On his way to find corpse three.
The Wife, if you will, Stephen. What a mixed-up, nervous creature you were. With your scrubbed hands and your confused dick. The Husband, the Wife, the Friend . . .
Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, eliminate . . .
Ah, Stephen . . . I could have taught you there's only one rule in this business: you stay one step ahead of every living soul.
He now had two pistols but wouldn't use them yet. He wouldn't think of acting prematurely. If he stumbled now he'd never have another chance to kill Percey Clay before the grand jury met later that morning.
Moving silently into a parlor where two more U.S. marshals sat, one reading a paper, one watching TV.
The first one glanced up at the Dancer, saw the uniform, and returned to the paper. Then looked up again.
"Wait," the marshal said, suddenly realizing he didn't recognize the face.
But the Dancer didn't wait.
He answered with swish, swish to both carotid arteries. The man slid forward to die on page six of the Daily News so quietly that his partner never turned from the TV, where a blond woman wearing excessive gold jewelry was explaining how she met her boyfriend through a psychic.
"Wait? For what?" the second marshal asked, not looking away from the screen.
He died slightly more noisily than his partner but no one in the compound seemed to notice. The Dancer dragged the bodies flat, stowed them under a table.
At the back door he made certain there were no sensors on the door frame and then slipped outside. The two marshals in the front were vigilant, but their eyes were turned away from the house. One quickly glanced toward the Dancer, nodded a greeting, then turned back to his reconnaissance. The light of dawn was in the sky but it was still dim enough so that the man didn't recognize him. They both died almost silently.
As for the two in the back, at the guard station overlooking the lake, the Dancer came up behind them. He tickled the heart of one marshal with a stab in the back and then, swish, swish, sliced apart the throat of the second guard. Lying on the ground, the first marshal gave a plaintive scream as he died. But once again no one seemed to notice; the sound, the Dancer decided, was very much like the call of a loon, waking to the beautiful pink and gray dawn.
Rhyme and Sellitto were deep in bureaucratic debt by the time the fax of the DNA profile arrived. The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.
"Somebody killed him?" Sellitto muttered. His shirt was so wrinkled it looked like a fiber sample under five-hundred-times magnification. "Why?"
But why was not a criminalist's question.
Evidence . . . Rhyme thought. Evidence was his only concern.
He glanced at the crime scene charts on his wall, scanning all the clues of the case. The fibers, the bullets, the broken glass . . .
Analyze! Think!
You know the procedure. You've done it a million times.
You identify the facts. You quantify and categorize them. You state your assumptions. And you draw your conclusions. Then you test--
Assumptions, Rhyme thought.
There was one glaring assumption that had been present in this case from the beginning. They'd based their entire investigation on the belief that Kall was the Coffin Dancer. But what if he wasn't? What if he was the pawn and the Dancer'd been using him as a weapon?
Deception . . .
If so, there'd be some evidence that didn't fit. Something that pointed to the real Dancer.
He pored over the charts carefully.
But there was nothing unaccounted for except the green fiber. And that told him nothing.
"We don't have any of Kall's clothes, right?"
"No, he was buck naked when we found him," the tour doctor said.
"We have anything he came in contact with?"
Sellitto shrugged. "Well, Jodie."
Rhyme asked, "He changed clothes here, didn't he?"
"Right," Sellitto said.
"Bring 'em here. Jodie's clothes. I want to look at them."
"Uck," Dellray said. "They're excessively unpleasant."
Cooper found and produced them. He brushed them out over sheets of clean newsprint. He mounted samples of the trace on slides and set them in the compound 'scope.
"What do we have?" Rhyme asked, looking over the computer screen, a copycat image of what Cooper was seeing in his microscope.
"What's that white stuff?" Cooper asked. "Those grains. There's a lot of it. It was in the seams of his pants."
Rhyme felt his face flush. Some of it was his erratic blood pressure from exhaustion, some of it was the phantom pain that still plagued him every now and then. But mostly it was the heat of the chase.
