The Coffin Dancer

couple months after she died Stephen and his stepfather were out hunting. The kid knocked himout, stripped him naked, and tied him to a tree in the woods. Left him there for a few days. Just wanted to scare him, his lawyer said. By the time the police got to him, well, let’s just say the infestation was pretty bad. Maggots, mostly. Lived for two days after that. Delirious.”
    “Man,” Sachs whispered.
    “When they found him, the boy was there, just sitting next to him, watching.” Cooper read, “ ‘The suspect surrendered without resistance. Appeared in a disoriented state. Kept repeating, “Anything can kill, anything can kill . . . ” Taken to Cumberland Regional Mental Health Center for evaluation.’ ”
    The psychological makeup didn’t interest Rhyme very much. He trusted his forensic profiling techniques far more than the behavioral law enforcers’. He knew the Dancer was a sociopath—all professional killers were—and the sorrows and traumas that made him who he was weren’t much help at the moment. He asked, “Picture?”
    “No pictures in juvie.”
    “Right. Hell. How ’bout military?”
    “Nope. But there’s another conviction,” Cooper said. “He tried to enlist in the marines but the psych profile got him rejected. He hounded the recruiting officers in D.C. for a couple months and finally assaulted a sergeant. Pled a suspended.”
    Sellitto said, “We’ll run the name through FINEST, the alias list, and NCIC.”
    “Have Dellray get some people to Cumberland and start tracing him,” Rhyme ordered.
    “Will do.”
    Stephen Kall . . .
    After all these years. It was like finally visiting a shrine you’d read about all your life but never seen in person.
    There was a startling knock on the door. Sachs and Sellitto’s hands both twitched impulsively toward their weapons.
    But the visitor was just one of the cops from downstairs. He had a large satchel. “Delivery.”
    “What is it?” Rhyme asked.
    “A trooper from Illinois. Said this was from Du-Page County Fire and Rescue.”
    “What is it?”
    The cop shrugged. “He said it was shit from some truck treads. But that’s nuts. Must’ve been kidding.”
    “No,” Rhyme said, “that’s exactly what it is.” He glanced at Cooper. Tire scrapings from the crash site.
    The cop blinked. “You wanted that? Flown in from Chicago?”
    “We’ve been waiting with bated breath.”
    “Well. Life’s funny sometimes, ain’t it?”
    And Lincoln Rhyme could only agree.

    Professional flying is only partly about flying.
    Flying is also about paperwork.
    Littering the back of the van transporting Percey Clay to Mamaroneck Airport was a huge stack of books and charts and documents: NOS’s Airport/Facility Directory , the Airman’s Information Manual , the FAA’s NOTAMs—“Notices to Airmen”—andadvisory circulars, and the Jeppesen “J-Aids,” the Airport and Information Directory. Thousands of pages. Mountains of information. Percey, like most pilots, knew much of it by heart. But she also wouldn’t think about driving an aircraft without going back to the original materials and studying them, literally, from the ground up.
    With this information and her calculator she was filling out the two basic pre-flight documents: the navigation log and the flight plan. On the log she’d mark their altitude, calculate the course variations due to wind and the variance between true course and magnetic course, determine their ETE—estimated time en route—and come up with the Godhead number: the amount of fuel they’d need for the flight. Six cities, six different logs, dozens of checkpoints in between . . .
    Then there was the FAA flight plan itself, on the reverse side of the navigation log. Once airborne, the copilot would activate the plan by calling the Flight Service Station at Mamaroneck, which would in turn call ahead to Chicago with Foxtrot Bravo ’s estimated time of arrival. If the aircraft didn’t arrive at its destination within a half hour after ETA, it would be declared overdue and search-and-rescue procedures would start.
    These were complicated documents and had to be calculated perfectly. If aircraft had unlimited fuel supplies they could rely on radio navigation and spend as much time as they wanted cruising from destination to destination at whatever altitudes they wanted. But not only was fuel expensive to begin with (and thetwin Garrett turbofans burned an astonishing amount of it); it was also