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The Coffin Dancer Excerpt
When Edward Carney said good-bye to his wife, Percey, he never thought it would be the last time he'd see her.
He climbed into his car, which was parked in a precious space on East
Eighty-first Street in Manhattan, and pulled into traffic. Carney, an observant man by nature, noticed a black van parked near the townhouse. A van with mud-flecked, mirrored windows. He glanced at the battered
vehicle and recognized the West Virginia plates, realizing he'd seen it on the street several times in the past few days. But then the traffic in front of him sped up. He caught the end of the yellow light and
forgot the van completely. He was soon on the FDR expressway, cruising north.
Twenty minutes later he juggled the car phone and called his wife. He was troubled when she didn't answer.
Percey'd been scheduled to make the flight with him — they'd flipped a coin last night for the left-hand seat and she'd won, then given him one of her trademark victory grins. But then she'd wakened at
three a.m. with a blinding migraine, which had stayed with her all day. After a few phone calls they'd found a substitute copilot and Percey'd taken a Fiorninal and gone back to bed.
A migraine was the only malady that would ground her.
Lanky Edward Carney, forty-five years old, and still wearing a military hairstyle, cocked his head as he listened to the phone
ringing miles away. Their answering machine clicked on and he returned the phone to the cradle, mildly concerned.
He kept the car at exactly sixty miles per hour, centered perfectly in
the right lane; like most pilots he was a very conservative driver. He trusted other airmen but thought most drivers were crazy.
In the office of Hudson Air Charters, on the grounds of
Mamaroneck Airport in Westchester, a cake awaited. Prim and assembled Sally Anne, smelling like the perfume department at Macy's, had baked it herself, to commemorate the company's new contract. Wearing the
ugly rhinestone biplane broach her grandchildren had given her last Christmas, she scanned the room to make sure each of the dozen or so employees had a piece of devil's food sized just right for them. Ed Carney
ate a few bites of cake and talked about the flight with Ron Talbot, whose massive belly suggested he loved cake but in fact he survived mostly on cigarettes and coffee. Talbot wore the dual hats of operations and
business manager and he worried out loud if the shipment would be on time, if the fuel usage for the flight had been calculated correctly, if they'd priced the job right. Ed handed him the remains of his cake
and told him to relax.
He thought again about Percey and stepped away into his office, picked up the phone.
Still no answer at their
townhouse.
Now, concern became worry. People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone. He slapped the receiver down, thought about calling a
neighbor to check up on her. But then the large white truck pulled up in front of the hanger next to the office and it was time to go to work. Six p.m.
Talbot gave Carey a dozen
documents to sign just as young Tim Randolph arrived, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a narrow black tie. Tim referred to himself as a "copilot" and Carney liked that. "First officers" were company
people, airline creations, and while Ed respected any man who was competent in the right-hand seat, pretension put him off.
Tall, brunette Lauren, Talbot's assistant, had worn her lucky
dress, whose blue color matching the hue of the Hudson Air logo — a silhouette of an falcon flying over a gridded globe. She leaned close to Carney and whispered, "It's going to be okay now, won't
it?"
"It'll be fine," he assured her. They embraced for a moment. Sally Ann hugged him too and offered him some cake for the flight. He demurred. He wanted to be gone. Away from the
sentiment. Away from the festivities.
Away from the ground.
And soon he was: Sailing three miles above the earth, piloting a Lear 35A, the finest private jet
ever made, clear of markings or insignia except for its N registration number, polished silver, sleek as a pike.
They flew into a stunning sunset — toward big, rambunctious clouds,
pink and purple, leaking bolts of sunlight.
Only dawn was as beautiful. And only thunderstorms more spectacular.
It was 723 miles to O'Hare and they covered
that distance in less than two hours. Air Traffic Control's Chicago Center politely asked them to descend to 14,000 feet, then handed them off to Chicago Approach Control.
Tim made the
call. "Chicago Approach. Lear Four Niner Charlie Juliet with you at one four thousand."
"Evening, Niner Charlie Juliet," said yet another placid air
traffic controller. "Descend and maintain eight thousand. Chicago altimeter thirty point one one. Expect vectors to 27L."
