The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  The officialese vanished and he smiled. "But you nailed the bastard."

  Bang, bang.

  Then he asked, "You've done the written and orals, right?"

  "Yessir. Should have the results any day now."

  "My group'll complete our assessment evaluation and send that to the board with our recommendations. You can stand down now."

  "Yessir."

  The cop who'd played the last bad guy--the one with the shotgun--wandered up to her. He was a good-looking Italian, half a generation out of the Brooklyn docks, she judged, and had a boxer's muscles. A dirty stubble of beard covered his cheeks and chin. He wore a big-bore chrome automatic high on his trim hip and his cocky smile brought her close to suggesting he might want to use the gun's reflection as a mirror to shave.

  "I gotta tell ya--I've done a dozen assessments and that was the best I ever seen, babe."

  She laughed in surprise at the word. There were certainly cavemen left in the department--from Patrol Services to corner offices at Police Plaza--but they tended to be more condescending than openly sexist. Sachs hadn't heard a "babe" or "honey" from a male cop in at least a year.

  "Let's stick with 'Officer,' you don't mind."

  "No, no, no," he said, laughing. "You can chill now. The AE's over."

  "How's that?"

  "When I said 'babe,' it's not like it's a part of the assessment. You don't have to, you know, deal with it official or anything. I'm just saying it 'cause I was impressed. And 'cause you're . . . you know." He smiled into her eyes, his charm as shiny as his pistol. "I don't do compliments much. Coming from me, that's something."

  'Cause you're you know.

  "Hey, you're not pissed or anything, are you?" he asked.

  "Not pissed at all. But it's still 'Officer.' That's what you call me and what I'll call you."

  At least to your face.

  "Hey, I didn't mean any offense or anything. You're a pretty girl. And I'm a guy. You know what that's like. . . . So."

  "So," she replied and started away.

  He stepped in front of her, frowning. "Hey, hold on. This isn't going too good. Look, let me buy you a coffee. You'll like me when you get to know me."

  "Don't bet on it," one of his buddies called, laughing.

  The Babe Man good-naturedly gave him the finger then turned back to Sachs.

  Which is when her pager beeped and she looked down to see Lincoln Rhyme's number on the screen. The word "URGENT" appeared after it.

  "Gotta go," she said.

  "So no time for that coffee?" he asked, a fake pout on his handsome face.

  "No time."

  "Well, how 'bout a phone number?"

  She made a pistol with her index finger and thumb and aimed it at him. "Bang, bang," she said. And trotted toward her yellow Camaro.

  Chapter Three

  This is a school?

  Wheeling a large black crime-scene suitcase behind her, Amelia Sachs walked through the dim corridor. She smelled mold and old wood. Dusty webs had coagulated near the high ceiling and scales of green paint curled from the walls. How could anybody study music here? It was a setting for one of the Anne Rice novels that Sachs's mother read.

  "Spooky," one of the responding officers had muttered, only half jokingly.

  That said it all.

  A half-dozen cops--four patrol officers and two in soft clothes--stood near a double doorway at the end of the hall. Disheveled Lon Sellitto, head down and hand clutching one of his notepads, was talking to a guard. Like the walls and floors the guard's outfit was dusty and stained.

  Through the open doorway she glimpsed another dim space, in the middle of which was a light-colored form. The victim.

  To the CS tech walking beside her she said, "We'll need lights. A couple of sets." The young man nodded and headed back to the RRV--the crime scene rapid response vehicle, a station wagon filled with forensic collection equipment. It sat outside, half on the sidewalk, where he'd parked it after the drive here (probably at a more leisurely pace than Sachs in her 1969 Camaro SS, which had averaged 70 mph en route to the school from the assessment exercise).

  Sachs studied the young blonde woman, lying on her back ten feet away, belly arched up because her bound hands were underneath her. Even in the dimness of the school lobby Sachs's quick eyes noted the deep ligature marks on her neck and the blood on her lips and chin--probably from biting her tongue, a common occurrence in strangulations.

