The Coffin Dancer (46 page)

She pulled her blouse off and removed the bulky American Body Armor suit. Not as bulky as Jodie’s, of course. What a kick he was. The little ... what was Dellray’s street word? Skel. Short for “skeleton.” Scrawny little loser. What a mutt.

She reached under her mesh undershirt and scratched frantically. Her boobs, her back under the bra, her sides.

Ooooo, feels good.

Exhausted, sure, but could she sleep?

The bed looked pretty damn nice.

She pulled on her blouse again, buttoned it, and lay down on the comforter. Closed her eyes. Did she hear footsteps?

One of the guards making coffee, she supposed.

Sleep? Breathe deep ...

No sleep.

Her eyes opened and she stared at the webby ceiling.

The Coffin Dancer, she mused. How would he come at them? What would his weapon be?

His deadliest weapon is deception ...

Glancing out a crack in the curtain, she saw the beautiful fish-gray dawn. A haze of mist bleached the color from the distant trees.

Somewhere inside the compound she heard a thud. A footstep.

Sachs swung her feet around to the floor and sat up. May as well just give up and get some coffee. I’ll sleep tonight.

She had a sudden urge to talk to Rhyme, to see if he’d found anything. She could hear him saying,
“If I’d found something I would’ve called you, wouldn’t I? I said I’d check in.”

No, she didn’t want to wake him, but she doubted he was asleep. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and clicked it on before she remembered Marshal Franks’s warning to use only the secure line in the living room.

As she was about to shut the phone off, it chirped loudly.

She shivered—not at the jarring sound, but at the thought that the Dancer had somehow found her number and wanted to confirm she was in the compound. For an instant she wondered if somehow he’d slipped explosives into her phone too.

Damnit, Rhyme, look how spooked I am!

Don’t answer it, she told herself.

But instinct told her to, and while criminalists may shun instinct, patrol cops,
street
cops, always listen to those inner voices. She pulled the antenna out of the phone.

“Lo?”

“Thank God ...” The panicked tone of Lincoln Rhyme chilled her.

“Hey, Rhyme. What’s—”

“Listen very carefully. Are you alone?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

“Jodie’s the Dancer.”

“What?”

“Stephen Kall was the diversion. Jodie killed him. It
was his body in the park we found. Where’s Percey?”

“In her room. Up the hall. But how—”

“No time. He’s going for the kill right now. If the marshals’re still alive, tell them to get into a defensive position in one of the rooms. If they’re dead, find Percey and Bell and get out. Dellray’s scrambled SWAT, but it’ll be twenty or thirty minutes before they’re there.”

“But there’re eight guards. He can’t’ve taken them all out ...”

“Sachs,” he said sternly, “remember who he is. Move! Call me when you’re safe.”

Bell! she thought suddenly, recalling the detective’s still posture, his head slumped forward.

She raced to her door, threw it open, drew her gun. The black living room and corridor gaped. Dark. Only faint dawn light filtering into the rooms. She listened. A shuffle. A clink of metal. But where were the sounds coming from?

Sachs turned toward Bell’s room and trotted as quietly as she could.

He got her just before she got to his room.

As the figure stepped from the doorway she dropped into a crouch and swung the Glock toward him. He grunted and slapped the pistol from her hand. Without thinking, she shoved him forward, slamming his back into the wall.

Groping for her switchblade.

Roland Bell gasped, “Hold up there. Hey, now ...”

Sachs let go of his shirt.

“It’s you!”

“You scared the everlivin’ you-know-what outta me. What’s—”

“You’re all right!” she said.

“Just dozed off for a minute. What’s going on?”

“Jodie’s the Dancer. Rhyme just called.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know.” She looked around, shivering in panic. “Where’re the guards?”

The hall was empty.

Then she recognized the smell she’d wondered about. It was blood! Like hot copper. And she knew then that all the guards were dead. Sachs went to retrieve her weapon, which was lying on the floor. She frowned, looking at the end of the grip. Where the clip should have been was an empty hole. She picked up the gun.

“No!”

“What?” Bell asked.

“My clip. It’s gone.” She slapped her utility belt. The two clips in the keepers were gone too.

