The Vanished Man

bang.
    Then he asked, “You’ve done the written and orals, right?”
    “Yessir. Should have the results any day now.”
    “My group’ll complete our assessment evaluation and send that to the board with our recommendations. You can stand down now.”
    “Yessir.”
    The cop who’d played the last bad guy—the one with the shotgun—wandered up to her. He was a good-looking Italian, half a generation out of the Brooklyn docks, she judged, and had a boxer’s muscles. A dirty stubble of beard covered his cheeks and chin. He wore a big-bore chrome automatic high on his trim hip and his cocky smile brought her close to suggesting he might want to use the gun’s reflection as a mirror to shave.
    “I gotta tell ya—I’ve done a dozen assessments and that was the best I ever seen, babe.”
    She laughed in surprise at the word. There were certainly cavemen left in the department—from Patrol Services to corner offices at Police Plaza—but they tended to be more condescending than openly sexist. Sachs hadn’t heard a “babe” or “honey” from a male cop in at least a year.
    “Let’s stick with ‘Officer,’ you don’t mind.”
    “No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “You can chill now. The AE’s over.”
    “How’s that?”
    “When I said ‘babe,’ it’s not like it’s a part of the assessment. You don’t have to, you know, deal with it official or anything. I’m just saying it ’cause I was impressed. And ’cause you’re . . . you know.” He smiled into her eyes, his charm as shiny as his pistol. “I don’t do compliments much. Coming from me, that’s something.”
    ’Cause you’re you know.
    “Hey, you’re not pissed or anything, are you?” he asked.
    “Not pissed at all. But it’s still ‘Officer.’ That’s what you call me and what I’ll call you.”
    At least to your face.
    “Hey, I didn’t mean any offense or anything. You’re a pretty girl. And I’m a guy. You know what that’s like. . . . So.”
    “So,” she replied and started away.
    He stepped in front of her, frowning. “Hey, hold on. This isn’t going too good. Look, let me buy you a coffee. You’ll like me when you get to know me.”
    “Don’t bet on it,” one of his buddies called, laughing.
    The Babe Man good-naturedly gave him the finger then turned back to Sachs.
    Which is when her pager beeped and she looked down to see Lincoln Rhyme’s number on the screen. The word “URGENT” appeared after it.
    “Gotta go,” she said.
    “So no time for that coffee?” he asked, a fake pout on his handsome face.
    “No time.”
    “Well, how ’bout a phone number?”
    She made a pistol with her index finger and thumb and aimed it at him. “Bang, bang,” she said. And trotted toward her yellow Camaro.

Chapter Three
    This is a school?
    Wheeling a large black crime-scene suitcase behind her, Amelia Sachs walked through the dim corridor. She smelled mold and old wood. Dusty webs had coagulated near the high ceiling and scales of green paint curled from the walls. How could anybody study music here? It was a setting for one of the Anne Rice novels that Sachs’s mother read.
    “Spooky,” one of the responding officers had muttered, only half jokingly.
    That said it all.
    A half-dozen cops—four patrol officers and two in soft clothes—stood near a double doorway at the end of the hall. Disheveled Lon Sellitto, head down and hand clutching one of his notepads, was talking to a guard. Like the walls and floors the guard’s outfit was dusty and stained.
    Through the open doorway she glimpsed another dim space, in the middle of which was a light-colored form. The victim.
    To the CS tech walking beside her she said, “We’ll need lights. A couple of sets.” The young man nodded and headed back to the RRV—the crime scene rapidresponse vehicle, a station wagon filled with forensic collection equipment. It sat outside, half on the sidewalk, where he’d parked it after the drive here (probably at a more leisurely pace than Sachs in her 1969 Camaro SS, which had averaged 70 mph en route to the school from the assessment exercise).
    Sachs studied the young blonde woman, lying on her back ten feet away, belly arched up because her bound hands were underneath her. Even in the dimness of the school lobby Sachs’s quick eyes noted the deep ligature marks on her neck and the blood on her lips and chin—probably from biting her tongue, a common occurrence in strangulations.
    Automatically she also