The Coffin Dancer

chapter one

WHEN EDWARD CARNEY SAID GOOD-BYE to his wife, Percey, he never thought it would be the last time he’d see her.

He climbed into his car, which was parked in a precious space on East Eighty-first Street in Manhattan, and pulled into traffic. Carney, an observant man by nature, noticed a black van parked near their town house. A van with mud-flecked, mirrored windows. He glanced at the battered vehicle and recognized the West Virginia plates, realizing he’d seen the van on the street several times in the past few days. But then the traffic in front of him sped up. He caught the end of the yellow light and forgot the van completely. He was soon on the FDR Drive, cruising north.

Twenty minutes later he juggled the car phone and called his wife. He was troubled when she didn’t answer. Percey’d been scheduled to make the flight with him – they’d flipped a coin last night for the left-hand seat and she’d won, then given him one of her trademark victory grins. But then she’d wakened at 3a.m. with a blinding migraine, which had stayed with her all day. After a few phone calls they’d found a substitute copilot and Percey’d taken a Fiorinal and gone back to bed.

A migraine was the only malady that would ground her.

Lanky Edward Carney, forty-five years old and still wearing a military hairstyle, cocked his head as he listened to the phone ringing miles away. Their answering machine clicked on and he returned the phone to the cradle, mildly concerned.

He kept the car at exactly sixty miles per hour, centered perfectly in the right lane; like most pilots he was conservative in his car. He trusted other airmen but thought most drivers were crazy.

In the office of Hudson Air Charters, on the grounds of Mamaroneck Regional Airport, in Westchester, a cake awaited. Prim and assembled Sally Anne, smelling like the perfume department at Macy’s, had baked it herself to commemorate the company’s new contract. Wearing the ugly rhinestone biplane brooch her grandchildren had given her last Christmas, she scanned the room to make sure each of the dozen or so employees had a piece of devil’s food sized just right for them. Ed Carney ate a few bites of cake and talked about tonight’s flight with Ron Talbot, whose massive belly suggested he loved cake though in fact he survived mostly on cigarettes and coffee. Talbot wore the dual hats of operations and business manager and he worried out loud if the shipment would be on time, if the fuel usage for the flight had been calculated correctly, if they’d priced the job right. Carney handed him the remains of his cake and told him to relax.

He thought again about Percey and stepped away into his office, picked up the phone.

Still no answer at their town house.

Now concern became worry. People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone. He slapped the receiver down, thought about calling a neighbor to check up on her. But then the large white truck pulled up in front of the hangar next to the office and it was time to go to work. Six p.m.

Talbot gave Carney a dozen documents to sign just as young Tim Randolph arrived, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie. Tim referred to himself as a “copilot” and Carney liked that. “First officers” were company people, airline creations, and while Carney respected any man who was competent in the right-hand seat, pretension put him off.

Tall, brunette Lauren, Talbot’s assistant, had worn her lucky dress, whose blue color matched the hue of the Hudson Air logo – a silhouette of a falcon flying over a gridded globe. She leaned close to Carney and whispered, “It’s going to be okay now, won’t it?”

“It’ll be fine,” he assured her. They embraced for a moment. Sally Anne hugged him too and offered him some cake for the flight. He demurred. Ed Carney wanted to be gone. Away from the sentiment, away from the festivities. Away from the ground.

And soon he was. Sailing three miles above the earth, piloting a Lear 35A, the finest private jet ever made, clear of markings or insignia except for its N registration number, polished silver, sleek as a pike.

They flew toward a stunning sunset – a perfect orange disk easing into big, rambunctious clouds, pink and purple, leaking bolts of sunlight.

Only dawn was as beautiful. And only thunderstorms more spectacular.

It was 723 miles to O’Hare and they covered that distance in less than two hours. Air Traffic Control’s Chicago Center politely asked them to descend to fourteen thousand feet, then handed them off to Chicago Approach Control.

Tim made the call. “ Chicago Approach. Lear Four Niner Charlie Juliet with you at one four thousand.”

“Evening, Niner Charlie Juliet,” said yet another placid air traffic controller. “Descend and maintain eight thousand. Chicago altimeter thirty point one one. Expect vectors to twenty-seven L.”

“Roger, Chicago. Niner Charlie Juliet out of fourteen for eight.”

O’Hare is the busiest airport in the world and ATC put them in a holding pattern out over the western suburbs of the city, where they’d circle, awaiting their turn to land.

Ten minutes later the pleasant, staticky voice requested, “Niner Charlie Juliet, heading zero nine zero over the numbers downwind for twenty-seven L.”

“Zero nine zero. Niner Charlie Juliet,” Tim responded.

Carney glanced up at the bright points of constellations in the stunning gunmetal sky and thought, Look, Percey, it’s all the stars of evening…

And with that he had what was the only unprofessional urge of perhaps his entire career. His concern for Percey arose like a fever. He needed desperately to speak to her.

“Take the aircraft,” he said to Tim.

“Roger,” the young man responded, hands going unquestioningly to the yoke.

Air Traffic Control crackled, “Niner Charlie Juliet, descend to four thousand. Maintain heading.”

“Roger, Chicago,” Tim said. “Niner Charlie Juliet out of eight for four.”

Carney changed the frequency of his radio to make a unicom call. Tim glanced at him. “Calling the Company,” Carney explained. When he got Talbot he asked to be patched through the telephone to his home.

As he waited, Carney and Tim went through the litany of the pre-landing check.

“Flaps approach… twenty degrees.”

“Twenty, twenty, green,” Carney responded.

“Speed check.”

“One hundred eighty knots.”

As Tim spoke into his mike – “Chicago, Niner Charlie Juliet, crossing the numbers; through five for four” – Carney heard the phone start to ring in their Manhattan town house, seven hundred miles away.

Come on, Percey. Pick up! Where are you?

Please…

ATC said, “Niner Charlie Juliet, reduce speed to one eight zero. Contact tower. Good evening.”

“Roger, Chicago. One eight zero knots. Evening.”

Three rings.

Where the hell is she? What’s wrong?

The knot in his gut grew tighter.

The turbofan sang, a grinding sound. Hydraulics moaned. Static crackled in Carney’s headset.

Tim sang out, “Flaps thirty. Gear down.”

“Flaps, thirty, thirty, green. Gear down. Three green.”

And then, at last – in his earphone – a sharp click.

His wife’s voice saying, “Hello?”

He laughed out loud in relief.

Carney started to speak but, before he could, the aircraft gave a huge jolt – so vicious that in a fraction of a second the force of the explosion ripped the bulky headset from his ears and the men were flung forward into the control panel. Shrapnel and sparks exploded around them.

Stunned, Carney instinctively grabbed the unresponsive yoke with his left hand; he no longer had a right one. He turned toward Tim just as the man’s bloody, rag-doll body disappeared out of the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.

“Oh, God. No, no…”

Then the entire cockpit broke away from the disintegrating plane and rose into the air, leaving the fuselage and wings and engines of the Lear behind, engulfed in a ball of gassy fire.

“Oh, Percey,” he whispered, “Percey…” Though there was no longer a microphone to speak into.

chapter two

BIG AS ASTEROIDS, BONE YELLOW.

The grains of sand glowed on the computer screen. The man was sitting forward, neck aching, eyes in a hard squint – from concentration, not from any flaw in vision.

In the distance, thunder. The early morning sky was yellow and green and a storm was due at any moment. This had been the wettest spring on record.

Grains of sand.

“Enlarge,” he commanded, and dutifully the image on the computer doubled in size.

Strange, he thought.

“Cursor down… stop.”

Leaning forward again, straining, studying the screen.

Sand, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, is a criminalist’s delight: bits of rock, sometimes mixed with other material, ranging from.05 to 2 millimeters (larger than that is gravel, smaller is silt). It adheres to a perp’s clothing like sticky paint and conveniently leaps off at crime scenes and hideouts to link murderer and murdered. It also can tell a great deal about where a suspect has been. Opaque sand means he’s been in the desert. Clear means beaches. Hornblende means Canada. Obsidian, Hawaii. Quartz and opaque igneous rock, New England. Smooth gray magnetite, the western Great Lakes.

But where this particular sand had come from, Rhyme didn’t have a clue. Most of the sand in the New York area was quartz and feldspar. Rocky on Long Island Sound, dusty on the Atlantic, muddy on the Hudson. But this was white, glistening, ragged, mixed with tiny red spheres. And what are those rings? White stone rings like microscopic slices of calamari. He’d never seen anything like this.

The puzzle had kept Rhyme up till 4a.m. He’d just sent a sample of the sand to a colleague at the FBI’s crime lab in Washington. He’d had it shipped off with great reluctance – Lincoln Rhyme hated someone else’s answering his own questions.

Motion at the window beside his bed. He glanced toward it. His neighbors – two compact peregrine falcons – were awake and about to go hunting. Pigeons beware, Rhyme thought. Then he cocked his head, muttering, “Damn,” though he was referring not to his frustration with this uncooperative evidence but at the impending interruption.

Urgent footsteps were on the stairs. Thom had let visitors in and Rhyme didn’t want visitors. He glanced toward the hallway angrily. “Oh, not now, for God’s sake.”

But they didn’t hear, of course, and wouldn’t have paused even if they had.

Two of them…

One was heavy. One not.

A fast knock on the open door and they entered.

“ Lincoln.”

Rhyme grunted.

Lon Sellitto was a detective first grade, NYPD, and the one responsible for the giant steps. Padding along beside him was his slimmer, younger partner, Jerry Banks, spiffy in his pork gray suit of fine plaid. He’d doused his cowlick with spray – Rhyme could smell propane, isobutane, and vinyl acetate – but the charming spike still stuck up like Dagwood’s.

The rotund man looked around the second-floor bedroom, which measured twenty by twenty. Not a picture on the wall. “What’s different, Linc? About the place?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, hey, I know – it’s clean,” Banks said, then stopped abruptly as he ran into his faux pas.

“Clean, sure,” said Thom, immaculate in ironed tan slacks, white shirt, and the flowery tie that Rhyme thought was pointlessly gaudy though he himself had bought it, mail order, for the man. The aide had been with Rhyme for several years now – and though he’d been fired by Rhyme twice, and quit once, the criminalist had rehired the unflappable nurse/assistant an equal number of times. Thom knew enough about quadriplegia to be a doctor and had learned enough forensics from Lincoln Rhyme to be a detective. But he was content to be what the insurance company called a “caregiver,” though both Rhyme and Thom disparaged the term. Rhyme called him, variously, his “mother hen” or “nemesis,” both of which delighted the aide no end. He now maneuvered around the visitors. “He didn’t like it but I hired Molly Maids and got the place scrubbed down. Practically needed to be fumigated. He wouldn’t talk to me for a whole day afterwards.”

“It didn’t need to be cleaned. I can’t find anything.”

“But then he doesn’t have to find anything, does he?” Thom countered. “That’s what I’m for.”

No mood for banter. “Well?” Rhyme cast his handsome face toward Sellitto. “What?”

“Got a case. Thought you might wanta help.”

“I’m busy.”

“What’s all that?” Banks asked, motioning toward a new computer sitting beside Rhyme’s bed.

“Oh,” Thom said with infuriating cheer, “he’s state of the art now. Show them, Lincoln. Show them.”

“I don’t want to show them.”

