Excerpt from Select Editions’ The Vanished Man
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Sellitto received a phone call. He listened for a moment, then, looking bewildered, said, “Impossible. . . . You’re sure? . . . Yeah, okay. Thanks.” Hanging up, the detective glanced at Rhyme. “That was the administrator of the music school. There is no janitor. The cleaning staff doesn’t work on Saturday. And none of ’em look like the guy the respondings saw. He—”
“Oh, damn,” Rhyme snapped. “It was him! The janitor looked completely different from the perp, right?”
Sellitto consulted his notebook. “He was in his sixties, bald, no beard, wearing gray coveralls.”
“Gray coveralls!” Rhyme shouted. “That’s the silk fiber we found.”
“What’re you talking about?” Cooper asked.
“Our unsub killed the student. When he was surprised by the respondings, he blinded them with the flash and ran into the performance space, set up the fuses and the digital recorder to make them think he was still inside, changed into the janitor outfit, and ran out the second door.”
“How the hell could he’ve done it?” Sellitto asked. “He was out of sight for, what, sixty seconds? There’s no way.”
“No way?” Rhyme mused cynically as he wheeled himself closer to the whiteboard on which were taped the digital photos Amelia Sachs had taken of the footprints. “Then how ’bout some evidence?” He examined the perp’s footprints and then the ones that she’d lifted in the corridor near where the janitor had been.
“Shoes,” he announced.
“They’re the same?” Sellitto asked.
“Yep,” Amelia Sachs said, walking to the board. “Ecco, size ten.”
Rhyme asked, “Okay, what do we have? A perp in his early fifties, medium build, medium height, beardless, two deformed fingers, and that’s all.” Then he frowned. “No,” he muttered darkly, “that’s not all we know. He had a change of clothes with him, murder weapons. . . . He’s an organized offender.” He glanced at Sellitto and added, “He’s going to do this again.”
Sachs nodded her grim agreement.
Rhyme gazed at the evidence whiteboards and wondered, What ties this all together?
The black silk, the makeup, the costume change, the disguises, the flashes, and the pyrotechnics. The disappearing ink.
Rhyme said, “Our boy’s got some magic training.”
Sellitto nodded. “Okay. But whatta we do now?”
“Seems obvious to me,” Rhyme said. “Find our own.”
“Our own what?” Sellitto asked.
“Magician, of course.”
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