The Vanished Man

“See, when you use misdirection to trick people—smart people—they continue to be suspicious.”
    “So you hit us with misdirection number three. To keep us focused away from the circus you made us think that you got arrested intentionally to get insidethe detention center not to kill Grady but to break Constable out of jail. By then we’d forgotten completely about the circus and Kadesky. But in fact you didn’t care a bit about either Constable or Grady.”
    “They were props, misdirections to fool you,” he admitted.
    “The Patriot Assembly, they’re not going to be too happy about that,” Sellitto muttered.
    A nod at the shackles. “I’d say that’s the least of my worries, wouldn’t you?”
    Knowing what he did about Constable and the others in the Assembly, Rhyme wasn’t too sure.
    Bell nodded at the Conjurer and asked Rhyme, “But why’d he go to the trouble to set up Constable and plan the fake escape?”
    Sellitto answered, “Obviously—to, you know, misdirect us away from the circus so he’d have an easier time getting the bomb there.”
    “Actually, no, Lon,” Rhyme said slowly. “There was another reason.”
    At these words, or perhaps at the cryptic tone in Rhyme’s voice, the killer turned toward the criminalist, who could see caution in his eyes—real caution, if not fear—for the first time that night.
    Gotcha, Rhyme thought.
    He said, “See, there was a fourth misdirection.”
    “Four?” Sellitto said.
    “That’s right. . . . He’s not Erick Weir,” Rhyme announced with what even he had to admit was excessive dramatics.

Chapter Forty-eight
    With a sigh, the killer eased back against a chair leg, eyes closing.
    “Not Weir?” Sellitto asked.
    “That,” Rhyme continued, “was the whole point of what he did this weekend. He wanted revenge against Kadesky and the Hasbro circus—the Cirque Fantastique now. Well, it’s easy to get revenge if you don’t care about escaping. But”—a nod toward the Conjurer—“he wanted to get away, stay out of prison, keep performing. So he did an identity quick change. He became Erick Weir, got himself arrested this afternoon, fingerprinted and then escaped.”
    Sellitto nodded. “So after he killed Kadesky and burned down the circus everybody’d be looking for Weir and not for who he really is.” A frown. “And who the hell is he?”
    “Arthur Loesser, Weir’s protégé.”
    The killer gasped softly as the last shred of anonymity—and hope for escape—vanished.
    “But Loesser called us,” Sellitto pointed out. “He was out west. In Nevada.”
    “No, he wasn’t. I checked the phone records. The call came up ‘No caller ID’ on my phone because heplaced it through a prepaid long distance account. He was calling from a pay phone on West Eighty-seventh Street. He doesn’t have a wife. The message on his voice mail in Vegas was fake.”
    “Just like he called the other assistant, Keating, and pretended to be Weir, right?” Sellitto asked.
    “Yep. Asking about the Ohio fire, sounding weird and threatening. To back up what we thought: that Weir was in New York to get revenge against Kadesky. He had to leave a trail that Weir’d resurfaced. Like ordering the Darby handcuffs in Weir’s name. The gun he bought too.”
    Rhyme looked over the killer. “How’s the voice?” he asked sardonically. “The lungs feel better now?”
    “You know they’re fine,” Loesser snapped. The whisper and wheezing were gone. There was no damage to his lungs. It was just another ruse to make them believe he was Weir.
    Rhyme nodded toward the bedroom. “I saw some designs for promotional posters in there. I assume you drew them. The name on them was ‘Malerick.’ That’s you now, right?”
    The killer nodded. “What I told you before is true—I hated my old name, I hate anything about me from before the fire. It was too hard to be reminded of those times. Malerick’s how I think of myself now. . . . How did you catch on?”
    “After they sealed the corridor in detention you used your shirt and wiped the floor and the cuffs,” Rhyme explained. “But when I thought about that I couldn’t figure out why. To clean up the blood? That didn’t make sense. No, the only answer I could comeup with was that you wanted to get rid of your fingerprints. But you’d just been printed; why would you be worried about leaving them in the corridor?” Rhyme gave a shrug, suggesting that the answer was painfully obvious. “Because