The Coffin Dancer

rifle sailing through the air like a majorette’s baton.
    “Stay with her, Detective!” Sachs called to Bell and sprinted toward Jodie.
    She found him in the grass, lying on his back.
    One of her bullets had shattered his left shoulder. The other had hit the telescopic sight straight on and blown metal and glass into the man’s right eye. His face was a bloody mess.
    She cocked her tiny gun, put a good ration of pressure on the trigger and pressed the muzzle against his temple. She frisked him. Lifted a single Glock and a long carbide knife out of his pocket. She found no other weapons.
    “Clear,” she called.
    As she stood, pulling her cuffs out of the case, the Dancer coughed and spit, wiped blood out of his good eye. Then he lifted his head and looked out over the field. He spotted Percey Clay as she slowly rose from the grass, staring at her attacker.
    Jodie seemed to shiver as he gazed at her. Another cough then a deep moan. He startled Sachs by pushing against her leg with his uninjured arm. He was badly hurt—maybe mortally—and had little strength. It was a curious gesture, the way you’d push an irritating Pekinese out of your way.
    She stepped back, keeping the gun trained squarely on his chest.
    Amelia Sachs was no longer of any interest to the Coffin Dancer. Neither were his wounds or the terrible pain they must be radiating. There was only one thing on his mind. With superhuman effort he rolled onto his belly and, moaning and clawing dirt, he began muscling his way toward Percey Clay, toward the woman he’d been hired to kill.
    Bell joined Sachs. She handed him the Glock and together they kept their weapons on the Dancer. They could easily have stopped him—or killed him. But they remained transfixed, watching this pitiable man so desperately absorbed in his task that he didn’t even seem to know his face and shoulder had been destroyed.
    He moved another few feet, pausing only to grab a sharp rock about the size of a grapefruit. And he continued on toward his prey. Never saying a word, drenched in blood and sweat, his face a knot ofagony. Even Percey, who had every reason to hate this man, to sweep Sachs’s pistol from her hand and end the killer’s life right here, even she was mesmerized, watching this hopeless effort to finish what he’d started.
    “That’s enough,” Sachs said finally. She bent down and lifted the rock away.
    “No,” he gasped. “No . . . ”
    She cuffed him.
    The Coffin Dancer gave a horrifying moan—which might have been from his pain but seemed to arise more out of unbearable loss and failure—and dropped his head to the ground.
    He lay still. The trio stood around him, watching his blood soak the grass and innocent crocuses. Soon the heartrending call of the loons was lost in the whup whup whup of a helicopter skimming over the trees. Sachs noticed that Percey Clay’s attention slipped immediately away from the man who’d caused her so much sorrow, and the flier watched in rapt attention as the cumbersome aircraft eased through the misty air and touched down lithely on the grass.

 . . . Chapter Thirty-nine
    “A in’t kosher, Lincoln. Can’t do it.”
    Lon Sellitto was insistent.
    But so was Lincoln Rhyme. “Give me a half hour with him.”
    “They’re not comfy with it.” Which really meant what the detective added: “They shit when I suggested it. You’re civilian.”
    It was nearly ten on Monday morning. Percey’s appearance before the grand jury had been postponed until tomorrow. The navy divers had found the duffel bags that Phillip Hansen had sunk deep in Long Island Sound. They were being raced to an FBI PERT team in the Federal Building downtown for analysis. Eliopolos had delayed the grand jury to be able to present as much damning evidence against Hansen as possible.
    “What’re they worried about?” Rhyme asked petulantly. “It’s not as if I can beat him up.”
    He thought about lowering his offer to twenty minutes. But that was a sign of weakness. And Lincoln Rhyme did not believe in showing weakness. So he said, “ I caught him. I deserve a chance to talk to him.”
    And fell silent.
    Blaine, his ex-wife, had told him in a moment of very uncharacteristic perception that Rhyme’s eyes, dark as night, argued better than his words did. And so he stared at Sellitto until the detective sighed, then glanced at Dellray.
    “Aw, give him a little time,” the agent said. “What’s it gonna hurt? Bring the billy-boy up