Please!
She couldn't breathe. Not a cubic inch of air entered her lungs. Then she saw a knee inches from her face. It slammed into her cheek and stayed rooted there. She could smell dirty jeans, saw a scuffed boot in front of her eyes, inches away.
Please don't let me fall!
Then she realized that maybe she already had.
Chapter Thirty-one
Wearing a bellhop's uniform that closely matched those worn by the staff at the Lanham Arms Hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Malerick walked along the fifteenth-floor hallway of the hotel. He carried a heavy room service tray on which was a domed plate cover and a vase containing a huge red tulip.
Everything about him was in harmony with his surroundings so as not to arouse suspicion. Malerick himself was the model of a deferential, pleasant bellhop. The averted eyes, the half smile, the unobtrusive walk, the spotless tray.
Only one thing set him apart from the other bellhops here at the Lanham: under the metal warming dome on the tray was not a plate of eggs Benedict or a club sandwich but a loaded Beretta automatic pistol, equipped with a sausage-thick sound suppressor, and a leather pouch of lockpicking and other tools.
"Enjoying your stay?" he asked one couple.
Yes, they were, and they wished him a good afternoon.
He continued to nod and smile at the guests returning to their rooms after Sunday brunch or on their way to sightsee on this fine spring afternoon.
He passed a window, in which he could see a bit of green--a portion of Central Park. He wondered what sort of excitement was unfolding there at the moment, inside the white tent of the Cirque Fantastique--the place to which he'd spent the past few days directing the police with the clues he'd left at the sites of the murders.
Or misdirecting them, he should say.
Misdirection and ruse were the keys to successful illusion and there was no one better at it than Malerick, the man of a million faces, the man who materialized like a struck match, who disappeared like a snuffed flame.
The man who vanished himself.
The police would be frantic, of course, looking for the gasoline bomb, which they believed would go off at any moment. But there was no bomb, no risk at all to the two thousand people at the Cirque Fantastique (no risk other than the possibility that some of them would be trampled to death in their mindless panic).
At the end of the hallway Malerick glanced behind him and observed that he was alone. Quickly he set the tray on the floor near a doorway and lifted the cover. He collected the black pistol and slipped it into a zippered pocket in his bellman's uniform. He opened the leather tool pouch, extracted a screwdriver and pocketed the pouch too.
Moving fast, he unscrewed the metal guard that allowed the window to open only a few inches (human beings do seem to take any opportunity to kill themselves, don't they? he reflected) and raised the window all the way. He carefully replaced the screwdriver in its spot in the leather pouch and zipped it away. His strong arms deftly boosted him onto the sill. He stepped carefully out on the ledge, 150 feet above the ground.
The ledge was twenty inches wide--he'd measured the same ledge from the window of the room he'd taken here a few days ago--and though he'd only done limited acrobatics in his life, he had the superb balance of all great illusionists. He moved along the limestone rim now as comfortably as if it were a sidewalk. After a stroll of only fifteen feet he came to the corner of the hotel and stopped, looking at the building next door to the Lanham Arms.
This, an apartment building on East Seventy-fifth Street, had no ledges but did have a fire escape, six feet away from where he now stood--overlooking an air shaft filled with the restless churning of air conditioners. Malerick took a brief running start and leaped over the bottomless gap, easily reaching the fire escape and vaulting over the railing.
He climbed up two flights and paused at a window on the seventeenth floor. A glance inside. The hallway was empty. He placed the gun and the toolkit on the window ledge then stripped off the fake bellhop's uniform in one fast peel, revealing beneath it a simple gray suit, white shirt and tie. The gun went into his belt and he used the tools again to open the window lock. He hopped inside.
Standing motionless, catching his breath. Malerick then started down the hallway toward the apartment he sought. Stopping at the door, he dropped to his knees and opened the toolkit again. Into the keyhole he inserted a tension bar and above it the lock pick. In three seconds he'd scrubbed the lock open. In five, the deadbolt. He pushed the door open only far enough to be able to see the hinges, which he sprayed with oil from a tiny canister, like breath spray, to keep them silent. A moment later he was inside the long, dark hallway of the apartment. Malerick eased the door shut.
