The Coffin Dancer (47 page)

She cocked her tiny gun, put a good ration of pressure on the trigger and pressed the muzzle against his temple. She frisked him. Lifted a single Glock and a long carbide knife out of his pocket. She found no other weapons.

“Clear,” she called.

As she stood, pulling her cuffs out of the case, the Dancer coughed and spit, wiped blood out of his good eye. Then he lifted his head and looked out over the field. He spotted Percey Clay as she slowly rose from the grass, staring at her attacker.

Jodie seemed to shiver as he gazed at her. Another cough then a deep moan. He startled Sachs by pushing against her leg with his uninjured arm. He was badly hurt—maybe mortally—and had little strength. It was a curious gesture, the way you’d push an irritating Pekinese out of your way.

She stepped back, keeping the gun trained squarely on his chest.

Amelia Sachs was no longer of any interest to the Coffin Dancer. Neither were his wounds or the terrible pain they must be radiating. There was only one thing on his mind. With superhuman effort he rolled onto his belly and, moaning and clawing dirt, he began muscling his way toward Percey Clay, toward the woman he’d been hired to kill.

Bell joined Sachs. She handed him the Glock and together they kept their weapons on the Dancer. They could easily have stopped him—or killed him. But they remained transfixed, watching this pitiable man so desperately absorbed in his task that he didn’t even seem to know his face and shoulder had been destroyed.

He moved another few feet, pausing only to grab a sharp rock about the size of a grapefruit. And he continued on toward his prey. Never saying a word, drenched in blood and sweat, his face a knot of agony. Even Percey, who had every reason to hate this man, to sweep Sachs’s pistol from her hand and end the killer’s life right here, even she was mesmerized, watching this hopeless effort to finish what he’d started.

“That’s enough,” Sachs said finally. She bent down and lifted the rock away.

“No,” he gasped. “No ...”

She cuffed him.

The Coffin Dancer gave a horrifying moan—which might have been from his pain but seemed to arise more out of unbearable loss and failure—and dropped his head to the ground.

He lay still. The trio stood around him, watching his blood soak the grass and innocent crocuses. Soon the heartrending call of the loons was lost in the
whup whup whup
of a helicopter skimming over the trees. Sachs noticed that Percey Clay’s attention slipped immediately away from the man who’d caused her so much sorrow, and the flier watched in rapt attention as the cumbersome aircraft eased through the misty air and touched down lithely on the grass.

chapter thirty-nine

“Ain’t kosher, Lincoln. Can’t do it.”

Lon Sellitto was insistent.

But so was Lincoln Rhyme. “Give me a half hour with him.”

“They’re not comfy with it.” Which really meant what the detective added: “They shit when I suggested it. You’re civilian.”

It was nearly ten on Monday morning. Percey’s appearance before the grand jury had been postponed until tomorrow. The navy divers had found the duffel bags that Phillip Hansen had sunk deep in Long Island Sound. They were being raced to an FBI PERT team in the Federal Building downtown for analysis. Eliopolos had delayed the grand jury to be able to present as much damning evidence against Hansen as possible.

“What’re they worried about?” Rhyme asked petulantly. “It’s not as if I can beat him up.”

He thought about lowering his offer to twenty minutes. But that was a sign of weakness. And Lincoln Rhyme did not believe in showing weakness. So he said, “
I
caught him. I deserve a chance to talk to him.”

And fell silent.

Blaine, his ex-wife, had told him in a moment of very uncharacteristic perception that Rhyme’s eyes, dark as night, argued better than his words did. And so he stared at Sellitto until the detective sighed, then glanced at Dellray.

“Aw, give him a little time,” the agent said. “What’s it gonna hurt? Bring the billy-boy up here. And if he tries to run, hell, gimme a golden excuse for some target practice.”

Sellitto said, “Oh, all right. I’ll make the call. Only, don’t fuck up this case.”

The criminalist barely heard the words. His eyes turned toward the doorway, as if the Coffin Dancer were about to materialize magically.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if that had happened.

“What’s your real name? Is it really Joe or Jodie?”

“Ah, what’s it matter? You caught me. You can call me what you want.”

“How ’bout a first name?” Rhyme asked. “How ’bout what
you
call me? The Dancer. I like that.”

The small man examined Rhyme carefully with his good eye. If he was in pain from the wounds, or groggy from medication, he didn’t show it. His left arm was in a shoulder cast but he still wore thick cuffs attached to a waist shackle. His feet were chained too.

