The Vanished Man Read online

  Chapter Twenty

  As the Mazda headed straight at her, Sachs ran to the sidewalk to try for a cross-fire shot.

  Lifting the Glock, she aimed at the dark form that was the Conjurer's head, leading him by three or four feet. But beyond him were dozens of store windows and apartments and people crouching on the sidewalk. There was simply no way to fire even a single round safely.

  Her chorus didn't care.

  "Yo, bitch, lessee you waste that motherfuck."

  "Whatcho waitin' fo'?"

  She lowered the gun, shoulders slumped as she watched the Mazda streak straight for the Camaro.

  Oh, not the car. . . . No!

  Thinking of when her father had bought her the '69 muscle car, a junker, and how together they'd rebuilt much of the engine and suspension, added a new transmission, and stripped it, to goose the horsepower skyward. This vehicle and a love of policing were his essential legacies to his daughter.

  Thirty feet from the Camaro the Conjurer turned the wheel hard to the left, toward where Sachs crouched. She leaped aside and he turned the other way, back toward the Chevy. The Mazda skidded, cutting diagonally toward the sidewalk. At a glancing angle it slammed into the passenger door and right front fender of the Camaro, spinning it in a circle over two lanes onto the far sidewalk, where the four kids finally showed some energy and scattered.

  Sachs dove out of the way and landed on her knees on the concrete, gasping at the pain in her arthritic joints. The Camaro came to rest a few feet from her, its rear end off the ground, jacked up by the battered orange metal trash basket it had rolled over.

  The Mazda went over the far sidewalk then back into the street and turned right, heading north. Sachs climbed to her feet but didn't even bother to lift her gun in the direction of the beige car; there was no safe shot. A glance at the Camaro. The side was a mess, the front end too, but the torn fender wasn't binding on the tires. Yeah, she could probably catch him. She jumped in and fired up the engine. First gear. A roar. The tach shot up to 5000 and she popped the clutch.

  But she didn't move an inch. What was the problem? Was the drive train cracked?

  She glanced out the window and saw that the rear wheels--the drive wheels--were jacked up off the ground, thanks to the trash basket. She sighed in frustration, slammed the steering wheel with her palm. Damn! She saw the Mazda, three blocks away. The Conjurer wasn't escaping that fast; the collision had taken a toll on his car too. There was still a chance to catch him.

  But not in a car up on goddamn blocks.

  She'd have to--

  The Camaro began to rock back and forth.

  She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that three of the gangbangers had shed their combat jackets and were straining as they tried to shove the car off its perch. The fourth, bigger than the others, the leader of this crew, walked slowly up to the window. He leaned down, a gold tooth shining bright in the middle of his dark face. "Yo."

  Sachs nodded and held his eye.

  He looked back at his friends. "Yo, niggers, push the fuckin' car! You makin' like you jerkin' off with it."

  "Fuck you," came the winded reply.

  He leaned down again. "Yo, lady, we gonna get you down. Whatcha gonna shoot that motherfuck with?"

  "A Glock. Forty caliber."

  He glanced at her holster. "Sweet. Be the twenty-three. The C?"

  "No, the full size."

  "That a good gun. I got myself a Smittie." He lifted his throwaway sweatshirt and, with a mix of defiance and pride, showed her the brushed silver handle of a Smith & Wesson automatic. "But I'ma get me a Glock like yo's."

  So, she reflected, an armed teenager. How would a sergeant handle this situation?

  The car bounced down off the trash can, rear wheels ready to roll.

  Whatever a proper sergeant would say or do, she decided, didn't matter under the present circumstances. The way she handled it was to give him a solemn nod. "Thanks, homes." Then the woman with wire added ominously, "Don't shoot anybody and make me come lookin' for you. You got that?"

  A wide gold grin.

  Then, snap, into first gear and the gutsy tires burned wormholes into the asphalt. In a few seconds Amelia Sachs was doing sixty.

  "Go, go, go," she muttered to herself, focused on the faint blur of tan in the distance. The Chevy wobbled like crazy but it drove more or less straight. Sachs struggled to get the Motorola headset on. She called Central to report the pursuit and redirect the backup along this route.

