The Coffin Dancer (16 page)

“The first bag, Sachs? Where did it come from?”

She flipped angrily through her notes.

What was eating at her? he wondered. Something was wrong, Rhyme could see. Maybe it had to do with her anger at Percey Clay, maybe her concern for Jerry Banks. But maybe not. He could tell from the cool glances that she didn’t want to talk about it. Which was fine with him. The Dancer had to be caught. It was their only priority at the moment.

“This’s from the hangar where the Dancer waited for the plane.” She held up two of the bags. She nodded at three others. “This’s from the sniper’s nest. This’s from the painting van. This’s from the catering van.”

“Thom ... Thom!” Rhyme shouted, startling everyone in the room.

The aide appeared in the doorway. He asked a belabored “Yes? I’m trying to fix some food here, Lincoln.”

“Food?” Rhyme asked, exasperated. “We don’t need to eat. We need more charts. Write: ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ Yes, ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ That’s good. Then another one. ‘CS-Three.’ That’s where he fired from. His grassy knoll.”

“I should write that? ‘Grassy Knoll’ ?”

“Of course not. It’s a joke. I
do
have a sense of humor, you know. Write: ‘CS-Three. Sniper’s Nest.’ Now, let’s look at the hangar first. What do you have?”

“Bits of glass,” Cooper said, spilling the contents out on a porcelain tray like a diamond merchant. Sachs added, “And some vacuumed trace, a few fibers from the windowsill. No FR.”

Friction ridge prints, she meant. Finger or palm.

“He’s too careful with prints,” Sellitto said glumly.

“No, that’s
encouraging
,”
Rhyme said, irritated—as he often was—that no one else drew conclusions as quickly as he could.

“Why?” the detective asked.

“He’s careful because he’s on file somewhere! So when we
do
find a print we’ll stand a good chance of ID’ing him. Okay, okay, cotton glove prints, they’re no help ... No boot prints because he scattered gravel on the hangar floor. He’s a smart one. But if he were stupid, nobody’d need us, right? Now, what does the glass tell us?”

“What could it tell us,” Sachs asked shortly, “except he broke in the window to get into the hangar?”

“I wonder,” Rhyme said. “Let’s look at it.”

Mel Cooper mounted several shards on a slide and placed it under the lens of the compound ’scope at low magnification. He clicked the video camera on to send the image to Rhyme’s computer.

Rhyme motored back to it. He instructed, “Command mode.” Hearing his voice, the computer dutifully slipped a menu onto the glowing screen. He couldn’t control the microscope itself but he could capture the image on the computer screen and manipulate it—magnify or shrink it, for instance. “Cursor left. Double click.”

Rhyme strained forward, lost in the rainbow auras of refraction. “Looks like standard PPG single-strength window glass.”

“Agreed,” Cooper said, then observed, “No chipping. It was broken by a blunt object. His elbow maybe.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Look at the conchoidal, Mel.”

When someone breaks a window the glass shatters in a series of conchoidal breaks—curved fracture lines. You can tell from the way they curve which direction the blow came from.

“I see it,” the tech said. “Standard fractures.”

“Look at the dirt,” Rhyme said abruptly. “On the glass.”

“See it. Rainwater deposits, mud, fuel residue.”

“What
side
of the glass is the din on?” Rhyme asked impatiently. When he was running IRD, one of the complaints of the officers under him was that he acted like a schoolmarm. Rhyme considered it a compliment.

“It’s ... oh.” Cooper caught on. “How can that be?”

“What?” Sachs asked.

Rhyme explained. The conchoidal fractures began on the clean side of the glass and ended on the dirty side. “He was
inside
when he broke the window.”

“But he couldn’t’ve been,” Sachs protested. “The glass was inside the hangar. He—” She stopped and nodded. “You mean he broke it out, then scooped the glass up and threw it inside with the gravel. But why?”

“The gravel wasn’t to prevent shoe prints. It was to fool us into thinking he broke
in.
But he was already
inside
the hangar and broke
out.
Interesting.” The criminalist considered this for a moment, then shouted, “Check that trace. There any brass in it? Any brass with
graphite
on it?”

“A key,” Sachs said. “You’re thinking somebody gave him a key to get into the hangar.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Let’s find out who owns or leases the hangar.”

“I’ll call,” Sellitto said and flipped open his cell phone.

