[The falcon] began to fly. To fly: the horrible aerial toad, the silent-feathered owl, the humpbacked aviating Richard III, he made toward me close to the ground. His wings beat with a measured purpose, the two eyes of his low-held head fixed me with a ghoulish concentration.
The Goshawk,
T. H. White
Hour 23 of 45
SHORT-BARREL, PROBABLY COLT OR SMITTIE or Dago knockoff, not fired recently. Or oiled.
I smell rust.
And what does a rusty gun tell us, Soldier?
Plenty, sir.
Stephen Kall lifted his hands.
The high, unsteady voice said, “Drop your gun over there. And your walkie-talkie.”
Walkie-talkie?
“Come on, do it. I’ll blow your brains out.” The voice crackled with desperation. He sniffled wetly.
Soldier, do professionals threaten?
Sir, they do not. This man is an amateur. Should we immobilize him?
Not yet. He still represents a threat.
Sir, yessir.
Stephen dropped his gun on a cardboard box.
“Where…? Come on, where’s your radio?”
“I don’t have a radio,” Stephen said.
“Turn around. And don’t try anything.”
Stephen eased around and found himself looking at a skinny man with darting eyes. He was filthy and looked sick. His nose ran and his eyes were an alarming red. His thick brown hair was matted. And he stank. Homeless, probably. A wino, his stepfather would have called him. Or a hophead.
The old battered snub-nose Colt was thrust forward at Stephen’s belly and the hammer was back. It wouldn’t take much for the cams to slip, especially if it was old. Stephen smiled a benign smile. He didn’t move a muscle. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Where’s your radio?” the man blurted.
“I don’t have a radio.”
The man nervously patted his captive’s chest. Stephen could have killed him easily – the man’s attention kept wandering. He felt the skittering fingers glide over his body, probing. Finally the man stepped back. “Where’s your partner?”
“Who?”
“Don’t give me any shit. You know.”
Suddenly cringey again. Wormy… Something was wrong. “I really don’t know what you mean.”
“The cop who was just here.”
“Cop?” Stephen whispered. “In this building?”
The man’s rheumy eyes flickered with uncertainty. “Yeah. Aren’t you his partner?”
Stephen walked to the window and looked out.
“Hold it. I’ll shoot.”
“Point that someplace else,” Stephen commanded, glancing over his shoulder. No longer worried about slipping cams. He was beginning to see the extent of his mistake. He felt sick to his stomach.
The man’s voice cracked as he threatened, “Stop. Right there. I fucking mean it.”
“Are they in the alley too?” Stephen asked calmly.
A moment of confused silence. “You really aren’t a cop?”
“Are they in the alley too?” Stephen repeated firmly.
The man looked uneasily around the room. “A bunch of them were a while ago. They’re the ones put those trash bags there. I don’t know ’bout now.”
Stephen stared into the alley. The trash bags… They’d been left there to lure me out. False cover.
“If you signal anybody, I swear -”
“Oh, be quiet.” Stephen scanned the alley slowly, patient as a boa, and finally he saw a faint shadow on the cobblestones – behind a Dumpster. It moved an inch or two.
And on top of the building behind the safe house – on the elevator tower – he saw a ripple of shadow. They were too good to let their gun muzzles show but not good enough to think about blocking the light reflecting upward from the standing water that covered the roof of the building.
Jesus, Lord… Somehow Lincoln the Fucking Worm had known that Stephen wouldn’t buy the setup about the Twentieth Precinct. They’d been expecting him here all along. Lincoln had even figured out his strategy – that Stephen would try to get through the alley from this very building.
The face in the window…
Stephen suddenly had the absurd idea that it had been Lincoln the Worm in Alexandria, Virginia, standing in the window, lit with rosy light, looking at him. He couldn’t have been the one, of course. Still, that impossibility didn’t stop the cringey, pukey nausea from unfurling in Stephen’s gut.
The chocked door, the open window, and the fluttering curtain… a fucking welcome mat. And the alley: a perfect kill zone.
The only thing that had saved him was his instinct.
Lincoln the Worm had set him up.
Who the hell is he?
Rage boiled him. A wave of heat swept over his body. If they were expecting him they’d be following S &S procedures – search and surveillance. Which meant the cop this little shit had seen would be coming back soon to check this room. Stephen spun around to the thin man. “When was the last time the cop checked in here?”
The man’s apprehensive eyes flickered, then blossomed with fear.
“Answer me,” Stephen snapped, despite the black bore of the Colt pointed at him.
“Ten minutes ago.”
“What kind of weapon does he have?”
“I don’t know. I guess one of those fancy ones. Like a machine gun.”
“Who are you?” Stephen asked.
“I don’t have to answer your fucking questions,” the man said defiantly. He wiped his runny nose on his sleeve. And made the mistake of doing this with his gun hand. In a flash Stephen lifted the gun away from him and shoved the little man to the floor.
“No! Don’t hurt me.”
“Shut up,” Stephen barked. Instinctively he opened the little Colt to see how many rounds were in the cylinder. There were none. “It’s empty?” he asked, incredulous.
The man shrugged. “I -”
“You were threatening me with an unloaded weapon?”
“Well… See, if they catch you and it’s not loaded, they don’t put you away for as long.”
Stephen didn’t understand the point. He thought he might just kill the man for the stupidity of carrying an unloaded gun. “What’re you doing here?”
“Just go away and leave me alone,” the man whimpered, struggling to climb to his feet.
Stephen dropped the Colt into his pocket then snagged his Beretta and trained it at the man’s head. “What are you doing here?”
He wiped his face again. “There’re doctors’ offices upstairs. And nobody’s here on Sunday so I hit ’em for, you know, samples.”
“Samples?”
“Doctors get all these free samples of drugs and shit and there’s no record, so you can steal as much as you want and nobody knows. Percodan, Fiorinal, diet pills, stuff like that.”
But Stephen wasn’t listening. He felt the chill of the Worm again. Lincoln was very close.
“Hey, you all right?” the man asked, looking at Stephen’s face.
Oddly, the worms went away.
“What’s your name?” Stephen asked.
“Jodie. Well, Joe D’Oforio. But everybody, like, calls me Jodie. What’s yours?”
Stephen didn’t answer. Staring out the window. Another shadow moved on top of the building behind the safe house.
“Okay, Jodie. Listen up. You want to make some money?”
“Well?” Rhyme asked impatiently. “What’s going on?”
“He’s still in the building to the east of the safe house. He hasn’t gone into the alley yet,” Sellitto reported.
“Why not? He has to. There’s no reason for him not to. What’s the problem?”
“They’re checking every floor. He’s not in the office we thought he’d go for.”
The one with the open window. Damn! Rhyme had debated about leaving the window open, letting the curtain blow in and out, tempting him. But it was too obvious. The Dancer’d become suspicious.
“Everybody’s loaded and locked?” Rhyme asked.
“Of course. Relax.”
But he couldn’t relax. Rhyme hadn’t known exactly how the Dancer would try his assault on the safe house. He’d been sure, though, it would be through the alley. He’d hoped that the trash bags and Dumpsters would lull him into thinking there was enough cover to make his approach from that direction. Dellray’s agents and Haumann’s 32-E teams were surrounding the alley, in the office building itself, and on the buildings around the safe house. Sachs was with Haumann, Sellitto, and Dellray in a fake UPS van parked up the block from the safe house.
Rhyme had been temporarily fooled by the feint with the supposed gas truck bomb. That the Dancer would drop a tool at a crime scene was improbable but somewhat credible. But then Rhyme grew suspicious about the quantity of detonating cord residue on the clippers. It suggested that the Dancer had smeared the blade with explosive to make sure the police thought he’d try an assault on the precinct house with a bomb. He decided that, no, the Dancer hadn’t been losing his touch – as he and Sachs had originally thought. Being spotted surveiling his intended route of attack and then leaving a guard alive so that the man could call the police and tell them about the theft of the truck – those were intentional.
The final gram tipping the scales, though, was physical evidence. Ammonia bound to a paper fiber. There are only two sources for that combination – old architectural blueprints and land plat maps, which were reproduced by large-sheet ammonia printers. Rhyme had had Sellitto call Police Plaza and ask about break-ins at architectural firms or the county deeds office. A report came back that the recorder’s office had been broken into. Rhyme asked them to check East Thirty-fifth Street, amazing the city guards, who reported that, yes, those plats were missing.
Though how the Dancer’d found out that Percey and Brit were at the safe house and what its address was remained a mystery.
Five minutes ago two ESU officers had found a broken window on the first floor of the office building. The Dancer’d shunned the open front door but had still moved in for the assault on the safe house through the alley just as Rhyme had predicted. But something had spooked him. He was loose in the building and they had no idea where. A poisonous snake in a dark room. Where was he, what was he planning?
Too many ways to die…
“He wouldn’t wait,” Rhyme muttered. “It’s too risky.” He was growing frantic.
An agent called in, “Nothing on the first floor. We’re still making our rounds.”
Five minutes passed. Guards checked in with negative reports but all Rhyme really heard was the static rustling in his headset.
Jodie answered, “Who doesn’t wanna make money? But I don’t know doing what.”
“Help me get out of here.”
“I mean, what’re you doing here? Are they looking for you?”
Stephen looked the sad little man up and down. A loser, but not crazy or stupid. Stephen decided it was best tactically to be honest. Besides, the man’d be dead in a few hours anyway.
He said, “I’ve come here to kill somebody.”
“Whoa. Like, are you in the Mafia or something? Who’re you gonna kill?”
“Jodie, be quiet. We’re in a tough situation here.”
“We? I didn’t do anything.”
“Except you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Stephen said. “And that’s too bad, but you’re in the same situation I am because they want me and they aren’t going to believe you’re not with me. Now, you gonna help me or not? All I’ve got time for is yes or no.”
Jodie tried not to look scared, but his eyes betrayed him.
“Yes. Or. No.”
“I don’t want to get hurt.”
“If you’re on my side you’ll never get hurt. One thing I’m good at is making sure who gets hurt and who doesn’t.”
“And you’ll pay me? Money? Not a check.”
Stephen had to laugh. “Not a check. No. Cash.”
The jelly beans of eyes were considering something. “How much?”
The little crud was negotiating.
“Five thousand.”
The fear remained in the eyes but it was pushed aside by shock. “For real? You’re not shitting me?”
“No.”
“What if I get you out and you kill me so you don’t have to pay?”
Stephen laughed again. “I’m getting paid a lot more than that. Five’s nothing to me. Anyway, if we get out of here I could use your help again.”
“I -”
A sound in the distance. Footsteps coming closer.
It was the S &S cop, looking for him.
Just one, Stephen could tell, listening to the steps. Made sense. They’d be expecting him to go for the first-floor office with the open window, where Lincoln the Worm would’ve stationed most of the troopers.
Stephen replaced the pistol in his book bag and pulled out his knife. “You going to help me?”
A no-brainer, of course. If Jodie didn’t help he’d be dead in sixty seconds. And he knew it.
“Okay.” He extended his hand.
Stephen ignored it and asked, “How do we get out?”
“See those cinder blocks there? You can pull ’ em out. See, there? It leads to an old tunnel. There’re these delivery tunnels going underneath the city. Nobody knows about them.”
“There are?” Stephen wished he’d known about them before.
“I can get us to the subway. That’s where I live. This old subway station.”
It was two years since Stephen had worked with a partner. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t killed the man.
Jodie started toward the concrete blocks.
“No,” Stephen whispered. “Here’s what I want you to do. You stand against that wall. There.” He pointed to a wall opposite the doorway.
“But he’ll see me. He checks in here with his flashlight and I’ll be the first thing he’ll see!”
“Just stand there and put your hands up.”
“He’ll shoot me,” Jodie whimpered.
“No, he won’t. You’ve got to trust me.”
“But…” His eyes darted toward the door. He wiped his face.
Is this man going to buckle, Soldier?
That is a risk, sir, but I’ve considered the odds and I think he won’t. This is a man who wants money badly.
“You’ll have to trust me.”
Jodie sighed. “Okay, okay…”
“Make sure your hands are up or he will shoot.”
“Like this?” He lifted his arms.
“Step back so your face is in the shadows. Yeah, like that. I don’t want him to see your face… Good. Perfect.”
The footsteps were coming closer now. Walking softly. Hesitating.