He oriented himself, looking around the entryway.
On the wall were some mass-produced prints of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, some family portraits and, most prominently, a clumsy watercolor of New York City painted by a child (the artist's signature was "Chrissy"). A cheap table sat near the door, its short leg lengthened with a folded yellow square of foolscap legal paper. A single ski, the binding broken, leaned forlornly in the corner of the hallway. The wallpaper was old and stained.
Malerick started down the corridor, toward the sound of the television in the living room, but he detoured momentarily, stepping into a small dark room that was dominated by an ebony Kawai baby grand piano. A book of music, instructions noted in the margin, sat open on the piano. The name "Chrissy" appeared here too--penned on the cover of the book. Malerick only had a rudimentary knowledge of music but as he flipped through the lesson book he observed that the pieces seemed quite difficult.
He decided that the girl might've been a bad artist but she was quite the talented young musician--this Christine Grady, the daughter of New York assistant district attorney Charles Grady.
The man whose apartment this was. The man Malerick was being paid one hundred thousand dollars to kill.
*
Amelia Sachs sat on the grass outside of the Cirque Fantastique tent, wincing from the pain throbbing around her right kidney. She'd helped dozens of people away from the crush and had found a spot here to catch her breath.
Staring down at her from the huge black-and-white banner above her head was the masked Arlecchino, still rippling loudly in the wind. He'd seemed eerie yesterday; now, after the panic inside--which he'd caused--the image was repulsive and grotesque.
She had avoided being trampled to death; the knee and boot that'd clobbered her belonged to a man who'd scrabbled over the heads and shoulders of the audience to beat them out the door. Still, her back, ribs and face throbbed. She'd sat here for nearly fifteen minutes, faint and nauseated, partly from the crush, partly from the horrifying claustrophobia. She could generally tolerate small rooms, even elevators. Being completely restrained, unable to move, though, physically sickened her and racked her with panic.
Around her the injured were being treated. There'd been nothing serious, the EMS chief had reported to her--mostly sprains and cuts. A few dislocations and a broken arm.
Sachs and those around her had been spewed out the south exit of the tent. Once outside, she'd fallen to her knees on the grass, crawling away from the crowd. No longer trapped in an enclosed space with a potential bomb or an armed terrorist, the audience became better Samaritans and helped those who were woozy or hurt.
She'd flagged down an officer from the Bomb Squad and, looking at him upside down from her grassy bed, flashed her badge and told him about the tarp-covered object under the seats near the south door. He'd returned to his colleagues inside.
Then the brassy music from the tent had stopped and Edward Kadesky stepped outside.
Watching the Bomb Squad at work, some of the audience realized that there'd been a real threat and that Kadesky's quick thinking had saved them from a worse panic; they offered some impromptu applause, which he'd acknowledged modestly as he made the rounds, checking on his employees and the audience.
Other circusgoers--injured and otherwise--were less generous and scowled and demanded to know what had happened and complained that he should have handled the evacuation better.
Meanwhile the Bomb Squad and a dozen firemen had scoured the tent and found no sign of a device. The tarp-covered box had turned out to be cartons of toilet paper. The search expanded to the trailers and supply trucks but the officers found nothing there either.
Sachs frowned. They'd been wrong? How could that be? she wondered. The evidence was so clear. It was Rhyme's way to make bold assumptions about evidence and sometimes, sure, he made mistakes. But in the case of the Conjurer it seemed that all the evidence had come together and pointed directly to the Cirque Fantastique as his target.
Had Rhyme heard that they'd found no bombs? she wondered. Rising unsteadily, she went off in search of someone's radio to borrow; her Motorola, now lying in pieces near the south door of the tent, had apparently been the sole fatality of the panic.
*
Stepping quietly out of the music room in Charles Grady's apartment, Malerick walked back into the darkened hallway and paused, listening to the voices from the living room and kitchen.
Wondering just how dangerous this would be.
