The Coffin Dancer

chapter ten

Hour 3 of 45

I’M HERE, RHYME,” SHE ANNOUNCED.

Sachs climbed out of the RRV wagon and pulled latex gloves on her hands and wound rubber bands around her shoes – to make certain her footprints wouldn’t be confused with the perp’s, as Rhyme had taught her.

“And where, Sachs,” he asked, “is here?”

“At the intersection of taxiways. Between a row of hangars. It’s where Carney’s plane would’ve stopped.”

Sachs glanced uneasily at a line of trees in the distance. It was an overcast, dank day. Another storm was threatening. She felt exposed. The Dancer might be here now – maybe he’d returned to destroy evidence he’d left behind, maybe to kill a cop and slow down the investigation. Like the bomb in Wall Street a few years ago, the one that killed Rhyme’s techs.

Shoot first…

Damn it, Rhyme, you’re spooking me! Why’re you acting like this guy walks through walls and spits poison?

Sachs took the PoliLight box and a large suitcase from the back of the RRV. She opened the suitcase. Inside were a hundred tools of the trade: screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, wire cutters, knives, friction ridge collection equipment, ninhydrin, tweezers, brushes, tongs, scissors, flex-claw pickups, a gunshot residue kit, pencils, plastic and paper bags, evidence collection tape…

One, establish the perimeter.

She ran yellow police line tape around the entire area.

Two, consider media and range of camera lenses and microphones.

No media. Not yet. Thank you, Lord.

“What’s that, Sachs?”

“I’m thanking God there’re no reporters.”

“A fine prayer. But tell me what you’re doing.”

“Still securing the scene.”

“Look for the -”

“Entrance and exit,” she said.

Step three, determine the perpetrator’s entrance and exit routes – they will be secondary crime scenes.

But she didn’t have a clue as to where they might be. He could’ve come from anywhere. Snuck around the corners, driven here in a luggage cart, a gas truck…

Sachs donned goggles and began sweeping the PoliLight wand over the taxiway. It didn’t work as well outside as in a dark room, but with the heavy overcast she could see flecks and streaks glowing under the eerie green-yellow light. There were, however, no footprints.

“Sprayed her down last night,” the voice called behind her.

Sachs spun around, hand on her Glock, a half draw from the holster.

I’m never this edgy, Rhyme. It’s all your fault.

Several men in coveralls were standing at the yellow tape. She walked up to them cautiously and checked their picture IDs. They matched the men’s faces. Her hand slipped off the gun.

“They hose the place down every night. If you’re looking for something. Thought you were.”

“High-pressure hose,” another one added.

Great. Every bit of trace, every footprint, every fiber sloughed off the Dancer was gone.

“You see anybody here last night?”

“This have to do with the bomb?”

“Around seven-fifteen?” she persisted.

“Nope. Nobody comes up here. These hangars’re deserted. Probably gonna tear ’em down someday.”

“What’re you doing here now?”

“Saw a cop. You are a cop, right? And just thought we’d have a look-see. This is about that bomb, right? Who did it? Arabs? Or them militia shits?”

She shooed them off. Into the microphone she said, “They cleaned the taxiway last night, Rhyme. High-pressure water, looks like.”

“Oh, no.”

“They -”

“Hey there.”

She sighed, turning again, expecting to find the workmen back. But the new visitor was a cocky county trooper, wearing a blocked Smokey the Bear hat and razor-creased gray slacks. He ducked under the tape.

“Excuse me,” she protested. “This is a secure area.”

He slowed but didn’t stop. She checked his ID. It matched. The picture showed him looking off slightly, a cover boy on a men’s fashion magazine.

“You’re that officer from New York, right?” He laughed generously. “Nice uniforms they have down there.” Eyeing her tight jeans.

“This area’s sealed off.”

“I can help. I took the forensics course. Mostly I’m highway detail but I’ve got major crimes experience. You have some hair. Bet you’ve heard that before.”

“I really will have to ask you -”

“Jim Everts.”

Don’t go into first-name territory; it sticks like flypaper. “I’m Officer Sachs.”

“Big hubbub, this. A bomb. Messy.”

“See, Jim, this tape here’s to keep people out of the scene. Now, you gonna be helpful and step back behind it?”

“Wait. You mean officers too?”

“That I do, yes.”

“You mean me too?”

“Exactly.”

There were five classic crime scene contaminators: weather, relatives of the victim, suspects, souvenir collectors, and – the all-time worst – fellow cops.

“I won’t touch a thing. Cross my heart. Just be a pleasure to watch you work, honey.”

“Sachs,” Rhyme whispered, “tell him to get the fuck out of your crime scene.”

“Jim, get the fuck out of my crime scene.”

“Or you’ll report him.”

“Or I’ll report you.”

“Oooo, gonna be that way, is it?” He held his hands up in surrender. The last of the flirt drained from his slick grin.

“Get going, Sachs.”

The trooper ambled away slowly enough to drag some of his pride with him. He looked back once but a scathing retort eluded him.

Amelia Sachs began to walk the grid.

There were several different ways to search crime scenes. A strip search – walking in a serpentine pattern – was usually used for outdoor scenes because it covered the most ground quickly. But Rhyme wouldn’t hear of that. He used the grid pattern – covering the entire area back and forth in one direction, walking one foot at a time, then turning perpendicular and walking back and forth the other way. When he was running IRD, “walking the grid” became synonymous with searching a crime scene, and heaven help any cops Rhyme caught taking shortcuts or daydreaming when they were on the grid.

Sachs now spent an hour moving back and forth. While the spray truck might’ve eliminated prints and trace evidence, it wouldn’t destroy anything larger that the Dancer might’ve dropped, nor would it ruin footprints or body impressions left in the mud beside the taxiway.

But she found nothing.

“Hell, Rhyme, not a thing.”

“Ah, Sachs, I’ll bet there is. I’ll bet there’s plenty. Just takes a little bit more effort than most scenes. The Dancer’s not like other perps, remember.”

Oh, that again.

“Sachs.” His voice low and seductive. She felt a shiver. “Get into him,” Rhyme whispered. “You know what I mean.”

She knew exactly what he meant. Hated the thought. But, oh, yes, Sachs knew. The best criminalists were able to find a place in their minds where the line between hunter and hunted was virtually nonexistent. They moved through the crime scene not as cops tracking down clues but as the perp himself, feeling his desires, lusts, fears. Rhyme had this talent. And though she tried to deny it, Sachs did too. (She’d searched a scene a month ago – a father had murdered his wife and child – and managed to find the murder weapon when no one else had. After the case she hadn’t been able to work for a week and had been plagued by flashbacks that she’d been the one who stabbed the victims to death. Saw their faces, heard their screams.)

Another pause. “Talk to me,” he said. And finally the edginess in his voice was gone. “You’re him. You’re walking where he’s walked, you’re thinking the way he thinks…”

He’d said words like these to her before, of course. But now – as with everything else about the Dancer – it seemed to her that Rhyme had more in mind than just finding obscure evidence. No, she sensed that he was desperate to know about this perp. Who he was, what made him kill.

Another shiver. An image in her thoughts: back to the other night. The lights of the airfield, the sound of airplane engines, the smell of jet exhaust.

“Come on, Amelia… You’re him. You’re the Coffin Dancer. You know Ed Carney’s on the plane; you know you have to get the bomb on board. Just think about it for a minute or two.”

And she did, summoning up from somewhere a need to kill.

He continued, speaking in an eerie, melodic voice. “You’re brilliant,” he said. “You have no morals whatsoever. You’ll kill anyone, you’ll do anything to get to your goal. You divert attention, you use people… Your deadliest weapon is deception.”

I lay in wait.

My deadliest weapon…

She closed her eyes.

…is deception.

Sachs felt a dark hope, a vigilance, a hunt lust.

“I -”

He continued softly. “Is there any distraction, any diversion you can try?”

Eyes open now. “The whole area’s empty. Nothing to distract the pilots with.”

“Where are you hiding?”

“The hangars’re all boarded up. The grass is too short for cover. There’re no trucks or oil drums. No alleys. No nooks.”

In her gut: desperation. What’m I going to do? I’ve got to plant the bomb. I don’t have any time. Lights… there’re lights everywhere. What? What should I do?

She said, “I can’t hide around the other side of the hangars. There’re lots of workers. It’s too exposed. They’ll see me.”

For a moment, Sachs herself floated back into her mind and she wondered, as she often did, why Lincoln Rhyme had the power to conjure her into someone else. Sometimes it angered her. Sometimes it thrilled.

Dropping into a crouch, ignoring the pain in her knees from the arthritis that had tormented her off and on for the past ten of her thirty-three years. “It’s all too open here. I feel exposed.”

“What’re you thinking?”

There’re people looking for me. I can’t let them find me. I can’t!

This is risky. Stay hidden. Stay down.

Nowhere to hide.

If I’m seen, everything’s ruined. They’ll find the bomb; they’ll know I’m after all three witnesses. They’ll put them in protective custody. I’ll never get them then. I can’t let that happen.

Feeling his panic she turned back to the only possible place to hide. The hangar beside the taxiway. In the wall facing her was a single broken window, about three by four feet. She’d ignored it because it was covered with a sheet of rotting plywood, nailed to the frame on the inside.

She approached it slowly. The ground in front was gravel; there were no footprints.

“There’s a boarded-up window, Rhyme. Plywood on the inside. The glass is broken.”

“Is it dirty, the glass that’s still in the window?”

“Filthy.”

“And the edges?”

“No, they’re clean.” She understood why he’d asked the question. “The glass was broken recently!”

“Right. Push the board. Hard.”

It fell inward without any resistance and hit the floor with a huge bang.

“What was that?” Rhyme shouted. “Sachs, are you all right?”

“Just the plywood,” she answered, once more spooked by his uneasiness.

She shone her halogen flashlight through the hangar. It was deserted.

“What do you see, Sachs?”

“It’s empty. A few dusty boxes. There’s gravel on the floor -”

“That was him!” Rhyme answered. “He broke in the window and threw gravel inside, so he could stand on the floor and not leave footprints. It’s an old trick. Any footprints in front of the window? Bet it’s more gravel,” he added sourly.

“Is.”

“Okay. Search the window. Then climb inside. But be sure to look for booby traps first. Remember the trash can a few years ago.”

Stop it, Rhyme! Stop it.

Sachs shined the light around the space again. “It’s clean, Rhyme. No traps. I’m examining the window frame.”

The PoliLight showed nothing other than a faint mark left by a finger in a cotton glove. “No fiber, just the cotton pattern.”

“Anything in the hangar? Anything worth stealing?”

“No. It’s empty.”

“Good,” Rhyme said.

“Why good?” she asked. “I said there’s no print.”

“Ah, but it means it’s him, Sachs. It’s not logical for someone to break in wearing cotton gloves when there’s nothing to steal.”

She searched carefully. No footprints, no fingerprints, no visible evidence. She ran the Dustbuster and bagged the trace.

“The glass and gravel?” she asked. “Paper bag?”

“Yes.”

Moisture often destroyed trace and though it looked unprofessional certain evidence was best transported in brown paper bags rather than in plastic.

“Okay, Rhyme. I’ll have it back to you in forty minutes.”

They disconnected.

As she packed the bags carefully into the RRV, Sachs felt edgy, as she often did just after searching a scene where she’d found no obvious evidence – guns or knives or the perp’s wallet. The trace she’d collected might have a clue as to who the Dancer was and where he was hiding. But the whole effort could have been a bust too. She was anxious to get back to Rhyme’s lab and see what he could find.

Sachs climbed into the station wagon and sped back to the Hudson Air office. She hurried into Ron Talbot’s office. He was talking to a tall man whose back was to the door. Sachs said, “I found where he was, Mr. Talbot. The scene’s released. You can have the tower -”

The man turned around. It was Brit Hale. He frowned, trying to think of her name, remembered it. “Oh. Officer Sachs. Hey. How you doing?”

She started to nod an automatic greeting, then stopped.

What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in the safe house.

She heard a soft crying and looked into the conference room. There was Percey Clay sitting next to Lauren, the pretty brunette who Sachs remembered was Ron Talbot’s assistant. Lauren was crying and Percey, resolute in her own sorrow, was trying to comfort her. She glanced up, saw Sachs, and nodded to her.

No, no, no…

Then the third shock.

“Hi, Amelia,” Jerry Banks said cheerfully, sipping coffee and standing by a window, where he’d been admiring the Learjet parked in the hangar. “That plane’s something, isn’t it?”

“What’re they doing here?” Sachs snapped, pointing at Hale and Percey, forgetting that Banks outranked her.

“They had some problem or other about a mechanic,” Banks said. “Percey wanted to stop by here. Try to find -”

“Rhyme,” Sachs shouted into the microphone. “She’s here!”

“Who?” he asked acerbically. “And where is there?”

“Percey. And Hale too. At the airport.”

“No! They’re supposed to be at the safe house.”

“Well, they’re not. They’re right here in front of me.”

“No, no, no!” Rhyme raged.A moment passed. Then he said, “Ask Banks if they followed evasive driving procedures.”

Banks, uncomfortable, responded that they hadn’t. “She was real insistent that they stop here first. I tried to talk her -”

“Jesus, Sachs. He’s there someplace. The Dancer. I know he’s there.”

“How could he be?” Sachs’s eyes strayed to the window.

“Keep ’em down,” Rhyme said. “I’ll have Dellray get an armored van from the Bureau’s White Plains field office.”

Percey heard the commotion. “I’ll go to the safe house in an hour or so. I have to find a mechanic to work on -”

Sachs waved her silent, then said, “Jerry, keep them here.” She ran to the door and looked out over the gray expanse of the airfield as a noisy prop plane charged down the runway. She pulled the stalk mike closer to her mouth. “How, Rhyme?” she asked. “How’ll he come at us?”

“I don’t have a clue. He could do anything.”

Sachs tried to reenter the Dancer’s mind, but couldn’t. All she thought was, Deception…

“How secure is the area?” Rhyme asked.

“Pretty tight. Chain-link fence. Troopers at a roadblock at the entrance, checking tickets and IDs.”

Rhyme asked, “But they’re not checking IDs of police, right?”

Sachs looked at the uniformed officers, recalling how casually they’d waved her through. “Oh, hell, Rhyme, there’re a dozen marked cars here. A couple unmarkeds too. I don’t know the troopers or detectives… He could be any one of them.”

“Okay, Sachs. Listen, find out if any local cops’re missing. In the past two or three hours. The Dancer might’ve killed one and stolen his ID and uniform.”

Sachs called a state trooper up to the door, examined him and his ID closely, and decided he was the real article. She said, “We think the killer may be nearby, maybe impersonating an officer. I need you to check out everybody here. If you don’t recognize ’em, let me know. Also, find out from your dispatcher if any cops from around the area’ve gone missing in the past few hours.”

“I’m on it, Officer.”

She returned to the office. There were no blinds on the windows and Banks had moved Percey and Hale into an interior office.

“What’s going on?” Percey asked.

“You’re out of here in five minutes,” Sachs said, glancing out the window, trying to guess how the Dancer would attack. She had no idea.

“Why?” the flier asked, frowning.

“We think the man who killed your husband’s here. Or on his way here.”

“Oh, come on. There’re cops all over the field. It’s perfectly safe. I need to -”

Sachs snapped to her, “No arguments.”

But argue she did. “We can’t leave. I’ve just had my chief mechanic quit. I have to -”

“Perce,” Hale said uneasily, “maybe we ought to listen to her.”

“We’ve got to get that aircraft -”

“Get back. In there. And be quiet.”

Percey’s mouth opened wide in shock. “You can’t talk to me that way. I’m not a prisoner.”

“Officer Sachs? Hellooo?” The trooper she’d spoken to outside stepped into the doorway. “I’ve done a fast visual of everybody here in uniform and the detectives too. No unknowns. And no reports of any state or Westchester officers missing. But our Central Dispatch told me something maybe you oughta know about. Might be nothing, but -”

“Tell me.”

Percey Clay said, “Officer, I have to talk to you…”

Sachs ignored her and nodded to the trooper. “Go on.”

“Traffic Patrol in White Plains, about two miles away. They found a body in a Dumpster. Think he was killed about an hour ago, maybe less.”

“Rhyme, you hear?”

“Yes.”

Sachs asked the cop, “Why d’you think that’s important?”

“It’s the way he was killed. Was a hell of a mess.”

“Ask him if the hands and face were missing,” Rhyme asked.

“What?”

“Ask him!”

She did, and everyone in the office stopped talking and stared at Sachs.

The trooper blinked in surprise and said, “Yes ma’am, Officer. Well, the hands at least. The dispatcher didn’t say anything about the face. How’d you know…?”

Rhyme blurted, “Where’s it now? The body?”

She relayed the question.

“In a coroner’s bus. They’re taking it to the county morgue.”

“No,” Rhyme said. “Have them get it to you, Sachs. I want you to examine it.”

“The -”

“Body,” he said. “It’s got the answer to how he’s going to come at you. I don’t want Percey and Hale moved until we know what we’re up against.”

She told the cop Rhyme’s request.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get on it. That’s… You mean you want the body here.”

“Yes. Now.”

“Tell ’em to get it there fast, Sachs,” Rhyme said. He sighed. “Oh, this is bad. Bad.”

And Sachs had the uneasy thought that Rhyme’s urgent grief was not only for the man who had died so violently, whoever he was, but for those who, maybe, were just about to.

People believe that the rifle is the important tool for a sniper, but that’s wrong. It’s the telescope.

What do we call it, Soldier? Do we call it a telescopic sight? Do we call it a ’scope?

Sir, we do not. It’s a telescope. This one is a Redfield, three-by-nine variable, with crosshair reticles. There is none better, sir.

The telescope Stephen was mounting on top of the Model 40 was twelve and three-quarters inches long and weighed just over twelve ounces. It had been matched to this particular rifle with corresponding serial numbers and had been painstakingly adjusted for focus. The parallax had been fixed by the optical engineer in the factory so that the crosshairs resting on the lip of a man’s heart five hundred yards away would not move perceptibly when the sniper’s head eased from left to right. The eye relief was so accurate that the recoil would knock the eyepiece back to within one millimeter of Stephen’s eyebrow and yet never touch a hair.

The Redfield telescope was black and sleek, and Stephen kept it draped in velvet and nestled in a Styrofoam block in his guitar case.

Now, hidden in a nest of grass some three hundred yards from the Hudson Air hangar and office, Stephen fitted the black tube of the telescope into its mount, perpendicular to the gun (he always thought of his stepfather’s crucifix when he mounted it), then he swung the heavy tube into position with a satisfying click. He screwed down the lug nuts.

Soldier, are you a competent sniper?

Sir, I am the best, sir.

What are your qualifications?

Sir, I am in excellent physical shape, I am fastidious, I am right-handed, I have 20/20 vision, I do not smoke or drink or take any kind of drugs, I can lie still for hours at a time, and I live to send bullets up the ass of my enemy.