"Oh, my God," he whispered.
"What, Lincoln?"
"It's oolite," he announced.
"The fuck's that?" Sellitto asked.
"Eggstone. It's a wind-borne sand. You find it in the Bahamas."
"Bahamas?" Cooper asked, frowning. "What else did we just hear about the Bahamas?" He looked around the lab. "I don't remember."
But Rhyme did. His eyes were seated on the bulletin board, where was pinned the FBI analyst's report on the sand Amelia Sachs had found last week in Tony Panelli's car, the missing agent downtown.
He read:
"Substance submitted for analysis is not technically sand. It is coral rubble from reef formations and contains spicules, cross sections of marine worm tubes, gastropod shells, and foraminifers. Most likely source is the northern Caribbean: Cuba, the Bahamas."
Dellray's agent, Rhyme reflected . . . A man who'd know where the most secure federal safe house in Manhattan was. Who'd tell whoever was torturing him the address.
So that the Dancer could wait there, wait for Stephen Kall to show up, befriend him, and then arrange to get captured and get close to the victims.
"The drugs!" Rhyme cried.
"What?" Sellitto asked.
"What was I thinking of? Dealers don't cut prescription drugs! It's too much trouble. Only street drugs!"
Cooper nodded. "Jodie wasn't cutting them with the baby formula. He just dumped out the drugs. He was popping placebos, so we'd think he was a druggie."
"Jodie's the Dancer," Rhyme called. "Get on the phone! Call the safe house now!"
Sellitto picked up the phone and dialed.
Was it too late?
Oh, Amelia, what've I done? Have I killed you?
The sky was turning a metallic rosy color.
A siren sounded far away.
The peregrine falcon--the tiercel, he remembered--was awake and about to go hunting.
Lon Sellitto looked up desperately from the phone. "There's no answer," he said.
. . . Chapter Thirty-seven
Hour 44 of 45
They'd talked for a while, the three of them, in Percey's room.
Talked about airplanes and cars and police work.
Then Bell went off to bed and Percey and Sachs had talked about men.
Finally Percey'd lain back on the bed, closed her eyes. Sachs lifted the bourbon glass from the sleeping woman's hand and shut out the lights. Decided to try to sleep herself.
She now paused in the corridor to look out at the dim dawn sky--pink and orange--when she realized that the phone in the compound's main hallway had been ringing for a long time.
Why wasn't anybody answering it?
She continued down the corridor.
She couldn't see the two guards nearby. The enclave seemed darker than before. Most of the lights had been shut off. A gloomy place, she thought. Spooky. Smelling of pine and mold. Something else? Another smell that was very familiar to her. What?
Something from crime scenes. In her exhaustion she couldn't place it.
The phone continued to chirp.
She passed Roland Bell's room. The door was partly open and she looked
in. His back was to the door. He was sitting in an armchair that faced a curtained window, his head forward on his chest, arms crossed.
"Detective?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
Sound asleep. Just what she wanted to be. She closed his door softly and continued down the corridor, toward her room.
She thought about Rhyme. She hoped he was getting some sleep too. She'd seen one of his dysreflexia attacks. It had been terrifying and she didn't want him to go through another one.
The phone went quiet, cut off in the middle of a ring. She glanced toward where she'd heard it, wondering if it was for her. She couldn't hear whoever'd answered. She waited a moment, but no one summoned her.
Silence. Then a tap, a faint scrape. More silence.
She stepped into her room. It was dark. She turned to grope for the switch and found herself staring at two eyes that caught a sliver of reflected light from outside.
Right hand on the butt of her Glock, she swept her left up to the light switch. The eight-point buck stared at her with his shiny, false eyes.
"Dead animals," she muttered. "Great idea in a safe house . . . "
She pulled her blouse off and removed the bulky American Body Armor suit. Not as bulky as Jodie's, of course. What a kick he was. The little . . . what was Dellray's street word? Skel. Short for "skeleton." Scrawny little loser. What a mutt.