"Roger, Chicago. Niner Charlie Juliet out of fourteen for eight."
O'Hare is the busiest airport in the world and ATC put them in a holding pattern way out over the western suburbs of the city, where they'd await their turn to land.
Ten minutes later the pleasant, staticky voice vectored them into the landing pattern.
"Niner Charlie Juliet,
heading zero nine zero over the numbers downwind for 27L."
"Zero nine zero. Niner Charlie Juliet."
Carney glanced up at the bright points
of constellations in the stunning gunmetal sky and he thought, Look, Percey, it's all the stars of evening . . .
And with that he had what was the only unprofessional urge of perhaps his
entire career. His concern for Percey arose like a fever. He needed desperately to speak to her.
"Take the aircraft," he said to Tim.
"Roger,"
the young man responded, hands going immediately and unquestioningly to the yoke.
Air traffic control crackled, "Niner Charlie Juliet, descend to four thousand. Maintain
heading."
"Roger, Chicago," Tim said. "Niner Charlie Juliet out of eight for four."
Carney changed the frequency of his radio to make a unicom call. Tim glanced at him. "Calling the company," Carney explained. When he got Talbot he asked to be patched through the telephone to his home.
As he waited Carney and Tim went through the litany of the pre-landing check.
"Flaps approach. . . . twenty degrees."
"Twenty, twenty, green."
"Speed check."
"One hundred eighty knots."
As Tim spoke into his mike, "Chicago, Niner Charlie Juliet,
crossing the numbers. Through five for four," Carney heard the phone start to ring in their Manhattan townhouse eight hundred miles away.
Come on, Percey. Pick up! Where are you?
Please. . .
ATC said, "Niner Charlie Juliet,
reduce speed to one eight zero. Contact tower now. Good evening."
"Roger, Chicago. One eight zero knots. Evening."
Three
rings.
Where the hell is she? What's wrong?
The knot in his gut grew tighter.
The turbofan sang, a grinding sound. Hydraulics
moaned. Static crackled in Carney's headset.
Tim sang out, "Flaps thirty. Gear down."
"Flaps, thirty, thirty, green. Gear down. Three
green."
And then, at last — in his earphone — a sharp click.
His wife's voice saying, "Hello?"
He laughed out
loud in relief.
Carney started to speak but before he could, the aircraft gave a huge jolt — so vicious that in a fraction of a second the force ripped the bulky headset from his
ears, and the men were flung forward into the control panel. Shrapnel and sparks exploded around them.
Stunned, Carney instinctively grabbed the unresponsive yoke with his left hand; he
no longer had a right one. He turned toward Tim just as the man's bloody, rag-doll body disappeared out of the gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.
"Oh, God. No, no . . .
"
Then the entire cockpit broke away from the disintegrating plane and rose into the air, leaving the fuselage and wings and engines of the Lear behind, engulfed in ball of gassy
fire
"Oh, Percey," he whispered, "Percey . . ." Though there was no longer a microphone to speak into.
* * *
Big as asteroids, bone yellow.
The grains of sand glowed on the computer screen. He was sitting forward, neck aching, eyes in a hard squint — from concentration, not from any flaw
in vision.
In the distance, thunder. The early morning sky was yellow and green and a storm was due at any moment. This had been the wettest spring on record.
Grains of sand . . .
"Enlarge," he commanded and dutifully the image on the computer doubled in size.
Strange, he thought.
"Cursor
down . . . stop."
Leaning forward again, straining, studying the screen.
Sand, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, is a criminalist's delight: Bits of rock, sometimes
mixed with other material, ranging from .05 to 2mm (larger than that is gravel, smaller is silt). It adheres to a perp's clothing like sticky paint and conveniently leaps off at crime scenes to link murderer and
murdered. It also can tell a great deal about where a suspect has been. Opaque sand means he's been in the desert. Clear means beaches. Hornblende means Canada. Obsidian Hawaii. Quartz and opaque igneous rock New
England. Smooth gray magnetite the western Great Lakes.
