The Vanished Man

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. Listenedfor 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.
    “The information was not the most illuminating.”
    “For one thing everybody was freaked out.”
    “The location’s not helping.” A nod toward a wad of cobwebs hanging from the dark, water-stained ceiling.
    “Nobody knew the victim very well. When she got here this morning she walked to the recital room with a friend. She—”
    “The friend.”
    “—didn’t see anybody inside. They stood in the lobby for five, ten minutes, talking. The friend left around eight.”
    “So,” said Rhyme, who’d overheard on the radio, “he was inside the lobby waiting for her.”
    “The victim,” the shorter of the two sandy-haired detectives said, “had come over here from Georgia—”
    “That’s the Russia Georgia, not the peach-tree Georgia.”
    “—about two months ago. She was kind of a loner.”
    “The consulate’s contacting her family.”
    “All the other students were in different practice rooms today and none of them heard anything or saw anybody they didn’t know.”
    “Why wasn’t Svetlana in a practice room?” Sachs asked.
    “Her friend said Svetlana liked the acoustics better in the hall.”
    “Husband, boyfriend, girlfriend?” Sachs asked, thinking of rule number one in homicide investigations: the doer usually knows the doee.
    “None that the other students knew.”
    “How’d he get into the building?” Rhyme asked and Sachs relayed the question.
    The guard said, “Only door’s open is the front one. We got fire doors, course. But you can’t open them from the outside.”
    “And he’d have to walk past you, right?”
    “And sign in. And get his picture took by the camera.”
    Sachs glanced up. “There’s a security camera, Rhyme, but it looks like the lens hasn’t been cleaned in months.”
    They gathered behind the desk. The guard punched buttons and played the tape. Bedding and Saul had vetted seven of the people. But they agreed that one person—a brown-haired, bearded older man in jeans and bulky jacket—hadn’t been among those they’d talked to.
    “That’s him,” Franciscovich said. “That’s the killer.” Nancy Ausonio nodded.
    On the fuzzy tape he was signing the register book then walking inside. The guard glanced at the book, but not at the man’s face, as he signed it.
    “Did you get a look at him?” Sachs asked.
    “Didn’t pay no attention,” he said defensively. “If they sign I let them in. That’s all I gotta do. That’s my job. I’m here mostly to keep folk from walking out with our stuff.”
    “We’ve got his signature at least, Rhyme. And a name. They’ll be fake but at least it’s a handwriting sample. Which line did he sign on?” Sachs asked, picking up the sign-in book with latex-clad fingers.
    They ran the tape, fast-forward, from the beginning. The killer was the fourth person to sign the book. But in the fourth