The Coffin Dancer

as he walked out the door.
    Franks continued, “Few other things need mentioning. Don’t look out windows. Don’t go outside without an escort. That phone there”—he pointed to a beige phone in the corner of the living room—“is secure. It’s the only one you should use. Shut off your cell phones and don’t use them under any circumstances. So. That’s it. Any questions?”
    Percey asked, “Yeah, you got any booze?”
    Franks bent to the cabinet beside him and pulled out a bottle of vodka and one of bourbon. “We like to keep our guests happy.”
    He set the bottles on the table, then walked to the front door, slipping his windbreaker on. “I’m headedhome. ’Night, Tom,” he said to the marshal at the door and nodded to the quartet of guardees, standing incongruously in the middle of the varnished wood hunting lodge, two bottles of liquor between them and a dozen deer and elk heads staring down.
    The phone rang, startling them all. One of the marshals got it on the third ring. “Hello? . . . ”
    He glanced at the two women. “Amelia Sachs?”
    She nodded and took the receiver.
    It was Rhyme. “Sachs, how safe is it?”
    “Pretty good,” she said. “High tech. Any luck with the body?”
    “Nothing so far. Four missing males reported in Manhattan in the last four hours. We’re checking them all out. Is Jodie there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Ask him if the Dancer ever mentioned assuming a particular identity.”
    She relayed the question.
    Jodie thought back. “Well, I remember him saying something once . . . I mean, nothing specific. He said if you’re going to kill somebody you have to infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, then eliminate. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. He meant delegate somebody else to do something, then when everybody’s distracted, he’d move in. I think he mentioned like a delivery guy or shoe-shine boy.”
    Your deadliest weapon is deception . . .
    After she relayed this to Rhyme he said, “We’re thinking the body’s a young businessman. Could be a lawyer. Ask Jodie if he ever mentioned trying to get into the courthouse for the grand jury.”
    Jodie didn’t think so.
    Sachs told Rhyme this.
    “Okay. Thanks.” She heard him calling something to Mel Cooper. “I’ll check in later, Sachs.”
    After they hung up, Percey asked them, “You want a nightcap?”
    Sachs couldn’t decide if she did or not. The memory of the scotch preceding her fiasco in Lincoln Rhyme’s bed made her cringe. But on impulse she said, “Sure.”
    Roland Bell decided he could be off duty for a half hour.
    Jodie opted for a fast, medicinal shot of whiskey, then headed off to bed, toting his self-help book under his arm and staring with a city boy’s fascination at a mounted moose head.

    Outside, in the thick spring air, cicadas chirped and bullfrogs belched their peculiar, unsettling calls.
    As he looked out the window into the early morning darkness Jodie could see the starbursts of searchlights radiating through the fog. Shadows danced sideways—the mist moving through the trees.
    He stepped away from his window and walked to the door of his room, looked out.
    Two marshals guarded this corridor, sitting in a small security room twenty feet away. They seemed bored and only moderately vigilant.
    He listened and heard nothing other than the snaps and ticks of an old house late in the evening.
    Jodie returned to his bed and sat on the sagging mattress. He picked up his battered, stained copy of Dependent No More.
    Let’s get to work, he thought.
    He opened the book wide, the glue cracking, and tore a small patch of tape off the bottom of the spine. A long knife slid onto the bed. It looked like black metal though it was made of ceramic-impregnated polymer and wouldn’t register on a metal detector. It was stained and dull, sharp as a razor on one edge, serrated like a surgical saw on the other. The handle was taped. He’d designed and constructed it himself. Like most serious weapons it wasn’t glitzy and it wasn’t sexy and it did only one thing: it killed. And it did this very, very well.
    He had no qualms about picking up the weapon—or touching doorknobs or windows—because he was the owner of new fingerprints. The skin on the pads of eight fingers and two thumbs had been burned away chemically last month by a surgeon in Berne, Switzerland, and a new set of prints etched into the scar tissue by a laser used for microsurgery. His own prints would