But where this particular sand had come from, Rhyme didn't have a clue. Most of the sand in the New York area was quartz and
feldspar. Rocky on Long Island Sound, dusty on the Atlantic, muddy on the Hudson. But this was white, glistening and ragged, mixed with tiny red spheres. And what are those rings? White stone rings like microscopic
slices of calamari. He'd never seen anything like this.
The puzzle had kept Rhyme up till four a.m. He'd just sent a sample of the sand to a colleague at the FBI's crime lab in
D.C. He'd had it shipped off with great reluctance — Lincoln Rhyme hated someone else answering his own questions.
Motion at the window beside his bed. He glanced toward it. His
neighbors — two compact peregrine falcons — were awake and about to go hunting. Pigeons beware, Rhyme thought. Then he cocked his head. Muttering, "Damn." Though he was referring not to his
frustration at identifying this uncooperative evidence but at the impending interruption.
Urgent footsteps were on the stairs. Thom had let visitors in and Rhyme didn't want visitors. He
glanced toward the hallway angrily. "Oh, not now, for God's sake,"
But they didn't hear of course and wouldn't have paused even if they had.
Two of them . . .
One was heavy. One not.
A fast knock on the open door and they entered.
"Lincoln."
Rhyme grunted.
Lon Sellitto was a detective first grade, NYPD, and the one responsible for the giant steps. Padding along beside him was
his slimmer, younger partner, Jerry Banks, spiffy in his pork-gray suit of fine plaid. He'd doused his cowlick with spray — Rhyme could smell propane, isobutane and vinyl acetate — but the charming
spike still stuck up like Dagwood's.
The rotund man looked around the second-floor bedroom, which measured twenty by twenty. Not a picture on the wall. "What's different, Linc?
About the place?"
"Nothing."
"Oh, hey, I know — it's clean," Banks said, then stopped abruptly as he ran into his faux
pas.
"Clean, sure," said Thom, walking into the room, immaculate in ironed tan slacks, white shirt and the flowery tie that Rhyme thought was pointlessly gaudy though he himself
had bought it, mail order, for the man. The aide had been with Rhyme for several years now — and though he'd been fired by Rhyme twice, and quit once, the criminalist had rehired the unflappable
nurse/assistant an equal number of times. Thom knew enough about quadriplegia to be a doctor and had learned enough forensics from Lincoln Rhyme to be a detective. But he was content to be what the insurance company
called a "care giver," though both Rhyme and Thom disparaged the term; Rhyme called him, variously, his "mother hen" or "nemesis." Both of which delighted the aide no end. He now maneuvered around the visitors.
"He didn't like it but I hired Molly Maids and got the place scrubbed down. Practically needed to be fumigated. He wouldn't talk to me for a whole day afterwards."
"It didn't need to be cleaned. I can't find anything."
"But then he doesn't have to find anything, does he?" Thom countered. "That's what I'm for."
No mood for banter. "Well?" Rhyme cast his handsome face toward Sellitto. "What?"
"Got a case. Thought you might wanta help."
"I'm busy."
"What's all that?" Banks asked, motioning toward a new computer sitting beside Rhyme's bed.
"Oh," Thom said with infuriating cheer. "He's state of the art now. Show them, Lincoln. Show them."
"I don't want to
show them."
More thunder but not a drop of rain. Nature, as often, was teasing today.
Thom persisted, "Show them how it
works."
"Don't want to."
"He's just embarrassed."
"Thom," Rhyme snapped.
But the young aide was as oblivious to threats as he was to recrimination. He tugged his hideous, or stylish, silk tie. "I don't know why he's behaving this way. He seemed very proud
of the whole setup the other day."
"Did not."
Thom continued, "That box there—" He pointed to a beige contraption. "That
goes to the computer."
"Whoa, two hundred megahertz?" Banks asked, nodding at the computer. To escape Rhyme's scowl he'd grabbed the question like an owl snagging a frog.
"Yep," Thom said.
But Lincoln Rhyme was not interested in computers. At the moment Lincoln Rhyme was interested only in microscopic rings of
sculpted calamari and the sand they nestled in.
Thom continued, "The microphone goes into the computer. Whatever he says, the computer recognizes. It took the thing a while to learn
his voice. He mumbled a lot."