He nestled farther into the pile of leaves and grass.

There might be worms here, he thought. But he wasn’t feeling cringey at the moment. He had his mission and that was occupying his mind completely.

Stephen cradled the gun, smelling the machine oil from the bolt-action receiver and the neat’s-foot oil from the sling, so worn and soft it was like angora. The Model 40 was a 7.62 millimeter NATO rifle and weighed eight pounds, ten ounces. The trigger pull generally ranged from three to five pounds, but Stephen set it a bit higher because his fingers were very strong. The weapon had a rated effective range of a thousand yards, though he had made kills at more than 1300.

Stephen knew this gun intimately. In sniper teams, his stepfather had told him, the snipers themselves have no disassemble authority, and the old man wouldn’t let him strip the weapon himself. But that was one rule of the old man’s that hadn’t seemed right to Stephen and so, in a moment of uncharacteristic defiance, he’d secretly taught himself how to dismantle the rifle, clean it, repair it, and even machine parts that needed adjustment or replacement.

Through the telescope he scanned Hudson Air. He couldn’t see the Wife, though he knew she was there or soon would be. Listening to the tape of the phone tap on the Hudson Air office lines, Stephen had heard her tell someone named Ron that they were changing their plans; rather than going to the safe house they were driving to the airport to find some mechanics who could work on the airplane.

Using the low-crawl technique, Stephen now moved forward until he was on a slight ridge, still hidden by trees and grass but with a better view of the hangar, the office, and the parking lot in front of it, separated from him by flat grass fields and two runways.

It was a glorious kill zone. Wide. Very little cover. All entrances and exits easily targeted from here.

Two people stood outside at the front door. One was a county or state trooper. The other was a woman – red hair dipping beneath a baseball cap. Very pretty. She was a cop, plainclothes. He could see the boxy outline of a Glock or Sig-Sauer high on her hip. He lifted his range finder and put the split image on the woman’s red hair. He twisted a ring until the images moved together seamlessly.

Three hundred and sixteen yards.

He replaced the range finder, lifted the rifle, and sighted on the woman, centering the reticles on her hair once more. He glanced at her beautiful face. It troubled him, her attractiveness. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like her. He wondered why.

The grass rustled around him. He thought: Worms.

Was starting to feel cringey.

The face in the window…

He put the crosshairs on her chest.

The cringey feeling went away.

Soldier, what is the sniper’s motto?

Sir, it is “One chance, one shot, one kill.”

The conditions were excellent. There was a slight right-to-left crosswind, which he guessed was four miles an hour. The air was humid, which would buoy the slug. He was shooting over unvaried terrain with only moderate thermals.

He slid back down the knoll and ran a cleaning rod, tipped with a soft cotton cloth, through the Model 40. You always cleaned your weapon before firing. The slightest bit of moisture or oil could put a shot off by an inch or so. Then he made a loop sling and lay down in his nest.

Stephen loaded five rounds into the chamber. They were M-118 match-quality rounds, manufactured at the renowned Lake City arsenal. The bullet itself was a 173-grain boattail and it struck its target at a speed of a half mile a second. Stephen had altered the slugs somewhat, however. He’d drilled into the core and filled them with a small explosive charge and replaced the standard jacket with a ceramic nose that would pierce most kinds of body armor.

He unfolded a thin dish towel and spread it out on the ground to catch the ejected cartridges. Then he doubled the sling around his left biceps and planted that elbow firmly on the ground, keeping the forearm absolutely perpendicular to the ground – a bone support. He “spot-welded” his cheek and right thumb to the stock above the trigger.

Then slowly he began scanning the kill zone.

It was hard to see inside the offices but Stephen thought he caught a glimpse of the Wife.

Yes! It was her.

She was standing behind a big curly-haired man in a wrinkled white shirt. He held a cigarette. A young blond man in a suit, a badge on his belt, ushered them back out of sight.

Patience… she’ll present again. They don’t have a clue that you’re here. You can wait all day. As long as the worms -

Flashing lights again.

Into the parking lot sped a county ambulance. The red-haired cop saw it. Her eyes grew excited. She ran toward the vehicle.

Stephen breathed deeply.

One chance…

Zero your weapon, Soldier.

Normal come-up elevation at 316 yards is three minutes, sir. He clicked the sight so that the barrel would be pointed upward slightly to take gravity into account.

One shot…

Calculate the crosswind, Soldier.

Sir, the formula is range in hundreds of yards times velocity divided by fifteen. Stephen’s mind thought instantly: Slightly less than one minute of windage. He adjusted the telescope accordingly.

Sir, I am ready, sir.

One kill…

A shaft of light streamed from behind a cloud and lit the front of the office. Stephen began to breathe slowly and evenly.

He was lucky; the worms stayed away. And there were no faces watching him from the windows.

chapter eleven

Hour 4 of 45

THE MEDIC ROLLED OUT OF THE AMBULANCE.

She nodded to him. “I’m Officer Sachs.”

He aimed his rotund belly her way and, straight-faced, said, “So. You ordered the pizza?” Then giggled.

She sighed. “What happened?” Sachs said.

“What happened? T’him? He got himself dead’s what happened.” He looked her over, shook his head. “What kinda cop are you? I never seen you up here.”

“I’m from the city.”

“Oh, the city. She’s from the city. Well, better ask,” he added gravely. “You ever see a body before?”

Sometimes you bend just a little. Learning how and how far takes some doing but it’s a valuable lesson. Sometimes more than valuable, sometimes necessary. She smiled. “You know, we’ve got a real critical situation here. I’d sure appreciate your help. Could you tell me where you found him?”

He studied her chest for a moment. “Reason I ask about seeing bodies is this one’s gonna bother you. I could do what needs to be done, searching it or whatever.”

“Thanks. We’ll get to that. Now, again, where’d you find him?”

“Dumpster in a parking lot ’bout two clicks -”

“That’s miles,” another voice added.

“Hey, Jim,” the medic said.

Sachs turned. Oh, great. It was the GQ cop. The one who’d been flirting with her on the taxiway. He strode up to the ambulance.

“Hi, honey. Me again. How’s your police tape holdin’ up? Whatcha got, Earl?”

“One body, no hands.” Earl yanked the door open, reached in, and unzipped the body bag. Blood flowed out onto the floor of the ambulance.

“Ooops.” Earl winked. “Say, Jim, after you’re through here, wanna get some spaghetti?”

“Mebbe pig’s knuckles.”

“There’s a thought.”

Rhyme interrupted. “Sachs, what’s going on there? You got the body?”

“I’ve got it. Trying to figure out the story.” To the medic she said, “We’ve gotta move on this. Anybody have any idea who he is?”

“Wasn’t anything around to ID him. No missing persons reported. Nobody saw nothing.”

“Any chance he’s a cop?”

“Naw. Nobody I know,” Jim said. “You, Earl?”

“Nup. Why?”

Sachs didn’t answer. She said, “I need to examine him.”

“Okay, miss,” Earl said. “How ’bout I give you a hand?”

“Hell,” the trooper said, “sounds like he’s the one needs a hand.” He chuckled; the medic gave another of his piggy giggles.

She climbed up in the back of the ambulance and unzipped the body bag completely.

And because she wasn’t going to tug off her jeans and have intercourse with them or at the very least flirt back, they had no choice but to torment her further.

“The thing is, this isn’t the kind of traffic detail you’re probably used to,” Earl said to her. “Hey, Jim, this as bad as the one you saw last week?”

“That head we found?” The cop mused, “Hell, I’d rather have a fresh head any day than a month-er. You ever seen a month-er, honey? Now, they’re about as unpleasant as can be. Give a body three, four months in the water, hey, not a problem – mostly just bones. But you get one’s been simmering for a month…”

“Nasty,” Earl said. “Uck-o.”

“You ever seen a month-er, honey?”

“ ’Preciate your not saying that, Jim,” she said absently to the cop.

“ ‘Month-er’?”

“ ‘Honey.’ ”

“Sure, sorry.”

“Sachs,” Rhyme snapped, “what the hell is going on?”

“No ID, Rhyme. Nobody’s got a clue as to who it is. Hands removed with a fine-bladed razor saw.”

“Is Percey safe? Hale?”

“They’re in the office. Banks’s with them. Away from the windows. What’s the word on the van?”

“Should be there in ten minutes. You’ve got to find out about that body.”

“You talking to yourself, hon – Officer?”

Sachs studied the poor man’s body. She guessed the hands had been removed just after he’d died, or as he was dying, because of the copious amount of blood. She pulled on her latex examining gloves.

“It’s strange, Rhyme. Why’s he only partially ID-proofed?”

If killers don’t have time to dispose of a body completely they ID-proof it by removing the main points of identification: the hands and the teeth.

“I don’t know,” the criminalist responded. “It’s not like the Dancer to be careless, even if he was in a hurry. What’s he wearing?”

“Just skivvies. No clothes or other ID found at the scene.”

“Why,” Rhyme mused, “did the Dancer pick him?”

“If it was the Dancer did this.”

“How many bodies turn up like that in Westchester?”

“To hear the locals tell it,” she said ruefully, “every other day.”

“Tell me about the corpse. COD?”

“You determine the cause of death?” she called to chubby Earl.

“Strangled,” the tech said.

But Sachs noticed right away there were no petechial hemorrhages on the inner surface of the eyelids. No damage to the tongue either. Most strangulation victims bite their tongue at some point during the attack.

“I don’t think so.”

Earl cast another glance at Jim and snorted. “Sure, he was. Lookit that red line on his neck. We call that a ligature mark, honey. You know, we can’t keep him here forever. They start going ripe, days like this. Now, that’s a smell you haven’t lived till you smelled.”

Sachs frowned. “He wasn’t strangled.”

They double-teamed her. “Hon – Officer, that’s a ligature mark,” Jim, the trooper, said. “I seen hundreds of ’em.”

“No, no,” she said. “The perp just ripped a chain off him.”

Rhyme broke in. “That’s probably it, Sachs. First thing you do when you’re ID-proofing a corpse, get rid of the jewelry. It was probably a Saint Christopher, maybe inscribed. Who’s there with you?”

“A pair of cretins,” she said.

“Oh. Well, what is the COD?”

After a brief search she found the wound. “Ice pick or narrow-bladed knife in the back of the skull.”

The medic’s round form eased into the doorway. “We woulda found that,” he said defensively. “I mean, we were in such an all-fire hurry to get here, thanks to you folks.”

Rhyme said to Sachs, “Describe him.”

“He’s overweight, big gut. Lotta flab.”

“Tan or sunburn?”

“On his arms and torso only. Not legs. He’s got untrimmed toenails and a cheap earring – steel posts, not gold. His briefs are Sears and they’ve got holes in them.”

“Okay, he’s looking blue collar,” Rhyme said. “Workman, deliveryman. We’re closing in. Check his throat.”

“What?”

“For his wallet or papers. If you want to keep a corpse anonymous for a few hours you shove his IDs down his throat. It doesn’t get spotted till the autopsy.”

A chortle of laughter from outside.

Which Sachs ended quickly when she grabbed the man’s jaws, pulled wide, and started reaching inside.

“Jesus,” Earl muttered. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing there, Rhyme.”

“You better cut. The throat. Go deeper.”

Sachs had bridled at some of Rhyme’s more macabre requests in the past. But today she glanced at the grinning boys behind her and lifted her illegal but cherished switchblade from her jeans pocket, clicked it open.

Took the grins off both faces.

“Say, honey, what’re you doing?”

“Little surgery. Gotta look inside.” Like she did this every day.

“I mean, I can’t deliver no corpse to the coroner cut up by some New York City cop.”

“Then you do it.”

She offered him the handle of the knife.

“Aw, she’s shitting us, Jim.”

She lifted an eyebrow and slipped the knife into the man’s Adam’s apple like a fisherman gutting a trout.

“Oh, Jesus, Jim, lookit what she’s doing. Stop her.”

“I’m outa here, Earl. I didn’t see that.” The trooper walked off.

She finished the tidy incision and gazed inside, sighed. “Nothing.”

“What the hell is he up to?” Rhyme asked. “Let’s think… What if he isn’t ID-proofing the body? If he’d wanted to he would’ve taken the teeth. What if there’s something else he’s trying to hide from us?”

“Something on the vic’s hands?” Sachs suggested.

“Maybe,” Rhyme responded. “Something that he couldn’t wash off the corpse easily. And something that’d tell us what he was up to.”

“Oil? Grease?”

“Maybe he was delivering jet fuel,” Rhyme said. “Or maybe he was a caterer – maybe his hands smelled of garlic.”

Sachs looked around the airport. There were dozens of gasoline deliverymen, ground crews, repairmen, construction workers building a new wing on one of the terminals.

Rhyme continued, “He’s a big guy?”

“Yep.”

“He was probably sweating today. Maybe he wiped his head. Or scratched it.”

I’ve been doing that all day myself, Sachs thought, and felt an urge to dig into her hair, hurt her skin as she always did when she felt frustrated and tense.

“Check his scalp, Sachs. Behind the hairline.”

She did.

And there she found it.

“I see streaks of color. Blue. Bits of white too. On the hair and skin. Oh, hell, Rhyme. It’s paint! He’s a painting contractor. And there’re about twenty construction workers on the grounds.”

“The line on the neck,” Rhyme continued. “The Dancer pulled off his necklace ID.”

“But the picture’d be different.”

“Hell, the ID’s probably covered with paint or he faked it somehow. He’s on the field somewhere, Sachs. Get Percey and Hale down on the floor. Put a guard on ’em and get everybody else out, looking for the Dancer. SWAT’s on its way.”

Problems.

He was watching the red-haired cop in the back of the ambulance. Through the Redfield telescope he couldn’t see clearly what she was doing. But he suddenly felt uneasy.

He felt she was doing something to him. Something to expose him, to tie him down.

The worms were getting closer. The face at the window, the wormy face, was looking for him.

Stephen shuddered.

She jumped out of the ambulance, looking around the field.

Something’s happening, Soldier.

Sir, I am aware of that, sir.

The redhead began shouting orders to other cops. Most of them looked at her, took her news grimly, then looked around. One ran to his car, then a second.

He saw the redhead’s pretty face and her wormy eyes scanning the airport grounds. He rested the reticles on her perfect chin. What had she found? What was she looking for?

She paused and he saw her talking to herself.

No, not herself. She was talking into a headset. The way she’d listen, then nod, it seemed that she was taking orders from someone.

Who? he wondered.

Someone who’d figured out that I’m here, Stephen thought.

Someone looking for me.

Someone who can watch me through windows and disappear instantly. Who can move through walls and holes and tiny cracks to sneak up and find me.

A chill down his back – he actually shivered – and for a moment the reticles of the telescope danced away from the redheaded cop and he lost acquisition of a target completely.

What the fuck was that, Soldier?

Sir, I don’t know, sir.

When he reacquired the redhead he saw how bad things were. She was pointing right at the painting contractor’s van he’d just stolen. It was parked about two hundred feet from him, in a small parking lot reserved for construction trucks.

Whoever the redhead was talking to had found the painter’s body and discovered how he’d gotten onto the airport grounds.

The worm moved closer. He felt its shadow, its cold slime.

The cringey feeling. Worms crawling up his legs… worms crawling down his neck…

What should I do? he wondered.

One chance… one shot…

They’re so close, the Wife and the Friend. He could finish everything right now. Five seconds was all it would take. Maybe those were their outlines he could see in the window. That shadowy form. Or that one… But Stephen knew that if he fired through the glass, everyone would drop to the floor. If he didn’t kill the Wife with the first shot, he’d ruin the chance.

I need her outside. I need to draw them out of cover into the kill zone. I can’t miss there.

He had no time. No time! Think!

If you want a doe, endanger the fawn.

Stephen began breathing slowly. In, out, in, out. He drew his target. Began applying pressure, imperceptible, to the trigger. The Model 40 fired.

The ka-boom rolled over the field and all the cops hit the ground, drawing their weapons.

Another shot, and a second puff of smoke flew from the tail-mounted engine of the silver jet in the hangar.

The redheaded cop, her own gun in hand, was crouching, scanning for location. She glanced at the two smoking holes in the skin of the plane, then looked out over the field once more, pointing a stubby Glock out in front of her.

Take her out?

Yes? No?

Negative, Soldier. Stay fixed on your target.

He fired again. The puff of explosion tore another tiny chunk out of the side of the airplane.

Calm. Another shot. The kick in the shoulder, the sweet smell of the burnt powder. A windshield in the cockpit exploded.

This was the shot that did it.

Suddenly there she was – the Wife – forcing her way through the office door, grappling with the young blond cop who tried to hold her back.

No target yet. Keep her coming.

Squeeze. Another bullet tore through the engine.

The Wife, her face horrified, broke free and ran down the stairs toward the hangar to close the doors, to protect her child.

Reload.

He laid the reticles on her chest as she stepped to the ground and started to run.

Full target lead of four inches, Stephen calculated automatically. He moved the gun ahead of her and squeezed the trigger. It fired just as the blond cop tackled her and they went down below a slight dip in the earth. A miss. And they had just enough cover to keep him from skimming slugs into their backs.

They’re moving in, Soldier. They’re flanking you.

Yessir, understood.

Stephen glanced over the runways. Other police had appeared. They were crawling toward their cars. One car was speeding directly toward him, only fifty yards away. Stephen used one shot to take out the engine block. Steam spraying from the front end, the car eased to a stop.

Stay calm, he told himself.

We’re prepared to evacuate. We just need one clear shot.

He heard several fast pistol shots. He looked back at the redhead. She was in a competition combat stance, pointing the stubby pistol in his direction, looking for his muzzle flash. The sound of the shot wouldn’t do her any good, of course; it was why he never bothered with silencers. Loud noises are as hard to pinpoint as soft ones.

The redheaded cop was standing tall, squinting as she gazed.

Stephen closed the bolt of the Model 40.

Amelia Sachs saw a faint glimmer and she knew where the Coffin Dancer was.

In a small grove of trees about three hundred yards away. His telescopic sight caught the reflected glint of the pale clouds overhead.

“Over there,” she cried, pointing, to two county cops huddling in their cruiser.

The troopers rolled into their car and took off, skidding behind a nearby hangar to flank him.

“Sachs,” Rhyme called through her headset. “What’s -”

“Jesus, Rhyme, he’s on the field, shooting at the plane.”

“What?”

“Percey’s trying to get to the hangar. He’s shooting explosive slugs. He’s shooting to draw her out.”

“You stay down, Sachs. If Percey’s going to kill herself, let her. But you stay down!”

She was sweating furiously, hands shaking, heart pounding. She felt the quiver of panic run down her back.

“Percey!” Sachs cried.

The woman had broken free from Jerry Banks and rolled to her feet. She was speeding toward the hangar door.

“No!”

Oh, hell.

Sachs’s eyes were on the spot where she’d seen the flare of the Dancer’s ’scope.

