The Coffin Dancer

real tight schedule. Was supposed to fly to Chicago, SaintLouis, Memphis, Lexington, Cleveland, then lay over in Erie, Pennsylvania. Come back this morning.”
    “Any passengers?” Rhyme asked.
    “Not whole ones,” Sellitto muttered. “Just the cargo. Everything’s routine about the flight. Then about ten minutes out of O’Hare, a bomb goes off. Blows the shit out of the plane. Killed both Carney and his copilot. Four injuries on the ground. His wife, by the way, was supposed to be flying with him but she got sick and had to cancel.”
    “There an NTSB report?” Rhyme asked. “No, of course not, there wouldn’t be. Not yet.”
    “Report won’t be ready for two, three days.”
    “Well, we can’t wait two or three days!” Rhyme griped loudly. “I need it now!”
    A pink scar from the ventilator hose was visible on his throat. But Rhyme had weaned himself off the fake lung and could breathe like nobody’s business. Lincoln Rhyme was a C4 quad who could sigh, cough, and shout like a sailor. “I need to know everything about the bomb.”
    “I’ll call a buddy in the Windy City,” Dellray said. “He owes me major. Tell ’im what’s what and have ’im ship us whatever they got, pronto.”
    Rhyme nodded to the agent, then considered what Sellitto had told him. “Okay, we’ve got two scenes. The crash site in Chicago. That one’s too late for you, Sachs. Contaminated as hell. We’ll just have to hope the folks in Chicago do a halfway decent job. The other scene’s the airport in Mamaroneck—where the Dancer got the bomb on board.”
    “How do we know he did it at the airport?” Sachssaid. She was rolling her brilliant red hair in a twist, then pinning it on top of her head. Magnificent strands like these were a liability at crime scenes; they threatened to contaminate the evidence. Sachs went about her job armed with a Glock 9 and a dozen bobby pins.
    “Good point, Sachs.” He loved her outguessing him. “We don’t know and we won’t until we find the seat of the bomb. It might’ve been planted in the cargo, in a flight bag, a coffeepot.”
    Or a wastebasket, he thought grimly, again recalling the Wall Street bombing.
    “I want every single bit of that bomb here as soon as possible. We have to have it,” Rhyme said.
    “Well, Linc,” Sellitto said slowly, “the plane was a mile up when it blew. The wreckage’s scattered over a whole fucking subdivision.”
    “I don’t care,” Rhyme said, neck muscles aching. “Are they still searching?”
    Local rescue workers searched crash sites but investigations were federal, so it was Fred Dellray who placed a call to the FBI special agent at the site.
    “Tell him we need every piece of wreckage that tests positive for explosive. I’m talking nanograms. I want that bomb.”
    Dellray relayed this. Then he looked up, shook his head. “Scene’s released.”
    “What?” Rhyme snapped. “After twelve hours? Ridiculous. Inexcusable!”
    “They had to get the streets open. He said—”
    “Fire trucks!” Rhyme called.
    “What?”
    “Every fire truck, ambulance, police car . . . every emergency vehicle that responded to the crash. I want the tires scraped.”
    Dellray’s long, black face stared at him. “You wanna repeat that? For my ex–good friend here?” The agent pushed the phone at him.
    Rhyme ignored the receiver and said to Dellray, “Emergency vehicle tires’re one of the best sources for good evidence at contaminated crime scenes. They were first on the scene, they usually have new tires with deep tread grooves, and they probably didn’t drive anywhere but to and from the crash site. I want all the tires scraped and the trace sent here.”
    Dellray managed to get a promise from Chicago that the tires of as many emergency vehicles as they could get to would be scraped.
    “Not ‘as many as,’ ” Rhyme called. “ All of them.”
    Dellray rolled his eyes and relayed that information too, then hung up.
    Suddenly Rhyme cried, “Thom! Thom, where are you?”
    The belabored aide appeared at the door a moment later. “In the laundry room, that’s where.”
    “Forget laundry. We need a time chart. Write, write . . . ”
    “Write what , Lincoln?”
    “On that chalkboard, right there. The big one.” Rhyme looked at Sellitto. “When’s the grand jury convening?”
    “Nine on Monday.”
    “The prosecutor’ll want them there a couple hours early—the van’ll pick ’em up between six and seven.”He looked at