Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

Bell had ordered Grady and his family not to attend their daughter's recital. In their place a team of ESU troopers would drive to the school in Grady's city car. Teams stationed themselves north of the school on Fifth Avenue, on cross streets west at Sixth Avenue and east at University Place and south in Washington Square Park.

Sure enough, Bell, who'd taken the park, had spotted a minister walking nervously toward the school. Bell had started to tail him but was spotted so he'd peeled off. Another SWAT officer picked up and tracked him to the school. A third detective from Bell's SWAT group approached and asked about the concert, checking visually for signs of weapons, but not finding any obvious ones – and hence having no probable cause to detain and search him.

But the suspect remained under close surveillance and as soon as he was seen pulling the gun from his attaché case and starting for the decoys he was taken down.

Expecting a fake priest, they'd been surprised to find that they'd caught a real one, which the contents of Swensen's wallet confirmed – despite the contrary testimony of the embarrassingly bad sermon. Bell nodded at the H &K automatic.

"Pretty big gun for a priest," he said.

"I'm a minister."

"Meant to say."

"Ordained."

"Good for you. Now I'm wondering: I read you those rights. You want to waive your right to remain silent? Tell you, sir, you bow up to what you just did and things'll go a lot easier for you. Tell us who wanted you to kill Mr. Grady."

"God."

"Hmm," Bell said. "Okay. How 'bout anybody else?"

"That's all I'm saying to you or to anybody. That's my answer. God."

"Well, all right, let's getcha downtown now and see if He's inclined to throw bail for you."

They call that music?

A thud of a drum and then the raw sound of a brass instrument rehearsing short passages penetrated Rhyme's parlor. It was coming from the Cirque Fantastique, across the street in the park. The notes were jarring and the tone gaudy and brash. He tried to ignore it and returned to his phone conversation with Charles Grady, who was thanking him for his efforts in collaring the minister who'd come to town to kill him.

Bell had just interrogated Constable, down at the Detention Center. The prisoner said he knew Swensen but had drummed him out of the Patriot Assembly over a year ago because of an "unhealthy interest" in the daughters of some parishioners.

Constable had had nothing to do with the man after that and he'd fallen in with some backwoods militiamen, according to local gossip. The prisoner adamantly denied that he knew anything about the attempted killing.

Still, Grady had arranged to have delivered to Rhyme a box of evidence from the crime scene at the Neighborhood School and one from the Reverend Swensen's hotel room. Rhyme had looked through it quickly but found no obvious connection to Constable. He explained this to Grady and added, "We need to get it to some forensic people upstate, in – what's the town?"

" Canton Falls."

"They can do some soil or trace comparisons. There might be something linking Swensen to Constable but I don't have any samples from up there."

"Thanks for checking, Lincoln. I'll have somebody get it up there ASAP."

"If you want me to write an expert's opinion on the results I'd be happy to," the criminalist said then had to repeat the offer; the last half was drowned out by a particularly raucous horn solo.

Hell, yes, I could write better music than that , he thought.

Thom called time-out and took Rhyme's blood pressure. He found the results high.

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

"Well, for the record, I don't like a lot of things," Rhyme responded petulantly, frustrated with their slow progress with the case: a tech at the FBI lab in D.C. had called and said that it would be morning before they'd have any report on the bits of metal found in the Conjurer's bag. Redding and Saul had called more than fifty hotels in Manhattan, but had found none that used APC key cards that matched the one found in the Conjurer's running jacket. Sellitto had also called the relief watch outside the Cirque Fantastique – fresh officers had replaced the two who'd been there since that morning – and they'd reported nothing suspicious.

And, most troubling of all, there'd been no luck in finding Larry Burke, the missing patrol officer who'd collared the Conjurer near the crafts fair. Dozens of officers were searching the West Side but had turned up no witnesses or evidence as to where he might be. One encouraging note, though: his body wasn't in the stolen Mazda. The car hadn't yet been raised but a diver who'd braved the currents reported that there were no bodies inside the car itself or the trunk.

"Where's the food?" Sellitto asked, looking out the window. Sachs and Kara had gone up the street to pick up some takeout from a nearby Cuban restaurant (the young illusionist was less excited about dinner than the prospect of her first Cuban coffee, which Thom described as "one-half espresso, one-half condensed milk, and one-half sugar," the concept of which, despite the impossible proportions, had instantly intrigued her).

The bulky detective turned to Rhyme and Thom and asked, "You ever have those Cubano sandwiches? They're the best."

But neither the food nor the case meant anything to the aide. "Time for bed."

"It's nine thirty-eight," Rhyme pointed out. "Practically afternoon. So it's not. Time. For. Bed." He managed to make his singsong voice sound both juvenile and threatening at the same time. "We have a fucking killer on the loose who keeps changing his mind about how often he wants to kill people. Every four hours, every two hours." A glance at the clock. "And he might just now be perpetrating his nine thirty-eight killing. I appreciate that you don't like it. But I have work to do."

"No, you don't. If you don't want to call it a night, all right. But we're going upstairs to take care of some things and then you're taking a nap for a couple of hours."

"Ha. You're just hoping I'll fall asleep till morning. Well, I won't. I'll stay awake all night."

The aide rolled his eyes. He announced in a firm voice, " Lincoln 'll be upstairs for a few hours."

"How'd you like to be out of work," Rhyme snapped.

"How'd you like to be in a coma?" Thom shot back.

"This is fucking crip abuse," he muttered. But he was giving in. He understood the danger. When a quad sits too long in one position or is constricted in the extremities or, as Rhyme loved to put it so indelicately in front of strangers, needs to piss or shit and hasn't for a while – there was a risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a soaring of the blood pressure that could result in a stroke, leading to more paralysis or death. Dysreflexia's rare but it'll send you to the hospital, or a grave, pretty damn fast, and so Rhyme acquiesced to a trip upstairs for the personal business and then a rest. It was moments like this – disruptions of "normal" life – that infuriated him most about his disability.

Infuriated and, though he refused to let on, deeply depressed him.

In the bedroom upstairs Thom took care of the necessary bodily details. "Okay. Two hours' rest. Get some sleep."

"One hour," Rhyme grumbled.

The aide was going to argue but then he glanced at Rhyme's face and, while he probably saw anger and don't-fuck-with-me eyes, which wouldn't have affected him one bit, he observed too the criminalist's heartfelt concern for the next victims on the Conjurer's list. Thom conceded, "One hour. If you sleep."

"An hour it is," Rhyme said. Then added wryly, "And I'll have the sweetest of dreams… A drink would help, you know."

The aide tugged at the subtle purple tie – a gesture of weakening that Rhyme seized on like a shark lapping a molecule of blood. "Just one," the criminalist said.