Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

His cell phone rang. It was Rhyme. "Everything secure there?" the criminalist asked.

"Tight as a bed baby," Bell replied.

"Constable's in a secure cell."

"And we know his guards, right?" Bell asked.

"Amelia said Weir might be good but he's not good enough to turn himself into two Shaquille O'Neal look-alikes."

"Got it. How's the lawyer?"

"Roth? He'll live. Was a bad beating though. I'm…" Rhyme stopped talking as someone else in the room began speaking. Bell believed he heard the soft voice of Mel Cooper.

He then resumed speaking to Bell. "I'm still going through what Amelia found at the scenes in the detention center. Don't have any specific leads yet. But we've got something else I wanted to mention. Bedding and Saul finally tracked down which room at the Lanham Arms the key card belonged to."

"Who was it registered to?"

"Fake name and address," Rhyme explained. "But the desk clerk said the guest fit Weir's description perfectly. CS didn't get much but they found a discarded syringe behind the dresser. We don't know whether Weir left it or not but I'm going on the assumption he did. Mel found traces of chocolate and sucrose on the needle."

"Sucrose – that's sugar?"

"Right. And arsenic in the barrel of the syringe."

Bell said, "So he injected poison into some sweets."

"Sounds like it. Ask the Gradys if anybody's sent them any candy lately."

Bell relayed the question to the prosecutor and his wife and they shook their heads, dismayed to even hear the question.

"No, we don't keep candy in the house," the prosecutor's wife said.

The criminalist then asked Bell, "You said he surprised you by getting into Grady's apartment itself this afternoon."

"Yup. We thought we'd nail him in the lobby, the basement or the roof. We never expected him to get in the front door."

"After he broke in, where did he go?"

"He just showed up in the living room. Shook us all up."

"So he might've had time to leave some candy in the kitchen."

"No, couldn't've been in the kitchen," Bell explained. "Lon and I were in there."

"What other rooms could he have gotten into?"

Bell posed the question to Grady and his wife.

"What's going on, Roland?" the prosecutor asked.

" Lincoln just found some more evidence and's thinking that Weir might've tried to get some poison into your house. It looks like it was in some candy. We're not sure he did but -"

"Candy?" From a soft, high voice behind them.

Bell, the Gradys and two of the other cops on protection detail turned to see the prosecutor's daughter staring at the detective, eyes wide with fear.

"Chrissy?" her mother asked. "What is it?"

"Candy?" the girl whispered again.

A foil wrapper fell from her hand and she began to sob.

• • •

Hands sweating, Bell looked at the passersby on the sidewalk in front of Charles Grady's apartment.

Dozens of people.

Was one of them Weir?

Or somebody else from that goddamn Patriot Assembly?

The ambulance rolled up and two techs jumped out. But before they got through the front door the detective carefully examined their IDs.

"What's all this about?" one of them asked, offended.

Bell ignored him and checked out the cars on the street, the passersby, the windows in the buildings nearby. When it was safe he gave a whistle and Luis Martinez, the quiet bodyguard, hustled the girl out and into the ambulance, accompanied by her mother.

Chrissy wasn't showing symptoms of poisoning yet though she was pale and shook from fearful crying. The girl had eaten a peppermint patty that had mysteriously appeared in her piano room. This was beyond evil to Bell – hurting children and, though he'd been suckered in by Constable's smooth talk momentarily, this incident clarified the complete depravity of people like those in the Patriot Assembly.

Differences between cultures? Between races? No, sir. There's only one difference. There's good and decency on the one side and evil on the other.

If the girl died Bell would make it his personal quest to see that both Weir and Constable received the punishment that corresponded to what he'd done to Chrissy – lethal injection.

"Don't you worry, honey," he now said to her as one of the medics took her blood pressure. "You're going to be just fine."

The response to this was the girl's silent sobbing. He glanced at Chrissy's mother, on whose face was a look of tenderness that couldn't quite hide a fury exponentially greater than Bell 's.

The detective radioed to Central and was patched through to Emergency Services at the hospital they were careening toward at the moment. He said to the supervisor, "We're gonna be at the admission dock in two minutes. Now listen here – I want that area and a route to a poison-control center cleared of people. I don't want a soul around less they're wearing a picture ID badge."

"Well, Detective, we can't do that," the woman said. "That's a very busy section of the hospital."

"I'm gonna be muley on this one, ma'am."

"You're going to be what?"

"Stubborn. There's an armed perpetrator who's after this little girl and her family. And if I do see anybody in our line of sight without a badge, they're gonna get handcuffed and in a pretty impatient way."

"This's an emergency room in a city hospital, Detective," the woman responded testily. "Do you know how many people I'm looking at right now?"

"No, ma'am, I do not. But imagine lookin' at every one of 'em on their bellies and hog-tied. Which is what they're gonna be if they're not gone by the time we get there. And, by the by, that's looking to be all of two minutes from right now."

"Cases change color."

Charles Grady sat hunched forward in an orange plastic chair in a room off the Urgent Care waiting area, staring at the green linoleum, scuffed by thousands of despairing feet.

"Criminal cases, I mean."

Roland Bell sat next to him. Luis's vigilant form filled one doorway and nearby, at the entrance to a busy hallway, was another of Bell 's SWAT officers, Graham Wilson, a handsome, intense detective with keen, stern eyes and a talent for spotting people packing weapons as if he had X-ray vision.

Grady's wife had accompanied Chrissy into the ER itself, along with Luis and another protection-team officer.

"I had a law school professor one time," Grady continued, still as wood. "He'd been a prosecutor and then a judge. He told us once in class that in all his years of practicing law he'd never seen a black-and-white case come through the door. They were all different shades of gray. There was pretty damn dark gray and there was damn light gray. But they were all gray."

Bell glanced up the corridor, toward the impromptu waiting room that the duty nurse had made for the injured skateboarders and bicyclists. As Bell had insisted, this portion of the hospital had been cleared.

"But then, once you got involved in the case yourself, it changed color. It became black and white. Whether you were prosecuting or defending, the gray disappeared. Your side was one hundred percent good. The other side was one hundred percent evil. Right or wrong. My professor said you have to guard against that. You have to keep reminding yourself that cases were really gray."

Bell noticed an orderly. The young Latino seemed harmless but the detective nodded to Wilson, who stopped him and checked his badge nonetheless. He gave an okay sign to Bell.

Chrissy'd been in an operating room for fifteen minutes. Why couldn't somebody come out and at least give them some progress?

Grady continued, "But you know, Roland, all these months since we found out about that conspiracy in Canton Falls I kept seeing the Constable case as black and white. I never once considered it gray. I went after him with everything I had." A sad laugh. He looked up the hall again, the grim smile fading. "Where the hell's that doctor?"