The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  He handed her the small metal lighter. She took it and blinked. Her frown deepened. It was her own lighter, which he'd dipped from her purse when she'd leaned toward him.

  Malerick whispered coldly, "Guess you didn't need one after all."

  Leaving her at the bar, two tears leading the mascara down her cheeks, he thought that of all the sadistic illusions he'd perpetrated, and had planned for, this weekend--the blood, the cut flesh, the fire--this one would perhaps be the most satisfying.

  *

  She heard the sirens when they were two blocks away from Rhyme's.

  Amelia Sachs's mind did one of those funny jogs: hearing the urgent electronic catcall from some emergency vehicle, thinking the sound seemed to be coming from the direction of his town house.

  Of course it wasn't, she decided.

  Too much of a coincidence.

  But then, the flashing lights, blue and red, were on Central Park West, where his place was located.

  Come on, girl, she reassured herself, it's your imagination, stoked by the memory of the eerie harlequin on the banner in front of the Cirque Fantastique tent in the park, the masked performers, the horror of the Conjurer's murders. They were making her paranoid.

  Spooky . . .

  Forget it.

  Shifting the large shopping bag containing garlicky Cuban food from one hand to the other, she and Kara continued down the busy sidewalk, talking about parents, about careers, about the Cirque Fantastique. About men too.

  Bang, bang . . .

  The young woman sipped her double Cuban coffee, to which, she said, she'd become addicted at first taste. Not only was it half the price of Starbucks', Kara pointed out, but it was twice as strong. "I'm not sure about the math but I think that makes it four times as good," the young woman said. "I'll tell you, I love finds like this. It's the little things in life, don't you think?"

  But Sachs had lost the thread of the conversation. Another ambulance sped by. She sent a silent prayer that it keep going past Rhyme's.

  It didn't. The vehicle braked to a fast stop at the corner next to his building.

  "No," she whispered.

  "What's going on?" Kara wondered. "An accident?"

  Heart pounding, Sachs dropped the bags of food and began sprinting toward the building.

  "Oh, Lincoln . . ."

  Kara started after her, spilled hot coffee on her hand and dropped the cup. She kept up the pace beside the policewoman. "What's going on?"

  As she turned the corner Sachs counted a half-dozen fire trucks and ambulances.

  At first she'd suspected he'd had an attack of dysreflexia. But this had clearly been a fire. She looked up to the second story and gasped in shock. Smoke was drifting out of Rhyme's bedroom window.

  Jesus, no!

  Sachs ducked under the police line and ran toward the cluster of firefighters in the doorway. She leaped up the front stairs, her arthritis momentarily forgotten. Then she was through the door, nearly slipping on the marble floor. The hallway and the lab seemed intact but a faint haze of smoke filled the downstairs hallway.

  Two firemen were walking slowly down the stairs. It seemed their faces were filled with resignation.

  "Lincoln!" she cried.

  And started for the stairs.

  "No, Amelia!" Lon Sellitto's gruff voice cut through the hallway.

  She turned, panicked, thinking that he wanted to stop her from seeing his burned corpse. If the Conjurer had taken Lincoln away from her he was going to die. Nothing in the world would stop her.

  "Lon!"

  He motioned her off the stairs and embraced her. "He's not up there, Amelia."

  "Is--"

  "No, no, it's okay. He's all right. Thom brought him down to the guest room in the back. This floor."

  "Thank God," Kara said. She looked around in dismay at more firefighters coming down the stairs, large men and women swollen even larger by their uniforms and equipment.

  Thom, grim-faced, joined them from the back of the hall. "He's all right, Amelia. No burns, some smoke inhalation. Blood pressure's high. But he's on his meds. It'll be okay."

  "What happened?" she asked the detective.

  "The Conjurer," Sellitto muttered. He sighed. "He killed Larry Burke. Stole his uniform. That's how he got in. Somehow he snuck up to Rhyme's room. He set a fire around his bed. We didn't even know it down here; somebody saw the smoke from the street and called nine-one-one. And Dispatch called me. Thom and Mel and I got most of it out before the trucks got here."

  She asked Sellitto, "I don't suppose we got him, the Conjurer?"

