The Coffin Dancer

surprised eyes on her boss. She asked, “Search a hangar in an hour? Come on, Rhyme.” Her face said: Here I am defending you and now you’re pulling this? Whose side are you on?
    Some criminalists assigned teams to search crime scenes. But Rhyme always insisted that Amelia Sachs search alone, just as he’d done. A single CS searcher had a focus that couldn’t be achieved with other people on the scene. An hour was an extraordinarily brief time for a single person to cover a large scene. Rhyme knew this but he didn’t respond to Sachs. He kept his eyes on Percey. She said, “An hour? All right. I can live with that.”
    “Rhyme,” Sachs protested, “I’ll need more time.”
    “Ah, but you’re the best, Amelia,” he joshed. Which meant the decision had already been made.
    “Who can help us up there?” Rhyme asked Percey.
    “Ron Talbot. He’s a partner in the company and our operations manager.”
    Sachs jotted the name in her watch book. “Should I go now?” she asked.
    “No,” Rhyme responded. “I want you to wait until we have the bomb from the Chicago flight. I need you to help me analyze it.”
    “I only have an hour,” she said testily. “Remember?”
    “You’ll have to wait,” he grumbled. Then asked Fred Dellray, “What about the safe house?”
    “Oh, we got a place you’ll like,” the agent said to Percey. “In Manhattan. Your taxpayer dollars be working hard. Yep, yep. U.S. marshals use it for the crème de la crème in witness protection. Only thing is, we need somebody from NYPD for baby-sitting detail. Somebody who knows and appreciates the Dancer.”
    And just then Jerry Banks looked up, wondering why everybody was staring at him. “What?” he asked. “What?” And tried in vain to pat down his persistent cowlick.

    Stephen Kall, talker of soldier talk, shooter of soldier guns, had never in fact been a soldier.
    But he now said to Sheila Horowitz, “I’m proud of my military heritage. And that’s the truth.”
    “Some people don’t—”
    “No,” he interrupted, “some people don’t respect you for it. But that’s their problem.”
    “It is their problem,” Sheila echoed.
    “You have a nice place here.” He looked around the dump, filled with Conran’s markdowns.
    “Thank you, friend. Uhm, you, like, want something to drink? Oopsie, there I go using that old preposition the wrong way. Mom’s always after me. Watching too much TV. Like, like, like. Shamie shamie.”
    What the fuck is she talking about?
    “You live here alone?” he asked with a pleasant smile of curiosity.
    “Yep, just me and the dynamic trio. I don’t know why they’re hiding. Those silly-billy scamps.” Sheila nervously pinched the fine hem of her vest. And because he hadn’t answered, she repeated, “So? Something to drink?”
    “Sure.”
    He saw a single bottle of wine, dust encrusted, sitting on top of her refrigerator. Saved for that special occasion. Was this it?
    Apparently not. She broke out the diet Dr Pepper.
    He strolled to the window and looked out. No police on the street here. And only a half block to a subway stop. The apartment was on the second floor, and though she had grates on the back windows they were unlocked and if he had to he could climb down the fire escape and disappear onto Lexington Avenue, which was always crowded . . .
    She had a telephone and a PC. Good.
    He glanced at a wall calendar—pictures of angels. There were a few notations but nothing for this weekend.
    “Hey, Sheila, would you—” He caught himself and shook his head, fell silent.
    “Uhm, what?”
    “Well, it’s . . . I know it’s stupid to ask. I mean, it’s such short notice and everything. I was just wondering if you had plans for the next couple of days.”
    Cautious here. “Oh, I, uhm, I was supposed to see my mother.”
    Stephen wrinkled his face in disappointment. “Too bad. See, I have this place in Cape May—”
    “The Jersey shore!”
    “Right. I’m going out there—”
    “After you get Buddy?”
    Who the fuck was Buddy?
    Oh, the cat. “Right. If you weren’t doing anything, I thought you might like to come out.”
    “You have . . . ?”
    “My mom’s going to be there, some of her girlfriends.”
    “Well, golly. I don’t know.”
    “So, why don’t you call your mother and tell her she’ll have to live without you for the weekend?”
    “Well . . . I don’t really have to call. If I don’t show up it’s, like, no big deal. It was