The Vanished Man

observed: emerald-colored studs for earrings, shabby running shoes. No apparent robbery, sexual molestation or mutilation. No wedding ring.
    “Who was first officer?”
    A tall woman with short brunette hair, her name tag reading D. FRANCISCOVICH, said, “We were.” A nod toward her blonde partner. N. AUSONIO. Their eyes were troubled and Franciscovich played a brief rhythm on her holster with thumb and fingers. Ausonio kept glancing at the body. Sachs guessed this was their first homicide.
    The two patrol officers gave their account of what had happened. Finding the perp, a flash of light, his disappearing, a barricade. Then he was gone.
    “You said he claimed to have a hostage?”
    “That’s what he said,” Ausonio offered. “But everybody in the school’s accounted for. We’re sure he was bluffing.”
    “Victim?”
    “Svetlana Rasnikov,” Ausonio said. “Twenty-four. Student.”
    Sellitto turned away from the security guard. He said to Sachs, “Bedding and Saul’re interviewing everybody in the building here this morning.”
    She nodded toward the scene. “Who’s been inside?”
    Sellitto said, “The first officers.” Nodding toward the women. “Then two medics and two ESU. They backed out as soon as they cleared it. Scene’s still pretty clean.”
    “The guard was inside too,” Ausonio said. “But only for a minute. We got him out as soon as we could.”
    “Good,” Sachs said. “Witnesses?”
    Ausonio said, “There was a janitor outside the room when we got here.”
    “He didn’t see anything,” Franciscovich added.
    Sachs said, “I still need to see the soles of his shoes for comparison. Could one of you find him for me?”
    “Sure.” Ausonio wandered off.
    From one of the black suitcases Sachs extracted a zippered clear plastic case. She opened it and pulled out a white Tyvek jumpsuit. Donning it, she pulled the hood over her head. Then gloves. The outfit was standard issue now for all forensics techs at the NYPD; it prevented substances—trace, hair, epithelial skin cells and foreign matter—from sloughing off her body and contaminating the scene. The suit had booties but she still did what Rhyme always insisted on—put rubber bands on her feet to distinguish her prints from the victim’s and the perp’s.
    Mounting the earphones on her head and adjusting the stalk mike, she hooked up her Motorola. She called in a landline patch and a moment later a complex arrangement of communications systems brought the low voice of Lincoln Rhyme into her ear.
    “Sachs, you there?”
    “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 AmeliaSachs now slipped as she gazed at the body of the young woman, lying on the floor, next to a fiberboard 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