The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  Which meant that the person who broke in undoubtedly noted this. As for the attacker himself, Rhyme had ventured that he might be disguised as a minister or priest. With the help of an FBI database Cooper managed to trace the black fibers and dye to a cloth manufacturer in Minnesota, which--Cooper and Rhyme learned from its website--specialized in black gabardine for clerical-clothing makers. Rhyme also noted that several of the white fibers CS had found were polyester bonded with starched cotton, which suggested a white lightweight shirt with a stiff clerical collar attached.

  The single red satin fiber was the sort that could've come from a ribbon bookmark in an old book, as could the gold leaf. A Bible, for instance. Rhyme had run a case years ago in which a smuggler had hidden drugs in a hollowed-out Bible; that CS search team had found similar trace in the man's office.

  Bell had ordered Grady and his family not to attend their daughter's recital. In their place a team of ESU troopers would drive to the school in Grady's city car. Teams stationed themselves north of the school on Fifth Avenue, on cross streets west at Sixth Avenue and east at University Place and south in Washington Square Park.

  Sure enough, Bell, who'd taken the park, had spotted a minister walking nervously toward the school. Bell had started to tail him but was spotted so he'd peeled off. Another SWAT officer picked up and tracked him to the school. A third detective from Bell's SWAT group approached and asked about the concert, checking visually for signs of weapons, but not finding any obvious ones--and hence having no probable cause to detain and search him.

  But the suspect remained under close surveillance and as soon as he was seen pulling the gun from his attache case and starting for the decoys he was taken down.

  Expecting a fake priest, they'd been surprised to find that they'd caught a real one, which the contents of Swensen's wallet confirmed--despite the contrary testimony of the embarrassingly bad sermon. Bell nodded at the H&K automatic. "Pretty big gun for a priest," he said.

  "I'm a minister."

  "Meant to say."

  "Ordained."

  "Good for you. Now I'm wondering: I read you those rights. You want to waive your right to remain silent? Tell you, sir, you bow up to what you just did and things'll go a lot easier for you. Tell us who wanted you to kill Mr. Grady."

  "God."

  "Hmm," Bell said. "Okay. How 'bout anybody else?"

  "That's all I'm saying to you or to anybody. That's my answer. God."

  "Well, all right, let's getcha downtown now and see if He's inclined to throw bail for you."

  Chapter Twenty-four

  They call that music?

  A thud of a drum and then the raw sound of a brass instrument rehearsing short passages penetrated Rhyme's parlor. It was coming from the Cirque Fantastique, across the street in the park. The notes were jarring and the tone gaudy and brash. He tried to ignore it and returned to his phone conversation with Charles Grady, who was thanking him for his efforts in collaring the minister who'd come to town to kill him.

  Bell had just interrogated Constable, down at the Detention Center. The prisoner said he knew Swensen but had drummed him out of the Patriot Assembly over a year ago because of an "unhealthy interest" in the daughters of some parishioners. Constable had had nothing to do with the man after that and he'd fallen in with some backwoods militiamen, according to local gossip. The prisoner adamantly denied that he knew anything about the attempted killing.

  Still, Grady had arranged to have delivered to Rhyme a box of evidence from the crime scene at the Neighborhood School and one from Reverend Swensen's hotel room. Rhyme had looked through it quickly but found no obvious connection to Constable. He explained this to Grady and added, "We need to get it to some forensic people upstate, in--what's the town?"

  "Canton Falls."

  "They can do some soil or trace comparisons. There might be something linking Swensen to Constable but I don't have any samples from up there."

  "Thanks for checking, Lincoln. I'll have somebody get it up there ASAP."

  "If you want me to write an expert's opinion on the results I'd be happy to," the criminalist said then had to repeat the offer; the last half was drowned out by a particularly raucous horn solo.

  Hell, yes, I could write better music than that, he thought.

  Thom called time-out and took Rhyme's blood pressure. He found the results high. "I don't like it," he said.

