The Coffin Dancer (12 page)

“What’re you doing here now?”

“Saw a cop. You are a cop, right? And just thought we’d have a look-see. This
is
about that bomb, right? Who did it? Arabs? Or them militia shits?”

She shooed them off. Into the microphone she said, “They cleaned the taxiway last night, Rhyme. High-pressure water, looks like.”

“Oh, no.”

“They—”

“Hey there.”

She sighed, turning again, expecting to find the workmen back. But the new visitor was a cocky county trooper, wearing a blocked Smokey the Bear hat and razor-creased gray slacks. He ducked under the tape.

“Excuse me,” she protested. “This is a secure area.”

He slowed but didn’t stop. She checked his ID. It matched. The picture showed him looking off slightly, a cover boy on a men’s fashion magazine.

“You’re that officer from New York, right?” He laughed generously. “Nice uniforms they have down there.” Eyeing her tight jeans.

“This area’s sealed off.”

“I can help. I took the forensics course. Mostly I’m highway detail but I’ve got major crimes experience. You have
some
hair. Bet you’ve heard that before.”

“I really will have to ask you—”

“Jim Everts.”

Don’t go into first-name territory; it sticks like flypaper. “I’m Officer Sachs.”

“Big hubbub, this. A bomb. Messy.”

“See, Jim, this tape here’s to keep people
out
of the scene. Now, you gonna be helpful and step back behind it?”

“Wait. You mean officers too?”

“That I do, yes.”

“You mean me too?”

“Exactly.”

There were five classic crime scene contaminators: weather, relatives of the victim, suspects, souvenir collectors, and—the all-time worst—fellow cops.

“I won’t touch a thing. Cross my heart. Just be a pleasure to watch you work, honey.”

“Sachs,” Rhyme whispered, “tell him to get the fuck out of your crime scene.”

“Jim, get the fuck out of my crime scene.”

“Or you’ll report him.”

“Or I’ll report you.”

“Oooo, gonna be
that
way, is it?” He held his hands up in surrender. The last of the flirt drained from his slick grin.

“Get
going
, Sachs.”

The trooper ambled away slowly enough to drag some of his pride with him. He looked back once but a scathing retort eluded him.

Amelia Sachs began to walk the grid.

There were several different ways to search crime scenes. A strip search—walking in a serpentine pattern—was usually used for outdoor scenes because it covered the most ground quickly. But Rhyme wouldn’t hear of that. He used the grid pattern—covering the entire area back and forth in one direction, walking one foot at a time, then turning perpendicular and walking back and forth the other way. When he was running IRD, “walking the grid” became synonymous with searching a crime scene, and heaven help any cops Rhyme caught taking shortcuts or daydreaming when they were on the grid.

Sachs now spent an hour moving back and forth. While the spray truck might’ve eliminated prints and trace evidence, it wouldn’t destroy anything larger that the Dancer might’ve dropped, nor would it ruin footprints or body impressions left in the mud beside the taxiway.

But she found nothing.

“Hell, Rhyme, not a thing.”

“Ah, Sachs, I’ll bet there is. I’ll bet there’s plenty. Just takes a little bit more effort than most scenes. The Dancer’s not like other perps, remember.”

Oh,
that
again.

“Sachs.” His voice low and seductive. She felt a shiver. “Get into him,” Rhyme whispered. “You know what I mean.”

She knew exactly what he meant. Hated the thought. But, oh, yes, Sachs knew. The best criminalists were able to find a place in their minds where the line between hunter and hunted was virtually nonexistent. They moved through the crime scene not as cops tracking down clues but as the perp himself, feeling his desires, lusts, fears. Rhyme had this talent. And though she tried to deny it, Sachs did too. (She’d searched a scene a month ago—a father had murdered his wife and child—and managed to find the murder weapon when no one else had. After the case she hadn’t been able to work for a week and had been plagued by flashbacks that
she’d
been the one who stabbed the victims to death. Saw their faces, heard their screams.)

Another pause. “Talk to me,” he said. And finally the edginess in his voice was gone. “You’re him. You’re walking where he’s walked, you’re thinking the way he thinks ...”

He’d said words like these to her before, of course. But now—as with everything else about the Dancer—it seemed to her that Rhyme had more in mind than just finding obscure evidence. No, she sensed that he was desperate to know about this perp. Who he was, what made him kill.