Too far, it’s too far, she thought. I can’t hit anything at that distance.

If you stay calm, you can. You’ve got eleven rounds left. There’s no wind. Trajectory’s the only problem. Aim high and work down.

She saw several leaves fly outward as the Dancer fired again.

An instant later a bullet passed within inches of her face. She felt the shock wave and heard the snap as the slug, traveling twice the speed of sound, burned the air around her.

She uttered a faint whimper and dropped to her stomach, cowering.

No! You had a chance to shoot. Before he rechambered. But it’s too late now. He’s locked and loaded again.

She looked up fast, lifted her gun, then lost her nerve. Head down, the Glock pointed generally in the direction of the trees, she fired five fast shots.

But she might as well have been shooting blanks.

Come on, girl. Get up. Aim and shoot. You got six left and two clips on your belt.

But the thought of the near miss kept her pinned to the ground.

Do it! she raged at herself.

But she couldn’t.

All Sachs had the courage for was to raise her head a few inches – just far enough to see Percey Clay, sprinting, race to the hangar door just as Jerry Banks caught up with her. The young detective shoved her down to the ground behind a generator cart. Almost simultaneously with the rolling boom of the Coffin Dancer’s rifle there came the sickening crack of the bullet striking Banks, who spun about like a drunk as blood puffed into a cloud around him.

And on his face, first a look of surprise, then of bewilderment, then of nothing whatsoever as he spiraled down to the damp concrete.

chapter twelve

Hour 5 of 45

“WELL?” RHYME ASKED.

Lon Sellitto folded up his phone. “They still don’t know.” Eyes out the window of Rhyme’s town house, tapping the glass compulsively. The falcons had returned to the ledge but kept their eyes vigilantly on Central Park, uncharacteristically oblivious to the noise.

Rhyme had never seen the detective this upset. His doughy, sweat-dotted face was pale. A legendary homicide investigator, Sellitto was usually unflappable. Whether he was reassuring victims’ families or relentlessly punching holes in a suspect’s alibi, he always concentrated on the job before him. But at the moment his thoughts seemed miles away, with Jerry Banks, in surgery – maybe dying – in a Westchester hospital. It was now three on Saturday afternoon and Banks had been in the operating room for an hour.

Sellitto, Sachs, Rhyme, and Cooper were on the ground floor of Rhyme’s town house, in the lab. Dellray had left to make sure the safe house was ready and to check out the new baby-sitter the NYPD was providing to replace Banks.

At the airport they’d loaded the wounded young detective into the ambulance – the same one containing the dead, handless painting contractor. Earl, the medic, had stopped being an asshole long enough to work feverishly to stop Banks’s torrential bleeding. Then he’d sped the pale, unconscious detective to the emergency room several miles away.

FBI agents from White Plains got Percey and Hale into an armored van and started south to Manhattan, using evasive driving techniques. Sachs worked the new crime scenes: the sniper’s nest, the painter’s van, and the Dancer’s getaway wheels – a catering van. It was found not far from where he’d killed the contractor and where, they guessed, he’d have hidden the car he’d driven to Westchester in.

Then she’d sped back to Manhattan with the evidence.

“What’ve we got?” Rhyme now asked her and Cooper. “Any rifle slugs?”

Worrying a tattered bloody nail, Sachs explained, “Nothing left of them. They were explosive rounds.” She seemed very spooked, eyes flitting like birds’.

“That’s the Dancer. Not only deadly but his evidence self-destructs.”

Sachs prodded a plastic bag. “Here’s what’s left of one. I scraped it off a wall.”

Cooper spilled the contents into a porcelain examining tray. He stirred them. “Ceramic tipped too. Vests’re pointless.”

“Grade-A asshole,” Sellitto offered.

“Oh, the Dancer knows his tools,” Rhyme said.

There was a bustle of activity at the doorway and Thom let two suited FBI agents into the room. Behind them were Percey Clay and Brit Hale.

Percey asked Sellitto, “How’s he doing?” Her dark eyes looked around the room, saw the coolness that greeted her. Didn’t seem fazed. “Jerry, I mean.”

Sellitto didn’t answer.

Rhyme said, “He’s still in surgery.”

Her face was fretted, hair more tangled than this morning. “I hope he’ll be all right.”

Amelia Sachs turned to Percey and said coldly, “You what?”

“I said, I hope he’ll be all right.”

“You hope?” The policewoman towered over her. She stepped closer. The squat woman stood her ground as Sachs continued, “Little late for that, isn’t it?”

“What’s your problem?”

“That’s what I oughta be asking you. You got him shot.”

“Hey, Officer -” Sellitto said.

Composed, Percey said, “I didn’t ask him to run after me.”

“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for him.”

“Maybe. We don’t know that. I’m sorry he was hurt. I -”

“And how sorry are you?”

“Amelia,” Rhyme said sharply.

“No, I want to know how sorry. Are you sorry enough to give blood? To wheel him around if he can’t walk? Give his eulogy if he dies?”

Rhyme snapped, “Sachs, take it easy. It’s not her fault.”

Sachs slapped her hands, tipped in chewed nails, against her thighs. “It’s not?”

“The Dancer out-thought us.”

Sachs continued, gazing down into Percey’s dark eyes. “Jerry was baby-sitting you. When you ran into the line of fire what’d you think he was going to do?”

“Well, I didn’t think, okay? I just reacted.”

“Jesus.”

“Hey, Officer,” Hale said, “maybe you act a lot cooler under pressure than some of us. But we’re not used to getting shot at.”

“Then she should’ve stayed down. In the office. Where I told her to stay.”

There seemed to be a slight drawl in Percey’s voice when she continued. “I saw my aircraft endangered. I reacted. Maybe for you it’s like seeing your partner wounded.”

Hale said, “She just did what any pilot would’ve done.”

“Exactly,” Rhyme announced. “That’s what I’m saying, Sachs. That’s the way the Dancer works.”

But Amelia Sachs wasn’t letting go. “You should’ve been in the safe house in the first place. You never should have gone to the airport.”

“That was Jerry’s fault,” said Rhyme, growing angrier. “He had no authority to change the route.”

Sachs glanced at Sellitto, who’d been Banks’s partner for two years. But apparently he wasn’t about to stand up for the young man.

“This’s been real pleasant,” Percey Clay said dryly, turning toward the door. “But I’ve got to get back to the airport.”

“What?” Sachs almost gasped. “Are you crazy?”

“That’s impossible,” Sellitto said, emerging from his gloom.

“It was bad enough just trying to get my aircraft outfitted for the flight tomorrow. Now we’ve got to repair the damage too. And since it looks like every certified mechanic in Westchester ’s a damn coward I’m going to have to do the work myself.”

“Mrs. Clay,” Sellitto began, “not a good idea. You’ll be okay in the safe house but there’s no way we can guarantee your safety anywhere else. You stay there until Monday, you’ll be -”

“Monday,” she blurted. “Oh, no. You don’t understand. I’m driving that aircraft tomorrow night – the charter for U.S. Medical.”

“You can’t -”

“A question,” asked the icy voice of Amelia Sachs. “Could you tell me exactly who else you want to kill?”

Percey stepped forward. She snapped, “Goddamn it, I lost my husband and one of my best employees last night. I’m not losing my company too. You can’t tell me where I’m going or not. Not unless I’m under arrest.”

“Okay,” Sachs said, and in a flash the cuffs were ratcheted onto the woman’s narrow wrists. “You’re under arrest.”

“Sachs,” Rhyme called, enraged. “What are you doing? Uncuff her. Now!”

Sachs swung to face him, snapped back, “You’re a civilian. You can’t order me to do a thing!”

“I can,” Sellitto said.

“Uh-un,” she said adamantly. “I’m the arresting, Detective. You can’t stop me from making a collar. Only the DA can throw a case out.”

“What is this bullshit?” Percey spat out, the vestigial drawl returning full force. “What’re you arresting me for? Being a witness?”

“The charge is reckless endangerment, and if Jerry dies then it’ll be criminally negligent homicide. Or maybe manslaughter.”

Hale worked up some courage and said, “Look now. I don’t really like the way you’ve been talking to her all day. If you arrest her, you’re going to have to arrest me…”

“Not a problem,” Sachs said, then turned to Sellitto. “Lieutenant, I need your cuffs.”

“Officer, enougha this crap,” he grumbled.

“Sachs,” Rhyme called, “we don’t have time for this! The Dancer’s out there, planning another attack right now.”

“You arrest me,” Percey said, “I’ll be out in two hours.”

“Then you’ll be dead in two hours and ten minutes. Which would be your business -”

“Officer,” Sellitto snapped, “you’re on real thin ice here.”

“- if you didn’t have this habit of taking other people with you.”

“Amelia,” Rhyme said coldly.

She swung to face him. He called her “Sachs” most of the time; using her first name now was like a slap in the face.

The chains on Percey’s bony wrists clinked. In the window the falcon fluttered its wings. No one said a word.

Finally, in a reasonable voice, Rhyme asked, “Please take the cuffs off and let me have a few minutes alone with Percey.”

Sachs hesitated. Her face was an expressionless mask.

“Please, Amelia,” Rhyme said, struggling to be patient.

Without a word she unhooked the cuffs.

Everyone filed out.

Percey rubbed her wrists then pulled her flask from her pocket and took a sip.

“Would you mind closing the door?” Rhyme asked Sachs.

But she merely glanced toward him and then continued into the corridor. It was Hale who swung the heavy oak door shut.

Outside in the hallway Lon Sellitto called again about Banks. He was still in surgery and the floor nurse would say nothing else about him.

Sachs took this news with a faint nod. She walked to the window overlooking the alley behind Rhyme’s town house. The oblique light fell onto her hands and she looked at her torn nails. She’d put bandages on two of the most damaged fingers. Habits, she thought. Bad habits… Why can’t I stop?

The detective walked up beside her, looked up at the gray sky. More spring storms were promised.

“Officer,” he said, speaking softly so none of the others could hear. “She fucked up, that lady did, okay. But you gotta understand – she’s not a pro. Our mistake was letting her fuck up and, yeah, Jerry should’ve known better. It hurts me more than I can even think about to say it. But he blew it.”

“No,” she said through clenched teeth. “You don’t understand.”

“Whatsat?”

Could she say it? The words were so hard.

“I blew it. It’s not Jerry’s fault.” She tossed her head toward Rhyme’s room. “Or Percey’s. It’s mine.”

“You? Fuck, you ’n’ Rhyme’re the ones figured out he was at the airport. He mighta nailed everybody, it wasn’t for you.”

She was shaking her head. “I saw… I saw the Dancer’s position before he capped Jerry.”

“And?”

“I knew exactly where he was. I drew a target. I…”

Oh, hell. This was hard.

“What’re you sayin’, Officer?”

“He let off a round at me… Oh, Christ. I clenched. I hit the ground.” Her finger disappeared into her scalp and she scratched until she felt slick blood. Stop it. Shit.

“So?” Sellitto didn’t get it. “Everybody hit the deck, right? I mean, who wouldn’t?”

Staring out the window, face burning with shame. “After he fired and missed, I’d’ve had at least three seconds to fire – I knew he was shooting bolt action. I could’ve lost a whole clip at him. But I tongued dirt. Then I didn’t have the balls to get up again because I knew he’d rechambered.”

Sellitto scoffed. “What? You’re worried ’cause you didn’t stand up, without cover, and give a sniper a nice fat target? Come on, Officer… And, hey, wait a minute; you had your service weapon?”

“Yeah, I -”

“Three hundred yards with a Glock nine? In your dreams.”

“I might not have hit him but I could’ve parked enough nearby to keep him pinned down. So he wouldn’t’ve got that last shot in and hit Jerry. Oh, hell.” She clenched her hands, looked at her index-finger nail again. It was dark with blood. She scratched harder.

The brilliant red reminded her of the dust cloud of blood rising around Jerry Banks and so she scratched harder still.

“Officer, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that one.”

How could she explain? What was eating at her now was more complex than the detective knew. Rhyme was the best criminalist in New York, maybe in the country. Sachs aspired, but she’d never match him at that. But shooting – like driving fast – was one of her gifts. She could outshoot most of the men and women on the force, either-handed. She’d prop dimes up on the fifty-yard range and shoot for the glare, making presents of the bent coins for her goddaughter and her friends. She could have saved Jerry. Hell, she might even have hit the son of a bitch.

She was furious with herself, furious with Percey for putting her in this position.

And furious with Rhyme too.

The door swung open and Percey appeared. With a cold look at Sachs she asked Hale to join them. He disappeared into the room and a few minutes later it was Hale who opened the door and said, “He’d like everyone back inside.”

Sachs found them this way: Percey was sitting next to Rhyme in a battered old armchair. She had this ridiculous image of them as a married couple.

“We’re compromising,” Rhyme announced. “Brit and Percey’ll go to Dellray’s safe house. They’ll have somebody else do the repairs on the plane. Whether we find the Dancer or not, though, I’ve agreed to let her make the flight tomorrow night.”

“And if I just arrest her?” Sachs said heatedly. “Take her to detention?”

She’d thought Rhyme would explode at this – she was ready for it – but he said reasonably, “I thought about that, Sachs. And I don’t believe it’s a good idea. There’d be more exposure – court, detention, transport. The Dancer’d have more of a chance to get them.”

Amelia Sachs hesitated then gave in, nodded. He was right; he usually was. But right or not, he’d have things his way. She was his assistant, nothing more. An employee. That’s all she was to him.

Rhyme continued. “Here’s what I’ve got in mind. We’re going to set a trap. I’ll need your help, Lon.”

“Talk to me.”

“Percey and Hale’ll go to the safe house. But I want to make it look like they’re going someplace else. We’ll make a big deal out of it. Very visible. I’d pick one of the precincts, pretend they’re going into the lockup there for security. We’ll put out a transmission or two on citywide, unscrambled, that we’re closing the street in front of the station house for security and transporting all booked suspects down to detention to keep the facility clear. If we’re lucky the Dancer’ll be listening on a scanner. If not, the media’ll pick it up and he might hear about it that way.”

“How ’bout the Twentieth?” Sellitto suggested.

The Twentieth Precinct, on the Upper West Side, was only a few blocks from Lincoln Rhyme’s town house. He knew many of the officers there.

“Okay, good.”

Sachs then noticed some uneasiness in Sellitto’s eyes. He leaned forward toward Rhyme’s chair, sweat dripping down his broad, creased forehead. In a voice only Rhyme and Sachs could hear, he whispered, “You’re sure about this, Lincoln. I mean, you thought about it?”

Rhyme’s eyes swiveled toward Percey. A look passed between the two of them. Sachs didn’t know what it meant. She knew only that she didn’t like it.

“Yes,” Rhyme said. “I’m sure.”

Though to Sachs he didn’t seem very sure at all.

chapter thirteen

Hour 6 of 45

“LOTS OF TRACE, I SEE.”

Rhyme looked approvingly at the plastic bags Sachs had brought back from the airport crime scenes.

Trace evidence was Rhyme’s favorite – the bits and pieces, sometimes microscopic, left by perps at crime scenes, or picked up there by them unwittingly. It was trace evidence that even the cleverest of perps didn’t think to alter or plant and it was trace that even the most industrious couldn’t dispose of altogether.

“The first bag, Sachs? Where did it come from?”

She flipped angrily through her notes.

What was eating at her? he wondered. Something was wrong, Rhyme could see. Maybe it had to do with her anger at Percey Clay, maybe her concern for Jerry Banks. But maybe not. He could tell from the cool glances that she didn’t want to talk about it. Which was fine with him. The Dancer had to be caught. It was their only priority at the moment.

“This’s from the hangar where the Dancer waited for the plane.” She held up two of the bags. She nodded at three others. “This’s from the sniper’s nest. This’s from the painting van. This’s from the catering van.”

“Thom… Thom!” Rhyme shouted, startling everyone in the room.

The aide appeared in the doorway. He asked a belabored “Yes? I’m trying to fix some food here, Lincoln.”

“Food?” Rhyme asked, exasperated. “We don’t need to eat. We need more charts. Write: ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ Yes, ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ That’s good. Then another one. ‘CS-Three.’ That’s where he fired from. His grassy knoll.”

“I should write that? ‘Grassy Knoll’?”

“Of course not. It’s a joke. I do have a sense of humor, you know. Write: ‘CS-Three. Sniper’s Nest.’ Now, let’s look at the hangar first. What do you have?”

“Bits of glass,” Cooper said, spilling the contents out on a porcelain tray like a diamond merchant. Sachs added, “And some vacuumed trace, a few fibers from the windowsill. No FR.”

Friction ridge prints, she meant. Finger or palm.

“He’s too careful with prints,” Sellitto said glumly.

“No, that’s encouraging,” Rhyme said, irritated – as he often was – that no one else drew conclusions as quickly as he could.

“Why?” the detective asked.

“He’s careful because he’s on file somewhere! So when we do find a print we’ll stand a good chance of ID’ing him. Okay, okay, cotton glove prints, they’re no help… No boot prints because he scattered gravel on the hangar floor. He’s a smart one. But if he were stupid, nobody’d need us, right? Now, what does the glass tell us?”

“What could it tell us,” Sachs asked shortly, “except he broke in the window to get into the hangar?”

“I wonder,” Rhyme said. “Let’s look at it.”

Mel Cooper mounted several shards on a slide and placed it under the lens of the compound ’scope at low magnification. He clicked the video camera on to send the image to Rhyme’s computer.

Rhyme motored back to it. He instructed, “Command mode.” Hearing his voice, the computer dutifully slipped a menu onto the glowing screen. He couldn’t control the microscope itself but he could capture the image on the computer screen and manipulate it – magnify or shrink it, for instance. “Cursor left. Double click.”

Rhyme strained forward, lost in the rainbow auras of refraction. “Looks like standard PPG single-strength window glass.”

“Agreed,” Cooper said, then observed, “No chipping. It was broken by a blunt object. His elbow maybe.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Look at the conchoidal, Mel.”

When someone breaks a window the glass shatters in a series of conchoidal breaks – curved fracture lines. You can tell from the way they curve which direction the blow came from.

“I see it,” the tech said. “Standard fractures.”

“Look at the dirt,” Rhyme said abruptly. “On the glass.”

“See it. Rainwater deposits, mud, fuel residue.”

“What side of the glass is the dirt on?” Rhyme asked impatiently. When he was running IRD, one of the complaints of the officers under him was that he acted like a schoolmarm. Rhyme considered it a compliment.

“It’s… oh.” Cooper caught on. “How can that be?”

“What?” Sachs asked.

Rhyme explained. The conchoidal fractures began on the clean side of the glass and ended on the dirty side. “He was inside when he broke the window.”

“But he couldn’t’ve been,” Sachs protested. “The glass was inside the hangar. He -” She stopped and nodded. “You mean he broke it out, then scooped the glass up and threw it inside with the gravel. But why?”

