The Vanished Man

matter?” Sachs asked.
    “The manure on the Conjurer’s shoes.”
    “What about it?”
    “It’s not from dogs. It’s from horses! Look at the vegetation. What the hell was I thinking of? Dogs’re carnivores. They don’t eat grass and hay. . . . All right, let’s think. The dirt and the mold and the other evidence placed him in Central Park. And the hairs . . . You know that area, the dog knoll? That’s in the park too.”
    “It’s right across the street,” Sellitto pointed out. “Where everybody walks their dogs.”
    “Kara,” he snapped, “does the Cirque Fantastique have horses?”
    “No,” she said. “No animal acts at all.”
    “Okay, that lets the circus out. . . . What else could he be up to? The dog knoll’s right next to the bridle path in the park, right? It’s a long shot but maybe he rides or’s been checking out riders. One of them could be a target. Maybe not his next one but let’s just go on the assumption that it is—since it’s our only goddamn solid lead.”
    Sellitto said, “There’s a stable someplace around here, isn’t there?”
    “I’ve seen it nearby,” Sachs said. “It’s in the eighties, I think.”
    “Find out,” Rhyme called. “And get some people over there.”
    Sachs glanced at the clock. It was 1:35 P.M. “Well, we’ve got some time. Two and a half hours till the next victim.”
    “Good,” Sellitto said. “I’ll get surveillance teams set up in the park and around the stable. If they’re in place by two-thirty that’ll be plenty of time to spot him.”
    Then Rhyme noticed Kara frowning. “What is it?” he asked her.
    “You know, I’m not sure you do have that much time.”
    “Why?”
    “I was telling you about misdirection?”
    “I remember.”
    “Well, there’s also time misdirection. That’s tricking the audience by making them think something’s going to happen at one time when it really happens at another.Like, an illusionist’ll repeat an act at regular intervals. The audience subconsciously comes to believe that whatever he’s doing has to happen only at those times. But what the performer does then is shorten the time between the intervals. The audience isn’t paying attention and they completely miss whatever he’s doing. You can spot a time misdirection trick because the illusionist always lets the audience know what the interval is.”
    “Like breaking the watches?” Sachs asked.
    “Exactly.”
    Rhyme asked, “So you don’t think we have until four?”
    Kara shrugged. “We might. Maybe he’s planned to kill three people every four hours and then he’ll murder the fourth victim only one hour later. I don’t know.”
    “We don’t know anything here,” Rhyme said firmly. “What do you think, Kara? What would you do?”
    She gave a troubled laugh, being asked to step into the mind of a killer. After a moment of hard debate she said, “He knows you’ve found the watches by now. He knows you’re smart. He doesn’t need to hammer it home anymore. If I were him I’d be going after the next victim before four. I’d be going after him right now.”
    “That’s good enough for me,” Rhyme said. “Forget surveillance and forget soft clothes. Lon, call Haumann and get ESU into the park. In a big way.”
    “It might scare him off, Linc—if he’s in disguise and doing his own surveillance.”
    “I think we have to take that chance. Tell ESU we’re looking for . . . who knows what the hell we’relooking for? Give him a general description, as best you can.”
    Fifty-year-old killer, sixty-year-old janitor, seventy-year-old bag lady . . .
    Cooper looked up from his computer. “Got the stable. Hammerstead Riding Academy.”
    Bell, Sellitto and Sachs started for the door. Kara said, “I want to go too.”
    “No,” Rhyme said.
    “There may be something I’ll notice. Some sleight or a quick-change move by somebody in a crowd. I could spot it.” A nod toward the other cops. “ They might not.”
    “No. It’s too dangerous. No civilians on a tactical operation. That’s the rule.”
    “I don’t care about the rules,” the young woman said, leaning toward him defiantly. “I can help.”
    “Kara—”
    But the young woman silenced him by glancing at the crime scene photos of Tony Calvert and Svetlana Rasnikov then turning back to Lincoln Rhyme with a cold expression in her eyes. In this simple gesture she reminded him that it was he who’d asked her here, he who’d brought her