The Vanished Man

of sight.
    Heart slamming from the fright, Franciscovich called him inside.
    He asked, “Is it, uhm . . . I mean, you get him?”
    “He’s not here,” Ausonio said in a shaky voice.
    “What?” The man peeked cautiously into the hall.
    Franciscovich heard the voices of the officers and EMS techs arriving. The jangle of equipment. Still, the women couldn’t bring themselves to join their fellow cops just yet. They stood transfixed in the middle of the recital space, both uneasy and bewildered, trying vainly to figure out how the killer had escaped from a room from which there was no escape.

Chapter Two
    “He’s listening to music.”
    “I’m not listening to music. The music happens to be on. That’s all.”
    “Music, huh?” Lon Sellitto muttered as he walked into Lincoln Rhyme’s bedroom. “That’s a coincidence.”
    “He’s developed a taste for jazz,” Thom explained to the paunchy detective. “Surprised me, I have to tell you.”
    “As I said,” Lincoln Rhyme continued petulantly, “I’m working and the music happens to be playing in the background. What do you mean, coincidence?”
    Nodding at the flat-screen monitor in front of Rhyme’s Flexicair bed, the slim, young aide, dressed in a white shirt, tan slacks and solid purple tie, said, “No, he’s not working. Unless staring at the same page for an hour is work. He wouldn’t let me get away with work like that.”
    “Command, turn page.” The computer recognized Rhyme’s voice and obeyed his order, slapping a new page of Forensic Science Review onto the monitor. He asked Thom acerbically, “Say, you want to quiz me on what I’ve been staring at? The composition of the top five exotic toxins found in recent terrorist laboratoriesin Europe? And how ’bout we put some money on the answers?”
    “No, we have other things to do,” the aide replied, referring to the various bodily functions that caregivers must attend to several times a day when their patients are quadriplegics like Lincoln Rhyme.
    “We’ll get to that in a few minutes,” the criminalist said, enjoying a particularly energetic trumpet riff.
    “We’ll get to that now. If you’ll excuse us for a moment, Lon.”
    “Yeah, sure.” Large, rumpled Sellitto stepped into the corridor outside the second-floor bedroom of Rhyme’s Central Park West town house. He closed the door.
    As Thom expertly performed his duties Lincoln Rhyme listened to the music and wondered: Coincidence?
    Five minutes later Thom let Sellitto back into the bedroom. “Coffee?”
    “Yeah. Could use some. Too fucking early to work on a Saturday.”
    The aide left.
    “So, how do I look, Linc?” asked the pirouetting middle-aged detective, whose gray suit was typical of his wardrobe—made apparently from permanently wrinkled cloth.
    “A fashion show?” Rhyme asked.
    Coincidence?
    Then his mind slipped back to the CD. How the hell does somebody play the trumpet so smoothly? How can you get that kind of sound from a metal instrument?
    The detective continued: “I lost sixteen pounds. Rachel has me on a diet. Fat’s the problem. You cut out fat, you’d be amazed how much weight you can lose.”
    “Fat, yes. I think we knew that, Lon. So . . . ?” Meaning, get to the point.
    “Gotta bizarre case. Found a body a half hour ago at a music school up the street from here. I’m case officer and we could use some help.”
    Music school. And I’m listening to music. That’s a piss-poor coincidence.
    Sellitto ran through some of the facts: student killed, the perp was nearly collared but he got away through some kind of trapdoor that nobody could find.
    Music was mathematical. That much Rhyme, a scientist, could understand. It was logical, it was perfectly structured. It was also, he reflected, infinite. An unlimited number of tunes could be written. You could never be bored writing music. He wondered how one went about it. Rhyme believed he had no creativity. He’d taken piano lessons when he was eleven or twelve but, even though he’d developed an enduring crush on Miss Osborne, the lessons themselves were a write-off. His fondest memories of the instrument were taking stroboscopic pictures of the resonating strings for a science-fair project.
    “You with me, Linc?”
    “A case, you were saying. Bizarre.”
    Sellitto gave more of the details, slowly corralling Rhyme’s attention. “There’s got to be some way outta the hall. But nobody from the school or our team can find