The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver

folder, and Rhyme was happier to see him than he’d been to see anybody in the past week.
    “The bomb!” he shouted. “Here’s the bomb!”
    The officer, surprised at the odd collection of law enforcers, must have wondered what hit him as Cooper scooped the bags away from him and Sellitto scrawled a signature on the receipt and chain-of-custody card and shoved them back into his hand. “Thanks so long see ya,” the detective exhaled, turning back to the evidence table.
    Thom smiled politely to the trooper and let him out of the room.
    Rhyme called, “Let’s go, Sachs. You’re just standing around! What’ve we got?”
    She offered a cold smile and walked over to Cooper’s table, where the tech was carefully laying out the contents of the bags.
    What was her problem today? An hour was plenty of time to search a scene, if that’s what she was upset about. Well, he liked her feisty. He himself was always at his best that way. “Okay, Thom, help us out here. The blackboard. We need to list the evidence. Make us some charts. ‘CS-One.’ The first heading.”
    “C, uhm, S?”
    “‘Crime scene,’” the criminalist snapped. “What else would it be? ‘CS-One, Chicago.’”
    In a recent case, Rhyme had used the back of a limp Metropolitan Museum poster as an evidence profiling chart. He now was state of the art—several large chalkboards were mounted to the wall, redolent with scents that took him back to humid spring school days in the Midwest, living for science class and despising spelling and English.
    The aide, casting an exasperated glance toward his boss, picked up the chalk, brushed some dust fromhis perfect tie and knife-crease slacks, and wrote.
    “What do we have, Mel? Sachs, help him.”
    They began unloading the plastic bags and plastic jars of ash and bits of metal and fiber and wads of plastic. They assembled contents in porcelain trays. The crash site searchers—if they were on a par with the men and women Rhyme had trained—would have used roller-mounted magnets, large vacuum cleaners, and a series of fine mesh screens to locate debris from the blast.
    Rhyme, expert in most areas of forensics, was an authority on bombs. He’d had no particular interest in the subject until the Dancer left his tiny package in the wastebasket of the Wall Street office where Rhyme’s two techs were killed. After that Rhyme had taken it on himself to learn everything he could about explosives. He’d studied with the FBI’s Explosives Unit, one of the smallest—but most elite—in the federal lab, composed of fourteen agent-examiners and technicians. They didn’t find IEDs—improvised explosive devices, the law enforcement term for bombs—and they didn’t render them safe. Their job was to analyze bombs and bomb crime scenes and to trace and categorize the makers and their students (bomb manufacture was considered an art in certain circles and apprentices worked hard to learn the techniques of famous bomb makers).
    Sachs was poking over the bags. “Doesn’t a bomb destroy itself?”
    “Nothing’s ever completely destroyed, Sachs. Remember that.” Though as he wheeled closer and examined the bags, he admitted, “This was a bad one.See those fragments? That pile of aluminum on the left? The metal’s shattered, not bent. That means the device had a high brisance—”
    “High . . . ?” Sellitto asked.
    “Brisance.” Rhyme explained: “Detonation rate. But even so, sixty to ninety percent of a bomb survives the blast. Well, not the explosive, of course. Though there’s always enough residue to type it. Oh, we’ve got plenty to work with here.”
    “Plenty?” Dellray snorted a laugh. “Bad as puttin’ Humpty-Dumpty together again.”
    “Ah, but that’s not our job, Fred,” Rhyme said briskly. “All we need to do is catch the son of a bitch who pushed him off the wall.” He wheeled farther down the table. “What’s it look like, Mel? I see battery, I see wire, I see timer. What else?