Stephen touched his fingers to his lips and went prone, disappearing into the floor.
The footsteps grew soft and then paused. The figure appeared in the doorway. He was in body armor and wore an FBI windbreaker.
He pushed into the room, scanning with the flashlight attached to the end of his H &K. When the beam caught Jodie’s midriff he did something that astonished Stephen.
He started to pull the trigger.
It was very subtle. But Stephen had shot so many animals and so many people that he knew the ripple of muscles, the tension of stance, just before you fired your weapon.
Stephen moved fast. He leapt up, lifting the machine gun away and breaking off the man’s stalk microphone. Then he drove his k-bar knife up under the agent’s triceps, paralyzing his right arm. The man cried out in pain.
They’re green-lighted to kill! Stephen thought. No surrender pitch. They see me, they shoot. Armed or not.
Jodie cried, “Oh, my God!” He stepped forward uncertainly, hands still airborne – almost comically.
Stephen knocked the agent to his knees and pulled his Kevlar helmet over his eyes, gagged him with a rag.
“Oh, God, you stabbed him,” Jodie said, lowering his arms and walking forward.
“Shut up,” Stephen said. “What we talked about. The exit.”
“But -”
“Now.”
Jodie just stared.
“Now!” Stephen raged.
Jodie ran to the hole in the wall as Stephen pulled the agent to his feet and led him into the corridor.
Green-lighted to kill…
Lincoln the Worm had decided he’d die. Stephen was furious.
“Wait there,” he ordered Jodie.
Stephen plugged the headset back into the man’s transceiver and listened. They were on the Special Operations channel and there must have been a dozen or so cops and agents, calling in as they searched different parts of the building.
He didn’t have much time, but he had to slow them up.
Stephen led the dazed agent out into the yellow hallway.
He pulled out his knife again.
Hour 23 of 45
“DAMN. DAMN!” Rhyme snapped, flecking his chin with spittle. Thom stepped up to the chair and wiped it, but Rhyme angrily shook him away.
“Bo?” he called into his microphone.
“Go ahead,” Haumann said from the command van.
“I think somehow he made us and’s going to fight his way out. Tell your agents to form defensive teams. I don’t want anybody alone. Move everybody into the building. I think – ”
“Hold on… Hold on. Oh, no…”
“Bo? Sachs?… Anybody?”
But nobody answered.
Rhyme heard shouting voices through the radio. The transmission was cut off. Then staccato bursts: “…assistance. We’ve got a blood trail… In the office building. Right, right… no… downstairs… Basement. Innelman’s not reporting in. He was… basement. All units move, move. Come on, move!…”
Rhyme called, “Bell, you hear me? Double up on the principals. Do not, repeat, do not leave them unguarded. The Dancer’s loose and we don’t know where he is.”
Roland Bell’s calm voice came over the line. “Got ’em under our wing. Nobody’s getting in here.”
An infuriating wait. Unbearable. Rhyme wanted to scream with frustration.
Where was he?
A snake in a dark room…
Then one by one the troopers and agents called in, telling Haumann and Dellray that they’d secured one floor after another.
Finally, Rhyme heard: “Basement’s secure. But Jesus Lord there’s a lot of blood down here. And Innelman’s gone. We can’t find him! Jesus, all this blood!”
“Rhyme, can you hear me?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m in the basement of the office building,” Amelia Sachs said into her stalk mike, looking around her.
The walls were filthy yellow concrete and the floors were painted battleship gray. But you hardly noticed the decor of the dank place; blood spatter was everywhere, like a horrific Jackson Pollock painting.
The poor agent, she thought. Innelman. Better find him fast. Someone bleeding this much couldn’t last more than fifteen minutes.
“You have the kit?” Rhyme asked her.
“We don’t have time! All the blood, we’ve got to find him!”
“Steady, Sachs. The kit. Open the kit.”
She sighed. “All right! Got it.”
The crime scene blood kit contained a ruler, protractor with string attached, tape measure, the Kastle-Meyer Reagent presumptive field test. Luminol too – which detects iron oxide residue of blood even when a perp scrubs away all visual trace.
“It’s just a mess, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to figure out anything.”
“Oh, the scene’ll tell us more than you think, Sachs. It’ll tell us plenty.”
Well, if anybody could make sense of this macabre setting, it would be Rhyme; she knew that he and Mel Cooper were long-standing members of the International Association of Blood Pattern Analysts. (She didn’t know which was more disturbing – the gruesome blood spatter at crime scenes or the fact that there was a group of people who specialized in the subject.) But this seemed hopeless.
“We’ve got to find him…”
“Sachs, calm down… You with me?”
After a moment she said, “Okay.”
“All you need for now is the ruler,” he said. “First, tell me what you see.”
“There’re drips all over the place here.”
“Blood spatter’s very revealing. But it’s meaningless unless the surface it’s on is uniform. What’s the floor like?”
“Smooth concrete.”
“Good. How big are the drops? Measure them.”
“He’s dying, Rhyme.”
“How big?” he snapped.
“All different sizes. There’re hundreds of them about three-quarters of an inch. Some are bigger. About an inch and a quarter. Thousands of very little ones. Like a spray.”
“Forget the little ones. They’re ‘overcast’ drops, satellites of the others. Describe the biggest ones. Shape?”
“Mostly round.”
“Scalloped edges?”
“Yes,” she muttered. “But there are some that just have smooth edges. Here’re some in front of me. They’re a little smaller, though.”
Where is he? she wondered. Innelman. A man she’d never met. Missing and bleeding like a fountain.
“Sachs?”
“What?” she snapped.
“What about the smaller drops? Tell me about them.”
“We don’t have time to do this!”
“We don’t have time not to,” he said calmly.
God damn you, Rhyme, she thought, then said, “All right.” She measured. “They’re about a half inch. Perfectly round. No scalloped edges.”
“Where are those?” he asked urgently. “At one end of the corridor, or the other?”
“Mostly in the middle. There’s a storeroom at the end of the hall. Inside there and near it they’re bigger and have ragged or scalloped edges. At the other end of the corridor, they’re smaller.”
“Okay, okay,” Rhyme said absently, then he announced, “here’s the story… What’s the agent’s name?”
“Innelman. John Innelman. He’s a friend of Dellray’s.”
“The Dancer got Innelman in the storeroom, stabbed him once, high. Debilitated him, probably arm or neck. Those are the big, uneven drops. Then he led him down the corridor, stabbing him again, lower. Those are the smaller, rounder ones. The shorter the distance blood falls, the more even the edges.”
“Why’d he do that?” she gasped.
“To slow us down. He knows we’ll look for a wounded agent before we start after him.”
He’s right, she thought, but we’re not looking fast enough!
“How long’s the corridor?”
She sighed, looked down it. “About fifty feet, give or take, and the blood trail covers the whole thing.”
“Any footprints in the blood?”
“Dozens. They go everywhere. Wait… There’s a service elevator. I didn’t see it at first. That’s where the trail leads! He must be inside. We have to -”
“No, Sachs, wait. That’s too obvious.”
“We have to get the elevator door open. I’m calling the Fire Department for somebody with a Halligan tool or an elevator key. They can -”
Calmly Rhyme said, “Listen to me. Do the drops leading to the elevator look like teardrops? With the tails pointing in different directions?”
“He’s got to be in the elevator! There’re smears on the door. He’s dying, Rhyme! Will you listen to me!”
“Teardrops, Sachs?” he asked soothingly. “Do they look like tadpoles?”
She looked down. They did. Perfect tadpoles, with the tails pointing in a dozen different directions.
“Yeah, Rhyme. They do.”
“Backtrack until those stop.”
This was crazy. Innelman was bleeding out in the elevator shaft. She gazed at the metal door for a moment, thought about ignoring Rhyme, but then trotted back down the corridor.
To the place where they stopped.
“Here, Rhyme. They stop here.”
“It’s at a closet or door?”
“Yes, how’d you know?”
“And it’s bolted from the outside?”
“That’s right.”
How the hell does he do it?
“So the search team’d see the bolt and pass it by – the Dancer couldn’t very well bolt himself inside. Well, Innelman’s in there. Open the door, Sachs. Use the pliers on the handle, not the knob itself. There’s a chance we can lift a print. And Sachs?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think he left a bomb. He hardly had time. But whatever shape the agent’s in, and it won’t be good, ignore him for a minute and look for any traps first.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
Pliers out… unbolt the latch… twist the knob.
Glock up. Apply poundage. Now!
The door flew outward.
But there was no bomb or other trap. Just the pale, blood-slicked body of John Innelman, unconscious, tumbling to her feet.
She barked a soft scream. “He’s here. Need medics! He’s cut bad.”
Sachs bent over him. Two EMS techs and more agents ran up, Dellray with them, grim faced.
“What’d he do to you, John? Oh, man.” The lanky agent stood back while the medics went to work. They cut off much of his clothing and examined the stab wounds. Innelman’s eyes were half open, glazed.
“Is he…?” Dellray asked.
“Alive, just barely.”
The medics slapped pads on the slashes, put a tourniquet on his leg and arm, and then ran a plasma line. “Get him in the bus. We gotta move. I mean, move!”
They placed the agent on a gurney and hurried down the corridor, Dellray with him, head down, muttering to himself and squeezing his dead cigarette between his fingers.
“Could he talk?” Rhyme asked. “Any clue where the Dancer went?”
“No. He was unconscious. I don’t know if they can save him. Jesus.”
“Don’t get raided, Sachs. We’ve got a crime scene to analyze. We have to find out where the Dancer is, if he’s still around. Go back to the storeroom. See if there are exterior doors or windows.”
As she walked to it she asked, “How’d you know about the closet?”
“Because of the direction of the drops. He shoved Innelman inside and soaked a rag in the cop’s blood. He walked to the elevator, swinging the rag. The drops were moving in different directions when they fell. So they had a teardrop appearance. And since he tried leading us to the elevator, we should look in the opposite direction for his escape route. The storeroom. Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Describe it.”
“There’s a window looking out on the alley. Looks like he started to open it. But it’s puttied shut. No doors.” She looked out the window. “I can’t see any of the trooper’s positions, though. I don’t know what tipped him.”
“You can’t see any of the troopers,” Rhyme said cynically. “He could. Now, walk the grid and let’s see what we find.”
She searched the scene carefully, walking the grid, then vacuumed for trace and carefully bagged the filters.
“What do you see? Anything?”
She shone her light on the walls and she found two mismatched blocks. A tight squeeze, but someone limber could have fit through there.
“Got his exit route, Rhyme. He went through the wall. Some loose concrete blocks.”
“Don’t open it. Get SWAT there.”
She called several agents down to the room and they pulled the blocks out, sweeping the inner chamber with flashlights mounted on the barrels of their H &K submachine guns.
“Clear,” one agent called. Sachs drew her weapon and slipped into the cool, dank space.
It was a narrow declining ramp filled with rubble, leading through a hole in the foundation. Water dripped. She was careful to step on large chunks of concrete and leave the damp earth untouched.
“What do you see, Sachs? Tell me!”
She waved the PoliLight wand over the places where the Dancer would logically have gripped with his hands and stepped with his feet. “Whoa, Rhyme.”
“What?”
“Fingerprints. Fresh latents… Wait. But here’re the glove prints too. In blood. From holding the rag. I don’t get it. It’s like a cave… Maybe he took the gloves off for some reason. Maybe he thought he was safe in the tunnel.”
Then she looked down and shone the eerie glow of yellow-green light at her feet. “Oh.”
“What?”
“They’re not his prints. He’s with somebody else.”
“Somebody else? How do you know?”
“There’s another set of footprints too. They’re both fresh. One bigger than the other. They go off in the same direction, running. Jesus, Rhyme.”
“What’s the matter?”
“It means he’s got a partner.”
“Come on, Sachs. The glass is half full.” Rhyme added cheerfully, “It means we’ll have twice as much evidence to help us track him down.”
“I was thinking,” she said darkly, “that it meant he’d be twice as dangerous.”
“What’ve you got?” Lincoln Rhyme asked.
Sachs had returned to his town house and she and Mel Cooper were looking over the evidence collected at the scene. Sachs and SWAT had followed the footsteps into a Con Ed access tunnel, where they lost track of both the Dancer and his companion. It looked as if the men had climbed to the street and escaped through a manhole.
