The Vanished Man

Chapter Twenty-nine

Sunday morning passed in frustration as the search for Erick Weir stalled.

The team learned that after the fire in Ohio the illusionist had remained in the burn unit of a local hospital for several weeks and then left on his own, without officially checking out. There was a record that he sold his house in downtown Las Vegas not long after that but no public record of buying another. In that cash-fat city though, Rhyme supposed, one could easily buy a small place in the desert with a stack of greenbacks, no questions asked, no public filings involved.

The team managed to find Weir's late wife's mother. But Mrs. Cosgrove knew nothing of Weir's whereabouts. He'd never contacted them after the disaster to send his condolences about their daughter's death. She reported, though, that she wasn't surprised. Weir was a selfish, cruel man, she explained, who'd become obsessed with her young daughter and virtually hypnotized her into marrying him. None of the other Cosgrove relatives had had any contact with Weir.

Cooper compiled the remaining information from the computer searches on Weir but there wasn't much. No VICAP or NCIC reports. There were no other details on the man, and the officers tracking down Weir's family found only that both parents were deceased, that he was an only child and that no next of kin could be located.

Late in the morning Weir's other assistant, Art Loesser, returned their call from Las Vegas. The man wasn't surprised to learn that his former boss was wanted in connection with a crime and echoed what they'd learned already: that Weir was one of the world's greatest illusionists but that he took the profession far too seriously and was known for his dangerous illusions and hot temper. Loesser still had nightmares about being his apprentice.

I said "hurts." I meant to say "haunts." He still haunts me.

"All young assistants're influenced by their mentors," Loesser told the team via speakerphone. "But my therapist said that in Weir's case we were mesmerized by him."

So both of them are in therapy.

"He said being with Weir created a Stockholm syndrome relationship. You know what that is?"

Rhyme said he was familiar with the condition – where hostages form close bonds with, and even feel affection and love for, their kidnappers.

"When did you last see him?" Sachs asked. The assessment exercise over, she was in soft clothes today – jeans and a forest-green knit blouse.

"In the hospital, the burn unit. That was about three years ago. I'd go visit him regularly at first but all he'd talk about was getting even with anybody who'd ever hurt him or who didn't approve of his kind of magic. Then he disappeared and I never saw him after that."

But then, the former protégé explained, Weir had called out of the blue about two months ago. Around the same time, Rhyme reflected, he'd called his other assistant. Loesser's wife had taken the call. "He didn't leave a number and said he'd call back but he never did. Thank God. I'll tell you, I don't know that I could've handled it."

"Do you know where he was when he called?"

"No. I asked Kathy – I was afraid he was back in town – but she said he didn't say and the call came up 'out-of-area' on caller-ID."

"He didn't tell your wife what he might be calling about? Any clue where he might be?"

"She said he sounded odd, agitated. He was whispering, hard to understand. I remember that from after the fire. His lungs'd been damaged. Made him even scarier."

Tell me about it, Rhyme thought.

"He asked if we'd heard anything about Edward Kadesky – he was the producer of the Hasbro show when the fire happened. That was it."

Loesser couldn't provide any other helpful information and they hung up.

Thom let two policewomen into the lab. Sachs nodded a greeting and introduced them to Rhyme. Diane Franciscovich and Nancy Ausonio.

They were, he recalled, the respondings at the first murder and had been given the assignment of tracking down the antique handcuffs.

Franciscovich said, "We talked to all the dealers the director of the museum recommended." Beneath their crisp uniforms both the tall brunette and the shorter blonde looked exhausted. They'd taken their assignment seriously, it seemed, and probably hadn't gotten any sleep the night before.

"The handcuffs are Darbys, like you thought," Ausonio said. "They're pretty rare – and expensive. But we've got a list of twelve people who -"

"Oh, my God, look." Franciscovich was pointing to the evidence chart, where Thom had written:

• Perp's identity: Erick A. Weir.

Ausonio flipped through the sheets she held. "Erick Weir placed a mail order for a pair of the cuffs from Ridgeway Antique Weapons in Seattle last month."

"Address?" Rhyme asked excitedly.

"Post office box in Denver. We checked. But the lease lapsed. There're no records of a permanent address."

"And no record that Weir ever lived in Denver."

"Method of payment?" Sachs asked.

"Cash," was the simultaneous response from Ausonio and Rhyme, who added, "He's not going to make stupid mistakes. Nope. That trail's dead. But at least we've got a confirmation that this's our boy."

Rhyme thanked the officers and Sachs walked them to the door.

Another call came in on Rhyme's phone. The area code on the caller ID looked familiar but Rhyme couldn't place it. "Command, answer phone… Hello?"

"Yessir. This's Lieutenant Lansing, State Police. I'm trying to reach Detective Roland Bell. I was given this number as his temporary command post."

"Hey, Harv," Bell called, walking closer to the speaker phone. "I'm here." He explained to Rhyme, "Our liaison on the Constable case up in Canton Falls."

Lansing continued, "We got the evidence you sent up here this morning. Our forensic boys're going through it. We had a couple of detectives go and talk to Swensen's wife – that minister you folks took down last night. She didn't say anything helpful and my boys didn't find anything in the trailer to connect him to Constable or anybody else in the Patriot Assembly."

"Nothin'?" Bell sighed. "Too bad. I figured him to be poke-easy careless."

"Maybe the Patriot boys got there first and scoured the place clean."

"That's more'n half likely. Man, I'm feeling we're due a little luck here. Okay, keep at it, Harv. Thanks."

"We'll let you know, we come up with anything else, Roland."

