Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

Sachs then dressed in the Tyvek outfit and armed with camera and collection bags, and with rubber bands at last on her feet, she waded into the scene, starting with the remains of Carlos's destroyed mansion. She took her time and searched carefully. After this harrowing daylong pursuit Amelia Sachs was accepting nothing at face value. True, the Conjurer might be floating forty feet below the surface of the gray-brown water. But he could just as easily be crawling safely up the riverbank nearby.

She wouldn't even have been surprised to find out that he was already miles away, dressed in a new disguise, stalking his next victim.

• • •

The Reverend Ralph Swensen had been in town for several days – his first visit to New York City – and he'd decided he could never get used to the place.

The thin man, somewhat balding, somewhat shy, ministered to souls in a town thousands of times smaller than and dozens of years removed from Manhattan.

Whereas at home he looked out the window of his church to see rolling acres of land where placid animals grazed, here he looked out the barred window of his cheap hotel room near Chinatown and saw a brick wall with a swirl of grainy spray paint that was part of an obscenity.

Whereas at home when he walked down the street of his town, people would say, "Hello, Reverend," or "Great sermon, Ralph," here they would say, "Gimme a dollar," or "I got AIDS," or simply "Suck me."

Still, Reverend Swensen was here only for a brief time so he supposed he could survive a little culture shock for a bit longer.

For the past several hours he'd been trying to read the ancient, crumbling Gideon Bible the hotel had provided. But finally he gave up. The Gospel according to St. Matthew, as compelling as that story was, couldn't compete with the sound of a gay hooker and his client banging away at each other and howling loudly in pain or pleasure or, most likely, both.

The reverend knew he should be honored to have been picked for this mission to New York but he felt like the Apostle Paul on one of his missionary quests among the nonbelievers in Greece and Asia Minor, greeted with only derision and scorn.

Ah, ah, ah, ah… Right there, right there… Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it that's it that's…

Okay, that was it. Even Paul hadn't had to put up with this level of depravity.

The concert recital wasn't scheduled to start for several hours but Reverend Swensen decided to leave early. He brushed his hair, found his glasses and tossed the Bible, a map of the city and a sermon he was working on in his attaché case. He took the stairs to the lobby, where another prostitute was sitting. This one was – or appeared to be – a woman.

Our Father in heaven, full of grace…

A knot of tension in his gut, he hurried past, staring at the floor, anticipating a proposition. But she – or he, or whatever it was – merely smiled and said, "Beautiful weather, ain't it, Father?"

Reverend Swensen blinked and then smiled back. "Yes, it is," resisting the urge to add, "my child," which is something he'd never said in all his days as a minister. He settled for, "Have a nice day."

Outside, into the hard streets of the Lower East Side of New York City.

He paused on the sidewalk in front of the hotel as taxis shushed past, young Asians and Latinos hurried by purposefully, buses exhaled hot, metallic fumes and Chinese delivery boys on battered bicycles zipped over the sidewalk. It was all so very exhausting. Edgy and upset, the reverend decided that a walk to the school where the recital would be held would relax him. He'd consulted the map and knew it was a long way but he needed to do something to bleed off this mad anxiety. He'd do some window-shopping, stop for dinner, work on his sermon.

As he oriented himself for the walk he sensed that he was being watched. He glanced to his left, into the alley next to the hotel. A man stood half hidden by a Dumpster, a lean, brown-haired man in overalls, holding a small toolkit. He was looking the priest up and down in a way that seemed purposeful. Then, as if he'd been caught, he turned and receded into the alley.

Reverend Swensen tightened his grip on the attaché case, wondering if he'd made a mistake not staying in the safety of his room – foul and noisy though it was – until it was time for the recital. Then he gave a faint laugh. Relax , he told himself. The man had been nothing more than a janitor or handyman, maybe an employee of the hotel itself, surprised to see a minister step out of the sleazy place.

Besides, he reflected as he started walking north, he was a man of the cloth, a calling that surely had to give him some degree of immunity, even here in this modern-day Sodom.

Here one second, gone the next.

The red ball couldn't possibly get from Kara's outstretched right hand to the spot behind her ear.

But it did.

And after she'd plucked it away and tossed the crimson sphere into the air it couldn't possibly have vanished and ended up inside in the fold of her left elbow.

But it did that too.

How? Rhyme wondered.

She and the criminalist were in the downstairs lab of his townhouse, waiting for Amelia Sachs and Roland Bell. As Mel Cooper was setting the evidence out on examination tables and a CD pumped jazz piano into the room Rhyme was being treated to his own sleight-of-hand show.

Kara stood in front of a window, wearing one of Sachs's black T-shirts from the closet upstairs. Thom was currently washing her tank top, removing the Heinz 57 bloodstain from her improvised illusion at the crafts fair.

"Where'd you get those?" Rhyme asked, nodding at the balls. He hadn't seen her take them out of her purse or pocket.

She said with a smile that she'd "materialized" them (another trick magicians enjoyed, Rhyme had wryly observed, was transforming intransitive verbs into transitive ones).

"Where do you live?" he asked.

"The Village."

Rhyme nodded at some memories. "When my wife and I were together most of our friends lived down there. And SoHo, TriBeCa."

"I don't get north of Twenty-third much," she said.

A laugh from the criminalist. "In my day Fourteenth was the start of the demilitarized zone."

"Our side's winning, looks like," she joked as the red balls appeared and disappeared, moved from one hand to the other, then circulated in the air in an impromptu juggling act.

"Your accent?" he asked.

"I have an accent?" she asked.

"Intonation then, inflection… tone."

" Ohio probably. Midwest."

"Me too," Rhyme told her. " Illinois."

"But I've been here since I was eighteen. Went to school in Bronxville."

"Sarah Lawrence, drama," Rhyme deduced.

"English."

"And you liked it here and stayed."

"Well, I liked it once I got out of the 'burbs and into the city. Then after my father died my mother moved out here to be closer to me."

Daughter of a widowed mother… like Sachs , Rhyme reflected. He wondered if Kara had the same problems with her mother as Sachs'd had with hers. A peace treaty had been negotiated in recent years but in Sachs's youth her mother had been tempestuous, moody, unpredictable. Rose didn't understand why her husband wanted to be nothing more than a cop and why her daughter wanted to be anything other than what her mother wanted her to be. This naturally drove father and daughter into an alliance, which made matters worse. Sachs had told him that their refuge on bad days was the garage, where they found a comfortably predictable universe: when a carburetor didn't seat it was because a simple and just rule of the physical world had been broken – machine tolerances were off or a gasket had been cut wrong. Engines and suspensions and transmissions didn't subject you to melodramatic moods or cryptic diatribes and even at the worst they never blamed you for their own failings.