More thunder but not a drop of rain. Nature, as often, was teasing today.

Thom persisted. “Show them how it works.”

“Don’t want to.”

“He’s just embarrassed.”

“Thom,” Rhyme muttered.

But the young aide was as oblivious to threats as he was to recrimination. He tugged his hideous, or stylish, silk tie. “I don’t know why he’s behaving this way. He seemed very proud of the whole setup the other day.”

“Did not.”

Thom continued. “That box there” – he pointed to a beige contraption – “that goes to the computer.”

“Whoa, two hundred megahertz?” Banks asked, nodding at the computer. To escape Rhyme’s scowl he’d grabbed the question like an owl snagging a frog.

“Yep,” Thom said.

But Lincoln Rhyme was not interested in computers. At the moment Lincoln Rhyme was interested only in microscopic rings of sculpted calamari and the sand they nestled in.

Thom continued. “The microphone goes into the computer. Whatever he says, the computer recognizes. It took the thing a while to learn his voice. He mumbled a lot.”

In truth Rhyme was quite pleased with the system – the lightning-fast computer, a specially made ECU box – environmental control unit – and voice-recognition software. Merely by speaking he could command the cursor to do whatever a person using a mouse and keyboard could do. And he could dictate too. Now, with words, he could turn the heat up or down and the lights on or off, play the stereo or TV, write on his word processor, and make phone calls and send faxes.

“He can even write music,” Thom said to the visitors. “He tells the computer what notes to mark down on the staff.”

“Now that’s useful,” Rhyme said sourly. “Music.”

For a C4 quad – Rhyme’s injury was at the fourth cervical vertebra – nodding was easy. He could also shrug, though not as dismissingly as he’d have liked. His other circus trick was moving his left ring finger a few millimeters in any direction he chose. That had been his entire physical repertoire for the past several years; composing a sonata for the violin was probably not in the offing.

“He can play games too,” Thom said.

“I hate games. I don’t play games.”

Sellitto, who reminded Rhyme of a large unmade bed, gazed at the computer and seemed unimpressed. “ Lincoln,” he began gravely. “There’s a task-forced case. Us ’n’ the feds. Ran into a problem last night.”

“Ran into a brick wall,” Banks ventured to say.

“We thought… well, I thought you’d want to help us out on this one.”

Want to help them out?

“I’m working on something now,” Rhyme explained. “For Perkins, in fact.” Thomas Perkins, special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI. “One of Fred Dellray’s runners is missing.”

Special Agent Fred Dellray, a longtime veteran with the Bureau, was a handler for most of the Manhattan office’s undercover agents. Dellray himself had been one of the Bureau’s top undercover ops. He’d earned commendations from the director himself for his work. One of Dellray’s agents, Tony Panelli, had gone missing a few days earlier.

“Perkins told us,” Banks said. “Pretty weird.”

Rhyme rolled his eyes at the unartful phrase. Though he couldn’t dispute it. The agent had disappeared from his car across from the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan around 9p.m. The streets weren’t crowded but they weren’t deserted either. The engine of the Bureau’s Crown Victoria was running, the door open. There was no blood, no gunshot residue, no scuff marks indicating struggle. No witnesses – at least no witnesses willing to talk.

Pretty weird indeed.

Perkins had a fine crime scene unit at his disposal, including the Bureau’s Physical Evidence Response Team. But it had been Rhyme who’d set up PERT and it was Rhyme whom Dellray had asked to work the scene of the disappearance. The crime scene officer who worked as Rhyme’s partner had spent hours at Panelli’s car and had come away with no unidentified fingerprints, ten bags of meaningless trace evidence, and – the only possible lead – a few dozen grains of this very odd sand.

The grains that now glowed on his computer screen, as smooth and huge as heavenly bodies.

Sellitto continued. “Perkins’s gonna put other people on the Panelli case, Lincoln, if you’ll help us. Anyway, I think you’ll want this one.”

That verb again – want. What was this all about?

Rhyme and Sellitto had worked together on major homicide investigations some years ago. Hard cases – and public cases. He knew Sellitto as well as he knew any cop. Rhyme generally distrusted his own ability to read people (his ex-wife, Elaine, had said – often, and heatedly – that Rhyme could spot a shell casing a mile away and miss a human being standing in front of him) but he could see now that Sellitto was holding back.

“Okay, Lon. What is it? Tell me.”

Sellitto nodded toward Banks.

“Phillip Hansen,” the young detective said significantly, lifting a puny eyebrow.

Rhyme knew the name only from newspaper articles. Hansen – a large, hard-living businessman originally from Tampa, Florida – owned a wholesale company in Armonk, New York. It was remarkably successful and he’d become a multimillionaire thanks to it. Hansen had a good deal for a small-time entrepreneur. He never had to look for customers, never advertised, never had receivables problems. In fact, if there was any downside to PH Distributors, Inc., it was that the federal government and New York State were expending great energy to shut it down and throw its president in jail. Because the product Hansen’s company sold was not, as he claimed, secondhand military surplus vehicles but weaponry, more often than not stolen from military bases or imported illegally. Earlier in the year two army privates had been killed when a truckload of small arms was hijacked near the George Washington Bridge on its way to New Jersey. Hansen was behind it – a fact the U.S. attorney and the New York attorney general knew but couldn’t prove.

“Perkins and us’re hammering together a case,” Sellitto said. “Working with the army CID. But it’s been a bitch.”

“And nobody ever dimes him,” said Banks. “Ever.”

Rhyme supposed that, no, no one would dare snitch on a man like Hansen.

The young detective continued. “But finally, last week, we got a break. See, Hansen’s a pilot. His company’s got warehouses at Mamaroneck Airport – that one near White Plains? A judge issued paper to check ’ em out. Naturally we didn’t find anything. But then last week, it’s midnight? The airport’s closed but there’re some people there, working late. They see a guy fitting Hansen’s description drive out to this private plane, load some big duffel bags into it, and take off. Unauthorized. No flight plan, just takes off. Comes back forty minutes later, lands, gets back into his car, and burns rubber out of there. No duffel bags. The witnesses give the registration number to the FAA. Turns out it’s Hansen’s private plane, not his company’s.”

Rhyme said, “So he knew you were getting close and he wanted to ditch something linking him to the killings.” He was beginning to see why they wanted him. Some seeds of interest here. “Air Traffic Control track him?”

“LaGuardia had him for a while. Straight out over Long Island Sound. Then he dropped below radar for ten minutes or so.”

“And you drew a line to see how far he could get over the Sound. There’re divers out?”

“Right. Now, we knew that soon as Hansen heard we had the three witnesses he was gonna rabbit. So we managed to put him away till Monday. Federal Detention.”

Rhyme laughed. “You got a judge to buy probable cause on that?”

“Yeah, with the risk of flight,” Sellitto said. “And some bullshit FAA violations and reckless endangerment thrown in. No flight plan, flying below FAA minimums.”

“What’d Mis-ter Han-sen say?”

“He knows the drill. Not a word to the arrestings, not a word to the prosecutors. Lawyer denies everything and’s preparing suit for wrongful arrest, yadda, yadda, yadda… So if we find the fucking bags we go to the grand jury on Monday and, bang, he’s away.”

“Provided,” Rhyme pointed out, “there’s anything incriminating in the bags.”

“Oh, there’s something incriminating.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Hansen’s scared. He’s hired somebody to kill the witnesses. He’s already got one of ’em. Blew up his plane last night outside of Chicago.”

And, Rhyme thought, they want me to find the duffel bags… Fascinating questions were now floating into his mind. Was it possible to place the plane at a particular location over the water because of a certain type of precipitation or saline deposit or insect found crushed on the leading edge of the wing? Could one calculate the time of death of an insect? What about salt concentrations and pollutants in the water? Flying that low to the water, would the engines or wings pick up algae and deposit it on the fuselage or tail?

“I’ll need some maps of the Sound,” Rhyme began. “Engineering drawings of his plane -”

“Uhm, Lincoln, that’s not why we’re here,” Sellitto said.

“Not to find the bags,” Banks added.

“No? Then?” Rhyme tossed an irritating tickle of black hair off his forehead and frowned the young man down.

Sellitto’s eyes again scanned the beige ECU box. The wires that sprouted from it were dull red and yellow and black and lay curled on the floor like sunning snakes.

“We want you to help us find the killer. The guy Hansen hired. Stop him before he gets the other two wits.”

“And?” For Rhyme saw that Sellitto still had not mentioned what he was holding in reserve.

With a glance out the window the detective said, “Looks like it’s the Dancer, Lincoln.”

“The Coffin Dancer?”

Sellitto looked back and nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“We heard he’d done a job in D.C. a few weeks ago. Killed a congressional aide mixed up in arms deals. We got pen registers and found calls from a pay phone outside Hansen’s house to the hotel where the Dancer was staying. It’s gotta be him, Lincoln.”

On the screen the grains of sand, big as asteroids, smooth as a woman’s shoulders, lost their grip on Rhyme’s interest.

“Well,” he said softly, “that’s a problem now, isn’t it?”

chapter three

SHE REMEMBERED:

Last night, the cricket chirp of the phone intruding on the drizzle outside their bedroom window.

She’d looked at it contemptuously as if Bell Atlantic were responsible for the nausea and the suffocating pain in her head, the strobe lights flashing behind her eyelids.

Finally she’d rolled to her feet and snagged the receiver on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

Answered by the empty-pipe echo of a unicom radio-to-phone patch.

Then a voice. Perhaps.

A laugh. Perhaps.

A huge roar. A click. Silence.

No dial tone. Just silence, shrouded by the crashing waves in her ears.

Hello? Hello?…

She’d hung up the phone and returned to the couch, watched the evening rain, watched the dogwood bend and straighten in the spring storm’s breeze. She’d fallen asleep again. Until the phone rang again a half hour later with the news about Lear Niner Charlie Juliet going down on approach and carrying her husband and young Tim Randolph to their deaths.

Now, on this gray morning, Percey Rachael Clay knew that the mysterious phone call last night had been from her husband. Ron Talbot – the one who’d courageously called to deliver the news of the crash – had explained he’d patched a call through to her at around the time the Lear had exploded.

Ed’s laugh…

Hello? Hello?

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 clear 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 attitude by the flames.

He was saved from this horrid reverie by the buzz of the fax machine. Jerry Banks snagged the first sheet. “Crime scene report from the crash,” he announced.

Rhyme’s head snapped toward the machine eagerly. “Time to go to work, boys and girls!”

Wash ’em. Wash ’em off.

Soldier, are those hands clean?

Sir, they’re getting there, sir.

The solid man, in his mid-thirties, stood in the washroom of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, lost in his task.

Scrub, scrub, scrub…

He paused and looked out the men’s room door. Nobody seemed interested that he’d been in here for nearly ten minutes.

Back to scrubbing.

Stephen Kall examined his cuticles and big red knuckles.

Lookin’ clean, lookin’ clean. No worms. Not a single one.

He’d been feeling fine as he moved the black van off the street and parked it deep in an underground garage. Stephen had taken what tools he needed from the back of the vehicle and climbed the ramp, slipping out onto the busy street. He’d worked in New York several times before but he could never get used to all the people, a thousand people on this block alone.

Makes me feel cringey.

Makes me feel wormy.

And so he stopped here in the men’s room for a little scrub.

