Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

The Conjurer, however, simply gunned the engine and went though the gate. The kids scattered and he narrowly missed some of them as he sped up again to take out a second gate on the far side.

Sachs hesitated but decided not to follow – not in an unstable car with youngsters around. She sped around the block, praying she'd pick him up on the other side, then skidded around the corner and stopped.

No sign of him.

She didn't see how he'd gotten away. He'd been out of sight for only ten seconds or so as she made the sweep around the playground and the school. And the only other escape route was a short dead-end street, terminating in a wall of bushes and small saplings. Beyond that, she could see the elevated Harlem River Drive, beyond which was just a scuzzy mud bank leading down to the river.

So, he got away… And all I've got to show for the pursuit is five thousand bucks of bodywork. Man…

Then a voice crackled. "All units in the vicinity of Frederick Douglass and One-five-three Street, be advised of a ten-five-four." Car accident with probable injuries.

"Vehicle has gone into the Harlem River. Repeat, we have a vehicle in the water."

Could it be him? she wondered. "Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five. Further to that ten-five-four. You have the make of the vehicle? K."

"Mazda or Toyota. Late model. Beige."

"Okay, Central, believe that's the subject vehicle of the Central Park pursuit. I'm ten-eight-four at the scene. Out."

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Out."

Sachs sped her Camaro to the end of the cul-de-sac and parked on the sidewalk.

She climbed out as an ambulance and Emergency Services Unit truck arrived and rocked slowly through the brush, which had been crushed by the speeding Mazda.

She followed, walking carefully over the rubble. As they broke from the vegetation she saw a cluster of decrepit shanties and lean-tos. Dozens of homeless, mostly men. The place was muddy and filled with brush and garbage, dumped appliances, stripped, rusting cars.

Apparently the Conjurer, expecting to find a road on the other side of the bushes, had gone through the brush fast. She saw the panicked skid marks as he slid uncontrollably through the slick muck, careened off a shack, knocking it apart, then went off a rotting pier into the river.

Two ESU officers helped the residents of the shack out of the wreckage – they were unhurt – while others scanned the river for any sign of the driver. She radioed Rhyme and Sellitto and told them what had happened and asked the detective to call in a priority request for a crime scene rapid response bus.

"They get him, Amelia?" Sellitto asked. "Tell me they got him."

Looking at the slick of oil and gasoline on top of the choppy water, she said, "No sign."

Walking past a shattered toilet and a ripe-smelling trash bag, Sachs approached several men who were talking excitedly in Spanish among themselves. They held fishing rods; this was a popular place to use bloodworms or cut bait to catch stripers, bluefish and tommycod. They'd been drinking but were sober enough to give her a coherent account. The car had sped through the bushes fast and gone straight into the river.

They'd all seen a man in the driver's seat and they were positive he hadn't jumped out.

Sachs talked briefly with Carlos and his friend, the two homeless men who lived in the now-demolished shack. They were both stoned and, since they'd been inside when the Mazda struck it, they hadn't seen anything that could help. Carlos was belligerent and seemed to feel the city owed him some compensation for his loss.

Two other witnesses, ripping open trash bags for refundable bottles and cans at the time of the accident, reiterated the story of the fishermen.

More police cars were arriving, TV crews too, turning their cameras on what was left of the shack and on the police boat, off the stern of which two wet-suited divers were rolling backward into the water.

Now that the emergency activity had shifted to the river itself, the land-side operation became Amelia Sachs's. She had little crime scene equipment in the Camaro but she did have plenty of yellow tape, with which she now sealed off a large area of the riverbank. By the time she finished the RRV had arrived.

Hooking up her headset, she called Central and was patched through to Rhyme once more.

"We've been following it, Sachs. The divers haven't found anything yet?"

"Don't think so."

"Did he bail out?"

"Not according to the witnesses. I'm going to run the scene here on the riverbank, Rhyme," she told him. "It'll be good luck."

"Luck?"

"Sure. I go to the trouble to run the scene. That means the divers'll be sure to find his body and a search'll be a waste of time."

"There'll still be an inquiry and -"

"It was a joke, Rhyme."

"Yeah, well, this par- tic -ular perp doesn't make me feel like laughing. Get going on the grid."

She carried one of the CS suitcases to the perimeter of the scene and was opening it when she heard an accented voice call out urgently, "My God, what happened? Is everyone all right?"

Near the TV7 crews a well-coiffed Latino in jeans and a sports jacket pushed forward through the crowd. He squinted in alarm at the damaged shack and then began to run toward it.

"Hey," Sachs called. He didn't hear her.

The man ducked under the yellow tape and made straight for the shack, tramping over the Mazda's tire treads and possibly obliterating anything that the Conjurer might have thrown from the car or had fallen out – maybe even destroying the killer's own footprints if he had bailed, despite what the fishermen believed they'd seen.

Suspicious of everyone now, she checked out his left hand and could see that the index and little finger weren't fused together. So he wasn't the Conjurer. But who the hell is he? Sachs wondered. And what was he doing in her crime scene?

The man was now wading through the wreckage of the shack, grabbing planks and sheets of wood and corrugated metal, flinging them over his shoulder.

"Hey, you!" she called. "Get the hell out of there!"

He shouted over his shoulder, "There could be somebody inside!"

Angry now, she snapped, "This's a crime scene! You can't be in there."

"There could be somebody inside!" he repeated.

"No, no, no. Everybody's out. They're okay. Hey, you hearing me?… Excuse me, buddy. Are you hearing me?"

Whether he was or not apparently didn't matter, not to him. He continued to dig feverishly. What was his point? The man was dressed well and wearing a gold Rolex; crack-head Carlos was clearly not a relative.

Reciting to herself the famous cop's prayer – Lord, deliver us from concerned citizens – she gestured to two nearby patrol officers. "Get him out."

He was shouting, "We need more medics! There could be children inside."

Sachs disgustedly watched the officers' footprints adding to the slow erosion of her crime scene. They grabbed the intruder by the arms and pulled him to his feet. He yanked his arms away from the officers, haughtily called his name to Sachs as if he was some kind of mafioso that everybody should know and began to lecture her on the police's shameful treatment of the neglected Latino population here.

"Lady, do you have any idea -"

"Cuff him," she said. "Then get him the hell out of there." Deciding that the community relations part of the sergeant's handbook slogan took second place to criminal investigation in this case.

The officers ratcheted the cuffs on the red-faced man and he was led, fuming and cursing, out of the scene. "Want we should book him?" one officer called.

"Naw, just put him in time-out for a while," she shouted, drawing laughter from some of the onlookers. She watched him being deposited in the back of a squad car, yet another obstacle in the seemingly impossible search for an elusive killer.