Another shiver. An image in her thoughts: back to the other night. The lights of the airfield, the sound of airplane engines, the smell of jet exhaust.

“Come on, Amelia ... You’re him. You’re the Coffin Dancer. You know Ed Carney’s on the plane; you know you have to get the bomb on board. Just think about it for a minute or two.”

And she did, summoning up from somewhere a need to kill.

He continued, speaking in an eerie, melodic voice. “You’re brilliant,” he said. “You have no morals whatsoever. You’ll kill
anyone
, you’ll do
anything
to get to your goal. You divert attention, you use people ... Your deadliest weapon is deception.”

I lay in wait.

My deadliest weapon ...

She closed her eyes.

... is deception.

Sachs felt a dark hope, a vigilance, a hunt lust.

“I—”

He continued softly. “Is there any distraction, any diversion you can try?”

Eyes open now. “The whole area’s empty. Nothing to distract the pilots with.”

“Where are you hiding?”

“The hangars’re all boarded up. The grass is too short for cover. There’re no trucks or oil drums. No alleys. No nooks.”

In her gut: desperation. What’m I going to do? I’ve got to plant the bomb. I don’t have any time. Lights ... there’re lights everywhere. What? What should I do?

She said, “I can’t hide around the other side of the hangars. There’re lots of workers. It’s too exposed. They’ll see me.”

For a moment, Sachs herself floated back into her mind and she wondered, as she often did, why Lincoln Rhyme had the power to conjure her into someone else. Sometimes it angered her. Sometimes it thrilled.

Dropping into a crouch, ignoring the pain in her knees from the arthritis that had tormented her off and on for the past ten of her thirty-three years. “It’s all too open here. I feel exposed.”

“What’re you thinking?”

There’re people looking for me. I can’t let them find me. I can’t!

This is risky. Stay hidden. Stay down.

Nowhere to hide.

If I’m seen, everything’s ruined. They’ll find the bomb; they’ll know I’m after all three witnesses. They’ll put them in protective custody. I’ll
never
get them then. I
can’t
let that happen.

Feeling his panic she turned back to the only possible place to hide. The hangar beside the taxiway. In the wall facing her was a single broken window, about three by four feet. She’d ignored it because it was covered with a sheet of rotting plywood, nailed to the frame on the inside.

She approached it slowly. The ground in front was gravel; there were no footprints.

“There’s a boarded-up window, Rhyme. Plywood on the inside. The glass is broken.”

“Is it dirty, the glass that’s still in the window?”

“Filthy.”

“And the edges?”

“No, they’re clean.” She understood why he’d asked the question. “The glass was broken recently!”

“Right. Push the board. Hard.”

It fell inward without any resistance and hit the floor with a huge bang.

“What was that?” Rhyme shouted. “Sachs, are you all right?”

“Just the plywood,” she answered, once more spooked by his uneasiness.

She shone her halogen flashlight through the hangar. It was deserted.

“What do you see, Sachs?”

“It’s empty. A few dusty boxes. There’s gravel on the floor—”

“That was him!” Rhyme answered. “He broke in the window and threw gravel inside, so he could stand on the floor and not leave footprints. It’s an old trick. Any footprints in front of the window? Bet it’s more gravel,” he added sourly.

“Is.”

“Okay. Search the window. Then climb inside. But be sure to look for booby traps first. Remember the trash can a few years ago.”

Stop it, Rhyme! Stop it.

Sachs shined the light around the space again. “It’s clean, Rhyme. No traps. I’m examining the window frame.”

The PoliLight showed nothing other than a faint mark left by a finger in a cotton glove. “No fiber, just the cotton pattern.”

“Anything in the hangar? Anything worth stealing?”

“No. It’s empty.”

“Good,” Rhyme said.

“Why good?” she asked. “I said there’s no print.”

“Ah, but it means it’s
him
, Sachs. It’s not logical for someone to break in wearing cotton gloves when there’s nothing to steal.”

She searched carefully. No footprints, no fingerprints, no visible evidence. She ran the Dustbuster and bagged the trace.

“The glass and gravel?” she asked. “Paper bag?”

“Yes.”

Moisture often destroyed trace and though it looked unprofessional certain evidence was best transported in brown paper bags rather than in plastic.

