The Vanished Man Read online

  "Where do you live?" he asked.

  "The Village."

  Rhyme nodded at some memories. "When my wife and I were together most of our friends lived down there. And SoHo, TriBeCa."

  "I don't get north of Twenty-third much," she said.

  A laugh from the criminalist. "In my day Fourteenth was the start of the demilitarized zone."

  "Our side's winning, looks like," she joked as the red balls appeared and disappeared, moved from one hand to the other, then circulated in the air in an impromptu juggling act.

  "Your accent?" he asked.

  "I have an accent?" she asked.

  "Intonation then, inflection . . . tone."

  "Ohio probably. Midwest."

  "Me too," Rhyme told her. "Illinois."

  "But I've been here since I was eighteen. Went to school in Bronxville."

  "Sarah Lawrence, drama," Rhyme deduced.

  "English."

  "And you liked it here and stayed."

  "Well, I liked it once I got out of the 'burbs and into the city. Then after my father died my mother moved out here to be closer to me."

  Daughter of a widowed mother . . . like Sachs, Rhyme reflected. He wondered if Kara had the same problems with her mother as Sachs'd had with hers. A peace treaty had been negotiated in recent years but in Sachs's youth her mother had been tempestuous, moody, unpredictable. Rose didn't understand why her husband wanted to be nothing more than a cop and why her daughter wanted to be anything other than what her mother wanted her to be. This naturally drove father and daughter into an alliance, which made matters worse. Sachs had told him that their refuge on bad days was the garage, where they found a comfortably predictable universe: when a carburetor didn't seat it was because a simple and just rule of the physical world had been broken--machine tolerances were off or a gasket had been cut wrong. Engines and suspensions and transmissions didn't subject you to melodramatic moods or cryptic diatribes and even at the worst they never blamed you for their own failings.

  Rhyme had met Rose Sachs on several occasions and found her charming, chatty, eccentric and proud of her daughter. But the past, he knew, is nowhere as present as it is between parents and children.

  "And how does it work out, her being nearby?" Rhyme asked skeptically.

  "Sounds like the sitcom from hell, huh? But, nope, Mum's great, my mom. She's . . . hey, you know, a mother. They're just a certain way. They never outgrow that."

  "Where does she live?"

  "She's in a care facility, Upper East Side."

  "Is she very sick?"

  "Nothing serious. She'll be fine." Kara absently rolled the balls over her knuckles and into her palm. "As soon as she's better we're going to England, just the two of us. London, Stratford, the Cotswolds. My parents and I went there once. It was our best vacation ever. This time I'm going to drive on the left-hand side of the road and drink warm beer. They wouldn't let me the last time. Of course, I was thirteen. You ever been there?"

  "Sure. I used to work with Scotland Yard from time to time. And I'd lecture there. I haven't been back since . . . well, not for a few years."

  "Magic and illusion were always more popular in England than here. There's so much history. I want to show Mum where Egyptian Hall was in London. That was the center of the universe for magicians a hundred years ago. Sort of like a pilgrimage for me, you know."

  He glanced toward the door. No sign of Thom. "Do me a favor."

  "Sure."

  "I need some medicine."

  Kara noticed some pill bottles against the wall.

  "No, over on the bookcase."

  "Ah, gotcha. Which one?" she asked.

  "The one on the end. Macallan, eighteen years." He whispered, "And probably the quieter you poured it, the better."

  "Hey, you're talking to the right person. Robert-Houdin said there were three skills you needed to master to be a successful illusionist. Dexterity, dexterity and dexterity." In a moment a healthy dose of the smoky whisky had been poured into his tumbler--indeed silently and almost invisibly. Thom could've been standing nearby and would never have noticed. She slipped the straw into the cup and fitted it into the holder on his chair.

  "Help yourself," he said.

  Kara shook her head and gestured toward the coffeepot--which she alone had nearly drained. "That's my poison."

  Rhyme sipped the scotch. He tilted his head back and let the burn ease into the back of his mouth then disappear. Watching her hands, the improbable behavior of the red balls. Another long sip. "I like it."

  "What?"