She reached under her mesh undershirt and scratched frantically. Her boobs, her back under the bra, her sides.
Ooooo, feels good.
Exhausted, sure, but could she sleep?
The bed looked pretty damn nice.
She pulled on her blouse again, buttoned it, and lay down on the comforter. Closed her eyes. Did she hear footsteps?
One of the guards making coffee, she supposed.
Sleep? Breathe deep . . .
No sleep.
Her eyes opened and she stared at the webby ceiling.
The Coffin Dancer, she mused. How would he come at them? What would his weapon be?
His deadliest weapon is deception . . .
Glancing out a crack in the curtain, she saw the beautiful fish-gray dawn. A haze of mist bleached the color from the distant trees.
Somewhere inside the compound she heard a thud. A footstep.
Sachs swung her feet around to the floor and sat up. May as well just give up and get some coffee. I'll sleep tonight.
She had a sudden urge to talk to Rhyme, to see if he'd found anything. She could hear him saying, "If I'd found something I would've called you, wouldn't I? I said I'd check in."
No, she didn't want to wake him, but she doubted he was asleep. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and clicked it on before she remembered Marshal Franks's warning to use only the secure line in the living room.
As she was about to shut the phone off, it chirped loudly.
She shivered--not at the jarring sound, but at the thought that the Dancer had somehow found her number and wanted to confirm she was in the compound. For an instant she wondered if somehow he'd slipped explosives into her phone too.
Damnit, Rhyme, look how spooked I am!
Don't answer it, she told herself.
But instinct told her to, and while criminalists may shun instinct, patrol cops, street cops, always listen to those inner voices. She pulled the antenna out of the phone.
"'Lo?"
"Thank God . . . " The panicked tone of Lincoln Rhyme chilled her.
"Hey, Rhyme. What's--"
"Listen very carefully. Are you alone?"
"Yeah. What's going on?"
"Jodie's the Dancer."
"What?"
"Stephen Kall was the diversion. Jodie killed him. It was his body in the park we found. Where's Percey?"
"In her room. Up the hall. But how--"
"No time. He's going for the kill right now. If the marshals're still alive, tell them to get into a defensive position in one of the rooms. If they're dead, find Percey and Bell and get out. Dellray's scrambled SWAT, but it'll be twenty or thirty minutes before they're there."
"But there're eight guards. He can't've taken them all out . . . "
"Sachs," he said sternly, "remember who he is. Move! Call me when you're safe."
Bell! she thought suddenly, recalling the detective's still posture, his head slumped forward.
She raced to her door, threw it open, drew her gun. The black living room and corridor gaped. Dark. Only faint dawn light filtering into the rooms. She listened. A shuffle. A clink of metal. But where were the sounds coming from?
Sachs turned toward Bell's room and trotted as quietly as she could.
He got her just before she got to his room.
As the figure stepped from the doorway she dropped into a crouch and swung the Glock toward him. He grunted and slapped the pistol from her hand. Without thinking, she shoved him forward, slamming his back into the wall.
Groping for her switchblade.
Roland Bell gasped, "Hold up there. Hey, now . . . "
Sachs let go of his shirt.
"It's you!"
"You scared the everlivin' you-know-what outta me. What's--"
"You're all right!" she said.
"Just dozed off for a minute. What's going on?"
"Jodie's the Dancer. Rhyme just called."
"What? How?"
"I don't know." She looked around, shivering in panic. "Where're the guards?"
The hall was empty.
Then she recognized the smell she'd wondered about. It was blood! Like hot copper. And she knew then that all the guards were dead. Sachs went to retrieve her weapon, which was lying on the floor. She frowned, looking at the end of the grip. Where the clip should have been was an empty hole. She picked up the gun.
"No!"
"What?" Bell asked.
"My clip. It's gone." She slapped her utility belt. The two clips in the keepers were gone too.
Bell drew his weapons--the Glock and the Browning. They too were clipless. The chambers of the guns were empty too.
