The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Maybe the window--Sachs, did you search the fire escape?"

  "No. The window on the escape was locked from the inside."

  "Still should've searched it," Rhyme said shortly.

  "He didn't get in that way. There wasn't time."

  "Well, then he must've had the vic's keys," the criminalist said.

  "There were no latents on them," Sachs countered. "Only the vic's."

  "He must have," Rhyme insisted.

  "No," Kara said. "He picked the lock."

  "Impossible," Rhyme said. "Or maybe he'd gotten in before and had a mold made of the key. Sachs, you should go back and check out if he had--"

  "He picked the lock," the young woman said adamantly. "I guarantee it."

  Rhyme shook his head. "In sixty seconds he got through two doors? He couldn't possibly."

  Kara sighed. "I'm sorry, but, yeah, in sixty seconds he got through two doors. And it might've taken him less than that."

  "Well, let's assume he didn't," Rhyme said dismissively. "Now--"

  The young woman snapped, "Let's assume he did. Look, we can't skip over this. It tells us something else about him--something important: that locked doors don't even slow him up."

  Rhyme glanced at Sellitto, who said, "I gotta say, working Larceny I busted a dozen burglars and none of 'em could get through locks that fast."

  "Mr. Balzac has me practicing lock picking ten hours a week," Kara said. "I don't have my kit with me but if I did I could open your front door in thirty seconds, the deadbolt in sixty. And I don't know how to scrub a lock. If the Conjurer does he could cut that time in half. Now, I know you like all this, like, evidence stuff. But you're wasting your time to have Amelia go search for something that isn't there."

  "You sure?" Sellitto asked.

  "If you don't trust my opinion, then why'd you want my help?"

  Sachs glanced at Rhyme. He grudgingly accepted Kara's assessment with a stony nod (though privately he was pleased that the woman had shown some grit; it made up a lot for the Look and the Smile). He said to Thom, "Okay, put down on the chart that our boy's a master lock picker too."

  Sachs continued, "No sign of whatever the Conjurer used to knock him out. Blunt-object trauma. Looks like a pipe probably. But he took that with him too."

  The report from Latents came in. Eighty-nine separate prints from areas of the crime scene near the victim and the places the Conjurer most likely touched. But Rhyme noticed immediately that some of the prints looked odd and, on closer examination, he could see that they were from the finger cups. He didn't bother to scan the others.

  Turning to the trace Sachs had collected at the scene, they found minuscule amounts of the same mineral oil they'd recovered at the music school that morning and more of the latex, makeup and alginate.

  Detective Kuan from the Ninth Precinct called and reported that a search of the Dumpsters around Calvert's building had turned up no sign of the man's quick-change outfit or the murder weapons. Rhyme thanked him and told him to keep at it. The man said he would but with such fake enthusiasm that Rhyme knew the search had already ended.

  The criminalist asked Sachs, "You said he smashed Calvert's watch?"

  "Yep. At noon exactly. A few seconds after."

  "And the other victim was at eight. He's on a timetable, looks like. And probably has somebody else lined up for four this afternoon."

  Less than three hours from now.

  Cooper continued, "No luck with the mirror. No manufacturer--that must've been on the frame and he scraped it off. A few real prints but they're covered up by his finger cup smudges so I'd guess that they're from the clerk where he bought it or the manufacturer. I'll send 'em through AFIS anyway."

  "Got some shoes," Sachs said, lifting a bag out of a cardboard box.

  "His?"

  "Probably. They're the same Ecco brand we found at the music school--same size too."

  "He left 'em behind. Why?" Sellitto wondered.

  Rhyme suggested, "Probably thought that we knew he was wearing Eccos at the first scene and was worried the respondings'd noticed them on an elderly woman."

  Examining the shoes, Mel Cooper said, "We've got some good trace in the indentation in front of the heel and between the upper and sole." He opened a bag and scraped the material out. "Horn o' plenty," the tech said absently and bent over the dirt.

  It was hardly a cornucopia but for forensic purposes the residue was as big as a mountain and might reveal a wealth of information. "Scope it, Mel," Rhyme ordered. "Let's see what we've got."

  The workhorse of tools in a forensic lab is the microscope and although there've been many refinements over the years the instrument isn't any different in theory from the tiny brass-plate microscope that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented in the Netherlands in the 1600s.

