The Vanished Man

think.”
    Sellitto got the spelling of the man’s name. Then asked, “Did Weir ever call back?”
    “No. But he didn’t need to. Five minutes and he got the claws in. Hurting and haunting.”
    It’s Erick . . .
    “Look, I should go. I have to iron my uniform. I’m working the Sunday morning shift. It’s a busy one.”
    After they hung up, Sachs walked to the speakerphone to hit the disconnect button. “Brother,” she muttered.
    “Needs more meds,” Sellitto observed.
    “Well, at least we’ve got a lead,” Rhyme said. “Track down that Kadesky.”
    Mel Cooper disappeared for a few minutes and when he returned he had a printout of a database of theatrical companies. Kadesky Productions had its office on South Wells Street in the Windy City. Sellitto placed a call and, not surprisingly, being late Saturday night, got the answering service. He left a message.
    Sellitto said, “Okay—Weir’s messed up his assistant’s life. He’s unstable. He’s injured people in the audience and now he’s a pattern doer. But what’s making him tick?”
    Sachs looked up at this. “Let’s give Terry a call.”
    Terry Dobyns was an NYPD psychologist. There were several on the force but Dobyns was the sole behavioral profiler, a skill he’d learned and honed at the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. Thanks to the press and popular fiction the public hears a lot about psychological profiling and it can be valuable—but only, Rhyme felt, in a limited type of crime. Generally there’s nothing mysterious about the workings of a perp’s mind. But in cases where the motive is a mystery and his next target is hard to anticipate, profiling can be valuable. It helps investigators find informants or individuals who might know the suspect, anticipate his next move, setup decoys in appropriate neighborhoods, run stakeouts and look for similar crimes in the past.
    Sellitto thumbed through an NYPD directory of phone numbers and placed a call to Dobyns at home.
    “Terry.”
    “Lon. You’ve got speakerphone echo. Let me deduce that Lincoln’s there too.”
    “Yep,” Rhyme confirmed. He had a fondness for Dobyns, the first person he saw when he awakened after his spinal cord accident. Rhyme recalled that the man loved touch football, opera and the mysteries of the human mind in roughly the same degrees—and all passionately.
    “Sorry it’s late,” Sellitto offered, not sounding sorry at all. “But we need some help with a multiple doer. We’ve got a name but not much else.”
    “This the one in the news? Killed the music student this morning? And that patrol officer too?”
    “Right. He also killed a makeup artist and tried to kill a horseback rider. Because of what they and the student quote represented. Two straight women, one gay man. No sexual activities. We’re at a loss. And he’s told Lincoln that he’s going to start up again tomorrow afternoon.”
    “He told Lincoln? Over the phone? A letter?”
    “In person,” Rhyme said.
    “Hmm. That must’ve been quite a conversation.”
    “You don’t know the half of it.”
    Sellitto and Rhyme gave the man a rundown on Weir’s crimes and what they’d learned about him.
    Dobyns asked a number of questions. Then he fell silent for a moment and finally said, “I see two forcesat work in him. But they reinforce each other and lead to the same result. . . . Is he still performing?”
    “No,” Kara said. “He hasn’t performed since the fire. Not that anybody’s heard.”
    “Public performing,” Dobyns said, “is such an intense experience, it’s so compelling, that when it’s denied someone who was successful the loss is profound. Actors and musicians—magicians too, I’d guess—tend to define themselves in terms of their careers. So the result is that the fire basically eradicated the man he had been.”
    The Vanished Man, Rhyme reflected.
    “That in turn means he’s now motivated not by ambition to succeed or to please his audience or a devotion to his craft but by anger. And that’s aggravated by the second force: the fire deformed him and damaged his lungs. So as a public person he’d be particularly self-conscious of the deformities. They’d multiply the anger logarithmically. We could call it the Phantom of the Opera syndrome, I suppose. He’d see himself as a freak.”
    “So he wants to get even?”
    “Yes, but not necessarily in a literal sense: fire quote murdered him—his old persona—and by murdering someone else he feels