Jeffery Deaver: The Vanished Man

"Yep. It was just like you said – they had him cornered and he disappeared."

He chuckled. "And now they want us to find him. Do we have to clean up for everybody's mistakes? Hold on a minute. Command, volume lower… lower."

Music in the background diminished.

The tech who'd accompanied Sachs down the gloomy corridor returned with tall lamps on tripods. She set them up in the lobby and clicked the switch.

There's a lot of debate about the proper way to process a scene. Generally investigators agree that less is more, though most departments still use teams of CS searchers. Before his accident Lincoln Rhyme, however, had run most scenes alone and he insisted that Amelia Sachs do the same. With other searchers around, you tend to be distracted and are often less vigilant because you feel – even if only subconsciously – that your partner will find what you miss.

But there was another reason for solitary searching. Rhyme recognized that there's a macabre intimacy about criminal violation. A crime scene searcher working alone is better able to forge a mental relationship with the victim and the perpetrator, gather better insights into what is the relevant evidence and where it might be found.

It was into this difficult state of mind that Amelia Sachs now slipped as she gazed at the body of the young woman, lying on the floor, next to a fiber-board table.

Near the body were a spilled cup of coffee, sheet music, a music case and a piece of the woman's silver flute, which she'd apparently been in the act of assembling when the killer flipped the rope around her neck. In her death grip she clutched another cylinder of the instrument. Had she intended to use it as a weapon?

Or did the desperate young woman just want to feel something familiar and comforting in her fingers as she died?

"I'm at the body, Rhyme," she said as she snapped digital pictures of the corpse.

"Go ahead."

"She's on her back – but the respondings found her on her abdomen. They turned her over to give her CPR. Injuries consistent with strangulation." Sachs now delicately rolled the woman back onto her belly. "Hands're in some kind of old-fashioned cuffs. I don't recognize them. Her watch is broken. Stopped at exactly eight A. M. Doesn't look accidental." She closed her gloved hand around the woman's narrow wrist. It was shattered. "Yep, Rhyme, he stomped on it. And it's nice. A Seiko. Why break it? Why not steal it?"

"Good question, Sachs… Might be a clue, might be nothing."

Which was as good a slogan for forensic science as any, she reflected. "One of the respondings cut the rope around her neck. She missed the knot." Officers should never cut through the knot to remove a cord from a strangulation victim; it can reveal a great deal of information about the person who tied it.

Sachs then used a tape roller to collect trace evidence – recent forensic thinking was that a portable vacuum cleaner, which resembled a Dustbuster, picked up too much trace. Most CS teams were switching to rollers similar to dog-hair removers. She bagged the trace and used a vic kit to take hair combings and nail scraping samples from the woman's body. Sachs said, "I'm going to walk the grid."

The phrase – of Lincoln Rhyme's own creation – came from his preference for searching a crime scene. The grid pattern is the most comprehensive method: back and forth in one direction, then turning perpendicular and covering the same ground again, always remembering to examine the ceiling and walls as well as the ground or floor.

She began the search now, looking for discarded or dropped objects, rolling for trace, taking electrostatic prints of shoeprints and digital photos. The photo team would make a comprehensive still and video record of the scene but getting those images took time and Rhyme always insisted on having some photographic record available instantly.

"Officer?" Sellitto called.

She glanced back.

"Just wondering… Since we don't know where this asshole got to, you want some backup in there?"

"Nope," she said, silently thanking him for reminding her that there was a missing murderer last seen nearby. Another of Lincoln Rhyme's crime-scene aphorisms: search well but watch your back. She tapped the butt of her Glock to remind herself exactly where it was in case she needed to draw fast – the holster rode slightly higher when she wore the Tyvek jumpsuit – and continued the search.

"Okay, got something," she told Rhyme a moment later. "In the lobby. About ten feet away from the victim. Piece of black cloth. Silk. I mean, it appears to be silk. It's on top of a part of the vic's flute so it has to be his or hers."

"Interesting," Rhyme mused. "Wonder what that's about."

The lobby yielded nothing else and she entered the performance space itself, her hand continuing to stray to the butt of her Glock. She relaxed momentarily, seeing that there was in fact absolutely no hiding place where a perp could be, no secret doorways or exits. But as she started on the grid here she felt a growing sense of discomfort.

Spooky…

"Rhyme, this is strange…"

"I can't hear you, Sachs -"

She realized that in her uneasiness she'd been whispering.

"There's burned string tied around the chairs that're lying on the ground. Fuses too, it looks like. I smell nitrate and sulfur residue. The reportings said he fired a round. But it's not the smell of smokeless powder. It's something else. Ah, okay… It's a little gray firecracker. Maybe that was the gunshot they heard… Hold on. There's something else – under a chair. It's a small green circuit board with a speaker attached to it."

"'Small'?" Rhyme asked caustically. "A foot is small compared with an acre. An acre's small compared with a hundred acres, Sachs."

"Sorry. Measures about two inches by five."

"That'd be big compared with a dime, now, wouldn't it?"

Got the message, thank you very much , she replied silently.

She bagged everything, then left by the second door – the fire door – and electrostaticked and photographed the footprints she found there. Finally, she took control samples to compare against the trace found on the victim and where the unsub had walked. "Got everything, Rhyme. I'll be back in a half hour."

"And the trapdoors, the secret passages everybody's talking about?"

"I can't find any."

"All right, come on home, Sachs."

She returned to the lobby and let Photo and Latents take over the scene. She found Franciscovich and Ausonio by the doorway. "You find the janitor?" she asked. "I need to look at his shoes."

Ausonio shook her head. "He told the guard he had to take his wife to work. I left a message with maintenance for him to call."

Her partner said solemnly, "Hey, Officer, we were talking, Nancy and me? And we don't want this scumbag to get away. If there's anything more we can do, you know, to follow up, let us know."

Sachs understood exactly how they felt. "I'll see what I can do," she told them.

Sellitto's radio crackled and he took the call. Listened for a moment. "It's the Hardy Boys. They've finished interviewing the wits and're in the main lobby."

Sachs, Sellitto and the two patrolwomen returned to the front of the school.

There they joined Bedding and Saul, one of them tall, one short, one with freckles, one with a clear complexion. These were detectives from the Big Building who specialized in canvassing – post-crime interviewing of witnesses.

"We talked to the seven people here this morning."

"Plus the guard."

"No teachers -"

"- only students."

Also called the Twins, despite very different appearances, the duo were skilled at double-teaming perps and witnesses alike. It got too confusing if you tried to tell them apart. Lump them together and consider them one person, they were a lot easier to understand.