  "Well, for the record, I don't like a lot of things," Rhyme responded petulantly, frustrated with their slow progress with the case: a tech at the FBI lab in D.C. had called and said that it would be morning before they'd have any report on the bits of metal found in the Conjurer's bag. Bedding and Saul had called more than fifty hotels in Manhattan, but had found none that used APC key cards that matched the one found in the Conjurer's running jacket. Sellitto had also called the relief watch outside the Cirque Fantastique--fresh officers had replaced the two who'd been there since that morning--and they'd reported nothing suspicious.

  And, most troubling of all, there'd been no luck in finding Larry Burke, the missing patrol officer who'd collared the Conjurer near the crafts fair. Dozens of officers were searching the West Side but had turned up no witnesses or evidence as to where he might be. One encouraging note, though: his body wasn't in the stolen Mazda. The car hadn't yet been raised but a diver who'd braved the currents reported that there were no bodies inside the car itself or the trunk.

  "Where's the food?" Sellitto asked, looking out the window. Sachs and Kara had gone up the street to pick up some takeout from a nearby Cuban restaurant (the young illusionist was less excited about dinner than the prospect of her first Cuban coffee, which Thom described as "one-half espresso, one-half condensed milk, and one-half sugar," the concept of which, despite the impossible proportions, had instantly intrigued her).

  The bulky detective turned to Rhyme and Thom and asked, "You ever have those Cubano sandwiches? They're the best."

  But neither the food nor the case meant anything to the aide. "Time for bed."

  "It's nine thirty-eight," Rhyme pointed out. "Practically afternoon. So it's not. Time. For. Bed." He managed to make his singsong voice sound both juvenile and threatening at the same time. "We have a fucking killer on the loose who keeps changing his mind about how often he wants to kill people. Every four hours, every two hours." A glance at the clock. "And he might just now be perpetrating his nine thirty-eight killing. I appreciate that you don't like it. But I have work to do."

  "No, you don't. If you don't want to call it a night, all right. But we're going upstairs to take care of some things and then you're taking a nap for a couple of hours."

  "Ha. You're just hoping I'll fall asleep till morning. Well, I won't. I'll stay awake all night."

  The aide rolled his eyes. He announced in a firm voice, "Lincoln'll be upstairs for a few hours."

  "How'd you like to be out of work," Rhyme snapped.

  "How'd you like to be in a coma?" Thom shot back.

  "This is fucking crip abuse," he muttered. But he was giving in. He understood the danger. When a quad sits too long in one position or is constricted in the extremities or, as Rhyme loved to put it so indelicately in front of strangers, needs to piss or shit and hasn't for a while--there was a risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a soaring of the blood pressure that could result in a stroke, leading to more paralysis or death. Dysreflexia's rare but it'll send you to the hospital, or a grave, pretty damn fast, and so Rhyme acquiesced to a trip upstairs for the personal business and then a rest. It was moments like this--disruptions of "normal" life--that infuriated him most about his disability. Infuriated and, though he refused to let on, deeply depressed him.

  In the bedroom upstairs Thom took care of the necessary bodily details. "Okay. Two hours' rest. Get some sleep."

  "One hour," Rhyme grumbled.

  The aide was going to argue but then he glanced at Rhyme's face and, while he probably saw anger and don't-fuck-with-me eyes, which wouldn't have affected him one bi
t, he observed too the criminalist's heartfelt concern for the next victims on the Conjurer's list. Thom conceded, "One hour. If you sleep."

  "An hour it is," Rhyme said. Then added wryly, "And I'll have the sweetest of dreams. . . . A drink would help, you know."

  The aide tugged at the subtle purple tie--a gesture of weakening that Rhyme seized on like a shark lapping a molecule of blood. "Just one," the criminalist said.

  "All right." He poured a little ancient Macallan into one of Rhyme's tumblers and arranged the straw next to his mouth.

  The criminalist sipped long. "Ah, heaven . . ." Then he glanced at the empty glass. "Someday I'll teach you how to pour a real drink."

  "I'll be back in an hour," Thom said.

  "Command, alarm clock," Rhyme said sternly. On the flat-screen monitor a clock face appeared and he orally set the alarm to sound in one hour.

  "I would've gotten you up," the aide said.

