The Coffin Dancer (4 page)

Percey uncorked her flask, took a sip. She thought of the windy day years ago when she and Ed had flown a pontoon-equipped Cessna 180 to Red Lake, Ontario, setting down with about six ounces of fuel left in the tank, and celebrated their arrival by downing a bottle of label-less Canadian whiskey, which turned out to give them both the most dire hangovers of their lives. The thought brought tears to her eyes now, as the pain had then.

“Come on, Perce, enough of that, okay?” said the man sitting on the living room couch. “Please.” He pointed to the flask.

“Oh, right,” her gravelly voice responded with controlled sarcasm. “Sure.” And she took another sip. Felt like a cigarette but resisted. “What the hell was he doing calling me on final?” she asked.

“Maybe he was worried about you,” Brit Hale suggested. “Your migraine.”

Like Percey, Hale hadn’t slept last night. Talbot had called him too with the news of the crash and he’d driven down from his Bronxville apartment to be with Percey. He’d stayed with her all night, helped her make the calls that had to be made. It was Hale, not Percey, who’d delivered the news to her own parents in Richmond.

“He had no business doing that, Brit. A call on final.”

“That had nothing to do with what happened,” Hale said gently.

“I know,” she said.

They’d known each other for years. Hale had been one of Hudson Air’s first pilots and had worked for free for the first four months until his savings ran out and he had to approach Percey reluctantly with a request for some salary. He never knew that she’d paid it out of her own savings, for the company didn’t turn a profit for a year after incorporation. Hale resembled a lean, stern schoolteacher. In reality he was easygoing—the perfect antidote to Percey—and a droll practical joker who’d been known to roll a plane into inverted flight if his passengers were particularly rude and unruly and keep it there until they calmed down. Hale often took the right seat to Percey’s left and was her favorite copilot in the world. “Privilege to fly with you, ma’am,” he’d say, offering his imperfect Elvis Presley impersonation. “Thank you very much.”

The pain behind her eyes was nearly gone now. Percey had lost friends—to crashes mostly—and she knew that psychic loss was an anesthetic to physical pain.

So was whiskey.

Another hit from the flask. “Hell, Brit.” She slumped into the couch beside him. “Oh, hell.”

Hale slipped his strong arm around her. She dropped her head, covered with dark curls, to his shoulder. “Be okay, babe,” he said. “Promise. What can I do?”

She shook her head. It was an answerless question.

A sparse mouthful of bourbon, then she looked at the clock. Nine a.m. Ed’s mother would be here any minute. Friends, relatives ... There was the memorial service to plan ...

So much to do.

“I’ve got to call Ron,” she said. “We’ve got to do something. The Company ...”

In airlines and charters the word “Company” didn’t mean the same as in any other businesses. The Company, cap C, was an entity, a living thing. It was spoken with reverence or frustration or pride. Sometimes with sorrow. Ed’s death had inflicted a wound in many lives, the Company’s included, and the injury could very well prove to be lethal.

So much to do ...

But Percey Clay, the woman who never panicked, the woman who’d calmly controlled deadly Dutch rolls, the nemesis of Lear 23s, who’d recovered from graveyard spirals that would have sent many seasoned pilots into spins, now sat paralyzed on the couch. Odd, she thought, as if from a different dimension, I can’t move. She actually looked at her hands and feet to see if they were bone white and bloodless.

Oh, Ed ...

And Tim Randolph too, of course. As good a copilot as you’d ever find, and good first officers were rare. She pictured his young, round face, like a younger Ed’s. Grinning inexplicably. Alert and obedient but firm—giving no-nonsense orders, even to Percey herself, when he had command of the aircraft.

“You need some coffee,” Hale announced, heading for the kitchen. “I’ll getcha a whipped double mochaccino latte with steamed skim.”

One of their private jokes was about sissy coffees. Real pilots, they both felt, drink only Maxwell House or Folgers.

Today, though, Hale, bless his heart, wasn’t really talking about coffee. He meant: Lay off the booze. Percey took the hint. She corked the flask and dropped it on the table with a loud clink. “Okay, okay.” She rose and paced through the living room. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. The pug face. Black hair in tight, stubborn curls. (In her tormented adolescence, during a moment of despair, she’d given herself a crew cut. That’ll show ’em. Though naturally all this act of defiance did was to give the chahmin’ girls of the Lee School in Richmond even more ammunition against her.) Percey had a slight figure and marbles of black eyes that her mother repeatedly said were her finest quality. Meaning her only quality. And a quality that men, of course, didn’t give a shit about.