Soldier, aren’t you through with that yet? You’ve got two targets left to eliminate.

Sir, almost, sir. Have to remove the risk of any trace evidence prior to proceeding with the operation, sir.

Oh, for the luva Christ…

The hot water pouring over his hands. Scrubbing with a brush he carried with him in a plastic Baggie. Squirting the pink soap from the dispenser. And scrubbing some more.

Finally he examined the ruddy hands and dried them under the hot air of the blower. No towels, no telltale fibers.

No worms either.

Stephen wore camouflage today though not military olive drab or Desert Storm beige. He was in jeans, Reeboks, a work shirt, a gray windbreaker speckled with paint drips. On his belt was his cell phone and a large tape measure. He looked like any other contractor in Manhattan and was wearing this outfit today because no one would think twice about a workman wearing cloth gloves on a spring day.

Walking outside.

Still lots of people. But his hands were clean and he wasn’t cringey anymore.

He paused at the corner and looked down the street at the building that had been the Husband’s and Wife’s town house but was the Wife’s alone now because the Husband had been neatly blown into a million small pieces over the Land of Lincoln.

So, two witnesses were still alive and they both had to be dead before the grand jury convened on Monday. He glanced at his bulky stainless-steel watch. It was nine-thirty Saturday morning.

Soldier, is that enough time to get them both?

Sir, I may not get them both now but I still have nearly forty-eight hours, sir. That is more than sufficient time to locate and neutralize both targets, sir.

But, Soldier, do you mind challenges?

Sir, I live for challenges, sir.

There was a single squad car in front of the town house. Which he’d expected.

All right, we have a known kill zone in front of the house, an unknown one inside…

He looked up and down the street, then started along the sidewalk, his scrubbed hands tingling. The backpack weighed close to sixty pounds but he hardly felt it. Crew-cut Stephen was mostly muscle.

As he walked he pictured himself as a local. Anonymous. He didn’t think of himself as Stephen or as Mr. Kall or Todd Johnson or Stan Bledsoe or any of the dozens of other aliases he’d used over the past ten years. His real name was like a rusty gym set in the backyard, something you were aware of but didn’t really see.

He turned suddenly and stepped into the doorway of the building opposite the Wife’s town house. Stephen pushed open the front door and looked out at the large glass windows in front, partially obscured by a flowering dogwood tree. He put on a pair of expensive yellow-tinted shooting glasses and the glare from the window vanished. He could see figures moving around inside. One cop… no, two cops. A man with his back to the window. Maybe the Friend, the other witness he’d been hired to kill. And… yes! There was the Wife. Short. Homely. Boyish. She was wearing a white blouse. It made a good target.

She stepped out of view.

Stephen bent down and unzipped his backpack.

chapter four

A SITTING TRANSFER into the Storm Arrow wheelchair.

Then Rhyme took over, gripping the plastic straw of the sip-and-puff controller in his mouth, and he drove into the tiny elevator, formerly a closet, that carried him unceremoniously down to the first floor of his town house.

In the 1890s, when the place had been built, the room into which Lincoln Rhyme now wheeled had been a parlor off the dining room. Plaster-and-lath construction, fleur-de-lis crown molding, domed icon recesses, and solid oak floorboards joined as tight as welded steel. An architect, though, would have been horrified to see that Rhyme had had the wall separating the two rooms demolished and large holes dug into the remaining walls to run additional electrical lines. The combined rooms were now a messy space filled not with Tiffany’s stained glass or moody landscapes by George Inness but with very different objets d’art: density-gradient tubes, computers, compound microscopes, comparison ’scopes, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a PoliLight alternative light source, fuming frames for raising friction ridge prints. A very expensive scanning electron microscope hooked to an energy dispersive X-ray unit sat prominently in the corner. Here too were the mundane tools of the criminalist’s trade: goggles, latex and cut-resistant gloves, beakers, screwdrivers and pliers, postmortem finger spoons, tongs, scalpels, tongue depressors, cotton swabs, jars, plastic bags, examining trays, probes. A dozen pairs of chopsticks (Rhyme ordered his assistants to lift evidence the way they picked up dim sum at Ming Wa ’s).

Rhyme steered the sleek, candy-apple red Storm Arrow into position beside the worktable. Thom placed the microphone over his head and booted up the computer.

A moment later Sellitto and Banks appeared in the doorway, joined by another man who’d just arrived. He was tall and rangy, with skin as dark as tires. He was wearing a green suit and an unearthly yellow shirt.

“Hello, Fred.”

“ Lincoln.”

“Hey.” Sachs nodded to Fred Dellray as she entered the room. She’d forgiven him for arresting her not long ago – an interagency squabble – and they now had a curious affinity, this tall, beautiful cop and the tall, quirky agent. They were both, Rhyme had decisively concluded, people cops (he himself being an evidence cop). Dellray trusted forensics as little as Rhyme trusted the testimony of witnesses. As for former beat cop Sachs, well, there was nothing Rhyme could do about her natural proclivities but he was determined that she push those talents aside and become the best criminalist in New York, if not the country. A goal that was easily within her grasp, even if she herself didn’t know it.

Dellray loped across the room, stationed himself beside the window, crossed his lanky arms. No one – Rhyme included – could peg the agent exactly. He lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn, loved to read literature and philosophy, and loved even more to play pool in tawdry bars. Once the jewel in the crown of the FBI’s undercover agents, Fred Dellray was still referred to occasionally by the nickname he’d had when he was in the field: “The Chameleon” – a tribute to his uncanny skill at being whoever his undercover role required he be. He had over a thousand arrests to his credit. But he’d spent too much time undercover and had become “overextended,” as the Bureauese went. It was only a matter of time before he’d be recognized by some dealer or warlord and killed. So he’d reluctantly agreed to take an administrative job running other undercover agents and CIs – confidential informants.

“So, mah boys tell me we got us the Dancer hisself,” the agent muttered, the patois less Ebonics than, well… pure Dellray. His grammar and vocabulary, like his life, were largely improvised.

“Any word on Tony?” Rhyme asked.

“My boy gone missing?” Dellray asked, his face screwing up angrily. “Not. A. Thing.”

Tony Panelli, the agent who’d disappeared from the Federal Building several days before, had left behind a wife at home, a gray Ford with a running engine, and a number of grains of infuriatingly mysterious sand – the sensuous asteroids that promised answers but had so far delivered none.

“When we catch the Dancer,” Rhyme said, “we’ll get back on it, Amelia and me. Full-time. Promise.”

Dellray angrily tapped the unlit tip of a cigarette nestling behind his left ear. “The Dancer… Shit. Better nail his ass this time. Shit.”

“What about the hit?” Sachs asked. “The one last night. Have any details?”

Sellitto read through the wad of faxes and some of his own handwritten notes. He looked up. “Ed Carney took off from Mamaroneck Airport around seven-fifteen last night. The company – Hudson Air – they’re a private charterer. They fly cargo, corporate clients, you know. Lease out planes. They’d just gotten a new contract to fly – get this – body parts for transplants to hospitals around the Midwest and East Coast. Hear it’s a real competitive business nowadays.”

“Cutthroat,” Banks offered and was the only one who smiled at his joke.

Sellitto continued. “The client was U.S. Medical and Healthcare. Based up in Somers. One of those for-profit hospital chains. Carney had a real tight schedule. Was supposed to fly to Chicago, Saint Louis, Memphis, Lexington, Cleveland, then lay over in Erie, Pennsylvania. Come back this morning.”

“Any passengers?” Rhyme asked.

“Not whole ones,” Sellitto muttered. “Just the cargo. Everything’s routine about the flight. Then about ten minutes out of O’Hare, a bomb goes off. Blows the shit out of the plane. Killed both Carney and his copilot. Four injuries on the ground. His wife, by the way, was supposed to be flying with him but she got sick and had to cancel.”

“There an NTSB report?” Rhyme asked. “No, of course not, there wouldn’t be. Not yet.”

“Report won’t be ready for two, three days.”

“Well, we can’t wait two or three days!” Rhyme griped loudly. “I need it now!”

A pink scar from the ventilator hose was visible on his throat. But Rhyme had weaned himself off the fake lung and could breathe like nobody’s business. Lincoln Rhyme was a C4 quad who could sigh, cough, and shout like a sailor. “I need to know everything about the bomb.”

“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 10a.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, they 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 found 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?”

“What’s going on, what is all this?”

“They think you might be in danger,” the officer said. “Not you, ma’am,” he added to Ed’s mother. “Mrs. Clay and Mr. Hale here. Because they’re witnesses in that case. We were told to secure the premises and take them to the command post.”

“They talk to him yet?” Hale asked.

“Don’t know who that’d be, sir.”

The lean man answered, “The guy we’re witnesses against. Hansen.” Hale’s world was the world of logic. Of reasonable people. Of machines and numbers and hydraulics. His three marriages had failed because the only place where his heart poked out was in the science of flight and the irrefutable sense of the cockpit. He now swiped his hair off his forehead and said, “Just ask him. He’ll tell you where the killer is. He hired him.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s quite as easy as that.”

Another officer appeared in the doorway. “Street’s secure, sir.”

“If you’ll come with us, please. Both of you.”

“What about Ed’s mother?”

“Do you live in the area?” the officer asked.

“No. I’m staying with my sister,” Mrs. Carney answered. “In Saddle River.”

“We’ll drive you back there, have a New Jersey trooper stay outside the house. You’re not involved in this, so I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, Percey.”

The women hugged. “It’ll be okay, Mother.” Percey struggled to hold back the tears.

“No, it won’t,” the frail woman said. “It’ll never be okay…”

An officer led her off to a squad car.

Percey watched the car drive off, then asked the cop beside her, “Where’re we going?”

“To see Lincoln Rhyme.”

Another officer said, “We’re going to walk out together, an officer on either side of you. Keep your heads down and don’t look up under any circumstance. We’re going to walk fast to that second van there. See it? You jump in. Don’t look out the windows, and get your belts on. We’ll be driving fast. Any questions?”

Percey opened the flask and took a sip of bourbon. “Yeah, who the hell is Lincoln Rhyme?”

“You sewed that? Yourself?”

“I did,” the woman said, tugging at the embroidered vest, which, like the plaid skirt she wore, was slightly too large, calculated to obscure her substantial figure. The stitching reminded him of the rings around a worm’s body. He shivered, felt sick.

But he smiled and said, “That’s amazing.” He’d sopped up the tea and apologized like the gentleman his stepfather could sometimes be.

He asked if she minded if he sat down with her.

“Uhm… no,” she said and hid the Vogue in her canvas bag as if it were porn.

“Oh, by the way,” Stephen said, “I’m Sam Levine.” Her eyes flickered at his surname and took in his Aryan features. “Well, it’s Sammie mostly,” he added. “To Mom I’m Samuel but only if I’ve done something wrong.” A chuckle.

“I’ll call you ‘friend,’ ” she announced. “I’m Sheila Horowitz.”

He glanced out the window to avoid having to shake her moist hand, tipped with five white squooshy worms.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, turning back, sipping his new cup of tea, which he found disgusting. Sheila noticed that two of her stubby nails were dirty. She tried unobtrusively to dig the crud from under them.

“It’s relaxing,” she explained. “Sewing. I have an old Singer. One of those old black ones. Got it from my grams.” She tried to straighten her shiny, short hair, wishing undoubtedly that today of all days she’d washed it.