They hung up.

"This Constable case's full-up tough as this one." Nodding at the whiteboards.

Another knock on the front door.

Armed with a large coffee cup Kara walked into the room, looking more tired and haggard than the policewomen.

Sellitto was delivering a monologue about new techniques for weight loss when his Jenny Craig lecture was interrupted by yet another phone call.

" Lincoln?" the voice crackled through the speakerphone. "Bedding here. We think we've narrowed the key down to three hotels. Reason it took so long – "

The voice of his partner, Saul, interrupted. "Turns out that a lot of monthly and long-term hotels use card keys too."

"Not to mention hourly-rate places. But that's a whole 'nother story."

"We had to check them all out. Anyway, that's what we found. It's probably I say, probably, either the Chelsea Lodge, the Beckman or the… what is it?"

"Or the Lanham Arms," his partner supplied.

"Right. They're the only ones using this color Model 42. We're at the Beckman now. Thirty-four and Fifth. We're about to start trying it out."

"What do you mean trying it out?" Rhyme called.

"How d'I put this?" Bedding or Saul wondered. "The keys work one way but not the other."

"How's that?" Rhyme asked.

"See, only the lock unit on the hotel room door can read a key. The machine at the front desk that burns the room codes onto a blank key can't read one that's already been burned and tell you what room it is."

"Why not? That's crazy."

"Nobody ever needs to know that."

"Except us, of course, which is why we have to go from door to door and try them all."

"Shit," Rhyme snapped.

"Summarizes our feelings too," one of the detectives said.

Sellitto asked, "Okay. You need more people?"

"Nup. We can only do one door at a time. No other way to do it. And if there's a new guest in the room -"

"- this card'll be invalid. Which won't improve our moods any."

"Say, gentlemen?" Bell said into the phone.

"Hey there, Roland."

"We recognized the accent."

"You said the Lanham Arms. Where is that?"

"East Seventy-five. Near Lex."

"Something familiar 'bout the name. Can't quite place it." Bell was frowning, shaking his head.

"That's next on our list."

"After the Beckman."

"With its six hundred and eighty-two rooms. Better get to it." They left the Twins to their arduous task.

Cooper's computer beeped and he read an incoming email. "FBI lab in Washington… Finally got a report on the metal shavings in the Conjurer's gym bag. They say the markings suggest they're consistent with a clock mechanism."

"Well, it's not a clock," Rhyme said.

"Obviously."

"How do you know?" Bell asked.

"It's a detonator," Sachs said solemnly.

"That's what I'd say," Rhyme confirmed.

"A gas bomb?" Cooper asked, nodding toward the handkerchief "souvenir" Weir had left last night, which had been soaked in gasoline.

"Likely."

"He's got a supply of gas and he's obsessed with fire. He's going to burn the next victim."

Just like what happened to him.

Fire quote murdered him – his old persona – and by murdering someone else he feels better; it reduces the anxiety that the anger builds up in him…

Rhyme noticed the hour was approaching 12:00. Almost afternoon… The next victim was going to die soon. But when, 12:01 or 4:00? A shudder of frustration and anger started at the base of his skull and vanished into his stony body.

They had so little time.

Maybe no time at all.

But he could come to no conclusions based on the evidence they had. And the day dragged on, slow as an IV drip.

A fax arrived. Cooper read it. "From the document examiner in Queens. They opened up the newspaper that was in the Mazda. No notations anywhere and nothing was circled. Those're the headlines."

He taped it to the board.

ELECTRICAL BREAKDOWN

CLOSES POLICE STATION

FOR ALMOST 4 HOURS

NEW YORK IN RUNNING

FOR GOP CONVENTION

PARENTS PROTEST

POOR SECURITY AT

GIRLS' SCHOOL

MILITIA MURDER PLOT

TRIAL OPENS MONDAY

WEEKEND GALA AT MET

TO BENEFIT CHARITIES

SPRING ENTERTAINMENT

FOR KIDS YOUNG AND OLD

GOVERNOR, MAYOR MEET

ON NEW WEST SIDE PLAN

"One of those's significant," Rhyme said. But which one? Was the killer targeting the girls' school? The gala? Had he tested out a gimmick that disrupted the electricity at the police station? He felt all the more frustrated because they had some new evidence but its meaning remained elusive.

Sellitto's phone rang. As he took the call, everyone stared at him, anticipating another death.

The time was now 1:03.

Well into the afternoon, well into the killing time.

But apparently the news wasn't bad. The detective lifted an eyebrow in pleasant surprise and said into the receiver, "That's right… Really? Well, that's not far away. Could you come over here?" He then gave Rhyme's address and hung up.

"Who?"

"Edward Kadesky. The manager of the circus in Ohio, the one where Weir was burned. He's in town. He got the message from his service in Chicago and he's coming over to talk to us."

THE CONJURER

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 janitor.

• No apparent motive.

• Victim: Svetlana Rasnikov.

• Full-time music student.

• Checking family, friends, students, coworkers for possible leads.

• No boyfriends, no known enemies. Performed at children's birthday parties.

• Circuit board with speaker attached.

• Sent to FBI lab, NYC.

• Digital recorder, probably containing perp's voice. All data destroyed.

• Voice recorder is a "gimmick." Homemade.

• Used antique iron handcuffs to restrain victim.

• Handcuffs are Darby irons. Scotland Yard. Checking with Houdini Museum in New Orleans for leads.

• Sold to Erick Weir last month. Sent to Denver P.O. box. No other leads.

• Destroyed victim's watch at exactly 8:00 A. M.

