The Coffin Dancer

destruction of aircraft. Site of device seems to be underneath and behind the cockpit.’”
    “Underneath and behind. I wonder if a cargo bay’s there. Maybe . . . ” Rhyme fell silent. His head swiveled back and forth, gazing at the evidence bags. “Wait, wait!” he shouted. “Mel, let me see those bits of metal there. Third bag from the left. The aluminum. Put it under a ’scope.”
    Cooper had connected the video output of his compound microscope to Rhyme’s computer. What Cooper saw, Rhyme could see. The tech began mounting samples of the minuscule bits of debris on slides and running them under the ’scope.
    A moment later Rhyme ordered, “Cursor down. Double click.”
    The image on his computer screen magnified.
    “There, look! The skin of the plane was blown inward.”
    “Inward?” Sachs asked. “You mean the bomb was on the outside?”
    “I think so, yes. What about it, Mel?”
    “You’re right. Those polished rivet heads are all bent inward. It was outside, definitely.”
    “A rocket maybe?” Dellray asked. “SAM?”
    Reading from the report Sellitto said, “No radar blips consistent with missiles.”
    Rhyme shook his head. “No, everything points to a bomb.”
    “But on the outside?” Sellitto asked. “Never heard of that before.”
    “That explains this,” Cooper called. The tech, wearing magnifying goggles and armed with a ceramic probe, was looking over bits of metal as fast as a cowboy counts heads in a herd. “Fragments of ferrous metal. Magnets. Wouldn’t stick to the aluminum skin but there was steel under it. And I’ve got bits of epoxy resin. He stuck the bomb on the outside with the magnets to hold it until the glue hardened.”
    “And look at the shock waves in the epoxy,” Rhyme pointed out. “The glue wasn’t completely set, so he planted it not long before takeoff.”
    “Can we brand the epoxy?”
    “Nope. Generic composition. Sold everywhere.”
    “Any hope of prints? Tell me true, Mel.”
    Cooper’s answer was a faint, skeptical laugh. But he went through the motions anyway and scanned the fragments with the PoliLight wand. Nothing was evident except the blast residue. “Not a thing.”
    “I want to smell it,” Rhyme announced.
    “Smell it?” Sachs asked.
    “With the brisance, we know it’s high explosive. I want to know exactly what kind.”
    Many bombers used low explosives—substances that burn quickly but don’t explode unless confined in, say, a pipe or box. Gunpowder was the most common of these. High explosives—like plastic or TNT—detonate in their natural state and don’t need to be packed inside anything. They were expensiveand hard to come by. The type and source of explosive could tell a lot about the bomber’s identity.
    Sachs brought a bag to Rhyme’s chair and opened it. He inhaled.
    “RDX,” Rhyme said, recognizing it immediately.
    “Consistent with the brisance,” Cooper said. “You thinking C three or C four?” Cooper asked. RDX was the main component of these two plastic explosives, which were military; they were illegal for a civilian to possess.
    “Not C three,” Rhyme said, again smelling the explosive as if it were a vintage Bordeaux. “No sweet smell . . . Not sure. And strange . . . I smell something else . . . GC it, Mel.”
    The tech ran the sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. This machine isolated elements in compounds and identified them. It could analyze samples as small as a millionth of a gram and, once it had determined what they were, could run the information through a database to determine, in many cases, brand names.
    Cooper examined the results. “You’re right, Lincoln. It’s RDX. Also oil. And this is weird—starch . . . ”
    “Starch!” Rhyme cried. “That’s what I smelled. It’s guar flour . . . ”
    Cooper laughed as those very words popped up on the computer screen. “How’d you know?”
    “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’sa mixture of RDX, TNT, motor oil, and the guar flour. You don’t see it very often.”
    “Military, huh?” Sellitto said. “Points to Hansen.”
    “That it does.”
    The tech mounted samples on his compound ’scope’s stage.
    The images appeared simultaneously on Rhyme’s computer screen. Bits of fiber, wires, scraps, splinters, dust.
    He was reminded