The Vanished Man Read online

  *

  "Hey there, you okay?"

  Bell touched Amelia Sachs on the arm. She was so shaken by Kara's death that she couldn't answer. She nodded, breathless with grief.

  Ignoring the pain in her knees from the earlier jogging, Sachs and the detective continued quickly up West End toward where Patrolman Burke had radioed that he'd collared the killer.

  Wondering if Kara had siblings. Oh, God, we'll have to tell her family.

  No, not we.

  I'll have to do it. This's my fault. I make that call.

  Sick with the sorrow she hurried toward the alleyway. Bell glanced at her again, inhaling deeply to catch his breath.

  But at least they'd caught the Conjurer.

  Though she was, in her private heart, sorry she hadn't been the arresting officer. She wished she'd found herself alone in the alley facing the Conjurer, a gun in his hand. She might've used the Glock before the Motorola and tapped his shoulder with a single round. In movies shoulder shots were just flesh wounds, inconveniences, and the heroes survived with nothing more than a sling. The truth, though, was that even a small bullet wound changed your life for a long, long time. Sometimes forever.

  But the killer had been caught and she'd have to be satisfied with multiple murder convictions.

  Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry . . .

  Kara . . .

  Sachs realized she didn't even know her real name.

  It's my stage name but I use it most of the time. Better than the one my parents were kind enough to give me.

  This small bit of missing information brought her close to tears.

  She realized that Bell was saying something to her. "You, uhn, with us here, Amelia?"

  A curt nod.

  They turned the corner onto Eighty-eighth Street, where the patrolman had downed the perp. Both ends of the street were being sealed off by RMPs. Bell squinted up the block and noted an alleyway. "There," he said, pointing. He motioned several cops--both plainclothes detectives and uniformed patrol officers--to follow them.

  "Okay, let's go wrap him up," Sachs muttered. "Man, I hope Grady goes for the needle."

  They stopped and looked into the dim canyon. The alley was empty.

  "Isn't this it?" Bell asked.

  "He said Eight-eight, right?" Sachs asked. "A block and a half east of West End. I'm sure that was the call."

  "Me too," a detective said.

  "This's gotta be the place." She looked up and down the street. "No other alleys."

  Three more officers joined them. "We get it wrong?" one asked, looking around. "This the place or not?"

  Bell called on his Motorola, "Portable Five Two One Two, respond, K."

  No answer.

  "Portable Five Two, what street are you on, K?"

  Sachs squinted down the alley. "Oh, no." Her heart sank.

  Running forward, she found, resting on the cobblestones near a pile of garbage, a pair of handcuffs, open. Next to them was a plastic hog tie, which had been severed. Bell ran up beside her.

  "He got out of the goddamn cuffs and cut the restraint." Sachs looked around.

  "Well, where are they?" one of the uniformed officers asked.

  "Where's Larry?" another one called.

  "In pursuit?" somebody else offered. "Maybe he's out of reception area."

  "Maybe," drawled Bell, the concern in his tone reflecting the fact that the workhorse Motorolas rarely malfunctioned and their reception in the city was better than most cell phones'.

  Bell called in a 10-39, escaped suspect, with an officer missing or in pursuit. He asked the dispatcher if there'd been any transmissions from Burke but was told there'd been none. No third-party reports of shots fired in the vicinity either.

  Sachs walked the length of the alley, looking for any clues that might suggest where the killer had gone or where the Conjurer might've dumped the patrol officer's body if he'd gotten control of Burke's gun and killed him. But neither she nor Bell found any sign of the officer or the perp. She returned to the cluster of cops at the mouth of the alley.

  What a terrible day. Two dead this morning. Kara too.

  And now a police officer was missing.

  Her hand rose to the speaker/mike of her SP-50 handy-talkie and pulled it off her shoulder. Time to tell Rhyme. Oh, brother. Don't want to make this call. She called in to Central on the radio and asked for a patch. As she was waiting for the call to go through she felt a tug on her sleeve.

  Sachs turned. As she inhaled a shocked breath the mike slipped from her hand and swung at her side, a pendulum.

  Two people stood in front of her. One was the balding officer Sachs had been giving orders to at the fair ten minutes ago.

