Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

This scene'd be a grounder, of course. An accidental shooting involving an officer and a suspect who'd tried to escape? Pro forma. Still, the event was a homicide and required a complete crime scene report for the Shooting Incident Board and any subsequent investigation and lawsuits. Amelia Sachs would run the scene as carefully as any other.

A guard checked their IDs and led the team through a maze of corridors into the basement. Finally they came to a yellow police-line tape across a closed door.

Here she found a detective talking to a uniformed officer, her nose stuffed with tissue and bandaged.

Sachs introduced herself and explained that she was going to be running the scene. The detective stepped aside and Sachs asked Linda Welles what had happened.

In a halting, nasal voice the guard explained that on the way from fingerprinting to intake the suspect had somehow undone his handcuffs. "It took him two, three seconds. All the cuffs. Just like that, they were open. He didn't get my key." She pointed to her blouse pocket, where presumably it resided. "He had a pick or key or something on his hip."

"His pocket?" Sachs asked, frowning. She remembered they'd searched him carefully.

"No, his leg . You'll see." She nodded toward the corridor where Weir's body lay. "There's a cut in his skin. Under a bandage. Everything happened so fast."

Sachs supposed that he'd cut himself to create a hiding space. A queasy thought.

"Then he grabbed my weapon and we were struggling for it. It just discharged. I didn't mean to pull the trigger. I didn't, really. But… I tried to keep control and I couldn't. It just discharged."

Control… Discharge . The words, official copspeak, were perhaps an attempt to insulate her from the guilt she'd be feeling. This had nothing to do with the fact that a killer was dead, or that her life had been endangered, or that a dozen other officers had been taken in by this man; no, it was that this woman had stumbled. Women in the NYPD set the bar high; the falls are always harder than for men.

"We collared and searched him at the takedown," Sachs said kindly. "And we missed the key too."

"Yeah," the officer muttered. "But it's still gonna come up."

At the shooting inquiry, she meant. And, yeah, it would.

Well, Sachs'd do a particularly thorough job on her report to give this officer as much support as possible.

Welles touched her nose gently. "Oh, that hurts." Tears were streaming from her eyes. "What're my kids going to say? They always ask me if I do anything dangerous. And I tell ' em no. Look at this…"

Pulling on latex gloves, Sachs asked for the woman's Glock. She took it, dropped the clip and ejected the round in the chamber. Everything went into a plastic evidence bag.

Slipping into her sergeant mode, Sachs said, "You can take an LOA, you know."

Welles didn't even hear her. "It just discharged," the woman said in a hollow voice. "I didn't want it to. I didn't want to kill anybody."

"Linda?" Sachs said. "You can take an LOA. A week, ten days."

"I can?"

"Talk to your supervisor."

"Sure. Yeah. I could do that." Welles rose and wandered over to the medic treating her partner, who had a nasty bruise on his neck but who otherwise seemed all right.

The CS team set up shop outside the door to the corridor where the shooting had occurred, opening the suitcases and arranging evidence collection equipment, friction ridge supplies and video and still cameras. Sachs dressed in the white Tyvek suit and accessorized with rubber bands around her feet.

She fitted the microphone over her head and asked for a radio patch to Lincoln Rhyme's phone. Ripping down the police tape, she opened the door, thinking: A slit in the skin to hide lock picks and cuff keys? Of all the perps she and Lincoln had been up against, the Conjurer was -

"Oh, goddamn," she spat out.

"Hello to you too, Sachs," Rhyme said acerbically through her headset. "At least I think it's you. Hell of a lot of static."

"I don't believe it, Rhyme. The M. E. took the body before I could process it."

Sachs was looking into the corridor, bloody but empty.

"What?" he snapped. "Who approved that?"

The rule in crime scene work was that emergency medical personnel could enter a scene to save an injured person but, in the case of homicide, the body had to remain untouched by everyone, including the tour doctor from the Medical Examiner's office, until it'd been processed by someone from forensics. This was fundamental police work and the career of whoever'd released the Conjurer's corpse was now in jeopardy.

"There a problem, Amelia?" one of the techs called from the doorway.

"Look," she said angrily, nodding into the corridor. "The M. E. got the body before we processed it. What happened?"

The crew-cut young tech frowned. He glanced at his partner then said, "Uhm, well, the tour doc's outside. He was the guy we were talking to when you showed up. The one feeding the pigeons. He was waiting to move the body till we were finished."

"What's going on?" Rhyme growled. "I hear voices, Sachs."

To him she said, "There's a crew from the M. E.'s office outside, Rhyme. Sounds like they haven't picked up the body. What's -"

"Oh, Jesus Christ. No!"

The chill went straight to her soul. "Rhyme, you don't think -?"

He barked out, "What do you see, Sachs? What's the blood spatter look like?"

She ran to where the shooting had happened and studied the bloodstain on the wall. "Oh, no. It doesn't look normal for a gunshot, Rhyme."

"Brain matter, bone?"

"Gray matter, yeah. But it doesn't look right either. There is some bone. Not much, though, for a close-range shot."

"Do a presumptive blood test. That'll be dispositive."

She sped back to the doorway.

"What's going…?" one of the techs asked but he fell silent as he watched her dig frantically through the suitcases.

Sachs grabbed the Kastle-Meyer catalytic blood kit then returned to the corridor and took a swab from the wall. She treated this with phenolphthalein and a moment later she had the answer. "I don't know what it is but it's definitely not blood." She glanced down at the ruddy smears on the floor. This, however, looked real. She tested a sample and it showed positive. Then she noticed a bloody razor knife blade in the corner. "Christ, Rhyme he faked the shooting. Cut himself somewhere to bleed for real and fool the guards."

"Call security."

Sachs yelled, "It's an escape – have the exits sealed!"

The detective jogged into the hallway and stared at the floor. Linda Welles joined him, her eyes wide. The momentary relief that she hadn't in fact been involved in a man's death faded fast as she realized the far-worse implications of what had happened. "No! He was there. His eyes were open. He looked dead." Her voice was high, frantic. "I mean, his head… it was all bloody. I could see… I could see the wound!"

You could see the illusion of a wound , Sachs thought bitterly.

The detective called out, "They've notified the guards at all the exits. But, Christ, this isn't a lock-down corridor. As soon as we closed the doors here he could've stood up and wandered anywhere. He's probably stealing a car right now or on the subway to Queens."

Amelia Sachs began giving orders. Whatever the detective's rank he was so shaken by the escape that he didn't question her authority. "Get an escape bulletin out now," she said. "All agencies in the metro area. Federal and state. Don't forget MTA. The name is Erick Weir. White male. Early fifties. You've got the mug shot."

"What's he wearing?" the detective asked Welles and her partner, who both struggled to remember. They gave a rough description.

Sachs was thinking, though, that it hardly mattered. He'd be in different clothing now. She gazed down the four tentacles of dim corridors she could see from here and observed silhouettes of dozens of people. Guards, janitors, cops…