The Vanished Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  Head back in the pillow.

  Kara's hands clenched into knotted fists. Her breath came fast. "It's me, Mum! Me! The Royal Kid. Can't you see me?"

  "You?"

  Goddamnit! Kara raged silently to the demon who'd possessed the poor woman and muffled her soul. Leave her alone! Give her back to me!

  "Hi there." A woman's voice from the doorway startled Kara, who subtly lifted several tears off her cheek, as smoothly as executing a French drop, before she turned around.

  "Hey," she said to Amelia Sachs. "You tracked me down."

  "I'm a cop. That's what we do." She walked into the room, holding two Starbucks cups. She glanced at the container in Kara's hand. "Sorry. Redundant present."

  Kara thumped the carton she was holding. Almost out. She took the second cup gratefully. "Caffeine'll never go to waste around me." She started sipping. "Thanks. You guys have fun?"

  "Sure did. That woman's a scream. Jaynene. Thom's in love with her. And she actually made Lincoln laugh."

  "She has that effect on people," Kara said. "A way good soul."

  Amelia said, "Balzac dragged you away pretty fast at the end of the show. I just wanted to come by and thank you again. And to say that you should send us a bill for your time."

  "I never thought about it. You introduced me to Cuban coffee. That's payment enough."

  "No, invoice us something. Send it to me and I'll make sure it goes to the city."

  "Playing G-woman," Kara said. "It'll be a story I'll tell my grandkids. . . . Hey, I'm free for the rest of the night--Mr. Balzac's off with his friend. I was going to see some people down in SoHo. You want to come?"

  "Sure," the policewoman said. "We could--" She looked up, over Kara's shoulder. "Hello."

  Kara glanced behind her and saw her mother, looking with curiosity at the policewoman, and sized up the gaze. "She's not really with us right now."

  "It was during the summer," the elderly woman said. "June, I'm pretty sure." She closed her eyes and lay back.

  "Is she okay?"

  "Just a temporary thing. She'll come back soon. Her mind's a little funny sometimes." Kara stroked the old woman's arm then asked Sachs, "Your parents?"

  "It'll sound familiar, I've got a feeling. Father's dead. My mother lives near me in Brooklyn. Little too close for comfort. But we've come to an . . . understanding."

  Kara knew that understandings between mother and daughter were as complex as international treaties and she didn't ask Amelia to elaborate, not now. There'd be time for that in the future.

  A piercing beep filled the room and both women reached for the pagers on their belts. Amelia won. "I shut my cell off when I got here. There was a sign in the lobby that said I couldn't use it. You mind?" She nodded toward the telephone on the table.

  "No, go ahead."

  She picked up the phone and dialed and Kara rose to straighten the blankets on her mother's bed. "Remember that bed-and-breakfast we stayed at in Warwick, Mum? Near the castle?"

  Do you remember? Tell me you remember!

  Amelia's voice: "Rhyme? Me."

  Kara's unilateral conversation was interrupted a few seconds later, though, when she heard the officer's voice ask a sharp, "What? When?"

  Turning to the policewoman, Kara frowned. Amelia was looking at her, shaking her head. "I'll get right down there. . . . I'm with her now. I'll tell her." She hung up.

  "What's the matter?" Kara asked.

  "Looks like I can't join you guys after all. We must've missed a lock pick or key. Weir got out of his cuffs at detention and went for somebody's gun. He was killed."

  "Oh, my God."

  Amelia walked to the doorway. "I've got to run the scene down there." She paused and glanced at Kara. "You know, I was worried about keeping him under guard during the trial. That man was just too slippery. But I guess sometimes there is justice. Oh, that bill? Whatever you were going to charge, double it."

  *

  "Constable's got some information," the man's voice came crisply through the phone.

  "He's been playing detective, has he?" Charles Grady asked the lawyer wryly.

  Wryly--but not sarcastically. The prosecutor had nothing against Joseph Roth, who--though he represented scum--was a defense lawyer who managed to step around the slime trail left by his clients and who treated D.A.'s and cops with honesty and respect. Grady reciprocated.

  "Yeah, he has. Made some calls up to Canton Falls and put the fear of God into a couple of the Patriot Assembly folks. They checked things out. Looks like some of the former members've gone rogue."

