The Coffin Dancer

Rhyme reminded. “I wasn’t fooled.”
    Though I still didn’t get him, he reflected bitterly.
    “He plans everything,” the detective continued. “Sets up diversions then moves in. Does the job. And he fucking cleans up afterwards real efficient.” Sellitto stopped talking, looking strangely uneasy for a man who hunts killers for a living.
    Eyes out the window, Rhyme didn’t acknowledge his ex-partner’s reticence. He merely continued the story. “That case—with the skinned hands—was the Dancer’s most recent job in New York. Five, six years ago. He was hired by one Wall Street investment banker to kill his partner. Did the job nice and clean. My CS team got to the scene and started to walk the grid. One of them lifted a wad of paper out of the trash can. It set off a load of PETN. About eight ounces, gas enhanced. Both techs were killed and virtually every clue was destroyed.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sachs said. There was an awkward silence between them. She’d been his apprentice and his partner for more than a year—and had become his friend too. Had even spent the night here sometimes, sleeping on the couch or even, as chaste as a sibling, in Rhyme’s half-ton Clinitron bed. But the talk was mostly forensic, with Rhyme’s lulling her to sleep with tales of stalking serial killers and brilliant cat burglars. They generally steered clear of personalissues. Now she offered nothing more than, “It must have been hard.”
    Rhyme deflected the taut sympathy with a shake of his head. He stared at the empty wall. For a time there’d been art posters taped up around the room. They were long gone but his eyes played a game of connect-the-dots with the bits of tape still stuck there. A lopsided star was the shape they traced, while within him somewhere, deep, Rhyme felt an empty despair, replaying the horrid crime scene of the explosion, seeing the burnt, shattered bodies of his officers.
    Sachs asked, “The guy who hired him, he was willing to dime the Dancer?”
    “Was willing to, sure. But there wasn’t much he could say. He delivered cash to a drop box with written instructions. No electronic transfers, no account numbers. They never met in person.” Rhyme inhaled deeply. “But the worst part was that the banker who’d paid for the hit changed his mind. He lost his nerve. But he had no way to get in touch with the Dancer. It didn’t matter anyway. The Dancer’d told him right up front: ‘Recall is not an option.’ ”
    Sellitto briefed Sachs about the case against Phillip Hansen, the witnesses who’d seen his plane make its midnight run, and the bomb last night.
    “Who are the other wits?” she asked.
    “Percey Clay, the wife of this Carney guy killed last night in the plane. She’s the president of their company, Hudson Air Charters. Her husband was VP. The other wit’s Britton Hale. He’s a pilot works for them. I sent baby-sitters to keep an eye on ’em both.”
    Rhyme said, “I’ve called Mel Cooper in. He’ll be working the lab downstairs. The Hansen case is task-forced so we’re getting Fred Dellray to represent the feds. He’ll have agents for us if we need them and’s clearing one of U.S. Marshal’s wit-protection safe houses for the Clay woman and Hale.”
    Lincoln Rhyme’s opulent memory intruded momentarily and he lost track of what the detective was saying. An image of the office where the Dancer had left the bomb five years ago came to mind again.
    Remembering: The trash can, blown open like a black rose. The smell of the explosive—the choking chemical scent, nothing at all like wood-fire smoke. The silky alligatoring on the charred wood. The seared bodies of his techs, drawn into the pugilistic attitude by the flames.
    He was saved from this horrid reverie by the buzz of the fax machine. Jerry Banks snagged the first sheet. “Crime scene report from the crash,” he announced.
    Rhyme’s head snapped toward the machine eagerly. “Time to go to work, boys and girls!”

    Wash ’em. Wash ’em off.
    Soldier, are those hands clean?
    Sir, they’re getting there, sir.
    The solid man, in his mid-thirties, stood in the washroom of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, lost in his task.
    Scrub, scrub, scrub . . .
    He paused and looked out the men’s room door. Nobody seemed interested that he’d been in here for nearly ten minutes.
    Back to scrubbing.
    Stephen Kall examined his cuticles and big red knuckles.
    Lookin’ clean, lookin’ clean. No worms. Not a