’t Ed Carney or his copilot see it?”

“Because,” Sachs said suddenly, “the Dancer couldn’t put the bomb on board until he knew for sure who was going to be in the plane.”

Rhyme swiveled around to her. “That’s it, Sachs! He was there watching. When he saw Carney get on board he knew he had at least one of the victims. He slipped it on somewhere after Carney got on board and before the plane took off. You’ve got to find out where, Sachs. And search it. Better get going.”

“Only have an hour—well, less now,” said cool-eyed Amelia Sachs as she started toward the door.

“One thing,” Rhyme said.

She paused.

“The Dancer’s a little different from everybody else you’ve ever been up against.” How could he explain it? “With him, what you see isn’t necessarily what is.”

She cocked an eyebrow, meaning, Get to the point.

“He’s probably not up there, at the airport. But if you see anyone make a move for you, well ... shoot first.”

“What?” She laughed.

“Worry about yourself first, the scene second.”

“I’m just CS,” she answered, walking through the door. “He’s not going to care about me.”

“Amelia, listen ...”

But he heard her footsteps receding. The familiar pattern: the hollow thud on the oak, the mute steps as she crossed the Oriental carpet, then the tap on the marble entryway. Finally, the coda—as the front door closed with a snap.

chapter nine

Hour 3 of 45

The best soldiers are patient soldiers.

Sir, I’ll remember that, sir.

Stephen Kall was sitting at Sheila’s kitchen table, deciding how much he disliked Essie, the mangy cat, or whoever the fuck it was, and listening to a long conversation on his tape recorder. At first he’d decided to find the cats and kill them but he’d noticed that they occasionally gave an unearthly howl. If neighbors were used to the sound they might become suspicious if they heard only silence from Sheila Horowitz’s apartment.

Patience ... Watching the cassette roll. Listening.

It was twenty minutes later that he heard what he’d been hoping for on the tape. He smiled. Okay, good. He collected his Model 40 in the Fender guitar case, snug as a baby, and walked to the refrigerator. He cocked his head. The noises had stopped. It didn’t shake any longer. He felt a bit of relief, less cringey, less
crawly
, thinking of the worm inside, now cold and still. It was safe to leave. He picked up his backpack and left the dim apartment with its pungent cat musk, dusty wine, and a million trails of disgusting worms.

Into the country.

Amelia Sachs sped through a tunnel of spring trees,, rocks on one side, a modest cliff on another. A dusting of green, and everywhere the yellow starbursts of forsythia.

Sachs was a city girl, born in Brooklyn General Hospital, and was a lifetime resident of that borough. Nature, for her, was Prospect Park on Sundays or, on weekday evenings, Long Island forest preserves, where she’d hide her black shark-like Dodge Charger from the patrol cruisers prowling for her and her fellow amateur auto racers.

Now, at the wheel of an Investigation and Resources Division rapid response vehicle—a crime scene station wagon—she punched the accelerator, swerved onto the shoulder, and passed a van that, sported an upside-down Garfield cat suctioned to the rear window. She made the turnoff that took her deep into Westchester County.