  "This idea of illusion." Don't get fucking maudlin, he told himself. You get maudlin when you're drunk. But this self-insight didn't stop him from taking another sip of whisky and continuing, "Sometimes reality can be a bit hard to take, you know." Nor could he avoid an unfortunate look down at his motionless body.

  Instantly he regretted the comment--and the glance--and he started to change the subject. But Kara didn't offer any canned sympathy. She said, "You know, I'm not sure there is much reality."

  He frowned, not getting her meaning.

  "Isn't most of our lives an illusion?" she continued.

  "How's that?"

  "Well, everything in the past is memory, right?"

  "True."

  "And everything in the future is imagination. Those're both illusions--memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that's completely real is this one instant of the present--and that's constantly changing from imagination to a memory. So, see? Most of our life's illusory."

  Rhyme laughed softly at this. A logician, a scientist, he wanted to poke a hole in her theory. But, he couldn't. She was right, he concluded. He spent much of his time with memories of the Before, prior to the accident, and of how his life had changed After.

  And the future? Oh, yes, he often dwelt there. Unknown to almost everyone except Sachs and Thom he spent at least an hour most days exercising--working through manual range-of-motion exercises, doing aqua therapy at a nearby hospital or riding the Electrologic stimulation bicycle tucked away in a bedroom upstairs. This exercise regimen was partly to regain some nerve and motor functions, improve his stamina and prevent the adjunct health problems that can plague quads. But the main reason for his efforts was to keep his muscles in shape for the day when a cure was possible.

  He applied Kara's theory to his profession too: working a case, he continually scanned his vast memory banks for knowledge about forensics and past crimes while he anticipated where a suspect might be and what he might do next.

  Everything in the past is memory, everything in the future is imagination. . . .

  "Since we've broken the ice," she said, adding sugar to her coffee, "I've got a confession."

  Another sip. "Yes?"

  "When I saw you for the first time I had this thought."

  Oh, yes, he remembered. The Look. The famous escape-from-the-crip look. Served up with the Smile. The only thing worse than that was what now loomed: the ever-so-awkward apology for the Look and the Smile.

  She hesitated, embarrassed. Then said, "I thought, what an amazing illusionist you'd be."

  "Me?" a surprised Rhyme asked.

  Kara nodded. "You're all about perception and reality. People'd look at you and see that you're handicapped. . . . Is that what you say?"

  "The politically correct call it 'disabled.' I myself just say that I'm fucked."

  Kara laughed and continued, "They see you can't move. They probably think you've got mental problems or you're slow. Right?"

  This was true. People who didn't know him often spoke slower and louder, explained the obvious in simple terms. (To Thom's disgust, Rhyme would sometimes respond by muttering incoherently or feigning Tourette's syndrome and driving the horrified visitors out of the room.) "An audience'd have instant opinions about you and be convinced that you couldn't possibly be behind the illusions they were seeing. Half of them'd be obsessing with your condition. The other half wouldn't
even look at you. That's when you'd hook 'em. . . . Anyway, there I was meeting you and you were in this wheelchair and'd obviously gone through a tough time. And I wasn't sympathetic, didn't ask how you were doing. I didn't even say, 'I'm sorry.' I was just thinking, damn, what a performer you'd be. That was pretty crass and I had a feeling you picked up on it."

  This delighted him completely. He reassured her, "Believe me, I don't do well with sympathy or kid gloves. Crass scores a lot more points."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yep."

  She lifted her coffee cup. "To the famous illusionist, the Immobilized Man."

  "Sleight of hand'd be a bit of a problem," Rhyme pointed out.

  Kara replied, "Like Mr. Balzac's always saying, sleight of mind's the better skill."

  Then they heard the front door open and the voices of Sachs and Sellitto speaking as they walked into the hallway. Rhyme lifted an eyebrow and leaned for the straw in the tumbler. He whispered, "Watch this. It's a routine I call Vanishing the Incriminating Evidence."

  *

  Lon Sellitto asked, "First of all, do we think he's dead? Sleepin' wit' da fishes?"

  Sachs and Rhyme looked at each other and simultaneously said, "No."