“I don’t know any girls who sew anymore,” Stephen said. “Girl I dated in college did. Made most of her own clothes. Was I impressed.”

“Uhm, in New York, like, nobody, and I mean nobody, sews.” She sneered emphatically.

“My mother used to sew all the time, hours on end,” Stephen said. “Every stitch had to be just perfect. I mean perfect. A thirty-second of an inch apart.” This was true. “I still have some of the things she made. Stupid, but I kept ’em just ’cause she made them.” This was not.

Stephen could still hear the start and stop of the Singer motor coming from his mother’s tiny, hot room. Day and night. Get those stitches right. One thirty-second of an inch. Why? Because it’s important! Here comes the ruler, here comes the belt, here comes the cock…

“Most men” – the stress she put on the word explained a deal about Sheila Horowitz’s life – “don’t care doodles for sewing. They want girls to do sports or know movies.” She added quickly, “And I do. I mean, I’ve been skiing. I’m not as good as you, I’ll bet. And I like to go to the movies. Some movies.”

Stephen said, “Oh, I don’t ski. I don’t like sports much.” He looked outside and saw the cops everywhere. Looking in every car. A swarm of blue worms…

Sir, I don’t understand why they’re mounting this offensive, sir.

Soldier, your job is not to understand. Your job is to infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, isolate, and eliminate. That is your only job.

“Sorry?” he asked, missing what she’d said.

“I said, oh, don’t give me that. I mean, I’d have to work out for, like, months to get in shape like you. I’m going to join the Health & Racquet Club. I’ve been planning to. Only, I’ve got back problems. But I really, really am going to join.”

Stephen laughed. “Aw, I get so tired of – geez, all these girls look so sick. You know? All thin and pale. Take one of those skinny girls you see on TV and send her back to King Arthur’s day and, bang, they’d call for the court surgeon and say, ‘She must be dying, m’lord.’ ”

Sheila blinked, then roared with laughter, revealing unfortunate teeth. The joke gave her an excuse to rest her hand on his arm. He felt the five worms kneading his skin and fought down the nausea. “My daddy,” she said, “he was a career army officer, traveled a lot. He told me in other countries they think American girls are way skinny.”

“He was a soldier?” Sam Sammie Samuel Levine asked, smiling.

“Retired colonel.”

“Well…”

Too much? he wondered. No. He said, “I’m service. Sergeant. Army.”

“No! Where you stationed?”

“Special Operations. In New Jersey.” She’d know enough not to ask any more about Special Ops activities. “I’m glad you’ve got a soldier in the family. I sometimes don’t tell people what I do. It’s not too cool. ’Specially around here. New York, I mean.”

“Don’t you worry about that. I think it’s very cool, friend.” She nodded at the Fender case. “And you’re a musician, too?”

“Not really. I volunteer at a day care center. Teach kids music. It’s something the base does.”

Looking outside. Flashing lights. Blue white. A squad car streaked past.

She scooted her chair closer and he detected a repulsive scent. It made him go cringey again and the image came to mind of worms oozing through her greasy hair. He nearly vomited. He excused himself for a moment and spent three minutes scrubbing his hands. When he returned he noticed two things: that the top button of her blouse had been undone and that the back of her vest contained about a thousand cat hairs. Cats, to Stephen, were just four-legged worms.

He looked outside and saw that the line of cops was getting closer. Stephen glanced at his watch and said, “Say, I’ve gotta pick up my cat. He’s at the vet -”

“Oh, you have a cat? What’s his name?” She leaned forward.

“Buddy.”

Her eyes glowed. “Oh, cutey cutey cute. You have a picture?”

Of a fucking cat?

“Not on me,” Stephen said, clicked his tongue regretfully.

“Is poor Buddy sicky-wicky?”

“Just a checkup.”

“Oh, good for you. Watch out for those worms.”

“How’s that?” he asked, alarmed.

“You know, like heartworm.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Uhm, if you’re good, friend,” Sheila said, sing-songy again, “maybe I’ll introduce you to Garfield, Andrea, and Essie. Well, it’s really Esmeralda but she’d never approve of that, of course.”

“They sound so wonderful,” he said, gazing at the pictures Sheila’d dug from her wallet. “I’d love to meet them.”

“You know,” she blurted, “I only live three blocks away.”

“Hey, got an idea.” He looked bright. “Maybe I could drop this stuff off and meet your babies. Then you could help me collect Buddy.”

“Neat-o,” Sheila said.

“Let’s go.”

Outside, she said, “Ooo, look at all the police. What’s going on?”

“Wow. Dunno.” Stephen slung the backpack over his shoulder. Something metal clinked. Maybe a flash grenade banged against his Beretta.

“What’s in there?”

“Musical instruments. For the kids.”

“Oh, like triangles?”

“Yeah, like triangles.”

“You want me to carry your guitar?”

“You mind?”

“Uhm, I think it’d be neat.”

She took the Fender case and slipped her arm through his and they walked past a cluster of cops, blind to the loving couple, and continued down the street, laughing and talking about those crazy cats.

chapter six

Hour 1 of 45

THOM APPEARED IN LINCOLN RHYME’S doorway and motioned someone inside.

A trim, crew-cut man in his fifties. Captain Bo Haumann, head of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit – the police’s SWAT team. Grizzled and tendony, Haumann looked like the drill sergeant he’d been in the service. He spoke slowly and reasonably, and he looked you dead in the eye, with a faint smile, when he talked. In tactical operations he was often suited up in flak jacket and Nomex hood and was usually one of the first officers through the door in a dynamic barricade entry.

“It’s really him?” the captain asked. “The Dancer?”

“S’what we heard,” Sellitto said.

The slight pause, which from the gray-haired cop was like a loud sigh from anyone else. Then he said, “I’ve got a couple of Thirty-two-E teams dedicated.”

Thirty-two-E officers, nicknamed after their operations room at Police Plaza, were an unkept secret Officially called Special Procedures Officers of the Emergency Services Unit, the men and women were mostly ex-military and had been relentlessly instructed in full S &S procedures – search and surveillance – as well as assault, sniping, and hostage rescue. There weren’t many of them. The city’s tough reputation notwithstanding, there were relatively few tactical operations in New York and the city’s hostage negotiators – considered the best in the country – usually resolved standoffs before an assault was necessary. Haumann’s committing two teams, which totaled ten officers, to the Dancer would have used up most of the 32-Es.

A moment later a slight, balding man wearing very unstylish glasses entered the room. Mel Cooper was the best lab man in IRD, the department’s Investigation and Resources Division, which Rhyme used to head. He’d never searched a crime scene, never arrested a perp, had probably forgotten how to fire the slim pistol he grudgingly wore on the back of his old leather belt. Cooper had no desire to be anywhere in the world except sitting on a lab stool, peering into microscopes and analyzing friction ridge prints (well, there and on the ballroom dance floor, where he was an award-winning tango dancer).

“Detective,” Cooper said, using the title that Rhyme had carried when he’d hired Cooper away from Albany PD some years ago, “thought I was going to be looking at sand. But I hear it’s the Dancer.” There’s only one place the word travels faster than on the street, Rhyme reflected, and that’s inside the Police Department itself. “We’ll get him this time, Lincoln. We’ll get him.”

As Banks briefed the newcomers Rhyme happened to look up. He saw a woman in the doorway of the lab. Dark eyes scanning the room, taking it all in. Not cautious, not uneasy.

“Mrs. Clay?” he asked.

She nodded. A lean man appeared in the doorway beside her. Britton Hale, Rhyme assumed.

“Please come in,” the criminalist said.

She stepped into the middle of the room, glancing at Rhyme, then at the wall of forensic equipment near Mel Cooper.

“Percey,” she said. “Call me Percey. You’re Lincoln Rhyme?”

“That’s right. I’m very sorry about your husband.”

She nodded briskly, seemed uncomfortable with the sympathy.

Just like me, Rhyme thought.

He asked the man standing beside Percey, “And you’re Mr. Hale?”

The lanky pilot nodded and stepped forward to shake hands, then noticed Rhyme’s arms were strapped to the wheelchair. “Oh,” he muttered, then blushed. He stepped back.

Rhyme introduced them to the rest of the team, everyone except Amelia Sachs, who – at Rhyme’s insistence – was changing out of her uniform and putting on the jeans and sweatshirt that happened to be hanging upstairs in Rhyme’s closet. He’d explained that the Dancer often killed or wounded cops as a diversion; he wanted her to look as civilian as possible.

Percey pulled a flask from her slacks pocket, a silver flask, and took a short sip. She drank the liquor – Rhyme smelled expensive bourbon – as if it were medicine.

Betrayed by his own body, Rhyme rarely paid attention to the physical qualities in others, except victims and perps. But Percey Clay was hard to ignore. She wasn’t much over five feet tall. Yet she radiated a distilled intensity. Her eyes, black as midnight, were captivating. Only after you managed to look away from them did you notice her face, which was un-pretty – pug and tomboyish. She had a tangle of black curly hair, cropped short, though Rhyme thought that long tresses would soften the angular shape of her face. She didn’t adopt the cloaking mannerisms of some short people – hands on hips, crossed arms, hands hovering in front of the mouth. She offered as few gratuitous gestures as Rhyme did, he realized.

A sudden thought came to him: she’s like a Gypsy.

He realized that she was studying him too. And hers seemed to be a curious reaction. Seeing him for the first time, most people slap a dumb grin on their faces, blush red as fruit, and force themselves to stare fixedly at Rhyme’s forehead so their eyes won’t drop accidentally to his damaged body. But Percey looked once at his face – handsome with its trim lips and Tom Cruise nose, a face younger than its forty-some years – and once at his motionless legs and arms and torso. But her attention focused immediately on the crip equipment – the glossy Storm Arrow wheelchair, the sip-and-puff controller, the headset, the computer.

Thom entered the room and walked up to Rhyme to take his blood pressure.

“Not now,” his boss said.

“Yes now.”

“No.”

“Be quiet,” Thom said and took the pressure reading anyway. He pulled off the stethoscope. “Not bad. But you’re tired and you’ve been way too busy lately. You need some rest.”

“Go away,” Rhyme grumbled. He turned back to Percey Clay. Because he was a crip, a quad, because he was merely a portion of a human being, visitors often seemed to think he couldn’t understand what they were saying; they spoke slowly or even addressed him through Thom. Percey now spoke to him conversationally and earned many points from him for doing this. “You think we’re in danger, Brit and me?”

“Oh, you are. Serious danger.”

Sachs walked into the room and glanced at Percey and Rhyme.

He introduced them.

“Amelia?” Percey asked. “Your name’s Amelia?”

Sachs nodded.

A faint smile passed over Percey’s face. She turned slightly and shared it with Rhyme.

“I wasn’t named after her – the flier,” Sachs said, recalling, Rhyme guessed, that Percey was a pilot. “One of my grandfather’s sisters. Was Amelia Earhart a hero?”

“No,” Percey said. “Not really. It’s just kind of a coincidence.”

Hale said, “You’re going to have guards for her, aren’t you? Full-time?” He nodded at Percey.

“Sure, you bet,” Dellray said.

“Okay,” Hale announced. “Good… One thing. I was thinking you really ought to have a talk with that guy. Phillip Hansen.”

