The Coffin Dancer (8 page)

A sudden thought came to him: she’s like a Gypsy.

He realized that she was studying him too. And hers seemed to be a curious reaction. Seeing him for the first time, most people slap a dumb grin on their faces, blush red as fruit, and force themselves to stare fixedly at Rhyme’s forehead so their eyes won’t drop accidentally to his damaged body. But Percey looked once at his face—handsome with its trim lips and Tom Cruise nose, a face younger than its forty-some years—and once at his motionless legs and arms and torso. But her attention focused immediately on the crip equipment—the glossy Storm Arrow wheelchair, the sip-and-puff controller, the headset, the computer.

Thom entered the room and walked up to Rhyme to take his blood pressure.

“Not now,” his boss said.

“Yes now.”

“No.”

“Be quiet,” Thom said and took the pressure reading anyway. He pulled off the stethoscope. “Not bad. But you’re tired and you’ve been way too busy lately. You need some rest.”

“Go away,” Rhyme grumbled. He turned back to Percey Clay. Because he was a crip, a quad, because he was merely a portion of a human being, visitors often seemed to think he couldn’t understand what they were saying; they spoke slowly or even addressed him through Thom. Percey now spoke to him conversationally and earned many points from him for doing this. “You think we’re in danger, Brit and me?”

“Oh, you are. Serious danger.”

Sachs walked into the room and glanced at Percey and Rhyme.

He introduced them.

“Amelia?” Percey asked. “Your name’s
Amelia?”

Sachs nodded.

A faint smile passed over Percey’s face. She turned slightly and shared it with Rhyme.

“I wasn’t named after her—the flier,” Sachs said, recalling, Rhyme guessed, that Percey was a pilot. “One of my grandfather’s sisters. Was Amelia Earhart a hero?”

“No,” Percey said. “Not really. It’s just kind of a coincidence.”

Hale said, “You’re going to have guards for her, aren’t you? Full-time?” He nodded at Percey.

“Sure, you bet,” Dellray said.

“Okay,” Hale announced. “Good ... One thing. I was thinking you really ought to have a talk with that guy. Phillip Hansen.”

“A talk?” Rhyme queried.

“With Hansen?” Sellitto asked. “Sure. But he’s denying everything and won’t say a word more’n that.” He looked at Rhyme. “Had the Twins on him for a while.” Then back to Hale. “They’re our best interrogators. And he stonewalled completely. No luck so far.”

“Can’t you threaten him ... or something?”

“Uhm, no,” the detective said. “Don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rhyme continued. “There’s nothing Hansen could tell us anyway. The Dancer never meets his clients face-to-face and he never tells them how he’s going to do the job.”

“The Dancer?” Percey asked.

“That’s the name we have for the killer. The Coffin Dancer.”

“Coffin
Dancer?” Percey gave a faint laugh, as if the phrase meant something to her. But she didn’t elaborate.

“Well, that’s a little spooky,” Hale said dubiously, as if cops shouldn’t have eerie nicknames for their bad guys. Rhyme supposed he was right.

Percey looked into Rhyme’s eyes, nearly as dark as hers. “So what happened to you? You get shot?”

Sachs—and Hale too—stirred at these blunt words but Rhyme didn’t mind. He preferred people like himself—those with no use for pointless tact. He said equably, “I was searching a crime scene at a construction site. A beam collapsed. Broke my neck.”

“Like that actor. Christopher Reeve.”

“Yes.”

Hale said, “That was tough. But, man, he’s brave. I’ve seen him on TV. I think I would’ve killed myself if that’d happened.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who caught his eye. He turned back to Percey. “We need your help. We have to figure out how he got that bomb on board. Do you have any idea?”

“None,” Percey said, then looked at Hale, who shook his head.

“Did you see anyone you didn’t recognize near the plane before the flight?”

“I was sick last night,” Percey said. “I didn’t even go to the airport.”

Hale said, “I was upstate, fishing. I had the day off. Didn’t get home till late.”

“Where exactly was the plane before it took off?”

“It was in our hangar. We were outfitting it for the new charter. We had to take seats out, install special racks with heavy-duty power outlets. For the refrigeration units. You know what the cargo was, don’t you?”

“Organs,” Rhyme said. “Human organs. Do you share the hangar with any other company?”

“No, it’s ours. Well, we lease it.”

“How easy is it to get inside?” Sellitto asked.

