The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver Page B

Wouldn’t stick to the aluminum skin but there was steel under it. And I’ve got bits of epoxy resin. He stuck the bomb on the outside with the magnets to hold it until the glue hardened.”
    “And look at the shock waves in the epoxy,” Rhyme pointed out. “The glue wasn’t completely set, so he planted it not long before takeoff.”
    “Can we brand the epoxy?”
    “Nope. Generic composition. Sold everywhere.”
    “Any hope of prints? Tell me true, Mel.”
    Cooper’s answer was a faint, skeptical laugh. But he went through the motions anyway and scanned the fragments with the PoliLight wand. Nothing was evident except the blast residue. “Not a thing.”
    “I want to smell it,” Rhyme announced.
    “Smell it?” Sachs asked.
    “With the brisance, we know it’s high explosive. I want to know exactly what kind.”
    Many bombers used low explosives—substances that burn quickly but don’t explode unless confined in, say, a pipe or box. Gunpowder was the most common of these. High explosives—like plastic or TNT—detonate in their natural state and don’t need to be packed inside anything. They were expensive and hard to come by. The type and source of explosive could tell a lot about the bomber’s identity.
    Sachs brought a bag to Rhyme’s chair and opened it. He inhaled.
    “RDX,” Rhyme said, recognizing it immediately.
    “Consistent with the brisance,” Cooper said. “You thinking C three or C four?” Cooper asked. RDX was the main component of these two plastic explosives, which were military; they were illegal for a civilian to possess.
    “Not C three,” Rhyme said, again smelling the explosive as if it were a vintage Bordeaux. “No sweet smell ... Not sure. And strange ... I smell something else ... GC it, Mel.”
    The tech ran the sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. This machine isolated elements in compounds and identified them. It could analyze samples as small as a millionth of a gram and, once it had determined what they were, could run the information through a database to determine, in many cases, brand names.
    Cooper examined the results. “You’re right, Lincoln. It’s RDX. Also oil. And this is weird—starch ...”
    “Starch!” Rhyme cried. “That’s what I smelled. It’s guar flour ...”
    Cooper laughed as those very words popped up on the computer screen. “How’d you know?”
    “Because it’s military dynamite.”
    “But there’s no nitroglycerine,” Cooper protested. The active ingredient in dynamite.
    “No, no, it’s not real dynamite,” Rhyme said. “It’s a mixture of RDX, TNT, motor oil, and the guar flour. You don’t see it very often.”
    “Military, huh?” Sellitto said. “Points to Hansen.”
    “That it does.”
    The tech mounted samples on his compound ’scope’s stage.
    The images appeared simultaneously on Rhyme’s computer screen. Bits of fiber, wires, scraps, splinters, dust.
    He was reminded of a similar image from years ago, though in circumstances very different. Looking through a heavy brass kaleidoscope he’d bought as a birthday present for a friend. Claire Trilling, beautiful and stylish. Rhyme had found the kaleidoscope in a store in SoHo. The two of them had spent an evening sharing a bottle of merlot and trying to guess what kind of exotic crystals or gemstones were making the astonishing images in the eyepiece. Finally, Claire, nearly as scientifically curious as Rhyme, had unscrewed the bottom of the tube and emptied the contents onto a table. They’d laughed. The objects were nothing more than scraps of metal, wood shavings, a broken paper clip, torn shreds from the Yellow Pages, thumbtacks.
    Rhyme pushed those memories aside and concentrated on the objects he was seeing on the screen: A fragment of waxed manila paper—what the military dynamite had been wrapped in. Fibers—rayon and cotton—from the detonating cord the Dancer had tied around the dynamite, which would crumble too easily to mold