“A talk?” Rhyme queried.

“With Hansen?” Sellitto asked. “Sure. But he’s denying everything and won’t say a word more’n that.” He looked at Rhyme. “Had the Twins on him for a while.” Then back to Hale. “They’re our best interrogators. And he stonewalled completely. No luck so far.”

“Can’t you threaten him… or something?”

“Uhm, no,” the detective said. “Don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rhyme continued. “There’s nothing Hansen could tell us anyway. The Dancer never meets his clients face-to-face and he never tells them how he’s going to do the job.”

“The Dancer?” Percey asked.

“That’s the name we have for the killer. The Coffin Dancer.”

“Coffin Dancer?” Percey gave a faint laugh, as if the phrase meant something to her. But she didn’t elaborate.

“Well, that’s a little spooky,” Hale said dubiously, as if cops shouldn’t have eerie nicknames for their bad guys. Rhyme supposed he was right.

Percey looked into Rhyme’s eyes, nearly as dark as hers. “So what happened to you? You get shot?”

Sachs – and Hale too – stirred at these blunt words but Rhyme didn’t mind. He preferred people like himself – those with no use for pointless tact. He said equably, “I was searching a crime scene at a construction site. A beam collapsed. Broke my neck.”

“Like that actor. Christopher Reeve.”

“Yes.”

Hale said, “That was tough. But, man, he’s brave. I’ve seen him on TV. I think I would’ve killed myself if that’d happened.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who caught his eye. He turned back to Percey. “We need your help. We have to figure out how he got that bomb on board. Do you have any idea?”

“None,” Percey said, then looked at Hale, who shook his head.

“Did you see anyone you didn’t recognize near the plane before the flight?”

“I was sick last night,” Percey said. “I didn’t even go to the airport.”

Hale said, “I was upstate, fishing. I had the day off. Didn’t get home till late.”

“Where exactly was the plane before it took off?”

“It was in our hangar. We were outfitting it for the new charter. We had to take seats out, install special racks with heavy-duty power outlets. For the refrigeration units. You know what the cargo was, don’t you?”

“Organs,” Rhyme said. “Human organs. Do you share the hangar with any other company?”

“No, it’s ours. Well, we lease it.”

“How easy is it to get inside?” Sellitto asked.

“It’s locked if nobody’s around but the past couple days we’ve had crews working twenty-four hours to outfit the Lear.”

“You know the crew?” Sellitto asked.

“They’re like family,” Hale said defensively.

Sellitto rolled his eyes at Banks. Rhyme supposed that the detective was thinking that family members were always the first suspects in a murder case.

“We’ll take the names anyway, you don’t mind. Check ’em out.”

“Sally Anne, she’s our office manager,’ll get you a list.”

“You’ll have to seal the hangar,” Rhyme said. “Keep everybody out.”

Percey was shaking her head. “We can’t -”

“Seal it,” he repeated. “Everybody out. Every… body.”

“But -”

Rhyme said, “We have to.”

“Whoa,” Percey said, “hold up there.” She looked at Hale. “Foxtrot Bravo?”

He shrugged. “Ron said it’ll take another day at least.”

Percey sighed. “The Learjet that Ed was flying was the only one outfitted for the charter. There’s another flight scheduled for tomorrow night. We’ll have to work nonstop to get the other plane ready. We can’t close the hangar.”

Rhyme said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t an option.”

Percey blinked. “Well, I don’t know who you are to give me options…”

“I’m somebody trying to save your life,” Rhyme snapped.

“I can’t risk losing this contract.”

“Hold up, miss,” Dellray said. “You’re not understandin’ this bad guy…”

“He killed my husband,” she responded in a flinty voice. “I understand him perfectly. But I’m not being bullied into losing this job.”

Sachs’s hands went to her hips. “Hey, hold up there. If there’s anybody who can save your skin, it’s Lincoln Rhyme. I don’t think we need an attitude here.”

Rhyme’s voice broke into the argument. He asked calmly, “Can you give us an hour for the search?”

“An hour?” Percey considered this.

Sachs gave a laugh and turned her surprised eyes on her boss. She asked, “Search a hangar in an hour? Come on, Rhyme.” Her face said: Here I am defending you and now you’re pulling this? Whose side are you on?

Some criminalists assigned teams to search crime scenes. But Rhyme always insisted that Amelia Sachs search alone, just as he’d done. A single CS searcher had a focus that couldn’t be achieved with other people on the scene. An hour was an extraordinarily brief time for a single person to cover a large scene. Rhyme knew this but he didn’t respond to Sachs. He kept his eyes on Percey. She said, “An hour? All right. I can live with that.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs protested, “I’ll need more time.”

“Ah, but you’re the best, Amelia,” he joshed. Which meant the decision had already been made.

“Who can help us up there?” Rhyme asked Percey.

“Ron Talbot. He’s a partner in the company and our operations manager.”

Sachs jotted the name in her watch book. “Should I go now?” she asked.

“No,” Rhyme responded. “I want you to wait until we have the bomb from the Chicago flight. I need you to help me analyze it.”

“I only have an hour,” she said testily. “Remember?”

“You’ll have to wait,” he grumbled. Then asked Fred Dellray, “What about the safe house?”

“Oh, we got a place you’ll like,” the agent said to Percey. “In Manhattan. Your taxpayer dollars be working hard. Yep, yep. U.S. marshals use it for the crème de la crème in witness protection. Only thing is, we need somebody from NYPD for baby-sitting detail. Somebody who knows and appreciates the Dancer.”

And just then Jerry Banks looked up, wondering why everybody was staring at him. “What?” he asked. “What?” And tried in vain to pat down his persistent cowlick.

Stephen Kall, talker of soldier talk, shooter of soldier guns, had never in fact been a soldier.

But he now said to Sheila Horowitz, “I’m proud of my military heritage. And that’s the truth.”

“Some people don’t -”

“No,” he interrupted, “some people don’t respect you for it. But that’s their problem.”

“It is their problem,” Sheila echoed.

“You have a nice place here.” He looked around the dump, filled with Conran’s markdowns.

“Thank you, friend. Uhm, you, like, want something to drink? Oopsie, there I go using that old preposition the wrong way. Mom’s always after me. Watching too much TV. Like, like, like. Shamie shamie.”

What the fuck is she talking about?

“You live here alone?” he asked with a pleasant smile of curiosity.

“Yep, just me and the dynamic trio. I don’t know why they’re hiding. Those silly-billy scamps.” Sheila nervously pinched the fine hem of her vest. And because he hadn’t answered, she repeated, “So? Something to drink?”

“Sure.”

He saw a single bottle of wine, dust encrusted, sitting on top of her refrigerator. Saved for that special occasion. Was this it?

Apparently not. She broke out the diet Dr Pepper.

He strolled to the window and looked out. No police on the street here. And only a half block to a subway stop. The apartment was on the second floor, and though she had grates on the back windows they were unlocked and if he had to he could climb down the fire escape and disappear onto Lexington Avenue, which was always crowded…

She had a telephone and a PC. Good.

He glanced at a wall calendar – pictures of angels. There were a few notations but nothing for this weekend.

“Hey, Sheila, would you -” He caught himself and shook his head, fell silent.

“Uhm, what?”

“Well, it’s… I know it’s stupid to ask. I mean, it’s such short notice and everything. I was just wondering if you had plans for the next couple of days.”

Cautious here. “Oh, I, uhm, I was supposed to see my mother.”

Stephen wrinkled his face in disappointment. “Too bad. See, I have this place in Cape May -”

“The Jersey shore!”

“Right. I’m going out there -”

“After you get Buddy?”

Who the fuck was Buddy?

Oh, the cat. “Right. If you weren’t doing anything, I thought you might like to come out.”

“You have…?”

“My mom’s going to be there, some of her girlfriends.”

“Well, golly. I don’t know.”

“So, why don’t you call your mother and tell her she’ll have to live without you for the weekend?”

“Well… I don’t really have to call. If I don’t show up it’s, like, no big deal. It was like, maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t.”

So she’d been lying. An empty weekend. Nobody’d miss her for the next few days.

A cat jumped up next to him, stuck her face into his. He pictured a thousand worms spraying over his body. He pictured the worms squirming through Sheila’s hair. Her wormy fingers. Stephen began to detest this woman. He wanted to scream.

“Ooo, say hello to our new friend, Andrea. She likes you, Sam.”

He stood up, looking around the apartment. Thinking:

Remember, boy, anything can kill.

Some things kill fast and some things kill slow. But anything can kill.

“Say,” he asked, “you have any packing tape?”

“Uhm, for…?” Her mind raced. “For…?”

“The instruments I have in the bag? I need to tape one of the drums back together.”

“Oh, sure, I’ve got some in here.” She walked into the hallway. “I send my aunties packages all the time. I always buy a new roll of tape. I can never remember if I’ve bought one before so I end up with a ton of them. Aren’t I a silly-billy?”

He didn’t answer because he was surveying the kitchen and decided that was the best kill zone in the apartment.

“Here you go.” She tossed him the roll of tape playfully. He instinctively caught it. He was angry because he hadn’t had the chance to put his gloves on. He knew he’d left prints on the roll. He shivered in rage and when he saw Sheila grinning, saying, “Hey, good catch, friend,” what he was really looking at was a huge worm moving closer and closer. He set the tape down and pulled on his gloves.

“Gloves? You cold? Say, friend, what’re you…?”

He ignored her and opened the refrigerator door, began removing the food.

She stepped farther into the room. Her giddy smile started to fade. “Uhm, you hungry?”

He began removing the shelves.

A look passed between them and suddenly, from deep within her throat, came a faint “Eeeeeeee.”

Stephen got the fat worm before she made it halfway to the front door.

Fast or slow?

He dragged her back into the kitchen. Toward the refrigerator.

chapter seven

Hour 2 of 45

THREES.

Percey Clay, honors engineering major, certified airframe and power plant mechanic, and holder of every license the Federal Aviation Agency could bestow on pilots, had no time for superstition.

Yet as she drove in a bulletproof van through Central Park on the way to the federal safe house in mid-town, she thought of the old adage that superstitious travelers repeat like a grim mantra. Crashes come in threes.

Tragedies too.

First, Ed. Now, the second sorrow: what she was hearing over the cell phone from Ron Talbot, who was in his office at Hudson Air.

She was sandwiched between Brit Hale and that young detective, Jerry Banks. Her head was down.

Hale watched her, and Banks looked vigilantly out the window at traffic, passersby, and trees.

“U.S. Med agreed to give us one more shot.” Talbot’s breath wheezed in and out alarmingly. One of the best pilots she’d ever known, Talbot hadn’t driven an aircraft for years – grounded because of his precarious health. Percey considered this a horrifyingly unjust punishment for his sins of liquor, cigarettes, and food (largely because she shared them). “I mean, they can cancel the contract. Bombs aren’t force majeure. They don’t excuse us from performance.”

“But they’re letting us make the flight tomorrow.”

A pause.

“Yeah. They are.”

“Come on, Ron,” she snapped. “No bullshit between us.” She heard him light another cigarette. Big and smokey – the man she’d bum Camels from when she was quitting smoking – Talbot was forgetful of fresh clothing and shaves. And inept at delivering bad news.

“It’s Foxtrot Bravo,” he said reluctantly.

“What about her?”

