The Coffin Dancer Read online

  "I'll call a buddy in the Windy City," Dellray said. "He owes me major. Tell 'im what's what and have 'im ship us whatever they got, pronto."

  Rhyme nodded to the agent, then considered what Sellitto had told him. "Okay, we've got two scenes. The crash site in Chicago. That one's too late for you, Sachs. Contaminated as hell. We'll just have to hope the folks in Chicago do a halfway decent job. The other scene's the airport in Mamaroneck--where the Dancer got the bomb on board."

  "How do we know he did it at the airport?" Sachs said. She was rolling her brilliant red hair in a twist, then pinning it on top of her head. Magnificent strands like these were a liability at crime scenes; they threatened to contaminate the evidence. Sachs went about her job armed with a Glock 9 and a dozen bobby pins.

  "Good point, Sachs." He loved her outguessing him. "We don't know and we won't until we find the seat of the bomb. It might've been planted in the cargo, in a flight bag, a coffeepot."

  Or a wastebasket, he thought grimly, again recalling the Wall Street bombing.

  "I want every single bit of that bomb here as soon as possible. We have to have it," Rhyme said.

  "Well, Linc," Sellitto said slowly, "the plane was a mile up when it blew. The wreckage's scattered over a whole fucking subdivision."

  "I don't care," Rhyme said, neck muscles aching. "Are they still searching?"

  Local rescue workers searched crash sites but investigations were federal, so it was Fred Dellray who placed a call to the FBI special agent at the site.

  "Tell him we need every piece of wreckage that tests positive for explosive. I'm talking nanograms. I want that bomb."

  Dellray relayed this. Then he looked up, shook his head. "Scene's released."

  "What?" Rhyme snapped. "After twelve hours? Ridiculous. Inexcusable!"

  "They had to get the streets open. He said--"

  "Fire trucks!" Rhyme called.

  "What?"

  "Every fire truck, ambulance, police car . . . every emergency vehicle that responded to the crash. I want the tires scraped."

  Dellray's long, black face stared at him. "You wanna repeat that? For my ex-good friend here?" The agent pushed the phone at him.

  Rhyme ignored the receiver and said to Dellray, "Emergency vehicle tires're one of the best sources for good evidence at contaminated crime scenes. They were first on the scene, they usually have new tires with deep tread grooves, and they probably didn't drive anywhere but to and from the crash site. I want all the tires scraped and the trace sent here."

  Dellray managed to get a promise from Chicago that the tires of as many emergency vehicles as they could get to would be scraped.

  "Not 'as many as,' " Rhyme called. "All of them."

  Dellray rolled his eyes and relayed that information too, then hung up.

  Suddenly Rhyme cried, "Thom! Thom, where are you?"

  The belabored aide appeared at the door a moment later. "In the laundry room, that's where."

  "Forget laundry. We need a time chart. Write, write . . . "

  "Write what, Lincoln?"

  "On that chalkboard, right there. The big one." Rhyme looked at Sellitto. "When's the grand jury convening?"

  "Nine on Monday."

  "The prosecutor'll want them there a couple hours early--the van'll pick 'em up between six and seven." He looked at the wall clock. It was now 10 A.M. Saturday.

  "We've got exactly forty-five hours. Thom, write, 'Hour one of forty-five.' "

  The aide hesitated.

  "Write!"

  He did.

  Rhyme glanced at the others in the room. He saw their eyes flickering uncertainly among them, a skeptical frown on Sachs's face. Her hand rose to her scalp and she scratched absently.

  "Think I'm being melodramatic?" he asked finally. "Think we don't need a reminder?"

  No one spoke for a moment. Finally Sellitto said, "Well, Linc, I mean, it's not like anything's going to happen by then."

  "Oh, yes, something's going to happen," Rhyme said, eyes on the male falcon as the muscular bird launched himself effortlessly into the air over Central Park. "By seven o'clock on Monday morning, either we'll've nailed the Dancer or both our witnesses'll be dead. There're no other options."

  The dense silence was broken by the chirp of Banks's cell phone. He listened for a minute, then looked up. "Here's something," he said.

  "What?" Rhyme asked.