  Automatically she also observed: emerald-colored studs for earrings, shabby running shoes. No apparent robbery, sexual molestation or mutilation. No wedding ring.

  "Who was first officer?"

  A tall woman with short brunette hair, her name tag reading D. FRANCISCOVICH, said, "We were." A nod toward her blonde partner. N. AUSONIO. Their eyes were troubled and Franciscovich played a brief rhythm on her holster with thumb and fingers. Ausonio kept glancing at the body. Sachs guessed this was their first homicide.

  The two patrol officers gave their account of what had happened. Finding the perp, a flash of light, his disappearing, a barricade. Then he was gone.

  "You said he claimed to have a hostage?"

  "That's what he said," Ausonio offered. "But everybody in the school's accounted for. We're sure he was bluffing."

  "Victim?"

  "Svetlana Rasnikov," Ausonio said. "Twenty-four. Student."

  Sellitto turned away from the security guard. He said to Sachs, "Bedding and Saul're interviewing everybody in the building here this morning."

  She nodded toward the scene. "Who's been inside?"

  Sellitto said, "The first officers." Nodding toward the women. "Then two medics and two ESU. They backed out as soon as they cleared it. Scene's still pretty clean."

  "The guard was inside too," Ausonio said. "But only for a minute. We got him out as soon as we could."

  "Good," Sachs said. "Witnesses?"

  Ausonio said, "There was a janitor outside the room when we got here."

  "He didn't see anything," Franciscovich added.

  Sachs said, "I still need to see the soles of his shoes for comparison. Could one of you find him for me?"

  "Sure." Ausonio wandered off.

  From one of the black suitcases Sachs extracted a zippered clear plastic case. She opened it and pulled out a white Tyvek jumpsuit. Donning it, she pulled the hood over her head. Then gloves. The outfit was standard issue now for all forensics techs at the NYPD; it prevented substances--trace, hair, epithelial skin cells and foreign matter--from sloughing off her body and contaminating the scene. The suit had booties but she still did what Rhyme always insisted on--put rubber bands on her feet to distinguish her prints from the victim's and the perp's.

  Mounting the earphones on her head and adjusting the stalk mike, she hooked up her Motorola. She called in a landline patch and a moment later a complex arrangement of communications systems brought the low voice of Lincoln Rhyme into her ear.

  "Sachs, you there?"

  "Yep. It was just like you said--they had him cornered and he disappeared."

  He chuckled. "And now they want us to find him. Do we have to clean up for everybody's mistakes? Hold on a minute. Command, volume lower . . . lower." Music in the background diminished.

  The tech who'd accompanied Sachs down the gloomy corridor returned with tall lamps on tripods. She set them up in the lobby and clicked the switch.

  There's a lot of debate about the proper way to process a scene. Generally investigators agree that less is more, though most departments still use teams of CS searchers. Before his accident Lincoln Rhyme, however, had run most scenes alone and he insisted that Amelia Sachs do the same. With other searchers around, you tend to be distracted and are often less vigilant because you feel--even if only subconsciously--that your partner will find what you miss.

  But there was another reason for solitary searching. Rhyme recognized that there's a macabre intimacy about criminal violation. A crime scene searcher working alone is better able to forge a
mental relationship with the victim and the perpetrator, gather better insights into what is the relevant evidence and where it might be found.

  It was into this difficult state of mind that Amelia Sachs now slipped as she gazed at the body of the young woman, lying on the floor, next to a fiberboard table.

  Near the body were a spilled cup of coffee, sheet music, a music case and a piece of the woman's silver flute, which she'd apparently been in the act of assembling when the killer flipped the rope around her neck. In her death grip she clutched another cylinder of the instrument. Had she intended to use it as a weapon?

  Or did the desperate young woman just want to feel something familiar and comforting in her fingers as she died?

  "I'm at the body, Rhyme," she said as she snapped digital pictures of the corpse.

  "Go ahead."