  Accelerating fast, braking hard . . . the streets of crowded Harlem aren't made for high-speed pursuits. Still, the Conjurer was in the same traffic as she was--and he wasn't half the driver. Slowly she closed the gap. Then he turned toward a school yard, in which kids were playing half-court basketball and whacking softballs into fake outfields. The playground wasn't crowded; the gate was padlocked shut and anybody wishing to play here either had to squeeze through the gap like a contortionist or be willing to scale a twenty-foot chain-link fence.

  The Conjurer, however, simply gunned the engine and went though the gate. The kids scattered and he narrowly missed some of them as he sped up again to take out a second gate on the far side.

  Sachs hesitated but decided not to follow--not in an unstable car with youngsters around. She sped around the block, praying she'd pick him up on the other side, then skidded around the corner and stopped.

  No sign of him.

  She didn't see how he'd gotten away. He'd been out of sight for only ten seconds or so as she made the sweep around the playground and the school. And the only other escape route was a short dead-end street, terminating in a wall of bushes and small saplings. Beyond that, she could see the elevated Harlem River Drive, beyond which was just a scuzzy mud bank leading down to the river.

  So, he got away. . . . And all I've got to show for the pursuit is five thousand bucks of bodywork. Man. . . .

  Then a voice crackled. "All units in the vicinity of Frederick Douglass and One-five-three Street, be advised of a ten-five-four."

  Car accident with probable injuries.

  "Vehicle has gone into the Harlem River. Repeat, we have a vehicle in the water."

  Could it be him? she wondered. "Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five. Further to that ten-five-four. You have the make of the vehicle? K."

  "Mazda or Toyota. Late model. Beige."

  "Okay, Central, believe that's the subject vehicle of the Central Park pursuit. I'm ten-eight-four at the scene. Out."

  "Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Out."

  Sachs sped her Camaro to the end of the cul-desac and parked on the sidewalk. She climbed out as an ambulance and Emergency Services Unit truck arrived and rocked slowly through the brush, which had been crushed by the speeding Mazda. She followed, walking carefully over the rubble. As they broke from the vegetation she saw a cluster of decrepit shanties and lean-tos. Dozens of homeless, mostly men. The place was muddy and filled with brush and garbage, dumped appliances, stripped, rusting cars.

  Apparently the Conjurer, expecting to find a road on the other side of the bushes, had gone through the brush fast. She saw the panicked skid marks as he slid uncontrollably through the slick muck, careened off a shack, knocking it apart, then went off a rotting pier into the river.

  Two ESU officers helped the residents of the shack out of the wreckage--they were unhurt--while others scanned the river for any sign of the driver. She radioed Rhyme and Sellitto and told them what had happened and asked the detective to call in a priority request for a crime scene rapid response bus.

  "They get him, Amelia?" Sellitto asked. "Tell me they got him."

  Looking at the slick of oil and gasoline on top of the choppy water, she said, "No sign."

  Walking past a shattered toilet and a ripe-smelling trash bag, Sachs approached several men who were talking excitedly in Spanish among themselves. They held fishing rods; this was a popular place to use bloodworms or cut bait to catch stripers, bluefish and tommycod. They'd been drinking but we
re sober enough to give her a coherent account. The car had sped through the bushes fast and gone straight into the river. They'd all seen a man in the driver's seat and they were positive he hadn't jumped out.

  Sachs talked briefly with Carlos and his friend, the two homeless men who lived in the now-demolished shack. They were both stoned and, since they'd been inside when the Mazda struck it, they hadn't seen anything that could help. Carlos was belligerent and seemed to feel the city owed him some compensation for his loss. Two other witnesses, ripping open trash bags for refundable bottles and cans at the time of the accident, reiterated the story of the fishermen.

  More police cars were arriving, TV crews too, turning their cameras on what was left of the shack and on the police boat, off the stern of which two wet-suited divers were rolling backward into the water.

  Now that the emergency activity had shifted to the river itself, the land-side operation became Amelia Sachs's. She had little crime scene equipment in the Camaro but she did have plenty of yellow tape, with which she now sealed off a large area of the riverbank. By the time she finished the RRV had arrived. Hooking up her headset, she called Central and was patched through to Rhyme once more.