“It’s locked if nobody’s around but the past couple days we’ve had crews working twenty-four hours to outfit the Lear.”

“You know the crew?” Sellitto asked.

“They’re like family,” Hale said defensively.

Sellitto rolled his eyes at Banks. Rhyme supposed that the detective was thinking that family members were always the first suspects in a murder case.

“We’ll take the names anyway, you don’t mind. Check ’em out.”

“Sally Anne, she’s our office manager, ’ll get you a list.”

“You’ll have to seal the hangar,” Rhyme said. “Keep everybody out.”

Percey was shaking her head. “We can’t—”

“Seal it,” he repeated. “Everybody out. Every ... body.”

“But—”

Rhyme said, “We have to.”

“Whoa,” Percey said, “hold up there.” She looked at Hale.
“Foxtrot Bravo?”

He shrugged. “Ron said it’ll take another day at least.”

Percey sighed. “The Learjet that Ed was flying was the only one outfitted for the charter. There’s another flight scheduled for tomorrow night. We’ll have to work nonstop to get the other plane ready. We can’t close the hangar.”

Rhyme said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t an option.”

Percey blinked. “Well, I don’t know who you are to give me options ...”

“I’m somebody trying to save your life,” Rhyme snapped.

“I can’t risk losing this contract.”

“Hold up, miss,” Dellray said. “You’re not understandin’ this bad guy ...”

“He killed my husband,” she responded in a flinty voice. “I understand him perfectly. But I’m not being bullied into losing this job.”

Sachs’s hands went to her hips. “Hey, hold up there. If there’s anybody who can save your skin, it’s Lincoln Rhyme. I don’t think we need an attitude here.”

Rhyme’s voice broke into the argument. He asked calmly, “Can you give us an hour for the search?”

“An hour?” Percey considered this.

Sachs gave a laugh and turned her surprised eyes on her boss. She asked, “Search a hangar in an hour? Come on, Rhyme.” Her face said: Here I am defending you and now you’re pulling this? Whose side are you on?

Some criminalists assigned teams to search crime scenes. But Rhyme always insisted that Amelia Sachs search alone, just as he’d done. A single CS searcher had a focus that couldn’t be achieved with other people on the scene. An hour was an extraordinarily brief time for a single person to cover a large scene. Rhyme knew this but he didn’t respond to Sachs. He kept his eyes on Percey. She said, “An hour? All right. I can live with that.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs protested, “I’ll need more time.”

“Ah, but you’re the best, Amelia,” he joshed. Which meant the decision had already been made.

“Who can help us up there?” Rhyme asked Percey.

“Ron Talbot. He’s a partner in the company and our operations manager.”

Sachs jotted the name in her watch book. “Should I go now?” she asked.

“No,” Rhyme responded. “I want you to wait until we have the bomb from the Chicago flight. I need you to help me analyze it.”

“I only have an hour,” she said testily. “Remember?”

“You’ll have to wait,” he grumbled. Then asked Fred Dellray, “What about the safe house?”

“Oh, we got a place you’ll like,” the agent said to Percey. “In Manhattan. Your taxpayer dollars be working hard. Yep, yep. U.S. marshals use it for the crème de la crème in witness protection. Only thing is, we need somebody from NYPD for baby-sitting detail. Somebody who knows and appreciates the Dancer.”

And just then Jerry Banks looked up, wondering why everybody was staring at him. “What?” he asked.
“What?”
And tried in vain to pat down his persistent cowlick.

Stephen Kall, talker of soldier talk, shooter of soldier guns, had never in fact been a soldier.

But he now said to Sheila Horowitz, “I’m proud of my military heritage. And that’s the truth.”

“Some people don’t—”

“No,” he interrupted, “some people don’t respect you for it. But that’s their problem.”

“It
is
their problem,” Sheila echoed.

“You have a nice place here.” He looked around the dump, filled with Conran’s markdowns.

“Thank you, friend. Uhm, you, like, want something to drink? Oopsie, there I go using that old preposition the wrong way. Mom’s always after me. Watching too much TV. Like, like, like. Shamie shamie.”

What the fuck is she talking about?

“You live here alone?” he asked with a pleasant smile of curiosity.

“Yep, just me and the dynamic trio. I don’t know why they’re hiding. Those silly-billy scamps.” Sheila nervously pinched the fine hem of her vest. And because he hadn’t answered, she repeated, “So? Something to drink?”

“Sure.”

He saw a single bottle of wine, dust encrusted, sitting on top of her refrigerator. Saved for that special occasion. Was this it?