“Whatever you like,” Rhyme said pleasantly, and continued to study the man as if he were an unusual pollen spore picked up at a crime scene.

The Dancer smiled. Because of the damaged facial nerves and the bandages, his expression was grotesque. Tremors occasionally shook his body, and his fingers twitched; his broken shoulder rose and fell involuntarily. Rhyme had a curious feeling—that he himself was healthy and it was the prisoner who was the cripple.

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The Dancer smiled at him. “You’re just dying to know, aren’t you?” he asked Rhyme.

“Know what?”

“To know all ... That’s why you brought me here. You were lucky—catching me, I mean—but you don’t really have a clue as to how I did it.”

Rhyme clucked his tongue. “Oh, but I know exactly how you did it.”

“Do you now?”

“I just asked you here to talk to you,” Rhyme replied. “That’s all. To talk to the man who almost out-thought me.”

“ ‘Almost.’ ” The Dancer laughed. Another twisted smile. It was really quite eerie. “Okay, then tell me.”

Rhyme sipped from his straw. It was fruit juice. He’d astonished Thom by asking him to dump out the scotch and replace it with Hawaiian Punch. Rhyme now said agreeably, “All right. You were hired to kill Ed Carney, Brit Hale, and Percey Clay. You were paid a lot, I’d guess. Six figures.”

“Seven,” the Dancer said proudly.

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. “Lucrative line of work.”

“If you’re good.”

“You deposited the money in the Bahamas. You’d gotten Stephen Kall’s name from somewhere—I don’t know where exactly, probably a mercenary network”—the Dancer nodded—“and you hired him as a subcontractor. Anonymously, maybe by E-mail, maybe fax, using references he’d trust. You’d never meet him face-to-face, of course. And I assume you tried him out?”

“Of course. A hit outside of Washington, D.C. I was hired to kill a congressional aide sneaking secrets out of Armed Services Committee files. It was an easy job, so I subcontracted it to Stephen. Gave me a good chance to check him out. I watched him every step of the way. I checked the entrance wound on the body myself. Very professional. I think he saw me watching him and he came after me to take care of witnesses. That was good too.”

Rhyme continued. “You left him his cash and the key to Phillip Hansen’s hangar—where he waited to plant the bomb on Carney’s plane. You knew he was good but you weren’t sure he was good enough to kill all three of them. You probably thought he could get one at the most but would provide enough diversion for you to get close to the other two.”

The Dancer nodded, reluctantly impressed. “Him killing Brit Hale surprised me. Oh, yes. And it surprised me even more that he got away afterward and got the second bomb onto Percey Clay’s plane.”

“You guessed that you’d have to kill at least one of the victims yourself, so last week you became Jodie, started hawking your drugs everywhere so that people on the street’d know about you. You kidnapped the agent in front of the Federal Building, found out which safe house they’d be in. You waited in the most logical place for Stephen to make his attack and let him kidnap you. You left plenty of clues to your subway hideout so we’d be sure to find you ... and use you to get to Kall. We all trusted you. Sure we did—Stephen didn’t have a clue
you’d
hired him. All he knew was that you betrayed him and he wanted to kill you. Perfect cover for you. But risky.”

“But what’s life without risk?” the Dancer asked playfully. “Makes it all worthwhile, don’t you think? Besides, when we were together I built in a few ... let’s call them countermeasures, so that he’d hesitate to shoot me. Latent homosexuality is
always
helpful.”

“But,” Rhyme added, piqued that his narrative had been interrupted, “when Kall was in the park, you slipped out of the alley where you were hiding, found him, and killed him ... You disposed of the hands, teeth, and clothes—and his guns—in the sewer interceptor pipes. And then we invited you out to Long Island ... Fox in the henhouse.” Rhyme added flippantly, “That’s the schematic ... That’s the bare bones. But I think it tells the story.”

The man’s good eye closed momentarily, then opened again. Red and wet, it stared at Rhyme. He gave a faint nod of concession, or perhaps admiration. “What was it?” the Dancer finally asked. “What tipped you?”

“Sand,” Rhyme answered. “From the Bahamas.”

He nodded, winced at the pain. “I turned my pockets out. I vacuumed.”

“In the folds of the seams. The drugs too. Residue and the baby formula.”

