The Vanished Man

Conjurer but with this particular perp Rhyme was taking no chances.
    The jacket also contained a gray plastic hotel key card. Rhyme was delighted at this find. Even though there was no hotel name on it—just a picture of a key and an arrow to show the guest which end to insert in the lock—he assumed it would have codes in the magnetic strip to tell them which hotel and room it belonged to.
    Cooper found the manufacturer’s name in small type on the back of the card: APC INC., AKRON, OHIO. This, he found out from a search of a trademark database, stood for American Plastic Cards, a company that made hundreds of different identification and key cards.
    In a few minutes the team was on the speakerphonewith the president of APC himself—a shirtsleeve CEO, Rhyme imagined, who had no problem working on Saturday or picking up his own phone. Rhyme explained the situation to him, described the key and asked how many hotels in the New York City metro area it was sold to.
    “Ah, that’s the APC-42. It’s our most popular model. We make them for all the big locking systems. Ilco, Saflok, Tesa, Ving, Sargent, all the others.”
    “Any suggestions on narrowing down which hotel it belongs to?”
    “I’m afraid you’ll just have to start calling hotels and see who uses gray APC-42s. We have that information here someplace but I wouldn’t know how to dig it up myself. I’ll try and track down my sales manager or his assistant. But it could be a day or two.”
    “Ouch,” Sellitto said.
    Yeah, ouch.
    After they hung up, Rhyme decided he wasn’t content to wait for APC so he had Sellitto send the key to Bedding and Saul with instructions to start canvassing hotels in Manhattan to find out who used the very fucking popular APC-42. He also ordered both the press pass and the key card fingerprinted—but the results were negative on this too. They revealed just smudges and two more of the finger-cup prints.
    Roland Bell returned from the scenes on the West Side and Cooper briefed him on what the team had learned so far. They then returned to the evidence and found that the Conjurer’s running jacket contained something else: a restaurant check from a place called the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction, New York. Thebill revealed that four people had eaten lunch at table 12 on Saturday, April 6—two weeks ago. The meal consisted of turkey, meatloaf, a steak and one daily special. No one drank alcohol. It was soft drinks all around.
    Sachs shook her head. “Where the hell’s Bedford Junction?”
    “Way upstate, I do believe,” Mel Cooper said.
    “There’s a phone number on the receipt,” Bell drawled. “Call ’em up. Ask Debby or Tanya or whoever’s the charmin’ waitress if any regular foursome sits at”—he squinted at the receipt—“table twelve. Or at least if she remembers who ordered those things. Long shot, but who knows?”
    “What’s the number?” Sellitto asked.
    Bell called it out.
    It was a long shot—too long, as Rhyme had expected. The manager and the waitresses there had no idea who might’ve been in on that Saturday.
    “It’s a ‘bustlin’ spot,’ “ Sellitto reported, rolling his eyes. “That’s a quote.”
    “I don’t like it,” Sachs said.
    “What?”
    “What’s he doing having lunch with three other people?”
    “Good point,” Bell said. “You think he’s working with somebody?”
    Sellitto replied, “Naw, I doubt it. Pattern doers’re almost always loners.”
    Kara disagreed. “I’m not sure. Close-in artists, parlor magicians—they work alone. But he’s an illusionist, remember? They always work with other people. You’ve got volunteers from the audience. Then assistantsonstage that the audience knows’re working with the performer. And then there’re confederates too. Those’re people who’re working for the illusionist but the audience doesn’t know it. They might be disguised as stagehands, members of the audience, volunteers. In a good show you’re never quite sure who’s who.”
    Christ, Rhyme thought, this one perp was bad enough, with his skills at quick change, escape and illusionism. Working with assistants would make him a hundred times more dangerous.
    “Mark it down, Thom,” he barked. Then: “Let’s look at what you found in the alley—where Burke collared him.”
    The first item was the officer’s handcuffs.
    “He got out of them in seconds. Had to’ve had a key,” Sachs said. To the dismay of cops around the country most