The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme 2)

"Right," Cooper called.

"Compare them," Rhyme called out. "I want a profile of the corpse's markers. And I want it now."

Poetry was not lost on him.

The "Coffin Dancer" . . . I like that, he thought. Much better than "Jodie"--the name he'd picked for this job because it was so unthreatening. A silly name, a diminutive name.

The Dancer . . .

Names were important, he knew. He read philosophy. The act of naming--of designating--is unique to humans. The Dancer now spoke silently to the late, dismembered Stephen Kall: It was me you heard about. I'm the one who calls my victims "corpses." You call them Wives, Husbands, Friends, whatever you like.

But once I'm hired, they're corpses. That's all they are.

Wearing a U.S. marshal's uniform, he started down the dim hallway from the bodies of the two officers. He hadn't avoided the blood completely, of course, but in the murkiness of the enclave you couldn't see that the navy blue uniform had patches of red on it.

On his way to find corpse three.

The Wife, if you will, Stephen. What a mixed-up, nervous creature you were. With your scrubbed hands and your confused dick. The Husband, the Wife, the Friend . . .

Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, eliminate . . .

Ah, Stephen . . . I could have taught you there's only one rule in this business: you stay one step ahead of every living soul.

He now had two pistols but wouldn't use them yet. He wouldn't think of acting prematurely. If he stumbled now he'd never have another chance to kill Percey Clay before the grand jury met later that morning.

Moving silently into a parlor where two more U.S. marshals sat, one reading a paper, one watching TV.

The first one glanced up at the Dancer, saw the uniform, and returned to the paper. Then looked up again.

"Wait," the marshal said, suddenly realizing he didn't recognize the face.

But the Dancer didn't wait.

He answered with swish, swish to both carotid arteries. The man slid forward to die on page six of the Daily News so quietly that his partner never turned from the TV, where a blond woman wearing excessive gold jewelry was explaining how she met her boyfriend through a psychic.

"Wait? For what?" the second marshal asked, not looking away from the screen.

He died slightly more noisily than his partner but no one in the compound seemed to notice. The Dancer dragged the bodies flat, stowed them under a table.

At the back door he made certain there were no sensors on the door frame and then slipped outside. The two marshals in the front were vigilant, but their eyes were turned away from the house. One quickly glanced toward the Dancer, nodded a greeting, then turned back to his reconnaissance. The light of dawn was in the sky but it was still dim enough so that the man didn't recognize him. They both died almost silently.

As for the two in the back, at the guard station overlooking the lake, the Dancer came up behind them. He tickled the heart of one marshal with a stab in the back and then, swish, swish, sliced apart the throat of the second guard. Lying on the ground, the first marshal gave a plaintive scream as he died. But once again no one seemed to notice; the sound, the Dancer decided, was very much like the call of a loon, waking to the beautiful pink and gray dawn.

Rhyme and Sellitto were deep in bureaucratic debt by the time the fax of the DNA profile arrived. The test had been the fast version, the polymerase chain reaction test, but it was still virtually conclusive; the odds were about six thousand to one that the body in front of them was Stephen Kall.

"Somebody killed him?" Sellitto muttered. His shirt was so wrinkled it looked like a fiber sample under five-hundred-times magnification. "Why?"

But why was not a criminalist's question.

Evidence . . . Rhyme thought. Evidence was his only concern.

He glanced at the crime scene charts on his wall, scanning all the clues of the case. The fibers, the bullets, the broken glass . . .

Analyze! Think!

You know the procedure. You've done it a million times.

You identify the facts. You quantify and categorize them. You state your assumptions. And you draw your conclusions. Then you test--