She gave Cooper the print she’d found in the entrance to the tunnel. He scanned it into the computer and sent it off to the feds for an AFIS search.
Then she held up two electrostatic prints for Rhyme to examine. “These’re the footprints in the tunnel. This one’s the Dancer’s.” She lifted one of the prints – transparent, like an X ray. “It matches a print in the shrink’s office he broke into on the first floor.”
“Wearing average ordinary factory shoes,” Rhyme said.
“You’d think he’d be in combat boots,” Sellitto muttered.
“No, those’d be too obvious. Work shoes have rubber soles for gripping and steel caps in the toes. They’re as good as boots if you don’t need ankle support Hold the other one closer, Sachs.”
The smaller shoes were very worn at the heel and the ball of the foot. There was a large hole in the right shoe and through it you could see a lattice of skin wrinkles.
“No socks. Could be his friend’s homeless.”
“Why’s he got somebody with him?” Cooper asked.
“Don’t know,” Sellitto said. “Word is he always works alone. He uses people but he doesn’t trust them.”
Just what I’ve been accused of, Rhyme thought. He said, “And leaving fingerprints at the scene? This guy’s no pro. He must have something the Dancer needs.”
“A way out of the building, for one thing,” Sachs suggested.
“That could be it.”
“And’s probably dead now,” she suggested.
Probably, Rhyme agreed silently.
“The prints,” Cooper said. “They’re pretty small. I’d guess size eight male.”
The size of the sole doesn’t necessarily correspond to shoe size and provides even less insight into the stature of the person wearing them, but it was reasonable to conclude the Dancer’s partner had a slight build.
Turning to the trace evidence, Cooper mounted samples onto a slide and slipped it under the compound ’scope. He patched the image through to Rhyme’s computer.
“Command mode, cursor left,” Rhyme ordered into his microphone. “Stop. Double click.” He examined the computer monitor. “More of the mortar from the cinder block. Dirt and dust… Where’d you get this, Sachs?”
“I scraped it from around the cinder blocks and vacuumed the floor of the tunnel. I also found a nest behind some boxes where it looked like somebody’d been hiding.”
“Good. Okay, Mel, gas it. There’s a lot of stuff here I don’t recognize.”
The chromatograph rumbled, separating the compounds, and sent the resulting vapors to the spectrometer for identification. Cooper examined the screen.
He exhaled a surprised breath. “I’m surprised his friend’s able to walk at all.”
“Little more specific there, Mel.”
“He’s a drugstore, Lincoln. We’ve got secobarbital, phenobarbital, Dexedrine, amobarbital, meprobamate, chlordiazepoxide, diazepam.”
“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Reds, dexies, blue devils…”
Cooper continued, “Lactose and sucrose too. Calcium, vitamins, enzymes consistent with dairy products.”
“Baby formula,” Rhyme muttered. “Dealers use it to cut drugs.”
“So the Dancer’s got himself a cluckhead for a sidekick. Go figure.”
Sachs said, “All those doctors’ offices there… This guy must’ve been boosting pills.”
“Log on to FINEST,” Rhyme said. “Get a list of every drugstore cowboy they’ve got.”
Sellitto laughed. “It’s gonna be big as the White Pages, Lincoln.”
“Nobody says it’s easy, Lon.”
But before he could make the call, Cooper received an E-mail. “Don’t bother.”
“Huh?”
“The AFIS report on the fingerprints?” The tech tapped the screen. “Whoever the guy is, he doesn’t have a record in New York City or State or NCIC.”
“Hell!” Rhyme snapped. He felt cursed. Couldn’t it be just a little easier? He muttered, “Any other trace?”
“Something here,” Cooper said. “A bit of blue tile, grouted on the back, attached to what looks like concrete.”
“Let’s see it.”
Cooper mounted the specimen onto the ’scope’s stage.
His neck quivering, almost breaking into a spasm, Rhyme leaned forward and studied it carefully. “Okay. Old mosaic tile. Porcelain, crackle finish, lead based. Sixty, seventy years old, I’d guess.” But he could make no cunning deductions from the sample. “Anything else?” he muttered.
“Some hairs.” Cooper mounted them to do a visual. He bent over the ’scope.
Rhyme too examined the thin shafts.
“Animal,” he announced.
“More cats?” Sachs asked.
“Let’s see,” Cooper said, head down.
But these hairs weren’t feline. They were rodent. “Rat,” Rhyme announced. “Rattus norvegicus.Your basic sewer rat.”
“Keep going. What’s in that bag, Sachs?” Rhyme asked like a hungry boy looking over chocolates in a candy store display case. “No, no. There. Yes, that one.”
Inside the evidence bag was a square of paper towel smeared with a faint brown stain.
“I found that on the cinder block, the one he moved. I think it was on his hands. There were no prints but the pattern could’ve been made by a palm.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I rubbed my hand in some dirt and pushed on another cinder block. The mark was the same.”
That’s my Amelia, he thought. For an instant his thoughts returned to last night – the two of them lying in bed together. He pushed the thought away.
“What is it, Mel?”
“Looks like it’s grease. Impregnated with dust, dirt, fragments of wood, bits of organic material. Animal flesh, I think. All very old. And look there in the upper corner.”
Rhyme examined some silvery flecks on his computer screen. “Metal. Ground or shaved off of something. Gas it. Let’s find out for certain.”
Cooper did.
“Petrochemical,” he answered. “Crudely refined, no additives… There’s iron with traces of manganese, silicon, and carbon.”
“Wait,” Rhyme called. “Any other elements – chromium, cobalt, copper, nickel, tungsten?”
“No.”
Rhyme gazed at the ceiling. “The metal? It’s old steel, made from pig iron in a Bessemer furnace. If it were modern it’d have some of those other materials in it.”
“And here’s something else. Coal tar.”
“Creosote!” Rhyme cried. “I’ve got it. The Dancer’s first big mistake. His partner’s a walking road map.”
“To where?” Sachs asked.
“To the subway. That grease is old, the steel’s from old fixtures and tie spikes, the creosote’s from the ties. Oh, and the fragment of tile is from a mosaic. A lot of the old stations were tiled – they had pictures of something that related to the neighborhood.”
Sachs said, “Sure – the Astor Place station’s got mosaics of the animals that John Jacob Astor traded.”
“Grouted porcelain tile. So that’s what the Dancer wanted him for. A place to hide out. The Dancer’s friend’s probably a homeless druggie living in an abandoned siding or tunnel or station somewhere.”
Rhyme realized that everyone was looking at a man’s shadow in the doorway. He stopped speaking.
“Dellray?” Sellitto said uncertainly.
The dark, somber face of Fred Dellray was focused out the window.
“What is it?” Rhyme asked.
“Innelman’s what it is. They stitched him up. Three hundred stitches they gave him. But it was too late. Lost too much blood. He just died.”
“I’m sorry,” Sachs said.
The agent lifted his hands, long sticklike fingers raised like spikes.
Everyone in the room knew about Dellray’s longtime partner – the one killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. And Rhyme thought too of Tony Panelli – ’napped downtown a few days ago. Probably dead by now, the only clue to his whereabouts the grains of curious sand.
And now another of Dellray’s friends was gone.
The agent paced in a threatening lope.
“You know why he got cut, don’t you – Innelman?”
Everyone knew; no one answered.
“A diversion. That’s the only reason in the world. To keep us off the scent. Can you believe that? A fuckin’ diversion.” He stopped pacing abruptly. He looked at Rhyme with his frightening black eyes. “You got any leads at all, Lincoln?”
“Not much.” He explained about the Dancer’s homeless friend, the drugs, the hidey-hole in the subway. Somewhere.
“That’s it?”
“Afraid so. But we still have some more evidence to look at.”
“Evidence,” Dellray whispered contemptuously. He walked to the door, paused. “A distraction. That’s no fucking reason for a good man to die. No reason at all.”
“Fred, wait… we need you.”
But the agent didn’t hear, or he ignored Rhyme if he did. He stalked out of the room.
A moment later the door downstairs closed with a sharp click.
Hour 24 of 45
“HOME, SWEET HOME,” JODIE SAID.
A mattress and two boxes of old clothes, canned food. Magazines – Playboy and Penthouse and some cheap hard-core porn, which Stephen glanced at distastefully. A book or two. The fetid subway station where Jodie lived, somewhere downtown, had been closed decades ago and replaced by one up the street.
A good place for worms, Stephen thought grimly, then pried the image from his mind.
They’d entered the small station from the platform below. They’d made their way here – probably two or three miles from the safe house – completely underground, moving through the basements of buildings, tunnels, huge sewer pipes, and small sewer pipes. Leaving a false lead – an open manhole cover. Finally they’d entered the subway tunnel and made good time, though Jodie was pathetically out of shape and gasped for breath trying to keep up with Stephen’s frantic pace.
There was a door leading out to the street, barred from the inside. Slanting lines of dusty light fell through the slats in the boards. Stephen peered outside into the grim spring overcast. It was a poor part of town. Derelicts sat on street corners, bottles of Thunderbird and Colt 44 were strewn on the sidewalk, and the polka dots of crack vial caps were everywhere. A huge rat chewed something gray in the alley.
Stephen heard a clatter behind him and turned to see Jodie dropping a handful of stolen pills into coffee cans. He was hunched over, carefully organizing them. Stephen dug through his book bag and found his cell phone. He made a call to Sheila’s apartment He was expecting to hear her answering machine but a recording came on that said the line was out of order.
Oh, no…
He was stunned.
It meant that the antipersonnel satchel had gone off in Sheila’s apartment. And that meant they’d found out he’d been there. How the hell had they done that?
“You all right?” Jodie asked.
How?
Lincoln, King of the Worms. That’s how!
Lincoln, the white, wormy face peering out the window…
Stephen’s palms began to sweat.
“Hey?”
Stephen looked up.
“You seem -”
“I’m fine,” Stephen answered shortly.
Stop worrying, he told himself. If it blew, the explosion was big enough to hose the apartment and destroy any trace of him. It’s all right. You’re safe. They’ll never find you, never tie you down. The worms won’t get you…
He looked at Jodie’s easy smile of curiosity. The cringe went away. “Nothing,” he said. “Just a change of plans.” He hung up.
Stephen opened his book bag again, counted out $5,000. “Here’s the money.”
Jodie was transfixed by the cash. His eyes flipped back and forth between the bills and Stephen’s face. The thin hand reached out, shaking, and took the five thousand carefully, as if it might crumble if he gripped it too hard.
As he took the bills Jodie’s hand touched Stephen’s. Even through the glove the killer felt a huge jolt – like the time he’d been stabbed in the gut with a razor knife – stunning but painless. Stephen let go of the money and, looking away, said, “If you’ll help me again I’ll pay you another ten.”
The man’s red, puffy face broke into a cautious smile. He took a deep breath and poked through one of his coffee cans. “I get… I don’t know… nervous, sort of.” He found a pill, swallowed it. “It’s a blue devil. Makes you feel nice. Makes you feel all comfy. Want one?”
“Uhm…”
Soldier, do men take a drink occasionally?
Sir, I don’t know, sir.
Well, they do. Here, have one.
I don’t think I -
Take a drink, Soldier. That’s an order.
Well, sir -
You’re not a pussy girl, are you, Soldier? You have titties?
I… Sir, I do not, sir.
Then drink, Soldier.
Sir, yes sir.
Jodie repeated, “You want one?”
“No,” Stephen whispered.
Jodie closed his eyes and lay back. “Ten… thousand…” After a moment he asked, “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“Who?” Stephen asked.
“Back there, that cop? Hey, you want some orange juice?”
“That agent in the basement? Maybe I killed him. I don’t know. That wasn’t the point.”
“Was it hard to do? Like, I don’t mean anything, I’m just curious. Orange juice? I drink a lot of it. Pills make you thirsty. Your mouth gets all dry.”
“No.” The can looked dirty. Maybe worms had crawled on it. Maybe crawled inside. You could drink a worm and never know it… He shivered. “Do you have running water here?”
“No. But I have some bottles. Poland Spring. I stole a case from A &P.”
Cringey.
“I need to wash my hands.”
“You do?”
“To get the blood off them. It soaked through the gloves.”
“Oh. It’s right there. Why do you wear gloves all the time? Fingerprints?”
“That’s right.”
“You were in the army, right? I knew it.”
