The Coffin Dancer

couldn’t dispose of altogether.
    “The first bag, Sachs? Where did it come from?”
    She flipped angrily through her notes.
    What was eating at her? he wondered. Something was wrong, Rhyme could see. Maybe it had to do with her anger at Percey Clay, maybe her concern for Jerry Banks. But maybe not. He could tell from thecool glances that she didn’t want to talk about it. Which was fine with him. The Dancer had to be caught. It was their only priority at the moment.
    “This’s from the hangar where the Dancer waited for the plane.” She held up two of the bags. She nodded at three others. “This’s from the sniper’s nest. This’s from the painting van. This’s from the catering van.”
    “Thom . . . Thom!” Rhyme shouted, startling everyone in the room.
    The aide appeared in the doorway. He asked a belabored “Yes? I’m trying to fix some food here, Lincoln.”
    “Food?” Rhyme asked, exasperated. “We don’t need to eat. We need more charts. Write: ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ Yes, ‘CS-Two. Hangar.’ That’s good. Then another one. ‘CS-Three.’ That’s where he fired from. His grassy knoll.”
    “I should write that? ‘Grassy Knoll’?”
    “Of course not. It’s a joke. I do have a sense of humor, you know. Write: ‘CS-Three. Sniper’s Nest.’ Now, let’s look at the hangar first. What do you have?”
    “Bits of glass,” Cooper said, spilling the contents out on a porcelain tray like a diamond merchant. Sachs added, “And some vacuumed trace, a few fibers from the windowsill. No FR.”
    Friction ridge prints, she meant. Finger or palm.
    “He’s too careful with prints,” Sellitto said glumly.
    “No, that’s encouraging ,” Rhyme said, irritated—as he often was—that no one else drew conclusions as quickly as he could.
    “Why?” the detective asked.
    “He’s careful because he’s on file somewhere! So when we do find a print we’ll stand a good chance of ID’ing him. Okay, okay, cotton glove prints, they’re no help . . . No boot prints because he scattered gravel on the hangar floor. He’s a smart one. But if he were stupid, nobody’d need us, right? Now, what does the glass tell us?”
    “What could it tell us,” Sachs asked shortly, “except he broke in the window to get into the hangar?”
    “I wonder,” Rhyme said. “Let’s look at it.”
    Mel Cooper mounted several shards on a slide and placed it under the lens of the compound ’scope at low magnification. He clicked the video camera on to send the image to Rhyme’s computer.
    Rhyme motored back to it. He instructed, “Command mode.” Hearing his voice, the computer dutifully slipped a menu onto the glowing screen. He couldn’t control the microscope itself but he could capture the image on the computer screen and manipulate it—magnify or shrink it, for instance. “Cursor left. Double click.”
    Rhyme strained forward, lost in the rainbow auras of refraction. “Looks like standard PPG single-strength window glass.”
    “Agreed,” Cooper said, then observed, “No chipping. It was broken by a blunt object. His elbow maybe.”
    “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Look at the conchoidal, Mel.”
    When someone breaks a window the glass shatters in a series of conchoidal breaks—curved fracture lines. You can tell from the way they curve which direction the blow came from.
    “I see it,” the tech said. “Standard fractures.”
    “Look at the dirt,” Rhyme said abruptly. “On the glass.”
    “See it. Rainwater deposits, mud, fuel residue.”
    “What side of the glass is the dirt on?” Rhyme asked impatiently. When he was running IRD, one of the complaints of the officers under him was that he acted like a schoolmarm. Rhyme considered it a compliment.
    “It’s . . . oh.” Cooper caught on. “How can that be?”
    “What?” Sachs asked.
    Rhyme explained. The conchoidal fractures began on the clean side of the glass and ended on the dirty side. “He was inside when he broke the window.”
    “But he couldn’t’ve been,” Sachs protested. “The glass was inside the hangar. He—” She stopped and nodded. “You mean he broke it out, then scooped the glass up and threw it inside with the gravel. But why?”
    “The gravel wasn’t to prevent shoe prints. It was to fool us into thinking he broke in. But he was already inside the hangar and broke out. Interesting.” The criminalist considered this for a moment, then shouted, “Check that trace. There any brass in it? Any brass with graphite