Bell drew his weapons—the Glock and the Browning. They too were clipless. The chambers of the guns were empty too.

“In the car!” she stammered. “I’ll bet he did it in the car. He was sitting between us. Fidgeting all the time. Bumping into us.”

Bell said, “I saw a gun case in the living room. A couple of hunting rifles.”

Sachs remembered it. She pointed. “There.” They could just make it out in the dim light of dawn. Bell looked around him and hurried to it, crouching, while Sachs ran to Percey’s room and looked in. The woman was asleep on the bed.

Sachs stepped back to the corridor, flicked her knife open, and crouched, squinting. Bell returned a moment later. “It’s been broken into. All the rifles’re gone. And no ammo for the sidearms.”

“Let’s get Percey and get out of here.”

A footstep not far away. A click of a bolt-action rifle’s safety going off.

She grabbed Bell’s collar and pulled him to the floor.

The gunshot was deafening and the bullet broke the sound barrier directly over them. She smelled her own burning hair. Jodie must have had a sizable arsenal by now—all the sidearms of the marshals—but he was using the hunting rifle.

They sprinted for Percey’s door. It opened just as they got there and she stepped out, saying, “My God, what’s—”

The full body tackle from Roland Bell shoved Percey back into her room. Sachs tumbled in on top of them. She slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran to the window, flung it open. “Go, go, go, go ...”

Bell lifted a stunned Percey Clay off the ground and dragged her toward the window as several high-powered deer slugs tore through the door around the lock.

None of them looked to see how successful the Coffin Dancer’d been. They rolled through the window into the dawn and ran and ran and ran through the dewy grass.

chapter thirty-eight

Hour 44 of 45

Sachs stopped beside the lake. Mist, tinted red and pink, wafted in ghostly tatters over the still, gray water.

“Go on,” she shouted to Bell and Percey. “Those trees.”

She was pointing to the nearest cover—a wide band of trees at the end of a field on the other side of the lake. It was more than a hundred yards away but was the closest cover.

Sachs glanced back at the cabin. There was no sign of Jodie. She dropped into a crouch over the body of one of the marshals. Their holsters were empty, of course, their clip cases too. She’d known Jodie had taken those weapons, but she hoped there was one thing he hadn’t thought of.

He
is
human, Rhyme ...

And frisking the cool body she found what she was looking for. Tugging up the marshal’s pants cuff she pulled his backup weapon out of his ankle holster. A silly gun. A tiny five-shot Colt revolver with a two-inch barrel.

She glanced at the cabin just as Jodie’s face appeared in the window. He lifted the hunting rifle. Sachs spun and squeezed off a round. Glass broke inches from his face and he stumbled backward into the room.

Sachs sprinted around the lake after Bell and Percey. They ran fast, weaving sideways, through the dewy grass.

They got nearly a hundred yards from the house before they heard the first shot. It was a rolling sound, echoing off the trees. It kicked up dirt near Percey’s leg.

“Down,” Sachs cried. “There.” Pointing to a dip in the earth.

They rolled to the ground just as he fired again. If Bell had been upright the shot would have hit him directly between the shoulder blades.

They were still fifty feet from the nearest clump of trees that would give them protection. But to try for it now would be suicide. Jodie was apparently every bit the marksman that Stephen Kall had been.

Sachs lifted her head briefly.

She saw nothing but heard an explosion. An instant later the slug snapped through the air beside her. She felt the same draining terror as at the airport. She pressed her face into the cool spring grass, slick with dew and her sweat. Her hands shook.

Bell looked up fast and then down again.

Another shot. Dirt kicked up inches from his face.

“I think I saw him,” the detective drawled. “There’re some bushes to the right of the house. On that hill.”

Sachs breathed a trio of fast breaths. Then she rolled five feet to the right, poked her head up fast, ducked again.

Jodie chose not to shoot this time and she’d gotten a good look. Bell was right: the killer was on the side of a hill, targeting them with the telescopic deer rifle; she’d seen the faint glint from the ’scope. He couldn’t quite hit them where they were if they stayed prone. But all he had to do was move up the hill. From its crest he could shoot down into the pit they were hiding in now—a perfect kill zone.

