The Coffin Dancer (32 page)

“Ha. Very funny,” Rhyme grumbled.

After a sitting transfer to get him in bed, some bodily functions taken care of, Rhyme was now leaning back into his luxurious down pillow. Thom had slipped the voice recognition headset over his head and, despite his fatigue, Rhyme himself had gone through the steps of talking to the computer and having it patch into the Special Ops frequency.

This system
was
an amazing invention. Yes, he’d downplayed it to Sellitto and Banks. Yes, he’d
groused.
But the device, more than any other of his aids, made him feel differently about himself. For years he’d been resigned to never leading a life that approached normal. Yet with this machine and software he
did
feel normal.

He rolled his head in a circle and let it ease back into the pillow.

Waiting. Trying not to think of the debacle with Sachs last night.
‘.
.

Motion nearby. The falcon strutted into view. Rhyme saw a flash of white breast, then the bird turned his blue-gray back to Rhyme and looked out over Central Park. It was the male. The tiercel, he remembered Percey Clay telling him. Smaller and less ruthless than the female. He remembered something else about peregrines. They’d come back from the dead. Not too many years ago the entire population in eastern North America grew sterile from chemical pesticides and the birds nearly became extinct. Only through captive breeding efforts and control of pesticides had the creatures thrived.

Back from the dead ...

The radio clattered. It was Amelia Sachs calling in. She sounded tense as she told him that everything was set up at the safe house.

“We’re all on the top floor with Jodie,” she said. “Wait ... Here’s the truck.”

An armored 4X4 with mirrored windows, filled with four officers from the tactical team, was being used as the bait. It would be followed by a single unmarked van, containing—apparently—two plumbing supply contractors. In fact they were 32-E troopers in street clothes. In the back of the van were four others.

“The decoys’re downstairs. Okay ... okay.”

They were using two officers from Haumann’s unit for decoys.

Sachs said, “Here they go.”

Rhyme was pretty sure that given the Dancer’s new plans, he wouldn’t try a sniper shot from the street. Still, he found himself holding his breath.

“On the run ...”

A click as the radio went dead.

Another click. Static. Sellitto broadcast, “They made it. Looks good. Starting to drive. The tail cars’re ready.”

“All right,” Rhyme said. “Jodie’s there?”

“Right here. In the safe house with us.”

“Tell him to make the call.”

“Okay, Linc. Here we go.”

The radio clicked off.

Waiting.

To see if this time the Dancer had faltered. To see if this time Rhyme had out-thought the cold brilliance of the man’s mind.

Waiting.

Stephen’s cell phone brayed. He flipped it open.

“ ’Lo.”

“Hi. It’s me. It’s—”

“I know,” Stephen said. “Don’t use names.”

“Right, sure.” Jodie sounded nervous as a cornered ’coon. A pause, then the little man said, “Well, I’m here.”

“Good. You got that Negro to help you?”

“Uhm, yeah. He’s here.”

“And where are you? Exactly?”

“Across the street from that town house. Man, there’re a lot of cops. But nobody’s paying any attention to me. There’s a van just pulled up a minute ago. One of those four-by-fours. A big one. A Yukon. It’s blue and it’s easy to spot.” In his discomfort he was rambling. “It’s really, really neat. It has mirrored windows.”

“That means they’re bulletproof.”

“Oh. Really. It’s neat how you know all this stuff.”

You’re going to die, Stephen said to him silently.

“This man and a woman just ran out of the alley with, like, ten cops. I’m sure it’s them.”

“Not decoys?”

“Well, they didn’t look like cops and they were looking pretty freaked out. Are you on Lexington?”

“Yeah.”

“In a car?” Jodie asked.

“Of course in a car,” Stephen said. “I stole some little shit Jap thing. I’m going to follow them. Then wait till they get to some deserted area and do it.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How’re you going to do it? Like a grenade or a machine gun?”

Stephen thought, Wouldn’t you like to know?

He said, “I’m not sure. It depends.”

“You see ’em?” Jodie asked, sounding uncomfortable.

“I see them,” Stephen said. “I’m behind them. I’m pulling into traffic now.”

“A Jap car, huh?” Jodie said. “Like a Toyota or something?”