He'd taken steps to make it less likely that Grady's bodyguards would panic and gun him down. At his lunch at the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction two weeks ago, meeting with Jeddy Barnes and other militiamen from upstate New York, Malerick had laid out his plan. He'd decided it'd be best to have someone make an attempt on the prosecutor's life before Malerick's invasion of Grady's apartment today. The universal choice for a fall guy was some pervert of a minister from Canton Falls named Ralph Swensen. (Barnes had some leverage on the reverend but explained to Malerick that he hadn't fully trusted him. So after his escape from the Harlem River yesterday the illusionist had donned his janitor's costume and had followed the reverend from his fleabag hotel to Greenwich Village--just to make sure the loser didn't balk at the last minute.)
Malerick's plan called for Swensen's attempt to fail (the gun Barnes provided had a broken firing pin). Malerick had theorized that catching one assassin would lull Grady's guards into complacency and make them psychologically less likely to react violently when they saw a second killer.
Well, that was the theory, he reflected uneasily. Let's see if it holds up in practice.
Walking silently past more bad art, past more family portraits, past stacks of magazines--law reviews and Vogues and The New Yorker s--and scabby street-fair antiques the Gradys had bought intending to refinish but that sat as permanent testimonials to the proposition there just aren't enough hours in the day.
Malerick knew his way around the apartment; he'd been here once before briefly--disguised as a maintenance man--but that had been basic reconnaissance, learning the layout, the entrance and escape routes. He hadn't spent any time noticing the personal side of the family's life: the diplomas of Grady and his wife, who was also an attorney. Wedding photos. Snapshots of relatives and a gallery's worth of pictures of their blonde nine-year-old daughter.
Malerick recalled his meeting with Barnes and his associates over lunch. The militiamen had digressed into a cold debate about whether it made sense to kill Grady's wife and daughter too. According to Malerick's plan, sacrificing Swensen made sense. But what was the point, he'd wondered, of killing Grady's family? He'd posed this question to Barnes and the others between bites of very good roast turkey.
"Well now, Mr. Weir," Jeddy Barnes had said to Malerick. "That's a good question. I'd say you should kill 'em just because."
And Malerick had nodded, offering a thoughtful expression; he knew enough never to condescend to either an audience or fellow performers. "Well, I don't mind killing them," he'd explained. "But wouldn't it make more sense to leave them alive unless they're a risk--like a risk they could identify me? Or, say, the little girl goes for the phone to call the police? Probably there are some of your people who'd object to killing women and children."
"Well, it's your plan, Mr. Weir," Barnes had said. "We'll go with what you think." Though the idea of temperance seemed to leave him vaguely dissatisfied.
Now Malerick stopped outside Grady's living room and hung a fake NYPD badge around his neck, the one he'd flashed at the cops near the Cirque Fantastique when he'd sent them home for the day. He glanced in a flea-market mirror whose surface needed to be recoated.
Yes, he was in role, looking just like a detective here to protect a prosecutor against whom vicious death threats had been made.
A deep breath. No butterflies.
And now, Revered Audience, lights up, curtain up.
The real show is about to begin. . . .
Hands held naturally at his sides, Malerick turned the corner of the corridor and strode into the living room.
Chapter Thirty-two "Hey, how's it going?" the man in the gray suit asked, startling Luis Martinez, the quiet, bulky detective working for Roland Bell.
The guard was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, a Sunday New York Times in his lap. "Man, surprised me." He nodded a greeting, glanced at the newcomer's badge and ID and then scanned his face. "You the relief?"
"That's right."
"How'd you get in? They give you a key?"
"Got one downtown." He was speaking in a throaty whisper, like he had a cold.
"Lucky you," Luis muttered. "We've gotta share one. Pain in the ass."
"Where's Mr. Grady?"
"In the kitchen. With his wife and Chrissy. How come you're early?"
"I dunno," the man replied. "I'm just the hired help. This's the time they told me."
"Story of our lives, huh?" Luis said. He frowned. "I don't think I know you."
"Name's Joe David," the man said. "Usually work over in Brooklyn."