Cooper looked through the eyepiece of another microscope. He had it on high magnification. “Here we go,” he said. “Lot of graphite and brass. What I’d guess is some 3-In-One oil too. So it was an old lock. He had to fiddle with it.”

“Or?” Rhyme prompted. “Come on, think!”

“Or a new-made key!” Sachs blurted.

“Right! A sticky one. Good. Thom, the chart, please! Write: ‘Access by key.’ ”

In his precise handwriting the aide wrote the words.

“Now, what else do we have?” Rhyme sipped and puffed and swung closer to the computer. He misjudged and slammed into it, nearly knocking over his monitor.

“Goddamn,” he muttered.

“You all right?” Sellitto asked.

“Fine, I’m fine,” he snapped. “Anything
else?
I was asking—anything else?”

Cooper and Sachs brushed the rest of the trace onto a large sheet of clean newsprint. They put on magnifying goggles and went over it. Cooper lifted several flecks with a probe and placed them on a slide.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “We’ve got fibers.”

A moment later Rhyme was looking at the tiny strands on his computer screen.

“What do you think, Mel? Paper, right?”

“Yep.”

Speaking into his headset, Rhyme ordered his computer to scroll through the microscopic images of the fibers. “Looks like two different kinds. One’s white or buff. The other’s got a green tint.”

“Green? Money?” Sellitto suggested.

“Possibly.”

“You have enough to gas a few?” Rhyme asked. The chromatograph would destroy the fibers.

Cooper said they had and proceeded to test several of them.

He read the computer screen. “No cotton and no soda, sulfite, or sulfate.”

These were chemicals added to the pulping process in making high-quality paper.

“It’s cheap paper. And the dye’s water soluble. There’s no oil-based ink.”

“So,” Rhyme announced, “it’s not money.”

“Probably recycled,” Cooper said.

Rhyme magnified the screen again. The matrix was large now and the detail lost. He was momentarily frustrated and wished that he was looking through a real compound ’scope eyepiece. There was nothing like the clarity of fine optics.

Then he saw something.

“Those yellow blotches, Mel? Glue?”

The tech looked through the microscope’s eyepiece and announced, “Yes. Envelope glue, looks like.”

So possibly the key had been delivered to the Dancer in an envelope. But what did the green paper signify? Rhyme had no idea.

Sellitto folded up his phone. “I talked to Ron Talbot at Hudson Air. He made a few calls. Guess who leases that hangar where the Dancer waited.”

“Phillip Hansen,” Rhyme said.

“Yep.”

“We’re making a good case,” Sachs said.

True, Rhyme thought, though his goal was not to hand the Dancer over to the AG with a watertight case. No, he wanted the man’s head on a pike.

“Anything else there?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, let’s move on to the other scene. The sniper’s nest. He was under a lot of pressure there. Maybe he got careless.”

But, of course, he hadn’t been careless.

There were no shell casings.

“Here’s why,” Cooper said, examining the trace through the ’scope. “Cotton fibers. He used a dish towel to catch the casings.”

Rhyme nodded. “Footprints?”

“Nope.” Sachs explained that the Dancer’d worked his way around the patches of exposed mud, staying on the grass even when he was racing to the catering van to escape.

“How many FRs you find?”

“None at the sniper’s nest,” she explained. “Close to two hundred in the two vans.”

Using AFIS—the automated fingerprint identification system that linked digitalized criminal, military, and civil service fingerprint databases around the country—a cold search of this many prints would be possible (though very time consuming). But as obsessed as Rhyme was with finding the Dancer, he didn’t bother with an AFIS request. Sachs reported that she’d found his glove prints in the vans too. The friction ridge prints inside the vehicles wouldn’t be the Dancer’s.

Cooper emptied the plastic bag onto an examining tray. He and Sachs looked over it. “Dirt, grass, pebbles ... Here we go. Can you see this, Lincoln?” Cooper mounted another slide.

“Hairs,” Cooper said, bent over his own ’scope. “Three, four, six, nine ... a dozen of ’em. It looks like a continuous medulla.”

The medulla is a canal running through the middle of a strand of some types of hair. In humans, the medulla is either nonexistent or fragmented. A continuous medulla meant the hair was animal. “What do you think, Mel?”

“I’ll run them through the SEM.” The scanning electron microscope. Cooper ran the scale up to 1500X magnification and adjusted dials until one of the hairs was centered in the screen. It was a whitish stalk with sharp-edged scales resembling a pineapple’s skin.

