The Coffin Dancer

lecture.
    They were interrupted by a huge pounding on the door. Before Rhyme could ask who it was, Lon Sellitto burst into the room.
    He glanced at Sachs without judgment, then back to Rhyme and announced, “Just heard from Bo’s guys over at the Twentieth. The Dancer was there, staking out the place. The son of a bitch’s taken the bait! We’re gonna get him, Lincoln. This time we’re gonna get him.”

    “Couple hours ago,” the detective continued his story, “some of the S&S boys saw a white male taking a stroll around the Twentieth Precinct house. He ducked into an alley and it looked like he was checking out guards. And then they saw him scoping out the gas pump next to the station house.”
    “Gas pump? For the RMPs?” Radio mobile patrols—squad cars.
    “Right.”
    “They follow him?”
    “Tried. But he vanished ’fore they got close.”
    Rhyme was aware of Sachs’s discreetly fixing the top button of her blouse . . . He had to have a talk with her about what had happened. He had to make her understand. But considering what Sellitto was now saying, it would have to wait.
    “Gets better. Half hour ago, we got a report of a truck hijacking. Rollins Distributing. Upper West Side near the river. They deliver gas to independent service stations. Some guy cuts through the chain-link. The guard hears and goes to investigate. He gets blindsided. Gets the absolute crap beat out of him. And the guy gets away with one of the trucks.”
    “Is Rollins the company the department uses for gas?”
    “Naw, but who’d know? The Dancer pulls up to the Twentieth in a tanker, the guards there don’t think anything of it, they wave him through, next thing—”
    Sachs interrupted. “The truck blows.”
    This brought Sellitto up short. “I was just thinking he’d use it as a way to get inside. You’re thinking a bomb?”
    Rhyme nodded gravely. Angry with himself. Sachs was right. “Outsmarted ourselves here. Never occurred to me he’d try anything like this. Jesus, a tanker truck goes up in that neighborhood . . . ”
    “A fertilizer bomb?”
    “No,” Rhyme said. “I don’t think he’d have time to put that together. But all he needs is an AP charge on the side of a small tanker and he’s got a super gas-enhanced device. Burn the precinct to the ground. We’ve got to evacuate everyone. Quietly.”
    “Quietly,” Sellitto muttered. “That’ll be easy.”
    “How’s the guard from the gas distributor? Can he talk?”
    “Can, but he got hit from behind. Didn’t see a thing.”
    “Well, I want his clothes at least. Sachs”—she caught his eye—“could you get over to the hospital and bring them back? You’ll know how to pack them to save the trace. And then work the scene where he stole the truck.”
    He wondered what her response would be. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d quit cold and walked out the door. But he saw in her still, beautiful face that she was feeling exactly what he was: ironically, relief that the Dancer had intervened to change the disastrous course of their evening.

    Finally, finally, some of the luck Rhyme had hoped for.
    An hour later Amelia Sachs was back. She held up a plastic bag containing a pair of wire cutters.
    “Found them near the chain-link. The guard must’ve surprised the Dancer and he dropped them.”
    “Yes!” Rhyme shouted. “I’ve never known him to make a mistake like that. Maybe he is getting careless . . . I wonder what’s spooking him.”
    Rhyme glanced at the cutters. Please, he prayed silently, let there be a print.
    But a groggy Mel Cooper—he’d been sleeping in one of the smaller bedrooms upstairs—went over every square millimeter of the tool. Not a print to be found.
    “Does it tell us anything?” Rhyme asked.
    “It’s a Craftsman model, top of the line, sold in every Sears around the country. And you can pick them up in garage sales and junkyards for a couple bucks.”
    Rhyme wheezed in disgust. He gazed at the clippers for a moment then asked, “Tool marks?”
    Cooper looked at him curiously. Tool marks are distinctive impressions left at crime scenes by the tools criminals used—screwdrivers, pliers, lock picks, crowbars, slim jims, and the like. Rhyme had once linked a burglar to a crime scene solely on the basis of a tiny V notch on a brass lock plate. The notch matched an imperfection in a chisel found on the man’s workbench. Here, though, they had the tool , not any marks it might have made.