  The big detective said, "You know how rough that water is in the Harlem? Kids try and swim it and you never see 'em again."

  "Bring me his corpse," Rhyme said, "and I'll believe it."

  He was encouraged about one thing, though: that they'd had no reports of a homicide or disappearance. The near capture and the swim in the river had probably spooked the killer; maybe now that he knew the police were close on his trail he'd either give up the attacks or at least go to ground for a while, giving Rhyme and the team a chance to find where he was hiding out.

  "What about Larry Burke?" Rhyme asked.

  Sellitto shook his head. "We've got dozens of people out searching. Lot of volunteers too, officers and firemen off-duty, you know. The mayor's offering a reward. . . . But I gotta say, it's not looking good. I'm thinking he might be in the trunk of the Mazda."

  "They haven't brought it up yet?"

  "They haven't found it yet. Water's black as night and, with that current, a diver was telling me a car could drift a half mile before it hit the bottom."

  "We have to figure," Rhyme pointed out, "that he's got Burke's weapon and radio. Lon, we should change the frequency so he can't hear what we're up to."

  "Sure." The detective called downtown and had all transmissions about the Conjurer case changed to the citywide special-ops frequency.

  "Let's get back to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?"

  "Nothing in the Greek restaurant," she said, grimacing. "I told the owner to preserve the scene but somehow it didn't translate. Or he didn't want it to translate. By the time we got back the staff had cleaned the table and mopped the floor."

  "How 'bout the pond? Where you found him."

  "We found some things there," Sachs said. "He blinded us with more of that flash cotton and then set off some squibs. We thought he was shooting at first."

  Cooper looked over the burned residue. "Just like the others. Can't source it."

  "All right," Rhyme sighed. "What else is there?"

  "Chains. Two lengths."

  He'd wrapped these around Cheryl Marston's chest, arms and ankles and secured them with snap clasps, like on the end of dog leashes. Cooper and Rhyme examined all of these items carefully. There were no manufacturers' markings on any of them. The story was the same with the rope and the duct tape he'd gagged her with.

  The gym bag that the killer had collected from the car, presumably containing the chains and rope, was unbranded and had been made in China. Given enough manpower, it was sometimes possible to find a source for common items like this by canvassing discount stores and street vendors. But for a cheap, mass-produced bag a search of that magnitude was impossible.

  Cooper inverted the bag above a porcelain examining tray and repeatedly tapped the bottom to dislodge whatever might be inside. A bit of white powder drifted out. The tech did a drug analysis and the substance turned out to be flunitrazepam.

  "Date rape drug of choice," Sachs told Kara.

  There were also tiny pellets of a sticky translucent material inside. It looked like a similar substance was lodged in the zipper and smeared on the handle. "I don't recognize it," Cooper said.

  But Kara looked it over, smelled the substance and said, "Magician's adhesive wax. We use it to stick things together temporarily onstage. Maybe he had an open capsule of the drug stuck to the palm of his hand. When he reached over her drink or coffee he tipped it in."

  "Sources for the wax are?" Rhyme asked cynically. "Let me guess--any magic supply store in the free world?"

  Kara nodded. "Sorry."

  Within the bag Cooper also found some tiny metallic shavings and a circular black mark--as if from some residue on the bottom of a small bottle of paint.

  An examination through the microscope revealed the metal was probably brass and there were unique machining patterns on the metal. But any deductions were beyond Lincoln Rhyme. "Send some pictures down to our friends in the bureau." Cooper took the images, compressed them and sent them off via encrypted email to Washington.

  The black stains turned out not to be paint but permanent ink. But the database couldn't identify what kind specifically; there were no markers to individuate it.

  "What's that?" Rhyme asked, looking toward a plastic bag containing some navy-blue cloth.

  "We were lucky there," Sachs said. "That's the windbreaker he was wearing when he picked up the Marston woman. He didn't get a chance to take it with him when he bolted."

  "Individuate?" Rhyme asked, hoping that there might be some initials or laundry marks inside.

  After a lengthy examination of the garment Cooper said, "Nope. And all the tags've been removed."

