The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme, #2)

by Jeffery Deaver

Lincoln Rhyme is] among the most brilliant and most vulnerable of crime fiction’s heroes.”

He kept the car at exactly sixty miles per hour, centered perfectly in the right lane; like most pilots he was conservative in his car.

People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone.

O’Hare is the busiest airport in the world

Sand, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, is a criminalist’s delight: bits of rock, sometimes mixed with other material, ranging from .05 to 2 millimeters (larger than that is gravel, smaller is silt). It adheres to a perp’s clothing like sticky paint and conveniently leaps off at crime scenes and hideouts to link murderer and murdered.

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

The crime scene officer who worked as Rhyme’s partner had spent hours at Panelli’s car and had come away with no unidentified fingerprints, ten bags of meaningless trace evidence, and—the only possible lead—a few dozen grains of this very odd sand.

Rhyme generally distrusted his own ability to read people (his ex-wife, Blaine, had said—often, and heatedly—that Rhyme could spot a shell casing a mile away and miss a human being standing in front of him) but he could see now that Sellitto was holding back.

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

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

He’s got—or had, at least—a tattoo on his upper arm: the Grim Reaper dancing with a woman in front of a coffin.”

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

She’d been his apprentice and his partner for more than a year—and had become his friend too. Had even spent the night here sometimes, sleeping on the couch or even, as chaste as a sibling, in Rhyme’s half-ton Clinitron bed.

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

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

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

“No, everything points to a bomb.” “But on the outside?” Sellitto asked. “Never heard of that before.”

The type and source of explosive could tell a lot about the bomber’s identity.

“Because it’s military dynamite.” “But there’s no nitroglycerine,” Cooper protested. The active ingredient in dynamite. “No, no, it’s not real dynamite,” Rhyme said. “It’s a mixture of RDX, TNT, motor oil, and the guar flour. You don’t see it very often.”

Most bombers will pack explosives around the detonating system to destroy clues.

The rule of thumb is that if two bombs share at least four points of construction—soldered leads instead of taped, for instance, or analog versus digital timers—they were probably made by the same person or under his tutelage.

And if Rhyme knew anything about the Coffin Dancer, it was that he tailored his tools to the job.

A falconer’s bird, however tame and affectionate, is as close to a wild animal in condition and habit as an animal that lives with man can be. Above all, it hunts.

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.

“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 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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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 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.

“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.”

“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!”

His speech may have been slow but his eyes were very fast,

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.

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.”

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.)

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.

“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.

“You must be going through hell,” Ron said. “Not really,” she said. Not yet, Stephen corrected silently.

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.”

In the old days, in the Before days, Lincoln Rhyme had been a walker. There was something about motion that soothed him.

One of the most frustrating things about his present condition was the inability to let off tension.

Rhyme, ever skeptical of the psychologist’s black arts, nonetheless knew self-destructive behavior when he saw it.

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

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 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.

It never occurred to Stephen that police cars wouldn’t buy their gas at Amoco or Shell stations.

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

Rhyme closed his eyes and felt a horror he hadn’t felt in years. An icy stab through his insentient body.