Why, you little asshole traitor, Stephen thought bitterly, stung deeply by the betrayal even though he’d known it was probably inevitable.

Stephen was in fact watching the Yukon and backup vans speed past him. He wasn’t, however, in any Japanese car, shitty or otherwise. He wasn’t in any car at all. Wearing the fireman’s uniform he’d just stolen, he was standing on the street corner exactly one hundred feet from the safe house, watching the real version of the events Jodie was fictionalizing. He knew they were decoys in the Yukon. He knew the Wife and the Friend were still in the safe house.

Stephen picked up the gray remote-det transmitter. It looked like a walkie-talkie but had no speaker or microphone. He set the frequency to the bomb in Jodie’s phone and armed the device.

“Stand by,” he said to Jodie.

“Heh,” Jodie laughed. “Will do, sir.”

Lincoln Rhyme, just a spectator now, a voyeur.

Listening through his headset. Praying that he was right.

“Where’s the van?” Rhyme heard Sellitto ask.

Two blocks away,” Haumann said. “We’re on it It’s moving slowly up Lex. Getting near traffic. He ... wait.” A long pause.

“What?”

“We’ve got a couple cars, a Nissan, a Subaru. An Accord too, but that’s got three people in it. The Nissan’s getting close to the van. That might be it. Can’t see inside.”

Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes. He felt his left ring finger, his only extant digit, flick nervously on the comforter covering the bed.

“Hello?” Stephen said into the phone.

“Yeah,” Jodie responded. “I’m still here.”

“Directly across from the safe house?”

“That’s right.”

Stephen was looking at the building. No Jodie, no Negro.

“I want to say something to you.”

“What’s that?” the little man asked.

Stephen remembered the electric sizzle as his knee touched the man’s.

I can’t do it ...

Soldier ...

Stephen gripped the remote-det box in his left hand. He said, “Listen carefully.”

“I’m listening. I—”

Stephen pushed the transmit button.

The explosion was astonishingly loud. Louder than even Stephen expected. It raided panes and sent a million pigeons reeling into the sky. Stephen saw the glass and wood from the top floor of the safe house go spraying into the alley beside the building.

Which was even better than he had hoped. He’d expected Jodie to be
near
the safe house. Maybe in a police van in front. Maybe in the alley. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune that Jodie’d actually been inside. It was perfect!

He wondered who else had died in the blast.

Lincoln the Worm, he prayed.

The redheaded cop?

He looked over the safe house and saw the smoke curling from the top window.

Now, just a few more minutes, until the rest of his team joined him.

The telephone rang and Rhyme ordered the computer to shut off the radio and answer the phone.

“Yes,” he said.

“Lincoln.” It was Lon Sellitto. “I’m landline,” he said, referring to the phone. “Want to keep Special Ops free for the chase.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“He blew the bomb.”

“I know.” Rhyme had heard it; the safe house was more than two miles from his bedroom, but his windows had rattled and the peregrines outside his window had taken off and flown a slow circle, angry at the disturbance.

“Everybody okay?”

“The mutt’s freaking out, Jodie. But ’side from that everything’s okay. ’Cept for the feds’re looking at more damage to the safe house than they’d planned on. Already bitching about it.”

“Tell ’em we’ll pay our taxes early this year.”

What had tipped Rhyme to the cell phone bomb had been tiny fingernails of polystyrene that Sachs had found in the trace at the subway station. That and more residue of plastic explosive, a slightly different formula from that of the AP bomb in Sheila Horowitz’s apartment. Rhyme had simply matched the polystyrene fragments to the phone the Dancer’d given to Jodie and realized that somebody had unscrewed the casing.

Why? Rhyme had wondered. There was only one logical reason that he could see and so he’d called the bomb squad down at the Sixth Precinct. Two detectives had rendered the phone safe, removed the large wad of plastic explosive and the firing circuit from the phone, then mounted a much smaller bit of explosive and the same circuit in an oil drum near one of the windows, pointed into the alley like a mortar. They’d filled the room with bomb blankets and stepped into the corridor, handing the harmless phone back to Jodie, who held it with shaking hands, demanding that they prove to him all the explosive had been taken out.