Luis nodded. "Yeah, that's where I cut my teeth, the Seventy."
"This is my first rotation here. Bodyguard detail, I mean."
A loud commercial came on the TV.
"Sorry," Luis said. "I missed that. Your first rotation, you said?"
"Right."
The big detective said, "Okay, how 'bout your last too?" Luis dropped the newspaper and leaped up from the couch, drawing his Glock smoothly and pointing it at the man he knew was Erick Weir. Normally placid, Luis now shouted into his microphone, "He's here! He got in--in the living room!"
Two other officers who'd been waiting in the kitchen--Detective Bell and that fat lieutenant, Lon Sellitto--shoved through another doorway, both with astonished looks on their faces. They grabbed Weir's arms and pulled a silenced pistol from his belt.
"Down, now, now, now!" Sellitto shouted in a raw, edgy voice, his gun pressed into the man's face. And what an expression was on it! Luis thought. He'd seen a lot of surprised perps over the years. But this guy took the prize. He was gasping, couldn't speak. But Luis supposed he wasn't any more surprised than the cops were.
"Where the hell d'he come from?" Sellitto asked breathlessly. Bell only shook his head in dismay.
As Luis double-cuffed Weir roughly, Sellitto leaned close to the perp. "You alone? You got backup outside?"
"No."
"Don't bullshit us!"
"My arms, you're hurting my arms!" Weir gasped.
"Anybody else with you?"
"No, no, I swear."
Bell was calling the others on his handy-talkie. "Heaven help me--he got inside. . . . I don't know how."
Two uniformed officers assigned to the Saving the Witness's Ass Team hurried into the apartment from the hallway, where they'd been hiding near the elevator. "Looks like he jimmied the window on this floor," one of them said. "You know, the window at the fire escape."
Bell glanced at Weir and he understood. "The ledge from the Lanham? You jumped?"
Weir said nothing but that had to be the answer. They'd stationed officers in the alley between the Lanham and Grady's building and on the roofs of both structures too. But it had never occurred to them he'd walk along the ledge and leap over
the air shaft.
Bell asked the officers, "And no sign of anybody else?"
"Nope. Looks like he was solo."
Sellitto donned latex gloves and patted him down. The search yielded burglary tools and various props and magic supplies. The oddest were the fake fingertips, glued on tightly. Sellitto pulled them off and deposited them in a plastic evidence bag. If the situation weren't so unnerving--that a hired killer had actually gotten into the apartment of the family they were protecting--the image of the ten finger pads in a bag would've been comical.
They looked over their prey as Sellitto continued to search him. Weir was muscular and in excellent shape, despite the fact that the fire had caused some serious damage--the scarring was quite extensive.
"Any ID?" Bell asked.
Sellitto shook his head. "FAO Schwarz." Meaning low-quality fake NYPD badge and ID card. Not much better than toys.
Weir glanced toward the kitchen, which he could see was empty. He frowned.
"Oh, the Gradys aren't here," Bell said, as if it were obvious.
The man closed his eyes and rested his head on the threadbare carpet. "How? How did you figure it out?"
Sellitto supplied an answer of sorts. "Well, guess what? There's somebody who'd love to answer that question for you. Come on, we're going for a ride."
*
Looking over the shackled killer standing in the doorway of the lab, Lincoln Rhyme said, "Welcome back."
"But . . . the fire." Dismayed, the man looked toward the stairway that led up to the bedroom.
"Sorry we ruined your performance," Rhyme said coldly. "I guess you couldn't quite escape from me after all, could you, Weir?"
He turned his gaze back to the criminalist and hissed, "That's not my name anymore."
"You changed it?"
Weir shook his head. "Not legally. But Weir's who I used to be. I go by something else now."
Rhyme recalled psychologist Terry Dobyns's observation that the fire had "murdered" Weir's old persona and he'd become somebody else.
The killer now looked over Rhyme's body. "You understand that, don't you? You'd like to forget the past and become somebody else too, I'd imagine."
"What are you calling yourself?"
"That's between me and my audience."
The Vanished Man Page 28