  "Those uniforms guarding Mrs. Clay and the other witness? Britton Hale?"

  "What about them?"

  "They're at her town house. One of 'em just called in. Seems Mrs. Clay says there was a black van she'd never seen before parked on the block outside the house for the last couple days. Out-of-state plates."

  "She get the tag? Or state?"

  "No," Banks responded. "She said it was gone for a while last night after her husband left for the airport."

  Sellitto stared at him.

  Rhyme's head eased forward. "And?"

  "She said it was back this morning for a little while. It's gone now. She was--"

  "Oh, Jesus," Rhyme whispered.

  "What?" Banks asked.

  "Central!" the criminalist shouted. "Get on the horn to Central. Now!"

  A taxi pulled up in front of the Wife's town house.

  An elderly woman got out and walked unsteadily to the door.

  Stephen watching, vigilant.

  Soldier, is this an easy shot?

  Sir, a shooter never thinks of a shot as easy. Every shot requires maximum concentration and effort. But, sir, I can make this shot and inflict lethal wounds, sir. I can turn my targets into jelly, sir.

  The woman climbed up the stairs and disappeared into the lobby. A moment later Stephen saw her appear in the Wife's living room. There was a flash of white cloth--the Wife's blouse again. The two of them hugged. Another figure stepped into the room. A man. A cop? He turned around. No, it was the Friend.

  Both targets, Stephen thought excitedly, only thirty yards away.

  The older woman--mother or mother-in-law--remained in front of the Wife as they talked, heads down.

  Stephen's beloved Model 40 was in the van. But he wouldn't need the sniper rifle for this shot, only the long-barrel Beretta. It was a wonderful gun. Old, battered, and functional. Unlike many mercenaries and pros, Stephen didn't make a fetish out of his weapons. If a rock was the best way to kill a particular victim, he'd use a rock.

  He assessed his target, measuring angles of incidence, the window's potential distortion and deflection. The old woman stepped away from the Wife and stood directly in front of the glass.

  Soldier, what is your strategy?

  He'd shoot through the window and hit the elderly woman high. She'd fall. The Wife would instinctively step forward toward her and bend over her, presenting a fair target. The Friend would run into the room too and would profile just fine.

  And what about the cops?

  A slight risk. But uniformed patrolmen were modest shots at best and had probably never been fired on in the line of duty. They'd be sure to panic.

  The lobby was still empty.

  Stephen pulled back the slide to cock the weapon and give himself the better control of squeezing the trigger in the gun's single-action mode. He pushed the door open and blocked it with his foot, looked up and down the street.

  No one.

  Breathe, soldier. Breathe, breathe, breathe . . .

  He lowered the gun to his palm, the butt resting heavy in his gloved hand. He began applying imperceptible pressure to the trigger.

  Breathe, breathe.

  He stared at the old woman, and forgot completely about squeezing, forgot about aiming, forgot about the money he was making, forgot everything in the universe. He simply held the gun steady as a rock in his supple, relaxed hands and waited for the weapon to fire itself.

  . . . Chapter Five

  Hour 1 of 45

  The elderly woman wiping tears, the Wife standing behind her, arms crossed.

  They were dead, the
y were--

  Soldier!

  Stephen froze. Relaxed his trigger finger.

  Lights!

  Flashing lights, silently zooming along the street. The turret lights on a police cruiser. Then two more cars, then a dozen, and an Emergency Services van bounding over the potholes. Converging on the Wife's town house from both ends of the street.

  Safety your weapon, Soldier.

  Stephen lowered the gun, stepped back into the dim lobby.

  Police ran from the cars like spilt water. They spread out along the sidewalk, gazing outward and up at the rooftops. They flung open the doors to the Wife's town house, shattering the glass and pushing inside.

  The five ESU officers, in full tactical gear, deployed along the curb, covering exactly the spots that ought to be covered, eyes vigilant, fingers curled loosely on the black triggers of their black guns. Patrol officers might be glorified traffic cops but there were no better soldiers than New York's ESU. The Wife and the Friend had disappeared, probably flung to the floor. The old lady too.

  More cars, filling the street and pulling up onto the sidewalks.

