The Coffin Dancer (9 page)

“But they’re letting us make the flight tomorrow.”

A pause.

“Yeah. They are.”

“Come on, Ron,” she snapped. “No bullshit between us.” She heard him light another cigarette. Big and smokey—the man she’d bum Camels from when she was quitting smoking—Talbot was forgetful of fresh clothing and shaves. And inept at delivering bad news.

“It’s
Foxtrot Bravo,
” he said reluctantly.

“What about her?”

N695FB was Percey Clay’s Learjet 35A. Not that the paperwork indicated this. Legally the twin-engine jet was leased to Clay-Carney Holding Corporation Two, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hudson Air Charters, Ltd., by Morgan Air Leasing Inc., which in turn leased it from La Jolla Holding Two’s wholly owned subsidiary Transport Solutions Incorporated, a Delaware company. This byzantine arrangement was both legal and common, given the fact that both airplanes and airplane crashes are phenomenally expensive.

But everyone at Hudson Air Charters knew that November Six Nine Five
Foxtrot Bravo
was Percey’s. She’d logged thousands of hours in the airplane. It was her pet. It was her child. And on the too-many nights Ed was gone just the thought of the aircraft would take the sting out of the loneliness. A sweet stick, the aircraft could cruise at forty-five thousand feet at speeds of 460 knots—over 500 miles per hour. She personally knew it could fly higher and faster, though that was a secret kept from Morgan Air Leasing, La Jolla Holding, Transport Solutions, and the FAA.

Talbot finally said, “Getting her outfitted—it’s going to be trickier than I thought.”

“Go on.”

“All right,” he said finally. “Stu quit.” Stu Marquard, their chief mechanic.

“What?”

“The son of a bitch quit. Well, he hasn’t yet,” Talbot continued. “He called in sick but it sounded funny, so I made some calls. He’s going over to Sikorsky. Already took the job.”

Percey was stunned.

This was a major problem. Lear 35As came equipped as eight-seat passenger jets. To make the aircraft ready for the U.S. Medical run, most of the seats had to be stripped out; shock-absorbed, refrigerated bays had to be installed, and extra power outlets had to be run from the engine’s generators. This meant major electrical and airframe work.

There were no mechanics better than Stu Marquard and he’d outfitted Ed’s Lear in record time. But without him Percey didn’t know how they could finish in time for tomorrow’s flight.

“What is it, Perce?” Hale asked, seeing her grimacing face.

“Stu quit,” she whispered.

He shook his head, not understanding. “Quit what?”

“He left,” she muttered. “Quit his job. Going to work on fucking choppers.”

Hale gazed at her in shock. “Today?”

She nodded.

Talbot continued. “He’s scared, Perce. They know it was a bomb. The cops aren’t saying anything but everybody knows what happened. They’re nervous. I was talking to John Ringle—”

“Johnny?” A young pilot they’d hired last year. “He’s not leaving too?”

“He was just asking if we’re closing down for a while. Until this all blows over.”

“No, we’re not closing down,” she said firmly. “We’re not canceling a single goddamn job. It’s business as usual. And if anybody else calls in sick, fire them.”

“Percey ...”

Talbot was dour but everybody knew he was the company’s soft touch.

“All right,” she snapped, “
I’ll
fire them.”

“Look, about
Foxtrot Bravo
, I can do most of the work myself,” said Talbot, a certified airframe mechanic himself.

“Do what you can. But see if you can find another mechanic,” she told him. “We’ll talk later.”

She hung up.

“I can’t believe it,” Hale said. “He quit.” The pilot was bewildered.

Percey was furious. People were bailing out—the worst sin there was. The Company was dying. Yet she didn’t have a clue how to save it.

Percey Clay had no monkey skills for running a business.

Monkey skills ...

A phrase she’d heard when she was a fighter pilot. Coined by a navy flier, an admiral, it meant the esoteric, unteachable talents of a natural-born pilot.

Well, sure, Percey had monkey skills when it came to flying. Any type of aircraft, whether she’d flown it previously or not, under any weather conditions, VFR or IFR, day or night. She could drive the plane flawlessly and set it down on that magic spot pilots aimed for—exactly “a thousand past the numbers”—a thousand feet down the landing strip past the white runway designation. Sailplanes, biplanes, Hercs, seven three sevens, MiGs—she was at home in any cockpit.