Stephen was about to lie, changed his mind suddenly. He said, “No. I was almost in the army. Well, the marines. I was going to join. My stepfather was a marine and I was going in like him.”
“Semper Fi.”
“Right.”
There was silence and Jodie was looking at him expectantly. “What happened?”
“I tried to enlist but they wouldn’t let me in.”
“That’s stupid. Wouldn’t let you? You’d make a great soldier.” Jodie was looking Stephen up and down, nodding. “You’re strong. Great muscles. I” – he laughed – “I don’t hardly get any exercise, ’cept running from niggers or kids want to mug me. And they always catch me anyway. You’re handsome too. Like soldiers ought to be. Like the soldiers in movies.”
Stephen felt the wormy feeling going away and, my God, he started blushing. He stared at the floor. “Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Come on. Your girlfriend thinks you’re handsome, bet.”
Little cringey here. Worms starting to move.
“Well, I -”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
Stephen asked, “You got that water?”
Jodie pointed to the box of Poland Spring. Stephen opened two bottles and began washing his hands. Normally he hated people watching him do this. When people watched him wash he kept being cringey and the worms never went away. But for some reason he didn’t mind Jodie watching.
“No girlfriend, huh?”
“Not right now,” Stephen explained carefully. “It’s not like I’m a homo or anything, if you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I don’t believe in that cult. Now, I don’t think my stepfather was right – that AIDS is God’s way of getting rid of homosexual people. Because if that’s what God wanted to do he’d be smart and just get rid of them, the faggots, I mean. Not make there be a risk that normal people might get sick too.”
“That makes sense,” Jodie said from his hazy plateau. “I don’t have one either, a girlfriend.” He laughed bitterly. “Well, how could I? Right? What’ve I got? I’m not good-looking like you, I don’t have any money… I’m just a fucking junkie is all.”
Stephen felt his face burn hot and he washed harder.
Scrub that skin, yes, yes, yes…
Worms, worms, go away…
Looking at his hands Stephen continued. “The fact is I’ve been in a situation lately where I haven’t really… where I haven’t been as interested in women as most men are. But it’s just a temporary condition.”
“Temporary,” Jodie repeated.
Eyes watching the bar of soap, as if it were a prisoner trying to escape.
“Temporary. Owing to my necessary vigilance. In my work, I mean.”
“Sure. Your vigilance.”
Scrub, scrub, the soap lathered like thunderheads.
“Have you ever killed a faggot?” Jodie asked, curious.
“I don’t know. I’ll tell you I’ve never killed anybody because he’s a homosexual. That would make no sense.” Stephen’s hands tingled and buzzed. He scrubbed harder, not looking at Jodie. He suddenly felt swollen with an odd feeling – of talking to someone who might just understand him. “See, I don’t kill people just to kill them.”
“Okay,” Jodie said. “But what if some drunk came up to you on the street and pushed you around and called you, I don’t know, a motherfucking faggot? You’d kill him, right? Say you could get away with it.”
“But… well, a faggot wouldn’t want to have sex with his mother now, would he?”
Jodie blinked then laughed. “That’s pretty good.”
Did I just make a joke? Stephen wondered. He smiled, pleased that Jodie’d been impressed.
Jodie continued, “Okay, let’s say he just called you a motherfucker.”
“Of course I wouldn’t kill him. And I’ll tell you this, if you’re talking about faggots let’s talk about Negroes and Jewish people too. I wouldn’t kill a Negro unless I’d been hired to kill somebody who happened to be a Negro. There are probably reasons why Negroes shouldn’t live, or at least shouldn’t live here in this country. My stepfather had a lot of reasons for that. I’m pretty much in accord with him. He felt the same about Jewish people but there I disagree. Jewish people make very good soldiers. I respect them.”
He continued. “See, killing’s a business, that’s all it is. Look at Kent State. I was just a kid then but my stepfather told me about it. You know Kent State? Those students got shot by the National Guard?”
“Sure. I know.”
“Now, come on, nobody really cared that those students died, right? But to me it was stupid shooting them. Because what purpose did it serve? None. If you wanted to stop the movement, or whatever it was, you should’ve targeted the leaders and taken them out. It would’ve been so easy. Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, isolate, eliminate.”
“That’s how you kill people?”
“You infiltrate the area. Evaluate the difficulty of the kill and the defenses. You delegate the job of diverting everyone’s attention from the victim – make it look like you’re coming at them from one way but it turns out that it’s just a delivery boy or shoe-shine boy or something, and meanwhile you’ve come up behind the victim. Then you isolate him, and eliminate him.”
Jodie sipped his orange juice. There were dozens of empty orange juice cans piled in the corner. It seemed to be all he lived on. “You know,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “you think professional killers’d be crazy. But you don’t seem crazy.”
“I don’t think I’m crazy,” Stephen said matter-of-factly.
“The people you kill, are they bad? Like crooks and Mafia people and things?”
“Well, they’ve done something bad to people who pay me to kill them.”
“Which means they’re bad?”
“Sure.”
Jodie laughed dopily, eyelids half closed. “Well, some people’d say that’s not exactly how you, you know, figure out what’s good or bad.”
“Okay, what is good and bad?” Stephen responded. “I don’t do anything different than God does. Good people die and bad people die in a train wreck and nobody gets on God’s case because of it. Some professional killers call their victims ‘targets’ or ‘subjects.’ One guy I heard about calls them ‘corpses.’ Even before he kills them. Like, ‘The corpse is leaving his car. I’m targeting him.’ It’s easier for him to think of the victims that way, I guess. Me, I don’t care. I call ’em what they are. Who I’m after now are the Wife and the Friend. I already killed the Husband. That’s how I think of them. They’re people I kill, is all. No big deal.”
Jodie considered what he’d heard and said, “You know something? I don’t think you’re evil. You know why?”
“Why’s that?”
“Because evil is something that looks innocent but turns out to be bad. The thing about you is you’re exactly what you are. I think that’s good.”
Stephen flicked his scrubbed fingernails with a click. He felt himself blushing again. Finally, he asked, “I scare you, don’t I?”
“No,” Jodie said. “I wouldn’t want to have you against me. No sir, I wouldn’t want that. But I feel like we’re friends. I don’t think you’d hurt me.”
“No,” Stephen said. “We’re partners.”
“You talked about your stepfather. He still alive?”
“No, he died.”
“I’m sorry. When you mentioned him I was thinking about my father – he’s dead too. He said the thing he respected most in the world was craftsmanship. He liked watching a talented man do what he did best. That’s kind of like you.”
“Craftsmanship,” Stephen repeated, feeling swollen with inexplicable feelings. He watched Jodie hide the cash in a slit in his filthy mattress. “What’re you going to do with the money?”
Jodie sat up and looked at Stephen with dumb but earnest eyes. “Can I show you something?” The drugs made his voice slurred.
“Sure.”
He lifted a book out of his pocket. The title was Dependent No More.
“I stole it from this bookstore on Saint Marks Place. It’s for people who don’t want to be, you know, alcoholics or drug addicts anymore. It’s pretty good. It mentions these clinics you can go to. I found this place in New Jersey. You go in there and you spend a month – a whole month – but you come out and you’re clean. They say it really works.”
“That’s good of you,” Stephen said. “I approve of that.”
“Yeah, well,” Jodie curled up his face. “It costs fourteen thousand.”
“No shit.”
“For one month. Can you believe that?”
“Somebody’s making some bucks there.” Stephen made $150,000 for a hit, but he didn’t share this information with Jodie, his newfound friend and partner.
Jodie sighed, wiped his eyes. The drugs had made him weepy, it seemed. Like Stephen’s stepfather when he drank. “My whole life’s been so messed up,” he said. “I went to college. Oh, yeah. Didn’t do too bad either. I taught for a while. Worked for a company. Then I lost my job. Everything went bad. Lost my apartment… I’d always had a pill problem. Started stealing… Oh, hell…”
Stephen sat down next to him. “You’ll get your money and go into that clinic there. Get your life turned around.”
Jodie smiled blearily at him. “My father had this thing he said, you know? When there was something you had to do that was hard. He said don’t think about the hard part as a problem, just think about it as a factor. Like something to consider. He’d look me in the eye and say, ‘It’s not a problem, it’s just a factor.’ I keep trying to remember that.”
“Not a problem, just a factor,” Stephen repeated. “I like that.”
Stephen put his hand on Jodie’s leg to prove that he really did like it.
Soldier, what the fuck are you doing?
Sir, busy at the moment, sir. Will report in later.
Soldier -
Later, sir!
“Here’s to you,” Jodie said.
“No, to you,” Stephen said.
And they toasted, spring water and orange juice, to their strange alliance.
Hour 24 of 45
A LABYRINTH.
The New York City subway system extends for over 250 miles and incorporates more than a dozen separate tunnels that crisscross four of the five boroughs (Staten Island only being excluded, though the islanders, of course, have a famous ferry of their very own).
A satellite could find a sailboat adrift in the North Atlantic quicker than Lincoln Rhyme’s team could locate two men hiding in the New York subway.
The criminalist, Sellitto, Sachs, and Cooper were poring over a map of the system taped inelegantly to Lincoln Rhyme’s wall. Rhyme’s eyes scanned the different-colored lines representing the various routes, blue for Eighth Avenue, green for Lex, red for Broadway.
Rhyme had a special relationship with the cantankerous system. It was in the pit of a subway construction site that an oak beam had split and crushed Rhyme’s spine – just as he’d said, “Ah,” and leaned forward to lift a fiber, golden as an angel’s hair, from the body of a murder victim.
Yet even before the accident, subways played an important role in NYPD forensics. Rhyme studied them diligently when he was running IRD: because they covered so much terrain and incorporated so many different kinds of building materials over the years, you could often link a perp to a particular subway line, if not his neighborhood and station, on the basis of good trace evidence alone. Rhyme had collected subway exemplars for years – some of the samples dating to the prior century. (It had been in the 1860s that Alfred Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun and Scientific American, decided to adapt his idea of transmitting mail via small pneumatic tubes to moving people in large ones.)
Rhyme now ordered his computer to dial a number and in a few moments was connected with Sam Hoddleston, chief of the Transit Authority Police. Like the Housing Police, they were regular New York City cops, no different from NYPD, merely assigned to the transportation system. Hoddleston knew Rhyme from the old days and the criminalist could hear in the silence after he identified himself some fast mental tap-dancing; Hoddleston, like many of Rhyme’s former colleagues, didn’t know that Rhyme had returned from the near dead.
“Should we power-off any of the lines?” Hoddleston asked after Rhyme briefed him about the Dancer and his partner. “Do a field search?”
Sellitto heard the question on the speakerphone and shook his head.
Rhyme agreed. “No, we don’t want to tip our hand. Anyway, I think he’s in an abandoned area.”
“There aren’t many empty stations,” Hoddleston said. “But there’re a hundred deserted spurs and yards, work areas. Say, Lincoln, how’re you doing? I-”
“Fine, Sam. I’m fine,” Rhyme said briskly, deflecting the question as he always did. Then added, “We were talking – we think they’re probably going to stick to foot. Stay off the trains themselves. So we’re guessing they’re in Manhattan. We’ve got a map here and we’re going to need your help in narrowing it down some.”
“Whatever I can do,” the chief said. Rhyme couldn’t remember what he looked like. From his voice he sounded fit and athletic, but then Rhyme supposed he himself might seem like an Olympian to someone who couldn’t see his destroyed body.
Rhyme now considered the rest of the evidence that Sachs had found in the building next to the safe house – the evidence left by the Dancer’s partner.
He said to Hoddleston, “The dirt has a high moisture content and’s loaded with feldspar and quartz sand.”
“I remember you always like your dirt, Lincoln.”
“Useful, soil is,” he said, then continued. “Very little rock and none of it blasted or chipped, no limestone or Manhattan mica schist. So we’re looking at downtown. And from the amount of old wood particles, probably closer to Canal Street.”
North of Twenty-seventh Street the bedrock lies close to the surface of Manhattan. South of that, the ground is dirt, sand, and clay, and it’s very damp. When the sandhogs were digging the subways years ago the soupy ground around Canal Street would flood the shaft. Twice a day all work had to cease while the tunnel was pumped out and the walls shored up with timber, which over the years had rotted away into the soil.