N695FB was Percey Clay’s Learjet 35A. Not that the paperwork indicated this. Legally the twin-engine jet was leased to Clay-Carney Holding Corporation Two, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hudson Air Charters, Ltd., by Morgan Air Leasing Inc., which in turn leased it from La Jolla Holding Two’s wholly owned subsidiary Transport Solutions Incorporated, a Delaware company. This byzantine arrangement was both legal and common, given the fact that both airplanes and airplane crashes are phenomenally expensive.

But everyone at Hudson Air Charters knew that November Six Nine Five Foxtrot Bravo was Percey’s. She’d logged thousands of hours in the airplane. It was her pet. It was her child. And on the too-many nights Ed was gone just the thought of the aircraft would take the sting out of the loneliness. A sweet stick, the aircraft could cruise at forty-five thousand feet at speeds of 460 knots – over 500 miles per hour. She personally knew it could fly higher and faster, though that was a secret kept from Morgan Air Leasing, La Jolla Holding, Transport Solutions, and the FAA.

Talbot finally said, “Getting her outfitted – it’s going to be trickier than I thought.”

“Go on.”

“All right,” he said finally. “Stu quit.” Stu Marquard, their chief mechanic.

“What?”

“The son of a bitch quit. Well, he hasn’t yet,” Talbot continued. “He called in sick but it sounded funny, so I made some calls. He’s going over to Sikorsky. Already took the job.”

Percey was stunned.

This was a major problem. Lear 35As came equipped as eight-seat passenger jets. To make the aircraft ready for the U.S. Medical run, most of the seats had to be stripped out; shock-absorbed, refrigerated bays had to be installed, and extra power outlets had to be run from the engine’s generators. This meant major electrical and airframe work.

There were no mechanics better than Stu Marquard and he’d outfitted Ed’s Lear in record time. But without him Percey didn’t know how they could finish in time for tomorrow’s flight.

“What is it, Perce?” Hale asked, seeing her grimacing face.

“Stu quit,” she whispered.

He shook his head, not understanding. “Quit what?”

“He left,” she muttered. “Quit his job. Going to work on fucking choppers.”

Hale gazed at her in shock. “Today?”

She nodded.

Talbot continued. “He’s scared, Perce. They know it was a bomb. The cops aren’t saying anything but everybody knows what happened. They’re nervous. I was talking to John Ringle -”

“Johnny?” A young pilot they’d hired last year. “He’s not leaving too?”

“He was just asking if we’re closing down for a while. Until this all blows over.”

“No, we’re not closing down,” she said firmly. “We’re not canceling a single goddamn job. It’s business as usual. And if anybody else calls in sick, fire them.”

“Percey…”

Talbot was dour but everybody knew he was the company’s soft touch.

“All right,” she snapped, “I’ll fire them.”

“Look, about Foxtrot Bravo, I can do most of the work myself,” said Talbot, a certified airframe mechanic himself.

“Do what you can. But see if you can find another mechanic,” she told him. “We’ll talk later.”

She hung up.

“I can’t believe it,” Hale said. “He quit.” The pilot was bewildered.

Percey was furious. People were bailing out – the worst sin there was. The Company was dying. Yet she didn’t have a clue how to save it.

Percey Clay had no monkey skills for running a business.

Monkey skills…

A phrase she’d heard when she was a fighter pilot. Coined by a navy flier, an admiral, it meant the esoteric, unteachable talents of a natural-born pilot.

Well, sure, Percey had monkey skills when it came to flying. Any type of aircraft, whether she’d flown it previously or not, under any weather conditions, VFR or IFR, day or night. She could drive the plane flawlessly and set it down on that magic spot pilots aimed for – exactly “a thousand past the numbers” – a thousand feet down the landing strip past the white runway designation. Sailplanes, biplanes, Hercs, seven three sevens, MiGs – she was at home in any cockpit.

But that was about as far as Percey Rachael Clay’s monkey skills extended.

She had none at family relations, that was for sure. Her tobacco society father had refused to speak to her for years – had actually disinherited her – when she’d dropped out of his alma mater, UVA, to attend aviation school at Virginia Tech. (Even though she told him that the departure from Charlottesville was inevitable – six weeks into the first semester Percey’d KO’d a sorority president after the lanky blonde commented in an overloud whisper that the troll girl might want to pledge at theag school and not on Greek Row.)

Certainly no monkey skills at navy politics. Her awe-inspiring flight performance in the big Tomcats didn’t quite tip the balance against her unfortunate habit of speaking her mind when everyone else was keeping mum about certain events.

And no skills at running the very charter company she was president of. It was mystifying to her how Hudson Air could be so busy yet continue to skirt bankruptcy. Like Ed and Brit Hale and the other staff pilots, Percey was constantly working (one reason she shunned scheduled airlines was the asinine FAA pronouncement that pilots fly no more than eighty hours a month). So why were they constantly broke? If it hadn’t been for charming Ed’s ability to get clients, and grumpy Ron Talbot’s to cut costs and juggle creditors, they never would have survived for the past two years.

The Company had nearly gone under last month but Ed managed to snare the contract from U.S. Medical. The hospital chain made an astonishing amount of money doing transplants, which she learned was a business far bigger than just hearts and kidneys. The major problem was getting the donor organ to the appropriate recipient within hours of its availability. Organs were often flown on commercial flights (carried in coolers in the cockpit), but transporting them was dictated by commercial airline scheduling and routing. Hudson Air didn’t have those restrictions. The Company agreed to dedicate one aircraft to U.S. Medical. It would fly a counterclockwise route throughout the East Coast and Midwest to six or eight of the Company’s locations, circulating organs wherever they were needed. Delivery was guaranteed. Rain, snow, wind shear, conditions at minimum – as long as the airport was open and it was legal to fly, Hudson Air would deliver the cargo on time.

The first month was to be a trial period. If it worked out they’d get an eighteen-month contract that would be the backbone for the Company’s survival.

Apparently Ron had charmed the client into giving them another chance, but if Foxtrot Bravo wasn’t ready for tomorrow’s flight… Percey didn’t even want to think about that possibility.

As she rode in the police car through Central Park Percey Clay looked over the early spring growth. Ed had loved the park and had run here frequently. He’d do two laps around the reservoir and return home looking bedraggled, his grayish hair hanging in strands around his face. And me? Percey laughed sadly to herself now. He’d find her sitting at home, poring over a nav log or an advanced turbofan repair manual, maybe smoking, maybe drinking a Wild Turkey. And, grinning, Ed would poke her in the ribs with a strong finger and ask if she could do anything else unhealthy at the same time. And while they laughed, he’d sneak a couple of swigs of the bourbon.

Remembering then how he’d bend down and kiss her shoulder. When they made love it was that juncture where he’d rest his face, bent forward, locked against her skin, and Percey Clay believed that there, where her neck flared onto her delicate shoulders, if only there, she was a beautiful woman.

Ed…

All the stars of evening…

Tears again filling her eyes, she glanced up into the gray sky. Ominous. She estimated the ceiling at one five hundred feet, winds 090 at fifteen knots. Wind shear conditions. She shifted in the seat. Brit Hale’s strong fingers were encircling her forearm. Jerry Banks was chatting about something. She wasn’t listening.

Percey Clay came to a decision. She unfolded the cell phone again.

chapter eight

Hour 3 of 45

THE SIREN WAILED.

Lincoln Rhyme expected to hear the Doppler effect as the emergency vehicle cruised past. But right outside his front door the siren gave a brief chirrup and went silent. A moment later Thom let a young man into the first-floor lab. Crowned with a spiffy crew cut, the Illinois state trooper wore a blue uniform, which had probably been immaculate when he put it on yesterday but was now wrinkled and streaked with soot and dirt. He’d run an electric razor over his face but had made only faint inroads into the dark beard that contrasted with his thin yellow hair. He was carrying two large canvas satchels and a brown folder, and Rhyme was happier to see him than he’d been to see anybody in the past week.

“The bomb!” he shouted. “Here’s the bomb!”

The officer, surprised at the odd collection of law enforcers, must have wondered what hit him as Cooper scooped the bags away from him and Sellitto scrawled a signature on the receipt and chain-of-custody card and shoved them back into his hand. “Thanks so long see ya,” the detective exhaled, turning back to the evidence table.

Thom smiled politely to the trooper and let him out of the room.

Rhyme called, “Let’s go, Sachs. You’re just standing around! What’ve we got?”

She offered a cold smile and walked over to Cooper’s table, where the tech was carefully laying out the contents of the bags.

What was her problem today? An hour was plenty of time to search a scene, if that’s what she was upset about. Well, he liked her feisty. He himself was always at his best that way. “Okay, Thom, help us out here. The blackboard. We need to list the evidence. Make us some charts. ‘CS-One.’ The first heading.”

“C, uhm, S?”

“ ‘Crime scene,’ ” the criminalist snapped. “What else would it be? ‘CS-One, Chicago.’ ”

In a recent case, Rhyme had used the back of a limp Metropolitan Museum poster as an evidence profiling chart. He now was state of the art – several large chalkboards were mounted to the wall, redolent with scents that took him back to humid spring school days in the Midwest, living for science class and despising spelling and English.

The aide, casting an exasperated glance toward his boss, picked up the chalk, brushed some dust from his perfect tie and knife-crease slacks, and wrote.

“What do we have, Mel? Sachs, help him.”

They began unloading the plastic bags and plastic jars of ash and bits of metal and fiber and wads of plastic. They assembled contents in porcelain trays. The crash site searchers – if they were on a par with the men and women Rhyme had trained – would have used roller-mounted magnets, large vacuum cleaners, and a series of fine mesh screens to locate debris from the blast.

Rhyme, expert in most areas of forensics, was an authority on bombs. He’d had no particular interest in the subject until the Dancer left his tiny package in the wastebasket of the Wall Street office where Rhyme’s two techs were killed. After that Rhyme had taken it on himself to learn everything he could about explosives. He’d studied with the FBI’s Explosives Unit, one of the smallest – but most elite – in the federal lab, composed of fourteen agent-examiners and technicians. They didn’t find lEDs – improvised explosive devices, the law enforcement term for bombs – and they didn’t render them safe. Their job was to analyze bombs and bomb crime scenes and to trace and categorize the makers and their students (bomb manufacture was considered an art in certain circles and apprentices worked hard to learn the techniques of famous bomb makers).

Sachs was poking over the bags. “Doesn’t a bomb destroy itself?”

“Nothing’s ever completely destroyed, Sachs. Remember that.” Though as he wheeled closer and examined the bags, he admitted, “This was a bad one. See those fragments? That pile of aluminum on the left? The metal’s shattered, not bent. That means the device had a high brisance -”

“High…?” Sellitto asked.

“Brisance.” Rhyme explained: “Detonation rate. But even so, sixty to ninety percent of a bomb survives the blast. Well, not the explosive, of course. Though there’s always enough residue to type it. Oh, we’ve got plenty to work with here.”

“Plenty?” Dellray snorted a laugh. “Bad as puttin’ Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

“Ah, but that’s not our job, Fred,” Rhyme said briskly. “All we need to do is catch the son of a bitch who pushed him off the wall.” He wheeled farther down the table. “What’s it look like, Mel? I see battery, I see wire, I see timer. What else? Maybe bits of the container or packing?”

