Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

• • •

"Hey there, you okay?"

Bell touched Amelia Sachs on the arm. She was so shaken by Kara's death that she couldn't answer. She nodded, breathless with grief.

Ignoring the pain in her knees from the earlier jogging, Sachs and the detective continued quickly up West End toward where Patrolman Burke had radioed that he'd collared the killer.

Wondering if Kara had siblings. Oh, God, we'll have to tell her family.

No, not we.

I'll have to do it. This's my fault. I make that call.

Sick with the sorrow she hurried toward the alleyway. Bell glanced at her again, inhaling deeply to catch his breath.

But at least they'd caught the Conjurer.

Though she was, in her private heart, sorry she hadn't been the arresting officer. She wished she'd found herself alone in the alley facing the Conjurer, a gun in his hand. She might've used the Glock before the Motorola and tapped his shoulder with a single round. In movies shoulder shots were just flesh wounds, inconveniences, and the heroes survived with nothing more than a sling. The truth, though, was that even a small bullet wound changed your life for a long, long time. Sometimes forever.

But the killer had been caught and she'd have to be satisfied with multiple murder convictions.

Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry…

Kara…

Sachs realized she didn't even know her real name.

It's my stage name but I use it most of the time. Better than the one my parents were kind enough to give me.

This small bit of missing information brought her close to tears.

She realized that Bell was saying something to her. "You, uhn, with us here, Amelia?"

A curt nod.

They turned the corner onto Eighty-eighth Street, where the patrolman had downed the perp. Both ends of the street were being sealed off by RMPs. Bell squinted up the block and noted an alleyway. "There," he said, pointing. He motioned several cops – both plainclothes detectives and uniformed patrol officers – to follow them.

"Okay, let's go wrap him up," Sachs muttered. "Man, I hope Grady goes for the needle."

They stopped and looked into the dim canyon. The alley was empty.

"Isn't this it?" Bell asked.

"He said Eight-eight, right?" Sachs asked. "A block and a half east of West End. I'm sure that was the call."

"Me too," a detective said.

"This's gotta be the place." She looked up and down the street. "No other alleys."

Three more officers joined them. "We get it wrong?" one asked, looking around. "This the place or not?"

Bell called on his Motorola, "Portable Five Two One Two, respond, K."

No answer.

"Portable Five Two, what street are you on, K?"

Sachs squinted down the alley. "Oh, no." Her heart sank.

Running forward, she found, resting on the cobblestones near a pile of garbage, a pair of handcuffs, open. Next to them was a plastic hog tie, which had been severed. Bell ran up beside her.

"He got out of the goddamn cuffs and cut the restraint." Sachs looked around.

"Well, where are they?" one of the uniformed officers asked.

"Where's Larry?" another one called.

"In pursuit?" somebody else offered. "Maybe he's out of reception area."

"Maybe," drawled Bell, the concern in his tone reflecting the fact that the workhorse Motorolas rarely malfunctioned and their reception in the city was better than most cell phones'.

Bell called in a 10-39, escaped suspect, with an officer missing or in pursuit.

He asked the dispatcher if there'd been any transmissions from Burke but was told there'd been none. No third-party reports of shots fired in the vicinity either.

Sachs walked the length of the alley, looking for any clues that might suggest where the killer had gone or where the Conjurer might've dumped the patrol officer's body if he'd gotten control of Burke's gun and killed him. But neither she nor Bell found any sign of the officer or the perp. She returned to the cluster of cops at the mouth of the alley.

What a terrible day. Two dead this morning. Kara too.

And now a police officer was missing.

Her hand rose to the speaker/mike of her SP-50 handy-talkie and pulled it off her shoulder. Time to tell Rhyme. Oh, brother. Don't want to make this call. She called in to Central on the radio and asked for a patch. As she was waiting for the call to go through she felt a tug on her sleeve.

Sachs turned. As she inhaled a shocked breath the mike slipped from her hand and swung at her side, a pendulum.

Two people stood in front of her. One was the balding officer Sachs had been giving orders to at the fair ten minutes ago.

The other was Kara, wearing an NYPD windbreaker. Frowning, the young woman looked up and down the alley. She asked, "So where is he?"

"Are you all right?" Sachs stammered. "What… Wait, what happened?"

"All right? Yeah, I'm fine…" Kara took in the woman's astonished gaze and said, "You mean you didn't know?"

The balding officer said to Sachs, "I tried to tell you. But you ran off before I had a chance."

"Tell me…?" Sachs's voice stopped working. She was so stunned – and riddled with relief – that she couldn't speak.

"You thought I was really hurt?" Kara said. "Oh, God."

Bell walked up, nodding a greeting to Kara, who said, "Amelia didn't know."

"About?"

"Our plan. The fake stabbing."

The expression on Bell 's face was pure shock. "Lord, you thought she was really dead?"

The patrol officer repeated to Bell, "I tried to let her know. First, I couldn't find her and then, when I did, she just tells me to seal the scene and call the M. E. and takes off."

Kara explained, "Roland and I were talking? And we figured that the Conjurer was going to hurt somebody for real – maybe set a fire or shoot or stab somebody. You know, to misdirect us so he could get away. So we thought we'd make up our own misdirection."

"To flush that boy outta the brush," Bell added. "She got some catsup at the concession stand, squirted it on herself, screamed then fell down."

Kara opened the blue windbreaker to reveal the red stain on her purple tank top.

The detective continued, "Was worried a few folks at the fair'd be all tore up over it -"

Well, I'd guess…

"- but we were thinking that'd be better than somebody really getting clocked or stabbed by the Conjurer." Bell added proudly, "Was her idea. No foolin'."

"I'm getting a feel for how he thinks," the young woman said.

"Jesus." Sachs found herself trembling. "It was so real."

Bell nodded. "She does dead good."

Sachs gave her a hug then said sternly, "But from now on, stay close. Or keep me in the loop. I'm too young for heart attacks."

They waited a short while but no reports came in of suspects spotted in the area. Finally Bell said, "You search the scene here, Amelia. I'm going to go interview the victim. See if she can tell us anything. Meet you back at the fair."

A crime scene bus was parked on Eighty-Eighth Street. She walked to it and began to collect her equipment to run the scene. A voice clattered through her dangling speaker, startling her. She pulled her hands-free headset off her belt and plugged it in. "Five Eight Eight Five. Repeat, K."

"Sachs, what the hell's going on? I heard you had him and now he's gone?"

She told Rhyme what had happened, about flushing the Conjurer from the fair.

"Kara's idea? Playing dead? Hmm." The final sound – a grunt really – was a high compliment, coming from Lincoln Rhyme.

"But he's disappeared," Sachs added. "And we can't find that officer either. Maybe he's in pursuit. But we don't know. Roland's interviewing the woman we saved. See if she has any leads."