  In addition to an ancient scanning electron microscope, which he rarely needed, Rhyme had two other microscopes in his homegrown laboratory. One was a compound Leitz Orthoplan, an older model but one he swore by. It was trinocular--two eyepieces for the operator and a camera tube in the middle.

  The second--which Cooper was preparing to use now--was a stereo microscope, which the tech had used to examine the fibers from the first scene. These instruments have relatively low magnification and are used for examining three-dimensional objects like insects and plant materials.

  The image popped onto the computer screen for Rhyme and the others to see.

  First-year criminalistics students invariably click immediately on a microscope's highest power to examine evidence. But in reality the best magnification for forensic purposes is usually quite low. Cooper began at 4x and then went up to 30x.

  "Ah, focus, focus," Rhyme called.

  Cooper adjusted the high-ratio screw of the objective so that the image of the material came into perfect clarity.

  "Okay, let's walk through it," Rhyme said.

  The tech moved the stage, with imperceptible twists of the controls connected to the stage. As he did, hundreds of shapes scrolled past on the screen, some black, some red or green, some translucent. Rhyme felt, as he always did when looking through the eyepiece of a microscope, that he was a voyeur, examining a world that had no idea it was being spied upon.

  And a world that could be very revealing.

  "Hairs," Rhyme said, studying a long strand. "Animal." He could tell this by the number of scales.

  "What kind?" Sachs asked.

  "Dog, I'd say," Cooper offered. Rhyme concurred. The tech went online and a moment later was running the images through an NYPD database of animal hair. "Got two breeds, no, three. Looks like a medium-length-coat breed of some kind. German shepherd or Malinois. And hairs from two longer-haired breeds. English sheepdog, briard."

  Cooper brought the screen to a stop. They were looking at a mass of brownish grains and sticks and tubes.

  "What's that long stuff?" Sellitto asked.

  "Fibers?" Sachs suggested.

  Rhyme glanced at it. "Dried grass, I'd say, or some kind of vegetation. But I don't recognize that other material. GC it, Mel."

  Soon the chromatograph/spectrometer had spit out its data. On the monitor a chart appeared, giving the results from the analysis: bile pigments, stercobilin, urobilin, indole, nitrates, skatole, mercaptans, hydrogen sulfide.

  "Ah."

  "Ah?" Sellitto asked. "What's 'ah'?"

  "Command, microscope one," Rhyme commanded. The image reappeared on the computer screen and he replied to the detective, "It's obvious--dead bacterial matter, partially digested fiber and grass. It's shit. Oh, excuse me for being indelicate," he said sarcastically. "It's doggy do. Our perp stepped where he should not have."

  This was encouraging; the hairs and fecal matter were good class evidence and, if they found similar trace on a suspect, at a particular location or in a car there'd be a strong presumption that he was, or had contact with, the Conjurer.

  The fingerprint report on the shards of mirror in the alley came in from the AFIS system. It was ne
gative, to no one's surprise.

  "What else from the scene?" Rhyme asked.

  "Zip," Sachs said. "That's it."

  Rhyme was scanning the evidence charts when the doorbell rang and Thom went to answer it. A moment later he returned, accompanied by a uniformed officer. He stood timidly in the doorway, as many young law enforcers did when they entered the den of the legendary Lincoln Rhyme. "I'm looking for Detective Bell. I was told he was here?"

  "That's me," Bell said.

  "Crime scene report. From the break-in at Charles Grady's office."

  "Thanks, son." The detective took the envelope and nodded to the young man, who, with a brief, intimidated glance at Lincoln Rhyme, turned and left.

  Reading the contents, Bell shrugged. "Not my expertise. Hey, Lincoln, any chance you could take a look at it?"

  "Sure, Roland," Rhyme said. "Pull the staples out and mount it in the turning frame there. Thom'll do it. What's the story? This about the Andrew Constable case?"

  "Is." He told Rhyme about the break-in at Charles Grady's office. When the aide was finished mounting the report Rhyme drove into position. He read the first page carefully. Then said, "Command, turn page." He continued reading.