“The gravel wasn’t to prevent shoe prints. It was to fool us into thinking he broke in. But he was already inside the hangar and broke out. Interesting.” The criminalist considered this for a moment, then shouted, “Check that trace. There any brass in it? Any brass with graphite on it?”

“A key,” Sachs said. “You’re thinking somebody gave him a key to get into the hangar.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Let’s find out who owns or leases the hangar.”

“I’ll call,” Sellitto said and flipped open his cell phone.

Cooper looked through the eyepiece of another microscope. He had it on high magnification. “Here we go,” he said. “ Lot of graphite and brass. What I’d guess is some 3-In-One oil too. So it was an old lock. He had to fiddle with it.”

“Or?” Rhyme prompted. “Come on, think!”

“Or a new-made key!” Sachs blurted.

“Right! A sticky one. Good. Thom, the chart, please! Write: ‘Access by key.’ ”

In his precise handwriting the aide wrote the words.

“Now, what else do we have?” Rhyme sipped and puffed and swung closer to the computer. He misjudged and slammed into it, nearly knocking over his monitor.

“Goddamn,” he muttered.

“You all right?” Sellitto asked.

“Fine, I’m fine,” he snapped. “Anything else? I was asking – anything else?”

Cooper and Sachs brushed the rest of the trace onto a large sheet of clean newsprint. They put on magnifying goggles and went over it. Cooper lifted several flecks with a probe and placed them on a slide.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “We’ve got fibers.”

A moment later Rhyme was looking at the tiny strands on his computer screen.

“What do you think, Mel? Paper, right?”

“Yep.”

Speaking into his headset, Rhyme ordered his computer to scroll through the microscopic images of the fibers. “Looks like two different kinds. One’s white or buff. The other’s got a green tint.”

“Green? Money?” Sellitto suggested.

“Possibly.”

“You have enough to gas a few?” Rhyme asked. The chromatograph would destroy the fibers.

Cooper said they had and proceeded to test several of them.

He read the computer screen. “No cotton and no soda, sulfite, or sulfate.”

These were chemicals added to the pulping process in making high-quality paper.

“It’s cheap paper. And the dye’s water soluble. There’s no oil-based ink.”

“So,” Rhyme announced, “it’s not money.”

“Probably recycled,” Cooper said.

Rhyme magnified the screen again. The matrix was large now and the detail lost. He was momentarily frustrated and wished that he was looking through a real compound ’scope eyepiece. There was nothing like the clarity of fine optics.

Then he saw something.

“Those yellow blotches, Mel? Glue?”

The tech looked through the microscope’s eyepiece and announced, “Yes. Envelope glue, looks like.”

So possibly the key had been delivered to the Dancer in an envelope. But what did the green paper signify? Rhyme had no idea.

Sellitto folded up his phone. “I talked to Ron Talbot at Hudson Air. He made a few calls. Guess who leases that hangar where the Dancer waited.”

“Phillip Hansen,” Rhyme said.

“Yep.”

“We’re making a good case,” Sachs said.

True, Rhyme thought, though his goal was not to hand the Dancer over to the AG with a watertight case. No, he wanted the man’s head on a pike.

“Anything else there?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, let’s move on to the other scene. The sniper’s nest. He was under a lot of pressure there. Maybe he got careless.”

But, of course, he hadn’t been careless.

There were no shell casings.

“Here’s why,” Cooper said, examining the trace through the ’scope. “Cotton fibers. He used a dish towel to catch the casings.”

Rhyme nodded. “Footprints?”

“Nope.” Sachs explained that the Dancer’d worked his way around the patches of exposed mud, staying on the grass even when he was racing to the catering van to escape.

“How many FRs you find?”

“None at the sniper’s nest,” she explained. “Close to two hundred in the two vans.”

Using AFIS – the automated fingerprint identification system that linked digitalized criminal, military, and civil service fingerprint databases around the country – a cold search of this many prints would be possible (though very time consuming). But as obsessed as Rhyme was with finding the Dancer, he didn’t bother with an AFIS request. Sachs reported that she’d found his glove prints in the vans too. The friction ridge prints inside the vehicles wouldn’t be the Dancer’s.

Cooper emptied the plastic bag onto an examining tray. He and Sachs looked over it. “Dirt, grass, pebbles… Here we go. Can you see this, Lincoln?” Cooper mounted another slide.

“Hairs,” Cooper said, bent over his own ’scope. “Three, four, six, nine… a dozen of ’em. It looks like a continuous medulla.”

The medulla is a canal running through the middle of a strand of some types of hair. In humans, the medulla is either nonexistent or fragmented. A continuous medulla meant the hair was animal. “What do you think, Mel?”

“I’ll run them through the SEM.” The scanning electron microscope. Cooper ran the scale up to 1500X magnification and adjusted dials until one of the hairs was centered in the screen. It was a whitish stalk with sharp-edged scales resembling a pineapple’s skin.

“Cat,” Rhyme announced.

“Cats, plural,” Cooper corrected, looking into the compound ’scope again. “Looks like we’ve got a black and a calico. Both shorthairs. Then a tawny, long and fine. Persian, something like that.”

Rhyme snorted. “Don’t think the Dancer’s profile’s that he’s an animal lover. He’s either passing for somebody with cats or’s staying with somebody who’s got ’em.”

“More hair,” Cooper announced and mounted a slide on the compound ’scope. “Human. It’s… wait, two strands about six inches long.”

“He’s shedding, huh?” Sellitto asked.

“Who knows?” Rhyme said skeptically. Without the bulb attached, it’s impossible to determine the sex of the person who lost the strand. Age, except with an infant’s hair, was also impossible to tell. Rhyme suggested, “Maybe it’s the paint truck driver’s. Sachs? He have long hair?”

“No. Crew cut. And it was blond.”

“What do you think, Mel?”

The tech scanned the length of the hair. “It’s been colored.”

“The Dancer’s known for changing his appearance,” Rhyme said.

“Don’t know, Lincoln,” Cooper said. “The dye’s similar to the natural shade. You’d think he’d go for something very different if he wanted to change his identity. Wait, I see two colors of dye. The natural shade is black. It’s had some auburn added, and then more recently a dark purple wash. About two to three months apart.

“I’m also picking up a lot of residue here, Lincoln. I ought to gas one of the hairs.”

“Do it.”

A moment later Cooper was reading the chart on the computer connected to the GC/MS. “Okay, we’ve got some kind of cosmetic.”

Makeup was very helpful to the criminalist; cosmetic manufacturers were notorious for changing the formulation of their products to take advantage of new trends. Different compositions could often be pinpointed to different dates of manufacture and distribution locations.

“What do we have?”

“Hold on.” Cooper was sending the formula to the brand-name database. A moment later he had an answer. “Slim-U-Lite. Swiss made, imported by Jencon, outside of Boston. It’s a regular detergent-based soap with oils and amino acids added. It was in the news – the FTC’s on their case for claiming that it takes off fat and cellulite.”

“Let’s profile,” he announced. “Sachs, what do you think?”

“About him?”

“About her. The one aiding and abetting him. Or the one he killed to hide out in her apartment. And maybe steal her car.”

“You’re sure it’s a woman?” wondered Lon Sellitto.

“No. But we don’t have time to be timid in our speculations. More women are worried about cellulite than men. More women color their hair than men. Bold propositions! Come on!”

“Well, overweight,” Sachs said. “Self-image problem.”

“Maybe punky, New Wave, or whatever the fuck the weirdos call ’emselves nowadays,” Sellitto suggested. “My daughter turned her hair purple. Pierced some stuff too, which I don’t want to talk about. How ’bout the East Village?”

“I don’t think she’s going for a rebel image,” Sachs said. “Not with those colors. They’re not different enough. She’s trying to be stylish and nothing she’s doing is working. I say she’s fat, with short hair, in her thirties, professional. Goes home alone to her cats at night.”

Rhyme nodded, staring at the chart. “Lonely. Just the sort to get suckered in by somebody with a glib tongue. Let’s check veterinarians. We know she’s got three cats, three different colors.”

“But where?” Sellitto asked. “ Westchester? Manhattan?”

“Let’s first ask,” Rhyme mulled, “why would he hook up with this woman in the first place?”

Sachs snapped her fingers. “Because he had to! Because we nearly trapped him.” Her face had lit up. Some of the old Amelia was back.

“Yes!” Rhyme said. “This morning, near Percey’s town house. When ESU moved in.”

Sachs continued. “He ditched the van and hid out in her apartment until it was safe to move.”

Rhyme said to Sellitto, “Get some people calling vets. For ten blocks around the town house. No, make it the whole Upper East Side. Call, Lon, call!”

As the detective punched numbers into his phone, Sachs asked gravely, “You think she’s all right? The woman?”

Rhyme answered from his heart though not with what he believed to be the truth. “We can hope, Sachs. We can hope.”

chapter fourteen

Hour 7 of 45

TO PERCEY CLAY THE SAFE HOUSE didn’t appear particularly safe.

It was a three-story brownstone structure like many others along this block near the Morgan Library.

“This’s it,” an agent said to her and Brit Hale, nodding out the window of the van. They parked in the alley and she and Hale were hustled through a basement entrance. The steel door slammed shut. They found themselves staring at an affable man in his late thirties, lean and with thinning brown hair. He grinned.

“Howdy,” he said, showing his NYPD identification and gold shield. “Roland Bell. From now on you meet anybody, even somebody charming as me, ask ’em for an ID and make sure it’s got an identical picture on it.”

Percey listened to his relentless drawl and asked, “Don’t tell me… you’re a Tarheel?”

“That I am.” He laughed. “Lived in Hoggston – not a joke, no – until I escaped to Chapel Hill for four years. Understand you’re a Richmond gal.”

“Was. Long time ago.”

“And you, Mr. Hale?” Bell asked. “You flying the Stars and Bars too?”

“ Michigan,” Hale said, shaking the detective’s vigorous hand. “Via Ohio.”

“Don’t you worry, I’ll forgive you for that little mistake of yours in the eighteen sixties.”

“I myself would’ve surrendered,” Hale joked. “Nobody asked me.”

“Hah. Now, I’m a Homicide detective but I keep drawing this witness protection detail ’cause I have this knack of keeping people alive. So my dear friend Lon Sellitto asked me to help him out. I’ll be babysitting y’all for a spell.”

Percey asked, “How’s that other detective?”

“Jerry? What I hear, he’s still in the operating room. No news yet.”

His speech may have been slow but his eyes were very fast, scooting over their bodies. Looking for what? Percey wondered. To see if they were armed? Had microphones hidden on them? Then he’d scan the corridor. Then the windows.

“Now,” Bell said, “I’m a nice fellow but I can be a bit muley when it comes to looking after who I’m s’posed to.” He gave Percey a faint smile. “You look a bit muley yourself but just remember that everything I tell you t’do’s for your own good. All right? All right. Hey, I think we’re going to get along just fine. Now lemme show you our grade-A accommodations.”

As they walked upstairs he said, “Y’all’re probably dead to know how safe this place is…”

Hale asked uncertainly, “What was that again? ‘Dead to know’?”

“Means, uhm, eager. I guess I talk a bit South still. Boys down in the Big Building – that’s headquarters – fool with me some. Leave messages saying they’ve collared themselves a redneck and want me to translate for ’em. Anyway, this place is good ’n’ safe. Our friends in Justice, oh, they know what they’re doing. Bigger’n it looks from the outside, right?”

“Bigger than a cockpit, smaller than an open road,” Hale said.

Bell chuckled. “Those front windows? Didn’t look too secure when you were driving up.”

“That was one thing…,” Percey began.

“Well, here’s the front room. Take a peek.” He pushed open a door.

There were no windows. Sheets of steel had been bolted over them. “Curtains’re on the other side,” Bell explained. “From the street it looks just like dark rooms. All the other windows’re bulletproof glass. But you stay away from ’em all the same. And keep the shades drawn. The fire escape and roof’re loaded with sensors and we’ve got tons of video cameras hidden around the place. Anybody comes near we check ’em clip and clean ’fore they get to the front door. It’d take a ghost with anorexia to get in here.” He walked down a wide corridor. “Follow me down this dogtrot here… Okay, that’s your room there, Mrs. Clay.”

“Long as we’re living together, you may’s well call me Percey.”

“Done deal. And you’re over here…”

“Brit.”

The rooms were small and dark and very still – very different from Percey’s office in the corner of the hangar at Hudson Air. She thought of Ed, who preferred to have an office in the main building, his desk organized, pictures of B17s and P-51s on the wall, Lucite paperweights on every stack of documents. Percey liked the smell of jet fuel, and for a sound track to her workday the buzz saw of pneumatic wrenches. She thought of them together, him perched on her desk, sharing coffee. She managed to push the thought away before the tears started again.

Bell called on his walkie-talkie. “Principals in position.” A moment later two uniformed policemen appeared in the corridor. They nodded and one of them said, “We’ll be out here. Full-time.” Curiously, their New York twang didn’t seem that different from Bell ’s resonant drawl.

“That was good,” Bell said to Percey.

She raised an eyebrow.

“You checked his ID. Nobody’s gonna get the bulge on you.”

She smiled wanly.

Bell said to Percey, “Now, we’ve got two men with your mother-in-law in New Jersey. Any other family needs watching?”

Percey said she didn’t, not in the area.

He repeated the question to Hale, who answered, with a rueful grin, “Not unless an ex-wife’s considered family. Well, wives.”

“Okay. Cats’r dogs need watering?”

“Nope,” Percey said. Hale shook his head.

“Then we may’s well just ree-lax. No phone calls from cell phones if you’ve got one. Only use that line there. Remember the windows and curtains. Over there, that’s a panic button. Worse comes to worst, and it won’t, you hit it and drop to the ground. Now, you need anything, just give me a holler.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Percey said. She held up the silver flask.

“Well, now,” Bell drawled, “you want me to help you empty it, I’m afraid I’m still on duty. But ’preciate the offer. You want me to help you fill it, why, that’s a done deal.”

Their scam didn’t make the five o’clock news.

But three transmissions went out unscrambled on a citywide police channel, informing the precincts about a 10-66 secure operation at the Twentieth Precinct and broadcasting a 10-67 traffic advisory about street closures on the Upper West Side. All suspects apprehended within the borders of the Twentieth were to be taken directly to Central Booking and the Men’s or Women’s Detention Center downtown. No one would be allowed in or out of the precinct without a special okay from the FBI. Or the FAA – Dellray’s touch.

As this was being broadcast, Bo Haumann’s 32-E teams went into position around the station house.

Haumann was now in charge of that portion of the operation. Fred Dellray was putting together a federal hostage rescue team in case they discovered the cat lady’s identity and her apartment. Rhyme, along with Sachs and Cooper, continued to work the evidence from the crime scenes.

There were no new clues, but Rhyme wanted Sachs and Cooper to reexamine what they’d already found. This was criminalistics – you looked and looked and looked, and then, when you couldn’t find anything, you looked some more. And when you hit the inevitable brick wall, you kept right on looking.

Rhyme had wheeled up close to his computer and was ordering it to magnify images of the timer found in the wreckage of Ed Carney’s plane. The timer itself might have been useless, because it was so generic, but Rhyme wondered if it might not contain a little trace or even a partial latent print. Bombers often believe that fingerprints are destroyed in the detonation and will shun gloves when working with the tinier components of the devices. But the blast itself will not necessarily destroy prints. Rhyme now ordered Cooper to fume the timer in the SuperGlue frame and, when that revealed nothing, to dust it with the Magna-Brush, a technique for raising prints that uses fine magnetic powder. Once again he found nothing.

Finally he ordered that the sample be bombarded by the nit-yag, slang for a garnet laser that was state-of-the-art in raising otherwise invisible prints. Cooper was looking at the image under the ’scope while Rhyme examined it on his computer screen.

Rhyme gave a short laugh, squinted, then looked again, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“Is that?… Look. Lower right-hand corner!” Rhyme called.

But Cooper and Sachs could see nothing.

His computer-enhanced image had found something that Cooper’s optical ’scope had missed. On the lip of metal that had protected the timer from being blown to smithereens was a faint crescent of ridge endings, crossings, and bifurcations. It was no more than a sixteenth of an inch wide and maybe a half inch long.

“It’s a print,” Rhyme said.

“Not enough to compare,” Cooper said, gazing at Rhyme’s screen.

There are a total of about 150 individual ridge characteristics in a single fingerprint but an expert can determine a match with only eight to sixteen ridge matches. Unfortunately this sample didn’t even provide half that.

Still, Rhyme was excited. The criminalist who couldn’t twist the focus knob of a compound ’scope had found something that the others hadn’t. Something he probably would have missed if he’d been “normal.”

He ordered the computer to load a screen capture program and he saved the print as a.bmp file, not compressing it to.jpg, to avoid any risk of corrupting the image. He printed out a hard copy on his laser printer and had Thom tape it up next to the crash-site-scene evidence board.

The phone rang and, with his new system, Rhyme tidily answered the call and turned on the speaker-phone.

It was the Twins.

Also known by the affectionate handle “the Hardy Boys,” this pair of Homicide detectives worked out of the Big Building, One Police Plaza. They were interrogators and canvassers – the cops who interview residents, bystanders, and witnesses after a crime – and these two were considered the best in the city. Even Lincoln Rhyme, with his distrust of the powers of human observation and recall, respected them.

Despite their delivery.

“Hey, Detective. Hey, Lincoln,” said one of them. Their names were Bedding and Saul. In person, you could hardly tell them apart. Over the phone, Rhyme didn’t even try.

“What’ve you got?” he asked. “Find the cat lady?”

“This one was easy. Seven veterinarians, two boarding services -”

“Made sense to hit them too. And -”

“We did three pet-walking companies too. Even though -”

“Who walks cats, right? But they also feed and water and change the litter when you’re away. Figured it couldn’t hurt.”

“Three of the vets had a maybe, but they weren’t sure. They were pretty big operations.”

“Lotsa animals on the Upper East Side. You’d be surprised. Maybe you wouldn’t.”

“And so we had to call employees at home. You know, doctors, assistants, washers -”

“That’s a job. Pet washer. Anyway, a receptionist at a vet on Eighty-second was thinking it might be this customer Sheila Horowitz. She’s mid-thirties, short dark hair, heavyset. Has three cats. One black and the other blond. They don’t know the color on the third one. She lives on Lexington between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth.”

Five blocks from Percey’s town house.

Rhyme thanked them and told them to stay on call, then barked, “Get Dellray’s teams over there now! You too, Sachs. Whether he’s there or not, we’ll have a scene to search. I think we’re getting close. Can you feel it, everybody? We’re getting close!”

Percey Clay was telling Roland Bell about her first solo flight.

Which didn’t go quite as she planned.

She’d taken off from the small grass strip four miles outside of Richmond, feeling the familiar ka-thunk ka-thunk as the Cessna’s gear bounded over the rough spots just before she hit V1 speed. Then back on the yoke and the crisp little 150 took to the air. A humid spring afternoon, just like this one.

