Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

Sachs shook her head. "Where the hell's Bedford Junction?"

"Way upstate, I do believe," Mel Cooper said.

"There's a phone number on the receipt," Bell drawled. "Call ' em up. Ask Debby or Tanya, or whoever's the charmin' waitress if any regular foursome sits at" – he squinted at the receipt – "table twelve. Or at least if she remembers who ordered those things. Long shot, but who knows?"

"What's the number?" Sellitto asked.

Bell called it out.

It was a long shot – too long, as Rhyme had expected. The manager and the waitresses there had no idea who might've been in on that Saturday.

"It's a 'bustlin' spot,'" Sellitto reported, rolling his eyes. "That's a quote."

"I don't like it," Sachs said.

"What?"

"What's he doing having lunch with three other people?"

"Good point," Bell said. "You think he's working with somebody?"

Sellitto replied, "Naw, I doubt it. Pattern doers're almost always loners."

Kara disagreed. "I'm not sure. Close-in artists, parlor magicians – they work alone. But he's an illusionist, remember? They always work with other people. You've got volunteers from the audience. Then assistants onstage that the audience knows're working with the performer. And then there're confederates too. Those're people who're working for the illusionist but the audience doesn't know it. They might be disguised as stagehands, members of the audience, volunteers. In a good show you're never quite sure who's who."

Christ , Rhyme thought, this one perp was bad enough, with his skills at quick change, escape and illusionism. Working with assistants would make him a hundred times more dangerous.

"Mark it down, Thom," he barked. Then: "Let's look at what you found in the alley – where Burke collared him."

The first item was the officer's handcuffs.

"He got out of them in seconds. Had to've had a key," Sachs said. To the dismay of cops around the country most handcuffs can be opened with generic keys, available from law-enforcement supply houses for a few dollars. Rhyme wheeled over to the examination table and studied them carefully. "Turn them over… Hold them up… He might've used a key, true, but I see fresh scratches in the hole. I'd say it was picked…"

"But Burke would've frisked him," Sachs pointed out. "Where'd he get a pick?"

Kara offered, "Could've been hidden anywhere. His hair, his mouth."

"Mouth?"

Rhyme mused. "Hit the cuffs with the ALS, Mel."

Cooper donned goggles and shone an alternative light source on the cuffs. "Yep, we've got some tiny smears and dots around the keyhole." This meant, Rhyme explained to Kara, the presence of bodily fluid, saliva most likely.

"Houdini did that all the time. Sometimes he'd let somebody from the audience check his mouth out. Then just before he did the escape his wife'd kiss him – he said it was for luck but she was really passing a key from her mouth to his."

"But he'd be cuffed behind his back," Sellitto said. "How could he even reach his mouth?"

"Oh," Kara said with a laugh. "Any escapist can get cuffed hands in front of his body in three or four seconds."

Cooper tested the saliva traces. Some individuals secrete antibodies into all bodily fluids, which lets investigators determine blood type. The Conjurer, though, turned out not to be a secretor.

Sachs had also found a very tiny piece of serrated-edge metal.

"Yeah, it's his too," Kara said. "Another escapist tool. A razor saw. It's probably what he used to cut through those plastic bands on his ankles."

"Would that've been in his mouth too? Wouldn't it be too dangerous?"

"Oh, a lot of us hide needles and razor blades in our mouths as part of the acts. With practice it's pretty safe."

Examining the last of the trace from the alley scene, they found more bits of latex and traces of the makeup, identical to what they'd seen earlier. More Tack-Pure oil as well.

"At the riverside, Sachs, when he went into the river? You find anything?"

"Just skid marks in the mud." She pinned up the digital photos that Cooper had printed out from his computer. "Some helpful citizen managed to screw up the scene," she explained. "But I spent a half hour going through the muck. I'm pretty sure he didn't drop any evidence or bail out."

Sellitto asked Bell, "What about the vic, the Marston woman? She have anything to say?"

The Tarheel detective gave a summary of his interview with her.

An attorney , Rhyme considered. Why pick her? What the hell was the Conjurer's pattern with the victims? Musician, makeup artist and attorney.

Bell added, "She's divorced. Husband's out in California. Wasn't the friendliest divorce in the world but I don't reckon he's involved. I had LAPD make some calls and he was accounted for today. And there's no NCIC or VICAP sheet on him."

Cheryl Marston had described the Conjurer as slim, strong, bearded, scars on neck and chest. "Oh, and she confirmed his fingers were deformed, like we'd thought. Fused together, she said. He was hush about the neighborhood he lives in and he picked the alias 'John.' Now there's a clever boy for you."

Useless , Rhyme assessed.

Bell then explained how he'd picked her up and what had happened afterward.

Rhyme asked Kara, "Anything sound familiar?"

"He could've hypnotized a pigeon or gull, pitched it at the horse then used some kind of gimmick to keep the horse agitated."

"What kind of gimmick?" Rhyme asked. "You know any manufacturers?"

"No, that's probably homemade too. Magicians used to use electrodes or prods to get lions to roar on cue, things like that. But animal-rights activists'd never let you get away with that now."

Bell continued, describing what had happened when Marston and the Conjurer had gone to have coffee.

"One thing she said that was odd: it was like he could read her mind." Bell described what Marston had told him about the Conjurer's knowing so much about her.

"Body reading," Kara said. "He'd say something and then watch her close, check out her reactions. That'd tell him a lot about her. Coming on to somebody like that's called 'selling them the medicine.' A really good mentalist can find out all kinds of things just by having an innocent conversation with you."

"Then when she was gettin' comfortable with him he drugged her and took her to the pond. Dunked her upside down."

"It was a variation of the Water Torture Cell routine," Kara explained. "Houdini. One of his most famous."

"And his escape from the pond?" Rhyme asked Sachs.

"At first I wasn't sure it was him – he'd done a quick change," she said. "His clothes were different and" – a glance at Kara – "his eyebrows too. I couldn't get a look at his hand, to see the fingers. But he distracted me, used ventriloquism. I was looking right at his face – I never saw his lips move."

Kara said, "I'll bet he picked words that didn't have any b's or m's or p's. Probably no f's or v's either."

"You're right. I think it was something like, 'Yo, look out, on your right, that guy in the jogging suit's got a gun.' Perfect black dialect." She grimaced. "I looked away – the same direction he looked, like everybody else. Then he set off that flash cotton and I got blinded. He fired the squibs and I thought he was shooting. He got me cold."

Rhyme saw the disgust in her face. Amelia Sachs reserved her worst anger for herself.

Kara, though, said, "Don't take it too hard. Hearing's the easiest sensation to fool. We don't use sound illusions much in shows. They're cheap shots."

Sachs shrugged this reassurance off and continued, "While Roland and I were still blinded from the flash he took off and disappeared, slipped into the crafts fair." Another grimace. "And then I saw him fifteen minutes later – this biker, wearing a Harley shirt. I mean, for God's sake, he was right there in front of me."