  "She's on her back--but the respondings found her on her abdomen. They turned her over to give her CPR. Injuries consistent with strangulation." Sachs now delicately rolled the woman back onto her belly. "Hands're in some kind of old-fashioned cuffs. I don't recognize them. Her watch is broken. Stopped at exactly eight A.M. Doesn't look accidental." She closed her gloved hand around the woman's narrow wrist. It was shattered. "Yep, Rhyme, he stomped on it. And it's nice. A Seiko. Why break it? Why not steal it?"

  "Good question, Sachs. . . . Might be a clue, might be nothing."

  Which was as good a slogan for forensic science as any, she reflected.

  "One of the respondings cut the rope around her neck. She missed the knot." Officers should never cut through the knot to remove a cord from a strangulation victim; it can reveal a great deal of information about the person who tied it.

  Sachs then used a tape roller to collect trace evidence--recent forensic thinking was that a portable vacuum cleaner, which resembled a Dustbuster, picked up too much trace. Most CS teams were switching to rollers similar to dog-hair removers. She bagged the trace and used a vic kit to take hair combings and nail scraping samples from the woman's body.

  Sachs said, "I'm going to walk the grid."

  The phrase--of Lincoln Rhyme's own creation--came from his preference for searching a crime scene. The grid pattern is the most comprehensive method: back and forth in one direction, then turning perpendicular and covering the same ground again, always remembering to examine the ceiling and walls as well as the ground or floor.

  She began the search now, looking for discarded or dropped objects, rolling for trace, taking electrostatic prints of shoeprints and digital photos. The photo team would make a comprehensive still and video record of the scene but getting those images took time and Rhyme always insisted on having some photographic record available instantly.

  "Officer?" Sellitto called.

  She glanced back.

  "Just wondering. . . . Since we don't know where this asshole got to, you want some backup in there?"

  "Nope," she said, silently thanking him for reminding her that there was a missing murderer last seen nearby. Another of Lincoln Rhyme's crime scene aphorisms: search well but watch your back. She tapped the butt of her Glock to remind herself exactly where it was in case she needed to draw fast--the holster rode slightly higher when she wore the Tyvek jumpsuit--and continued the search.

  "Okay, got something," she told Rhyme a moment later. "In the lobby. About ten feet away from the victim. Piece of black cloth. Silk. I mean, it appears to be silk. It's on top of a part of the vic's flute so it has to be his or hers."

  "Interesting," Rhyme mused. "Wonder what that's about."

  The lobby yielded nothing else and she entered the performance space itself, her hand continuing to stray to the butt of her Glock. She relaxed momentarily, seeing that there was in fact absolutely no hiding place where a perp could be, no secret doorways or exits. But as she started on the grid here she felt a growing sense of discomfort.

  Spooky . . .

  "Rhyme, this is strange. . . ."

  "I can't hear you, Sachs."

  She realized that in her uneasiness she'd been whispering.

  "There's burned string tied around the chairs that're lying on the ground. Fuses too, it looks like. I smell nitrate and sulfur residue. The reportings said he fired a round. But it's not the smell of smokeless powder. It's something else. Ah, okay. . . . It's a little gray firecracker. Maybe that was the gunshot they heard. . . . Hold on. There's something else--under a chair. It's a small green circuit board with a speaker attached to it."

  " 'Small'?" Rhyme asked caustically. "A foot is small compared with an acre. An acre's small compared with a hundred acres, Sachs."

  "Sorry. Measures about two inches by five."

  "That'd be big compared with a dime, now, wouldn't it?"

  Got the message, thank you very much, she replied silently.

  She bagged everything, then left by the second door--the fire door--and electrostaticked and photographed the footprints she found there. Finally, she took control samples to compare against the trace found on the victim and where the unsub had walked. "Got everything, Rhyme. I'll be back in a half hour."

  "And the trapdoors, the secret passages everybody's talking about?"

  "I can't find any."

  "All right, come on home, Sachs."