Hoddleston wasn’t optimistic. Although Rhyme’s information limited the geographic area, he explained, there were dozens of connecting tunnels, transfer platforms, and portions of stations themselves that had been closed off over the years. Some of them were as sealed and forgotten as Egyptian tombs. Years after Alfred Beach died workmen building another subway line broke through a wall and discovered his original tunnel, long abandoned, with its opulent waiting room, which had included murals, a grand piano, and a goldfish tank.
“Any chance he’s just sleeping in active stations or between stations in a cutout?” Hoddleston asked.
Sellitto shook his head. “Not his profile. He’s a druggie. He’d be worried about his stash.”
Rhyme then told Hoddleston about the turquoise mosaic.
“Impossible to say where that came from, Lincoln. We’ve done so much work retiling, there’s tile dust and grout everywhere. Who knows where he could’ve picked it up.”
“So give me a number, Chief,” Rhyme said. “How many spots we looking at?”
“I’d guess twenty locations,” Hoddleston’s athletic voice said. “Maybe a few less.”
“Ouch,” Rhyme muttered. “Well, fax us a list of the most likely ones.”
“Sure. When do you need it?” But before Rhyme could answer, Hoddleston said, “Never mind. I remember you from the old days, Lincoln. You want it yesterday.”
“Last week,” Rhyme joked, impatient the chief was bantering and not writing.
Five minutes later the fax machine buzzed. Thom set the piece of paper in front of Rhyme. It listed fifteen locations in the subway system. “Okay, Sachs, get going.”
She nodded as Sellitto called Haumann to have the S &S teams get started. Rhyme added emphatically, “Amelia, you stay in the rear now, okay? You’re Crime Scene, remember? Only Crime Scene.”
On a curb in downtown Manhattan sat Leon the Shill. Beside him was the Bear Man – so named because he wheeled around a shopping cart filled with dozens of stuffed animals, supposedly for sale, though only the most psychotic of parents would buy one of the tattered, licey little toys for their child.
Leon and the Bear Man lived together – that is, they shared an alley near Chinatown – and survived on bottle deposits and handouts and a little harmless petty larceny.
“He dying, man,” Leon said.
“Naw, bad dream’s what it is,” Bear Man responded, rocking his shopping cart as if trying to put the bears to sleep.
“Oughta spenda dime, get a ambulance here.”
Leon and the Bear Man were looking across the street, into an alley. There lay another homeless man, black and sick looking, with a twitchy and mean – though currently unconscious – face. His clothes were in tatters.
“Oughta call somebody.”
“Les take a look.”
They crossed the street, skittish as mice.
The man was skinny – AIDS, probably, which told them he probably used smack – and filthy. Even Leon and Bear Man bathed occasionally in the Washington Square Park fountain or the lagoon in Central Park, despite the turtles. He wore ragged jeans, caked socks, no shoes, and a torn, filthy jacket that said Cats…The Musical on it.
They stared at him for a moment. When Leon tentatively touched Cats’s leg the man jerked awake and sat up, freezing them with a weird glare. “The fuck’re you? The fuck’re you?”
“Hey, man, you okay?” They backed away a few feet.
Cats shivered, clutching his abdomen. He coughed long and Leon whispered, “Looks too fucking mean to be sick, you know?”
“He’s scary. Les go.” Bear Man wanted to get back to his A &P baby carriage.
“I need help,” Cats muttered. “I hurt, man.”
“There’s a clinic over on -”
“Can’t go to no clinic,” Cats snapped, as if they’d insulted him.
So he had a record, and on the street refusing to go to a clinic when you were this sick meant you had a serious record. Felony warrants outstanding. Yeah, this mutt was trouble.
“I need medicine. You got some? I pay you. I got money.”
Which they normally wouldn’t’ve believed except that Cats was a can picker. And fucking good at it, they could see. Beside him was a huge bag of soda and beer cans he’d culled from the trash. Leon eyed it enviously. Must’ve taken two days to get that many. Worth thirty bucks, forty.
“We don’t got nothing. We don’t do that. Stuff, I mean.”
“Pills, he means.”
“You wanna bottle? T-bird. I got some nice T-bird, yessir. Trade you a bottle fo’ them cans…”
Cats struggled up on one arm. “I don’t want no fuckin’ bottle. I got beat up. Some kids, they beat me up. They busted something in me. It don’t feel right. I need medicine. Not crack or smack or fucking T-bird. I need something stop me hurtin’. I need pills!” He climbed to his feet and teetered, swaying toward Bear Man.
“Nothing, man. We don’t got nothing.”
“I’ma ask you a las’ time, you gonna give me somethin’?” He groaned and held his side. They knew how crazy strong some crackheads were. And this guy was big. He could easily break both of them in half.
Leon whispered to Bear Man, “That guy, th’other day?”
Bear Man was nodding avidly though it was a fear reflex. He didn’t know who the hell Leon was talking about.
Leon continued, “There’s this guy, okay? Was trying to sell us some shit yesterday. Pills. Pleased as could be.”
“Yeah, pleased as could be,” Bear Man said quickly, as if confirming the story might calm Cats down.
“Didn’t care who saw him. Just selling pills. No crack, no smack, no Jane. But uppers, downers, you name it.”
“Yeah, you name it.”
“I got money.” Cats fumbled in his filthy pocket and pulled out two or three crumpled twenties. “See? So where this motherfucker be?”
“Over near City Hall. Old subway station…”
“I’m sick, man. I got beat up. Why somebody beat me up? What I do? I’s pickin’ some cans’s all. And look what happen. Fuck. What his name?”
“I don’t know,” Bear Man said quickly, squiggling up his forehead as if he were thinking fiercely. “No, wait. He said something.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember… He was looking at my bears.”
“An’ he said something. Yeah, yeah. Said his name was Joe or something. Maybe Jodie.”
“Yeah, that was it. I’m sure.”
“Jodie,” Cats repeated, then wiped his forehead. “I’ma see him. Man, I need somethin’. I’m sick, man. Fuck you. I’m sick. Fuck you too.”
When Cats had staggered off, moaning and muttering to himself, dragging his bag of cans behind him, Leon and Bear Man returned to the curb and sat down. Leon cracked a Voodoo ale and they started drinking.
“Shouldn’ta done that to that fella,” he said.
“Who?”
“Joe or whatever his name was.”
“You want that motherfucker round here?” Bear Man asked. “He dangerous. He scare me. You want him to hang round here?”
“Course I don’t. But, man, you know.”
“Yeah, but -”
“You know, man.”
“Yeah, I know. Gimme the bottle.”
Hour 25 of 45
SITTING NEXT TO JODIE ON THE MATTRESS, Stephen was listening through the tap box to the Hudson Air phone line.
He was listening to Ron’s phone. Talbot was his last name, Stephen had learned. He wasn’t exactly sure what Ron’s job was but he seemed to be an executive with the charter company and Stephen believed he’d get the most information about the Wife and Friend by listening to this line.
He heard the man arguing with someone from the distributor who handled parts for Garrett turbines. Because it was Sunday they were having trouble getting the final items for the repairs – a fire extinguisher cartridge and something called the annular.
“You promised it by three,” Ron grumbled. “I want it by three.”
After some bargaining – and bitching – the company agreed to fly the parts into their Connecticut office from Boston. They’d be trucked to the Hudson Air office and arrive by three or four. They hung up.
Stephen listened for a few minutes longer but there were no other calls.
He clicked the phone off, frustrated.
He didn’t have a clue as to where the Wife and Friend were. Still in the safe house? Had they been moved?
What was wormy Lincoln thinking now? How clever was he?
And who was he? Stephen tried to picture him, tried to picture him as a target through the Redfield telescope. He couldn’t. All he saw was a mass of worms and a face looking at him calmly through a greasy window.
He realized that Jodie’d said something to him.
“What?”
“What’d he do? Your stepfather?”
“Just odd jobs mostly. Hunted and fished a lot. He was a hero in Vietnam. He went behind enemy lines and killed fifty-four people. Politicians and people like that, not just soldiers.”
“He taught you all this, about… what you do?” The drugs had worn off and Jodie’s green eyes were brighter now.
“I got most of my practice in Africa and South America but he started me. I called him ‘WGS.’ The World’s Greatest Soldier. He laughed at that.”
At ages eight and nine and ten Stephen would walk behind Lou as they trooped through the hills of West Virginia, hot drops of sweat falling down their noses and into the crooks of their index fingers, which curled around the ribbed triggers of their Winchesters or Rugers. They’d lie in the grass for hours and be quiet, be still. The sweat glistened on Lou’s scalp just below the bristly crew cut, both eyes open as they sighted on their targets.
Don’t you squint that left eye, Soldier.
Sir, never, sir.
Squirrels, wild turkeys, deer in season or out, bear when they could find them, dogs on slow days.
Make ’em dead, Soldier. Watch me.
Ka-rack. The thud against the shoulder, the bewildered eyes of an animal dying.
Or on steaming August Sundays they’d slip theCO2 cartridges into their paint-ball guns and strip down to their shorts, stalking each other and raising molehills of welts on their chests and thighs with the marble-sized balls that hissed through the air at three hundred feet per second, young Stephen struggling to keep from crying at the awful sting. The paint balls came in every color but Lou insisted on loading with red. Like blood.
And at night, sitting in front of a fire in the backyard as the smoke curled toward the sky and into the open window where his mother stood cleaning the supper dishes with a toothbrush, the taut little man – Stephen at fifteen was as tall as Lou – would sip from the newly opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and talk and talk and talk, whether Stephen was listening or not, as they watched the sparks flying into the sky like orange lightning bugs.
“Tomorrow I want you to bring down a deer with just a knife.”
“Well…”
“Can you do that, Soldier?”
“Yessir, I can.”
“Now look here.” He’d take another sip. “Where d’you think the neck vein is?”
“I -”
“Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. A good soldier admits his ignorance. But then he does something to correct it.”
“I don’t know where the vein is, sir.”
“I’ll show it on you. It’s right here. Feel that? Right there. Feel it?”
“Yessir. I feel it.”
“Now, what you do is you find a family – doe and fawns. You come up close. That’s the hard part, getting up close. To kill the doe, you endanger the fawn. You move for her baby. You threaten the fawn and then the mother won’t run off. She’ll come after you. Then, swick! Cut through her neck. Not sideways, but at an angle. Okay? A V-shape. You feel that? Good, good. Hey, boy, aren’t we having a high old time!”
Then Lou would go inside to inspect the plates and bowls and make sure they were lined up on the checkered tablecloth, four squares from the edge, and sometimes when they were only three and a half squares from the edge or there was still a dot of grease on the rim of a melamine plate Stephen would listen to the slaps and the whimpers from inside the house as he lay on his back beside the fire and watched the sparks fly toward the dead moon.
“You gotta be good at something,” the man would say later, his wife in bed and he outside again with his bottle. “Otherwise there’s no point in being alive.”
Craftsmanship. He was talking about craftsmanship.
Jodie now asked, “How come you couldn’t be in the marines? You never told me.”
“Well, it was stupid,” Stephen said, then paused and added, “I got into some trouble when I was a kid. D’you ever do that?”
“Get into trouble? Not much. I was scared to. I didn’t want to upset my mother, stealing and shit. What’d you do?”
“Something that wasn’t real bright. There was this man lived up the road in our town. He was, you know, a bully. I saw him twisting this woman’s arm. She was sick, and what was he doing hurting her? So I went up to him and said if he didn’t stop I’d kill him.”
“You said that?”
“Oh, and another thing my stepfather taught me. You don’t threaten. You either kill someone or let them be but you don’t threaten. Well, he kept on hassling this woman and I had to teach him a lesson. I started hitting him. It got out of hand. I grabbed a rock and hit him. I wasn’t thinking. I did a couple years for manslaughter. I was just a kid. Fifteen. But it was a criminal record. And that was enough to keep me out of the marines.”
“I thought I read somewhere that even if you’ve got a record you can go into the service. If you go to some special boot camp.”
“I guess maybe ’cause it was manslaughter.”
Jodie’s hand pressed Stephen’s shoulder. “That’s not fair. Not one bit fair.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I’m real sorry,” Jodie said.
Stephen, who never had any trouble looking any man in the eye, glanced at Jodie once then down immediately. And from somewhere, totally weird, this image came to mind. Jodie and Stephen living together in the cabin, going hunting and fishing. Cooking dinner over a campfire.
“What happened to him? Your stepfather?”