“Must’ve been exciting,” Bell offered, with a curiously dubious look.

“Got more so,” Percey said, then took a hit from the flask.

Twenty minutes later the engine quit over the Wilderness in eastern Virginia, a nightmare of brambles and loblolly pine. She set the staunch plane down on a dirt road, cleared the fuel line herself, and took off once again, returning home without incident.

There was no damage to the little Cessna – so the owner never found out about the joyride. In fact the only fallout from the incident was the whipping she got from her mother because the principal at the Lee School had reported Percey’d been in yet another fight and had punched Susan Beth Halworth in the nose and fled after fifth period.

“I had to get away,” Percey explained to Bell. “They were picking on me. I think they were calling me ‘troll.’ I got called that a lot.”

“Kids can be cruel,” Bell said. “I’d tan my boys’ hides, they ever did anything like – Wait, how old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Can you do that? I mean, don’t you need to be eighteen to fly?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh. Then… how’d it work that you were flyin’?”

“They never caught me,” Percey said. “That’s how it worked.”

“Oh.”

She and Roland Bell were sitting in her room in the safe house. He’d refilled her flask with Wild Turkey – a bread-and-butter present from a mob informant who’d lived here for five weeks – and they were sitting on a green couch, the squelch mercifully turned down on his walkie-talkie. Percey sat back, Bell forward – his posture due not to the uncomfortable furniture but to his extraordinary mindfulness. His eye would catch the motion of a fly zipping past the door, a breath of air pushing a curtain, and his hand would stray to one of the two large guns he carried.

At his prompting she continued the story of her flying career. She got her student pilot certificate at age sixteen, her private pilot certificate a year later, and at eighteen she had her commercial ticket.

To her parents’ horror, she fled the tobacco business circuit (Father didn’t work for a “company” but for a “grower,” though it was a $6 billion corporation to everyone else) and went for her engineering degree. (“Dropping out of UVA was the first sensible thing she’s done,” her mother pointed out to Percey’s father, the only time the girl could remember her mother taking her side. The woman had added, “It’ll be easier to find a husband at Virginia Tech.” Meaning the boys won’t have such high standards.)

But it wasn’t parties or boys or sororities she was interested in. It was one thing and one thing only. Aircraft. Every day that it was physically and financially possible, she flew. She got her flight instructor’s cert and started teaching. She didn’t like the job particularly but she persisted for a very savvy reason: the hours you spent flight-instructing went in your logbook as pilot-in-command time. Which would look good on the résumé when she went knocking on airline doors.

After graduation she began the life of an unemployed pilot. Lessons, air shows, joyrides, an occasional left-hand seat assignment for a delivery service or small charter company. Air taxis, seaplanes, crop dusting, even stunts, flying old Stearman and Curtis Jenny biplanes on Sunday afternoons at roadside carnivals.

“It was tough, real tough,” she said to Roland Bell. “Maybe like getting started in law enforcement.”

“Not a world of difference, I’d guess. I was running speed traps and overseeing crossing-guard detail as sheriff of Hoggston. We had three consecutive years with no homicides, even accidental. Then I started moving up – got a job as a deputy with the county, working Highway Patrol. But that was mostly picking folk outa moonshine wrecks. So I went back to UNC for a criminology/sociology degree. Then I moved to Winston-Salem and got myself a gold shield.”

“A what?”

“Detective. Course, I got beat up twice and shot at three times before my first review… Hey, be careful what you ask for; you may get it. You ever hear that?”

“But you were doing what you wanted.”

“I was that. You know, my aunt who raised me’d always say, ‘You walk the direction God points you.’ Think there’s something to that. I’m keen to know, how’d you start your own company?”

“Ed – my husband – and Ron Talbot and I did that. About seven, eight years ago. But I had a stopover first.”

“How’s that?”

“I enlisted.”

“No fooling?”

“Yep. I was desperate to fly and nobody was hiring. See, before you can get a job with a big charter or an airline you have to be rated on the kind of planes they fly. And in order to get rated you’ve got to pay for training and simulator time – out of your own pocket. Can cost you ten thousand bucks to get a ticket to fly a big jet. I was stuck flying props ’cause I couldn’t afford any training. Then it occurred to me: I could enlist and get paid to fly the sexiest aircraft on earth. So I signed up. Navy.”

“Why them?”

“Carriers. Thought it’d be fun to land on a moving runway.”

Bell winced. She cocked her eyebrow and he explained. “In case you didn’t guess, I’m not a huge fan of your business.”

“You don’t like pilots?”

“Oh, no, don’t mean that. It’s flying I don’t like.”

“You’d rather be shot at than go flying?”

Without consideration, he nodded emphatically, then asked, “You see combat?”

“Sure did. Las Vegas.”

He frowned.

“Nineteen ninety-one. The Hilton Hotel. Third floor.”

“Combat? I don’t get it.”

Percey asked, “You ever hear about Tailhook?”

“Oh, wasn’t that the navy convention or something? Where a bunch of male pilots got all drunk and attacked some women? You were there?”

“Got groped and pinched with the best of ’em. Decked one lieutenant and broke the finger of another, though I’m sorry to say he was too drunk to feel the pain till the next day.” She sipped some more bourbon.

“Was it as bad as they said?”

After a moment she said, “You’re used to expecting some North Korean or some Iranian in a MiG to drop out of the sun and lock on. But when the people supposed to be on your side do it, well, it really throws you. Makes you feel dirty, betrayed.”

“What happened?”

“Aw, kind of a mess,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t roll over. I named names and put some folks out of business. Some pilots, but some high-up folks too. That didn’t sit well in the briefing room. As you can imagine.”

Monkey skills or no monkey skills, you don’t fly with wingmen you don’t trust. “So I left. It was all right. I’d had fun with the ’Cats, fun flying sorties. But it was time to leave. I’d met Ed and we’d decided to open up this charter. I kissed and made up with Daddy – sort of – and he lent me most of the money for the Company.” She shrugged. “Which I paid back at prime plus three, never late a day on a payment. The son of a gun…”

This brought back a dozen memories of Ed. Helping her negotiate the loan. Shopping together for aircraft at the skeptical leasing companies. Renting hangar space. Arguing as they struggled to fix a nav-com panel at three in the morning, trying to get ready for a 6a.m. flight. The images hurt as bad as her ferocious migraines. Trying to deflect her thoughts, she asked, “So what brings you to parts north?”

“Wife’s family’s up here. On Long Island.”

“You gave up North Carolina for in-laws?” Percey nearly made a comment about how’d his wife lasso him into that but was glad she hadn’t. Bell ’s hazel eyes easily held hers as he said, “Beth was pretty sick. Passed away nineteen months ago.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. They had Sloan-Kettering up here and her folks and sister too. The fact is I needed some help with the kids. I’m fine pitching the football and making chili but they need other stuff than that. Like, I shrunk most of their sweaters first time I dried ’em. That sort of thing. I wasn’t averse to a move anyway. Wanted to show the kids there’s more to life than silos and harvesters.”

“You got pictures?” Percey asked, tipping back the flask. The hot liquor burned for a brief exquisite moment. She decided she’d quit drinking. Then decided not to.

“ ’Deed I do.” He fished a wallet from his baggy slacks and displayed the children. Two blond boys, around five and seven. “Benjamin and Kevin,” Bell announced.

Percey also caught a glimpse of another photo – a pretty, blond woman, short hair in bangs.

“They’re adorable.”

“You have any kids?”

“No,” she answered, thinking, I always had my reasons. There was always next year or the next. When the Company was doing better. When we’d leased that 737. After I got my DC-9 rating… She gave him a stoic smile. “Yours? They want to be cops when they grow up?”

“Soccer players’s what they want to be. Not much of a market for that in New York. Unless the Mets keep playing the way they’ve been.”

Before the silence grew too thick, Percey asked, “Is it okay if I call the Company? I’ve got to see how my aircraft’s coming.”

“You bet. I’ll leave you be. Just make sure you don’t give our number or address to a soul. It’s the one thing I’m gonna be real muley about.”

chapter fifteen

Hour 8 of 45

“RON. IT’S PERCEY. HOW IS EVERYONE?”

“Shook up,” he answered. “I sent Sally home. She couldn’t -”

“How is she?”

“Just couldn’t deal with it. Carol too. And Lauren. Lauren was out of control. I’ve never seen anybody that upset. How’re you and Brit?”

“Brit’s mad. I’m mad. What a mess this is. Oh, Ron…”

“And that detective, the cop who got shot?”

“I don’t think they know yet. How’s Foxtrot Bravo?”

“It’s not as bad as it could be. I’ve already replaced the cockpit window. No breaches in the fuselage. Number two engine… that’s a problem. We’ve got to replace a lot of the skin. We’re trying to find a new fire extinguisher cartridge. I don’t think it’ll be a problem…”

“But?”

“But the annular has to be replaced.”

“The combustor? Replace it? Oh, Jesus.”

“I’ve already called the Garrett distributor in Connecticut They agreed to deliver one tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday. I can have it installed in a couple, three hours.”

“Hell,” she muttered, “I should be there… I told them I’d stay put but, damn it, I should be there.”

“Where are you, Percey?”

And Stephen Kall, listening to this conversation as he sat in Sheila Horowitz’s dim apartment, was ready to write. He pressed the receiver closer to his ear.

But the Wife said only, “In Manhattan. About a thousand cops around us. I feel like the pope or the president.”

Stephen had heard on his police scanner reports of some curious activity around the Twentieth Precinct, which was on the Upper West Side. The station house was being closed and suspects were being relocated. He wondered if that was where the Wife was right now – at the precinct house.

Ron asked, “Are they going to stop this guy? Do they have any leads?”

Yes, do they? Stephen wondered.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Those gunshots,” Ron said. “Jesus, they were scary. Reminded me of the service. You know, that sound of the guns.”

Stephen wondered again about this Ron fellow. Could he be useful?

Infiltrate, evaluate… interrogate.

Stephen considered tracking him down and torturing him to get him to call Percey back and ask where the safe house was…

But although he probably could get through the airport security again it would be a risk. And it would take too much time.

As he listened to their conversation Stephen gazed at the laptop computer in front of him. A message saying Please wait kept flashing. The remote tap was connected to a Bell Atlantic relay box near the airport and had been transmitting their conversations to Stephen’s tape recorder for the past week. He was surprised the police hadn’t found it yet.

A cat – Esmeralda, Essie, the worm sack – climbed onto the table and arched her back. Stephen could hear the irritating purring.

He began to feel cringey.

He elbowed the cat roughly to the floor and enjoyed her pained bleat.

“I’ve been looking for more pilots,” Ron said uncomfortably. “I’ve got -”

“We just need one. Right-hand seat.”

A pause. “What?” Ron asked.

“I’m taking the flight tomorrow. All I need is an FO.”

“You? I don’t think that’s a good idea, Perce.”

“You have anybody?” she asked shortly.

“Well, the thing is -”

“Do you have anyone?”

“Brad Torgeson’s on the call list. He said he had no problem helping us out. He knows about the situation.”

“Good. A pilot with balls. How’s his Lear time?”

“Plenty… Percey, I thought you were hiding out until the grand jury.”

“ Lincoln agreed to let me take the flight. If I stayed here until then.”

“Who’s Lincoln?”

Yes, Stephen thought. Who is Lincoln?

“Well, he’s this weird man…” The Wife hesitated, as if she wanted to talk about him but wasn’t sure what to say. Stephen was disappointed when she said only, “He’s working with the police, trying to find the killer. I told him I’d stay here until tomorrow but I was definitely making the flight. He agreed.”

“Percey, we can delay it. I’ll talk to U.S. Medical. They know we’re going through some -”

“No,” she said firmly. “They don’t want excuses. They want wheels up on schedule. And if we can’t do it they’ll find somebody else. When are they delivering the cargo?”

“Six or seven.”

“I’ll be there late afternoon. I’ll help you finish with the annular.”

“Percey,” he wheezed, “everything’s going to be fine.”

“We get that engine fixed on time, everything’ll be great.”

“You must be going through hell,” Ron said.

“Not really,” she said.

Not yet, Stephen corrected silently.

Sachs skidded the RRV station wagon around the corner at forty miles per hour. She saw a dozen tactical agents trotting along the street.

Fred Dellray’s teams were surrounding the building where Sheila Horowitz lived. A typical Upper East Side brownstone, next door to a Korean deli, in front of which an employee squatted on a milk crate, peeling carrots for the salad bar and staring with no particular curiosity at the machine-gun-armed men and women surrounding the building.

Sachs found Dellray, weapon unholstered, in the foyer, examining the directory.

S. Horowitz. 204.

He tapped his radio. “We’re on four eight three point four.”

The secure federal tactical operations frequency. Sachs adjusted her radio as Dellray peered into the Horowitz woman’s mailbox with a small black flashlight. “Nothin’ picked up today. Got a feeling that girl’s gone.” He then said, “We got our folk on the fire escape and floor above and below with a SWAT cam and some mikes. Haven’t seen anybody inside. But we’re pickin’ up some scratching and purring. Nothing sounds human, though. She got cats, remember. That was a feather in his cap, thinking of the vets. Our man Rhyme, I mean.”

I know who you mean, she thought.

Outside, the wind was howling and another line of black clouds was trooping over the city. Big slabs of bruise-colored clouds.

Dellray snarled into his radio. “All teams. Status?”

“Red Team. We’re on the fire escape.”

“Blue Team. First floor.”

“Roger,” Dellray muttered. “Search and Surveillance. Report.”

“Still not sure. We’re getting faint infrared readings. Whoever or whatever’s in there isn’t moving. Could be a sleeping cat. Or a wounded victim. Or might be a pilot light or lamp that’s been burning for a while. Could be the subject, though. In an interior part of the apartment.”

“Well, what do you think?” Sachs asked.

“Who’s that?” the agent asked over the radio.

“NYPD, Portable Five Eight Eight Five,” Sachs responded, giving her badge number. “I want to know what your opinion is. Do you think the suspect is inside?”

“Why you askin’?” Dellray wanted to know.

“I want an uncontaminated scene. I’d like to go in alone if they think he’s not there.” A dynamic entry by a dozen tactical officers was probably the most efficient way to utterly decimate a crime scene.

Dellray looked at her for a moment, his dark face creased, then said into his stalk mike, “What’s your opinion, S &S?”

“We just can’t say for sure, sir,” the disembodied agent reported.

“Know you can’t, Billy. Just gimme what your gut’s telling you.”

A pause, then: “I think he’s rabbited. Think it’s clean.”

“Hokay.” To Sachs he said, “But you take one officer with you. That’s an order.”

“I go in first, though. He can cover me from the door. Look, this guy just isn’t leaving any evidence anywhere. We need a break.”

“All right, Officer.” Dellray nodded to several of the federal SWAT agents.

“Entry approved,” he muttered, slipping out of hipster as he spoke words of law enforcement art.

One of the tactical agents had the lobby door lock disassembled in thirty seconds.

“Hold up,” Dellray said, cocking his head. “It’s a call from Central.” He spoke into the radio. “Give ’em the frequency.” He looked at Sachs. “ Lincoln ’s calling you.”

A moment later the criminalist’s voice intruded. “Sachs,” he said, “what’re you doing?”

“I’m just -”

“Listen,” he said urgently. “Don’t go in alone. Let them secure the scene first. You know the rule.”

“I’ve got backup -”

“No, let SWAT secure it first.”

“They’re sure he’s not there,” she lied.

“That’s not good enough,” he shot back. “Not with the Dancer. Nobody’s ever sure with him.”

This again. I don’t need it, Rhyme. Exasperated, she said, “This’s the sort of scene he’s not expecting us to find. He probably hasn’t hosed it. We could find a fingerprint, a shell casing. Hell, we could find his credit card.”

No response. It wasn’t often that Lincoln Rhyme was rendered silent.

“Quit spooking me, Rhyme, okay?”

He didn’t respond and she had a strange feeling that he wanted her to be spooked. “Sachs…?”

“What?”

“Just be careful” was his only advice and the words were offered tentatively.

Then suddenly five tactical agents appeared, wearing Nomex gloves and hoods, blue flak jackets, and holding their black H &Ks.

“I’ll call you from inside,” she said.

She started up the stairs after them, her thoughts more on the heavy crime scene suitcase she held in her weak hand, her left, than on the black pistol in her right.

In the old days, in the Before days, Lincoln Rhyme had been a walker.

There was something about motion that soothed him. A stroll through Central or Washington Square Park, a brisk walk through the Fashion District. Oh, he’d pause often – maybe to collect a bit of evidence for the databases at the IRD lab – but once the bits of dirt or the plants or the samples of building materials were safely stowed and their sources jotted in his notebook, he’d continue on his way again. Miles and miles he’d walk.

One of the most frustrating things about his present condition was the inability to let off tension. He now had his eyes closed and he rubbed the back of his head into the headrest of the Storm Arrow, grinding his teeth together.

He asked Thom for some scotch.

“Don’t you need to be clearheaded?”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

Go to hell, Rhyme thought, and ground his teeth harder. Thom would have to clean off a bloody gum, have to arrange for the dentist to come over. And I’ll be a prick with him too.

Thunder rolled in the distance and the lights dimmed.

He pictured Sachs at the front of the tactical force. She was right, of course: an ESU team doing a full secure of the apartment would contaminate it badly. Still, he was worried sick for her. She was too reckless. He’d seen her scratching her skin, pulling eyebrows, chewing nails. Rhyme, ever skeptical of the psychologist’s black arts, nonetheless knew self-destructive behavior when he saw it. He’d also been for a drive with her – in her souped-up sports car. They’d hit speeds over 150 miles per hour and she seemed frustrated that the rough roads on Long Island wouldn’t let her do twice that.

He was startled to hear her whispering voice. “Rhyme, you there?”

“Go ahead, Amelia.”

A pause. “No first names, Rhyme. It’s bad luck.”

He tried to laugh, “wished he hadn’t used the name, wondered why he had.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m at the front door. They’re going to take it down with a battering ram. The other team reported in. They really don’t think he’s there.”

“You wearing your armor?”

“Stole a feebie’s flak jacket. Looks like I’m wearing black cereal boxes for a bra.”

“On three,” Rhyme heard Dellray’s voice, “all teams, take out door and windows, cover all areas, but hold short of entry. One…”

Rhyme was so torn. How badly he wanted the Dancer – he could taste it. But, oh, how frightened he was for her.

“Two…”

Sachs, damn it, he thought. I don’t want to worry about you…

“Three…”

He heard a soft snap, like a teenager cracking his knuckles, and found himself leaning forward. His neck quivered with a huge cramp and he leaned back. Thom appeared and began to massage it.

“It’s all right,” he muttered. “Thank you. Could you just get the sweat? Please.”

Thom looked at him suspiciously – at the word “please” – then wiped his forehead.