  The other was Kara, wearing an NYPD windbreaker. Frowning, the young woman looked up and down the alley. She asked, "So where is he?"

  Chapter Nineteen "Are you all right?" Sachs stammered. "What . . . Wait, what happened?"

  "All right? Yeah, I'm fine. . . ." Kara took in the woman's astonished gaze and said, "You mean you didn't know?"

  The balding officer said to Sachs, "I tried to tell you. But you ran off before I had a chance."

  "Tell me . . . ?" Sachs's voice stopped working. She was so stunned--and riddled with relief--that she couldn't speak.

  "You thought I was really hurt?" Kara said. "Oh, God."

  Bell walked up, nodding a greeting to Kara, who said, "Amelia didn't know."

  "About?"

  "Our plan. The fake stabbing."

  The expression on Bell's face was pure shock. "Lord, you thought she was really dead?"

  The patrol officer repeated to Bell, "I tried to let her know. First, I couldn't find her and then, when I did, she just tells me to seal the scene and call the M.E. and takes off."

  Kara explained, "Roland and I were talking? And we figured that the Conjurer was going to hurt somebody for real--maybe set a fire or shoot or stab somebody. You know, to misdirect us so he could get away. So we thought we'd make up our own misdirection."

  "To flush that boy outta the brush," Bell added. "She got some catsup at the concession stand, squirted it on herself, screamed then fell down."

  Kara opened the blue windbreaker to reveal the red stain on her purple tank top.

  The detective continued, "Was worried a few folks at the fair'd be all tore up over it--"

  Well, I'd guess . . .

  "--but we were thinking that'd be better than somebody really getting clocked or stabbed by the Conjurer." Bell added proudly, "Was her idea. No foolin'."

  "I'm getting a feel for how he thinks," the young woman said.

  "Jesus." Sachs found herself trembling. "It was so real."

  Bell nodded. "She does dead good."

  Sachs gave her a hug then said sternly, "But from now on, stay close. Or keep me in the loop. I'm too young for heart attacks."

  They waited a short while but no reports came in of suspects spotted in the area. Finally Bell said, "You search the scene here, Amelia. I'm going to go interview the victim. See if she can tell us anything. Meet you back at the fair."

  A crime scene bus was parked on Eighty-eighth Street. She walked to it and began to collect her equipment to run the scene. A voice clattered through her dangling speaker, startling her. She pulled her handsfree headset off her belt and plugged it in. Eight Eight Five. Repeat, K."

  "Sachs, what the hell's going on? I heard you had him and now he's gone?"

  She told Rhyme what had happened, about flushing the Conjurer from the fair.

  "Kara's idea? Playing dead? Hmm." The final sound--a grunt really--was a high compliment, coming from Lincoln Rhyme.

  "But he's disappeared," Sachs added. "And we can't find that officer either. Maybe he's in pursuit. But we don't know. Roland's interviewing the woman we saved. See if she has any leads."

  "Okay, well, run the scene, Sachs."

  "Scenes plural," she corrected sourly. "The coffee shop, the pond and the alley here. Too damn many."

 
"Not too many at all," he replied. "Three times the chance to find some good evidence."

  *

  Rhyme had been right.

  The three scenes had yielded a good amount of evidence.

  They'd been difficult to work, though for an unusual reason: the Conjurer had been present at each one--his phantom, at least. Hovering nearby. Making her pause often to tap the grip of her Glock, turning around and making sure the killer hadn't materialized behind her.

  Search well but watch your back.

  She never actually saw anyone. But then Svetlana Rasnikov hadn't seen her killer shed the black camouflage and creep up behind her from the shadows.

  Tony Calvert hadn't seen him hiding behind the mirror in the alley when he'd walked toward the fake cat.

  And even Cheryl Marston hadn't truly seen the Conjurer though she'd sat and talked with him. She'd seen someone else entirely, never suspecting the terrible death he had planned for her.