But that was about as far as Percey Rachael Clay’s monkey skills extended.

She had none at family relations, that was for sure. Her tobacco society father had refused to speak to her for years—had actually disinherited her—when she’d dropped out of his alma mater, UVA, to attend aviation school at Virginia Tech. (Even though she told him that the departure from Charlottesville was inevitable—six weeks into the first semester Percey’d KO’d a sorority president after the lanky blonde commented in an overloud whisper that the troll girl might want to pledge at the ag school and not on Greek Row.)

Certainly no monkey skills at navy politics. Her awe-inspiring flight performance in the big Tomcats didn’t quite tip the balance against her unfortunate habit of speaking her mind when everyone else was keeping mum about certain events.

And no skills at running the very charter company she was president of. It was mystifying to her how Hudson Air could be so busy yet continue to skirt bankruptcy. Like Ed and Brit Hale and the other staff pilots, Percey was constantly working (one reason she shunned scheduled airlines was the asinine FAA pronouncement that pilots fly no more than eighty hours a month). So why were they constantly broke? If it hadn’t been for charming Ed’s ability to get clients, and grumpy Ron Talbot’s to cut costs and juggle creditors, they never would have survived for the past two years.

The Company had nearly gone under last month but Ed managed to snare the contract from U.S. Medical. The hospital chain made an astonishing amount of money doing transplants, which she learned was a business far bigger than just hearts and kidneys. The major problem was getting the donor organ to the appropriate recipient within hours of its availability. Organs were often flown on commercial flights (carried in coolers in the cockpit), but transporting them was dictated by commercial airline scheduling and routing. Hudson Air didn’t have those restrictions. The Company agreed to dedicate one aircraft to U.S. Medical. It would fly a counterclockwise route throughout the East Coast and Midwest to six or eight of the Company’s locations, circulating organs wherever they were needed. Delivery was guaranteed. Rain, snow, wind shear, conditions at minimum—as long as the airport was open and it was legal to fly, Hudson Air would deliver the cargo on time.

The first month was to be a trial period. If it worked out they’d get an eighteen-month contract that would be the backbone for the Company’s survival.

Apparently Ron had charmed the client into giving them another chance, but if
Foxtrot Bravo
wasn’t ready for tomorrow’s flight ... Percey didn’t even want to think about that possibility.

As she rode in the police car through Central Park Percey Clay looked over the early spring growth. Ed had loved the park and had run here frequently. He’d do two laps around the reservoir and return home looking bedraggled, his grayish hair hanging in strands around his face. And me? Percey laughed sadly to herself now. He’d find her sitting at home, poring over a nav log or an advanced turbofan repair manual, maybe smoking, maybe drinking a Wild Turkey. And, grinning, Ed would poke her in the ribs with a strong finger and ask if she could do anything
else
unhealthy at the same time. And while they laughed, he’d sneak a couple of swigs of the bourbon.

Remembering then how he’d bend down and kiss her shoulder. When they made love it was that juncture where he’d rest his face, bent forward, locked against her skin, and Percey Clay believed that there, where her neck flared onto her delicate shoulders, if only there, she was a beautiful woman.

Ed ...

All the stars of evening ...

Tears again filling her eyes, she glanced up into the gray sky. Ominous. She estimated the ceiling at one five hundred feet, winds 090 at fifteen knots. Wind shear conditions. She shifted in the seat. Brit Hale’s strong fingers were encircling her forearm. Jerry Banks was chatting about something. She wasn’t listening.

Percey Clay came to a decision. She unfolded the cell phone again.

chapter eight

Hour 3 of 45

The siren wailed.

Lincoln Rhyme expected to hear the Doppler effect as the emergency vehicle cruised past. But right outside his front door the siren gave a brief chirrup and went silent. A moment later Thom let a young man into the first-floor lab. Crowned with a spiffy crew cut, the Illinois state trooper wore a blue uniform, which had probably been immaculate when he put it on yesterday but was now wrinkled and streaked with soot and dirt. He’d run an electric razor over his face but had made only faint inroads into the dark beard that contrasted with his thin yellow hair. He was carrying two large canvas satchels and a brown folder, and Rhyme was happier to see him than he’d been to see anybody in the past week.