What’re you doing, Sachs?

He wanted to ask but wouldn’t think of distracting her just now.

Then he heard a gasp. The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. “Jesus, Rhyme.”

“What? Tell me.”

“The woman… the Horowitz woman. The refrigerator door’s open. She’s inside. She’s dead but it looks like… Oh, God, her eyes.”

“Sachs…”

“It looks like he put her inside when she was still alive. Why the hell would he -”

“Think past it, Sachs. Come on. You can do it.”

“Jesus.”

Rhyme knew Sachs was claustrophobic. He imagined the terror she’d be feeling, looking at the terrible mode of death.

“Did he tape her or tie her?”

“Tape. Some kind of clear packing tape on her mouth. Her eyes, Rhyme. Her eyes…”

“Don’t get shook, Sachs. The tape’ll be a good surface for prints. What’re the floor surfaces?”

“Carpet in the living room. And linoleum in the kitchen. And -”

A scream. “Oh God!”

“What?”

“Just one of the cats. It jumped in front of me. Little shit… Rhyme?”

“What?”

“I’m smelling something. Something funny.”

“Good.” He’d taught her always to smell the air at a crime scene. It was the first fact a CS officer should note. “But what does ‘funny’ mean?”

“A sour smell. Chemical. Can’t place it.”

Then he realized that something didn’t make sense.

“Sachs,” he asked abruptly. “Did you open the refrigerator door?”

“No. I found it that way. It’s propped open with a chair, looks like.”

Why? Rhyme wondered. Why’d he do that? He thought furiously.

“That smell, it’s stronger. Smokey.”

The woman’s a distraction! Rhyme thought suddenly. He left the door open to make sure the entry team would focus on it.

Oh, no, not again!

“Sachs! That’s fuse you’re smelling. A time-delay fuse. There’s another bomb! Get out now! He left the refrigerator door open to lure us inside.”

“What?”

“It’s a fuse! He’s set a bomb. You’ve got seconds. Get out! Run!”

“I can get the tape. On her mouth.”

“Get the fuck out!”

“I can get it…”

Rhyme heard a rustle, a faint gasp, and seconds later, the ringing bang of the explosion, like a sledgehammer on a boiler.

It stunned his ear.

“No!” he cried. “Oh, no!”

He glanced at Sellitto, who was staring at Rhyme’s horrified face. “What happened, what happened?” the detective was calling.

A moment later Rhyme could hear through the earpiece a man’s voice, panicky, shouting, “We’ve got a fire. Second floor. The walls’re gone. They’re gone… We got injuries… Oh, God. What happened to her? Look at the blood. All the blood! We need help. Second floor! Second floor…”

Stephen Kall walked a circle around the Twentieth Precinct on the Upper West Side.

The station house wasn’t far from Central Park and he caught a glimpse of the trees. The cross street the precinct house was located on was guarded, but security wasn’t too bad. There were three cops in front of the low building, looking around nervously. But there were none on the east side of the station house, where a thick steel grille covered the windows. He guessed that this was the lockup.

Stephen continued around the corner and then walked south to the next cross street. There were no blue sawhorses closing off this street, but there were guards – two more cops. They eyed every car and pedestrian that passed. He studied the building briefly then continued yet another block south and circled around the west side of the precinct. He slipped through a deserted alley, took his binoculars from his backpack, and gazed at the station house.

Can you use this, Soldier?

Sir, yes, I can, sir.

In a parking lot beside the station house was a gas pump. An officer was filling his squad car with gas. It never occurred to Stephen that police cars wouldn’t buy their gas at Amoco or Shell stations.

For a long moment he gazed at the pump through his small, heavy Leica binoculars, then put them back into the bag and hurried west, conscious, as always, of people on the lookout for him.

chapter sixteen

Hour 12 of 45

“SACHS!” RHYME CRIED AGAIN.

Damnit, what was she thinking of? How could she be so careless?

“What happened?” Sellitto asked again. “What’s going on?”

What happened to her?

“A bomb in the Horowitz apartment,” Rhyme said hopelessly. “Sachs was inside when it went off. Call them. Find out what happened. On the speaker-phone.”

All the blood…

An interminable three minutes later Sellitto was patched through to Dellray.

“Fred,” Rhyme shouted, “how is she?”

A harrowing pause before he answered.

“Ain’t good, Lincoln. We’re just gettin’ the fire out now. It was an AP of some kind. Shit. We shoulda looked first. Fuck.”

Antipersonnel booby traps were usually plastic explosive or TNT and often contained shrapnel or ball bearings – to inflict the most damage they could.

Dellray continued. “Took a coupla walls down and burned mosta the place out.” A pause. “I have to tell you, Lincoln. We… found…” Dellray’s voice – usually so steady – now waffled uneasily.

“What?” Rhyme demanded.

“Some body parts… A hand. Part of an arm.”

Rhyme closed his eyes and felt a horror he hadn’t felt in years. An icy stab through his insentient body. His breath came out in a low hiss.

“ Lincoln -” Sellitto began.

“We’re still searching,” Dellray continued. “She might not be dead. We’ll find her. Get her to the hospital. We’ll do everything we can. You know we will.”

Sachs, why the hell did you do it? Why did I let you?

I should never -

Then a crackle sounded in his ear. A pop as loud as a firecracker. “Could somebody… I mean, Jesus, could somebody get this off me?”

“Sachs?” Rhyme called into the microphone. He was sure the voice was hers. Then it sounded like she was choking and retching.

“Uck,” she said. “Oh, boy… This’s gross.”

“Are you all right?” He turned to the speaker-phone. “Fred, where is she?”

“Is that you, Rhyme?” she asked. “I can’t hear anything. Somebody talk to me!”

“ Lincoln,” Dellray called. “We got her! She’s A-okay. She’s all right.”

“Amelia?”

He heard Dellray shouting for medics. Rhyme, whose body hadn’t shivered for some years, noted that his left ring finger was trembling fiercely.

Dellray came back on. “She can’t hear too good, Lincoln. What happened was… looks like what happened was it was the woman’s body we saw. Horowitz. Sachs pulled it out of the fridge just ’fore the bang. The corpse took mosta the blast.”

Sellitto said, “I see that look, Lincoln. Give her a break.”

But he didn’t.

In a fierce growl he said, “What the hell were you thinking of, Sachs? I told you it was a bomb. You should’ve known it was a bomb and bailed out.”

“Rhyme, is that you?”

She was faking. He knew she was.

“Sachs -”

“I had to get the tape, Rhyme. Are you there? I can’t hear you. It was plastic packing tape. We need to get one of his prints. You said so yourself.”

“Honestly,” he snapped, “you’re impossible.”

“Hello? Hello-o? Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“Sachs, don’t give me any crap.”

“I’m going to check something, Rhyme.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Sachs?… Sachs, you there? What the hell…?”

“Rhyme, listen – I just hit the tape with the PoliLight. And guess what? There’s a partial on it! I’ve got one of the Dancer’s prints!”

That stopped him for a moment but he soon resumed his tirade again. He was well into his lecture before he realized that he was reading the riot act to an empty line.

She was sooty and had a stunned look about her.

“No dressing-down, Rhyme. It was stupid but I didn’t think about it. I just moved.”

“What happened?” he asked. His stern visage had fallen away momentarily, he was so happy to see her alive.

“I was halfway inside. I saw the AP charge behind the door and didn’t think I could make it out in time. I grabbed the woman’s body out of the fridge. I was going to pull her to the kitchen window. It blew before I got halfway there.”

Mel Cooper looked over the bag of evidence Sachs handed him. He examined the soot and fragments from the bomb. “M forty-five charge. TNT, with a rocker switch and forty-five-second fuse delay. The entry team knocked it over when they rammed the door; that ignited the fuse. There’s graphite, so it’s newer-formulation TNT. Very powerful, very bad.”

“Fucker,” Sellitto spat out. “Time delay… He wanted to make sure as many people got into the room as possible ’fore it blew.”

Rhyme asked, “Anything traceable?”

“Off-the-shelf military. Won’t lead us anywhere except -”

“To the asshole gave it to him,” Sellitto muttered. “Phillip Hansen.” The detective’s phone rang and he took the call, lowered his head as he listened, nodding.

“Thank you,” he said finally, shut off the phone.

“What?” Sachs asked.

The detective’s eyes were closed.

Rhyme knew it was about Jerry Banks.

“Lon?”

“It’s Jerry.” The detective looked up. Sighed. “He’ll live. But he lost his arm. They couldn’t save it. Too much damage.”

“Oh, no,” Rhyme whispered. “Can I talk to him?”

“No,” the detective said. “He’s asleep.”

Rhyme thought of the young man, pictured him saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, poking at his cowlick, rubbing a razor cut on his smooth, pink chin. “I’m sorry, Lon.”

The detective shook his head, much the same way Rhyme deflected bouquets of sympathy. “We got other things to worry about.”

Yes, they did.

Rhyme noticed the plastic packing tape – the gag the Dancer had used. He could see, as could Sachs, a faint lipstick mark on the adhesive side.

Sachs was staring at the evidence, but it wasn’t a clinical look. Not a scientist’s gaze. She was troubled.

“Sachs?” he asked.

“Why’d he do that?”

“The bomb?”

She shook her head. “Why’d he put her in the refrigerator?” She lifted a finger to her mouth and chewed a nail. On her ten fingers, only one nail – the little finger of her left hand – was long and shapely. The others were chewed. Some were brown with dried blood.

The criminalist answered, “I think it was because he wanted to distract us so we wouldn’t focus on the bomb. A body in a refrigerator – that got our attention.”

“I don’t mean that,” she answered. “COD was suffocation. He put her in there alive. Why? Is he a sadist or something?”

Rhyme answered, “No, the Dancer’s not a sadist. He can’t afford to be. His only urge is to complete the job, and he’s got enough willpower to keep his other lusts under control. Why’d he suffocate her when he could have used a knife or rope?… I’m not exactly sure but it could be good for us.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe there was something about her that he hated and he wanted to kill her in the most unpleasant way he could.”

“Yeah, but why’s that good for us?” Sellitto asked.

“Because” – it was Sachs who answered – “it means maybe he’s losing his cool. He’s getting careless.”

“Exactly,” Rhyme called, proud of Sachs for making the connection. But she didn’t notice his smile of approval. Her eyes dipped closed momentarily and she shook her head, probably replaying the image of the dead woman’s horrified eyes. People thought criminalists were cold (how often had Rhyme’s wife leveled that charge at him?), but in fact the best ones had a heartbreaking empathy for the victims of the scenes they searched. Sachs was one of these.

“Sachs,” Rhyme whispered gently, “the print?”

She looked at him.

“You found a print, you said. We have to move fast.”

Sachs nodded. “It’s a partial.” She held up the plastic bag.

“Could it be hers?”

“No, I printed her. Took a while to find her hands. But the print definitely isn’t hers.”

“Mel,” Rhyme said.

The tech put the bit of packing tape in a SuperGlue frame and heated some glue. Immediately a tiny portion of the print became evident.

Cooper shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered.

“What?”

“He wiped the tape, the Dancer. He must’ve known he touched it without a glove on. There’s only a bit of one partial left.”

Like Rhyme, Cooper was a member of the International Association for Identification. They were experts at identifying people from fingerprints, DNA, and odontology – dental remains. But this particular print – like the one on the metal lip of the bomb – was beyond their power. If any experts could find and classify a print, it would be the two of them. But not this one.

“Shoot it and mount it,” Rhyme muttered. “Up on the wall.” They’d go through the motions because it was what you had to do in this business. But he was very frustrated. Sachs had nearly died for nothing.

Edmond Locard, the famous French criminalist, developed a principle named after him. He said that in every encounter between criminal and victim there is an exchange of evidence. It might be microscopic, but a transfer does take place. Yet it seemed to Rhyme that if anyone could disprove Locard’s Principle, it was the ghost they called the Coffin Dancer.

Sellitto, seeing the frustration on Rhyme’s face, said, “We’ve got the trap at the station house. If we’re lucky we’ll get him.”

“Let’s hope. We could use some goddamn luck.”

He closed his eyes, rested his head in the pillow. A moment later he heard Thom saying, “It’s nearly eleven. Time for bed.”

At times it’s easy to neglect the body, to forget we even have bodies – times like these, when lives are at stake and we have to step out of our physical beings and keep working, working, working. We have to go far beyond our normal limitations. But Lincoln Rhyme had a body that wouldn’t tolerate neglect. Bedsores could lead to sepsis and blood poisoning. Fluid in the lungs, to pneumonia. Didn’t catheterize the bladder? Didn’t massage the bowels to encourage a movement? Spenco boots too tight? Dysreflexia was the consequence and that could mean a stroke. Exhaustion alone could bring on an attack.

Too many ways to die…

“You’re going to bed,” Thom said.

“I have to -”

“Sleep. You have to sleep.”

Rhyme acquiesced. He was very tired.

“All right, Thom. All right.” He wheeled toward the elevator. “One thing.” He looked back. “Could you come up in a few minutes, Sachs?”

She nodded, watching the tiny elevator door swing shut.

She found him in the Clinitron.

Sachs had waited ten minutes to give him time to take care of bedtime functions – Thom had applied the catheter and brushed his boss’s teeth. She knew Rhyme talked tough – he had a crip’s disregard for modesty. But she knew too that there were certain personal routines he didn’t want her to witness.

She used the time to take a shower in the downstairs bathroom, dressed in clean clothes – hers – which Thom happened to have in the laundry room in the basement.

The lights were dim. Rhyme was rubbing his head against the pillow like a bear scratching his back on a tree. The Clinitron was the most comfortable bed in the world. Weighing a half ton, it was a massive slab containing glass beads through which flowed heated air.

“Ah, Sachs, you did good today. You out-thought him.”

Except thanks to me Jerry Banks lost his arm.

And I let the Dancer get away.

She walked to his bar and poured a glass of Macallan, lifted an eyebrow.

“Sure,” he said. “Mother’s milk, the dew of nepenthe…”

She kicked her issue shoes off, pulled up her blouse to look at the bruise.

“Ouch,” Rhyme said.

The bruise was the shape of Missouri and dark as an eggplant.

“I don’t like bombs,” she said. “Never been that close to one. And I don’t like them.”

Sachs opened her purse, found and swallowed three aspirin dry (a trick arthritics learn early). She walked to the window. There were the peregrines. Beautiful birds. They weren’t large. Fourteen, sixteen inches. Tiny for a dog. But for a bird… utterly intimidating. Their beaks were like the claws on a creature from one of those Alien movies.

“You all right, Sachs? Tell me true?”

“I’m okay.”

She returned to the chair, sipped more of the smokey liquor.

“You want to stay tonight?” he asked.

On occasion she’d spend the night here. Sometimes on the couch, sometimes in bed next to him. Maybe it was the fluidized air of the Clinitron, maybe it was the simple act of lying next to another human being – she didn’t know the reason – but she never slept better than when she slept here. She hadn’t enjoyed being close to another man since her most recent boyfriend, Nick. She and Rhyme would lie together and talk. She’d tell him about cars, about her pistol matches, about her mother and her goddaughter. About her father’s full life and sad, protracted death. She’d ante up far more personal information than he. But that was all right. She loved listening to him say whatever he wanted to. His mind was astonishing. He’d tell her about old New York, about Mafia hits the rest of the world had never heard about, about crime scenes so clean they seemed hopeless until the searchers found the single bit of dust, the fingernail, the dot of spit, the hair or fiber that revealed who the perp was or where he lived – well, revealed these facts to Rhyme, not necessarily anyone else. No, his mind never stopped. She knew that before the injury he’d roam the streets of New York looking for samples of soil or glass or plants or rocks – anything that might help him solve cases. It was as if that restlessness had moved from his useless legs into his mind, which roamed the city – in his imagination – well into the night.

But tonight was different. Rhyme was distracted. She didn’t mind him ornery – which was good because he was ornery a lot. But she didn’t like him being elsewhere. She sat on the edge of the bed.

He began to say what he’d apparently asked her here for. “Sachs… Lon told me. About what happened at the airport.”

She shrugged.

“There’s nothing you could’ve done except gotten yourself killed. You did the right thing, going for cover. He fired one for range and would’ve gotten you with the second shot.”

“I had two, three seconds. I could’ve hit him. I know I could’ve.”

“Don’t be reckless, Sachs. That bomb -”

The fervent look in her eyes silenced him. “I want to get him, whatever it takes. And I have a feeling you want to get him just as much. I think you’d take chances too.” She added with cryptic significance, “Maybe you are taking chances.”

This had a greater reaction than she’d expected. He blinked, looked away. But he said nothing else, sipped his scotch.

On impulse, she asked, “Can I ask something? If you don’t want me to you can tell me to clam up.”

“Come on, Sachs. We’ve got secrets, you and me? I don’t think so.”

Eyes on the floor, she said, “I remember once I was telling you about Nick. How I felt about him and so on. How what happened between us was so hard.”

He nodded.

“And I asked you if you’d felt that way about anyone, maybe your wife. And you said yes, but not Elaine.” She looked up at him.

He recovered fast, though not fast enough. And she realized she’d blown cold air on an exposed nerve.

“I remember,” he answered.

“Who was she? Look, if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“I don’t mind. Her name was Claire. Claire Trilling. How’s that for a last name?”

“Probably put up with the same crap in school I had to. Amelia Sex. Amelia Sucks… How’d you meet her?”

“Well…” He laughed at his own reluctance to continue. “In the department.”

“She was a cop?” Sachs was surprised.

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

“It was a… difficult relationship.” Rhyme shook his head ruefully. “I was married, she was married. Just not to each other.”

“Kids?”

“She had a daughter.”

“So you broke up?”

“It wouldn’t have worked, Sachs. Oh, Blaine and I were destined to get divorced – or kill each other. It was only a matter of time. But Claire… she was worried about her daughter – about her husband taking the little girl if she got divorced. She didn’t love him, but he was a good man. Loved the girl a lot.”

“You meet her?”

“The daughter? Yes.”

“You ever see her now? Claire?”

“No. That was the past. She’s not on the force anymore.”

“You broke up after your accident?”

“No, no, before.”

“She knows you were hurt, though, right?”

“No,” Rhyme said after another hesitation.

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

A pause. “There were reasons… Funny you bring her up. Haven’t thought about her for years.”

He offered a casual smile and Sachs felt the pain course through her – actual pain like the blow that left the bruise in the shape of the Show Me State. Because what he was saying was a lie. Oh, he’d been thinking about this woman. Sachs didn’t believe in woman’s intuition but she did believe in cop’s intuition; she’d walked a beat for far too long to discount insights like these. She knew Rhyme’d been thinking about Ms. Trilling.

Her feelings were ridiculous, of course. She had no patience for jealousy. Hadn’t been jealous of Nick’s job – he was undercover and spent weeks on the street. Hadn’t been jealous of the hookers and blond ornaments he’d drink with on assignments.