  The break-in had been accomplished by simply shattering the corner of the glass window in the door to the hall and unlatching it from the inside (the door between the secretary's outer office and prosecutor's interior office was double-locked and made of thick wood; it had defeated the burglar).

  The CS searchers, Rhyme noted, had found something interesting--on and around the secretary's desk were a number of fibers. The report indicated only their color--mostly white, some black and a single red one--but nothing else about them. They also found two tiny flecks of gold foil.

  The CS team had learned that the break-in had occurred after the cleaning service had finished with the office so the fibers probably had not been left by Grady's secretary or anyone legitimately in her office during the day. Most likely they'd come from the intruder.

  Rhyme came to the last page. "That's it?" he asked.

  "Reckon so," Bell responded.

  A grunt from the criminalist. "Command, telephone. Call Peretti comma Vincent."

  Rhyme had hired Peretti as a crime scene cop some years ago and he'd proved talented at forensics. What he'd truly excelled at, though, was the far more esoteric art of police department politics, which, unlike Rhyme, he preferred to the work of actually running crime scenes. He was now head of the NYPD's Investigation and Resource Division, which oversaw the crime scene unit.

  When Rhyme was finally put through, the man asked, "Lincoln, how are you?"

  "Fine, Vince. I--"

  "You're on this Conjurer case, right? How's it going?"

  "It's going. Listen, I'm calling about something else. I'm here with Roland Bell. I've got the report on the Grady office break-in--"

  "Oh, the Andrew Constable thing. Those threats against Grady. Right. What can I do?"

  "I'm looking at the report now. But it's just the preliminary. I need some more information. Crime Scene found some fibers. I need to know the exact composition of each one, length, diameter, color temperature, dyes used and amount of wear."

  "Hold on. I'll get a pen." A moment later: "Go ahead."

  "I also need electrostatics of all the footprints and photos of their patterns on the floor. And I want to know everything that was on the secretary's desk, credenza and bookshelves. Everything on any surface, in any drawer, on the wall. And its exact location."

  "Everything the perp touched? Okay, I guess. We'll--"

  "No, Vince. Everything that was in the office. Everything. Paper clips, pictures of the secretary's children. Mold in the top drawer. I don't care whether he touched it or not."

  Huffy now, Peretti said, "I'll make sure somebody does it."

  He didn't see why Peretti didn't do it himself, which is what Rhyme would have done, even as head of IRD, to make sure the job got done immediately.

  But in his present role as consultant he had only limited clout. "Sooner is better. . . . Thanks, Vince."

  "Don't mention it," the man said coolly.

  They hung up. Rhyme said to Bell, "Not much else I can do, Roland, until we get that information."

  A glance at the break-in report. Fibers and backwoods militiamen . . . Mysteries. But at the moment they'd have to remain somebody else's. Rhyme had his own enigmas to unravel and not much time in which to do so: the notations on the evidence chart about the broken watches reminded him that they had less than three hours to stop the Conjurer before he found his next victim.

  THE CONJURER

  Music School Crime Scene

  * Perp's description: Brown hair, fake beard, no distinguishing, medium build, medium height, age: fifties. Ring and little fingers of left hand fused together. Changed costume quickly to resemble old, bald janitor.

  * No apparent motive.

  * Victim: Svetlana Rasnikov.

  * Full-time music student.

  * Checking family, friends, students, coworkers for possible leads.

  * No boyfriends, no known enemies. Performed at children's birthday parties.

  * Circuit board with speaker attached.

  * Sent to FBI lab, NYC.

  * Digital recorder, probably containing perp's voice. All data destroyed.

  * Voice recorder is a "gimmick." Homemade.

  * Used antique iron handcuffs to restrain victim.

  * Handcuffs are Darby irons. Scotland Yard. Checking with Houdini Museum in New Orleans for leads.

  * Destroyed victim's watch at exactly 8:00 A.M.

  * Cotton string holding chairs. Generic. Too many sources to trace.

  * Squib for gunshot effect. Destroyed.

  * Too many sources to trace.

  * Fuse. Generic.

  * Too many sources to trace.

  * Responding officers reported flash in air. No trace material recovered.

  * Was from flash cotton or flash paper.

  * Too many sources to trace.

  * Perp's shoes: size 10 Ecco.