  "Who is it? Barnes? Stemple?"

  "We didn't go into it in depth. All I know is he's pretty upset. He kept saying, 'Judas, Judas, Judas.' Over and over."

  Grady couldn't stir up much sympathy. You lie down with dogs. . . . He said to the lawyer, "He knows I'm not letting him off scot-free."

  "He understands that, Charles."

  "You know Weir's dead?"

  "Yep. . . . I've got to tell you Andrew was happy to hear it. I really believe he didn't have anything to do with trying to hurt you, Charles."

  Grady didn't have any use for opinions from defense counsel, even forthright ones like Roth. He asked, "And he's got solid information?"

  "He does, yes."

  Grady believed him. Roth was a man you simply could not fool; if he thought Constable was going to dime out some of his people then it was going to happen. How successful the resulting case would be was a different matter, of course. But if Constable gave relatively hard information and if the troopers did a halfway decent job with their investigation and arrest he was confident he could put the perps away. Grady would also make sure that Lincoln Rhyme oversaw the forensics.

  Grady had mixed feelings about Weir's death. While he'd publicly express his concern at the man's shooting and promise to look into it officially, he was privately delighted that the fucker'd been disposed of. He was still shocked and infuriated that a killer had walked right into the apartment where his wife and daughter lived, willing to murder them too.

  Grady looked at the glass of wine he so dearly wanted a sip of, but realized that a consequence of this phone call was that it precluded alcohol for the time being. The Constable case was so important that he needed all his wits about him.

  "He wants to meet you face-to-face," Roth said.

  The wine was a Grgich Hills Cabernet Sauvignon. A 1997, no less. Great vineyard, great year.

  Roth continued, "How soon can you get down to detention?"

  "A half hour. I'll leave now."

  Grady hung up and announced to his wife, "The good news is no trial."

  Luis, the still-eyed bodyguard, said, "I'll go with you."

  After Weir's death Lon Sellitto had cut back the protection team to one officer.

  "No, you stay here with my family, Luis. I'd feel better."

  His wife asked cautiously, "If that's the good news, honey, what's the bad news?"

  "I have to miss dinner," the prosecutor said, tossing a handful of Goldfish crackers into his mouth and washing them down with a very large sip of very nice wine, thinking, hell with it, let's celebrate.

  *

  Sachs's war-torn yellow Camaro SS pulled to a stop outside 100 Centre Street. She tossed the NYPD placard onto the dash then climbed out. She nodded to a crime scene crew standing beside their RRV. "Where's the scene?"

  "First floor in the back. The corridor to intake."

  "Sealed?"

  "Yep."

  "Whose weapon?"

  "Linda Welles'. DOC. She's pretty shook up. Asshole broke her nose."

  Sachs grabbed one of the suitcases and, hooking it up to a wheelie luggage carrier, started for the front door of the Criminal Courts building. The other CS techs did the same and followed.

  This scene'd be a grounder, of course. An accidental shooting involving an officer and a suspect who'd tried to escape? Pro forma. Still, the event was a homicide and required a complete crime scene report for the Shooting I
ncident Board and any subsequent investigation and lawsuits. Amelia Sachs would run the scene as carefully as any other.

  A guard checked their IDs and led the team through a maze of corridors into the basement. Finally they came to a yellow police line tape across a closed door. Here she found a detective talking to a uniformed officer, her nose stuffed with tissue and bandaged.

  Sachs introduced herself and explained that she was going to be running the scene. The detective stepped aside and Sachs asked Linda Welles what had happened.

  In a halting, nasal voice the guard explained that on the way from fingerprinting to intake the suspect had somehow undone his handcuffs. "It took him two, three seconds. All the cuffs. Just like that, they were open. He didn't get my key." She pointed to her blouse pocket, where presumably it resided. "He had a pick or key or something on his hip."

  "His pocket?" Sachs asked, frowning. She remembered they'd searched him carefully.

  "No, his leg. You'll see." She nodded toward the corridor where Weir's body lay. "There's a cut in his skin. Under a bandage. Everything happened so fast."

  Sachs supposed that he'd cut himself to create a hiding space. A queasy thought.