And beyond jealousy, what could she possibly hope for with Rhyme? She’d talked about him to her mother many times. And the cagey old woman would usually say something like “It’s good to be nice to a cripple like that.”

Which just about summed up all that their relationship should be. All that it could be.

It was more than ridiculous.

But jealous she was. And it wasn’t of Claire.

It was of Percey Clay.

Sachs couldn’t forget how they’d looked together when she’d seen them sitting next to each other in his room, earlier today.

More scotch. Thinking of the nights she and Rhyme had spent here, talking about cases, drinking this very good liquor.

Oh, great. Now I’m maudlin. That’s a mature feeling. I’m gonna group a cluster right in its chest and kill it dead.

But instead she offered the sentiment a little more liquor.

Percey wasn’t an attractive woman, but that meant nothing; it had taken Sachs all of one week at Chantelle, the modeling agency on Madison Avenue where she’d worked for several years, to understand the fallacy of the beautiful. Men love to look at gorgeous women, but nothing intimidates them more.

“You want another hit?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

Without thinking now, she reclined, laid her head on his pillow. It was funny how we adjust to things, she thought. Rhyme couldn’t, of course, pull her to his chest and slip his arm around her. But the comparable gesture was his tilting his head to hers. In this way they’d fallen asleep a number of times.

Tonight, though, she sensed a stiffness, a caution.

She felt she was losing him. And all she could think about was trying to be closer. As close as possible.

Sachs had once confided with her friend Amy, her goddaughter’s mother, about Rhyme, about her feelings for him. The woman had wondered what the attraction was and speculated, “Maybe it’s that, you know, he can’t move. He’s a man but he doesn’t have any control over you. Maybe that’s a turn-on.”

But Sachs knew it was just the opposite. The turn-on was that he was a man who had complete control, despite the fact he couldn’t move.

Fragments of his words floated past as he spoke about Claire, then about the Dancer. She tilted her head back and looked at his thin lips.

Her hands started roving.

He couldn’t feel, of course, but he could see her perfect fingers with their damaged nails slide over his chest, down his smooth body. Thom exercised him daily with a passive range of motion exercises and though Rhyme wasn’t muscular he had a body of a young man. It was as if the aging process had stopped the day of the accident.

“Sachs?”

Her hand moved lower.

Her breathing was coming faster now. She tugged the blanket down. Thom had dressed Rhyme in a T-shirt. She tugged it up, moved her hands over his chest. Then she pulled her own shirt off, unhooked her bra, pressed her flushed skin against his pallid. She expected it to be cold but it wasn’t. It was hotter than hers. She rubbed harder.

She kissed him once on the cheek, then the corner of the mouth, then squarely on the mouth.

“Sachs, no… Listen to me. No.”

But she didn’t listen.

She’d never told Rhyme, but some months ago she’d bought a book called The Disabled Lover. Sachs was surprised to learn that even quadriplegics can make love and father children. A man’s perplexing organ literally has a mind of its own and severing the spinal cord eliminates only one type of stimulus. Handicapped men were capable of perfectly normal erections. True, he’d have no sensation, but – for her part – the physical thrill was only a part of the event, often a minor part. It was the closeness that counted; that was a high that a million phony movie orgasms would never approach. She suspected that Rhyme might feel the same way.

She kissed him again. Harder.

After a moment’s hesitation he kissed her back. She was not surprised that he was good at it. After his dark eyes, his perfect lips were the first thing she’d noticed about him.

Then he pulled his face away.

“No, Sachs, don’t…”

“Shhh, quiet…” She worked her hand under the blankets, began rubbing, touching.

“It’s just that…”

It was what? she wondered. That things might not work out?

But things were working out fine. She felt him growing hard under her hand, more responsive than some of the most macho lovers she’d had.

She slid on top of him, kicked the sheets and blanket back, bent down and kissed him again. Oh, how she wanted to be here, face-to-face – as close as they could be. To make him understand that she saw he was her perfect man. He was whole as he was.

She unpinned her hair, let it fall over him. Leaned down, kissed him again.

Rhyme kissed back. They pressed their lips together for what seemed like a full minute.

Then suddenly he shook his head, so violently that she thought he might have been having an attack of dysreflexia.

“No! “he whispered.

She’d expected playful, she’d expected passionate, at worst a flirtatious Oh-oh, not a good idea… But he sounded weak. The hollow sound of his voice cut into her soul. She rolled off, clutching a pillow to her breasts.

“No, Amelia. I’m sorry. No.”

Her face burned with shame. All she could think was how many times she’d been out with a man who was a friend or a casual date and suddenly been horrified to feel him start to grope her like a teenager. Her voice had registered the same dismay that she now heard in Rhyme’s.

So this was all that she was to him, she understood at last.

A partner. A colleague. A capital F Friend.

“I’m sorry, Sachs… I can’t. There’re complications.”

Complications? None that she could see, except, of course, for the fact that he didn’t love her.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said brusquely. “Stupid. Too much of that damn single malt. I never could hold the stuff. You know that.”

“Sachs.”

She kept a terse smile on her face as she dressed.

“Sachs, let me say something.”

“No.” She didn’t want to hear another word.

“Sachs…”

“I should go. I’ll be back early.”

“I want to say something.”

But Rhyme never got a chance to say anything, whether it was an explanation or apology or a confession. Or a lecture.

They were interrupted by a huge pounding on the door. Before Rhyme could ask who it was, Lon Sellitto burst into the room.

He glanced at Sachs without judgment, then back to Rhyme and announced, “Just heard from Bo’s guys over at the Twentieth. The Dancer was there, staking out the place. The son of a bitch’s taken the bait! We’re gonna get him, Lincoln. This time we’re gonna get him.”

“Couple hours ago,” the detective continued his story, “some of the S &S boys saw a white male taking a stroll around the Twentieth Precinct house. He ducked into an alley and it looked like he was checking out guards. And then they saw him scoping out the gas pump next to the station house.”

“Gas pump? For the RMPs?” Radio mobile patrols – squad cars.

“Right.”

“They follow him?”

“Tried. But he vanished ’fore they got close.”

Rhyme was aware of Sachs’s discreetly fixing the top button of her blouse… He had to have a talk with her about what had happened. He had to make her understand. But considering what Sellitto was now saying, it would have to wait.

“Gets better. Half hour ago, we got a report of a truck hijacking. Rollins Distributing. Upper West Side near the river. They deliver gas to independent service stations. Some guy cuts through the chain-link. The guard hears and goes to investigate. He gets blindsided. Gets the absolute crap beat out of him. And the guy gets away with one of the trucks.”

“Is Rollins the company the department uses for gas?”

“Naw, but who’d know? The Dancer pulls up to the Twentieth in a tanker, the guards there don’t think anything of it, they wave him through, next thing -”

Sachs interrupted. “The truck blows.”

This brought Sellitto up short. “I was just thinking he’d use it as a way to get inside. You’re thinking a bomb?”

Rhyme nodded gravely. Angry with himself. Sachs was right. “Outsmarted ourselves here. Never occurred to me he’d try anything like this. Jesus, a tanker truck goes up in that neighborhood…”

“A fertilizer bomb?”

“No,” Rhyme said. “I don’t think he’d have time to put that together. But all he needs is an AP charge on the side of a small tanker and he’s got a super gas-enhanced device. Burn the precinct to the ground. We’ve got to evacuate everyone. Quietly.”

“Quietly,” Sellitto muttered. “That’ll be easy.”

“How’s the guard from the gas distributor? Can he talk?”

“Can, but he got hit from behind. Didn’t see a thing.”

“Well, I want his clothes at least. Sachs” – she caught his eye – “could you get over to the hospital and bring them back? You’ll know how to pack them to save the trace. And then work the scene where he stole the truck.”

He wondered what her response would be. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d quit cold and walked out the door. But he saw in her still, beautiful face that she was feeling exactly what he was: ironically, relief that the Dancer had intervened to change the disastrous course of their evening.

Finally, finally, some of the luck Rhyme had hoped for.

An hour later Amelia Sachs was back. She held up a plastic bag containing a pair of wire cutters.

“Found them near the chain-link. The guard must’ve surprised the Dancer and he dropped them.”

“Yes!” Rhyme shouted. “I’ve never known him to make a mistake like that. Maybe he is getting careless… I wonder what’s spooking him.”

Rhyme glanced at the cutters. Please, he prayed silently, let there be a print.

But a groggy Mel Cooper – he’d been sleeping in one of the smaller bedrooms upstairs – went over every square millimeter of the tool. Not a print to be found.

“Does it tell us anything?” Rhyme asked.

“It’s a Craftsman model, top of the line, sold in every Sears around the country. And you can pick them up in garage sales and junkyards for a couple bucks.”

Rhyme wheezed in disgust. He gazed at the clippers for a moment then asked, “Tool marks?”

Cooper looked at him curiously. Tool marks are distinctive impressions left at crime scenes by the tools criminals used – screwdrivers, pliers, lock picks, crowbars, slim jims, and the like. Rhyme had once linked a burglar to a crime scene solely on the basis of a tiny V notch on a brass lock plate. The notch matched an imperfection in a chisel found on the man’s workbench. Here, though, they had the tool, not any marks it might have made. Cooper didn’t understand what tool marks Rhyme might be referring to.

“I’m talking about marks on the blade,” he said impatiently. “Maybe the Dancer’s been cutting something distinctive, something that might tell us where he’s holing up.”

“Oh.” Cooper examined it closely. “It’s nicked, but take a look… Do you see anything unusual?”

Rhyme didn’t. “Scrape the blade and handle. See if there’s any residue.”

Cooper ran the scrapings through the gas-chromatograph.

“Phew,” he muttered as he read the results. “Listen to this. Residue of RDX, asphalt, and rayon.”

“Detonating cord,” Rhyme said.

“He cut it with clippers?” Sachs asked. “You can do that?”

“Oh, it’s stable as clothesline,” Rhyme said absently, picturing what a thousand gallons of flaming gasoline would do to the neighborhood around the Twentieth Precinct.

I should’ve made them leave, he was thinking, Percey and Brit Hale. Put them into protective custody and sent them to Montana until the grand jury. This is damn nuts what I’m doing, this trap idea.

“ Lincoln?” Sellitto asked. “We’ve got to find that truck.”

“We’ve got a little time,” Rhyme said. “He’s not going to try to get in until the morning. He needs the cover story of a delivery. Anything else, Mel? Anything in the trace?”

Cooper scanned the vacuum filter. “Dirt and brick. Wait… here’re some fibers. Should I GC them?”

“Yes.”

The tech hunched over the screen as the results came up. “Okay, okay, it’s vegetable fiber. Consistent with paper. And I’m reading a compound… NH four OH.”

“Ammonium hydroxide,” Rhyme said.

“Ammonia?” Sellitto asked. “Maybe you’re wrong about the fertilizer bomb.”

“Any oil?” Rhyme asked.

“None.”

Rhyme asked, “The fiber with the ammonia – was it from the handle of the clipper?”

“No. It was on the clothes of the guard he beat up.”

Ammonia? Rhyme wondered. He asked Cooper to look at one of the fibers through the scanning electron microscope. “High magnification. How’s the ammonia attached?”

The screen clicked on. The strand of fiber appeared like a tree trunk.

“Heat fused, I’d guess.”

Another mystery. Paper and ammonia…

Rhyme looked at the clock. It was 2:40a.m.

Suddenly he realized Sellitto had asked him a question. He cocked his head.

“I said,” the detective repeated, “should we start evacuating everybody around the precinct? I mean, better now than wait till it’s closer to the time he might attack.”

For a long moment Rhyme gazed at the bluish tree trunk of fiber on the screen of the SEM. Then he said abruptly, “Yes. We have to get everybody out. Evacuate the buildings around the station house. Let’s think – the four apartments on either side and across the street.”

“That many?” Sellitto asked, giving a faint laugh. “You think we really gotta do that?”

Rhyme looked up at the detective and said, “No, I've changed my mind. The whole block. We’ve got to evacuate the whole block. Immediately. And get Haumann and Dellray over here. I don’t care where they are. I want them now.”

chapter seventeen

Hour 22 of 45

SOME OF THEM HAD SLEPT.

Sellitto in an armchair, waking more rumpled than ever, his hair askew. Cooper downstairs.

Sachs had apparently spent the night on a couch downstairs or in the other bedroom on the first floor. No interest in the Clinitron anymore.

Thom, himself bleary, was hovering, a dear busybody, taking Rhyme’s blood pressure. The smell of coffee filled the town house.

It was just after dawn and Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts. They’d been up till four, planning their strategy for snagging the Dancer – and responding to the legion of complaints about the evacuation.

Would this work? Would the Dancer step into their trap? Rhyme believed so. But there was another question, one that Rhyme didn’t like to think about but couldn’t avoid. How bad would springing the trap be? The Dancer was deadly enough on his own territory. What would he be like when he was cornered?

Thom brought coffee around and they looked over Dellray’s tactical map. Rhyme, back in the Storm Arrow, rolled into position and studied it too.

“Everybody in place?” he asked Sellitto and Dellray.

Both Haumann’s 32-E teams and Dellray’s federal pickup band of Southern and Eastern District FBI SWAT officers were ready. They’d moved in under cover of night, through sewers and basements and over rooftops, in full urban camouflage; Rhyme was convinced that the Dancer was surveiling his target.

“He won’t be sleeping tonight,” Rhyme had said.

“You sure he’s going in this way, Linc?” Sellitto’d asked uncertainly.

Sure? he thought testily. Who can be sure about anything with the Coffin Dancer?

His deadliest weapon is deception…

Rhyme said wryly, “Ninety-two point seven percent sure.”

Sellitto snorted a sour laugh.

It was then that the doorbell rang. A moment later a stocky, middle-aged man Rhyme didn’t recognize appeared in the doorway of the living room.

The sigh from Dellray suggested trouble brewing. Sellitto knew the man too, it seemed, and nodded cautiously.

He identified himself as Reginald Eliopolos, assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Rhyme recalled he was the prosecutor handling the Phillip Hansen case.

“You’re Lincoln Rhyme? Hear good things about you. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” He started forward, automatically offering his hand. Then he realized that the extended arm was wasted on Rhyme, so he simply pointed it toward Dellray, who shook it reluctantly. Eliopolos’s cheerful “Fred, good to see you” meant just the opposite and Rhyme wondered what was the source of the cold fusion between them.

The attorney ignored Sellitto and Mel Cooper. Thom instinctively sensed what was what and didn’t offer the visitor coffee.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Hear you’ve got quite an operation together. Not checking too much with the boys upstairs, but, hell, I know all about improvising. Sometimes you just can’t spend time waiting for signatures in triplicate.” Eliopolos walked up to a compound ’scope, peered through the eyepiece. “Uh-huh,” he said, though what he might be seeing was a mystery to Rhyme since the stage light was off.

“Maybe -” Rhyme began.

“The chase? Cut to the chase?” Eliopolos swung around. “Sure. Here it is. There’s an armored van at the Federal Building downtown. I want the witnesses in the Hansen case in it within the hour. Percey Clay and Brit Hale. They’ll be taken to the Shoreham federal protective reserve, on Long Island. They’ll be kept there until their grand jury testimony late on Monday. Period. End of chase. How’s that?”

“You think that’s a wise idea?”

“Uh-huh, we do. We think it’s wiser than using them as bait for some kind of personal vendetta by the NYPD.”

Sellitto sighed.

Dellray said, “Open your eyes little bit here, Reggie. You’re not exactly out of the loop. Do I see a joint operation? Do I see a task-forced operation?”

“And a good thing too,” Eliopolos said absently. His full attention was on Rhyme. “Tell me, did you really think that nobody downtown would remember that this was the perp killed your techs five years ago?”

Well, uh-huh, Rhyme had hoped that nobody would remember. And now that somebody had, he and the team were swimming in the soup pot.

“But, hey, hey,” the attorney said with jolly cheer, “I don’t want a turf war. Do I want that? Why would I want that? What I want is Phillip Hansen. What everybody wants is Hansen. Remember? He’s the big fish.”

As a matter of fact Rhyme had largely forgotten about Phillip Hansen and now that he’d been reminded he understood exactly what Eliopolos was doing. And the insight troubled him a great deal.

Rhyme snuck around Eliopolos like a coyote. “You’ve got yourself some good agents out there, do you,” he asked innocently, “who’ll protect the witnesses?”

“At Shoreham?” the attorney responded uncertainly. “Well, you bet we do. Uh-huh.”

“You’ve briefed them about security? About how dangerous the Dancer is?” Innocent as a babe.

A pause. “I’ve briefed them.”

“And what exactly are their orders?”

“Orders?” Eliopolos asked lamely. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew that he’d been caught.

Rhyme laughed. He glanced at Sellitto and Dellray. “See, our U.S. attorney friend here has three witnesses he hopes can nail Hansen.”

“Three?”

“Percey, Hale… and the Dancer himself,” Rhyme scoffed. “He wants to capture him so he’ll turn evidence.” He looked at Eliopolos. “So you’re using Percey as bait too.”

“Only,” Dellray chuckled, “he’s putting her in a Havaheart trap. Got it, got it.”

“You’re thinking,” Rhyme said, “that your case against Hansen’s not so good, whatever Percey and Hale saw.”

Mr. Uh-huh tried sincerity. “They saw him ditch some goddamn evidence. Hell, they didn’t even actually see him do that. If we find the duffel bags and they link him to the killings of those two soldiers last spring, fine, we’ve got a case. Maybe. But, A, we might not find the bags, and, B, the evidence inside them might be damaged.”

Then, C, call me, Rhyme thought. I can find evidence in the clear night wind.

Sellitto said, “But you get Hansen’s hit man alive, he can dime his boss.”

“Exactly.” Eliopolos crossed his arms the way he must have done in court when he was delivering closing statements.

Sachs had been listening from the doorway. She asked the question Rhyme had just been about to. “And what would you plea the Dancer out to?”

Eliopolos asked, “Who’re you?”

“Officer Sachs. IRD.”

“It’s not really a crime scene tech’s place to question -”

“Then I’m asking the fuckin’ question,” Sellitto barked, “and if I don’t get an answer, the mayor’s gonna be asking it too.”

Eliopolos had a political career ahead of him, Rhyme supposed. And a successful one, most likely. He said, “It’s important that we successfully prosecute Hansen. He’s the greater of the two evils. The more potential for harm.”

“That’s a pretty answer,” Dellray said, scrunching up his face. “But it don’t do a thing for the question. What’re you gonna agree to give the Dancer if he snitches on Hansen?”

“I don’t know,” the attorney said evasively. “That hasn’t been discussed.”

“Ten years in medium security?” Sachs muttered.

“It hasn’t been discussed.”

Rhyme was thinking about the trap that they’d planned so carefully until 4a.m. If Percey and Hale were moved now, the Dancer would learn of it. He’d regroup. He’d find out they were at Shoreham and, against guards with orders to take him alive, he’d waltz in, kill Percey and Hale – and a half dozen U.S. marshals – and leave.