  "Ah, well, just in case you were occupied and somehow forgot," Rhyme said coyly, "now I'll be sure to be awake, won't I?"

  The aide left, closing the door behind him, and Rhyme's eyes slipped to the window, where the peregrine falcons perched, lording over the city, their heads turning in that odd way of theirs--both jerky and elegant at the same time. Then one--the female, the better hunter--glanced quickly at him, blinking her narrow slits of eyes, as if she'd just sensed his gaze. A cock of her head. Then she returned to her examination of the hubbub of the circus in Central Park.

  Rhyme closed his eyes though his mind was speeding through the evidence, trying to figure out what the clues might mean: the brass, the hotel key, the press pass, the ink. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. . . . Finally his eyes sprang open. This was absurd. He wasn't the least bit tired. He wanted to get the hell back downstairs and return to work. Sleeping was out of the question.

  He felt a breeze tickle his cheek and was angrier yet at Thom--for leaving the air-conditioning on. When a quad's nose runs, there goddamn well better be somebody nearby to wipe it. He summoned up the climate control panel on the monitor, thinking about telling Thom that he would've gotten to sleep except that the room was too cold. But one look at the screen told him that the air conditioner was off.

  What had the breeze been?

  The door was still closed.

  There! He felt it again, a definite waft of air on his other cheek, his right one. He turned his head quickly. Was it from the windows? No, they too were closed. Well, it was probably--

  But then he noticed the door.

  Oh, no, he thought, chilled to his heart. The door to his bedroom had a bolt on it--a latch that could be closed only by someone in his room. Not from the outside.

  It was locked.

  Another breath on his skin. Hot, this time. Very close. He heard a faint wheeze too.

  "Where are you?" Rhyme whispered.

  He gasped as a hand appeared suddenly in front of his face, two fingers deformed, fused together. The hand held a razor blade, the sharp edge aimed toward Rhyme's eyes.

  "If you call for help," said the Conjurer in a breathy whisper, "if you make a noise, I'll blind you. Understood?"

  Lincoln Rhyme nodded.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The blade in the Conjurer's hand vanished.

  He didn't put it away, didn't hide it. One moment the metal rectangle was in his fingers, aimed at Rhyme's face; the next, it was gone.

  The man--brown-haired, beardless, wearing a policeman's uniform--walked around the room, examining the books, the CDs, the posters. He seemed to nod approvingly at something. He studied one curious decoration: a small red shrine, inside of which was a likeness of the Chinese god of war and of police detectives, Guan Di. The Conjurer seemed to think nothing of the incongruity of such an item in the bedroom of a forensic scientist.

  He returned to Rhyme.

  "Well," the man said in his throaty whisper, looking over the Flexicair bed. "You're not what I expected."

  "The car," Rhyme said. "In the river? How?"

  "Oh, that?" he said dismissively. "The Submerged Car trick? I was never in the car. I got out in the bushes at the end of that street. A simple trick: a closed window--so the witnesses would see mostly glare--and my hat on the headrest. It was my audience's imagination that saw me. Houdini was never even in some of the trunks and barrels he pretended to escape from."

  "So they weren't skid marks from braking," Rhyme said. "They were skid marks from accelerating tires." He was angry that he'd missed this. "You put a brick on the accelerator."

  "A brick wouldn't've looked natural when the divers found the car; I wedged it down with a shoe." The Conjurer looked Rhyme over closely and asked in a wheezing voice, "But you never believed I was dead." Not a question.

  "How did you get into the room without me hearing you?"

  "I was here first. I slipped upstairs ten minutes ago. I was downstairs too in your war room, or whatever you call it. Nobody noticed me."

  "You brought that evidence in?" Rhyme recalled being vaguely aware of two patrolmen carting in boxes of the evidence collected outside the Neighborhood School and Reverend Swensen's hotel room.

  "That's right. I was waiting on the sidewalk. This cop came up with a couple of boxes. I said hello and offered to help. Nobody ever stops you if you're in a uniform and you seem to have a purpose."

  "And you've been hiding up here--covered up with a piece of silk that was the color of the walls."

  "You caught on to that trick, did you?"