“Yes. Sure.” After a moment the Dancer added, “He was right to be scared of you. Stephen, I mean.” The eye was still scanning Rhyme, like a doctor looking for a tumor. He added, “Poor man. What a sad creature. Who buggered him, d’you think? Stepdad or the boys in reform? Or all of the above?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Rhyme said. On the windowsill the male falcon landed and folded his wings.

“Stephen got scared,” the Dancer mused. “And when you get scared it’s all over. He thought the worm was looking for him. Lincoln the Worm. I heard him whisper that a few times. He was scared of you.”

“But you weren’t scared.”

“No,” the Dancer said. “I don’t get scared.” Suddenly he nodded, as if he’d finally noticed something that had been nagging him. “Ah, listening carefully, are you? Trying to peg the accent?”

Rhyme had been.

“But, see, it changes. Mountain ... Connecticut ... Plains southern and swamp southern ... Mizzura. Kayntuckeh. Why’re you interrogating me? You’re Crime Scene. I’m caught. Time for beddy-bye. End of story. Say, I like chess. I
love
chess. You ever play, Lincoln?”

He’d used to like it. He and Claire Trilling had played quite a bit. Thom had been after him to play on the computer and had bought him a good chess program, installed it. Rhyme had never loaded it. “I haven’t played for a long time.”

“You and I’ll have to play a game of chess sometime. You’d be a good man to play against ... You want to know a mistake some players make?”

“What’s that?” Rhyme felt the man’s hot gaze. He was suddenly uneasy.

“They get curious about their opponents. They try to learn things about their personal life. Things that aren’t
useful
. Where they’re from, where they were born, who their siblings are.”

“Is that right?”

“That may satisfy an itch, but it confuses them. It can be dangerous. See, the game is all on the board, Lincoln. It’s all on the board.” A lopsided smile. “You can’t accept not knowing anything about me, can you?”

No, Rhyme thought, I can’t.

The Dancer continued. “Well, what exactly do you want? An address? A high school yearbook? How about a clue? ‘Rosebud.’ How’s that? I’m surprised at you, Lincoln. You’re a criminalist—the best I’ve ever seen. And here you are right now on some kind of pathetic sentimental journey. Well, who am I? The headless horseman. Beelzebub. I’m Queen Mab. I’m ‘them’ as in ‘Look out for them; they’re after you.’ I’m not your proverbial worst nightmare because nightmares aren’t real and I am more real than anybody wants to admit. I’m a craftsman. I’m a businessman. You won’t get my name, rank, or serial number. I don’t play according to the Geneva convention.”

Rhyme could say nothing.

There was a knock on the door.

The transport had arrived.

“Can you take the shackles off my feet?” the Dancer asked the two officers in a pathetic voice, his good eye blinking and tearful. “Oh, please. I hurt so much. And it’s
so
hard to walk.”

One of the guards looked at him sympathetically then at Rhyme, who said matter-of-factly, “You loosen so much as one restraint and you’ll lose your job and never work in this city again.”

The trooper stared at Rhyme for a moment, then nodded at his partner. The Dancer laughed. “Not a problem,” he said, his eye on Rhyme. “Just a factor.”

The guards gripped him by his good arm and lifted him to his feet. He was dwarfed by the two tall men as they led him to the door. He looked back.

“Lincoln?”

“Yes?”

“You’re going to miss me. Without me, you’ll be bored.” His single eye burned into Rhyme’s. “Without me, you’re going to die.”

An hour later the heavy footsteps announced the arrival of Lon Sellitto. He was accompanied by Sachs and Dellray.

Rhyme knew immediately there was trouble. For a moment he wondered if the Dancer had escaped.

But that wasn’t the problem.

Sachs sighed.

Sellitto gave Dellray a look. The agent’s lean face grimaced.

“Okay, tell me,” Rhyme snapped.

Sachs delivered the news. “The duffel bags. PERT’s been through ’em.”

“Guess what was inside,” Sellitto said.

Rhyme sighed, exhausted, and not in the mood for games. “Detonators, plutonium, and Jimmy Hoffa’s body.”

Sachs said, “A bunch of Westchester County Yellow Pages and five pounds of rocks.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing, Lincoln. Zip.”

“You’re sure they were phone books, not encrypted business records?”

“Bureau cryptology looked ’em over good,” Dellray said. “Fuckin’ off-the-shelf Yellow Pages. And the rocks’re nothin’. Just added ’em to make it sink.”