Five minutes passed without a shot. He’d be working his way up the hill, though cautiously—he knew Sachs was armed and he’d seen she was a good shot. Could they wait him out? When would the SWAT chopper get here?

Sachs squeezed her eyes closed, smelled the dirt, the grass.

She thought of Lincoln Rhyme.

You know him better than anybody, Sachs ...

You never really know a perp until you’ve walked where he’s walked, until you’ve cleaned up after his evil ...

But, Rhyme, she thought, this isn’t Stephen Kall. Jodie
isn’t
the killer I know. It wasn’t
his
crime scenes I walked through. It wasn’t
his
mind I peered into ...

She looked for a low spot in the ground that might lead
them safely to the trees, but there was nothing. If they moved five feet in either direction, he’d have a clean shot.

Well, he’d have a clean shot at them any minute now, when he got to the crest of the hill.

Then something occurred to her. That the crime scenes she’d worked really
were
the Dancer’s scenes. He may not have been the one who fired the bullet that killed Brit Hale or planted the bomb that blew up Ed Carney’s plane or swung the knife that killed John Innelman in the basement of the office building.

But Jodie
was
a perpetrator.

Get into his mind, Sachs, she heard Lincoln Rhyme say.

His deadliest—
my
deadliest weapon is deception.

“Both of you,” Sachs called, looking around. “There.” She pointed toward a slight ravine.

Bell glared at her. She saw how badly he wanted the Dancer too. But the look in her eyes told him that the killer was her prey and hers alone. No debate and no argument. Rhyme had given this chance to her and nothing in the world could stop her from doing what she was about to.

The detective nodded solemnly and he pulled Percey after him into the shallow notch in the earth.

Sachs checked the pistol. Four rounds left.

Plenty.

More than enough ...

If
I’m right.

Am I? she wondered, face against the wet, fragrant earth. And she decided that, yes, she was right. A frontal assault wasn’t the Dancer’s way.
Deception ...

And that’s just what I’m going to give him.

“Stay down. Whatever happens, stay down.” She rose to her hands and knees, looking over the ridge. Getting ready, preparing herself. Breathing slowly.

“That’s a hundred-yard shot, Amelia,” Bell whispered. “With a snub-nose?”

She ignored him.

“Amelia,” Percey said. The flier held her eyes for a moment and the women shared a smile. “Head down,” Sachs ordered and Percey complied, nestling into the grass.

Amelia Sachs stood up.

She didn’t crouch, didn’t turn sideways to present a more narrow target. She just slipped into the familiar two-hand target pistol stance. Facing the house, the lake, facing the prone figure halfway up the hill, who pointed the telescopic sight directly at her. The stubby pistol felt as light as a scotch glass in her hand.

She aimed at the glare of the telescopic sight, a football field away.

Sweat and mist forming on her face.

Breathe, breathe.

Take your time.

Wait ...

A ripple passed through her back and arms and hands. She forced the panic away.

Breathe ...

Listen, listen.

Breathe ...

Now!

She spun around and dropped to her knees as the rifle jutting from the grove of trees behind her, fifty feet away, fired. The bullet split the air just over her head.

Sachs found herself staring at Jodie’s astonished face, the hunting rifle still at his cheek. He realized that he hadn’t fooled her after all. That she’d figured out his tactic. How he’d fired a few shots from the lake, then dragged one of the guards up the hill and propped him there with one of the hunting rifles to keep them pinned down while he jogged up the road and circled behind.

Deception
...

For a moment neither of them moved.

The air was completely still. No tatters of mist floating past, no trees or grass bending in the wind.

A faint smile crossed Sachs’s face as she lifted the pistol in both hands.

Frantic, he ejected the shell from the deer rifle and chambered another round. As he lifted the gun to his cheek again Sachs fired. Two shots.

Both clean hits. Saw him fly backward, the rifle sailing through the air like a majorette’s baton.

“Stay with her, Detective!” Sachs called to Bell and sprinted toward Jodie.

She found him in the grass, lying on his back.

One of her bullets had shattered his left shoulder. The other had hit the telescopic sight straight on and blown metal and glass into the man’s right eye. His face was a bloody mess.