• Cotton string holding chairs. Generic. Too many sources to trace.

• Squib for gunshot effect. Destroyed.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Fuse. Generic.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Responding officers reported flash in air. No trace material recovered.

• Was from flash cotton or flash paper.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Perp's shoes: size 10 Ecco.

• Silk fibers, dyed gray, processed to a matte finish.

• From quick-change janitor's outfit.

• Unsub is possibly wearing brown wig.

• Red pignut hickory and Parmelia conspersa lichen, both found primarily in Central Park.

• Dirt impregnated with unusual mineral oil. Sent to FBI for analysis.

• Tack-Pure oil for saddles and leather.

• Black silk, 72 x 48". Used as camouflage. Not traceable.

• Illusionists use this frequently.

• Wears caps to cover up prints.

• Magician's finger cups.

• Traces of latex, castor oil, makeup.

• Theatrical makeup.

• Traces of alginate.

• Used in molding latex "appliances."

• Murder weapon: white silk-knit rope with black silk core.

• Rope is a magic trick. Color-changing. Not traceable.

• Unusual knot.

• Sent to FBI and Maritime Museum – no information.

• Knots are from Houdini routines, virtually impossible to untie.

• Used disappearing ink on sign-in register.

EastVillage Crime Scene

• Victim Two: Tony Calvert.

• Makeup artist, theater company.

• No known enemies.

• No apparent connection with first victim.

• No apparent motive.

Cause of death:

• Blunt-object trauma to head followed by postmortem dismemberment with crosscut saw.

• Perp escaped portraying woman in her 70s. Checking vicinity for discarded costume and other evidence.

• Nothing recovered.

• Watch smashed at 12:00 exactly.

• Pattern? Next victim presumably at 4:00 P. M.

• Perp hid behind mirror. Not traceable. Fingerprints sent to FBI.

• No matches.

• Used cat toy ("feke") to lure victim into alley. Toy is untraceable.

• Additional mineral oil found, same as at first scene. Awaiting FBI report.

• Tack-Pure oil for saddles and leather.

• Additional latex and makeup from finger cups.

• Additional alginate. 1 Ecco shoes left behind.

• Dog hairs found in shoes, from three different breeds of dog. Manure too.

• Manure from horses, not dogs.

Hudson River and Related Crime Scenes

• Victim: Cheryl Marston.

• Attorney.

• Divorced but husband not a suspect.

• No motive.

• Perp gave name as "John." Had scars on neck and chest. Deformed hand confirmed.

• Perp did quick change to unbearded businessman in chinos and dress shirt, then biker in denim Harley shirt.

• Car is in Harlem River.

• Duct tape gag. Can't be traced.

• Squibs, same as before. Can't be traced.

• Chains and snap fixtures, generic, not traceable.

• Rope, generic, not traceable.

• Additional makeup, latex and Tack-Pure.

• Gym bag, made in China, not traceable.

Containing:

• Traces of date-rape drug flunitrazepam.

• Adhesive magician's wax, not traceable.

• Brass (?) shavings. Sent to FBI.

• Consistent with clockwork mechanism, possible bomb timer.

• Permanent ink, black.

• Navy-blue windbreaker found, no initials or laundry marks.

Containing:

• Press pass for CTN cable network, issued to Stanley Saferstein. (He's not suspect – NCIC, VICAP search negative.)

• Plastic hotel key card, American Plastic Cards, Akron, Ohio. Model APC-42, negative on prints.

• CEO is searching for sales records.

• Dets. Bedding and Saul canvassing hotels.

• Narrowed down to Chelsea Lodge, Beckman and Lanham Arms. Still checking.

• Restaurant check from Riverside Inn, Bedford Junction, NY, indicating four people ate lunch, table 12, Saturday, two weeks prior. Turkey, meatloaf, steak, daily special. Soft drinks. Staff doesn't know who diners were. (Accomplices?)

Alley where Conjurer was arrested:

• Picked the cuff locks.

• Saliva (picks hidden in mouth).

• No blood type determined.

• Small razor saw for getting out of restraints (also hidden in mouth).

• No indication of Officer Burke's whereabouts.

• Report body somewhere on Upper West Side.

Harlem River scene:

• No evidence on riverbank, except skid marks in mud.

• Newspaper recovered from the car.

Headlines:

ELECTRICAL BREAKDOWN CLOSES POLICE STATION FOR ALMOST 4 HOURS

NEW YORK IN RUNNING FOR GOP CONVENTION

PARENTS PROTEST POOR SECURITY AT GIRLS' SCHOOL

MILITIA MURDER PLOT TRIAL OPENS MONDAY

WEEKEND GALA AT MET TO BENEFIT CHARITIES

SPRING ENTERTAINMENT FOR KIDS YOUNG AND OLD

GOVERNOR, MAYOR MEET ON NEW WEST SIDE PLAN

Lincoln Rhyme Crime Scene:

• Victim: Lincoln Rhyme

• Perp's identity: Erick A. Weir.

• LKA Las Vegas

• Burned in fire in Ohio, three years ago. Hasbro and Keller Brothers Circus. Disappeared after. Third-degree burns. Producer was Edward Kadesky.

• Conviction in New Jersey for reckless endangerment.

• Obsessed with fire.

• Manic. Referred to "Revered Audience."

• Performed dangerous tricks.

• Married to Marie Cosgrove, killed in fire.

• He hasn't contacted her family since.

• Weir's parents dead, no next of kin.

• No VICAP or NCIC on Weir.

• Referred to himself as "Wizard of the North."