  A bitter laugh. "Whatta you think? He vanished. Thin air."

  *

  Following the accident that left him paralyzed, after Rhyme had graduated from the stage of grief that called for him to spend months willing his legs to work again, he gave up on the impossible and turned his considerable focus and strength of will to a more reasonable goal.

  Breathing on his own.

  A C4 quad like Rhyme--his neck broken at the fourth vertebra from the base of the skull--is on the borderline of needing a ventilator. The nerves that lead from the brain down to the diaphragm muscles may or may not be functioning. In Rhyme's case his lungs appeared at first not to be pumping properly and he was put on a machine, a hose implanted in his chest. Rhyme hated the device, with its mechanical gasping and the odd sensation of not feeling the need to breathe even though he knew he himself wasn't. (The machine also had the nasty habit of occasionally stopping cold.) But then his lungs began working spontaneously and he was freed from the bionic device. The doctors said the improvement was due to his body's natural post-trauma stabilizing. But Rhyme knew the real answer. He'd done it himself. With willpower. Sucking air into his lungs--meager breaths at first, yes, but his own breaths all the same--was one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. He was now working hard at those exercises that might lead to increased sensation throughout his body and even movement of his limbs; but however successful he was with these he didn't think his sense of pride would match what he'd felt when he was taken off the ventilator for the first time.

  Tonight, lying in his small guest room, he recalled seeing the clouds of smoke flowing from the cloth and paper and plastic burning all around him in his room. In his panic he thought less about burning to death and more about the terrible smoke working into his lungs like metal splinters and taking away the sole victory he'd won in the war against his disability. It was as if the Conjurer had picked his single most vulnerable spot to attack.

  When Thom, Sellitto and Cooper burst into the room his first thought was not about the fire extinguishers the two cops held but the green oxygen tank the aide wielded. He'd thought, Save my lungs!

  Before the flames were out Thom had the oxygen mask over his face and he hungrily inhaled the sweet gas. They got him downstairs and both EMS and Rhyme's own SCI doctor had examined him, cleaning and dressing a few small burns and looking carefully for razor cuts (there were none; nor were any blades found in his pajamas). The spinal cord specialist declared that his lungs were all right, though Thom should rotate him more frequently than normal to keep them clear.

  It was only then that Rhyme began to calm. But he was still very anxious. The killer had done something far more cruel than causing him physical injury. The attack had reminded Rhyme how precarious his life was and how uncertain his future.

  He hated this feeling, this terrible helplessness and vulnerability.

  "Lincoln!" Sachs walked fast into the room, sat on the old Clinitron bed and dropped to his chest, hugged him hard. He lowered his head against her hair. She was crying. He'd seen tears in her eyes perhaps twice since he'd known her.

  "No first names," he whispered. "Bad luck, remember. And we've had enough of that today."

  "You're okay?"

  "Yes, I'm fine," he said in a whisper, stung by the illogical fear that if he spoke louder the particles of smoke would somehow puncture and deflate his lungs. "The birds?" he asked,
praying that nothing had happened to the peregrine falcons. He wouldn't have minded if they moved to a different building. But it would have devastated him if they'd been injured or killed.

  "Thom said they're fine. They're on the other sill."

  She held him for a moment then Thom appeared in the doorway. "I need to rotate you."

  The policewoman hugged him once more then stood back as Thom stepped close to the bed.

  "Search the scene," Rhyme told her. "There's got to be something that he's left behind. There was that handkerchief he put around my neck. And he had some razor blades."

  Sachs said she would and left the room. Thom took over and began expertly to clear his lungs.

  Twenty minutes later Sachs returned. She stripped off the Tyvek suit and carefully folded and replaced it in the crime scene suitcase.

  "Didn't find much," she reported. "Got that handkerchief and a couple of footprints. He's wearing a new pair of Eccos. But I didn't find any blades. And anything else he might've dropped got vaporized. Oh, and there was a bottle of scotch too. But I assume it's yours."

  "Yes, it is," Rhyme whispered. Normally he would've made a joke--something about the severity of the punishment for using eighteen-year-old single malt as an arson accelerant. But he couldn't bring himself to be humorous.

