The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver Page B

backpack over his shoulder. Something metal clinked. Maybe a flash grenade banged against his Beretta.
    “What’s in there?”
    “Musical instruments. For the kids.”
    “Oh, like triangles?”
    “Yeah, like triangles.”
    “You want me to carry your guitar?”
    “You mind?”
    “Uhm, I think it’d be neat.”
    She took the Fender case and slipped her arm through his and they walked past a cluster of cops, blind to the loving couple, and continued down the street, laughing and talking about those crazy cats.

chapter six
    Hour 1 of 45
    Thom appeared in Lincoln Rhyme’s doorway and motioned someone inside.
    A trim, crew-cut man in his fifties. Captain Bo Haumann, head of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit—the police’s SWAT team. Grizzled and tendony, Haumann looked like the drill sergeant he’d been in the service. He spoke slowly and reasonably, and he looked you dead in the eye, with a faint smile, when he talked. In tactical operations he was often suited up in flak jacket and Nomex hood and was usually one of the first officers through the door in a dynamic barricade entry.
    “It’s really him?” the captain asked. “The Dancer?”
    “S’what we heard,” Sellitto said.
    The slight pause, which from the gray-haired cop was like a loud sigh from anyone else. Then he said, “I’ve got a couple of Thirty-two-E teams dedicated.”
    Thirty-two-E officers, nicknamed after their operations room at Police Plaza, were an unkept secret Officially called Special Procedures Officers of the Emergency Services Unit, the men and women were mostly ex-military and had been relentlessly instructed in full S&S procedures—search and surveillance—as well as assault, sniping, and hostage rescue. There weren’t many of them. The city’s tough reputation notwithstanding, there were relatively few tactical operations in New York and the city’s hostage negotiators—considered the best in the country—usually resolved standoffs before an assault was necessary. Haumann’s committing two teams, which totaled ten officers, to the Dancer would have used up most of the 32-Es.
    A moment later a slight, balding man wearing very unstylish glasses entered the room. Mel Cooper was the best lab man in IRD, the department’s Investigation and Resources Division, which Rhyme used to head. He’d never searched a crime scene, never arrested a perp, had probably forgotten how to fire the slim pistol he grudgingly wore on the back of his old leather belt. Cooper had no desire to be anywhere in the world except sitting on a lab stool, peering into microscopes and analyzing friction ridge prints (well, there and on the ballroom dance floor, where he was an award-winning tango dancer).
    “Detective,” Cooper said, using the tide that Rhyme had carried when he’d hired Cooper away from Albany PD some years ago, “thought I was going to be looking at sand. But I hear it’s the Dancer.” There’s only one place the word travels faster than on the street, Rhyme reflected, and that’s inside the Police Department itself. “We’ll get him this time, Lincoln. We’ll get him.”
    As Banks briefed the newcomers Rhyme happened to look up. He saw a woman in the doorway of the lab. Dark eyes scanning the room, taking it all in. Not cautious, not uneasy.
    “Mrs. Clay?” he asked.
    She nodded. A lean man appeared in the doorway beside her. Britton Hale, Rhyme assumed.
    “Please come in,” the criminalist said.
    She stepped into the middle of the room, glancing at Rhyme, then at the wall of forensic equipment near Mel Cooper.
    “Percey,” she said. “Call me Percey. You’re Lincoln Rhyme?”
    “That’s right. I’m very sorry about your husband.”
    She nodded briskly, seemed uncomfortable with the sympathy.
    Just like me, Rhyme thought.
    He asked the man standing beside Percey, “And you’re Mr. Hale?”
    The lanky pilot nodded and stepped forward to shake hands, then noticed Rhyme’s arms were strapped to the wheelchair.