• Attacked Rhyme because he had to stop him before Sunday afternoon. (Next victim?)

• Eye color – brown.

• Psychological profile (per Terry Dobyns, NYPD): Revenge motivates him though he may not realize it. He wants to get even. Angry all the time. By killing he takes away some of the pain because of death of his wife, loss of ability to perform.

• Weir contacted assistants recently: John Keating and Arthur Loesser, in Nevada. Asking about the fire and people involved with it. Described Weir as crazed, overbearing, manic, dangerous, but brilliant.

• Contacting former manager at time of fire, Edward Kadesky.

• Killed victims because of what they represented – possibly happy or traumatic moments before the fire.

• Gasoline-soaked handkerchief, not traceable.

• Ecco shoes, no trace.

Profile as Illusionist

• Perp will use misdirection against victims and in eluding police.

• Physical misdirection (for distraction).

• Psychological (to eliminate suspicion).

• Escape at music school was similar to Vanished Man illusion routine. Too common to trace.

• Perp is primarily an illusionist. Talented at sleight-of-hand.

• Also knows protean (quick change) magic. Will use breakaway clothes, nylon and silk, bald cap, finger cups and other latex appliances. Could be any age, gender or race.

• Calvert's death = Selbit's Cutting a Woman in Half Routine.

• Proficient at lock-picking (possibly lock "scrubbing").

• Knows escapism techniques.

• Experience with animal illusions.

• Used mentalism to get information on victim.

• Used sleight of hand to drug her.

• Tried to kill third victim with Houdini escape. Water Torture Cell.

• Ventriloquism.

• Razor blades.

• Familiar with Burning Mirror routine. Very dangerous, rarely performed now.

• • •

The man was stocky, of medium height. A silver beard and wavy hair to match.

Rhyme, now suspicious after Weir's visit last night, greeted Edward Kadesky then asked for identification.

"You don't mind," Sellitto continued, explaining that they'd recently had trouble with a perp masquerading as someone else.

Kadesky – a man not used to being unrecognized, let alone carded – was put out but he complied and offered Sellitto his Illinois drivers license. Mel Cooper took a subtle look at both the picture and the producer and then gave a nod to Rhyme.

The tech had already gone on-line with Illinois DMV and gotten the license particulars and a picture of the man. All of which checked out.

"Your message said this was about Erick Weir?" Kadesky asked. His gaze was hawk-like and imperious.

"Right."

"So he's still alive?"

That the man would ask the question was a disappointment to Rhyme; it meant that Kadesky probably knew even less than they did.

Rhyme said, "Very much alive. He's a suspect in a series of homicides in town."

"No! Who did he kill?"

"Some local residents. A police officer too," Sellitto explained. "We were hoping you could give us some information that'd help find him."

"I haven't heard about him since just after the fire. Do you know about that?"

"A little," Sachs said. "Fill us in."

"He blamed me for it, you know… It was three years ago. Weir and his assistants were doing the illusion and quick-change acts in our show. Oh, they were good. I mean, astonishing. But we'd been having complaints for months. From the staff and from the audience. Weir scared people. He was like a little dictator. And those assistants of his – we called them the Moonies. He had them indoctrinated. Illusion to him was like a religion. Sometimes people got hurt in rehearsal or during the show – even audience volunteers. And Weir couldn't've cared less. He thought magic worked best when there was some risk. He said magic should be a hot iron; it should brand your soul." The producer laughed grimly. "But we can't have that in the entertainment business, now, can we? So I talked to Sidney Keller – he was the owner – and we decided we had to fire him. One Sunday morning before the matinee I told the stage manager to let him go."

"That was the day of the fire?" Rhyme asked.

Kadesky nodded. "The manager found Weir rigging the stage with propane lines for an illusion of his. The Burning Mirror. He told him what we'd decided. But Weir lost it – he shoved the manager down the stairs and kept right on rigging the trick. I went down to the stage. He grabbed me. We weren't really fighting, just scuffling, but a propane line was loose. We fell into some metal chairs and, I guess, a spark ignited the gas. He was burned and his wife was killed. The whole tent was destroyed. We talked about suing him but he snuck out of the hospital and disappeared."

"We found a case in New Jersey. Reckless endangerment. Do you know if he was arrested anywhere else?" Rhyme asked.

"No idea." Kadesky shook his head. "I shouldn't've hired him. But if you'd ever seen his show, you'd understand. He was the best. The audiences may have been terrified, they may have been, well, abused, but they bought tickets to see him. And you should've heard the ovations." The producer looked at his watch. The time was 1:45. "You know, my show starts in fifteen minutes… I think it'd be a good idea to get a few more police cars over there. With Weir around and everything that happened between us."

"Over where?" Rhyme asked.

"To my show."

He nodded toward Central Park. "That's yours? The Cirque Fantastique?"

"Right. I assumed you knew that. You had the police car parked there… You do know that Cirque Fantastique is the old Hasbro and Keller Brothers circus."

"What?" Sellitto asked.

Rhyme glanced at Kara, who was shaking her head. "Mr. Balzac never told me that when I called him last night."

"After the fire," Kadesky said, "we retooled. Cirque du Soleil was having so much success I recommended to Sid Keller that we do what they were. When we got the insurance money we started Fantastique."

"No, no, no," Rhyme whispered, staring at the evidence charts.

"What, Linc?" Sellitto asked.

"That's what Weir's doing here," he announced. "Your show's his target. Cirque Fantastique."

"What?"

Scanning the evidence again. Applying facts to the premise.

Rhyme nodded. "Dogs!"