Suitcases have convicted more bombers than timers and detonators. It’s not talked about but unclaimed baggage is often donated to the FBI by airlines and blown up in an attempt to duplicate explosions and provide standards for criminalists. In the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, the FBI identified the bombers not through the explosive itself but through the Toshiba radio it had been hidden in, the Samsonite suitcase containing the radio, and the clothes packed around it. The clothing in the suitcase was traced back to a store in Sliema, Malta, whose owner identified a Libyan intelligence agent as the person who’d bought the garments.

But Cooper shook his head. “Nothing near the seat of detonation except bomb components.”

“So it wasn’t in a suitcase or flight bag,” Rhyme mused. “Interesting. How the hell did he get it on board? Where’d he plant it? Lon, read me the report from Chicago.”

“ ‘Difficult to determine exact blast location,’ ” Sellitto read, “ ‘because of extensive fire and destruction of aircraft. Site of device seems to be underneath and behind the cockpit.’ ”

“Underneath and behind. I wonder if a cargo bay’s there. Maybe…” Rhyme fell silent. His head swiveled back and forth, gazing at the evidence bags. “Wait, wait!” he shouted. “Mel, let me see those bits of metal there. Third bag from the left. The aluminum. Put it under a ’scope.”

Cooper had connected the video output of his compound microscope to Rhyme’s computer. What Cooper saw, Rhyme could see. The tech began mounting samples of the minuscule bits of debris on slides and running them under the ’scope.

A moment later Rhyme ordered, “Cursor down. Double click.”

The image on his computer screen magnified.

“There, look! The skin of the plane was blown inward.”

“Inward?” Sachs asked. “You mean the bomb was on the outside?”

“I think so, yes. What about it, Mel?”

“You’re right. Those polished rivet heads are all bent inward. It was outside, definitely.”

“A rocket maybe?” Dellray asked. “SAM?”

Reading from the report Sellitto said, “No radar blips consistent with missiles.”

Rhyme shook his head. “No, everything points to a bomb.”

“But on the outside?” Sellitto asked. “Never heard of that before.”

“That explains this,” Cooper called. The tech, wearing magnifying goggles and armed with a ceramic probe, was looking over bits of metal as fast as a cowboy counts heads in a herd. “Fragments of ferrous metal. Magnets. Wouldn’t stick to the aluminum skin but there was steel under it. And I’ve got bits of epoxy resin. He stuck the bomb on the outside with the magnets to hold it until the glue hardened.”

“And look at the shock waves in the epoxy,” Rhyme pointed out. “The glue wasn’t completely set, so he planted it not long before takeoff.”

“Can we brand the epoxy?”

“Nope. Generic composition. Sold everywhere.”

“Any hope of prints? Tell me true, Mel.”

Cooper’s answer was a faint, skeptical laugh. But he went through the motions anyway and scanned the fragments with the PoliLight wand. Nothing was evident except the blast residue. “Not a thing.”

“I want to smell it,” Rhyme announced.

“Smell it?” Sachs asked.

“With the brisance, we know it’s high explosive. I want to know exactly what kind.”

Many bombers used low explosives – substances that burn quickly but don’t explode unless confined in, say, a pipe or box. Gunpowder was the most common of these. High explosives – like plastic or TNT – detonate in their natural state and don’t need to be packed inside anything. They were expensive and hard to come by. The type and source of explosive could tell a lot about the bomber’s identity.

Sachs brought a bag to Rhyme’s chair and opened it. He inhaled.

“RDX,” Rhyme said, recognizing it immediately.

“Consistent with the brisance,” Cooper said. “You thinking C three or C four?” Cooper asked. RDX was the main component of these two plastic explosives, which were military; they were illegal for a civilian to possess.

“Not C three,” Rhyme said, again smelling the explosive as if it were a vintage Bordeaux. “No sweet smell… Not sure. And strange… I smell something else… GC it, Mel.”

The tech ran the sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. This machine isolated elements in compounds and identified them. It could analyze samples as small as a millionth of a gram and, once it had determined what they were, could run the information through a database to determine, in many cases, brand names.

Cooper examined the results. “You’re right, Lincoln. It’s RDX. Also oil. And this is weird – starch…”

“Starch!” Rhyme cried. “That’s what I smelled. It’s guar flour…”

Cooper laughed as those very words popped up on the computer screen. “How’d you know?”

“Because it’s military dynamite.”

“But there’s no nitroglycerine,” Cooper protested. The active ingredient in dynamite.

“No, no, it’s not real dynamite,” Rhyme said. “It’s a mixture of RDX, TNT, motor oil, and the guar flour. You don’t see it very often.”

“Military, huh?” Sellitto said. “Points to Hansen.”

“That it does.”

The tech mounted samples on his compound ’scope’s stage.

The images appeared simultaneously on Rhyme’s computer screen. Bits of fiber, wires, scraps, splinters, dust.

He was reminded of a similar image from years ago, though in circumstances very different. Looking through a heavy brass kaleidoscope he’d bought as a birthday present for a friend. Claire Trilling, beautiful and stylish. Rhyme had found the kaleidoscope in a store in SoHo. The two of them had spent an evening sharing a bottle of merlot and trying to guess what kind of exotic crystals or gemstones were making the astonishing images in the eyepiece. Finally, Claire, nearly as scientifically curious as Rhyme, had unscrewed the bottom of the tube and emptied the contents onto a table. They’d laughed. The objects were nothing more than scraps of metal, wood shavings, a broken paper clip, torn shreds from the Yellow Pages, thumbtacks.

Rhyme pushed those memories aside and concentrated on the objects he was seeing on the screen: A fragment of waxed manila paper – what the military dynamite had been wrapped in. Fibers – rayon and cotton – from the detonating cord the Dancer had tied around the dynamite, which would crumble too easily to mold around the cord. A fragment of aluminum and a tiny colored wire – from the electric blasting cap. More wire and an eraser-size piece of carbon from the battery.

“The timer,” Rhyme called. “I want to see the timer.”

Cooper lifted a small plastic bag from the table.

Inside was the still, cold heart of the bomb.

It was in nearly perfect shape, surprising Rhyme. Ah, your first slipup, he thought, speaking silently to the Dancer. Most bombers will pack explosives around the detonating system to destroy clues. But here the Dancer had accidentally placed the timer behind a thick steel lip in the metal housing that held the bomb. The lip had protected the timer from the blast.

Rhyme’s neck stung as he strained forward, looking at the bent clock face.

Cooper scrutinized the device. I’ve got the model number and manufacturer.”

“Run everything through ERC.”

The FBI’s Explosives Reference Collection was the most extensive database on explosive devices in the world. It included information on all bombs reported in the United States as well as actual physical evidence from many of them. Certain items in the collection were antiques, dating back to the 1920s.

Cooper typed on his computer keyboard. Five seconds later his modem whistled and crackled.

A few moments later the results of the request came back.

“Not good,” the bald man said, grimacing slightly, about as emotional as the technician ever got. “No specific profiles match this particular bomb.”

Nearly all bombers fall into a pattern when they make their devices – they learn a technique and stick pretty close to it. (Given the nature of their product it’s a good idea not to experiment too much.) If the parts of the Dancer’s bomb matched an earlier IED in, say, Florida or California, the team might be able to pick up additional clues from those bomb sites that could lead them to the man’s whereabouts. The rule of thumb is that if two bombs share at least four points of construction – soldered leads instead of taped, for instance, or analog versus digital timers – they were probably made by the same person or under his tutelage. The Dancer’s bomb several years ago in Wall Street was different from this one. But, Rhyme knew, this one was intended to serve a different purpose. That bomb was planted to hamper a crime scene investigation; this one, to blow a large airplane out of the sky. And if Rhyme knew anything about the Coffin Dancer, it was that he tailored his tools to the job.

“Gets worse?” Rhyme asked, reading Cooper’s face as the tech stared at the computer screen.

“The timer.”

Rhyme sighed. He understood. “How many billions and billions in production?”

“The Daiwana Corporation in Seoul sold a hundred and forty-two thousand of them last year. To retail stores, OEMs, and licensees. There’s no coding on them to tell where they were shipped.”

“Great. Just great.”

Cooper continued to read the screen. “Hm. The folks at ERC say they’re very interested in the device and hope we’ll add it to their database.”

“Oh, our number one priority,” Rhyme grumbled.

His shoulder muscles suddenly cramped and he had to lean back into the headrest of the wheelchair. He breathed deeply for a few minutes until the nearly unbearable pain subsided, then vanished. Sachs, the only one who noticed, stepped forward, but Rhyme shook his head toward her, said, “How many wires you make out, Mel?”

“Just two, it looks like.”

“Multichannel or fiber optic?”

“Nope. Just average-ordinary bell wire.”

“No shunts?”

“None.”

A shunt is a separate wire that completes the connection if a battery or timer wire is cut in an attempt to render the bomb safe. All sophisticated bombs have shunting mechanisms.

“Well,” Sellitto said, “that’s good news, isn’t it? Means he’s getting careless.”

But Rhyme believed just the opposite. “Don’t think so, Lon. The only point of a shunt is to make rendering safe tougher. Not having a shunt means he was confident enough the bomb wouldn’t be found and would blow up just like he’d planned – in the air.”

“This thing,” Dellray asked contemptuously, looking over the bomb components. “What kind of people’d our boy have to rub shoulders with to make something like this? I got good CIs knowing ’bout bomb suppliers.”

Fred Dellray too had learned more about bombs than he’d ever intended. His longtime partner and friend, Toby Doolittle, had been on the ground floor of the Oklahoma City federal building several years ago. He’d been killed instantly in the fertilizer bomb explosion.

But Rhyme shook his head. “It’s all off-the-shelf stuff, Fred. Except for the explosives and the detonator cord. Hansen probably supplied them. Hell, the Dancer could’ve gotten everything he needed at Radio Shack.”

“What?” Sachs asked, surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Cooper said, adding, “we call it the Bomber’s Store.”

Rhyme wheeled along the table over to a piece of steel housing twisted like crumpled paper, stared at it for a long moment.

Then he backed up and looked at the ceiling. “But why plant it outside?” he pondered. “Percey said there were always lots of people around. And doesn’t the pilot walk around the plane before they take off, look at the wheels and things?”

“I think so,” Sellitto said.

“Why didn’t Ed Carney or his copilot see it?”

“Because,” Sachs said suddenly, “the Dancer couldn’t put the bomb on board until he knew for sure who was going to be in the plane.”

Rhyme swiveled around to her. “That’s it, Sachs! He was there watching. When he saw Carney get on board he knew he had at least one of the victims. He slipped it on somewhere after Carney got on board and before the plane took off. You’ve got to find out where, Sachs. And search it. Better get going.”

“Only have an hour – well, less now,” said cool-eyed Amelia Sachs as she started toward the door.

“One thing,” Rhyme said.

She paused.

“The Dancer’s a little different from everybody else you’ve ever been up against.” How could he explain it? “With him, what you see isn’t necessarily what is.”

She cocked an eyebrow, meaning, Get to the point.

“He’s probably not up there, at the airport. But if you see anyone make a move for you, well… shoot first.”

“What?” She laughed.

“Worry about yourself first, the scene second.”

“I’m just CS,” she answered, walking through the door. “He’s not going to care about me.”