  "We've been following it, Sachs. The divers haven't found anything yet?"

  "Don't think so."

  "Did he bail out?"

  "Not according to the witnesses. I'm going to run the scene here on the riverbank, Rhyme," she told him. "It'll be good luck."

  "Luck?"

  "Sure. I go to the trouble to run the scene. That means the divers'll be sure to find his body and a search'll be a waste of time."

  "There'll still be an inquiry and--"

  "It was a joke, Rhyme."

  "Yeah, well, this par-tic-ular perp doesn't make me feel like laughing. Get going on the grid."

  She carried one of the CS suitcases to the perimeter of the scene and was opening it when she heard an accented voice call out urgently, "My God, what happened? Is everyone all right?"

  Near the TV crews a well-coiffed Latino in jeans and a sports jacket pushed forward through the crowd. He squinted in alarm at the damaged shack and then began to run toward it.

  "Hey," Sachs called. He didn't hear her.

  The man ducked under the yellow tape and made straight for the shack, tromping over the Mazda's tire treads and possibly obliterating anything that the Conjurer might have thrown from the car or had fallen out--maybe even destroying the killer's own footprints if he had bailed, despite what the fishermen believed they'd seen.

  Suspicious of everyone now, she checked out his left hand and could see that the index and little finger weren't fused together. So he wasn't the Conjurer but who the hell is he? Sachs wondered. And what was he doing in her crime scene?

  The man was now wading through the wreckage of the shack, grabbing planks and sheets of wood and corrugated metal, flinging them over his shoulder.

  "Hey, you!" she called. "Get the hell out of there!"

  He shouted over his shoulder, "There could be somebody inside!"

  Angry now, she snapped, "This's a crime scene! You can't be in there."

  "There could be somebody inside!" he repeated.

  "No, no, no. Everybody's out. They're okay. Hey, you hearing me? . . . Excuse me, buddy. Are you hearing me?"

  Whether he was or not apparently didn't matter, not to him. He continued to dig feverishly. What was his point? The man was dressed well and wearing a gold Rolex; crack-head Carlos was clearly not a relative.

  Reciting to herself the famous cop's prayer--Lord, deliver us from concerned citizens--she gestured to two nearby patrol officers. "Get him out."

  He was shouting, "We need more medics! There could be children inside."

  Sachs disgustedly watched the officers' footprints adding to the slow erosion of her crime scene. They grabbed the intruder by the arms and pulled him to his feet. He yanked his arms away from the officers, haughtily called his name to Sachs as if he was some kind of mafioso that everybody should know and began to lecture her on the police's shameful treatment of the neglected Latino population here.

  "Lady, do you have any idea--"

  "Cuff him," she said. "Then get him the hell out of there." Deciding that the community relations part of the sergeant's handbook slogan took second place to criminal investigation in this case.

  The officers ratcheted the cuffs on the red-faced man and he was led, fuming and cursing, out of the scene. "Want we should book him?" one officer called.

  "Naw, just put him in time-out for a while," she shouted, drawing laughter from some of the onlookers. She watched him being deposited in the back of a squad car, yet another obstacle in the seemingly impossible search for an elusive killer.

  Sachs then dressed in the Tyvek outfit and armed with camera and collection bags, and with rubber bands at last on her feet, she waded into the scene, starting with the remains of Carlos's destroyed mansion. She took her time and searched carefully. After this harrowing daylong pursuit Amelia Sachs was accepting nothing at face value. True, the Conjurer might be floating forty feet below the surface of the gray-brown water. But he could just as easily be crawling safely up the riverbank nearby.

  She wouldn't even have been surprised to find out that he was already miles away, dressed in a new disguise, stalking his next victim.

  *

  The Reverend Ralph Swensen had been in town for several days--his first visit to New York City--and he'd decided he could never get used to the place.

  The thin man, somewhat balding, somewhat shy, ministered to souls in a town thousands of times smaller than and dozens of years removed from Manhattan.

  Whereas at home he looked out the window of his church to see rolling acres of land where placid animals grazed, here he looked out the barred window of his cheap hotel room near Chinatown and saw a brick wall with a swirl of grainy spray paint that was part of an obscenity.