"In the car!" she stammered. "I'll bet he did it in the car. He was sitting between us. Fidgeting all the time. Bumping into us."
Bell said, "I saw a gun case in the living room. A couple of hunting rifles."
Sachs remembered it. She pointed. "There." They could just make it out in the dim light of dawn. Bell looked around him and hurried to it, crouching, while Sachs ran to Percey's room and looked in. The woman was asleep on the bed.
Sachs stepped back to the corridor, flicked her knife open, and crouched, squinting. Bell returned a moment later. "It's been broken into. All the rifles're gone. And no ammo for the sidearms."
"Let's get Percey and get out of here."
A footstep not far away. A click of a bolt-action rifle's safety going off.
She grabbed Bell's collar and pulled him to the floor.
The gunshot was deafening and the bullet broke the sound barrier directly over them. She smelled her own burning hair. Jodie must have had a sizable arsenal by now--all the sidearms of the marshals--but he was using the hunting rifle.
They sprinted for Percey's door. It opened just as they got there and she stepped out, saying, "My God, what's--"
The full body tackle from Roland Bell shoved Percey back into her room. Sachs tumbled in on top of them. She slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran to the window, flung it open. "Go, go, go, go . . . "
Bell lifted a stunned Percey Clay off the ground and dragged her toward the window as several high-powered deer slugs tore through the door around the lock.
None of them looked to see how successful the Coffin Dancer'd been. They rolled through the window into the dawn and ran and ran and ran through the dewy grass.
. . . Chapter Thirty-eight
Hour 44 of 45
Sachs stopped beside the lake. Mist, tinted red and pink, wafted in ghostly tatters over the still, gray water.
"Go on," she shouted to Bell and Percey. "Those trees."
She
was pointing to the nearest cover--a wide band of trees at the end of a field on the other side of the lake. It was more than a hundred yards away but was the closest cover.
Sachs glanced back at the cabin. There was no sign of Jodie. She dropped into a crouch over the body of one of the marshals. Their holsters were empty, of course, their clip cases too. She'd known Jodie had taken those weapons, but she hoped there was one thing he hadn't thought of.
He is human, Rhyme . . .
And frisking the cool body she found what she was looking for. Tugging up the marshal's pants cuff she pulled his backup weapon out of his ankle holster. A silly gun. A tiny five-shot Colt revolver with a two-inch barrel.
She glanced at the cabin just as Jodie's face appeared in the window. He lifted the hunting rifle. Sachs spun and squeezed off a round. Glass broke inches from his face and he stumbled backward into the room.
Sachs sprinted around the lake after Bell and Percey. They ran fast, weaving sideways, through the dewy grass.
They got nearly a hundred yards from the house before they heard the first shot. It was a rolling sound, echoing off the trees. It kicked up dirt near Percey's leg.
"Down," Sachs cried. "There." Pointing to a dip in the earth.
They rolled to the ground just as he fired again. If Bell had been upright the shot would have hit him directly between the shoulder blades.
They were still fifty feet from the nearest clump of trees that would give them protection. But to try for it now would be suicide. Jodie was apparently every bit the marksman that Stephen Kall had been.
Sachs lifted her head briefly.
She saw nothing but heard an explosion. An instant later the slug snapped through the air beside her. She felt the same draining terror as at the airport. She pressed her face into the cool spring grass, slick with dew and her sweat. Her hands shook.
Bell looked up fast and then down again.
Another shot. Dirt kicked up inches from his face.
"I think I saw him," the detective drawled. "There're some bushes to the right of the house. On that hill."
Sachs breathed a trio of fast breaths. Then she rolled five feet to the right, poked her head up fast, ducked again.
Jodie chose not to shoot this time and she'd gotten a good look. Bell was right: the killer was on the side of a hill, targeting them with the telescopic deer rifle; she'd seen the faint glint from the 'scope. He couldn't quite hit them where they were if they stayed prone. But all he had to do was move up the hill. From its crest he could shoot down into the pit they were hiding in now--a perfect kill zone.