  Rhyme frowned, looking at the man's uniform. It seemed genuine, not a costume. But contrary to regulations there was no nameplate on the breast. His heart suddenly sank. He knew where it had come from. "You killed him, Larry Burke. . . . You killed him and stole his clothes."

  The Conjurer glanced down at the uniform and shrugged. "Reverse. Stole the uniform first," came the whispery, disembodied voice. "Convinced him that I wanted him naked to give me a chance to escape. He saved me the effort of stripping him afterward. Then I shot him."

  Repulsed, Rhyme reflected that he'd considered the danger that the Conjurer had taken Burke's radio and his weapon. It hadn't occurred to him, though, that he'd use the man's uniform as a quick-change costume to attack his pursuers. He asked in a whisper, "Where's his body?"

  "On the West Side."

  "Where?"

  "Keep that to myself, I think. Somebody'll find him in a day or two. Sniff him out. The weather's warm."

  "You son-of-a-bitch," the criminalist snapped. He might be civilian now but in his heart Lincoln Rhyme would always be a cop. And there is no bond closer than that between fellow police officers.

  The weather's warm. . . .

  But he struggled to remain calm and asked casually, "How did you find me?"

  "At the crafts fair. I got close to your partner. That redheaded policewoman. Very close. As close as I was to you just now. I breathed on her neck too--I'm not sure which I enjoyed more. . . . Anyway I heard her talking to you on her radio. She mentioned your name. Then it just took a little research to find you. You've been in the papers, you know. You're famous."

  "Famous? A freak like me?"

  "Apparently."

  Rhyme shook his head and said slowly, "I'm old news. The chain of command passed me by a long time ago."

  The word "command" zipped from Rhyme's lips through the microphone mounted to the headboard into the voice recognition software in his computer. "Command" was the latch word that told the computer to be prepared for instructions. A window opened up on the monitor, which he could see but the Conjurer could not. Instruction? it asked silently.

  "Chain of command?" the Conjurer asked. "What do you mean?"

  "I used to be in charge of the department. Now, sometimes the young officers, they won't even return my telephone call."

  The computer seized the last two words of the sentence. Its response: Whom would you like to call?

  Rhyme sighed. "I'll tell you a story: I needed to get in touch with an officer the other
day. A lieutenant. Lon Sellitto."

  The computer reported: Dialing Lon Sellitto.

  "And I told him--"

  A sudden frown from the Conjurer.

  He stepped forward quickly, swinging the monitor away from Rhyme's face and looking it over. The killer grimaced, ripped the phone lines from the wall and unplugged the computer. With a faint pop it went silent.

  As the man hovered a few feet from him Rhyme pressed his head into the pillows, expecting the terrible razor blade to appear. But the Conjurer stepped back, breathing hard with his asthmatic wheeze. He seemed more impressed than angered by what the criminalist had tried.

  "You know what that was, don't you?" he asked, smiling coldly. "Pure illusionism. You distracted me with patter and then did some classic verbal misdirection. Ruse, we call it. That was good. What you were saying was very natural--until you mentioned the name. It was the name ruined it. See, telling me that wasn't natural. It made me suspicious. But up until then you were good."

  The Immobilized Man . . .

  He continued, "I'm good too, though." The Conjurer reached forward with an open, empty palm. Rhyme cringed as the fingers passed close to his eyes. He felt a brush against his ear. When the Conjurer's hand appeared a second later there were four double-sided razor blades gripped between his fingers. He closed his hand into a fist and the four blades became a single one, now held once more between his thumb and index finger.

  No, please. . . . Worse than the pain, Rhyme feared the horror of being deprived of yet another of his senses. The killer eased the edge close to Rhyme's eye, moved it back and forth.

  Then the killer smiled and stepped back. He glanced across the room into the shadows on the far wall. "Now, Revered Audience, let's begin our routine with some prestidigitation. I'll be assisted by a fellow performer here." These words were spoken in an eerie, theatrical tone.

  The man's hand rose and he displayed the glistening razor blade. In a smooth gesture the Conjurer pulled out the waistband of Rhyme's sweatpants and underwear and tossed the blade like a frisbee toward his naked groin.

  The criminalist winced.