Dark lines under those eyes today and hopeless matte skin—smoker’s skin, she remembered from the years she went through two packs of Marlboros a day. The earring holes in her lobes had long ago grown closed.

A look out the window, past the trees, into the street in front of the town house. She caught sight of the traffic and something tugged at her mind. Something unsettling.

What? What is it?

The feeling vanished, pushed away by the ringing of the doorbell.

Percey opened the door and found two burly police officers in the entryway.

“Mrs. Clay?”

“Yes.”

“NYPD.” Showing IDs. “We’re here to keep an eye on you until we get to the bottom of what happened to your husband.”

“Come in,” she said. “Brit Hale’s here too.”

“Mr. Hale?” one of the cops said, nodding. “He’s here? Good. We sent a couple of Westchester County troopers to his place too.”

And it was then that she looked past one of the cops, into the street, and the thought popped into her mind.

Stepping around the policemen onto the front stoop.

“We’d rather you stayed inside, Mrs. Clay ...”

Staring at the street. What was it?

Then she understood.

“There’s something you should know,” she said to the officers. “A black van.”

“A ... ?”

“A black van. There was this black van.”

One of the officers took out a notebook. “You better tell me about it.”

“Wait,” Rhyme said.

Lon Sellitto paused in his narration.

Rhyme now heard another set of footsteps approaching, neither heavy nor light. He knew whose they were. This was not deduction. He’d heard this particular pattern many times.

Amelia Sachs’s beautiful face, surrounded by her long red hair, crested the stairs, and Rhyme saw her hesitate for a moment, then continue into the room. She was in full navy blue patrol uniform, minus only the cap and tie. She carried a Jefferson Market shopping bag.

Jerry Banks flashed her a smile. His crush was adoring and obvious and only moderately inappropriate—not many patrol officers have a history of a Madison Avenue modeling career behind them, as did tall Amelia Sachs. But the gaze, like the attraction, was not reciprocated, and the young man, a pretty boy himself despite the badly shaved face and cowlick, seemed resigned to carrying his torch a bit longer.

“Hi, Jerry,” she said. To Sellitto she gave another nod and a deferential “sir.” (He was a detective lieutenant and a legend in Homicide. Sachs had cop genes in her and had been taught over the dinner table as well as in the academy to respect elders.)

“You look tired,” Sellitto commented.

“Didn’t sleep,” she said. “Looking for sand.” She pulled a dozen Baggies out of the shopping bag. "I've been out collecting exemplars.”

“Good,” Rhyme said. “But that’s old news. We’ve been reassigned.”

“Reassigned?”

“Somebody’s come to town. And we have to catch him.”

“Who?”

“A killer,” Sellitto said.

“Pro?” Sachs asked. “OC?”

“Professional, yes,” Rhyme said. “No OC connection that we know about.” Organized crime was the largest purveyor of for-hire killers in the country.

“He’s freelance,” Rhyme explained. “We call him the Coffin Dancer.”

She lifted an eyebrow, red from worrying with a fingernail. “Why?”

“Only one victim’s ever got close to him and lived long enough to give us any details. He’s got—or had, at least—a tattoo on his upper arm: the Grim Reaper dancing with a woman in front of a coffin.”

“Well,
that’s
something to put in the ‘Distinguishing Marks’ box on an incident report,” she said wryly. “What else you know about him?”

“White male, probably in his thirties. That’s it.”

“You traced the tattoo?” Sachs asked.

“Of course,” Rhyme responded dryly. “To the ends of the earth.” He meant this literally. No police department in any major city around the world could find any history of a tattoo like his.

“Excuse me, gentlemen and lady,” Thom said. “Work to do.” Conversation came to a halt while the young man went through the motions of rotating his boss. This helped clear his lungs. To quadriplegics certain parts of their body become personified; patients develop special relationships with them. After his spine was shattered while searching a crime scene some years ago Rhyme’s arms and legs had become his crudest enemies and he’d spent desperate energy trying to force them to do what he wanted. But they’d won, no contest, and stayed as still as wood. Then he’d confronted the racking spasms that shook his body unmercifully. He’d tried to force them to stop. Eventually they had—on their own, it seemed. Rhyme couldn’t exactly claim victory though he did accept their surrender. Then he’d turned to lesser challenges and had taken on his lungs. Finally, after a year of rehab, he weaned himself off the ventilator. Out came the trachea tube and he could breathe on his own. It was his only victory against his body and he harbored a dark superstition that the lungs were biding their time to get even. He figured he’d die of pneumonia or emphysema in a year or two.