  She returned to the lobby and let Photo and Latents take over the scene. She found Franciscovich and Ausonio by the doorway. "You find the janitor?" she asked. "I need to look at his shoes."

  Ausonio shook her head. "He told the guard he had to take his wife to work. I left a message with maintenance for him to call."

  Her partner said solemnly, "Hey, Officer, we were talking, Nancy and me? And we don't want this scumbag to get away. If there's anything more we can do, you know, to follow up, let us know."

  Sachs understood exactly how they felt. "I'll see what I can do," she told them.

  Sellitto's radio crackled and he took the call. Listened for a moment. "It's the Hardy Boys. They've finished interviewing the wits and're in the main lobby."

  Sachs, Sellitto and the two patrolwomen returned to the front of the school. There they joined Bedding and Saul, one of them tall, one short, one with freckles, one with a clear complexion. These were detectives from the Big Building who specialized in canvassing--post-crime interviewing of witnesses.

  "We talked to the seven people here this morning."

  "Plus the guard."

  "No teachers--"

  "--only students."

  Also called the Twins, despite very different appearances, the duo were skilled at double-teaming perps and witnesses alike. It got too confusing if you tried to tell them apart. Lump them together and consider them one person, they were a lot easier to understand.

  "The information was not the most illuminating."

  "For one thing everybody was freaked out."

  "The location's not helping." A nod toward a wad of cobwebs hanging from the dark, water-stained ceiling.

  "Nobody knew the victim very well. When she got here this morning she walked to the recital room with a friend. She--"

  "The friend."

  "--didn't see anybody inside. They stood in the lobby for five, ten minutes, talking. The friend left around eight."

  "So," said Rhyme, who'd overheard on the radio, "he was inside the lobby waiting for her."

  "The victim," the shorter of the two sandy-haired detectives said, "had come over here from Georgia--"

  "That's the Russia Georgia, not the peach-tree Georgia."

  "--about two months ago. She was kind of a loner."

  "The consulate's contacting her family."

  "All the other students were in different practice rooms today and none of them heard anything or saw anybody they didn't know."

  "Why wasn't Svetlana in a practice room?" Sachs asked.

  "Her friend said Svetlana liked the acoustics better in the hall."

  "Husband, boyfriend, girlfriend?" Sachs asked, thinking of rule number one in homicide investigations: the doer usually knows the doee.
/>   "None that the other students knew."

  "How'd he get into the building?" Rhyme asked and Sachs relayed the question.

  The guard said, "Only door's open is the front one. We got fire doors, course. But you can't open them from the outside."

  "And he'd have to walk past you, right?"

  "And sign in. And get his picture took by the camera."

  Sachs glanced up. "There's a security camera, Rhyme, but it looks like the lens hasn't been cleaned in months."

  They gathered behind the desk. The guard punched buttons and played the tape. Bedding and Saul had vetted seven of the people. But they agreed that one person--a brown-haired, bearded older man in jeans and bulky jacket--hadn't been among those they'd talked to.

  "That's him," Franciscovich said. "That's the killer." Nancy Ausonio nodded.

  On the fuzzy tape he was signing the register book then walking inside. The guard glanced at the book, but not at the man's face, as he signed it.

  "Did you get a look at him?" Sachs asked.

  "Didn't pay no attention," he said defensively. "If they sign I let them in. That's all I gotta do. That's my job. I'm here mostly to keep folk from walking out with our stuff."

  "We've got his signature at least, Rhyme. And a name. They'll be fake but at least it's a handwriting sample. Which line did he sign on?" Sachs asked, picking up the sign-in book with latex-clad fingers.

  They ran the tape, fast-forward, from the beginning. The killer was the fourth person to sign the book. But in the fourth slot was a woman's name.

  Rhyme called, "Count all the people who signed."

  Sachs told the guard to do so and they watched nine people fill in their names--eight students, including the victim, and her killer.

  "Nine people signed, Rhyme. But there are only eight names on the list."