  Sachs walked the grids at the various locations, took digital photos and released the scenes to Latents and Photo. She then returned to the fair, where she met Roland Bell. He'd interviewed Cheryl Marston at the hospital. They of course couldn't rely on anything the killer had told her ("Pack of goddamn lies," Marston had summarized bitterly) but she remembered some details from before the drug reached its full effect. She gave a good description of him, including particulars about the scars. She also recalled that he'd stopped at a car. She remembered the make and the first few letters of the tag. This was good news. There are a hundred ways to trace a car to a perpetrator or witness. Lincoln Rhyme called cars "evidence generators."

  DMV had reported that a car matching the description--a 2001 tan Mazda 626--had been stolen from the White Plains airport a week ago. Sellitto put out an emergency vehicle locator request to all law enforcement agencies in the metro area and sent officers to check the blocks around the site of the attack to see if they could find the car, though neither officer had much faith that it would still be there.

  Bell was concluding his narrative about Cheryl Marston's harrowing ordeal when a patrol officer taking a radio call interrupted him.

  "Detective Bell? What was that car again? The one the perp was driving?"

  "Tan Mazda. Six two six. Tag's F-E-T two three seven."

  "That's it," the officer said into his mike. Then to Bell and Sachs he added, "Just got a report--RMP spotted him on Central Park West. They went after him but--get this--he drove over the curb into the park itself. The RMP tried to follow but got stuck on the embankment."

  "CPW and what?" Sachs asked.

  "Around Nine-two."

  "He probably bailed," Bell said.

  "He will bail," Sachs said. "But he's going to get some distance first." She nodded to the evidence crates. "Get all this to Rhyme," she called and ten seconds later she was in the seat of her Camaro and had the big engine rattling. She snapped the race-car harness on and pulled the canvas straps snug.

  "Amelia, wait!" Bell called. "ESU is on the way."

  But the squeal of rubber and the cloud of blue smoke the Goodyears left behind were her only response to Bell's words.

  *

  Skidding onto Central Park West, heading north, Sachs concentrated on avoiding pedestrians, poky cars, bicyclists and Rollerbladers.

  Baby strollers too. They were everywhere. Man, why weren't these kids home taking naps?

  She pitched the blue flasher onto the dash and plugged it into the cigarette lighter outlet. The brilliant light began rotating and as she hurtled forward she found herself slapping the horn in time to the flash.

  A streak of gray in front of her.

  Shit. . . . As she braked hard to avoid the U-turner the Camaro ended up a scant foot from the side of a car that was worth twice her annual income. Then she crunched the accelerator again and the General Motors horses responded instantly. She managed to keep the needle under fifty until the traffic thinned out, around Ninetieth Street, and then she went to the floor.

  In a few seconds she hit seventy.

  A clatter through the headset of her Motorola, which lay on the front passenger seat. She grabbed it with one hand and pulled it on.

  " 'Lo?" she called, dispensing with any pretense of requisite police radio codes.

  "Amelia? Roland here," Bell called. He'd also given up on standard communication protocols.

  "Go ahead."

  "We've got cars on the way."

  "Where is he?" she asked, shouting over the roar of the engine.

  "Hold on. . . . Okay, he drove out of the park on Central Park North. Sideswiped a truck and kept going."

  "Headed where?"

  "That was . . . It was less'n a minute ago. He's going north."

  "Got it."

  Heading north in Harlem? Sachs considered. There were several routes out of the city from that area of town but she doubted that he'd take any of them; they all involved bridges and most were via controlled-access highways, where he'd easily be trapped.

  More likely he'd abandon the sedan in a relatively quiet neighborhood and carjack a new one.

  A new voice resounded in her headset. "Sachs, we've got him!"

  "Where, Rhyme?"

  He'd turned westbound on 125th Street, the criminalist explained. "Near Fifth Avenue."

  "I'm just about at One-two-five and Adam Clayton Powell. I'll try to block him. But get me some backup," she called.

  "We're on it, Sachs. Just how fast are you going?"

  "I'm not really looking at the speedometer."

  "Probably just as well. Keep your eyes on the road."

  Sachs honked her way into the busy intersection at 125th Street. She parked crosswise, blocking the westbound lanes. She jumped out of her car, her Glock in her hand. Several cars were stopped in the eastbound lanes. Sachs shouted to the drivers, "Out! Police action. Get out of those cars and get under cover." The drivers--a deliveryman and a woman in a McDonald's uniform--instantly did as they were told.