"What?" Sachs asked.

"Goddamn dogs! Look at the chart. Look at it! The animal hairs and Central Park dirt're from the dog knoll! Right outside the window." A fierce nod toward the front of his townhouse. "He wasn't checking out Cheryl Marston on the bridle path; he was checking out the circus. The newspaper, the one in his Mazda – look at that headline: 'Entertainment for Kids Young and Old.' Call up the paper – see if there's information about the circus in it. Thom – call Peter! Hurry."

The aide was good friends with a reporter for the Times, a young man who'd helped them occasionally in the past. He grabbed the phone and placed the call.

Peter Hoddins worked the International desk but it took him less than a minute to find the answer. He relayed the information to Thom, who announced, "The circus was the feature of the story. All sorts of details – hours, acts, bios of the employees. Even a sidebar on security."

"Shit," Rhyme snapped. "He was doing his research… And the press pass? That'd give him access to backstage." Rhyme was squinting as he looked at the evidence chart. "Yes! I get it now. The victims. What did they represent? Jobs in the circus. A makeup artist. A horseback rider… And the first victim! Yes, she was a student but what was her job? Singing and entertaining kids – like a clown'd do."

"And the murder techniques themselves," Sachs pointed out. "They were all magic tricks."

"Yep. He's after your show. Terry Dobyns said his motive was ultimately revenge. Hell, he's planted a fuel bomb."

"My God," Kadesky said. "There're two thousand people there! And the show's starting in ten minutes."

At two in the afternoon…

"The Sunday matinee," Rhyme added. "Just like in Ohio three years ago."

Sellitto grabbed his Motorola and called the officers stationed at the circus.

There was no answer. The detective frowned and placed a call on Rhyme's speakerphone.

"Officer Koslowski here," the man answered a moment later.

Sellitto identified himself and barked, "Why isn't your radio on, Officer?"

"Radio? Well, we're off duty, Lieutenant."

"Off duty? You just went on duty."

"Well, Detective, we were told to stand down."

"You were what?"

"Some detective came by a half hour ago and told us we weren't needed anymore. Said we could take the rest of the day off. I'm on my way to Rock-away Beach with my family. I can -"

"Describe him."

"Fifties. Beard, brown hair."

"Where'd he go?"

"No idea. Walked up to the car, flashed his shield and dismissed us."

Sellitto slammed the disconnect. "It's happening… Oh, man, it's happening." He shouted to Sachs, "Call the Sixth, get the Bomb Squad there."

Then he himself called Central and had Emergency Services and fire trucks sent to the circus.

Kadesky ran toward the door. "I'll evacuate the tent."

Bell said he was calling Emergency Medical Services and having burn teams established at Columbia Presbyterian.

"I want more soft-clothed in the park," Rhyme said. "A lot of them. I have a feeling the Conjurer's going to be there."

"Be there?" Sellitto asked.

"To watch the fire. He'll be close. I remember his eyes when he was looking at the flames in my room. He likes to watch fire. No, he wouldn't miss this for the world."

Chapter Thirty

He wasn't worried so much about the fire itself.

As Edward Kadesky sprinted the short distance from Lincoln Rhyme's apartment to the tent of the Cirque Fantastique he was thinking that with new codes and fire retardants, even the worst theater and circus tent fires proceed fairly slowly.

No, the real danger is the panic, the tons of human muscles, the stampede that tramples and tears and crushes and suffocates. Bones broken, lungs burst, asphyxiation…

Saving people in a circus disaster means getting them out of the facility without panic. Traditionally, to alert the clowns and acrobats and other hands that a fire has broken out the ringmaster would send a subtle signal to the bandleader, who then launched into the energetic John Philip Sousa march, "Stars and Stripes Forever." The workers were supposed to take up emergency stations and calmly lead the audience through designated exits (those employees who didn't simply, of course, abandon ship themselves).

The tune had been replaced over the years by far more efficient procedures for the evacuation of a circus tent. But if a gas bomb detonated, spreading burning liquid everywhere?

The crowd would sprint to the exits and a thousand people would die in the crush.

Edward Kadesky ran into the tent and saw twenty-six hundred people eagerly awaiting the opening of his show.

His show.

That was what he thought. The show he'd created. Kadesky had been a hawker in sideshows, a curtain bitch at second-tier theaters in third-tier cities, a payroll manager and ticket seller in sweaty regional circuses. He'd struggled for years to bring to the public shows that transcended the tawdry side of the business, the carny aspect of circuses. He'd done it once, with the Hasbro and Keller Brothers show – which Erick Weir had destroyed. Then he'd done it again with Cirque Fantastique, a world-renowned show that brought legitimacy, even prestige, to a profession that was so often disparaged by those who attended theater and opera, and ignored by those who watched E! and MTV.

Remembering the wave of searing heat from the Hasbro tent fire in Ohio. The flecks of ash like deadly, gray snow. The howl of the flames – the astonishing noise – as his show had lumbered to its death right in front of him.

There was one difference, though: three years ago the tent had been empty. Today thousands of men, women and children would be in the middle of the conflagration.

Kadesky's assistant, Katherine Tunney, a young brunette who'd risen high in the Disney theme park organization before coming to work with him, noticed his troubled gaze and instantly joined him. That was one of Katherine's big talents: sensing his thoughts almost telepathically. "What?" she whispered.

He told her what he'd learned from Lincoln Rhyme and the police. Her eyes began to sweep the circus tent, just like his, looking both for the bomb and at the victims.

"How do we handle it?" she asked tersely.