  "Then he grabbed my weapon and we were struggling for it. It just discharged. I didn't mean to pull the trigger. I didn't, really. But . . . I tried to keep control and I couldn't. It just discharged."

  Control . . . Discharge. The words, official copspeak, were perhaps an attempt to insulate her from the guilt she'd be feeling. This had nothing to do with the fact that a killer was dead, or that her life had been endangered, or that a dozen other officers had been taken in by this man; no, it was that this woman had stumbled. Women in the NYPD set the bar high; the falls are always harder than for men.

  "We collared and searched him at the takedown," Sachs said kindly. "And we missed the key too."

  "Yeah," the officer muttered. "But it's still gonna come up."

  At the shooting inquiry, she meant. And, yeah, it would.

  Well, Sachs'd do a particularly thorough job on her report to give this officer as much support as possible.

  Welles touched her nose gently. "Oh, that hurts." Tears were streaming from her eyes. "What're my kids going to say? They always ask me if I do anything dangerous. And I tell 'em no. Look at this. . . ."

  Pulling on latex gloves, Sachs asked for the woman's Glock. She took it, dropped the clip and ejected the round in the chamber. Everything went into a plastic evidence bag.

  Slipping into her sergeant mode, Sachs said, "You can take an LOA, you know."

  Welles didn't even hear her. "It just discharged," the woman said in a hollow voice. "I didn't want it to. I didn't want to kill anybody."

  "Linda?" Sachs said. "You can take an LOA. A week, ten days."

  "I can?"

  "Talk to your supervisor."

  "Sure. Yeah. I could do that." Welles rose and wandered over to the medic treating her partner, who had a nasty bruise on his neck but who otherwise seemed all right.

  The CS team set up shop outside the door to the corridor where the shooting had occurred, opening the suitcases and arranging evidence collection equipment, friction ridge supplies and video and still cameras. Sachs dressed in the white Tyvek suit and accessorized with rubber bands around her feet.

  She fitted the microphone over her head and asked for a radio patch to Lincoln Rhyme's phone. Ripping down the police tape, she opened the door, thinking: A slit in the skin to hide lock picks and cuff keys? Of all the perps she and Lincoln had been up against, the Conjurer was--

  "Oh, goddamn," she spat out.

  "Hello to you too, Sachs," Rhyme said acerbically through her headset. "At least I think it's you. Hell of a lot of static."

  "I don't believe it, Rhyme. The M.E. took the body before I could process it." Sachs was looking into the corridor, bloody but empty.

  "What?" he snapped. "Who approved that?"

  The rule in crime scene work was that emergency medical personnel could enter a scene to save an injured person but, in the case of homicide, the body had to remain untouched by everyone, including the tour doctor from the Medical Examiner's office, until it'd been processed by someone from forensics. This was fundamental police work and the career of whoever'd released the Conjurer's corpse was now in jeopardy.

  "There a problem, Amelia?" one of the techs called from the doorway.

  "Look," she said angrily, nodding into the corridor. "The M.E. got the body before we processed it. What happened?"

  The crew cut young tech frowned. He glanced at his partner then said, "Uhm, well, the tour doc's outside. He was the guy we were talking to when you showed up. The one feeding the pigeons. He was waiting to move the body till we were finished."

  "What's going on?" Rhyme growled. "I hear voices, Sachs."

  To him she said, "There's a crew from the M.E.'s office outside, Rhyme. Sounds like they haven't picked up the body. What's--"

  "Oh, Jesus Christ. No!"

  The chill went straight to her soul. "Rhyme, you don't think--?"

  He barked out, "What do you see, Sachs? What's the blood spatter look like?"

  She ran to where the shooting had happened and studied the bloodstain on the wall. "Oh, no. It doesn't look normal for a gunshot, Rhyme."

  "Brain matter, bone?"

  "Gray matter, yeah. But it doesn't look right either. There is some bone. Not much, though, for a close-range shot."

  "Do a presumptive blood test. That'll be dispositive."

  She sped back to the doorway.

  "What's going . . . ?" one of the techs asked but he fell silent as he watched her dig frantically through the suitcases.