  Now all the lanes of 125th Street were blocked.

  "Everybody," she shouted. "Get under cover! Now!"

  "Motherfuck."

  "Yo."

  She glanced to her right to see four gangbangers leaning against a chain-link fence, staring with jaded interest at the Austrian gun, the Detroit car and the redhead they belonged to.

  Most other people on the street had taken cover but these four teenagers stayed right where they were, looking casual as Sunday. Why move? It wasn't often that a Wesley Snipes movie came to their 'hood.

  In the distance Sachs saw the Mazda weaving frantically through traffic as it sped west toward her impromptu roadblock. The Conjurer didn't notice the blockade until he was past the street that he could've taken to avoid her. He skidded to a halt. Behind him a garbage truck making a turn braked hard. The driver and the trash collectors saw what was happening and they bailed, leaving the truck to block him from the rear.

  She glanced at the teens again. "Get down!" she called.

  Sneering, they ignored her.

  Sachs shrugged, leaned over the hood of the Camaro and centered the blade sight on the windshield.

  So here he was at last, the Conjurer. She could see his face, his blue Harley shirt. Beneath a black cap his fake braid whipped back and forth as he looked desperately for some way to escape.

  But there wasn't any.

  "You! In the Mazda! Get out of the car and lie down on the ground!"

  No response.

  "Sachs?" Rhyme's voice came through the headset. "Can you--"

  She ripped the unit off and centered the sight once more on the silhouette of the killer's head.

  You have the gun to use, and you may as well use it. . . .

  Hearing Detective Mary Shanley's words looping through her head, Sachs breathed deeply and kept the gun steady, a bit high, a bit to the left, compensating for gravity and the pleasant April breeze.

  When you shoot, nothing exists but you and the target, connected by an invisible cable, like the qu
iet energy of light. Your ability to hit your target depends exclusively on where this energy originates. If its source is your brain you may hit what you're aiming at. But if it's your heart you almost always will. The Conjurer's victims--Tony Calvert, Svetlana Rasnikov, Cheryl Marston, Officer Larry Burke--now seated this power solidly in the latter and she knew that she couldn't miss.

  Come on, she thought, you son-of-a-bitch. Put the goddamn car in drive. Try for me.

  Come on!

  Give me an excuse . . .

  The car edged forward. Her finger slipped inside the trigger guard.

  As if he sensed this the Conjurer braked.

  "Come on," she found herself whispering.

  Thinking about how to handle it. If he just tried to get away she'd take out the fan blades or a tire and try to capture him alive. But if he drove toward her or aimed for the sidewalk, endangering someone else, then she'd drop him.

  "Yo!" one of the teens on the sidewalk called.

  "Shoot the motherfuck!"

  "Cap his ass, bitch!"

  You don't have to convince me, homes. Ready, willing and able . . .

  She decided that if he drove ten feet toward her, at any kind of speed, she'd nail him. The engine of the Band-Aid-colored car revved and she saw--or imagined--that the vehicle shuddered.

  Ten feet. That's all I'm asking.

  Another growl of the engine. Do it! she pleaded silently.

  And then Sachs saw a slow-moving mass of yellow ease behind the Mazda.

  A school bus from Zion Prophetic Tabernacle Church, filled with children, pulled away from the curb into traffic, the driver unaware of what was happening. It stopped at an angle between the Mazda and the garbage truck.

  No . . .

  Even a direct hit might not stop the slug, which could careen into the bus after it passed through its target.

  Finger off the trigger, muzzle safely in the air, Sachs looked through the windshield of the Mazda. She could see the faint motion of the Conjurer's head as he glanced up and to his right, locating the bus in the rearview mirror.

  He then looked back toward her and she had the impression that he smiled, deducing that she couldn't fire now.

  The raw squeal of the Mazda's front tires filled the street as he floored the pedal and headed toward Sachs at twenty, forty, fifty miles an hour. He bore straight down on the policewoman and her Camaro, which was a far brighter yellow than the Bible school bus, whose presence had cast its blessing of holy protection over the Conjurer.