He considered this for a moment then gave her instructions. He added, "Then you leave. Get out."

"But are you staying? What are -?"

"Do it now," he said firmly. Then squeezed her hand. In a softer voice he added, "I'll meet you outside. It'll be okay."

She wanted to embrace him, he sensed. But his glance told her no. They were in view of most of the seats here; he didn't want anyone in the audience to think even for a moment that something was wrong. "Walk slowly. Keep smiling. We're performers before anything else, remember."

Katherine nodded and went first to the lighting man and then to the bandleader to deliver Kadesky's instructions. Finally she took up a position beside the main doorway.

Straightening his tie and buttoning his jacket, Kadesky glanced at the orchestra, nodded. A drum roll began.

Showtime, he thought.

As he strode, smiling broadly, into the middle of the ring the audience began to fall silent. He stopped in the direct center of the circle and the drum roll ceased. A moment later two fingers of white illumination targeted him. Though he'd told Katherine to have the lighting man hit him with the main spots he still gave a brief gasp, thinking for an instant that the brilliant lights were from the detonating gas bomb.

But his smile never wavered and he recovered instantly. He lifted a cordless microphone to his lips and began to speak. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cirque Fantastique." Calm, pleasant, commanding. "We have a wonderful show for you today. And to begin I'm going to ask your indulgence. I'm afraid we're going to inconvenience you a bit but I think the effort will be well worth it. We have a special performance outside the tent. I apologize… We tried to get the Plaza Hotel inside here but their management wouldn't let us. Something about the guests not agreeing."

A pause for the laughter.

"So I'm going to ask you to hold on to your ticket stubs and step outside into Central Park."

The crowd began murmuring, wondering what the act might be.

He smiled. "Find space anywhere nearby. If you can see the buildings on Central Park South you'll be able to watch the act just fine."

Laughter and excitement now in the seats. What could he mean? Were daredevils doing high-wire acts on the skyscrapers?

"Now, lower rows first, in an orderly manner, if you please. Use whatever exit is near you."

The houselights went up. He saw Katherine Tunney standing at the door, smiling and motioning people to leave. Please, he thought to her, get out. Leave!

The audience was chatting loudly as they rose – he could vaguely see them through the blinding lights. They were looking at their companions, wondering who should be the first to leave. Which way to go. Then they began to gather children, collecting purses and popcorn containers, checking for their ticket stubs.

Kadesky smiled as he watched them rise and amble toward the exits to safety. But he was thinking: Chicago Illinois, December 1903. At a matinee performance of Eddie Foy's famous vaudeville routine at the Iroquois Theater a spotlight started a fire that quickly spread from the stage to the seats. The two thousand people inside raced to the exits, jamming them closed so completely that firemen couldn't get through the doors. More than six hundred in the audience died horrible deaths.

Hartford, Connecticut, July 1944. Another matinee. At the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, just as the famous Wallenda family was starting its renowned high-wire act, a small fire started in the southeast side of the tent and soon devoured the canvas – which had been waterproofed with gasoline and paraffin. Within minutes more than one hundred fifty people had been burned, suffocated or crushed to death.

Chicago, Hartford, so many other cities too. Thousands of terrible deaths in theater and circus fires over the years. Was that going to happen here? Is that how the Cirque Fantastique, how his show would be remembered?

The tent was emptying smoothly. Yet, the price of avoiding panic was a slow exit. There were still many people inside. And some, it seemed, remained in their seats, preferring to stay inside and miss the spectacle in the park. When most people had left he'd have to tell them what was really going on.

When was the bomb set to go off? Probably not right away. Weir would give the latecomers a chance to arrive and take their seats – to cause the most injuries.

It was now 2:10. Maybe he'd set it for an even time: quarter past or 2:30.

And where was it?

He had no clue where one might leave a bomb so that it would do the most damage.

Glancing across the tent to the crowd massing at the front doorway he saw Katherine's silhouette – the woman's arm beckoning to him to leave.

But he was staying. He'd do whatever was necessary to evacuate the tent, including taking people by the hand and leading them to the door, pushing them out if he needed to and returning for more – even if the tent was falling in sheets of fire around him. He was going to be the last person out.

Smiling broadly, he shook his head to her and then lifted the microphone and continued to tell the audience what a delightful act awaited them outside.

Suddenly loud music interrupted him. He glanced at the bandstand. The musicians had left – as Kadesky had ordered – but the bandleader stood over the computer console that controlled the prerecorded music they sometimes used. Their eyes met and Kadesky nodded in approval. The leader, a veteran of circus life, had put on a tape and turned the volume up. The tune was "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

• • •

Amelia Sachs pushed through the crowds exiting the Cirque Fantastique and ran into the center of the tent, where marching music was blaring loudly and Edward Kadesky was holding a microphone and enthusiastically urging everyone outside to see a special illusion – to avoid panic, she assumed.

Brilliant idea, she thought, picturing the horrific crush if this many people raced for the exits.

Sachs was the first officer to arrive – approaching sirens told her other rescue workers would be here soon – but she didn't wait for anyone else; she began the search immediately. She looked around, trying to decide the best place to leave a fuel bomb. To cause the most fatalities, she supposed, he'd plant it under some bleachers, near an exit.

The device – or devices – would be bulky. Unlike dynamite or plastic explosives, fuel bombs must be large to do significant damage. They could be hidden in a shipping container or a large cardboard box. Maybe in an oil drum. She noticed a plastic trash container – a big one, which would hold about fifty gallons, she guessed. It was just to the side of the main exit and dozens of people were walking slowly past it on their way outside. There were twenty or twenty-five such bins inside the tent. The dark-green containers would be the perfect choice to hide bombs.