Rhyme had guessed that the Dancer’s tactic was to use the bomb to divert attention away from the van and give him a better chance to assault it. The killer had also probably guessed that Jodie would turn and, when he made the call, that the little man would be close to the cops who were mounting the operation. If he took out the leaders the Dancer would have an even better chance of success.

Deception ...

There was no perp Rhyme hated more than the Coffin Dancer, no one he wanted more to run to ground and skewer through his hot heart. Still, Rhyme was a criminalist before anything else and he had a secret admiration for the man’s brilliance.

Sellitto explained, “We’ve got two tail cars behind the Nissan. We’re going to—”

There was a long pause.

“Stupid,” Sellitto muttered.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just nobody called Central. We’ve got fire trucks coming in. Nobody called to tell ’em to ignore the reports of the blast.”

Rhyme had forgotten about that too.

Sellitto continued. “Just got word. The decoy van’s turning east, Linc. The Nissan’s following. Maybe forty yards behind the van. It’s about four blocks to the parking lot by the FDR.”

“Okay, Lon. Is Amelia there? I want to talk to her.”

“Jesus,” he heard someone call in the background. Bo Haumann, Rhyme thought. “We got fire trucks all over the place here.”

“Didn’t somebody ... ?” another voice began to ask, then faded.

No, somebody didn’t, Rhyme thought. You can’t think of—

“Have to call you back, Lincoln,” Sellitto said. “We gotta do something. There’re fire trucks up on the goddamn sidewalks.”

“I’ll call Amelia myself,” Rhyme said.

Sellitto hung up.

The room darkened, curtains drawn.

Percey Clay was afraid.

Thinking of her haggard, the
falcon
, captured by the snare, flapping her muscular wings. The talons and beak slicing the air like honed blades, the mad screech. But the most horrifying of all to Percey, the bird’s frightened eyes. Denied her sky, the bird was lost in terror. Vulnerable.

Percey felt the same. She detested it here in the safe house. Closed in. Looking at—hating—the foolish pictures on the wall. Crap from Woolworth or JCPenney. The limp rug. The cheap water basin and pitcher. A ratty pink chenille bedspread, a dozen threads pulled out in long loops from a particular corner; maybe a mob informant had sat there, tugging compulsively on the pink knobby cloth.

Another sip from the flask. Rhyme had told her about the trap. That the Dancer would be following the van he believed Percey and Hale were in. They’d stop his car and arrest or kill him. Her sacrifice was now going to pay off. In ten minutes they’d have him, the man who’d killed Ed. The man who’d changed her life forever.

She trusted Lincoln Rhyme, and believed him. But she believed him the same way she believed Air Traffic Control when they reported no wind shear and you suddenly found your aircraft dropping at three thousand feet a minute when you were only two thousand feet in the air.

Percey tossed her flask on the bed, stood up and paced. She wanted to be flying, where it was safe, where she had control. Roland Bell had ordered her lights out, had ordered her to stay locked in her room. Everyone was upstairs on the top floor. She’d heard the bang of the explosion. She’d been expecting it. But she hadn’t been expecting the fear that it brought. Unbearable. She’d have given anything to look out the window.

She walked to the door, unlocked it, stepped into the corridor.

It too was dark. Like night ...
Au the stars of evening.

She smelled a pungent chemical scent. From whatever had made the bang, she guessed. The hallway was deserted. There was slight motion at the end of the hall. A shadow from the stairwell. She looked at it. It wasn’t repeated.

Brit Hale’s room was only ten feet away. She wanted badly to talk to him, but she didn’t want him to see her this way, pale, hands shaking. Eyes watering in fear ... My God, she’d pulled a seven three seven out of a wing-ice nosedive more calmly than this: looking into that dark corridor.

She stepped back into her room.

Did she hear footsteps?

She closed the door, returned to the bed.

More footsteps.

“Command mode,” Lincoln Rhyme instructed. The box dutifully came up on-screen.

He heard a faint siren in the distance.

And it was then that Rhyme realized his mistake.

Fire trucks ...

No! I didn’t think about that.

But the Dancer did. Of course! He’d have stolen a fireman’s or medic’s uniform and was strolling into the safe house at this moment!

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “No! How could I be so far off?”

And the computer heard the last word of Rhyme’s sentence and dutifully shut off his communications program.