“Okay, Rhyme. I’ll have it back to you in forty minutes.”

They disconnected.

As she packed the bags carefully into the RRV, Sachs felt edgy, as she often did just after searching a scene where she’d found no obvious evidence—guns or knives or the perp’s wallet. The trace she’d collected
might
have a clue as to who the Dancer was and where he was hiding. But the whole effort could have been a bust too. She was anxious to get back to Rhyme’s lab and see what he could find.

Sachs climbed into the station wagon and sped back to the Hudson Air office. She hurried into Ron Talbot’s office. He was talking to a tall man whose back was to the door. Sachs said, “I found where he was, Mr. Talbot. The scene’s released. You can have the tower—”

The man turned around. It was Brit Hale. He frowned, trying to think of her name, remembered it. “Oh. Officer Sachs. Hey. How you doing?”

She started to nod an automatic greeting, then stopped.

What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in the safe house.

She heard a soft crying and looked into the conference room. There was Percey Clay sitting next to Lauren, the pretty brunette who Sachs remembered was Ron Talbot’s assistant. Lauren was crying and Percey, resolute in her own sorrow, was trying to comfort her. She glanced up, saw Sachs, and nodded to her.

No, no, no ...

Then the third shock.

“Hi, Amelia,” Jerry Banks said cheerfully, sipping coffee and standing by a window, where he’d been admiring the Learjet parked in the hangar. “That plane’s something, isn’t it?”

“What’re they doing here?” Sachs snapped, pointing at Hale and Percey, forgetting that Banks outranked her.

“They had some problem or other about a mechanic,” Banks said. “Percey wanted to stop by here. Try to find—”

“Rhyme,” Sachs shouted into the microphone. “She’s here!”

“Who?” he asked acerbically. “And
where
is
there?”

“Percey. And Hale too. At the airport.”

“No! They’re supposed to be at the safe house.”

“Well, they’re not. They’re right here in front of me.”

“No, no, no!” Rhyme raged. A moment passed. Then he said, “Ask Banks if they followed evasive driving procedures.”

Banks, uncomfortable, responded that they hadn’t. “She was real insistent that they stop here first. I tried to talk her—”

“Jesus, Sachs. He’s there someplace. The Dancer. I know he’s there.”

“How could he be?” Sachs’s eyes strayed to the window.

“Keep ’em down,” Rhyme said. “I’ll have Dellray get an armored van from the Bureau’s White Plains field office.”

Percey heard the commotion. “I’ll go to the safe house in an hour or so. I have to find a mechanic to work on—”

Sachs waved her silent, then said, “Jerry, keep them here.” She ran to the door and looked out over the gray expanse of the airfield as a noisy prop plane charged down the runway. She pulled the stalk mike closer to her mouth. “How, Rhyme?” she asked. “How’ll he come at us?”

“I don’t have a clue. He could do anything.”

Sachs tried to reenter the Dancer’s mind, but couldn’t. All she thought was,
Deception ...

“How secure is the area?” Rhyme asked.

“Pretty tight. Chain-link fence. Troopers at a roadblock at the entrance, checking tickets and IDs.”

Rhyme asked, “But they’re not checking IDs of police, right?”

Sachs looked at the uniformed officers, recalling how casually they’d waved her through. “Oh, hell, Rhyme, there’re a dozen marked cars here. A couple unmarkeds too. I don’t know the troopers or detectives ... He could be any one of them.”

“Okay, Sachs. Listen, find out if any local cops’re missing. In the past two or three hours. The Dancer might’ve killed one and stolen his ID and uniform.”

Sachs called a state trooper up to the door, examined him and his ID closely, and decided he was the real article. She said, “We think the killer may be nearby, maybe impersonating an officer. I need you to check out everybody here. If you don’t recognize ’em, let me know. Also, find out from your dispatcher if any cops from around the area’ve gone missing in the past few hours.”

“I’m on it, Officer.”

She returned to the office. There were no blinds on the windows and Banks had moved Percey and Hale into an interior office.

“What’s going on?” Percey asked.

“You’re out of here in five minutes,” Sachs said, glancing out the window, trying to guess how the Dancer would attack. She had no idea.

“Why?” the flier asked, frowning.

“We think the man who killed your husband’s here. Or on his way here.”