“Died in an accident. He was hunting and fell off a cliff.”
Jodie said, “Sounds like it was probably the way he’d’ve wanted to go.”
After a moment Stephen said, “Maybe it was.”
He felt Jodie’s leg brush his. Another electric jolt. Stephen stood quickly and looked out the window again. A police car cruised past but the cops inside were drinking soda and talking.
The street was deserted except for a clutch of homeless men, four or five whites and one Negro.
Stephen squinted. The Negro, lugging a big garbage bag full of soda and beer cans, was arguing, looking around, gesturing, offering the bag to one of the white guys, who kept shaking his head. He had a crazy look in his eyes and the whites were scared. Stephen watched them argue for a few minutes, then he returned to the mattress, sat down next to Jodie.
Stephen put his hand on Jodie’s shoulder.
“I want to talk to you about what we’re going to do.”
“Okay, all right. I’m listening, partner.”
“There’s somebody out there looking for me.”
Jodie laughed. He said, “Seems to me after what happened back at that building there’s a buncha people looking for you.”
Stephen didn’t smile. “But there’s one person in particular. His name’s Lincoln.”
Jodie nodded. “That’s his first name?”
Stephen shrugged. “I don’t know… I’ve never met anyone like him.”
“Who is he?”
A worm…
“Maybe a cop. FBI. A consultant or something. I don’t know exactly.” Stephen remembered the Wife describing him to Ron – the way somebody’d talk about a guru, or a ghost. He felt cringey again. He slid his hand down Jodie’s back. It rested at the base of his spine. The bad feeling went away.
“This is the second time he’s stopped me. And he almost got me caught. I’m trying to figure him out and I can’t.”
“What do you have to figure out?”
“What he’s going to do next. So I can stay ahead of him.”
Another squeeze to the spine. Jodie didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t look away either. He wasn’t timid anymore. And the look he gave Stephen was odd. Was it a look of…? Well, he didn’t know. Admiration maybe…
Stephen realized that it was the way Sheila had looked at him in Starbucks when he was saying all the right things. Except that, with her, he hadn’t been Stephen, he had been somebody else. Somebody who didn’t exist. Jodie was now looking at him this way even though he knew exactly who Stephen was, that he was a killer.
Leaving his hand on the man’s back, Stephen said, “What I can’t figure out is if he’s going to move them out of their safe house. The one next to the building where I met you.”
“Move who? The people you’re trying to kill?”
“Yeah. He’s going to try to out-guess me. He’s thinking…” Stephen’s voice faded.
Thinking…
And what was Lincoln the Worm thinking? Would he move the Wife and the Friend, guessing I’ll try the safe house again? Or would he leave them, thinking I’ll wait and try for them at a new location? And even if he thinks I’ll try the safe house again, will he leave them there as bait, trying to sucker me back for another ambush? Will he move two decoys to a new safe house? And try to take me when I follow them?
The thin man said, almost whispering, “You seem, I don’t know, shook up or something.”
“I can’t see him… I can’t see what he’s going to do. Everybody else’s ever been after me I can see. I can figure them out. Him, I can’t.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jodie asked, swaying against Stephen. Their shoulders brushed.
Stephen Kall, craftsman extraordinaire, stepson of a man who never had a moment’s hesitation in anything he did – killing deer or inspecting plates cleaned with a toothbrush – was now confounded, staring at the floor, then looking up into Jodie’s eyes.
Hand on the man’s back. Shoulders touching too.
Stephen made up his mind.
He bent forward and rummaged through his backpack. He found a black cell phone, looked at it for a moment, then handed it to Jodie.
“Whatsis?” the man asked.
“A phone. For you to use.”
“A cell phone! Cool.” He examined it as if he’d never seen one, flipped it open, studying all the buttons.
Stephen asked, “You know what a spotter is?”
“No.”
“The best snipers don’t work alone. They always have a spotter with them. He locates the target and figures out how far away it is, looks for defensive troops, things like that.”
“You want me to do that for you?”
“Yep. See, I think Lincoln’s going to move them.”
“Why, you figure?” Jodie asked.
“I can’t explain it. I just have this feeling.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, here’s the thing. At one-thirty this afternoon, what I want you to do is walk down the street like a… homeless person.”
“You can say ‘bum,’ you want.”
“And watch the safe house. Maybe you could look through trash cans or something.”
“For bottles. I do that. All the time.”
“You find out what kind of car they get into, then call and tell me. I’ll be on the street around the corner, in a car, waiting. But you’ll have to watch out for decoys.”
An image of the red-haired woman cop came to mind. She could hardly be a decoy for the Wife. Too tall, too pretty. He wondered why he disliked her so much… He regretted not judging that shot at her better.
“Okay. I can do that. You’ll shoot them in the street?”
“It depends. I might follow them to the new safe house and do it there. I’ll be ready to improvise.”
Jodie studied the phone like a kid at Christmas. “I don’t know how it works.”
Stephen showed him. “You call me on it when you’re in position.”
“ ‘In position.’ That sounds professional.” Then Jodie looked up from the phone. “You know, after this’s over and I go through the rehab thing, why don’t we get together sometime? We could have some juice or coffee or something. Huh? You wanta do that?”
“Sure,” Stephen said. “We could -”
But suddenly a huge pounding shook the door. Spinning around like a dervish, whipping his gun from his pocket, Stephen dropped into two-handed shooting position.
“Open the fuckin’ door,” a voice from outside shouted. “Now!
“Quiet,” Stephen whispered to Jodie. Heart racing.
“You in there, booger?” the voice persisted. “Jodie. Where the fuck’re you?”
Stephen stepped to the boarded-over window and looked out again. The Negro homeless guy from across the street. He wore a tattered jacket that read Cats…The Musical. The Negro didn’t see him.
“Where’sa little man?” the Negro said. “I needa little man. I gotta have some pills! Jodie Joe? Where you be?”
Stephen said, “You know him?”
Jodie looked out, shrugged, and whispered, “I don’t know. Maybe. Looks like a lotta people on the street.”
Stephen studied the man for a long moment, thumbing the plastic grip of his pistol.
The homeless man called, “I know you here, man.” His voice dissolved into a gargle of disgusting cough. “Jo-die. Jo-die! It cos’ me, man. As’ wha’ it cos’ me. Cos’ me a fuckin’ weeka pickin’ cans’s what it cos’ me. They tole me you here. Ever-bod-y told me. Jodie, Jodie!”
“He’ll just go away,” Jodie said.
Stephen said, “Wait. Maybe we can use him.”
“How?”
“Remember what I told you? Delegate. This is good…” Stephen was nodding. “He looks scary. They’ll focus on him, not you.”
“You mean take him along with me? To that safe house place?”
“Yes,” Stephen said.
“I need some stuff, man,” the Negro moaned. “Come on. I’m fucked-up, man. Please. I got the wobblies. You fuck!” He kicked the door hard. “Please, man. You in there, Jodie? The fuck you at? You booger! Help me.” It sounded like he was crying.
“Go on out,” Stephen said. “Tell him you’ll give him something if he goes along with you. Just have him go through the trash or something across the street from the safe house, while you’re watching the traffic. It’ll be perfect.”
Jodie looked at him. “You mean now? Just go talk to him?”
“Yeah. Now. Tell him.”
“You want him to come in?”
“No, I don’t want him to see me. Just go talk to him.”
“Well… Okay.” Jodie pried the front door open. “What if he stabs me or something?”
“Look at him. He’s almost dead. You could beat the crap out of him with one hand.”
“Looks like he has AIDS.”
“Go on.”
“What if he touches -”
“Go!”
Jodie took a deep breath then stepped outside. “Hey, keep it down,” he said to the man. “What the hell you want?”
Stephen watched the Negro look over Jodie with his crazed eyes. “Word up you selling shit, man. I got money. I got sixty bucks. I need pills. Look, I’m sick.”
“Whatta you want?”
“Whatchu got, man?”
“Reds, bennies, dexies, yellow jackets, demmies.”
“Yeah, demmies’re good shit, man. I pay you. Fuck. I got money. I’m hurting inside. Got beat up. Where my money?” He slapped his pockets several times before realizing he was clutching the precious twenties in his left hand.
“But,” Jodie said, “you gotta do something for me first.”
“Yeah, whatta I gotta do that? You wanna blow job?”
“No,” Jodie snapped, horrified. “I want you to help me go through some trash.”
“Why I gotta do that shit?”
“Picking some cans.”
“Cans?” the man roared, scratching his nose compulsively. “The fuck you need a nickel for? I just give away a hunnerd cans find out where yo’ ass be. Fuck cans. I pay you money, man.”
“I give you the demmies for free, only you gotta help me get some bottles.”
“Free?” The man didn’t seem to understand this. “You mean, free like I don’t gotta pay?”
“Yeah.”
The Negro looked around as if he was trying to find somebody to explain this.
“Wait here,” Jodie said.
“Where I gotta look for bottles?”
“Just wait…”
“Where?” he demanded.
Jodie stepped back inside. He said to Stephen, “He’s gonna do it.”
“Good job.” Stephen smiled.
Jodie grinned back. He started to turn back to the door but Stephen said, “Hey.”
The little man paused.
Stephen blurted suddenly, “It’s good I met you.”
“I’m glad I met you too.” Jodie hesitated for a minute. “Partner.” He stuck his hand out.
“Partner,” Stephen echoed. He had a fierce urge to take his glove off, so he could feel Jodie’s skin on his. But he didn’t.
Craftsmanship had to come first.
Hour 25 of 45
THE DEBATE WAS FEVERISH.
“I think you’re wrong, Lincoln,” Lon Sellitto said. “We gotta move ’em. He’ll hit the safe house again, we leave ’em there.”
They weren’t the only ones considering the dilemma. Prosecutor Reg Eliopolos hadn’t checked in – not yet – but Thomas Perkins, the FBI special agent in charge of the Manhattan office, was here in person, representing the federal side of the debate. Rhyme wished Dellray were here – and Sachs too, though she was with the joint city/federal tactical force searching abandoned subway locations. So far they hadn’t found any trace of the Dancer or his compatriot.
“I’m being completely proactive in my take on the situation,” said earnest Perkins. “We have other facilities.” He was appalled that it had taken the Dancer only eight hours to find out where the witnesses were being held and to get within five yards of the disguised fire door of the safe house. “Better facilities,” he added quickly. “I think we should expedite immediate transferal. I’ve gotten a heads-up from high levels. Washington itself. They want the witnesses immunized.”
Meaning, Rhyme assumed, move ’em and move ’em now.
“No,” the criminalist said adamantly. “We have to leave them where they are.”
“Prioritizing the variables,” Perkins said, “I think the answer’s pretty clear. Move them.”
But Rhyme said, “He’ll come after them wherever they are, a new safe house or the existing one. We know the turf there, we know something about his approach. We’ve got good ambush coverage.”
“That’s a good point,” Sellitto conceded.
“It’ll also throw him off stride.”
“How so?” Perkins asked.
“He’s debating right now too, you know.”
“He is?”
“Oh, you bet,” Rhyme said. “He’s trying to figure out what we’re going to do. If we decide to keep them where they are, he’ll do one thing. If we move them – which I think is what he’s guessing we’ll do – he’ll try for a transport hit. And however good security is on the road, it’s always worse than fixed premises. No, we have to keep them where they are and be prepared for the next attempt. Anticipate it and be ready to move in. The last time -”
“The last time, an agent got killed.”
Rhyme snapped back to the SAC, “If Innelman had had a backup, it would’ve gone different.”
Perkins of the perfect suit was a self-protecting bureaucrat but he was reasonable. He nodded his concession.
But am I right? Rhyme wondered.
What is the Dancer thinking? Do I really know?
Oh, I can look over a silent bedroom or filthy alleyway and read perfectly the story that turned it into a crime scene. I can see, in the Rorschach of blood pasted to carpet and tile, how close the victim came to escaping or how little chance he had and what kind of death he died. I can look at the dust the killer leaves behind and know immediately where he comes from.
I can answer who, I can answer why.
But what’s the Dancer going to do?
That I can guess at but I can’t say for certain.
A figure appeared in the doorway, one of the officers from the front door. He handed Thom an envelope and stepped back to his guard post.