“Cat,” Rhyme announced.

“Cats, plural,” Cooper corrected, looking into the compound ’scope again. “Looks like we’ve got a black and a calico. Both shorthairs. Then a tawny, long and fine. Persian, something like that.”

Rhyme snorted. “Don’t think the Dancer’s profile’s that he’s an animal lover. He’s either passing for somebody with cats or’s staying with somebody who’s got ’em.”

“More hair,” Cooper announced and mounted a slide on the compound ’scope. “Human. It’s ... wait, two strands about six inches long.”

“He’s shedding, huh?” Sellitto asked.

“Who knows?” Rhyme said skeptically. Without the bulb attached, it’s impossible to determine the sex of the person who lost the strand. Age, except with an infant’s hair, was also impossible to tell. Rhyme suggested, “Maybe it’s the paint truck driver’s. Sachs? He have long hair?”

“No. Crew cut. And it was blond.”

“What do you think, Mel?”

The tech scanned the length of the hair. “It’s been colored.”

“The Dancer’s known for changing his appearance,” Rhyme said.

“Don’t know, Lincoln,” Cooper said. “The dye’s similar to the natural shade. You’d think he’d go for something very different if he wanted to change his identity. Wait, I see two colors of dye. The natural shade is black. It’s had some auburn added, and then more recently a dark purple wash. About two to three months apart.

“I’m also picking up a lot of residue here, Lincoln. I ought to gas one of the hairs.”

“Do it.”

A moment later Cooper was reading the chart on the computer connected to the GC/MS. “Okay, we’ve got some kind of cosmetic.”

Makeup was very helpful to the criminalist; cosmetic manufacturers were notorious for changing the formulation of their products to take advantage of new trends. Different compositions could often be pinpointed to different dates of manufacture and distribution locations.

“What do we have?”

“Hold on.” Cooper was sending the formula to the brand-name database. A moment later he had an answer. “Slim-U-Lite. Swiss made, imported by Jencon, outside of Boston. It’s a regular detergent-based soap with oils and amino acids added. It was in the news—the FTC’s on their case for claiming that it takes off fat and cellulite.”

“Let’s profile,” he announced. “Sachs, what do you think?”

“About him?”

“About
her.
The one aiding and abetting him. Or the one he killed to hide out in her apartment. And maybe steal her car.”

“You’re sure it’s a woman?” wondered Lon Sellitto.

“No. But we don’t have time to be timid in our speculations. More women are worried about cellulite than men. More women color their hair than men. Bold propositions! Come on!”

“Well, overweight,” Sachs said. “Self-image problem.”

“Maybe punky, New Wave, or whatever the fuck the weirdos call ’emselves nowadays,” Sellitto suggested. “My daughter turned her hair purple. Pierced some stuff too, which I don’t want to talk about. How ’bout the East Village?”

“I don’t think she’s going for a rebel image,” Sachs said. “Not with those colors. They’re not different enough. She’s trying to be stylish and nothing she’s doing is working. I say she’s fat, with short hair, in her thirties, professional. Goes home alone to her cats at night.”

Rhyme nodded, staring at the chart. “Lonely. Just the sort to get suckered in by somebody with a glib tongue. Let’s check veterinarians. We know she’s got three cats, three different colors.”

“But where?” Sellitto asked. “Westchester? Manhattan?”

“Let’s first ask,” Rhyme mulled, “why would he hook up with this woman in the first place?”

Sachs snapped her fingers. “Because he
had
to! Because we nearly trapped him.” Her face had lit up. Some of the old Amelia was back.

“Yes!” Rhyme said. “This morning, near Percey’s town house. When ESU moved in.”

Sachs continued. “He ditched the van and hid out in her apartment until it was safe to move.”

Rhyme said to Sellitto, “Get some people calling vets. For ten blocks around the town house. No, make it the whole Upper East Side. Call, Lon, call!”

As the detective punched numbers into his phone, Sachs asked gravely, “You think she’s all right? The woman?”

Rhyme answered from his heart though not with what he believed to be the truth. “We can hope, Sachs. We can hope.”

chapter fourteen

Hour 7 of 45

To Percey Clay the safe house didn’t appear particularly safe.

It was a three-story brownstone structure like many others along this block near the Morgan Library.