Apparently not. She broke out the diet Dr Pepper.

He strolled to the window and looked out. No police on the street here. And only a half block to a subway stop. The apartment was on the second floor, and though she had grates on the back windows they were unlocked and if he had to he could climb down the fire escape and disappear onto Lexington Avenue, which was always crowded ...

She had a telephone and a PC. Good.

He glanced at a wall calendar—pictures of angels. There were a few notations but nothing for this weekend.

“Hey, Sheila, would you—” He caught himself and shook his head, fell silent.

“Uhm, what?”

“Well, it’s ... I know it’s stupid to ask. I mean, it’s such short notice and everything. I was just wondering if you had plans for the next couple of days.”

Cautious here. “Oh, I, uhm, I was supposed to see my mother.”

Stephen wrinkled his face in disappointment. “Too bad. See, I have this place in Cape May—”

“The Jersey shore!”

“Right. I’m going out there—”

“After you get Buddy?”

Who the fuck was Buddy?

Oh, the cat. “Right. If you weren’t doing anything, I thought you might like to come out.”

“You have ... ?”

“My mom’s going to be there, some of her girlfriends.”

“Well, golly. I don’t know.”

“So, why don’t you call your mother and tell her she’ll have to live without you for the weekend?”

“Well ... I don’t really have to call. If I don’t show up it’s, like, no big deal. It was like, maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t.”

So she’d been lying. An empty weekend. Nobody’d miss her for the next few days.

A cat jumped up next to him, stuck her face into his. He pictured a thousand worms spraying over his body. He pictured the worms squirming through Sheila’s hair. Her wormy fingers. Stephen began to detest this woman. He wanted to scream.

“Ooo, say hello to our new friend, Andrea. She likes you, Sam.”

He stood up, looking around the apartment. Thinking:

Remember, boy, anything can kill.

Some things kill fast and some things kill slow. But anything can kill.

“Say,” he asked, “you have any packing tape?”

“Uhm, for ... ?” Her mind raced. “For ... ?”

“The instruments I have in the bag? I need to tape one of the drums back together.”

“Oh, sure, I’ve got some in here.” She walked into the hallway. “I send my aunties packages all the time. I always buy a new roll of tape. I can never remember if I’ve bought one before so I end up with a ton of them. Aren’t I a silly-billy?”

He didn’t answer because he was surveying the kitchen and decided that was the best kill zone in the apartment.

“Here you go.” She tossed him the roll of tape playfully. He instinctively caught it. He was angry because he hadn’t had the chance to put his gloves on. He knew he’d left prints on the roll. He shivered in rage and when he saw Sheila grinning, saying, “Hey, good catch, friend,” what he was really looking at was a huge worm moving closer and closer. He set the tape down and pulled on his gloves.

“Gloves? You cold? Say, friend, what’re you ... ?”

He ignored her and opened the refrigerator door, began removing the food.

She stepped farther into the room. Her giddy smile started to fade. “Uhm, you hungry?”

He began removing the shelves.

A look passed between them and suddenly, from deep within her throat, came a faint
“Eeeeeeee.”

Stephen got the fat worm before she made it halfway to the front door.

Fast or slow?

He dragged her back into the kitchen. Toward the refrigerator.

chapter seven

Hour 2 of 45

Threes.

Percey Clay, honors engineering major, certified airframe and power plant mechanic, and holder of every license the Federal Aviation Agency could bestow on pilots, had no time for superstition.

Yet as she drove in a bulletproof van through Central Park on the way to the federal safe house in mid-town, she thought of the old adage that superstitious travelers repeat like a grim mantra. Crashes come in threes.

Tragedies too.

First, Ed. Now, the second sorrow: what she was hearing over the cell phone from Ron Talbot, who was in his office at Hudson Air.

She was sandwiched between Brit Hale and that young detective, Jerry Banks. Her head was down.

Hale watched her, and Banks looked vigilantly out the window at traffic, passersby, and trees.

“U.S. Med agreed to give us one more shot.” Talbot’s breath wheezed in and out alarmingly. One of the best pilots she’d ever known, Talbot hadn’t driven an aircraft for years—grounded because of his precarious health. Percey considered this a horrifyingly unjust punishment for his sins of liquor, cigarettes, and food (largely because she shared them). “I mean, they
can
cancel the contract. Bombs aren’t force majeure. They don’t excuse us from performance.”