Lincoln Rhyme didn’t necessarily mind the idea of dying. But there were too many ways to die; he was determined not to go unpleasantly.

Sachs asked, “Any leads? LKA?”

“Last known was down in the D.C. area,” Sellitto said in his Brooklyn drawl. “That’s it. Nothin’ else. Oh, we hear about him some. Dellray more’n us, with all his skels and CIs, you know. The Dancer, he’s like he’s ten different people. Ear jobs, facial implants, silicon. Adds scars, removes scars. Gains weight, loses weight. Once he skinned this corpse—took some guy’s hands off and wore ’em like gloves to fool CS about the prints.”

“Not me, though,” Rhyme reminded. “I wasn’t fooled.”

Though I still didn’t get him, he reflected bitterly.

“He plans everything,” the detective continued. “Sets up diversions then moves in. Does the job. And he fucking cleans up afterwards real efficient.” Sellitto stopped talking, looking strangely uneasy for a man who hunts killers for a living.

Eyes out the window, Rhyme didn’t acknowledge his ex-partner’s reticence. He merely continued the story. “That case—with the skinned hands—was the Dancer’s most recent job in New York. Five, six years ago. He was hired by one Wall Street investment banker to kill his partner. Did the job nice and clean. My CS team got to the scene and started to walk the grid. One of them lifted a wad of paper out of the trash can. It set off a load of PETN. About eight ounces, gas enhanced. Both techs were killed and virtually every clue was destroyed.”

“I’m sorry,” Sachs said. There was an awkward silence between them. She’d been his apprentice and his partner for more than a year—and had become his friend too. Had even spent the night here sometimes, sleeping on the couch or even, as chaste as a sibling, in Rhyme’s half-ton Clinitron bed. But the talk was mostly forensic, with Rhyme’s lulling her to sleep with tales of stalking serial killers and brilliant cat burglars. They generally steered dear of personal issues. Now she offered nothing more than, “It must have been hard.”

Rhyme deflected the taut sympathy with a shake of his head. He stared at the empty wall. For a time there’d been art posters taped up around the room. They were long gone but his eyes played a game of connect-the-dots with the bits of tape still stuck there. A lopsided star was the shape they traced, while within him somewhere, deep, Rhyme felt an empty despair, replaying the horrid crime scene of the explosion, seeing the burnt, shattered bodies of his officers.

Sachs asked, “The guy who hired him, he was willing to dime the Dancer?”

“Was willing to, sure. But there wasn’t much he could say. He delivered cash to a drop box with written instructions. No electronic transfers, no account numbers. They never met in person.” Rhyme inhaled deeply. “But the worst part was that the banker who’d paid for the hit changed his mind. He lost his nerve. But he had no way to get in touch with the Dancer. It didn’t matter anyway. The Dancer’d told him right up front: ‘Recall is not an option.’ ”

Sellitto briefed Sachs about the case against Phillip Hansen, the witnesses who’d seen his plane make its midnight run, and the bomb last night.

“Who are the other wits?” she asked.

“Percey Clay, the wife of this Carney guy killed last night in the plane. She’s the president of their company, Hudson Air Charters. Her husband was VP. The other wit’s Britton Hale. He’s a pilot works for them. I sent baby-sitters to keep an eye on ’em both.”

Rhyme said, “I’ve called Mel Cooper in. He’ll be working the lab downstairs. The Hansen case is task-forced so we’re getting Fred Dellray to represent the feds. He’ll have agents for us if we need them and’s clearing one of U.S. Marshal’s wit-protection safe houses for the Clay woman and Hale.”

Lincoln Rhyme’s opulent memory intruded momentarily and he lost track of what the detective was saying. An image of the office where the Dancer had left the bomb five years ago came to mind again.

Remembering: The trash can, blown open like a black rose. The smell of the explosive—the choking chemical scent, nothing at all like wood-fire smoke. The silky alligatoring on the charred wood. The seared bodies of his techs, drawn into the pugilistic altitude by the flames.