“The bomb!” he shouted. “Here’s the bomb!”

The officer, surprised at the odd collection of law enforcers, must have wondered what hit him as Cooper scooped the bags away from him and Sellitto scrawled a signature on the receipt and chain-of-custody card and shoved them back into his hand. “Thanks so long see ya,” the detective exhaled, turning back to the evidence table.

Thom smiled politely to the trooper and let him out of the room.

Rhyme called, “Let’s go, Sachs. You’re just standing around! What’ve we got?”

She offered a cold smile and walked over to Cooper’s table, where the tech was carefully laying out the contents of the bags.

What
was
her problem today? An hour was plenty of time to search a scene, if that’s what she was upset about. Well, he liked her feisty. He himself was always at his best that way. “Okay, Thom, help us out here. The blackboard. We need to list the evidence. Make us some charts. ‘CS-One.’ The first heading.”

“C, uhm, S?”

“ ‘Crime scene,’ ” the criminalist snapped. “What else would it be? ‘CS-One, Chicago.’ ”

In a recent case, Rhyme had used the back of a limp Metropolitan Museum poster as an evidence profiling chart. He now was state of the art—several large chalkboards were mounted to the wall, redolent with scents that took him back to humid spring school days in the Midwest, living for science class and despising spelling and English.

The aide, casting an exasperated glance toward his boss, picked up the chalk, brushed some dust from his perfect tie and knife-crease slacks, and wrote.

“What do we have, Mel? Sachs, help him.”

They began unloading the plastic bags and plastic jars of ash and bits of metal and fiber and wads of plastic. They assembled contents in porcelain trays. The crash site searchers—if they were on a par with the men and women Rhyme had trained—would have used roller-mounted magnets, large vacuum cleaners, and a series of fine mesh screens to locate debris from the blast.

Rhyme, expert in most areas of forensics, was an authority on bombs. He’d had no particular interest in the subject until the Dancer left his tiny package in the wastebasket of the Wall Street office where Rhyme’s two techs were killed. After that Rhyme had taken it on himself to learn everything he could about explosives. He’d studied with the FBI’s Explosives Unit, one of the smallest—but most elite—in the federal lab, composed of fourteen agent-examiners and technicians. They didn’t find lEDs—improvised explosive devices, the law enforcement term for bombs—and they didn’t render them safe. Their job was to analyze bombs and bomb crime scenes and to trace and categorize the makers and their students (bomb manufacture was considered an art in certain circles and apprentices worked hard to learn the techniques of famous bomb makers).

Sachs was poking over the bags. “Doesn’t a bomb destroy itself?”

“Nothing’s ever completely destroyed, Sachs. Remember that.” Though as he wheeled closer and examined the bags, he admitted, “This was a bad one. See those fragments? That pile of aluminum on the left? The metal’s shattered, not bent. That means the device had a high brisance—”

“High ... ?” Sellitto asked.

“Brisance.” Rhyme explained: “Detonation rate. But even so, sixty to ninety percent of a bomb survives the blast. Well, not the explosive, of course. Though there’s always enough residue to type it. Oh, we’ve got plenty to work with here.”

“Plenty?” Dellray snorted a laugh. “Bad as puttin’ Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

“Ah, but that’s not our job, Fred,” Rhyme said briskly. “All we need to do is catch the son of a bitch who pushed him off the wall.” He wheeled farther down the table. “What’s it look like, Mel? I see battery, I see wire, I see timer. What else? Maybe bits of the container or packing?”

Suitcases have convicted more bombers than timers and detonators. It’s not talked about but unclaimed baggage is often donated to the FBI by airlines and blown up in an attempt to duplicate explosions and provide standards for criminalists. In the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, the FBI identified the bombers not through the explosive itself but through the Toshiba radio it had been hidden in, the Samsonite suitcase containing the radio, and the clothes packed around it. The clothing in the suitcase was traced back to a store in Sliema, Malta, whose owner identified a Libyan intelligence agent as the person who’d bought the garments.

But Cooper shook his head. “Nothing near the seat of detonation except bomb components.”

“So it wasn’t in a suitcase or flight bag,” Rhyme mused. “Interesting. How the hell did he get it on board? Where’d he plant it? Lon, read me the report from Chicago.”