“Amelia, listen…”

But he heard her footsteps receding. The familiar pattern: the hollow thud on the oak, the mute steps as she crossed the Oriental carpet, then the tap on the marble entryway. Finally, the coda – as the front door closed with a snap.

chapter nine

Hour 3 of 45

THE BEST SOLDIERS ARE PATIENT SOLDIERS.

Sir, I’ll remember that, sir.

Stephen Kall was sitting at Sheila’s kitchen table, deciding how much he disliked Essie, the mangy cat, or whoever the fuck it was, and listening to a long conversation on his tape recorder. At first he’d decided to find the cats and kill them but he’d noticed that they occasionally gave an unearthly howl. If neighbors were used to the sound they might become suspicious if they heard only silence from Sheila Horowitz’s apartment.

Patience… Watching the cassette roll. Listening.

It was twenty minutes later that he heard what he’d been hoping for on the tape. He smiled. Okay, good. He collected his Model 40 in the Fender guitar case, snug as a baby, and walked to the refrigerator. He cocked his head. The noises had stopped. It didn’t shake any longer. He felt a bit of relief, less cringey, less crawly, thinking of the worm inside, now cold and still. It was safe to leave. He picked up his backpack and left the dim apartment with its pungent cat musk, dusty wine, and a million trails of disgusting worms.

Into the country.

Amelia Sachs sped through a tunnel of spring trees, rocks on one side, a modest cliff on another. A dusting of green, and everywhere the yellow starbursts of forsythia.

Sachs was a city girl, born in Brooklyn General Hospital, and was a lifetime resident of that borough. Nature, for her, was Prospect Park on Sundays or, on weekday evenings, Long Island forest preserves, where she’d hide her black shark-like Dodge Charger from the patrol cruisers prowling for her and her fellow amateur auto racers.

Now, at the wheel of an Investigation and Resources Division rapid response vehicle – a crime scene station wagon – she punched the accelerator, swerved onto the shoulder, and passed a van that sported an upside-down Garfield cat suctioned to the rear window. She made the turnoff that took her deep into Westchester County.

Lifting her hand off the wheel she compulsively poked her finger into her hair and worried her scalp. Then she gripped the plastic wheel of the RRV once again and shoved the accelerator down until she burst into the suburban civilization of strip malls, sloppy commercial buildings, and fast-food franchises.

She was thinking about bombs, about Percey Clay.

And about Lincoln Rhyme.

Something was different about him today. Something significant. They’d been working together for a year now, ever since he’d shanghaied her away from a coveted assignment with Public Affairs to help him catch a serial kidnapper. At the time Sachs had been at a low point in her life – an affair gone bad and a corruption scandal in the department that disillusioned her so much that she wanted out of patrol altogether. But Rhyme wouldn’t let her. Simple as that. Even though he was a civilian consultant he’d arranged for her transfer to Crime Scene. She protested some but soon gave up the pretense of reluctance; the fact was that she loved the work. And she loved working with Rhyme, whose brilliance was exhilarating and intimidating and – an admission she made to no one – goddamn sexy.

Which wasn’t to say that she could read him perfectly. Lincoln Rhyme played life close to his chest and he wasn’t revealing all to her.

Shoot first…

What was that all about? You never discharged a weapon at a crime scene if there was any way to avoid it. A single gunshot would contaminate a scene with carbon, sulfur, mercury, antimony, lead, copper, and arsenic, and the discharge and blowback could destroy vital trace evidence. Rhyme himself told her of the time he’d had to shoot a perp hiding at a scene, his biggest concern being that the shots had ruined much of the evidence. (And when Sachs, believing she’d at last outthought him, said, “But what did it matter, Rhyme? You got the perp, right?” he’d pointed out acerbically, “But what if he’d had partners, hm? What then?”)

What was so different about the Coffin Dancer, other than the stupid name and the fact he seemed marginally smarter than the typical mafioso or Westie triggerman?

And working the scene at the hangar in an hour? It seemed to Sachs that he’d agreed to that as a favor for Percey. Which was completely unlike him. Rhyme would keep a scene sealed for days if he thought it was necessary.

These questions nagged and Amelia Sachs didn’t like unanswered questions.

Though she had no more time for speculation. Sachs spun the wheel of the RRV and turned into the wide entrance to the Mamaroneck Regional Airport. It was a busy place, nestled into a woody area of Westchester County, north of Manhattan. The big airlines had affiliated companies with service here – United Express, American Eagle – but most of the planes parked here were corporate jets, all of them unmarked, for security reasons, she guessed.

At the entrance were several state troopers, checking IDs. They did a double take when she pulled up – seeing the beautiful redhead driving an NYPD crime scene RRV and wearing blue jeans, a wind-breaker, and a Mets cap. They waved her through. She followed signs to Hudson Air Charters and found the small cinder-block building at the end of a row of commercial airline terminals.

She parked in front of the building and leapt out. She introduced herself to two officers who were standing guard over the hangar and the sleek, silver airplane that was inside. She was pleased that the local cops had run police tape around the hangar and the apron in front of it to secure the scene. But she was dismayed by the size of the area.

An hour to search? She could’ve spent an entire day here.

Thanks loads, Rhyme.

She hurried into the office.

A dozen men and women, some in business suits, some in overalls, stood in clusters. They were mostly in their twenties and thirties. Sachs supposed they’d been a young and enthusiastic group until last night. Now their faces revealed a collective sorrow that had aged them quickly.

“Is there someone named Ron Talbot here?” she asked, displaying her silver shield.

The oldest person in the room – a woman in her fifties, with spun and sprayed hair and wearing a frumpy suit – walked up to Sachs. “I’m Sally Anne McCay,” she said. “I’m the office manager. Oh, how’s Percey?”

“She’s all right,” Sachs said guardedly. “Where’s Mr. Talbot?”

A brunette in her thirties wearing a wrinkled blue dress stepped out of an office and put her arm around Sally Anne’s shoulders. The older woman squeezed the younger’s hand. “Lauren, you okay?”

Lauren, her puffy face a mask of shock, asked Sachs, “Do they know what happened yet?”

“We’re just starting the investigation… Now, Mr. Talbot?”

Sally Anne wiped tears then glanced toward an office in the corner. Sachs walked to the doorway. Inside was a bearish man with a stubbled chin and tangle of uncombed black-and-gray hair. He was poring over computer printouts, breathing heavily. He looked up, a dismal expression on his face. He’d been crying too, it seemed.

“I’m Officer Sachs,” she said. “I’m with the NYPD.”

He nodded. “You have him yet?” he asked, looking out the window as if he expected to see Ed Carney’s ghost float past. He turned back to her. “The killer?”

“We’re following up on several leads.” Amelia Sachs, second-generation cop, had the art of evasion down cold.

Lauren appeared in Talbot’s doorway. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” she gasped, an edgy panic in her voice. “Who’d do something like that? Who?” As a patrol officer – a beat cop – Sachs had delivered her share of bad news to loved ones. She never got used to the despair she heard in the voices of surviving friends and family.

“Lauren.” Sally Anne took her colleague’s arm. “Lauren, go on home.”

“No! I don’t want to go home. I want to know who the hell did it? Oh, Ed…”

Stepping farther into Talbot’s office, Sachs said, “I need your help. It looks like the killer mounted the bomb outside the plane underneath the cockpit. We have to find out where.”

“Outside?” Talbot was frowning. “How?”

“Magnetized and glued. The glue wasn’t completely set before the blast so it had to’ve been not long before takeoff.”

Talbot nodded. “Whatever I can do. Sure.”

She tapped the walkie-talkie on her hip. “I’m going to go on-line with my boss. He’s in Manhattan. We’re going to ask you some questions.” Hooked up the Motorola, headset, and stalk mike.

“Okay, Rhyme, I’m here. Can you hear me?”

Though they were on an areawide Special Ops frequency and should have been ten-fiveing and K’ing, according to Communications Department procedures, Sachs and Rhyme rarely bothered with radioese. And they didn’t now. His voice grumbled through the earphone, bouncing off who knew how many satellites. “Got it. Took you long enough.”

Don’t push it, Rhyme.

She asked Talbot, “Where was the plane before it took off? Say, an hour, hour and a quarter?”

“In the hangar,” Talbot said.

“You think he could’ve gotten to the plane there? After the – what do you call it? When the pilot inspects the plane?”

“The walkaround. I suppose it’s possible.”

“But there were people around all the time,” Lauren said. The crying fit was over and she’d wiped her face. She was calmer now and determination had replaced despair in her eyes.

“Who are you, please?”

“Lauren Simmons.”

“Lauren’s our assistant operations manager,” Talbot said. “She works for me.”

Lauren continued. “We’d been working with Stu – our chief mechanic, our former chief mechanic – to outfit the aircraft, working round the clock. We would’ve seen anybody near the plane.”

“So,” she said, “he mounted the bomb after the plane left the hangar.”

“Chronology!” Rhyme’s voice crackled through the headset. “Where was it from the moment it left the hangar until takeoff?”

When she relayed this question Talbot and Lauren led her into a conference room. It was filled with charts and scheduling boards, hundreds of books and notebooks and stacks of papers. Lauren unrolled a large map of the airport. It contained a thousand numbers and symbols Sachs didn’t understand, though the buildings and roadways were clearly outlined.

“No plane moves an inch,” Talbot explained in a gruff baritone, “unless Ground Control gives the okay. Charlie Juliet was -”

“What? Charlie…?”

“The number of the plane. We refer to planes by the last two letters on the registration number. See on the fuselage? CJ. So we called it Charlie Juliet. It was parked in the hangar here…” He tapped the map. “We finished loading -”

“When?” Rhyme called; so loud she wouldn’t have been surprised if Talbot had heard. “We need times! Exact times.”

The logbook in Charlie Juliet ’d been burned to a cinder and the time-stamped FAA tape hadn’t been transcribed yet. But Lauren examined the company’s internal records. “Tower gave ’em push-back clearance at seven-sixteen. And they reported wheels up at seven-thirty.”

Rhyme had heard. “Fourteen minutes. Ask them if the plane was ever both out of sight and stopped during that time.”

Sachs did and Lauren answered, “Probably there.” She pointed.

A narrow portion of taxiway about two hundred feet long. The row of hangars hid it from the rest of the airport. It ended at a T intersection.

Lauren said, “Oh, and it’s an ATC No Vis area.”

“That’s right,” Talbot said, as if this were significant.

“Translation!” Rhyme called.

“Meaning?” Sachs asked.

“Out of visibility from Air Traffic Control,” Lauren answered. “A blind spot.”

“Yes!” came the voice through her earphone. “Okay, Sachs. Seal and search. Release the hangar.”

To Talbot she said, “We’re not going to bother with the hangar. I’m releasing it. But I want to seal off that taxiway. Can you call the tower? Have them divert traffic?”

“I can,” he said doubtfully. “They aren’t going to like it.”

She said, “If there’s any problem have them call Thomas Perkins. He’s head of the FBI’s Manhattan office. He’ll clear it with FAA HQ.”

“FAA? In Washington?” Lauren asked.

“That’s the one.”

Talbot gave a faint smile. “Well, okay.”

Sachs started for the main door then paused, looking out at the busy airport. “Oh, I’ve got a car,” she called to Talbot. “Is there anything special you do when you drive around an airport?”

“Yeah,” he said, “try not to run into any airplanes.”