  "But," Sachs said, "we found some things in the pockets."

  The first item they examined was a press pass issued by one of the big cable-TV networks. The CTN reporter's name was Stanley Saferstein and the photo on the pass revealed a thin, brown-haired man with a beard. Sellitto called the network and spoke to the head of security. It turned out that Saferstein was one of their senior reporters and had worked the metro desk for years. His pass had been stolen last week--lifted during or after a press conference downtown. The reporter had never felt a thing as the thief had apparently cut the lanyard and pocketed the ID.

  The Conjurer had snatched Saferstein's card, Rhyme assumed, because the reporter bore a slight resemblance: in his fifties, narrow-faced and dark-haired.

  The stolen pass had been canceled, the security chief had explained, "but the guy could still flash it and get past a checkpoint. Guards and police don't check too close if they see our logo."

  After they hung up, Rhyme said to Cooper, "Run 'Saferstein' through VICAP and NCIC."

  "Sure. But why?"

  "Just because," Rhyme answered.

  He wasn't surprised when the results came back negative. He hadn't actually thought that the reporter had any connection with the Conjurer but with this particular perp Rhyme was taking no chances.

  The jacket also contained a gray plastic hotel key card. Rhyme was delighted at this find. Even though there was no hotel name on it--just a picture of a key and an arrow to show the guest which end to insert in the lock--he assumed it would have codes in the magnetic strip to tell them which hotel and room it belonged to.

  Cooper found the manufacturer's name in small type on the back of the card: APC INC., AKRON, OHIO. This, he found out from a search of a trademark database, stood for American Plastic Cards, a company that made hundreds of different identification and key cards.

  In a few minutes the team was on the speakerphone with the president of APC himself--a shirtsleeve CEO, Rhyme imagined, who had no problem working on Saturday or picking up his own phone. Rhyme explained the situation to him, described the key and asked how many hotels in the New York City metro area it w
as sold to.

  "Ah, that's the APC-42. It's our most popular model. We make them for all the big locking systems. Ilco, Saflok, Tesa, Ving, Sargent, all the others."

  "Any suggestions on narrowing down which hotel it belongs to?"

  "I'm afraid you'll just have to start calling hotels and see who uses gray APC-42s. We have that information here someplace but I wouldn't know how to dig it up myself. I'll try and track down my sales manager or his assistant. But it could be a day or two."

  "Ouch," Sellitto said.

  Yeah, ouch.

  After they hung up, Rhyme decided he wasn't content to wait for APC so he had Sellitto send the key to Bedding and Saul with instructions to start canvassing hotels in Manhattan to find out who used the very fucking popular APC-42. He also ordered both the press pass and the key card fingerprinted--but the results were negative on this too. They revealed just smudges and two more of the finger-cup prints.

  Roland Bell returned from the scenes on the West Side and Cooper briefed him on what the team had learned so far. They then returned to the evidence and found that the Conjurer's running jacket contained something else: a restaurant check from a place called the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction, New York. The bill revealed that four people had eaten lunch at table 12 on Saturday, April 6--two weeks ago. The meal consisted of turkey, meatloaf, a steak and one daily special. No one drank alcohol. It was soft drinks all around.

  Sachs shook her head. "Where the hell's Bedford Junction?"

  "Way upstate, I do believe," Mel Cooper said.

  "There's a phone number on the receipt," Bell drawled. "Call 'em up. Ask Debby or Tanya or whoever's the charmin' waitress if any regular foursome sits at"--he squinted at the receipt--"table twelve. Or at least if she remembers who ordered those things. Long shot, but who knows?"

  "What's the number?" Sellitto asked.

  Bell called it out.

  It was a long shot--too long, as Rhyme had expected. The manager and the waitresses there had no idea who might've been in on that Saturday.

  "It's a 'bustlin' spot,' " Sellitto reported, rolling his eyes. "That's a quote."

  "I don't like it," Sachs said.

  "What?"

  "What's he doing having lunch with three other people?"

  "Good point," Bell said. "You think he's working with somebody?"

  Sellitto replied, "Naw, I doubt it. Pattern doers're almost always loners."