Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

"All right." He poured a little ancient Macallan into one of Rhyme's tumblers and arranged the straw next to his mouth.

The criminalist sipped long. "Ah, heaven…" Then he glanced at the empty glass. "Someday I'll teach you how to pour a real drink."

"I'll be back in an hour," Thom said.

"Command, alarm clock," Rhyme said sternly. On the flat-screen monitor a clock face appeared and he orally set the alarm to sound in one hour.

"I would've gotten you up," the aide said.

"Ah, well, just in case you were occupied and somehow forgot," Rhyme said coyly, "now I'll be sure to be awake, won't I?"

The aide left, closing the door behind him, and Rhyme's eyes slipped to the window, where the peregrine falcons perched, lording over the city, their heads turning in that odd way of theirs – both jerky and elegant at the same time. Then one – the female, the better hunter – glanced quickly at him, blinking her narrow slits of eyes, as if she'd just sensed his gaze. A cock of her head. Then she returned to her examination of the hubbub of the circus in Central Park.

Rhyme closed his eyes though his mind was speeding through the evidence, trying to figure out what the clues might mean: the brass, the hotel key, the press pass, the ink. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. … Finally his eyes sprang open. This was absurd. He wasn't the least bit tired. He wanted to get the hell back downstairs and return to work. Sleeping was out of the question.

He felt a breeze tickle his cheek and was angrier yet at Thom – for leaving the air-conditioning on. When a quad's nose runs, there goddamn well better be somebody nearby to wipe it. He summoned up the climate control panel on the monitor, thinking about telling Thom that he would've gotten to sleep except that the room was too cold. But one look at the screen told him that the air-conditioner was off.

What had the breeze been?

The door was still closed.

There! He felt it again, a definite waft of air on his other cheek, his right one. He turned his head quickly. Was it from the windows? No, they too were closed. Well, it was probably -

But then he noticed the door.

Oh, no , he thought, chilled to his heart. The door to his bedroom had a bolt on it – a latch that could be closed only by someone in his room. Not from the outside.

It was locked.

Another breath on his skin. Hot, this time. Very close. He heard a faint wheeze too.

"Where are you?" Rhyme whispered.

He gasped as a hand appeared suddenly in front of his face, two fingers deformed, fused together. The hand held a razor blade, the sharp edge aimed toward Rhyme's eyes.

"If you call for help," said the Conjurer in a breathy whisper, "if you make a noise, I'll blind you. Understood?"

Lincoln Rhyme nodded.

The blade in the Conjurer's hand vanished.

He didn't put it away, didn't hide it. One moment the metal rectangle was in his fingers, aimed at Rhyme's face; the next, it was gone.

The man – brown-haired, beardless, wearing a policeman's uniform – walked around the room, examining the books, the CDs, the posters. He seemed to nod approvingly at something. He studied one curious decoration: a small red shrine, inside of which was a likeness of the Chinese god of war and of police detectives, Guan Di. The Conjurer seemed to think nothing of the incongruity of such an item in the bedroom of a forensic scientist.

He returned to Rhyme.

"Well," the man said in his throaty whisper, looking over the Flexicair bed. "You're not what I expected."

"The car," Rhyme said. "In the river? How?"

"Oh, that?" he said dismissively. "The Submerged Car trick? I was never in the car. I got out in the bushes at the end of that street. A simple trick: a closed window – so the witnesses would see mostly glare – and my hat on the headrest. It was my audience's imagination that saw me. Houdini was never even in some of the trunks and barrels he pretended to escape from."

"So they weren't skid marks from braking," Rhyme said. "They were skid marks from accelerating tires." He was angry that he'd missed this. "You put a brick on the accelerator."

"A brick wouldn't've looked natural when the divers found the car; I wedged it down with a shoe." The Conjurer looked Rhyme over closely and asked in a wheezing voice, "But you never believed I was dead." Not a question.

"How did you get into the room without me hearing you?"

"I was here first. I slipped upstairs ten minutes ago. I was downstairs too in your war room, or whatever you call it. Nobody noticed me."

"You brought that evidence in?" Rhyme recalled being vaguely aware of two patrolmen carting in boxes of the evidence collected outside the Neighborhood School and the Reverend Swensen's hotel room.

"That's right. I was waiting on the sidewalk. This cop came up with a couple of boxes. I said hello and offered to help. Nobody ever stops you if you're in a uniform and you seem to have a purpose."

"And you've been hiding up here – covered up with a piece of silk that was the color of the walls."

"You caught on to that trick, did you?"

Rhyme frowned, looking at the man's uniform. It seemed genuine, not a costume.

But contrary to regulations there was no nameplate on the breast. His heart suddenly sank. He knew where it had come from. "You killed him, Larry Burke… You killed him and stole his clothes."

The Conjurer glanced down at the uniform and shrugged. "Reverse. Stole the uniform first," came the whispery, disembodied voice. "Convinced him that I wanted him naked to give me a chance to escape. He saved me the effort of stripping him afterward. Then I shot him."

Repulsed, Rhyme reflected that he'd considered the danger that the Conjurer had taken Burke's radio and his weapon. It hadn't occurred to him, though, that he'd use the man's uniform as a quick-change costume to attack his pursuers. He asked in a whisper, "Where's his body?"

"On the West Side."

"Where?"

"Keep that to myself, I think. Somebody'll find him in a day or two. Sniff him out. The weather's warm."

"You son-of-a-bitch," the criminalist snapped. He might be civilian now but in his heart Lincoln Rhyme would always be a cop. And there is no bond closer than that between fellow police officers.

The weather's warm. …

But he struggled to remain calm and asked casually, "How did you find me?"

"At the crafts fair. I got close to your partner. That redheaded policewoman. Very close. As close as I was to you just now. I breathed on her neck too – I'm not sure which I enjoyed more… Anyway I heard her talking to you on her radio. She mentioned your name. Then it just took a little research to find you. You've been in the papers, you know. You're famous."

"Famous? A freak like me?"

"Apparently."

Rhyme shook his head and said slowly, "I'm old news. The chain of command passed me by a long time ago."

The word "command" zipped from Rhyme's lips through the microphone mounted to the headboard into the voice recognition software in his computer. "Command" was the latch word that told the computer to be prepared for instructions. A window opened up on the monitor, which he could see but the Conjurer could not.

Instruction? it asked silently.

"Chain of command?" the Conjurer asked. "What do you mean?"

"I used to be in charge of the department. Now, sometimes the young officers, they won't even return my telephone call."

The computer seized the last two words of the sentence. Its response: Whom would you like to call?

Rhyme sighed. "I'll tell you a story: I needed to get in touch with an officer the other day. A lieutenant. Lon Sellitto."

The computer reported: Dialing Lon Sellitto.