The Vanished Man

was banned by the FDA. You’d dissolve a pill in alcohol and make a blue ink. It had an alkaline pH. Then you’d write something. After a while, exposure to the air would make the blue disappear.”
    “Sure,” said Rhyme, recalling his basic chemistry. “The carbon dioxide in the air turns the ink acidic and that neutralizes the color.”
    “Exactly. You don’t see phenolphthalein muchanymore. But you can do the same thing with thymolphthalein indicator and sodium hydroxide.”
    “Can you buy this stuff anyplace in particular?”
    “Hm,” Kincaid considered. “Well. . . . Just a minute, honey. Daddy’s on the phone. . . . No, it’s okay. All cakes look lopsided when they’re in the oven. I’ll be there soon. . . . Lincoln? What I was going to say was that it’s a great idea in theory but when I was in the bureau there were never any perps or spies who actually used disappearing ink. It’s more of a novelty, you know. Entertainers’d use it.”
    Entertainment, Rhyme thought grimly, looking at the board on which were taped the pictures of poor Svetlana Rasnikov. “Where would our doer find ink like that?”
    “Most likely toy stores or magic shops.”
    Interesting . . .
    “Okay, well, that’s helpful, Parker.”
    “Come and visit sometime,” Sachs called. “And bring the kids.”
    Rhyme grimaced at the invitation. He whispered to Sachs, “And why don’t you invite all their friends too. The whole school . . .”
    Laughing, she shushed him.
    After he disconnected the call Rhyme said grumpily, “The more we learn, the less we know.”
    Bedding and Saul called in and reported that Svetlana seemed to be well liked at the music school and had no enemies there. Her part-time job wasn’t likely to have produced any stalkers either; she led sing-alongs at kids’ birthday parties.
    A package arrived from the medical examiner’s office. Inside was a plastic evidence bag containing theold handcuffs the victim had been restrained with. They were unopened, as Rhyme had ordered. He’d told the M.E. to compress the victim’s hands to remove them since drilling out the locks could destroy valuable trace.
    “Never seen anything like this,” Cooper said, holding them up, “outside of a movie.”
    Rhyme agreed. They were antique, heavy and made of unevenly forged iron.
    Cooper brushed and tapped all around the lock mechanisms but he found no significant trace. The fact they were antique, though, was encouraging because it would limit the sources they might’ve come from. Rhyme told Cooper to photograph the cuffs and print out pictures to show to dealers.
    Sellitto received another phone call. He listened for a moment then, looking bewildered, said, “Impossible. . . . You’re sure? . . . Yeah, okay. Thanks.” Hanging up, the detective glanced at Rhyme. “I don’t get it.”
    “What’s that?” Rhyme asked, in no mood for any more mysteries.
    “That was the administrator of the music school. There is no janitor.”
    “But the patrol officers saw him,” Sachs pointed out.
    “The cleaning staff doesn’t work on Saturday. Only weekday evenings. And none of ’em look like the guy the respondings saw.”
    No janitor?
    Sellitto looked through his notes. “He was right outside the second door, sweeping up. He—”
    “Oh, goddamn,” Rhyme snapped. “It was him!” A glance at the detective. “The janitor looked completely different from the perp, right?”
    Sellitto consulted his notebook. “He was in his sixties, bald, no beard, wearing gray coveralls.”
    “ Gray coveralls!” Rhyme shouted.
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s the silk fiber. It was a costume.”
    “What’re you talking about?” Cooper asked.
    “Our unsub killed the student. When he was surprised by the respondings he blinded them with the flash and ran into the performance space, set up the fuses and the digital recorder to make them think he was still inside, changed into the janitor outfit and ran out the second door.”
    “But he didn’t just strip off throwaway sweats like some chain-snatcher on the A train, Linc,” the rotund policeman pointed out. “How the hell could he’ve done it? He was out of sight for, what, sixty seconds?”
    “Fine. If you have an explanation that doesn’t involve divine intervention I’m willing to listen.”
    “Come on. There’s no fucking way.”
    “No way?” Rhyme mused cynically as he wheeled closer to the whiteboard on which Thom had taped the printouts of