In truth Rhyme was quite pleased with the system — the lightning-fast computer, a specially made ECU box — environmental control unit
— and voice-recognition software. By speaking alone he could command the cursor to do whatever a person using a mouse and keyboard could do. And he could dictate too. Now, with words, he could turn the heat up
or down and the lights on or off, play the stereo or TV, write on his word processor, make phone calls and send faxes.
"He can even write music," Thom said to the visitors.
"He tells the computer what notes to mark down on the staff."
"Now that's useful," Rhyme said sourly. "Music."
For a C4 quad
— Rhyme's injury was at the fourth cervical vertebra — nodding was easy. He could also shrug, though not as dismissingly as he'd have liked. His other circus trick was moving his left ring finger a few
millimeters in any direction he chose. That had been his entire physical repertoire for the past several years; composing a sonata for the violin was probably not in the offing.
"Games
too."
"I hate games. I don't play games."
Sellitto, who reminded Rhyme of a large, unmade bed, gazed at the computer and seemed unimpressed.
"Lincoln," he began gravely. "There's a task forced case. Us 'n' the feds. Ran into a problem last night."
"Ran into a brick wall," Banks ventured to
say.
"We thought . . . well, I thought you'd want to help us out on this one."
Want to help them out?
"I'm
working on something now," Rhyme explained. "For Perkins, in fact." Thomas Perkins, Special Agent in Charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI. "One of Fred Dellray's runners is
missing."
Special Agent Fred Dellray, a longtime veteran with the Bureau, was a handler for most of the Manhattan office's undercover agents. That had been Dellray's specialty when
he was in the field and he'd earned commendations from the director himself for infiltrating everything from Harlem drug lords' headquarters to black militant organizations in this country and overseas. One of
Dellray's star agents, Tony Panelli, had gone missing a few days earlier.
"Perkins told us," Banks said. "Pretty weird."
Rhyme rolled his
eyes at the inartful phrase. Though he couldn't dispute it. The agent had disappeared from his car across from the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan around nine p.m. The streets weren't crowded but they
weren't deserted either. The engine of the Bureau's Crown Victoria was running, the door open. There was no blood, no gunshot residue, no scuff marks indicating struggle. No witnesses — at least no
witnesses willing to talk.
Pretty weird indeed.
Perkins had a fine crime scene unit at his disposal, including the Bureau's Physical Evidence Response
Team. But it had been Rhyme who'd set up PERT and it was Rhyme whom Dellray had asked to work the scene of the disappearance. Rhyme's partner had spent hours at Panelli's car and had come away with no
unidentified fingerprints, ten bags of meaningless trace evidence, and — the only possible lead — a few dozen grains of this very odd sand.
The grains that now glowed on his
computer screen, as smooth and huge as heavenly bodies.
Sellitto continued, "Perkins's gonna put other people on that, Lincoln, if you'll help us. Anyway, I think you'll want
this one."
That verb again – want. What was this all about?
Rhyme and Sellitto had worked together on major homicide investigations some
years ago. Hard cases —- and public cases. He knew Sellitto as well as he knew any cop. Rhyme generally distrusted his ability to read people (Blaine had said — often, and heatedly — that Rhyme
could spot a shell casing a mile away and miss a human being standing in front of him) but he could see now that Sellitto was holding back.
"Okay, Lon. What is it? Tell me."
Sellitto nodded toward Banks.
"Phillip Hansen," the young detective said significantly, lifting a puny eyebrow.
Rhyme knew the name
only from newspaper reports. Hansen — a large, hard-living businessman originally from Tampa, Florida — owned a wholesale company in Armonk, NY. It was remarkably successful and he'd become a
multimillionaire thanks to it. Hansen had a good deal for an entrepreneur. He never had to look for customers, never advertised, never had receivables problems. In fact, if there was any downside to PH Distributors,
Inc., it was that the federal government and New York State were expending great energy to shut it down and throw its president in jail. Because the product Hansen's company sold was not, as he claimed,
secondhand military surplus vehicles but weaponry, more often than not stolen from military bases or imported illegally. Earlier in the year two army privates had been killed when a truckload of small arms was
hijacked near the George Washington Bridge on its way to New Jersey. Hansen was behind it – a fact the U.S. Attorney and the New York Attorney General knew but couldn't prove.
