Rhyme clucked his tongue. "Oh, but I know exactly how you did it."
"Do you now?"
"I just asked you here to talk to you," Rhyme replied. "That's all. To talk to the man who almost out-thought me."
" 'Almost.' " The Dancer laughed. Another twisted smile. It was really quite eerie. "Okay, then tell me."
Rhyme sipped from his straw. It was fruit juice. He'd astonished Thom by asking him to dump out the scotch and replace it with Hawaiian Punch. Rhyme now said agreeably, "All right. You were hired to kill Ed Carney, Brit Hale, and Percey Clay. You were paid a lot, I'd guess. Six figures."
"Seven," the Dancer said proudly.
Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. "Lucrative line of work."
"If you're good."
"You deposited the money in the Bahamas. You'd gotten Stephen Kall's name from somewhere--I don't know where exactly, probably a mercenary network"--the Dancer nodded--"and you hired him as a subcontractor. Anonymously, maybe by E-mail, maybe fax, using references he'd trust. You'd never meet him face-to-face, of course. And I assume you tried him out?"
"Of course. A hit outside of Washington, D.C. I was hired to kill a congressional aide sneaking secrets out of Armed Services Committee files. It was an easy job, so I subcontracted it to Stephen. Gave me a good chance to check him out. I watched him every step of the way. I checked the entrance wound on the body myself. Very professional. I think he saw me watching him and he came after me to take care of witnesses. That was good too."
Rhyme continued. "You left him his cash and the key to Phillip Hansen's hangar--where he waited to plant the bomb on Carney's plane. You knew he was good but you weren't sure he was good enough to kill all three of them. You probably thought he could get one at the most but would provide enough diversion for you to get close to the other two."
The Dancer nodded, reluctantly impressed. "Him killing Brit Hale surprised me. Oh, yes. And it surprised me even more that he got away afterward and got the second bomb onto Percey Clay's plane."
"You guessed that you'd have to kill at least one of the victims yourself, so last week you became Jodie, started hawking your drugs everywhere so that people on the street'd know about you. You kidnapped the agent in front of the Federal Building, found out which safe house they'd be in. You waited in the most logical place for Stephen to make his attack and let him kidnap you. You left plenty of clues to your subway hideout so we'd be sure to find you . . . and use you to get to Kall. We all trusted you. Sure we did--Stephen didn't have a clue you'd hired him. All he knew was that you betrayed him and he wanted to kill you. Perfect cover for you. But risky."
"But what's life without risk?" the Dancer asked playfully. "Makes it all worthwhile, don't you think? Besides, when we were together I built in a few . . . let's call them countermeasures, so that he'd hesitate to shoot me. Latent homosexuality is always helpful."
"But," Rhyme added, piqued that his narrative had been interrupted, "when Kall was in the park, you slipped out of the alley where you were hiding, found him, and killed him . . . You disposed of the hands, teeth, and clothes--and his guns--in the sewer interceptor pipes. And then we invited you out to Long Island . . . Fox in the henhouse." Rhyme added flippantly, "That's the schematic . . . That's the bare bones. But I think it tells the story."
The man's good eye closed momentarily, then opened again. Red and wet, it stared at Rhyme. He gave a faint nod of concession, or perhaps admiration. "What was it?" the Dancer finally asked. "What tipped you?"
"Sand," Rhyme answered. "From the Bahamas."
He nodded, winced at the pain. "I turned my pockets out. I vacuumed."
"In the folds of the seams. The drugs too. Residue and the baby formula."
"Yes. Sure." After a moment the Dancer added, "He was right to be scared of you. Stephen, I mean." The eye was still scanning Rhyme, like a doctor looking for a tumor. He added, "Poor man. What a sad creature. Who buggered him, d'you think? Stepdad or the boys in reform? Or all of the above?"
"I wouldn't know," Rhyme said. On the windowsill the male falcon landed and folded his wings.
"Stephen got scared," the Dancer mused. "And when you get scared it's all over. He thought the worm was looking for him. Lincoln the Worm. I heard him whisper that a few times. He was scared of you."
"But you weren't scared."
"No," the Dancer said. "I don't get scared." Suddenly he nodded, as if he'd finally noticed something that had been nagging him. "Ah, listening carefully, are you? Trying to peg the accent?"
Rhyme had been.
"But, see, it changes. Mountain . . . Connecticut . . . Plains southern and swamp southern . . . Mizzura. Kayntuckeh. Why're you interrogating me? You're Crime Scene. I'm caught. Time for beddy-bye. End of story. Say, I like chess. I love chess. You ever play, Lincoln?"
He'd used to like it. He and Claire Trilling had played quite a bit. Thom had been after him to play on the computer and had bought him a good chess program, installed it. Rhyme had never loaded it. "I haven't played for a long time."
"You and I'll have to play a game of chess sometime. You'd be a good man to play against . . . You want to know a mistake some players make?"
"What's that?" Rhyme felt the man's hot gaze. He was suddenly uneasy.
"They get curious about their opponents. They try to learn things about their personal life. Things that aren't useful. Where they're from, where they were born, who their siblings are."