The Coffin Dancer

explained, there were dozens of connecting tunnels, transfer platforms, and portions of stations themselves that had been closed off over the years. Some of them were as sealed and forgotten as Egyptian tombs. Years after Alfred Beach died workmen building another subway line broke through a wall and discovered his original tunnel, long abandoned, with its opulent waiting room, which had included murals, a grand piano, and a goldfish tank.
    “Any chance he’s just sleeping in active stations or between stations in a cutout?” Hoddleston asked.
    Sellitto shook his head. “Not his profile. He’s a druggie. He’d be worried about his stash.”
    Rhyme then told Hoddleston about the turquoise mosaic.
    “Impossible to say where that came from, Lincoln. We’ve done so much work retiling, there’s tile dust and grout everywhere. Who knows where he could’ve picked it up.”
    “So give me a number, Chief,” Rhyme said. “How many spots we looking at?”
    “I’d guess twenty locations,” Hoddleston’s athletic voice said. “Maybe a few less.”
    “Ouch,” Rhyme muttered. “Well, fax us a list of the most likely ones.”
    “Sure. When do you need it?” But before Rhyme could answer, Hoddleston said, “Never mind. I remember you from the old days, Lincoln. You want it yesterday.”
    “Last week,” Rhyme joked, impatient the chief was bantering and not writing.
    Five minutes later the fax machine buzzed. Thom set the piece of paper in front of Rhyme. It listed fifteen locations in the subway system. “Okay, Sachs, get going.”
    She nodded as Sellitto called Haumann to have the S&S teams get started. Rhyme added emphatically, “Amelia, you stay in the rear now, okay? You’re Crime Scene, remember? Only Crime Scene.”

    On a curb in downtown Manhattan sat Leon the Shill. Beside him was the Bear Man—so named because he wheeled around a shopping cart filled with dozens of stuffed animals, supposedly for sale, though only the most psychotic of parents would buy one of the tattered, licey little toys for their child.
    Leon and the Bear Man lived together—that is,they shared an alley near Chinatown—and survived on bottle deposits and handouts and a little harmless petty larceny.
    “He dying, man,” Leon said.
    “Naw, bad dream’s what it is,” Bear Man responded, rocking his shopping cart as if trying to put the bears to sleep.
    “Oughta spenda dime, get a ambulance here.”
    Leon and the Bear Man were looking across the street, into an alley. There lay another homeless man, black and sick looking, with a twitchy and mean—though currently unconscious—face. His clothes were in tatters.
    “Oughta call somebody.”
    “Les take a look.”
    They crossed the street, skittish as mice.
    The man was skinny—AIDS, probably, which told them he probably used smack—and filthy. Even Leon and Bear Man bathed occasionally in the Washington Square Park fountain or the lagoon in Central Park, despite the turtles. He wore ragged jeans, caked socks, no shoes, and a torn, filthy jacket that said Cats . . . The Musical on it.
    They stared at him for a moment. When Leon tentatively touched Cats’s leg the man jerked awake and sat up, freezing them with a weird glare. “The fuck’re you? The fuck’re you?”
    “Hey, man, you okay?” They backed away a few feet.
    Cats shivered, clutching his abdomen. He coughed long and Leon whispered, “Looks too fucking mean to be sick, you know?”
    “He’s scary. Les go.” Bear Man wanted to get back to his A&P baby carriage.
    “I need help,” Cats muttered. “I hurt, man.”
    “There’s a clinic over on—”
    “Can’t go to no clinic,” Cats snapped, as if they’d insulted him.
    So he had a record, and on the street refusing to go to a clinic when you were this sick meant you had a serious record. Felony warrants outstanding. Yeah, this mutt was trouble.
    “I need medicine. You got some? I pay you. I got money.”
    Which they normally wouldn’t’ve believed except that Cats was a can picker. And fucking good at it, they could see. Beside him was a huge bag of soda and beer cans he’d culled from the trash. Leon eyed it enviously. Must’ve taken two days to get that many. Worth thirty bucks, forty.
    “We don’t got nothing. We don’t do that. Stuff, I mean.”
    “Pills, he means.”
    “You wanna bottle? T-bird. I got some nice T-bird, yessir. Trade you a bottle fo’ them cans . . . ”
    Cats struggled up on one arm. “I don’t want