The Vanished Man

disk?”
    “Nope. Gone for good.”
    “Damn. I wanted a voiceprint.”
    “Sorry. It’s gone.”
    Rhyme sighed in frustration and rolled back to the examination trays; it was left to Sachs to tell Geller how much they appreciated the help.
    The team then examined the victim’s wristwatch, which had been shattered for reasons none of them could figure out. It yielded no evidence except the time it was broken. Perps occasionally broke watches or clocks at crime scenes after they’d set them to the wrong time to mislead investigators. But this wasstopped at close to the actual time of death. What should they make of that?
    Mysteriouser . . .
    As the aide wrote their observations on the whiteboard Rhyme looked over the bag containing the sign-in book. “The missing name in the book.” He mused, “Nine people signed but there’re only eight names in the log. . . . I think we need an expert here.” Rhyme ordered into the microphone, “Command, telephone. Call Kincaid comma Parker.”

Chapter Six
    On the screen the display showed a 703 area code, Virginia, then the number being dialed.
    A ring. A young girl’s voice said, “Kincaid residence.”
    “Uhm, yes. Is Parker there? Your father, I mean.”
    “Who’s calling?”
    “Lincoln Rhyme. In New York.”
    “Hold on, please.”
    A moment later the laid-back voice of one of the country’s preeminent document examiners came on the line. “Hey, Lincoln. Been a month or two, hasn’t it?”
    “Busy time,” Rhyme offered. “And what’re you up to, Parker?”
    “Oh, getting into trouble. Nearly caused an international incident. The British Cultural Society in the District wanted me to authenticate a notebook of King Edward’s they’d purchased from a private collector. Note the tense of the verb, Lincoln.”
    “They’d already paid for it.”
    “Six hundred thousand.”
    “Little pricey. They wanted it that badly?”
    “Oh, it had some real nice juicy gossip about Churchill and Chamberlain. Well, not in that sense, of course.”
    “Of course not.” As usual Rhyme tried to be patient with those from whom he was seeking gratuitous help.
    “I looked it over and what could I do? I had to question it.”
    The innocuous verb, from a respected document examiner like Kincaid, was synonymous with branding the diary a bad-ass forgery.
    “Ah, they’ll get over it,” he continued. “Though, come to think of it, they haven’t paid my bill yet. . . . No, honey, we don’t make the frosting till the cake cools. . . . Because I said so.”
    A single father, Kincaid was the former head of the FBI’s documents department at headquarters. He’d left the bureau to run his own document examination service so he could spend more time with his children, Robby and Stephanie.
    “How’s Margaret?” Sachs called into the speaker.
    “That you, Amelia?”
    “Yup.”
    “She’s fine. Haven’t seen her for a few days. We took the kids to Planet Play on Wednesday and I was just starting to beat her at laser tag when her pager goes off. She had to go kick in somebody’s door and arrest them. Panama or Ecuador or someplace like that. She doesn’t give me the details. So, what’s up?”
    “We’re running a case and I need some help. Here’s the scenario: perp was seen writing his name in a security desk sign-in book. Okay?”
    “Got it. And you need the handwriting analyzed?”
    “The problem is we don’t have any handwriting.”
    “It disappeared?”
    “Yep.”
    “And you’re sure the writer wasn’t faking?”
    “Positive. There was a guard who saw ink going on paper, no question.”
    “Anything visible now?”
    “Nothing.”
    Kincaid gave a grim laugh. “That’s smart. So there was no record of the perp entering the building. And then somebody else wrote their name over the blank space and ruined whatever impression there might’ve been of his signature.”
    “Right.”
    “Anything on the sheet below the top one?”
    Rhyme glanced at Cooper, who shone a bright light at an acute angle on the second sheet in the log—this, rather than covering the page with pencil lead, was the preferred method to raise impression evidence. He shook his head.
    “Nothing,” Rhyme told the document examiner. Then asked, “So how’d he pull that off?”
    “He Ex-Laxed it,” Kincaid announced.
    “How’s that?” Sellitto called.
    “Used disappearing ink. We call it Ex-Laxing in the business. The old Ex-Lax contained phenolphthalein. Before it