The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme 2)

"Are you fooling with us, Lincoln?" he asked dubiously.

"And Mel Cooper? Could you call him, Lon? He must have taken me seriously. I was kidding. He's such a goddamn scientist. No sense of humor. We'll need him back here."

Amelia Sachs wanted to flee. To bolt out of here, get into her car, and tear up the roads in New Jersey or Nassau County at 120 miles an hour. She couldn't stand to be in the same room with this woman a moment longer.

"All right, Percey," Rhyme said, "take Detective Bell with you and we'll make sure plenty of Bo's troopers are with you too. Get up to your airport. Do what you have to do."

"Thank you, Lincoln." She nodded, and offered a smile.

Just enough of one to make Amelia Sachs wonder if part of Percey Clay's speech wasn't meant for Sachs's benefit too, to make clear who the undisputed winner in this contest was. Well, some sports Sachs believed she was doomed to lose. Champion shooter, decorated cop, a demon of a driver, and pretty good criminalist, Sachs nonetheless possessed an unjacketed heart. Her father had sensed this about her; he'd been a romantic too. After she'd gone through a bad affair some years ago he'd said to her, "They oughta make body armor for the soul, Amie. They oughta do that."

Good-bye, Rhyme, she thought. Good-bye.

And his response to this tacit farewell? A minuscule glance and the gruff words "Let's look at that evidence, Sachs. Time's a-wasting."

. . . Chapter Twenty-eight

Hour 29 of 45

Individuation is the goal of the criminalist.

It's the process of tracing a piece of evidence back to a single source, to the exclusion of all other sources.

Lincoln Rhyme now gazed at the most individuated evidence there was: blood from the Dancer's body. A restriction fragment length polymorphism DNA test could eliminate virtually any possibility that the blood had come from anyone else.

Yet there was little that this evidence could tell him. CODIS--the Computer-Based DNA Information System--contained profiles of some convicted fel

ons, but it was a small database, made up primarily of sex offenders and a limited number of violent criminals. Rhyme wasn't surprised when the search of the Dancer's blood code came back negative.

Still, Rhyme harbored a faint pleasure that they now had a piece of the killer himself, swabbed and stuck into a test tube. For most criminalists, the perps were usually "out there"; he rarely met them face-to-face, often never saw them at all unless it was at trial. So he felt a deep stirring to be in the presence of the man who'd caused so many people, himself included, so much pain.

"What else did you find?" he asked Sachs.

She'd vacuumed Brit Hale's room for trace but she and Cooper, donning magnifiers, had been through it all and found nothing except gunshot residue and fragments of bullets and brick and plaster from the shoot-outs.

She'd found casings from the semiautomatic pistol he'd used. His weapon was a 7.62-millimeter Beretta. It was probably old; it showed breach spread. The casings, all of which Sachs had recovered, had been dipped in cleansers to eliminate even the prints of the employees of the ammunition company--so no one could trace the purchase back to a certain shift at one of the Remington plants and then forward to a shipment that ended up in a particular location. And the Dancer had apparently loaded them with his knuckles to avoid prints. An old trick.

"Keep going," Rhyme said to Sachs.

"Pistol slugs."

Cooper looked over the bullets. Three flattened. And one in pretty good shape. Two were covered with Brit Hale's black, cauterized blood.

"Scan them for prints," Rhyme ordered.

"I did," she said, her voice clipped.

"Try the laser."

Cooper did.

"Nothing, Lincoln." The tech looked at a piece of cotton in a plastic bag. He asked, "What's that?"

Sachs said, "Oh, I got one of his rifle slugs too."

"What?"

"He took a couple shots at Jodie. Two of them hit the wall and exploded. This one hit dirt--a bed of flowers--and didn't go off. I found a hole in one of the geraniums and--"