The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme, #2)

by Jeffery Deaver

The silver bird shuddered then settled gently on the concrete. It was the smoothest landing she’d ever made.

Eliopolos wouldn’t have stepped back for the world. But his eyes flickered to the windows to make certain the shades were closed.

“Yeah, Rhyme, that’s been your war cry all along. Well, we’re not sacrificing any more troops because you’ve got a hard-on for a guy killed two of your techs five years ago. Assuming you can get a hard-on—”

If you’re going to protect Percey, I want you to protect the chief forensic investigator in the case too.” “You?” the lawyer asked. “No, Amelia Sachs,” Rhyme replied. “Rhyme, no,” she said, frowning. Reckless Amelia Sachs . . . And I’m putting her square in the kill zone.

He thought of saying something about avoiding heroics, about Jerry Banks, about being too hard on herself. About giving up the dead . . . But he knew that any words of caution or encouragement would ring like lead. And so he settled for “Shoot first.”

When she hung up she stared at the passing scenery for a moment. She said absently to Bell, “The insurance company isn’t even going to pay for the cargo. They’re saying I assumed a known risk. So, that’s it. That’s it.” She added briskly, “We’re bankrupt.”

She appreciated trees and grass and cows but enjoyed nature best when she was streaking past it at 110 miles per hour.

And hit that panic button there and there’ll be a Huey full of SWAT boys here in twenty minutes.” Jodie’s face said twenty minutes seemed like a very long time. Sachs had to agree with him.

After they hung up, Percey asked them, “You want a nightcap?” Sachs couldn’t decide if she did or not. The memory of the scotch preceding her fiasco in Lincoln Rhyme’s bed made her cringe. But on impulse she said, “Sure.”

Jodie opted for a fast, medicinal shot of whiskey, then headed off to bed, toting his self-help book under his arm and staring with a city boy’s fascination at a mounted moose head.

Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More. Let’s get to work, he thought.

As the marshal lay on the floor, shaking and dying, he gazed up at Jodie, who was stripping off his own blood-soaked clothes. The marshal’s eyes flickered to Jodie’s biceps. They focused on the tattoo.

Who the hell is this? Rhyme wondered, looking at the savaged body in front of him. He’s the key to the Dancer’s next move. Oh, this was the worst feeling in the world: an unreachable itch. To have a piece of evidence in front of you, to know it was the key to the case, and yet to be unable to decipher it.

The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.

They’d based their entire investigation on the belief that Kall was the Coffin Dancer. But what if he wasn’t?

So that the Dancer could wait there, wait for Stephen Kall to show up, befriend him, and then arrange to get captured and get close to the victims.

“What was I thinking of? Dealers don’t cut prescription drugs! It’s too much trouble. Only street drugs!” Cooper nodded. “Jodie wasn’t cutting them with the baby formula. He just dumped out the drugs. He was popping placebos, so we’d think he was a druggie.”

She thought about Rhyme. She hoped he was getting some sleep too. She’d seen one of his dysreflexia attacks. It had been terrifying and she didn’t want him to go through another one.

“In the car!” she stammered. “I’ll bet he did it in the car. He was sitting between us. Fidgeting all the time. Bumping into us.”

But, Rhyme, she thought, this isn’t Stephen Kall. Jodie isn’t the killer I know. It wasn’t his crime scenes I walked through. It wasn’t his mind I peered into . . .

Frantic, he ejected the shell from the deer rifle and chambered another round. As he lifted the gun to his cheek again Sachs fired. Two shots. Both clean hits. Saw him fly backward, the rifle sailing through the air like a majorette’s baton.

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

But they remained transfixed, watching this pitiable man so desperately absorbed in his task that he didn’t even seem to know his face and shoulder had been destroyed.

Rhyme sipped from his straw. It was fruit juice. He’d astonished Thom by asking him to dump out the scotch and replace it with Hawaiian Punch.

You left plenty of clues to your subway hideout so we’d be sure to find you . . . and use you to get to Kall. We all trusted you. Sure we did—Stephen didn’t have a clue you’d hired him. All he knew was that you betrayed him and he wanted to kill you. Perfect cover for you.

Latent homosexuality is always helpful.”

You want to know a mistake some players make?” “What’s that?” Rhyme felt the man’s hot gaze. He was suddenly uneasy. “They get curious about their opponents. They try to learn things about their personal life. Things that aren’t useful.

See, the game is all on the board, Lincoln. It’s all on the board.”

Rhyme was vaguely aware of the agent trying to figure out how to best subdue a crip. And he was vaguely aware of Sachs stepping forward trying to figure out how to subdue the agent.

Apparently they actually did believe that, given a chance, Thom would wheel Rhyme out the door and he’d make a getaway in the Storm Arrow, top speed 7.5 miles per hour.

“I collect the trash,” Rhyme said, pleased as always when he could think up a melodramatic line.

“What if Hansen didn’t want to kill Ed and Percey because they were witnesses?”

“What do you think about the theory that the Dancer was hired to murder Percey and Ed so that the killer could buy the Company at a discount?”

A million told me that the man ordering the hit was an amateur. And that he had a lot of money at his disposal.”

“As a partner he had a right to buy our interest from our estates at a discount if we die.”

“But you didn’t hire Kall,” Rhyme reminded. “You hired Jodie—the Coffin Dancer—and he sub-contracted the work with Kall. Who didn’t know you from beans.”

Please, Sachs, don’t do it . . . He’ll see you. He’ll go for a head shot—amateurs always do—and you’ll die.

She inhaled deeply then blurted, “Rhyme, you should go for it.” Another sip. “I wasn’t sure I was going to say that.” “Beg pardon?” “She’s right for you. It could be real good.”

There are times when you just need to lift your hands and let them flop into your lap in frustration. Rhyme settled for nestling his head in his luxurious down pillow.

“The other night?” He sighed. “I had to draw the line between us, Sachs. I’m already too close to you for my own good.

Which is why he’d been so obsessed with the man. Why he’d wanted, so uncharacteristically, to debrief the killer. He wanted to catch the man who’d killed his lover. Wanted to know all about him.

“So, that’s it, Sachs. It has nothing to do with Percey. And as much as I wanted you to spend the night—to spend every night—I can’t risk loving you any more than I do.”

After the accident he’d come to believe that the oak beam that had snapped his spine actually did its worst damage to his heart, killing all sensation within it. And his ability to love and be loved were as crushed as the thin fiber of his spinal cord. But the other night, Sachs close to him, he’d realized how wrong he was.