“What’s that?” Rhyme eyed it carefully. He wasn’t expecting any lab reports and he was all too conscious of the Dancer’s predilection for bombs. The package was no more than a sheet of paper thick, however, and was from the FBI.
Thom opened it and read.
“It’s from PERT. They tracked down a sand expert.”
Rhyme explained to Perkins, “It’s not for this case. It’s about that agent who disappeared the other night.”
“Tony?” the SAC asked. “We haven’t had a single lead so far.”
Rhyme glanced at the report.
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.
Caribbean… Interesting. Well, he’d have to put the evidence on hold for the time being. After the Dancer was bagged and tagged he and Sachs would get back -
His headset crinkled.
“Rhyme, you there?” Sachs’s voice snapped.
“Yes! Where are you, Sachs? What do you have?”
“We’re outside an old subway station near City Hall. All boarded up. S &S says there’s somebody inside. At least one, maybe two.”
“Okay, Sachs,” he said, heart racing at the thought they might be close to the Dancer. “Report back.” Then he looked up at Sellitto and Perkins. “Looks like we may not have to decide about moving them from the safe house after all.”
“They found him?” the detective asked.
But the criminalist – a scientist foremost – refused to give voice to his hopes. Afraid he might jinx the operation – well, jinx Sachs, he was thinking. He muttered, “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
Silently the ESU troops surrounded the subway station.
This was probably the place where the Dancer’s new partner lived, Amelia Sachs concluded. S &S had found several locals who’d reported a druggie selling pills out of the place. He was a slightly built man – in line with a size-eight shoe.
The station was, almost literally, a hole in the wall, supplanted years ago by the fancier City Hall stop a few blocks away.
The 32-E team went into position, while S &S began to set up their microphones and infrareds, and other officers cleared the street of traffic and the homeless men sitting on curbs or in doorways.
The commander moved Sachs away from the main entrance, out of the line of fire. They gave her the demeaning job of guarding a subway exit that had been barred and padlocked for years. She actually wondered if Rhyme had cut a deal with Haumann to keep her safe. Her anger from last night, in abeyance in their search for the Dancer, now bubbled up again.
Sachs nodded toward the rusty lock. “Hmm. He probably won’t be getting out this way,” she offered brightly.
“Gotta guard all entrances,” the masked ESU officer muttered, missing or ignoring her sarcasm, and returned to his comrades.
Rain fell around her, a chill rain, dropping straight down from a dirty gray sky, tapping loudly on the refuse banked in front of the bars.
Was the Dancer inside? If so, there’d be a firefight. Absolutely. She couldn’t imagine he’d give it up without a violent struggle.
And it infuriated her that she wouldn’t be part of it.
You’re a slick dick when you’ve got a rifle and a quarter mile of protection, she thought to the killer. But tell me, asshole, how’re you with a handgun at close range? How’d you like to face me down? On her mantel at home were a dozen trophies of gold-plated shooters aiming pistols. (The gilt figures were all men, which for some reason tickled Amelia Sachs immensely.)
She stepped farther down the stairs, to the iron bars, then flattened against the wall.
Sachs, the criminalist, examined the squalid spot carefully, smelling garbage, rot, urine, the salty smell of the subway. She examined the bars and the chain and padlock. She peered inside the dim tunnel and could see nothing, hear nothing.
Where is he?
And what are the cops and agents doing? What’s the delay?
She heard the answer a moment later in her earphone: they were waiting for backup. Haumann had decided to call in another twenty ESU officers and the second 32-E team.
No, no, no, she thought. That was all wrong! All the Dancer has to do is take one peek outside and see that not a single car or taxi or pedestrian is going by and he’ll know instantly there’s a tactical operation under way. There’ll be a bloodbath… Don’t they get it?
Sachs left the crime scene kit at the foot of the stairs and climbed back to street level. A few doors away was a drugstore. She went inside. She bought two large cans of butane and borrowed the storekeeper’s awning rod – a five-foot-long piece of steel.
Back at the gated subway exit, Sachs slipped the awning rod through one of the chain links that was partially sawn through, and twisted until the chain was taut. She pulled on a Nomex glove and emptied the contents of the butane cans on the metal, watching it grow frosty from the freezing gas. (Amelia Sachs hadn’t walked a beat along the Deuce – Forty-second Street at Times Square – for nothing; she knew enough about breaking and entering to take up a second line of work.)
When the second can was empty she gripped the rod in both hands and began to twist. The icy gas had made the metal very brittle. With a soft snap the link cracked in half. She caught the chain before it fell to the ground and set it quietly in a pile of leaves.
The hinges were wet with rainwater but she spit on them for good measure to keep them from squeaking and pushed inside, sweeping her Glock from its holster, thinking: I missed you at three hundred yards. I won’t at thirty.
Rhyme wouldn’t have approved of this, of course, but Rhyme didn’t know. She thought momentarily about him, about last night, lying in his bed. But the image of his face vanished quickly. Like driving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, her mission now left no time for ruing the disaster of her personal life.
She disappeared into the dim corridor, leapt over the ancient wooden turnstile, and started along the platform toward the station.
She heard the voices before she got more than twenty feet.
“I have to leave… understand… I’m saying? Go away.”
White, male.
Was it the Dancer?
Heart slamming in her chest.
Breathe slow, she told herself. Shooting is breathing.
(But she hadn’t been breathing slowly at the airport. She’d been gasping in fear.)
“Yo, whatchu sayin’?” Another voice. Black male. Something about it scared her. Something dangerous. “I can get money, I can. I can get a shitload a money. I got sixty, I tell you that? But I can get mo’. I can get as much’s you want. I ha’ me a good job. Fuckers took it away. I knew too much.”
The weapon is merely an extension of your arm. Aim yourself, not the weapon.
(But she hadn’t been aiming at all when she’d been at the airport. She’d been on her belly like a scared rabbit, shooting blind – the most pointless and dangerous of practices with a firearm.)
“You understand me? I changed my mind, okay? Let me… and just leave. I’ll give… demmies.”
“You ain’ tole me where we goin’. Where this place we gotta look through? You tell me that first. Where? Tell me!”
“You’re not going anywhere. I want you to go away.”
Sachs started up the stairs slowly.
Thinking: Draw your target, check your background, squeeze three. Return to cover. Draw, squeeze three more if you have to. Cover. Don’t get rattled.
(But she had been raided at the airport. That terrible bullet snapping past her face…)
Forget it. Concentrate.
Up a few more stairs.
“An’ now you sayin’ I don’t get ’em fo’ free, right? Now you sayin’ I gotta pay. You motherfuck!”
Stairs were the worst. Knees, her weak spot. Fucking arthritis…
“Here. Here’s a dozen demmies. Take ’em and go!”
“A dozen. And I ain’ gotta pay you?” He brayed a laugh. “A dozen?”
Approaching the top of the stairs.
She could almost peer into the station itself. She was ready to shoot. He moves any direction more than six inches, girl, take him out. Forget the rules. Three head shots. Pop, pop, pop. Forget the chest. Forget -
Suddenly the stairs vanished.
“Ugh.” A grunt from deep in her throat as she fell.
The step she’d placed her foot on was a trap. The riser had been removed and the step rested only on two shoe boxes. They collapsed under her weight and the concrete slab pitched downward, sending her backward down the stairs. The Glock flew from her hand and as she started to shout, “Ten-thirteen!” she realized that the cord linking her headset to her Motorola had been yanked out of the radio.
Sachs fell with a thud onto the concrete-and-steel landing. Her head slammed into a pole supporting the handrail. She rolled onto her stomach, stunned.
“Oh, great,” the white guy’s voice muttered from the top of the stairs.
“Who the fuck that?” the black voice asked.
She lifted her head and caught a glimpse of two men standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down at her.
“Shit,” the black man muttered. “Fuck. What the fuck goin’ on here?”
The white guy snagged a baseball bat and started down the stairs.
I’m dead, she thought. I’m dead.
The switchblade rested in her pocket. It took every ounce of energy to get her right arm out from underneath her. She rolled onto her back, fishing for the knife. But it was too late. He stepped on her arm, pinning it to the ground, and he gazed down at her.
Oh, man, Rhyme, blew it bad. Wish we’d had a better farewell night… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…
She lifted her hands defensively to deflect the blow to her head, glanced for her Glock. It was too far away.
With a tendony hand tough as a bird claw, the small man pulled the knife from her pocket. He tossed it away.
Then he stood and gripped the club.
Pop, she spoke to her deceased father, How bad d’I blow this one? How many rules d’I break? Recalling that he’d told her all it took to get killed on the street was a one-second lapse.
“Now, you’re gonna tell me what you’re doing here,” he muttered, swinging the club absently, as if he couldn’t decide what to break first. “Who the hell’re you?”
“Her name’s Mizz Amelia Sachs,” said the homeless guy, suddenly sounding a lot less homeless. He stepped off the bottom stair and moved up to the white guy quickly, pulling the bat away. “And unless I’m most mistaken, she’s come here to bust your little ass, my friend. Just like me.” Sachs squinted to see the homeless guy straighten up and turn into Fred Dellray. He was pointing a very large Sig-Sauer automatic pistol at the astonished man.
“You’re a cop?” he sputtered.
“FBI.”
“Shit!” he spat out, closing his eyes in disgust. “This is just my fucking luck.”
“Nup,” Dellray said. “Luck didn’t have a bitsy thing to do with it. Now, I’m gonna cuff you and you’re gonna let me. You don’t, you gonna hurt for months and months. We all together on that?”
“How’d you do it, Fred?”
“ ’Seasy,” the lanky FBI agent said to Sachs as they stood in front of the deserted subway station. He still was dressed homeless and was filthy with the mud he’d smeared on his face and hands to simulate weeks of living on the street. “Rhyme was tellin’ me ’bout the Dancer’s friend being a junkie and living downtown in the subways, knew just where I hadta come. Bought a bag of empties and talked to who I knew I oughta talk to. Just ’bout got di-rections t’his livin’ room.” He nodded toward the subway. They glanced at a squad car, where Jodie sat, cuffed and miserable, in the backseat.
“Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing?”
Dellray’s answer was a laugh and Sachs knew the question was pointless; undercover cops rarely told anyone – fellow cops included, and especially supervisors – what they were doing. Nick, her ex, had been undercover, too, and there’d been a hell of a lot he hadn’t told her.
She massaged her side where she’d fallen. It hurt like a son of a bitch, and the medics said she ought to have X rays. Sachs reached up and squeezed Dellray’s biceps. She felt uneasy receiving gratitude – she was truly Lincoln Rhyme’s protégée there – but she now had no problem saying, “You saved my life. My ass’d be capped now if it wasn’t for you. What can I say?”
Dellray shrugged, deflecting the thanks, and bummed a cigarette from one of the uniformed cops standing in front of the station. He sniffed the Marlboro and slipped it behind his ear. He looked toward a blacked-out window in the station. “Please,” he said to no one, sighing. “ ’Bout time we had some luck here.”
When they’d arrested Joe D’Oforio and flung him into the back of a car, he’d told them that the Dancer had left only ten minutes before, climbing down the stairs and vanishing along a spur line. Jodie – the mutt’s nickname – didn’t know which direction he’d gone, only that he’d disappeared suddenly with his gun and his backpack. Haumann and Dellray sent their troopers to scour the station, the tracks, and the nearby City Hall station. They were now waiting for the results of the sweep.
“Come on…”
Ten minutes later a SWAT officer pushed through the doorway. Sachs and Dellray both looked at him hopefully. But he shook his head. “Lost his prints a hundred feet down the tracks. Don’t have a clue where he went.”
Sachs sighed and reluctantly relayed the message to Rhyme and asked if she should do a search of the tracks and the nearby station.
He took the news as acerbically as she’d guessed he would. “Damnit,” the criminalist muttered. “No, just the station itself. Pointless to grid the rest. Shit, how does he do it? It’s like he’s got some kind of fucking second sight.”
“Well,” she said, “at least we’ve got a witness.”
And regretted immediately that she’d said that.
“Witness?” Rhyme spat out. “A witness? I don’t need witnesses. I need evidence! Well, get him down here anyway. Let’s hear what he has to say. But, Sachs, I want that station swept like you’ve never swept a scene before. You hear me? Are you there, Sachs? Do you hear me?”
Hour 25 of 45
“AND WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?” Rhyme asked, giving a soft puff into the Storm Arrow control straw to scoot forward.