  Stephen Kall, feeling cringey. Wormy. Sweat dotted his palms and he flexed his fist so the glove would soak it up.

  Evacuate, Soldier . . .

  With a screwdriver he pried open the lock to the main door and pushed inside, walking fast but not running, head down, making for the service entrance that led to the alley. No one saw him and he slipped outside. Was soon on Lexington Avenue, walking south through the crowds toward the underground garage where he'd parked the van.

  Looking ahead.

  Sir, trouble here, sir.

  More cops.

  They'd closed down Lexington Avenue about three blocks south and were setting up a perimeter around the town house, stopping cars, looking over pedestrians, moving door to door, shining their long flashlights into parked cars. Stephen saw two cops, hands twitching on the butts of their Glocks, ask one man to step out of his car while they searched under a pile of blankets in the backseat. What troubled Stephen was that the man was white and about Stephen's age.

  The building where he'd parked the van was within the search perimeter. He couldn't drive out without being stopped. The line of cops moved closer. He walked back to the garage and pulled open the van door. Quickly he changed clothes--ditching the contractor outfit and dressing in blue jeans, work shoes (no telltale tread marks), a black T-shirt, a dark green windbreaker (no lettering of any kind), and a baseball cap (free of team insignia). The backpack contained his laptop, several cellular phones, his small-arms weapons, and ammunition from the van. He got more bullets, his binoculars, the night vision 'scope, tools, several packages of explosives, and various detonators. Stephen put the supplies in the large backpack.

  The Model 40 was in a Fender bass guitar case. He lifted this out of the back of the van and set it with the backpack on the garage floor. He considered what to do about the van. Stephen had never touched any part of the vehicle without wearing gloves and there was nothing inside that would give away his identity. The Dodge itself was stolen and he'd removed both the dash VIN and the secret VINs. He'd made the license plates himself. He'd planned on abandoning it sooner or later and could finish the job without the vehicle. He decided to leave it now. He covered the boxy Dodge with a blue Wolf car tarp, slipped his k-bar knife into the tires, flattening them, to make it look like the van had been there for months. He left the garage through the elevator to the building.

  Outside, he slipped into the crowd. But there were police everywhere. His skin started to crawl. It felt wormy, moist. He stepped up to a phone booth and pretended to make a call, lowered his head to the metal plate of the phone, felt the sweat prickle on his forehead, under his arms. Thinking, They're everywhere. Looking for him, looking at him. From cars. From the street.

  From windows . . .

  The memory came back again . . .

  The face in the window.

  He took a deep breath.

  The face in the window . . .

  It had happened recently. Stephen'd been hired for a hit in Washington, D.C. The job was to kill a congressional aide selling classified military arms information to--Stephen assumed--a competitor of the man who'd hired Stephen. The aide had been understandably paranoid and kept a safe house in Alexandria, Virginia. Stephen had learned where it was and finally managed to get close enough for a pistol shot--although it would be a tricky one.

  One chance, one shot . . .

  Stephen had waited for four hours, and when the victim arrived and darted toward his town house Stephen had managed to fire a single shot. Hit him, he believed, but the man had fallen out of sight in a courtyard.

  Listen to me, boy. You listening?

  Sir, yessir.

  You track down every wounded target and finish the job. You follow the blood spoor to hell and back, you have to.

  Well--

  No well about it. You confirm every kill. You understand me? This's not an option.

  Yessir.

  Stephen had climbed over the brick wall into the man's courtyard. He found the aide's body sprawled on the cobblestones, beside a goat-head fountain. The shot had been fatal after all.

  But something odd had happened. Something that sent a shiver through him and very few things in life had ever made him shiver. Maybe it was just a fluke, the way the aide had fallen or the way the bullet hit him. But it appeared that someone had carefully untucked the victim's bloody shirt and pulled it up to see the tiny entrance wound above the man's sternum.

  Stephen had spun around, looking for whoever had done this. But, no, there was no one nearby.

  Or so he thought at first.

  Then Stephen happened to look across the courtyard. There was an old carriage house, its windows smeared and dirty, lit from behind with failing sunset light. In one of those windows he saw--or imagined he saw--a face looking out at him. He couldn't see the man--or woman--clearly. But whoever it was didn't seem particularly scared. They hadn't ducked or tried to run.

