The Coffin Dancer

Cooper didn’t understand what tool marks Rhyme might be referring to.
    “I’m talking about marks on the blade,” he said impatiently. “Maybe the Dancer’s been cutting something distinctive, something that might tell us where he’s holing up.”
    “Oh.” Cooper examined it closely. “It’s nicked, but take a look . . . Do you see anything unusual?”
    Rhyme didn’t. “Scrape the blade and handle. See if there’s any residue.”
    Cooper ran the scrapings through the gas-chromatograph.
    “Phew,” he muttered as he read the results. “Listen to this. Residue of RDX, asphalt, and rayon.”
    “Detonating cord,” Rhyme said.
    “He cut it with clippers?” Sachs asked. “You can do that?”
    “Oh, it’s stable as clothesline,” Rhyme said absently, picturing what a thousand gallons of flaming gasoline would do to the neighborhood around the Twentieth Precinct.
    I should’ve made them leave, he was thinking, Percey and Brit Hale. Put them into protective custody and sent them to Montana until the grand jury. This is damn nuts what I’m doing, this trap idea.
    “Lincoln?” Sellitto asked. “We’ve got to find that truck.”
    “We’ve got a little time,” Rhyme said. “He’s not going to try to get in until the morning. He needs the cover story of a delivery. Anything else, Mel? Anything in the trace?”
    Cooper scanned the vacuum filter. “Dirt and brick. Wait . . . here’re some fibers. Should I GC them?”
    “Yes.”
    The tech hunched over the screen as the results came up. “Okay, okay, it’s vegetable fiber. Consistent with paper. And I’m reading a compound . . . NH four OH.”
    “Ammonium hydroxide,” Rhyme said.
    “Ammonia?” Sellitto asked. “Maybe you’re wrong about the fertilizer bomb.”
    “Any oil?” Rhyme asked.
    “None.”
    Rhyme asked, “The fiber with the ammonia—was it from the handle of the clipper?”
    “No. It was on the clothes of the guard he beat up.”
    Ammonia? Rhyme wondered. He asked Cooper to look at one of the fibers through the scanning electron microscope. “High magnification. How’s the ammonia attached?”
    The screen clicked on. The strand of fiber appeared like a tree trunk.
    “Heat fused, I’d guess.”
    Another mystery. Paper and ammonia . . .
    Rhyme looked at the clock. It was 2:40 A.M.
    Suddenly he realized Sellitto had asked him a question. He cocked his head.
    “I said,” the detective repeated, “should we start evacuating everybody around the precinct? I mean, better now than wait till it’s closer to the time he might attack.”
    For a long moment Rhyme gazed at the bluish tree trunk of fiber on the screen of the SEM. Then he said abruptly, “Yes. We have to get everybody out. Evacuate the buildings around the station house. Let’sthink—the four apartments on either side and across the street.”
    “That many?” Sellitto asked, giving a faint laugh. “You think we really gotta do that?”
    Rhyme looked up at the detective and said, “No, I’ve changed my mind. The whole block. We’ve got to evacuate the whole block. Immediately. And get Haumann and Dellray over here. I don’t care where they are. I want them now.”

 . . . Chapter Seventeen
    Hour 22 of 45
    S ome of them had slept.
    Sellitto in an armchair, waking more rumpled than ever, his hair askew. Cooper downstairs.
    Sachs had apparently spent the night on a couch downstairs or in the other bedroom on the first floor. No interest in the Clinitron anymore.
    Thom, himself bleary, was hovering, a dear busybody, taking Rhyme’s blood pressure. The smell of coffee filled the town house.
    It was just after dawn and Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts. They’d been up till four, planning their strategy for snagging the Dancer—and responding to the legion of complaints about the evacuation.
    Would this work? Would the Dancer step into their trap? Rhyme believed so. But there was anotherquestion, one that Rhyme didn’t like to think about but couldn’t avoid. How bad would springing the trap be? The Dancer was deadly enough on his own territory. What would he be like when he was cornered?
    Thom brought coffee around and they looked over Dellray’s tactical map. Rhyme, back in the Storm Arrow, rolled into position and studied it too.
    “Everybody in place?” he asked Sellitto and Dellray.
    Both Haumann’s 32-E teams and Dellray’s federal pickup band of Southern and Eastern District FBI SWAT officers were ready. They’d moved in