“An itsy piece of garbage,” offered Fred Dellray, cleaned up and back in uniform – if you could call an Irish green suit a uniform. “Uh, uh, uh. Don’t say a word. Not till we ask fo’ it.” He turned his alarming stare on Jodie.
“You fooled me!”
“Quiet, you little skel.”
Rhyme wasn’t pleased that Dellray had gone out on his own, but that was the nature of undercover work, and even if the criminalist didn’t understand it exactly he couldn’t dispute that – as the agent’s skills just proved – it could get results.
Besides, he’d saved Amelia Sachs’s hide.
She’d be here soon. The medics had taken her to the emergency room for a rib X ray. She was bruised from the fall down the stairs, but nothing was broken. He’d been dismayed to learn that his talk the other night had had no effect; she’d gone into the subway after the Dancer alone.
Damn it, he thought, she’s as pigheaded as me.
“I wasn’t going to hurt anybody,” Jodie protested.
“Hard o’ hearing? I said don’t say a word.”
“I didn’t know who she was!”
“No,” Dellray said, “that pretty silver badge of hers didn’t give nuthin’ away.” Then remembered he didn’t want to hear from the man.
Sellitto walked up close and bent over Jodie. “Tell us some more about your friend.”
“I’m not his friend. He kidnapped me. I was in that building on Thirty-fifth because -”
“Because you were boosting pills. We know, we know.”
Jodie blinked. “How’d you -”
“But we don’t care about that. Not yet, at least. Keep going.”
“I thought he was a cop but then he said he was there to kill some people. I thought he was going to kill me too. He needed to escape so he told me to stand still and I did, and this cop or somebody came to the door and he stabbed him -”
“And killed him,” Dellray spat out.
Jodie sighed and looked miserable. “I didn’t know he was going to kill him. I thought he was just going to knock him out or something.”
“Well, asshole,” Dellray spat out, “he did kill him. Killed him dead as a rock.”
Sellitto looked over the evidence bags from the subway, containing scuzzy porn magazines, hundreds of pills, clothes. A new cellular phone. A stack of money. He turned his attention back to Jodie. “Keep going.”
“He said he’d pay me to get him out of there and I led him through this tunnel to the subway. How’d you find me, man?” He looked at Dellray.
“ ’Cause you were skipping ‘long the street hawking your be-bops to everybody you came across. I even knew your name. Jee-sus, you are a mutt. I oughta squeeze your neck till you’re blue.”
“You can’t hurt me,” he said, struggling to be defiant. “I have rights.”
“Who hired him?” Sellitto asked Jodie. “He mention the name Hansen?”
“He didn’t say.” Jodie’s voice quavered. “Look, I only agreed to help him ’cause I knew he’d kill me if I didn’t. I wasn’t going to do it.” He turned to Dellray. “He wanted me to get you to help. But soon as he left I wanted you to leave. I was going to the police and telling them. I was. He’s a scary guy. I’m afraid of him!”
“Fred?” Rhyme asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” the agent conceded, “he did have a change of tune. Wanted me gone. Didn’t say anything about going to the police, though.”
“Where’s he going? What were you supposed to do?”
“I was supposed to go through the trash bins in front of that town house and watch the cars. He told me to look for a man and a woman getting into a car and leaving. I was supposed to tell him what kind of car. I was going to call on that phone there. Then he was going to follow.”
“You were right, Lincoln,” Sellitto said. “About keeping them in the safe house. He’s going for a transport hit.”
Jodie continued, “I was going to come to you -”
“Man, you’re useless when you lie. Don’t you have any dignity?”
“Look, I was going to,” he said, calmer now. He smiled. “I figured there was a reward.”
Rhyme glanced at the greedy eyes and tended to believe him. He looked at Sellitto, who nodded in agreement.
“You cooperate now,” Sellitto grumbled, “and we might just keep your ass out of jail. I don’t know about money. Maybe.”
“I’ve never hurt anybody. I wouldn’t. I -”
“Cool that tongue,” Dellray said. “We all together on that?”
Jodie rolled his eyes.
“Together?” the agent whispered maliciously.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Sellitto said, “We’ve got to move fast here. When were you supposed to be at the town house?”
“At twelve-thirty.”
They had fifty minutes left.
“What kind of car’s he driving?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he look like?”
“In his early, mid-thirties, I guess. Not tall. But he was strong. Man, he had muscles. Crew-cut black hair. Round face. Look, I’ll do one of those drawings… The police sketch thing.”
“Did he give you a name? Anything? Where he’s from?”
“I don’t know. He has kind of a southern accent. Oh, and one thing – he said he wears gloves all the time because he’s got a record.”
Rhyme asked, “Where and for what?”
“I don’t know where. But it’s for manslaughter. He said he killed this guy in his town. When he was a teenager.”
“What else?” Dellray barked.
“Look,” Jodie said, crossing his arms and looking up at the agent, “I’ve done some bad shit but I’ve never hurt anybody in my life. This guy kidnaps me and he’s got all these guns and is one crazy fucked-up guy and I was scared to death. I think you woulda done the same thing I did. So I’m not putting up with this crap anymore. You want to arrest me, do it and, like, take me to detention. But I’m not gonna say anything else. Okay?”
Dellray’s gangly face suddenly broke into a grin. “Well, the rock cracks.”
Amelia Sachs appeared in the doorway and she walked in, glancing at Jodie.
“Tell them!” he said. “I didn’t hurt you. Tell ’em.”
She looked at him the way you’d look at a wad of used chewing gum. “He was going to brain me with a Louisville Slugger.”
“Not so, not so!”
“You okay, Sachs?”
“Another bruise is all. On my back. Bookends.”
Sellitto, Sachs, and Dellray huddled with Rhyme, who told Sachs what Jodie’d reported.
The detective asked Rhyme in a whisper, “We believe him?”
“Little skel,” Dellray muttered. “But I gotta say I think he’s telling the God-ugly truth.”
Sachs nodded too. “I guess. But I think we have to keep him on a tight leash, whatever we do.”
Sellitto agreed. “Oh, we’ll keep him close.”
Rhyme reluctantly agreed too. It seemed impossible to get ahead of the Dancer without this man’s help. He’d been adamant about keeping Percey and Hale in the safe house but in fact he hadn’t known that the Dancer was going for a transport hit. He was only leaning toward that conclusion. He might easily have decided to move Percey and Hale and they might have been killed as they drove to the new safe house.
The tension gripped his jaw.
“How do you think we should handle it, Lincoln?” Sellitto asked.
This was tactical, not evidentiary. Rhyme looked at Dellray, who tugged his unlit cigarette out from behind his ear and smelled it for a moment. He finally said, “Have the mutt make the call and try to get whatever dope he can from the Dancer. We’ll set up a decoy car, send the Dancer after it. Have it full of our folks. Stop it fast, sandwich him in with a couple unmarkeds, and take him down.”
Rhyme nodded reluctantly. He knew how dangerous a tactical assault on a city street would be. “Can we get him out of midtown?”
“We could lead him over to the East River,” Sellitto suggested. “There’s plenty of room there for a takedown. Some of those old parking lots. We could make it look like we’re transferring them to another van. Doin’ a round-robin.”
They agreed this would be the least dangerous approach.
Sellitto nodded toward Jodie, whispered, “He’s diming the Coffin Dancer… what’re we gonna give him? Gotta be good to make it worth his while.”
“Waive conspiracy and aiding and abetting,” Rhyme said. “Give him some money.”
“Fuck,” said Dellray, though he was known for his generosity with the undercover CIs who worked for him. But finally he nodded. “Hokay, hokay. We’ll split the bill. Depending on how greedy the rodent is.”
Sellitto called him over.
“All right, here’s the deal. You help us, you make the call like he wanted and we get him, then we’ll drop all charges and get you some reward money.”
“How much?” Jodie asked.
“Yo, mutt, you’re not in any way, shape, or form to negotiate here.”
“I need money for a drug rehab program. I need another ten thousand. Is there any way?”
Sellitto looked at Dellray. “What’s your snitch fund look like?”
“We could go there,” the agent said, “if you do halvsies. Yeah.”
“Really?” Jodie repressed a smile. “Then I’ll do whatever you want.”
Rhyme, Sellitto, and Dellray hashed out a plan. They’d set up a command post on the top floor of the safe house, where Jodie would be with the cell phone. Percey and Brit would be on the main floor, with troopers protecting them. Jodie would call the Dancer and tell him that the couple had just gotten into a van and were leaving. The van would move slowly through traffic to a deserted parking lot on the East Side. The Dancer’d follow. They’d take him in the lot.
All right, let’s put it together, Sellitto said.
“Wait,” Rhyme ordered. They stopped and looked at him. “We’re forgetting the most important part of all.”
“Which is?”
“Amelia searched the scene at the subway. I want to analyze what she found. It might tell us how he’s coming at us.”
“We know how he’s coming at us, Linc,” Sellitto said, nodding at Jodie.
“Humor an old crip, will you? Now, Sachs, let’s see what we’ve got.”
The Worm.
Stephen was moving through alleys, riding on buses, dodging the cops he saw and the Worm he couldn’t see.
The Worm, watching him through every window on every street. The Worm, getting closer and closer.
He thought about the Wife and the Friend, he thought about the job, about how many bullets he had left, about whether the targets would be wearing body armor, what range he would shoot from, whether this time he should use a suppressor or not.
But these were automatic thoughts. He didn’t control them any more than he controlled his breathing or heartbeat or the speed of the blood coursing through his body.
What his conscious thoughts were consumed with was Jodie.
What was there about him that was so fascinating?
Stephen couldn’t say for certain. Maybe it was the way he lived by himself and didn’t seem to be lonely. Maybe the way he carried that little self-help book around with him and truly wanted to crawl out of the hole he was in. Or the way he hadn’t balked when Stephen told him to stand in the doorway and risk getting shot.
Stephen felt funny. He -
You feel what, Soldier?
Sir, I -
Funny, Soldier? What the fuck does “funny” mean? You going soft on me?
No sir, I am not.
It wasn’t too late to change the plans. There were still alternatives. Plenty of alternatives.
Thinking about Jodie. About what he’d said to Stephen. Hell, maybe they could get coffee after the job was over.
They could go to Starbucks. It would be like when he was talking to Sheila, only this would be real. And he wouldn’t have to drink that pissy little tea but he’d have real coffee, double strong like the kind Stephen’s mother made in the morning for his stepfather, water at a rolling boil for exactly sixty seconds, exactly two and three-quarters level tablespoons per cup, not a single black ground spilled anywhere.
And was fishing or hunting totally out of the question?
Or the campfire…
He could tell Jodie to abort the mission. He could take the Wife and the Friend on his own.
Abort, Soldier? What’re you talking about?
Sir, nothing, sir. I am considering all eventualities regarding the assault, as I have been instructed, sir.
Stephen climbed off the bus and slipped into the alley behind the fire station on Lexington. He rested the book bag behind a Dumpster, slipped his knife from the sheath under his jacket.
Jodie. Joe D…
He pictured the thin arms again, the way the man had looked at him.
I’m glad I met you too, partner.
Then Stephen shivered suddenly. Like the time in Bosnia when he’d had to jump into a stream to avoid being caught by guerrillas. The month was March and the water just above freezing.
He closed his eyes and pressed up against the brick wall, smelled the wet stone.
Jodie was -
Soldier, what the fuck is going on there?
Sir, I -
What?
Sir, uhm…
Spit it out. Now, Soldier!
Sir, I have ascertained that the enemy was trying psychological warfare. His attempts have proved unsuccessful, sir. I am ready to proceed as planned.
Very good, Soldier. But watch your fucking step.
And Stephen realized, as he opened the back door to the firehouse and slipped inside, that there’d be no changing the plans now. This was a perfect setup and he couldn’t waste it, particularly when there was a chance not only of killing the Wife and the Friend but of killing Lincoln the Worm and the redheaded woman cop too.
Stephen glanced at his watch. Jodie would be in position in fifteen minutes. He’d call Stephen’s phone. Stephen would answer and hear the man’s high-pitched voice one last time.
And he’d push the transmit button that would detonate the twelve ounces of RDX in Jodie’s cell phone.
Delegate… isolate… eliminate.
He really had no choice.
Besides, he thought, what would we ever have to talk about? What would we ever have to do after we’d finished our coffee?