She ran to the one nearest her and paused at the drum. She was unable to see inside – the lid was in an inverted V-shape with a swinging door – but Sachs knew the door wouldn't be rigged to trigger the detonator; the brass told them he was using a timer. She took a small flashlight from her back pocket and shone it into the messy, foul-smelling interior. The bin was already more than half full of paper and food wrappers and empty cups; she couldn't see the bottom. She shifted the drum slightly; it was too light to hold even a gallon of gasoline.

Another glance around the tent. Still hundreds of people inside, heading slowly for the doors.

And dozens of other trash bins to check out. She started for the next one.

Then she stopped and squinted. Under the main bleachers and right near the south exit of the tent was an object about four feet square, covered by a black tarp.

She thought immediately about Weir's trick of using a cloth to hide himself.

Whatever was under the cloth was virtually invisible and was big enough to hold hundreds of gallons of gas.

A large crowd was within twenty feet of it.

Outside, sirens grew louder and then began to go silent as the emergency vehicles parked near the tent. Firemen and police officers began to enter. She flashed her shield to the one nearest her. "Bomb Squad here yet?"

"Should be five, six minutes."

She nodded and told them to carefully check the trash drums then she started toward the tarp-covered box.

And then it happened.

Not the bomb itself. But the panic, which seemed to erupt as fast as a detonation.

Sachs wasn't sure what prompted it – the sight of the emergency vehicles outside and the firemen pushing their way inside probably made some patrons uneasy. Then Sachs heard a series of pops at the main doorway. She recognized the sound from yesterday: the snapping of the huge commedia dell'arte Harlequin banner in the wind. But the audience at that exit must've thought they were gunshots and turned back, panicked, looking for other exits. Suddenly the tent filled with a huge collective voice, like the inhalation of a breath in fear. A deep rustling, a roar.

Then the wave broke.

Screaming and crying out, people stampeded for the doors. Sachs was slammed from behind by the terrified mass. Her cheekbone struck the shoulder of a man in front of her, leaving her stunned. Screams rose, snatches of howls and shouts about fire, about bombs, about terrorists.

"Don't push!" she cried. But no one heard her words. It would be impossible to stop the tide anyway. A thousand individuals had become a single entity. Some people tried to fend off its crushing body but in the surge from behind they were pressed into it and became part of the beast, which lurched desperately toward the glare of the opening.

Sachs wrenched her arm free from between two teenage boys, their ruddy faces long with fear. Her head was slammed forward and she glimpsed some tattered flesh on the tent floor. She gasped, thinking a child was being trampled. But no, it was a shredded balloon. A baby's bottle, a scrap of green cloth, popcorn, a souvenir Harlequin mask, a Discman were being ground apart under the massive weight of the feet. If anyone was to fall they'd die in seconds. Sachs herself felt no balance or control; it seemed she could tumble helplessly to the floor at any moment.

Then her feet were actually lifted off the floor, sandwiched between two sweating bodies – a big man in a bloody Izod shirt, holding a sobbing young boy above his head, and a woman who seemed to have passed out. The screams grew louder, children's and adults' mixed, and fueled the panic. Heat enveloped her and soon it was nearly impossible to breathe. The pressure on her chest threatened to crush her heart to silence. Claustrophobia – Amelia Sachs's one big fear – now wrapped its tight arms around her and she felt herself swallowed up by an unbearable sensation of confinement.

When you move they can't getcha…

But she wasn't moving anywhere. She was held tight by a suffocating mass of powerful, damp bodies, not even human now, a collection of muscles and sweat and fists and spit and feet pressing harder and harder into itself.

Please, no! Please, let me move! Let me get one hand free. Let me take one breath of air.

She thought she saw blood. She thought she saw torn flesh.

Maybe they were hers.

From terror as much as from the pain and the suffocation, Amelia Sachs felt herself start to black out.

No! Don't fall under their feet. Don't fall!

Please!

She couldn't breathe. Not a cubic inch of air entered her lungs. Then she saw a knee inches from her face. It slammed into her cheek and stayed rooted there.

She could smell dirty jeans, saw a scuffed boot in front of her eyes, inches away.

Please don't let me fall!

Then she realized that maybe she already had.

Chapter Thirty-one

Wearing a bellhop's uniform that closely matched those worn by the staff at the Lanham Arms Hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Malerick walked along the fifteenth-floor hallway of the hotel. He carried a heavy room-service tray on which was a domed plate cover and a vase containing a huge red tulip.

Everything about him was in harmony with his surroundings so as not to arouse suspicion. Malerick himself was the model of a deferential, pleasant bellhop.

The averted eyes, the half smile, the unobtrusive walk, the spotless tray.

Only one thing set him apart from the other bellhops here at the Lanham: under the metal warming dome on the tray was not a plate of eggs Benedict or a club sandwich but a loaded Beretta automatic pistol, equipped with a sausage-thick sound suppressor, and a leather pouch of lock-picking and other tools.

"Enjoying your stay?" he asked one couple.

Yes, they were, and they wished him a good afternoon.

He continued to nod and smile at the guests returning to their rooms after Sunday brunch or on their way to sightsee on this fine spring afternoon.

He passed a window, in which he could see a bit of green – a portion of Central Park. He wondered what sort of excitement was unfolding there at the moment, inside the white tent of the Cirque Fantastique – the place to which he'd spent the past few days directing the police with the clues he'd left at the sites of the murders.

Or misdirecting them, he should say.