  He knew there wouldn't be much evidence. Because of the extensive destruction in a fire the clues in most suspicious-origin fire scenes usually reveal only where and how the fire started. But they already knew that. Still, he thought there must be more.

  "What about the duct tape? Thom pulled it off and dropped it."

  "No duct tape."

  "Look behind the head of the bed. The Conjurer was standing there. He might've--"

  "I did look."

  "Well, search again. You missed things. You must have."

  "No," she said simply.

  "What?"

  "Forget the crime scene. It's toast--so to speak."

  "We need to move this goddamn case forward."

  "We're going to, Rhyme. I'm going to interview the witness."

  "There was a witness?" he grumbled. "Nobody told me there was a witness."

  "Well, there was."

  She stepped to the doorway, called down the hall for Lon Sellitto to join them. He ambled inside, sniffing his jacket and wrinkling his nose. "A two-hundred-forty-fucking-dollar suit. History. Shit. What, Officer?"

  "I'm going to interview the witness, Lieutenant. You have your tape recorder?"

  "Sure." He took it out of his pocket and handed it to her. "There's a wit?"

  Rhyme said, "Forget witnesses, Sachs. You know how unreliable they are. Stick with the evidence."

  "No, we'll get something good. I'll make sure we do."

  A glance at the doorway. "Well, who the hell is it?"

  "You," she said, pulling a chair close to the bed.

  Chapter Twenty-seven "Me? Ridiculous."

  "No. Not ridiculous."

  "Forget it. Walk the grid again. You missed things. You searched way too fast. If you were a rookie--"

  "I'm not a rookie. I know how to search a scene fast and I know when it's time to stop searching and go on to more productive things." She examined Sellitto's small recorder, checked the tape, and clicked it on.

  "This is NYPD Patrol Officer Amelia Sachs, Badge Five Eight Eight Five, interviewing Lincoln Rhyme, witness in a ten-twenty-four assault and ten-twenty-nine arson at three-four-five Central Park West. The date is Saturday, April twentieth." She set the recorder on the table near Rhyme.

  Who glanced at the unit as if it were a snake.

  "Now," she said. "Description."

  "I told Lon--"

  "Tell me."

  A sarcastic look at the ceiling. "He was medium-built, male, approximately fifty to fifty-five years of age, wearing a police officer's uniform. No beard this time. Scar tissue and discoloration on his neck and on his chest."

  "His blouse was open? You could see his chest?"

  "Excuse me," he said with bright sarcasm. "Scar tissue at the base of his neck presumably continuing down to his chest. Little and ring fingers of his left hand were fused together. He had . . . appeared to have brown eyes."

  "Good, Rhyme," she said. "We didn't have his eye color before."

  "And we may not now if he's wearing contacts," he snapped, feeling he'd scored a point here. "I could probably remember better with something to help." He looked toward Thom.

  "Something to help?"

  "I assume you have an unincinerated bottle of Macallan somewhere in the kitchen."

  "Later," Sachs said. "Let's keep a clear head."

  "But--"

  Worrying her scalp with a nail, she continued, "Now. I want to go through everything that happened. What did he say?"

  "I can't remember very much," he said impatiently. "It was mostly crazy ramblings. And I was hardly in the mood to pay attention."

  "Maybe they sounded crazy to you. But I'll bet there was something we could use."

  "Sachs," he said sardonically, "do you think I might've been a little spooked and confused? I mean, just a little distracted maybe?"

  She touched his shoulder, a place where he could feel the contact. "I know you don't trust witnesses. But sometimes they do see things. . . . This's my specialty, Rhyme."

  Amelia Sachs, the people cop.

  "I'll walk you through it. Just like you walk me through the grid. We'll find something important."

  She rose, walked to the door and called, "Kara?"

  Yes, he distrusted witnesses, even those who had good vantage points and weren't part of the action itself. Anyone involved in the actual crime--especially a victim of violence--was totally unreliable. Even now, thinking about the killer's visit, all Rhyme could see was a random series of incidents--the Conjurer behind him, standing over him, lighting the fire. The razor blades. The smell of the scotch, the boiling smoke. He didn't even have a sense of the chronology of the killer's visit.