  A witness, you left a witness, Soldier!

  Sir, I will eliminate the possibility of identification immediately, sir.

  But when he kicked in the door of the carriage house he found it was empty.

  Evacuate, Soldier . . .

  The face in the window . . .

  Stephen had stood in the empty building, overlooking the courtyard of the aide's town house, lit with bold western sunlight, and turned around and around in slow, manic circles.

  Who was it? What had he been doing? Or was it just Stephen's imagination? The way his stepfather used to see snipers in the hawk nests of West Virginia oak trees.

  The face in the window had gazed at him the way his stepfather would look at him sometimes, studying him, inspecting. Stephen, remembering what young Stephen had often thought: Did I fuck up? Did I do good? What's he thinking about me?

  Finally he couldn't wait any longer and he'd headed back to his hotel in Washington.

  Stephen had been shot at and beaten and stabbed. But nothing had shaken him as much as that incident in Alexandria. He'd never once been troubled by the faces of his victims, dead or alive. But the face in the window was like a worm crawling up his leg.

  Cringey . . .

  Which was exactly what he felt now, seeing the lines of officers moving toward him from both directions on Lexington. Cars were honking, drivers were angry. But the police paid no mind; they continued their dogged search. It was just a matter of minutes until they spotted him--an athletic white man by himself, carrying a guitar case that might easily contain the best sniper rifle God put on this earth.

  His eyes went to the black, grimy windows overlooking the street.

  He prayed he wouldn't see a face looking out.

  Soldier, the fuck you talking about?

  Sir, I--

  Reconnoiter, Soldier.

  Sir, yessir.

  A burnt, bitter smell came to him.

  He turned around and fou
nd he was standing outside a Starbucks. He walked in and while he pretended to read the menu in fact he surveyed the customers.

  At a table by herself a large woman sat in one of the flimsy, uncomfortable chairs. She was reading a magazine and nursing a tall cup of tea. She was in her early thirties, dumpy, with a broad face and a thick nose. Starbucks, he free-associated . . . Seattle . . . dyke?

  But, no, he didn't think so. She pored over the Vogue in her hands with envy, not lust.

  Stephen bought a cup of Celestial Seasonings tea, chamomile. He picked up the container and started to walk toward a seat at the window. Stephen was just passing the woman's table when the cup slipped from his hand and dropped onto the chair opposite her, spraying the hot tea all over the floor. She slid back in surprise, looking up at the horrified expression on Stephen's face.

  "Oh, my goodness," he whispered, "I am sooo sorry." He lunged for a handful of napkins. "Tell me I didn't get any on you. Please!"

  Percey Clay pulled away from the young detective who held her pinned to the floor.

  Ed's mother, Joan Carney, lay a few feet away, her face frozen in shock and bewilderment.

  Brit Hale was up against the wall, covered by two strong cops. It looked as if they were arresting him.

  "I'm sorry, ma'am, Mrs. Clay," one cop said. "We--"

  "What's going on?" Hale seemed mystified. Unlike Ed and Ron Talbot and Percey herself, Hale had never been military, never come close to combat. He was fearless--he always wore long sleeves instead of a pilots' traditional short-sleeve white shirt to hide the leathery burn scars on his arms from the time a few years ago he'd climbed into a flaming Cessna 150 to rescue a pilot and passenger. But the idea of malice and crime--intentional harm--was wholly alien to him.

  "We got a call from the task force," the detective explained. "They think the man who killed Mr. Carney has been back. Probably to come after you two. Mr. Rhyme thinks the killer was the one driving that black van you saw today."

  "Well, we have those men to guard us," Percey snapped, tossing her head to the cops who'd arrived earlier.

  "Jesus," Hale muttered, looking outside. "There must be twenty cops out there."

  "Away from the window, please, sir," the detective said firmly. "He could be on a rooftop. The site's not secure yet."

  Percey heard footsteps running up the stairs. "The roof?" she asked sourly. "Maybe he's tunneling into the basement." She put her arm around Mrs. Carney. "You all right, Mother?"