The Vanished Man

when she was gettin’ comfortable with him he drugged her and took her to the pond. Dunked her upside down.”
    “It was a variation of the Water Torture Cell routine,” Kara explained. “Houdini. One of his most famous.”
    “And his escape from the pond?” Rhyme asked Sachs.
    “At first I wasn’t sure it was him—he’d done a quick change,” she said. “His clothes were different and”—a glance at Kara—“his eyebrows too. I couldn’t get a look at his hand, to see the fingers. But he distracted me, used ventriloquism. I was looking right at his face—I never saw his lips move.”
    Kara said, “I’ll bet he picked words that didn’t have any b ’s or m ’s or p ’s. Probably no f ’s or v ’s either.”
    “You’re right. I think it was something like, ‘Yo, look out, on your right, that guy in the jogging suit’s got a gun.’ Perfect black dialect.” She grimaced. “I looked away—the same direction he looked, like everybody else. Then he set off that flash cotton and I got blinded. He fired the squibs and I thought he was shooting. He got me cold.”
    Rhyme saw the disgust in her face. Amelia Sachs reserved her worst anger for herself.
    Kara, though, said, “Don’t take it too hard. Hearing’s the easiest sensation to fool. We don’t use sound illusions much in shows. They’re cheap shots.”
    Sachs shrugged this reassurance off and continued, “While Roland and I were still blinded from the flash he took off and disappeared, slipped into the crafts fair.” Another grimace. “And then I saw him fifteen minutes later—this biker, wearing a Harley shirt. I mean, for God’s sake, he was right there in front of me.”
    “Man,” Kara said, shaking her head, “his coins definitely don’t talk.”
    “What’s that?” Rhyme asked. “Coins?”
    “Oh, an expression magicians use. Literally it means you can’t hear any clinking when you do coin tricks but we use it in general when somebody’s really good. We’d also say he’s got ‘tight tricks.’ ”
    Walking to the whiteboard reserved for the magician profile, she picked up the marker and added to it, commenting, “So, he does close-in and mentalism and even ventriloquism. And animal tricks. We knew he does lock picking—from the second murder—but now we know he’s an escapist too. What kind of magic doesn’t he do?”
    As Rhyme leaned his head back, watching her write, Thom brought a large envelope into the room.
    He handed it to Bell. “For you.”
    “Whatsis?” the Tarheel detective asked, pulling the contents out and reading them. He nodded slowly as he read. “This’s the report on the follow-up search at Grady’s office. The one you asked Peretti to run. You mind taking a gander, Lincoln?”
    The curt note on top read: LR—As requested.—VP.
    Rhyme read through the details of the report, Thom flipping the page for him with every stern nod. The CS techs had completed a thorough inventory of the secretary’s office and had identified and mapped out all the footprints in the room, exactly as Rhyme had asked. He read this carefully several times, closing his eyes and picturing the scene.
    Then he turned to the complete analysis of the fibers that’d been found. Most of the white ones were a polyester/rayon blend. Some were attached to a thick cotton fiber—also white. Most were dull and dirty. The black fibers were wool.
    “Mel, what do we think about the black ones there?”
    The tech scooted off his stool and examined the images. “Photo work isn’t the best,” he said. After a moment he concluded, “From some tight weave, twilled fabric.”
    “Gabardine?” Rhyme asked.
    “Can’t tell without a bigger sample to see the diagonal. But I’ll go with gabardine.”
    Rhyme read down the page and learned that the single red fiber found in the office was satin. “Okay,okay,” he mused, closing his eyes and digesting everything he’d read.
    The criminalist asked Cooper, “What do you know about fabric and clothing, Mel?”
    “Not a lot. But if I can quote you, Lincoln, the important question isn’t ‘What do you know about something?’ It’s ‘Do you know where to find out about it?’ And the answer to that is yes, I do.”
    T HE C ONJURER

    Music School Crime Scene
    • Perp’s description: Brown hair, fake beard, no distinguishing, medium build, medium height, age: fifties. Ring and little fingers of left hand fused together. Changed costume quickly to resemble old, bald