  Whereas at home when he walked down the street of his town, people would say, "Hello, Reverend," or "Great sermon, Ralph," here they would say, "Gimme a dollar," or "I got AIDS," or simply "Suck me."

  Still, Reverend Swensen was here only for a brief time so he supposed he could survive a little culture shock for a bit longer.

  For the past several hours he'd been trying to read the ancient, crumbling Gideon Bible the hotel had provided. But finally he gave up. The Gospel according to St. Matthew, as compelling as that story was, couldn't compete with the sound of a gay hooker and his client banging away at each other and howling loudly in pain or pleasure or, most likely, both.

  The reverend knew he should be honored to have been picked for this mission to New York but he felt like the Apostle Paul on one of his missionary quests among the nonbelievers in Greece and Asia Minor, greeted with only derision and scorn.

  Ah, ah, ah, ah . . . Right there, right there . . . Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it that's it that's . . .

  Okay, that was it. Even Paul hadn't had to put up with this level of depravity. The concert recital wasn't scheduled to start for several hours but Reverend Swensen decided to leave early. He brushed his hair, found his glasses and tossed the Bible, a map of the city and a sermon he was working on in his attache case. He took the stairs to the lobby, where another prostitute was sitting. This one was--or appeared to be--a woman.

  Our Father in heaven, full of grace . . .

  A knot of tension in his gut, he hurried past, staring at the floor, anticipating a proposition. But she--or he, or whatever it was--merely smiled and said, "Beautiful weather, ain't it, Father?"

  Reverend Swensen blinked and then smiled back. "Yes, it is," resisting the urge to add, "my child," which is something he'd never said in all his days as a minister. He settled for, "Have a nice day."

  Outside, into the hard streets of the Lower East Side of New York City.

  He paused on the sidewalk in front of the hotel as taxis shushed past, young Asians and Latinos hurried by purposefully, buses exhaled hot, metallic fumes and Chine
se delivery boys on battered bicycles zipped over the sidewalk. It was all so very exhausting. Edgy and upset, the reverend decided that a walk to the school where the recital would be held would relax him. He'd consulted the map and knew it was a long way but he needed to do something to bleed off this mad anxiety. He'd do some window shopping, stop for dinner, work on his sermon.

  As he oriented himself for the walk he sensed that he was being watched. He glanced to his left, into the alley next to the hotel. A man stood half hidden by a Dumpster, a lean, brown-haired man in overalls, holding a small toolkit. He was looking the priest up and down in a way that seemed purposeful. Then, as if he'd been caught, he turned and receded into the alley.

  Reverend Swensen tightened his grip on the attache case, wondering if he'd made a mistake not staying in the safety of his room--foul and noisy though it was--until it was time for the recital. Then he gave a faint laugh. Relax, he told himself. The man had been nothing more than a janitor or handyman, maybe an employee of the hotel itself, surprised to see a minister step out of the sleazy place.

  Besides, he reflected as he started walking north, he was a man of the cloth, a calling that surely had to give him some degree of immunity, even here in this modern-day Sodom.

  Chapter Twenty-one Here one second, gone the next.

  The red ball couldn't possibly get from Kara's outstretched right hand to the spot behind her ear.

  But it did.

  And after she'd plucked it away and tossed the crimson sphere into the air it couldn't possibly have vanished and ended up inside in the fold of her left elbow.

  But it did that too.

  How? Rhyme wondered.

  She and the criminalist were in the downstairs lab of his town house, waiting for Amelia Sachs and Roland Bell. As Mel Cooper was setting the evidence out on examination tables and a CD pumped jazz piano into the room Rhyme was being treated to his own sleight-of-hand show.

  Kara stood in front of a window, wearing one of Sachs's black T-shirts from the closet upstairs. Thom was currently washing her tank top, removing the Heinz 57 bloodstain from her improvised illusion at the crafts fair.

  "Where'd you get those?" Rhyme asked, nodding at the balls. He hadn't seen her take them out of her purse or pocket.

  She said with a smile that she'd "materialized" them (another trick magicians enjoyed, Rhyme had wryly observed, was transforming intransitive verbs into transitive ones).