The Coffin Dancer

can get a hard-on—”
    Eliopolos was a large man and so he was surprised to find himself slammed so lithely to the floor, gasping for breath and staring up into Sellitto’s purple face, the lieutenant’s fist drawn back.
    “Do that, Officer,” the attorney wheezed, “and you’ll be arraigned within a half hour.”
    “Lon,” Rhyme said, “let it go, let it go . . . ”
    The detective calmed, glared at the man, walked away. Eliopolos climbed to his feet.
    The insult in fact meant nothing. He wasn’t even thinking of Eliopolos. Or the Dancer for that matter. For he’d happened to glance at Amelia Sachs, at the hollowness in her eyes, the despair. And he knew what she was feeling: the desperation at losing her prey. Eliopolos was stealing away her chance to get the Dancer. As with Lincoln Rhyme, the killer had come to be the dark focus of her life.
    All because of a single misstep—the incident at the airport, her going for cover. A small thing, minusculeto everyone but her. But what was the expression? A fool can throw a stone into a pond that a dozen wise men can’t recover. And what was Rhyme’s life now but the result of a piece of wood breaking a tiny piece of bone? Sachs’s life had been snapped in that single moment of what she saw as cowardice. But unlike Rhyme’s case, there was—he believed—a chance for her to mend.
    Oh, Sachs, how it hurts to do this, but I have no choice. He said to Eliopolos, “All right, but you have to do one thing in exchange.”
    “Or you’ll what?” Eliopolos snickered.
    “Or I won’t tell you where Percey is,” Rhyme said simply. “We’re the only ones who know.”
    Eliopolos’s face, no longer flushed from his World Wrestling pin, gazed icily at Rhyme. “What do you want?”
    Rhyme inhaled deeply. “The Dancer’s shown an interest in targeting the people looking for him. 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 motioned her over to him.
    “I want to stay here,” she said. “I want to find him.”
    He whispered, “Oh, don’t worry about that, Sachs. He’ll find you. We’ll try to figure out his new identity, Mel and me. But if he makes a move out on LongIsland, I want you there. I want you with Percey. You’re the only one who understands him. Well, you and me. And I won’t be doing any shooting in the near future.”
    “He could come back here—”
    “I don’t think so. There’s a chance this is the first fish of his that’s going to get away and he doesn’t like that one bit. He’s going after Percey. He’s desperate to. I know it.”
    She debated for a moment, then nodded.
    “Okay,” Eliopolos said, “you’ll come with us. We’ve got a van waiting.”
    Rhyme said, “Sachs?”
    She paused.
    Eliopolos said, “We really should move.”
    “I’ll be down in a minute.”
    “We’re under some time pressure here, Officer.”
    “I said, a minute.” She handily won the staring contest and Eliopolos and his trooper escort led Jodie down the stairs. “Wait,” the little man shouted from the hallway. He returned, grabbed his self-help book, and trotted down the stairs.
    “Sachs . . . ”
    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.”
    She placed her right hand on his left. He closed his eyes and tried so very hard to feel the pressure of herskin on his. He believed he did, if just in his ring finger.
    He looked up at her. She said, “And you keep a minder handy, okay?” Nodding at Sellitto and Dellray.
    Then an EMS medic appeared in the door, looking around the room at Rhyme, at the equipment, at the beautiful lady cop, trying to fathom why on earth he was doing what he’d been instructed to. “Somebody wanted a body?” he asked uncertainly.
    “In here!” Rhyme shouted. “Now! We need it now!”

    The van drove through a gate and then down a one-lane driveway. It extended for what seemed like miles.
    “If this’s the driveway,” Roland Bell muttered, “can’t wait to see the house.”
    He and Amelia Sachs flanked Jodie, who irritated