  Memory, as Kara had said, is only an illusion.

  A moment later the young woman appeared. "Are you all right, Lincoln?"

  "Fine," he muttered.

  Sachs was explaining that she wanted Kara to listen; she might recognize something the killer had said that could be helpful to them. The policewoman sat down again and pulled her chair close. "Let's go back there, Rhyme. Tell us what happened. Just in general terms."

  He hesitated, glanced at the tape recorder. Then he began to recount the events as he remembered them. The Conjurer appearing, admitting he'd stolen the uniform then killed the officer, telling Rhyme about the officer's body.

  The weather's warm . . .

  He then said, "It was like he was pretending he was performing a show and I was a fellow performer." Hearing the man's odd rambling in his mind, Rhyme said, "I do remember one thing. He's got asthma. Or at least he sounded winded. He was gasping for breath a lot, whispering."

  "Good," Sachs said. "I'd forgotten he sounded that way at the pond after the Marston assault. What else did he say?"

  Rhyme looked at the dark ceiling of the small guest room. Shaking his head. "That's about it. He was either burning me or threatening to slice me up. . . . Oh, did you find any razor blades when you searched the room?"

  "No."

  "Well, there. This's what I'm talking about--evidence. I know he threw a blade in my sweatpants. The doctors didn't find it. It must've fallen out. See, that's the sort of thing you should be looking for."

  "It was probably never in your pants," Kara said. "I know the illusion. He palmed the blade."

  "Well, my point is that you don't tend to listen to people real close when they're torturing you."

  "Come on, Rhyme, go on back there. It's earlier this evening. Kara and I're getting dinner. You've been looking over evidence. Thom's brought you upstairs. You were tired, right?"

  "No," the criminalist said, "I wasn't tired. But he brought me up there anyway."

  "Imagine you weren't too happy about that
."

  "No, I wasn't."

  "So you're up in the room."

  Picturing the lights, the silhouette of the birds. Thom, closing the door.

  "It's quiet--" Sachs began.

  "No, it's not quiet at all. There's that goddamn circus across the street. Anyway, I set the alarm--"

  "For what time?"

  "I don't know. An hour. What difference does it make?"

  "One detail can give birth to two others."

  A scowl. "Where'd that come from, a fortune cookie?"

  She smiled. "Made it up. But it sounds good, don't you think? Use it in the new edition of your book."

  "I don't write books about witnesses," Rhyme said. "I write them about evidence." Feeling victorious again with this comeback.

  "Now, how do you tell he's here at first? Did you hear anything?"

  "No, I felt a draft. I thought it was the air-conditioning at first. But it was him. He was blowing on my neck and cheek."

  "Just to--Why?"

  "To scare me, I guess. It worked, by the way." Rhyme closed his eyes. Then he nodded as a few memories came back. "I tried to call Lon on the phone. But he"--a glance at Kara. "He caught my move. He threatened to kill me--no, he threatened to blind me--if I tried to call for help. I thought he was going to. But--it was odd--he seemed impressed. He complimented me on my misdirection. . . ." His voice faded as his memory trailed off into dimness.

  "How did he get in?"

  "He walked in with the officer who brought the evidence from the Grady hit."

  "Shit," Sellitto said. "From now on we check IDs--everybody who walks through the friggin' door. I mean everybody."

  "He's talking about misdirection," Sachs continued. "He's complimented you. What else is he saying?"

  "I don't know," Rhyme muttered. "Nothing."

  "Nothing at all?" she asked, her voice a whisper.

  "I. Don't. Know." Lincoln Rhyme was furious. At Sachs because she was pushing him. Because she wouldn't let him have a drink to numb the terror.

  Furious mostly at himself for disappointing her.

  But she had to understand how hard it was for him to go back there--to the flames, to the smoke that slipped into his nose and threatened his precious lungs--

  Wait. Smoke . . .

  Lincoln Rhyme said, "Fire."

  "Fire?"

  "I think that was what he talked about the most. He was obsessed with it. There was an illusion he mentioned. The . . . right, the Burning Mirror. That was it. Flames all over the stage, I think. The illusionist has to escape from them. He turns into the devil. Or somebody turns into the devil."