The Vanished Man

town house.
    Of course it wasn’t, she decided.
    Too much of a coincidence.
    But then, the flashing lights, blue and red, were on Central Park West, where his place was located.
    Come on, girl, she reassured herself, it’s your imagination, stoked by the memory of the eerie harlequin on the banner in front of the Cirque Fantastique tent in the park, the masked performers, the horror of the Conjurer’s murders. They were making her paranoid.
    Spooky . . .
    Forget it.
    Shifting the large shopping bag containing garlicky Cuban food from one hand to the other, she and Kara continued down the busy sidewalk, talking about parents, about careers, about the Cirque Fantastique. About men too.
    Bang, bang . . .
    The young woman sipped her double Cuban coffee, to which, she said, she’d become addicted at first taste. Not only was it half the price of Starbucks’, Kara pointed out, but it was twice as strong. “I’m not sure about the math but I think that makes it four times as good,” the young woman said. “I’ll tell you, I love finds like this. It’s the little things in life, don’t you think?”
    But Sachs had lost the thread of the conversation. Another ambulance sped by. She sent a silent prayer that it keep going past Rhyme’s.
    It didn’t. The vehicle braked to a fast stop at the corner next to his building.
    “No,” she whispered.
    “What’s going on?” Kara wondered. “An accident?”
    Heart pounding, Sachs dropped the bags of food and began sprinting toward the building.
    “Oh, Lincoln . . .”
    Kara started after her, spilled hot coffee on her hand and dropped the cup. She kept up the pace beside the policewoman. “What’s going on?”
    As she turned the corner Sachs counted a half-dozen fire trucks and ambulances.
    At first she’d suspected he’d had an attack of dysreflexia. But this had clearly been a fire. She looked up to the second story and gasped in shock. Smoke was drifting out of Rhyme’s bedroom window.
    Jesus, no!
    Sachs ducked under the police line and ran toward the cluster of firefighters in the doorway. She leaped up the front stairs, her arthritis momentarily forgotten. Then she was through the door, nearly slipping on the marble floor. The hallway and the lab seemed intact but a faint haze of smoke filled the downstairs hallway.
    Two firemen were walking slowly down the stairs. It seemed their faces were filled with resignation.
    “Lincoln!” she cried.
    And started for the stairs.
    “No, Amelia!” Lon Sellitto’s gruff voice cut through the hallway.
    She turned, panicked, thinking that he wanted to stop her from seeing his burned corpse. If the Conjurer had taken Lincoln away from her he was going to die. Nothing in the world would stop her.
    “Lon!”
    He motioned her off the stairs and embraced her. “He’s not up there, Amelia.”
    “Is—”
    “No, no, it’s okay. He’s all right. Thom brought him down to the guest room in the back. This floor.”
    “Thank God,” Kara said. She looked around in dismay at more firefighters coming down the stairs, large men and women swollen even larger by their uniforms and equipment.
    Thom, grim-faced, joined them from the back of the hall. “He’s all right, Amelia. No burns, some smoke inhalation. Blood pressure’s high. But he’s on his meds. It’ll be okay.”
    “What happened?” she asked the detective.
    “The Conjurer,” Sellitto muttered. He sighed. “He killed Larry Burke. Stole his uniform. That’s how he got in. Somehow he snuck up to Rhyme’s room. He set a fire around his bed. We didn’t even know it down here; somebody saw the smoke from the street and called nine-one-one. And Dispatch called me. Thom and Mel and I got most of it out before the trucks got here.”
    She asked Sellitto, “I don’t suppose we got him, the Conjurer?”
    A bitter laugh. “Whatta you think? He vanished. Thin air.”
    •   •   •
    Following the accident that left him paralyzed, after Rhyme had graduated from the stage of grief that called for him to spend months willing his legs to work again, he gave up on the impossible and turned his considerable focus and strength of will to a more reasonable goal.
    Breathing on his own.
    A C4 quad like Rhyme—his neck broken at the fourth vertebra from the base of the skull—is on the borderline of needing a ventilator. The nerves that lead from the brain down to the diaphragm musclesmay or may not be functioning. In Rhyme’s case his lungs appeared at