The attorney began, “We don’t have much time -”

Rhyme interrupted with, “You have paper?”

“I was hoping you’d be willing to cooperate.”

“We aren’t.”

“You’re a civilian.”

“I’m not,” said Sellitto.

“Uh-huh. I see.” He looked at Dellray but didn’t even bother asking the agent whose side he was on. The attorney said, “I can get an order to show cause for protective custody in three or four hours.”

On Sunday morning? Rhyme thought. Uh-uh. “We’re not releasing them,” he said. “Do what you have to do.”

Eliopolos smiled a smile in his round bureaucratic face. “I should tell you that if this perp dies in any attempt to collar him I will personally be reviewing the shooting committee report, and it is a distinct possibility that I’ll conclude that proper orders on the use of deadly force in an arrest situation were not given by supervisory personnel.” He looked at Rhyme. “There could also be issues of interference by civilians with federal law enforcement activity. That could lead to major civil litigation. I just want you to be forewarned.”

“Thanks,” Rhyme said breezily. “ ’Preciateit.”

When he was gone, Sellitto crossed himself. “Jesus, Linc, you hear him. He said major civil litigation.”

“My my my… Speaking for myself, minor litigation woulda scared this boy plenty,” Dellray chimed in.

They laughed.

Then Dellray stretched and said, “A pisser what’s going round. You hear ’bout it, Lincoln? That bug?”

“What’s that?”

“Been infecting a lotta folk lately. My SWAT boys and me’re out on some operation or other and what happens but they come down with this nasty twitch in their trigger fingers.”

Sellitto, a much worse actor than the agent, said broadly, “You too? I thought it was just our folks at ESU.”

“But listen,” said Fred Dellray, the Alec Guinness of street cops. “I got a cure. All you gotta do is kill yourself a mean asshole, like this Dancer fella, he so much as looks cross-eyed at you. That always works.” He flipped open his phone. “Think I’ll call in and make sure my boys and girls remember ’bout that medicine. I’m gonna do that right now.”

chapter eighteen

Hour 22 of 45

WAKING IN THE GLOOMY SAFE HOUSE at dawn, Percey Clay rose from her bed and walked to the window. She drew aside the curtain and looked out at the gray monotonous sky. A slight mist was in the air.

Close to minimums, she estimated. Wind 090 at five knots. Quarter mile visibility. She hoped the weather cleared for the flight tonight. Oh, she could fly in any weather – and had. Anyone with an IFR ticket – instrument flight rules rating – could take off, fly, and land in dense overcast. (In fact, with their computers, transponders, radar, and collision avoidance systems, most commercial airliners could fly themselves – even setting down for a perfect, hands-free landing.) But Percey liked to fly in clear weather. She liked to see the ground pass by beneath her. The lights at night. The clouds. And above her the stars.

All the stars of evening…

She thought again of Ed and her call to his mother in New Jersey last night. They’d made plans for his memorial service. She wanted to think some more about it, work on the guest list, plan the reception.

But she couldn’t. Her mind was preoccupied with Lincoln Rhyme.

Recalling the conversation they’d had yesterday behind closed doors in his bedroom – after the fight with that officer Amelia Sachs.

She’d sat next to Rhyme in an old armchair. He’d studied her for a moment, looking her up and down. A curious sensation came over her. His wasn’t a personal perusal – not the way men looked over some women (not her, of course) in bars or on the street. It was the way a senior pilot might study her before their first flight together. Checking her authority, her demeanor, her quickness of thought. Her courage.

She’d pulled her flask from her pocket but Rhyme had shaken his head and suggested eighteen-year-old scotch. “Thom thinks I drink too much,” he’d said. “Which I do. But what’s life without vices, right?”

She’d given a wan laugh. “My father’s a purveyor.”

“Of booze? Or vice in general?”

“Cigarettes. Executive with U.S. Tobacco in Richmond. Excuse me. They’re not called that anymore. It’s U.S. Consumer Products or something like that.”

There was a flutter of wings outside the window.

“Oh.” She’d laughed. “It’s a tiercel.”

Rhyme had followed her gaze out the window. “A what?”

“A male peregrine. Why’s his aerie down here? They nest higher in the city.”

“I don’t know. I woke up one morning and there they were. You know falcons?”

“Sure.”

“Hunt with them?” he’d asked.

“I used to. I had a tiercel I used for hunting partridge. I got him as an eyas.”

“What’s that?”

“A young bird in the nest. They’re easier to train.” She’d examined the nest carefully, a faint smile on her face. “But my best hunter was a haggard – a mature goshawk. Female. They’re bigger than the males, better killers. Hard to work with. But she’d take anything – rabbit, hare, pheasant.”

“You still have her?”

“Oh, no. One day, she was waiting on – that means hovering, looking for prey. Then she just changed her mind. Let a big fat pheasant get away. Flew into a thermal that took her hundreds of feet up. Disappeared into the sun. I staked bait for a month but she never came back.”

“She just vanished?”

“Happens with haggards,” she’d said, shrugging unsentimentally. “Hey, they’re wild animals. But we had a good six months together.” It was this falcon that had been the inspiration for the Hudson Air logo. She’d nodded toward the window. “You’re lucky for the company. Have you named them?”

Rhyme’d given a scornful laugh. “Not the kind of thing I’d do. Thom tried. I laughed him out of the room.”

“Is that Officer Sachs really going to arrest me?”

“Oh, I think I can persuade her not to. Say, I have to tell you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“You have a choice to make, you and Hale. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Choice?”

“We can get you out of town. To a witness protection facility. With the right evasive maneuvers I’m pretty sure we can lose the Dancer and keep you safe for the grand jury.”

“But?” she’d asked.

“But he’ll keep after you. And even after the grand jury you’ll still be a threat to Phillip Hansen because you’ll have to testify at trial. That could be months away.”

“The grand jury might not indict him, no matter what we say,” Percey’d pointed out. “Then there’s no point in killing us.”

“It doesn’t matter. Once the Dancer’s been hired to kill someone he doesn’t stop until they’re dead. Besides, the prosecutors’ll go after Hansen for killing your husband and you’ll be a witness in that case too. Hansen needs you gone.”

“I think I see where you’re heading.”

He’d cocked an eyebrow.

“Worm on a hook,” she’d said.

His eyes had crinkled and he’d laughed. “Well, I’m not going to parade you around in public, just put you into a safe house here in town. Fully guarded. State-of-the-art security. But we’ll dig in and keep you there. The Dancer’ll surface and we’ll stop him, once and for all. It’s a crazy idea, but I don’t think we have much choice.”

Another tipple of the scotch. It wasn’t bad. For a product not bottled in Kentucky. “Crazy?” she’d repeated. “Let me ask you a question. You have your role models, Detective? Somebody you admire?”

“Sure. Criminalists. August Vollmer, Edmond Locard.”

“Do you know Beryl Markham?”

“No.”

“Aviatrix in the thirties and forties. She – not Amelia Earheart – was an idol of mine. She led a very dashing life. British upper class. The Out of Africa crowd. She was the first person – not first woman, the first person – to fly solo across the Atlantic the hard way, east to west. Lindbergh used tailwinds.” She’d laughed. “Everybody thought she was crazy. Newspapers were running editorials begging her not to try the flight. She did, of course.”

“And made it?”

“Crash-landed short of the airport, but, yeah, she made it. Well, I don’t know if that was brave or crazy. Sometimes I don’t think there’s any difference.”

Rhyme’d continued, “You’ll be pretty safe, but you won’t be completely safe.”

“Let me tell you something. You know that spooky name? That you call the killer?”

“The Dancer.”

“The Coffin Dancer. Well, there’s a phrase we use in flying jets. The ‘coffin corner.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the margin between the speed your plane stalls at and the speed it starts to break apart from Mach turbulence – when you approach the speed of sound. At sea level you’ve got a couple hundred miles per hour to play with, but at fifty or sixty thousand feet, your stall speed’s maybe five hundred knots per hour and your Mach buffet’s about five forty. You don’t stay within that forty-knots-per-hour margin, you turn the coffin corner and you’ve had it. Any planes that fly that high have to have autopilots to keep the speed inside the margin. Well, I’ll just say that I fly that high all the time and I hardly ever use an autopilot. Completely safe isn’t a concept I’m familiar with.”

“Then you’ll do it.”

But Percey hadn’t answered right away. She’d scrutinized him for a moment. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”

“More?” Rhyme had asked, but the innocence in his voice had been a thin patina.

“I read the Times Metro section. You cops don’t go all out like this for just any murder. What’d Hansen do? He killed a couple of soldiers, and my husband, but you’re after him like he’s Al Capone.”

“I don’t give a damn about Hansen,” quiet Lincoln Rhyme had said, sitting in his motorized throne, with a body that didn’t move and eyes that flickered like dark flames, exactly like the eyes of her hawk. She hadn’t told Rhyme that she, like him, would never name a hunting bird, that she’d called the haggard merely “the falcon.”

Rhyme had continued. “I want to get the Dancer. He’s killed cops, including two who worked for me. I’m going to get him.”

Still, she’d sensed there was more. But she hadn’t pushed it. “You’ll have to ask Brit too.”

“Of course.”

Finally, she’d said, “All right, I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. I -”

“But,” she interrupted.

“What?”

“There’s a condition.”

“What’s that?” Rhyme lifted an eyebrow and Percey had been struck by this thought: once you overlooked his damaged body you saw what a handsome man he was. And, yes, yes, realizing that, she felt her old enemy – the familiar cringe of being in the presence of a good-looking man. Hey, Troll Face, Pug Face, Troll, Trollie, Frog Girl, gotta date for Saturday night? Betcha don’t…

Percey’d said, “That I fly the U.S. Medical charter tomorrow night.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“It’s a deal breaker,” she’d said, recalling a phrase Ron and Ed had used occasionally.

“Why do you have to fly?”

“Hudson Air needs this contract. Desperately. It’s a narrow-margin flight and we need the best pilot in the company. That’s me.”

“What do you mean, narrow margin?”

“Everything’s planned out to the nth degree. We’re going with minimum fuel. I can’t have a pilot wasting time making go-arounds because he’s blown the approach or declaring alternates because of minimum conditions.” She’d paused, then added, “I am not letting my company go down the tubes.”

Percey’d said this with an intensity that matched his, but she’d been surprised when he nodded. “All right,” Rhyme had said. “I’ll agree.”

“Then we have a deal.” She’d instinctively reached forward to shake his hand but caught herself.

He’d laughed. “I stick to solely verbal agreements these days.” They’d sipped the scotch to seal the bargain.

Now, six-thirty on Saturday morning, she rested her head against the glass of the safe house. There was so much to do. Getting Foxtrot Bravo repaired. Preparing the nav log and the flight plan – which alone would take hours. But still, despite her uneasiness, despite her sorrow about Ed, she felt that indescribable sense of pleasure; she’d be flying tonight.

“Hey,” a friendly voice drawled.

She turned to see Roland Bell in the doorway.

“Morning,” she said.

He walked forward quickly. “You have those curtains open you better be keepin’ low as a bedbaby.” He tugged the drapes shut.

“Oh. I heard Detective Rhyme was springing some trap. Guaranteed to catch him.”

“Well, word is Lincoln Rhyme is all the time right. But I wouldn’t trust this particular killer behind a dime. You sleep decent?”

“No,” she said. “You?”

“I dozed a couple hours back,” Bell said, peering with sharp eyes out through the curtain. “But I don’t need much sleep. Wake up full of git most days. Havin’ youngsters does that to you. Now, just you keep that curtain closed. Remember, this is New York City, and think what’d happen to my career if you got yourself winged by some gangsta shootin’ stray bullets in the air. I’d have the dry grins for a week, that happened. Now how about some coffee?”

Here were a dozen punchy clouds reflected in the windows of the old town house early this Sunday morning.

Here was a hint of rain.

Here was the Wife standing in a bathrobe at the window, her white face surrounded by dark curly hair mussed from just waking.

And here was Stephen Kall, one block away from the Justice Department’s safe house on Thirty-fifth Street, blending into the shadows beneath a water tower on the top of an old apartment building, watching her through his Leica binoculars, the reflection of the clouds swimming across her thin body.

He knew that the glass would be bulletproof and would certainly deflect the first shot. He could place another round within four seconds, but she’d stumble backward in reaction to the shattering glass even if she didn’t realize she was being fired at. The odds were he couldn’t inflict a mortal wound.

Sir, I will stick to my original plan, sir.

A man appeared beside her and the curtain fell back. Then his face peered through the crack, eyes scanning the rooftops where a sniper would logically be positioned. He looked efficient and dangerous. Stephen memorized his appearance.

Then he ducked behind the façade of the building before he was seen.

The police trick – he guessed it was Lincoln the Worm’s idea – about moving the Wife and the Friend into the police precinct building on the West Side hadn’t fooled him for more than ten minutes. After listening to the Wife and Ron over the tapped line, he’d simply run a renegade software program – a remote star-69 – he’d downloaded from the warez newsgroup on the Internet. It returned a 212 phone number. Manhattan.

What he’d done next was a long shot.

But how are victories won, Soldier?

By considering every possibility, however improbable, sir.

He’d logged on to the Net and a moment later had typed the phone number into a reverse phone book, which gave you the address and name of the subscriber. It didn’t work with unlisted numbers and Stephen was certain that no one in the federal government would be so stupid as to use a listed number for a safe house.

He was wrong.

The name James L. Johnson, 258 East 35th Street popped onto the screen.

Impossible…

He’d then called the Manhattan Federal Building and asked to speak to Mr. Johnson. “That’d be James Johnson.”

“Hold please, I’ll put you through.”

“Excuse me,” Stephen had interrupted. “What department is he in again?”

“That’d be the Justice Department. Facilities Management Office.”

Stephen hung up as the call was being transferred.

Once he knew the Wife and Friend were in a safe house on Thirty-fifth Street, he’d stolen some official city maps of the block to plan his assault. Then he’d taken his stroll around the Twentieth Precinct building on the West Side and let himself be seen gazing at the gas pump. After that he’d boosted a gas delivery truck and left plenty of evidence behind so that they’d think he’d be using the truck as a giant gas bomb to take out the witnesses at the Twentieth.

And so here was Stephen Kall now, within small-arms range of the Wife and the Friend.

Thinking of the job, trying not to think about the obvious parallel: the face in the window, looking for him.

A little cringey, not too bad. A little wormy.

The curtain closed. Stephen now examined the safe house again.

It was a three-story building unattached to adjacent buildings, the alley like a dark moat around the structure. The walls were brownstone – the hardest building material other than granite or marble to tunnel or blast through – and the windows were blocked with bars that looked like old iron but that Stephen knew were really case-hardened steel and would be wired with motion or decibel sensors or both.

The fire escape was real, but if you looked closely you could see that behind the curtained windows was darkness. Probably sheet steel bolted to the inside frame. He’d found the real fire door – behind a large theatrical poster pasted to the brick. (Why would anyone put up an ad in an alley unless it was to disguise a door?) The alley itself looked like any other in midtown, cobblestone and asphalt, but he could see the glass eyes of security cameras recessed into the walls. Still, there were trash bags and several Dumpsters in the alley that would provide pretty good cover. He could climb into the alley from a window in the office building next door and use the Dumpsters for cover to get to the fire door.

In fact, there was an open window on the first floor of the office building, a curtain blowing in and out. Whoever was monitoring the security screens would have seen the motion and become used to it. Stephen could drop through the window, six feet to the ground, and then move behind the Dumpster and crawl to the fire door.

He also knew they wouldn’t be expecting him here – he’d heard the reports of an evacuation of all the buildings near the Twentieth Precinct, so they’d really believed that he’d try to get a gas truck bomb close to the station house.

Evaluate, Soldier.

Sir, my evaluation is that the enemy is relying on both physical structure and anonymity of the premises for defense. I note the absence of large numbers of tactical personnel and I have concluded that a single-person assault on the premises has a good likelihood of success in eliminating one or both of the targets, sir.

Despite the confidence, though, he felt momentarily cringey.

Picturing Lincoln searching for him. Lincoln the Worm. A big lumpy thing, a larva, moist with worm moisture, looking everywhere, seeing through walls, oozing up through cracks.

Looking through windows…

Crawling up his leg.

Chewing on his flesh.

Wash ’ em off. Wash them off!

Wash what off, Soldier? You still harping on those fucking worms?

Sir, I am… Sir, no sir.

Are you going soft on me, Soldier? Are you feeling like a little pussy schoolgirl?

Sir, no sir. I am a knife blade, sir. I am pure death. I have a hard-on to kill, sir!

Breathed deeply. Slowly calmed.

He hid the guitar case containing the Model 40 on the roof, under a wooden water tower. The rest of the equipment he transferred to a large book bag, and then pulled on a Columbia University windbreaker and his baseball cap.

He climbed down the fire escape and disappeared into the alley, feeling ashamed, even scared – not of his enemy’s bullets but of the piercing hot gaze of Lincoln the Worm, moving closer, easing slowly but relentlessly through the city, looking for him.

Stephen had planned on an invasive entry, but he didn’t have to kill a soul. The office building next to the safe house was empty.

The lobby was deserted and there were no security cameras inside. The main door was wedged partly open with a rubber doorstop and he saw dollies and furniture pads stacked beside it. It was tempting, but he didn’t want to run into any movers or tenants, so he stepped outside again and slipped around the corner, away from the safe house. He eased behind a potted pine tree, which hid him from the sidewalk. With his elbow he broke the narrow window leading into a darkened office – of a psychiatrist, it turned out – and climbed in. He stood completely still for five minutes, pistol in hand. Nothing. He then eased silently out the door and into the first-floor corridor of the building.

He paused outside the office he believed was the one with the window opening onto the alley – the one with the blowing curtain. Stephen reached for the doorknob.

But instinct told him to change his plans. He decided to try the basement. He found the stairs and descended into the musty warren of basement rooms.

Stephen worked his way silently toward the side of the building closest to the safe house and pushed open a steel door. He walked into a dimly lit twenty-by-twenty room filled with boxes and old appliances. He found a head-high window that opened onto the alley.

It’d be a tight fit. He’d have to remove the glass and the frame. But once he was out he could slip directly behind a pile of trash bags and in a sniper’s low crawl make his way to the fire door of the safe house. Much safer than the window upstairs.

Stephen thought: I’ve done it.

He’d fooled them all.

Fooled Lincoln the Worm! This gave him as much pleasure as killing the two victims would.

He took a screwdriver from his book bag and began to work the glazier’s putty out of the window. The gray wads came away slowly and he was so absorbed in his task that by the time he dropped the screwdriver and got his hand on the butt of his Beretta, the man was on top of him, shoving a pistol into Stephen’s neck and telling him in a whisper, “You move an inch and you’re dead.”