"Perkins and us're hammering together a case," Sellitto said. "Working with the Army CID. But it's been a bitch."
"And nobody ever dimes him," said Banks. "Ever."
Rhyme supposed that, no, no one would dare snitch on a man like Hansen. The young detective continued, "But finally, last week, we got a break. See, Hansen's a pilot. His company's got
warehouses at Mamaroneck airport — that one near White Plains? A judge issued paper to check 'em out. Naturally we didn't find anything. But then last week, it's midnight? The airport's closed but
there're some people there, working late. They see a guy fitting Hansen's description drive out to this private plane, load some big duffle bags into it and take off. Unauthorized. No flight plan, just takes
off. Comes back forty minutes later, lands, gets back into his car and burns rubber out of there. No duffle bags. The witnesses give the registration number to the FAA. Turns out it's Hansen's private plane, not
his company's."
Rhyme said, "So he knew you were getting close and he wanted to ditch something linking him to the killings." He was beginning to see why they wanted him. Some
seeds of interest here. "Air traffic control track him?"
"LaGuardia had him for a while. Straight out over Long Island Sound. Then he dropped below radar for ten minutes or
so."
"And you drew a line to see how far he could get over the Sound. There're divers out?"
"Right. Now, we knew that soon as Hansen heard
we had the three witnesses he was gonna rabbit. So we managed to put him away till Monday. Federal Detention."
Rhyme laughed. "You got a judge to buy probable cause on
that?"
"Yeah, with the risk of flight," Sellitto said. "And some bullshit FAA violations and reckless endangerment thrown in. No flight plan, flying below FAA
minimums."
"What'd Mis-ter Han-sen say?"
"He knows the drill. Not a word to the arrestings, not a word to the prosecutors. Lawyer denies everything and's
preparing suit for wrongful arrest, yadda, yadda, yadda . . . So if we find the fucking bags we go to the grand jury on Monday and, bang, he's away."
"Provided," Rhyme
pointed out, "there's anything incriminating in the bags."
"Oh, there's something incriminating."
"How do you
know?"
"Because Hansen's scared. He's hired somebody to kill the witnesses. He's already got one of 'em. Blew up his plane last night outside of
Chicago."
And, Rhyme thought, they want me to find the duffle bags. . . . Fascinating questions were now floating into his mind. Was it possible to place the plane at a particular
location over the water because of a certain type of precipitation or saline deposit or insect found crushed on the leading edge of the wing? Could one calculate the time of death of an insect? What about salt
concentrations and pollutants in the water? Flying that low to the water, would the engines or wings pick up algae and deposit it on the fuselage or tail?
"I'll need some maps of
the Sound," Rhyme began. "Engineering drawings of his plane—"
"Uhm, Lincoln, that's not why we're here," Sellitto said.
"Not to find
the bags," Banks added.
"No? Then?" Rhyme tossed an irritating tickle of black hair off his forehead and frowned the young man down.
Sellitto's
eyes again scanned the ECU box. Ugly beige. The wires that sprouted from it were dull red and yellow and black and lay curled on the floor like sunning snakes.
"We want you to help
us find the killer. The guy Hansen hired. Stop him before he gets the other two wits."
"And?" For Rhyme saw that Sellitto still had not mentioned what he was holding in reserve.
With a glance out the window the detective said, "Looks like it's the Dancer, Lincoln."
"The Coffin Dancer?"
Sellitto looked back and nodded.
"You're sure?"
"We heard the Dancer handled a job in D.C. a few weeks ago. Killed a Congressional aide mixed up in arms deals.
We got pen registers and found calls from a pay phone outside Hanson's house in Westchester to the hotel where the Dancer was staying. It's gotta be him, Lincoln."
On the screen the
grains of sand, big as asteroids, smooth as a woman's shoulders, lost their grip on Rhyme's interest.
"Well," he said softly, "that's a problem now, isn't
it?"
Copyright © 1998 Jeffery Deaver
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