The Coffin Dancer

you’ll be a witness in that case too. Hansen needs you gone.”
    “I think I see where you’re heading.”
    He’d cocked an eyebrow.
    “Worm on a hook,” she’d said.
    His eyes had crinkled and he’d laughed. “Well, I’m not going to parade you around in public, just put you into a safe house here in town. Fully guarded. State-of-the-art security. But we’ll dig in and keep you there. The Dancer’ll surface and we’ll stop him,once and for all. It’s a crazy idea, but I don’t think we have much choice.”
    Another tipple of the scotch. It wasn’t bad. For a product not bottled in Kentucky. “Crazy?” she’d repeated. “Let me ask you a question. You have your role models, Detective? Somebody you admire?”
    “Sure. Criminalists. August Vollmer, Edmond Locard.”
    “Do you know Beryl Markham?”
    “No.”
    “Aviatrix in the thirties and forties. She—not Amelia Earheart—was an idol of mine. She led a very dashing life. British upper class. The Out of Africa crowd. She was the first person—not first woman , the first person—to fly solo across the Atlantic the hard way, east to west. Lindbergh used tailwinds.” She’d laughed. “Everybody thought she was crazy. Newspapers were running editorials begging her not to try the flight. She did, of course.”
    “And made it?”
    “Crash-landed short of the airport, but, yeah, she made it. Well, I don’t know if that was brave or crazy. Sometimes I don’t think there’s any difference.”
    Rhyme’d continued, “You’ll be pretty safe, but you won’t be completely safe.”
    “Let me tell you something. You know that spooky name? That you call the killer?”
    “The Dancer.”
    “The Coffin Dancer. Well, there’s a phrase we use in flying jets. The ‘coffin corner.’ ”
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s the margin between the speed your plane stallsat and the speed it starts to break apart from Mach turbulence—when you approach the speed of sound. At sea level you’ve got a couple hundred miles per hour to play with, but at fifty or sixty thousand feet, your stall speed’s maybe five hundred knots per hour and your Mach buffet’s about five forty. You don’t stay within that forty-knots-per-hour margin, you turn the coffin corner and you’ve had it. Any planes that fly that high have to have autopilots to keep the speed inside the margin. Well, I’ll just say that I fly that high all the time and I hardly ever use an autopilot. Completely safe isn’t a concept I’m familiar with.”
    “Then you’ll do it.”
    But Percey hadn’t answered right away. She’d scrutinized him for a moment. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
    “More?” Rhyme had asked, but the innocence in his voice had been a thin patina.
    “I read the Times Metro section. You cops don’t go all out like this for just any murder. What’d Hansen do? He killed a couple of soldiers, and my husband, but you’re after him like he’s Al Capone.”
    “I don’t give a damn about Hansen,” quiet Lincoln Rhyme had said, sitting in his motorized throne, with a body that didn’t move and eyes that flickered like dark flames, exactly like the eyes of her hawk. She hadn’t told Rhyme that she, like him, would never name a hunting bird, that she’d called the haggard merely “the falcon.”
    Rhyme had continued. “I want to get the Dancer. He’s killed cops, including two who worked for me. I’m going to get him.”
    Still, she’d sensed there was more. But she hadn’t pushed it. “You’ll have to ask Brit too.”
    “Of course.”
    Finally, she’d said, “All right, I’ll do it.”
    “Thank you. I—”
    “But,” she interrupted.
    “What?”
    “There’s a condition.”
    “What’s that?” Rhyme lifted an eyebrow and Percey had been struck by this thought: once you overlooked his damaged body you saw what a handsome man he was. And, yes, yes, realizing that, she felt her old enemy—the familiar cringe of being in the presence of a good-looking man. Hey, Troll Face, Pug Face, Troll, Trollie, Frog Girl, gotta date for Saturday night? Betcha don’t . . .
    Percey’d said, “That I fly the U.S. Medical charter tomorrow night.”
    “Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
    “It’s a deal breaker,” she’d said, recalling a phrase Ron and Ed had used occasionally.
    “Why do you have to fly?”
    “Hudson Air needs this contract. Desperately. It’s a narrow-margin flight and we need the best pilot in the