The Coffin Dancer

Lincoln Rhyme’s protégée there—but she now had no problem saying, “You saved my life. My ass’d be capped now if it wasn’t for you. What can I say?”
    Dellray shrugged, deflecting the thanks, and bummed a cigarette from one of the uniformed cops standing in front of the station. He sniffed the Marlboro and slipped it behind his ear. He looked toward a blacked-out window in the station. “Please,” he said to no one, sighing. “’Bout time we had some luck here.”
    When they’d arrested Joe D’Oforio and flung him into the back of a car, he’d told them that the Dancer had left only ten minutes before, climbing down the stairs and vanishing along a spur line. Jodie—the mutt’s nickname—didn’t know which direction he’d gone, only that he’d disappeared suddenly with his gun and his backpack. Haumann and Dellray sent their troopers to scour the station, the tracks, and the nearby City Hall station. They were now waiting for the results of the sweep.
    “Come on . . . ”
    Ten minutes later a SWAT officer pushed through the doorway. Sachs and Dellray both looked at him hopefully. But he shook his head. “Lost his prints a hundred feet down the tracks. Don’t have a clue where he went.”
    Sachs sighed and reluctantly relayed the message to Rhyme and asked if she should do a search of the tracks and the nearby station.
    He took the news as acerbically as she’d guessed he would. “Damnit,” the criminalist muttered. “No, just the station itself. Pointless to grid the rest. Shit, how does he do it? It’s like he’s got some kind of fucking second sight.”
    “Well,” she said, “at least we’ve got a witness.”
    And regretted immediately that she’d said that.
    “Witness?” Rhyme spat out. “A witness? I don’t need witnesses. I need evidence! Well, get him down here anyway. Let’s hear what he has to say. But, Sachs, I want that station swept like you’ve never swept a scene before. You hear me? Are you there, Sachs? Do you hear me?”

 . . . Chapter Twenty-five
    Hour 25 of 45
    “A nd what do we have here?” Rhyme asked, giving a soft puff into the Storm Arrow control straw to scoot forward.
    “An itsy piece of garbage,” offered Fred Dellray, cleaned up and back in uniform—if you could call an Irish green suit a uniform. “Uh, uh, uh. Don’t say a word. Not till we ask fo’ it.” He turned his alarming stare on Jodie.
    “You fooled me!”
    “Quiet, you little skel.”
    Rhyme wasn’t pleased that Dellray had gone out on his own, but that was the nature of undercover work, and even if the criminalist didn’t understand it exactly he couldn’t dispute that—as the agent’s skills just proved—it could get results.
    Besides, he’d saved Amelia Sachs’s hide.
    She’d be here soon. The medics had taken her to the emergency room for a rib X ray. She was bruised from the fall down the stairs, but nothing was broken. He’d been dismayed to learn that his talk the other night had had no effect; she’d gone into the subway after the Dancer alone.
    Damn it, he thought, she’s as pigheaded as me.
    “I wasn’t going to hurt anybody,” Jodie protested.
    “Hard o’ hearing? I said don’t say a word.”
    “I didn’t know who she was!”
    “No,” Dellray said, “that pretty silver badge of hers didn’t give nuthin’ away.” Then remembered he didn’t want to hear from the man.
    Sellitto walked up close and bent over Jodie. “Tell us some more about your friend.”
    “I’m not his friend. He kidnapped me. I was in that building on Thirty-fifth because—”
    “Because you were boosting pills. We know, we know.”
    Jodie blinked. “How’d you—”
    “But we don’t care about that. Not yet, at least. Keep going.”
    “I thought he was a cop but then he said he was there to kill some people. I thought he was going to kill me too. He needed to escape so he told me to stand still and I did, and this cop or somebody came to the door and he stabbed him—”
    “And killed him,” Dellray spat out.
    Jodie sighed and looked miserable. “I didn’t know he was going to kill him. I thought he was just going to knock him out or something.”
    “Well, asshole,” Dellray spat out, “he did kill him. Killed him dead as a rock.”
    Sellitto looked over the evidence bags from the subway, containing scuzzy porn magazines, hundreds of pills, clothes. A new cellular phone. A stack of money. He turned his attention back to Jodie. “Keep