  * Silk fibers, dyed gray, processed to a matte finish.

  * From quick-change janitor's outfit.

  * Unsub is possibly wearing brown wig.

  * Red pignut hickory and Parmelia conspersa lichen, both found primarily in Central Park.

  * Dirt impregnated with unusual mineral oil. Sent to FBI for analysis.

  * Black silk, 72 x 48". Used as camouflage. Not traceable.

  * Illusionists use this frequently.

  * Wears caps to cover up prints.

  * Magician's finger cups.

  * Traces of latex, castor oil, makeup.

  * Theatrical makeup.

  * Traces of alginate.

  * Used in molding latex "appliances."

  * Murder weapon: white silk-knit rope with black silk core.

  * Rope is a magic trick. Color changing. Not traceable.

  * Unusual knot.

  * Sent to FBI and Maritime Museum--no information.

  * Knots are from Houdini routines, virtually impossible to untie.

  * Used disappearing ink on sign-in register.

  East Village Crime Scene

  * Victim Two: Tony Calvert.

  * Makeup artist, theater company.

  * No known enemies.

  * No apparent connection with first victim.

  * No apparent motive.

  * Cause of death:

  * Blunt-object trauma to head followed by postmortem dismemberment with crosscut saw.

  * Perp escaped portraying woman in her 70s. Checking vicinity for discarded costume and other evidence.

  * Nothing recovered.

  * Watch smashed at 12:00 exactly.

  * Pattern? Next victim presumably at 4:00 P.M.

  * Perp hid behind mirror. Not traceable. Fingerprints sent to FBI.

  * No matches.

  * Used cat toy ("feke") to lure victim into alley. Toy is untraceable.

  *
Additional mineral oil found, same as at first scene. Awaiting FBI report.

  * Additional latex and makeup from finger cups.

  * Additional alginate.

  * Ecco shoes left behind.

  * Dog hairs found in shoes, from three different breeds of dog. Manure too.

  Profile as Illusionist

  * Perp will use misdirection against victims and in eluding police.

  * Physical misdirection (for distraction).

  * Psychological (to eliminate suspicion).

  * Escape at music school was similar to Vanished Man illusion routine. Too common to trace.

  * Perp is primarily an illusionist.

  * Talented at sleight of hand.

  * Also knows protean (quick change) magic. Will use breakaway clothes, nylon and silk, bald cap, finger cups and other latex appliances. Could be any age, gender or race.

  * Calvert's death = Selbit's Cutting a Woman in Half routine.

  * Proficient at lock picking (possibly lock "scrubbing").

  Chapter Thirteen In 1900 Manhattan's horse population was over 100,000 and, space being at a premium on the island even in those days, many animals were housed in high-rises--at least that's what their second-and third-story quarters would have been considered at the time.

  One such elevated stable can still be found in the borough, the well-known Hammerstead Riding Academy on the Upper West Side. Still in its original structure, built in 1885, the academy features hundreds of stalls above the ground-level arena, which is the site for both private riding lessons and shows. A large, busy stable like this seems an anomaly in a city like Manhattan in the twenty-first century until you consider that Central Park's six miles of well-tended bridle paths are only a few blocks away.

  Ninety horses reside in the academy, some privately owned and some for rent, and one of these latter variety was now being led down a steep ramp from his stall by a groom, a redheaded teenage girl, to a waiting rider.

  Cheryl Marston felt the same thrill she did every Saturday at this time of day when she saw the tall, feisty horse with the mottled rump of an Appaloosa.

  "Hey, Donny Boy," she called, her pet name for the animal, whose real name was Don Juan di Middleburg. A ladies' man, she often said. A joke but true enough: under a male rider the animal would shy and whinny and resist from the git-go. But with Marston he was putty.

  "See you in an hour," she told the groom, swinging up onto Donny Boy, gripping the supple reins, feeling his astonishing muscles beneath her.

  A touch to the ribs and they were on their way. Out onto Eighty-sixth Street, moving east slowly toward Central Park, the shod feet clopping loudly on the asphalt, drawing everyone's attention, as they examined both the gorgeous animal and, high atop him, the thin-faced, serious woman dressed in jodhpurs, a red jacket and black velvet helmet, out of which dangled a long blonde French braid.