  Sachs grabbed the Kastle-Meyer catalytic blood kit then returned to the corridor and took a swab from the wall. She treated this with phenolphthalein and a moment later she had the answer. "I don't know what it is but it's definitely not blood." She glanced down at the ruddy smears on the floor. This, however, looked real. She tested a sample and it showed positive. Then she noticed a bloody razor knife blade in the corner. "Christ, Rhyme he faked the shooting. Cut himself somewhere to bleed for real and fool the guards."

  "Call security."

  Sachs yelled, "It's an escape--have the exits sealed!"

  The detective jogged into the hallway and stared at the floor. Linda Welles joined him, her eyes wide. The momentary relief that she hadn't in fact been involved in a man's death faded fast as she realized the far-worse implications of what had happened. "No! He was there. His eyes were open. He looked dead." Her voice was high, frantic. "I mean, his head . . . it was all bloody. I could see . . . I could see the wound!"

  You could see the illusion of a wound, Sachs thought bitterly.

  The detective called out, "They've notified the guards at all the exits. But, Christ, this isn't a lockdown corridor. As soon as we closed the doors here he could've stood up and wandered anywhere. He's probably stealing a car right now or on the subway to Queens."

  Amelia Sachs began giving orders. Whatever the detective's rank he was so shaken by the escape that he didn't question her authority. "Get an escape bulletin out now," she said. "All agencies in the metro area. Federal and state. Don't forget MTA. The name is Erick Weir. White male. Early fifties. You've got the mug shot."

  "What's he wearing?" the detective asked Welles and her partner, who both struggled to remember. They gave a rough description.

  Sachs was thinking, though, that it hardly mattered. He'd be in different clothing now. She gazed down the four tentacles of dim corridors she could see from here and observed silhouettes of dozens of people. Guards, janitors, cops . . .

  Or maybe the Conjurer, disguised as one of them.

  But for the moment she left the issue of pursuit in others' hands and turned back to her own area of expertise: the crime scene, whose search was supposed to be a brief formality but had now become a matter of life and death.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Making his way cautiously through th
e basement of the Manhattan Detention Center, Malerick was reflecting on his escape, offering silent patter to his revered audience.

  Let me share with you a trick of the illusionist's trade.

  To truly fool people it's not enough to misdirect them during the illusion. This is because when confronted with a phenomenon that defies logic the human brain continues to replay the scene afterward to try to understand what happened. We illusionists call this "reconstruction," and unless we set up our trick cleverly enough an intelligent, suspicious audience will be fooled only briefly and will figure out our method after the routine is over.

  So how do we trick audiences like this?

  We use the most implausible method we can--either one absurdly simple or overwhelmingly complex.

  An example: one famous illusionist appears to push an entire peacock feather through a handkerchief. Audiences rarely can figure out what kind of sleight of hand he uses to make it seem that the feather actually penetrates the cloth. What's the method? It does penetrate the cloth. There's a hole in the handkerchief! The audience considers this method at first but then invariably decides that it's too simple for such a great performer. They'd rather think he's doing something far more elaborate.

  Another: an illusionist met some friends for dinner at a restaurant and was asked to show them a few tricks. He declined at first but finally agreed. He took a spare tablecloth, held it up in front of a table of two lovers dining nearby and vanished the couple and their table in one second. The friends were astonished. How could he have done it? They never guessed that, supposing that he'd probably be invited to perform, the illusionist had arranged with the maitre d' to have a prepared, collapsible table on hand and hired an actor and actress to play the couple. When he'd held up the cloth they'd disappeared on cue.

  In reconstructing what they'd seen, the diners rejected the actual answer as too improbable for such an apparently impromptu performance.

  And this is what occurred with the illusion you just witnessed, one I call the Shot Prisoner.

  Reconstruction. Many illusionists forget about this psychological process. But Malerick never did. And he'd considered it carefully when planning his escape in the detention center. The officers escorting him down the corridor to the lockup believed they saw a prisoner slip his cuffs, grab a gun and end up shot dead right in front of them.

  There was shock, there was dismay, there was horror.

  But even at such peak moments the mind does what it must and before the smoke dissipated the officers were analyzing the events and considering options and courses of action. Like any audience they engaged in reconstruction and, knowing that Erick Weir was a skilled illusionist, undoubtedly wondered if the shooting had been faked.