The Vanished Man

your real prints were different from the ones on the card that’d just been rolled and filed.”
    “How the fuck d’he manage that?” Sellitto asked.
    “Amelia found traces of fresh ink at the scene. That was from his being printed tonight. The trace wasn’t important in itself but what was significant was that it matched the ink we found in his gym bag at the Marston assault. That meant he’d come in contact with fingerprint ink before today. I guessed that he stole a blank fingerprint card and printed it at home with the real Erick Weir’s prints. He used that adhesive wax to hide it in his jacket lining tonight—we were looking for weapons and keys, not pieces of cardboard—and then after they rolled his prints he distracted the technicians and swapped the cards. Probably flushed the new one or threw it out.”
    Loesser grimaced in anger, a confirmation of Rhyme’s deduction.
    “DOC sent over the card they had on file and Mel processed it. The rolled prints were Weir’s but the latents were Loesser’s. He was in the AFIS database from when he was arrested with Weir on those reckless endangerment charges in New Jersey. We checked the DOC officer’s Glock too. She took that with her and he didn’t get a chance to wipe it down. Those prints came back a match for Loesser too. Oh, and we got a partial from the razor knife blade.” Rhyme glanced atthe small bandage on Loesser’s temple. “You forgot to take that with you.”
    “I couldn’t find it,” the killer snapped. “I didn’t have time to look.”
    “But,” Sellitto pointed out to Rhyme, “he’d be younger than Weir.”
    “He is younger than Weir.” He nodded toward Loesser’s face. “The wrinkles’re just latex appliances. Like the scars—they’re all fake. Weir was born in 1950. Loesser’s twenty years younger so he had to age.” Then he muttered, “Oh, I missed that one. Should’ve thought better. Those bits of latex covered with makeup that Amelia found at the scenes? I assumed they were from those finger pads he was wearing. But that wouldn’t make sense. Nobody’d wear makeup on his fingers. It would come off. No, it was from the other appliances.” Rhyme examined the killer’s cheeks and brow. “The latex must be uncomfortable.”
    “You get used to it.”
    “Sachs, let’s see what he really looks like.”
    With some difficulty she peeled off the beard and patches of wrinkles around his eyes and chin. The resulting face was blotchy from the adhesive but, yes, he was clearly much younger. The structure of his face was different too. He didn’t look much at all like the man he’d been.
    “Not like those masks in Mission Impossible, hm? Put ’em on, pull ’em off.”
    “No, real appliances aren’t like that at all.”
    “The fingers too.” Rhyme nodded at the killer’s left hand.
    To make the fusing of the fingers credible they’dbeen bound together with a bandage then covered in thick latex. As a result the two digits were wrinkled, limp and virtually white but, of course, they were otherwise normal. Sachs examined them. “I was just asking Rhyme why you didn’t uncover them at the street fair—since we were looking for a man with a deformed left hand.” But the two digits had their own appearance of deformity and would’ve given him away.
    Rhyme looked the killer over and said, “Pretty close to a perfect crime: a perp who made certain that we charged somebody else. We’d know Weir was guilty, we’d have positive ID. But then he’d disappear. Loesser would go on with his life and the escapee—Weir—would be gone forever. The Vanished Man.”
    And even though Loesser had picked the victims yesterday to misdirect the police, not out of any deep psychological urge, nonetheless Terry Dobyns’s ultimate diagnosis fit perfectly—seeking revenge for the fire that had destroyed a loved one. The difference was that the tragedy hadn’t been Weir’s loss of his career and the death of his wife; it had been Loesser’s loss of his mentor, Weir himself.
    “But there’s one problem,” Sellitto pointed out. “All he did by swapping the print cards was make sure we’d go after the real Weir. Why would he do that to his mentor?”
    Rhyme said, “Why do you think I made those strapping young officers carry me up the stairs into this extremely in accessible place, Lon?” He looked around the room. “I wanted to walk the grid myself—oh, excuse me, I should say roll the grid.” He now wheeled