Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

As she turned the corner Sachs counted a half-dozen fire trucks and ambulances.

At first she'd suspected he'd had an attack of dysreflexia. But this had clearly been a fire. She looked up to the second story and gasped in shock. Smoke was drifting out of Rhyme's bedroom window.

Jesus, no!

Sachs ducked under the police line and ran toward the cluster of firefighters in the doorway. She leaped up the front stairs, her arthritis momentarily forgotten. Then she was through the door, nearly slipping on the marble floor. The hallway and the lab seemed intact but a faint haze of smoke filled the downstairs hallway.

Two firemen were walking slowly down the stairs. It seemed their faces were filled with resignation.

" Lincoln!" she cried.

And started for the stairs.

"No, Amelia!" Lon Sellitto's gruff voice cut through the hallway.

She turned, panicked, thinking that he wanted to stop her from seeing his burned corpse. If the Conjurer had taken Lincoln away from her he was going to die.

Nothing in the world would stop her.

"Lon!"

He motioned her off the stairs and embraced her. "He's not up there, Amelia."

"Is -"

"No, no, it's okay. He's all right. Thom brought him down to the guest room in the back. This floor."

"Thank God," Kara said. She looked around in dismay at more firefighters coming down the stairs, large men and women swollen even larger by their uniforms and equipment.

Thom, grim-faced, joined them from the back of the hall. "He's all right, Amelia. No burns, some smoke inhalation. Blood pressure's high. But he's on his meds. It'll be okay."

"What happened?" she asked the detective.

"The Conjurer," Sellitto muttered. He sighed. "He killed Larry Burke. Stole his uniform. That's how he got in. Somehow he snuck up to Rhyme's room. He set a fire around his bed. We didn't even know it down here; somebody saw the smoke from the street and called nine-one-one. And Dispatch called me. Thom and Mel and I got most of it out before the trucks got here."

She asked Sellitto, "I don't suppose we got him, the Conjurer?"

A bitter laugh. "Whatta you think? He vanished. Thin air."

Following the accident that left him paralyzed, after Rhyme had graduated from the stage of grief that called for him to spend months willing his legs to work again, he gave up on the impossible and turned his considerable focus and strength of will to a more reasonable goal.

Breathing on his own.

A C4 quad like Rhyme – his neck broken at the fourth vertebra from the base of the skull – is on the borderline of needing a ventilator. The nerves that lead from the brain down to the diaphragm muscles may or may not be functioning. In Rhyme's case his lungs appeared at first not to be pumping properly and he was put on a machine, a hose implanted in his chest. Rhyme hated the device, with its mechanical gasping and the odd sensation of not feeling the need to breathe even though he knew he himself wasn't. (The machine also had the nasty habit of occasionally stopping cold.)

But then his lungs began working spontaneously and he was freed from the bionic device. The doctors said the improvement was due to his body's natural post-trauma stabilizing. But Rhyme knew the real answer. He'd done it himself. With willpower. Sucking air into his lungs – meager breaths at first, yes, but his own breaths all the same – was one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. He was now working hard at those exercises that might lead to increased sensation throughout his body and even movement of his limbs; but however successful he was with these he didn't think his sense of pride would match what he'd felt when he was taken off the ventilator for the first time.

Tonight, lying in his small guest room, he recalled seeing the clouds of smoke flowing from the cloth and paper and plastic burning all around him in his room. In his panic he thought less about burning to death and more about the terrible smoke working into his lungs like metal splinters and taking away the sole victory he'd won in the war against his disability. It was as if the Conjurer had picked his single most vulnerable spot to attack.

When Thom, Sellitto and Cooper burst into the room his first thought was not about the fire extinguishers the two cops held but the green oxygen tank the aide wielded. He'd thought, Save my lungs!

Before the flames were out Thom had the oxygen mask over his face and he hungrily inhaled the sweet gas. They got him downstairs and both EMS and Rhyme's own SCI doctor had examined him, cleaning and dressing a few small burns and looking carefully for razor cuts (there were none; nor were any blades found in his pajamas). The spinal cord specialist declared that his lungs were all right, though Thom should rotate him more frequently than normal to keep them clear.

It was only then that Rhyme began to calm. But he was still very anxious. The killer had done something far more cruel than causing him physical injury. The attack had reminded Rhyme how precarious his life was and how uncertain his future.

He hated this feeling, this terrible helplessness and vulnerability.

" Lincoln!" Sachs walked fast into the room, sat on the old Clinitron bed and dropped to his chest, hugged him hard. He lowered his head against her hair. She was crying. He'd seen tears in her eyes perhaps twice since he'd known her.

"No first names," he whispered. "Bad luck, remember. And we've had enough of that today."

"You're okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine," he said in a whisper, stung by the illogical fear that if he spoke louder the particles of smoke would somehow puncture and deflate his lungs. "The birds?" he asked, praying that nothing had happened to the peregrine falcons. He wouldn't have minded if they moved to a different building. But it would have devastated him if they'd been injured or killed.

"Thom said they're fine. They're on the other sill."

She held him for a moment then Thom appeared in the doorway. "I need to rotate you."

The policewoman hugged him once more then stood back as Thom stepped close to the bed.

"Search the scene," Rhyme told her. "There's got to be something that he's left behind. There was that handkerchief he put around my neck. And he had some razor blades."

Sachs said she would and left the room. Thom took over and began expertly to clear his lungs.

Twenty minutes later Sachs returned. She stripped off the Tyvek suit and carefully folded and replaced it in the crime scene suitcase.

"Didn't find much," she reported. "Got that handkerchief and a couple of footprints. He's wearing a new pair of Eccos. But I didn't find any blades. And anything else he might've dropped got vaporized. Oh, and there was a bottle of scotch too. But I assume it's yours."

"Yes, it is," Rhyme whispered. Normally he would've made a joke – something about the severity of the punishment for using eighteen-year-old single malt as an arson accelerant. But he couldn't bring himself to be humorous.

He knew there wouldn't be much evidence. Because of the extensive destruction in a fire the clues in most suspicious-origin fire scenes usually reveal only where and how the fire started. But they already knew that. Still, he thought there must be more.

"What about the duct tape? Thom pulled it off and dropped it."

"No duct tape."

"Look behind the head of the bed. The Conjurer was standing there. He might've -"

"I did look."

"Well, search again. You missed things. You must have."

"No," she said simply.

"What?"

"Forget the crime scene. It's toast – so to speak."

"We need to move this goddamn case forward."

"We're going to, Rhyme. I'm going to interview the witness."

"There was a witness?" he grumbled. "Nobody told me there was a witness."