The Coffin Dancer

safe house, watching the real version of the events Jodie was fictionalizing. Heknew they were decoys in the Yukon. He knew the Wife and the Friend were still in the safe house.
    Stephen picked up the gray remote-det transmitter. It looked like a walkie-talkie but had no speaker or microphone. He set the frequency to the bomb in Jodie’s phone and armed the device.
    “Stand by,” he said to Jodie.
    “Heh,” Jodie laughed. “Will do, sir.”

    Lincoln Rhyme, just a spectator now, a voyeur.
    Listening through his headset. Praying that he was right.
    “Where’s the van?” Rhyme heard Sellitto ask.
    Two blocks away,” Haumann said. “We’re on it. It’s moving slowly up Lex. Getting near traffic. He . . . wait.” A long pause.
    “What?”
    “We’ve got a couple cars, a Nissan, a Subaru. An Accord too, but that’s got three people in it. The Nissan’s getting close to the van. That might be it. Can’t see inside.”
    Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes. He felt his left ring finger, his only extant digit, flick nervously on the comforter covering the bed.

    “Hello?” Stephen said into the phone.
    “Yeah,” Jodie responded. “I’m still here.”
    “Directly across from the safe house?”
    “That’s right.”
    Stephen was looking at the building. No Jodie, no Negro.
    “I want to say something to you.”
    “What’s that?” the little man asked.
    Stephen remembered the electric sizzle as his knee touched the man’s.
    I can’t do it . . .
    Soldier . . .
    Stephen gripped the remote-det box in his left hand. He said, “Listen carefully.”
    “I’m listening. I—”
    Stephen pushed the transmit button.
    The explosion was astonishingly loud. Louder than even Stephen expected. It rattled panes and sent a million pigeons reeling into the sky. Stephen saw the glass and wood from the top floor of the safe house go spraying into the alley beside the building.
    Which was even better than he had hoped. He’d expected Jodie to be near the safe house. Maybe in a police van in front. Maybe in the alley. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune that Jodie’d actually been inside. It was perfect!
    He wondered who else had died in the blast.
    Lincoln the Worm, he prayed.
    The redheaded cop?
    He looked over the safe house and saw the smoke curling from the top window.
    Now, just a few more minutes, until the rest of his team joined him.

    The telephone rang and Rhyme ordered the computer to shut off the radio and answer the phone.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Lincoln.” It was Lon Sellitto. “I’m landline,” he said, referring to the phone. “Want to keep Special Ops free for the chase.”
    “Okay. Go ahead.”
    “He blew the bomb.”
    “I know.” Rhyme had heard it; the safe house was more than two miles from his bedroom, but his windows had rattled and the peregrines outside his window had taken off and flown a slow circle, angry at the disturbance.
    “Everybody okay?”
    “The mutt’s freaking out, Jodie. But ’side from that everything’s okay. ’Cept for the feds’re looking at more damage to the safe house than they’d planned on. Already bitching about it.”
    “Tell ’em we’ll pay our taxes early this year.”
    What had tipped Rhyme to the cell phone bomb had been tiny fingernails of polystyrene that Sachs had found in the trace at the subway station. That and more residue of plastic explosive, a slightly different formula from that of the AP bomb in Sheila Horowitz’s apartment. Rhyme had simply matched the polystyrene fragments to the phone the Dancer’d given to Jodie and realized that somebody had unscrewed the casing.
    Why? Rhyme had wondered. There was only one logical reason that he could see and so he’d called the bomb squad down at the Sixth Precinct. Two detectives had rendered the phone safe, removed the largewad of plastic explosive and the firing circuit from the phone, then mounted a much smaller bit of explosive and the same circuit in an oil drum near one of the windows, pointed into the alley like a mortar. They’d filled the room with bomb blankets and stepped into the corridor, handing the harmless phone back to Jodie, who held it with shaking hands, demanding that they prove to him all the explosive had been taken out.
    Rhyme had guessed that the Dancer’s tactic was to use the bomb to divert attention away from the van and give him a better chance to assault it. The killer had also probably guessed that Jodie would turn and, when he made the