The Vanished Man

and glanced into her cupped palm. She looked up. “We said two out of three, right?”
    Sachs nodded.
    Kara opened her fingers. Inside were two dimes and a nickel. The dimes were heads up. No sign of the quarter. “Guess this means you’re buying.”

Chapter Eight
    “Lincoln, meet Kara.”
    She’d been warned, Rhyme could see, but the young woman still blinked in surprise and glanced at him with the Look. The one he knew so well. Accompanied by the Smile.
    It was the famous don’t-look-at-his-body gaze, accompanied by the oh-you’re-handicapped-I-never-noticed grin.
    And Rhyme knew she’d be counting down the moments until she could get the hell out of his presence.
    The sprightly young woman walked farther into the parlor lab in Rhyme’s town house. “Hi. Nice to meet you.” The eyes remained rooted in his. At least she didn’t start forward with that minuscule lean that told him she was stifling an offered handshake and then cringe in horror at the faux pas.
    Okay, Kara. Don’t worry. You can give the gimp your insights then get the hell out.
    He offered her a superficial smile that matched hers crease for crease and said how pleased he was to meet her too.
    Which on a professional level, at least, wasn’t sardonic—Kara was, it turned out, the only magician leadthey’d snared. None of the employees at the other shops in town had been any help—and everyone had alibis for the time of the killing.
    She was introduced to Lon Sellitto and Mel Cooper. Thom nodded and did one of the things he was known for, whether Rhyme wanted him to or not: offered refreshments.
    “We’re not really in a church social mode here, Thom,” Rhyme muttered.
    Kara said no that was all right but Thom said no he was insisting.
    “Maybe coffee?” she asked.
    “Coming up.”
    “Black. Sugar. Maybe a couple sugars?”
    “We really—” Rhyme began.
    “For the whole room,” the aide announced. “I’ll make a pot. Get some bagels too.”
    “Bagels?” Sellitto asked.
    “You could open a restaurant in your spare time,” Rhyme snapped to the aide. “Get it out of your system.”
    “What’s spare time?” came the trim blond man’s fast quip. He headed for the kitchen.
    “Officer Sachs,” he continued to Kara, “told us that you had some information you thought might help.”
    “I hope so.” Another tight perusal of Rhyme’s face. The Look again. Closer this time. Oh, for Christ’s sake, just say something. Ask me how it happened. Ask me if it hurts. Ask me what it’s like to pee into a tube.
    “Hey, what’re we calling him?” Sellitto tapped the top of the evidence whiteboard. Until the identity of the unsub—for “unknown subject”—was learned,many law enforcers gave perps nicknames. “How ’bout the ‘Magician’?”
    “No, that sounds too tame,” Rhyme said, looking at the pictures of the victim. “How’s the ‘Conjurer’?” Surprising himself by offering this decidedly right-brained suggestion.
    “Works for me.”
    In handwriting far less elegant than Thom’s the detective wrote the words on top of the chart.
    The Conjurer . . .
    “Now let’s see if we can make him appear,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs said, “Tell them about the Vanished Man.”
    The young woman rubbed her hand over her boyish hair as she described an illusionist’s trick that sounded almost identical to what the Conjurer had done at the music school.
    She added the discouraging news, though, that most illusionists would know about it.
    Rhyme asked, “Give us some idea about how he does the tricks. Techniques. So we’ll know what to expect from him if he tries to target somebody else.”
    “You want me to tip the gaff, huh?”
    “Tip the—?”
    “Gaff,” Kara said, then explained: “See, all magic tricks’re made up of an effect and a method. The effect is what the audience sees. You know: the girl levitating, the coins falling through a solid tabletop. The method is the mechanism of how the magician does it—wires holding up the girl, palming the coins then dropping identical ones from a rig under the table.”
    Effect and method, Rhyme reflected. Kind of likewhat I do: the effect is catching a perp when it seems impossible. The method is the science and logic that let us do it.
    Kara continued, “Tipping the gaff means giving away the method of a trick. Like I just did—explaining how the Vanished Man worked. It’s a sensitive thing—Mr. Balzac, my mentor, he’s always hounding magicians who tip