Misdirection and ruse were the keys to successful illusion and there was no one better at it than Malerick, the man of a million faces, the man who materialized like a struck match, who disappeared like a snuffed flame.

The man who vanished himself.

The police would be frantic, of course, looking for the gasoline bomb, which they believed would go off at any moment. But there was no bomb, no risk at all to the two thousand people at the Cirque Fantastique (no risk other than the possibility that some of them would be trampled to death in their mindless panic).

At the end of the hallway Malerick glanced behind him and observed that he was alone. Quickly he set the tray on the floor near a doorway and lifted the cover.

He collected the black pistol and slipped it into a zippered pocket in his bellman's uniform. He opened the leather tool pouch, extracted a screwdriver and pocketed the pouch too.

Moving fast, he unscrewed the metal guard that allowed the window to open only a few inches (human beings do seem to take any opportunity to kill themselves, don't they? he reflected) and raised the window all the way. He carefully replaced the screwdriver in its spot in the leather pouch and zipped it away.

His strong arms deftly boosted him onto the sill. He stepped carefully out on the ledge, 150 feet above the ground.

The ledge was twenty inches wide – he'd measured the same ledge from the window of the room he'd taken here a few days ago – and though he'd only done limited acrobatics in his life, he had the superb balance of all great illusionists. He moved along the limestone rim now as comfortably as if it were a sidewalk. After a stroll of only fifteen feet he came to the corner of the hotel and stopped, looking at the building next door to the Lanham Arms.

This, an apartment building on East Seventy-fifth Street, had no ledges but did have a fire escape, six feet away from where he now stood – overlooking an air shaft filled with the restless churning of air-conditioners. Malerick took a brief running start and leaped over the bottomless gap, easily reaching the fire escape and vaulting over the railing.

He climbed up two flights and paused at a window on the seventeenth floor. A glance inside. The hallway was empty. He placed the gun and the tool kit on the window ledge then stripped off the fake bellhop's uniform in one fast peel, revealing beneath it a simple gray suit, white shirt and tie. The gun went into his belt and he used the tools again to open the window lock. He hopped inside.

Standing motionless, catching his breath. Malerick then started down the hallway toward the apartment he sought. Stopping at the door, he dropped to his knees and opened the tool kit again. Into the keyhole he inserted a tension bar and above it the lock pick. In three seconds he'd scrubbed the lock open. In five, the deadbolt. He pushed the door open only far enough to be able to see the hinges, which he sprayed with oil from a tiny canister, like breath spray, to keep them silent. A moment later he was inside the long, dark hallway of the apartment. Malerick eased the door shut.

He oriented himself, looking around the entryway.

On the wall were some mass-produced prints of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, some family portraits and, most prominently, a clumsy water-color of New York City painted by a child (the artist's signature was "Chrissy"). A cheap table sat near the door, its short leg lengthened with a folded yellow square of foolscap legal paper. A single ski, the binding broken, leaned forlornly in the corner of the hallway. The wallpaper was old and stained.

Malerick started down the corridor, toward the sound of the television in the living room, but he detoured momentarily, stepping into a small dark room that was dominated by an ebony Kawai baby grand piano. A book of music, instructions noted in the margin, sat open on the piano. The name "Chrissy" appeared here too – penned on the cover of the book. Malerick only had a rudimentary knowledge of music but as he flipped through the lesson book he observed that the pieces seemed quite difficult.

He decided that the girl might've been a bad artist but she was quite the talented young musician – this Christine Grady, the daughter of New York assistant district attorney Charles Grady.

The man whose apartment this was. The man Malerick was being paid one hundred thousand dollars to kill.

• • •

Amelia Sachs sat on the grass outside of the Cirque Fantastique tent, wincing from the pain throbbing around her right kidney. She'd helped dozens of people away from the crush and had found a spot here to catch her breath.

Staring down at her from the huge black-and-white banner above her head was the masked Arlecchino, still rippling loudly in the wind. He'd seemed eerie yesterday; now, after the panic inside – which he'd caused – the image was repulsive and grotesque.

She had avoided being trampled to death; the knee and boot that'd clobbered her belonged to a man who'd scrabbled over the heads and shoulders of the audience to beat them out the door. Still, her back, ribs and face throbbed. She'd sat here for nearly fifteen minutes, faint and nauseated, partly from the crush, partly from the horrifying claustrophobia. She could generally tolerate small rooms, even elevators. Being completely restrained, unable to move, though, physically sickened her and racked her with panic.

Around her the injured were being treated. There'd been nothing serious, the EMS chief had reported to her – mostly sprains and cuts. A few dislocations and a broken arm.

Sachs and those around her had been spewed out the south exit of the tent. Once outside, she'd fallen to her knees on the grass, crawling away from the crowd.

No longer trapped in an enclosed space with a potential bomb or an armed terrorist, the audience became better Samaritans and helped those who were woozy or hurt.

She'd flagged down an officer from the Bomb Squad and, looking at him upside down from her grassy bed, flashed her badge and told him about the tarp-covered object under the seats near the south door. He'd returned to his colleagues inside.

Then the brassy music from the tent had stopped and Edward Kadesky stepped outside.

Watching the Bomb Squad at work, some of the audience realized that there'd been a real threat and that Kadesky's quick thinking had saved them from a worse panic; they offered some impromptu applause, which he'd acknowledged modestly as he made the rounds, checking on his employees and the audience. Other circus-goers – injured and otherwise – were less generous and scowled and demanded to know what had happened and complained that he should have handled the evacuation better.

Meanwhile the Bomb Squad and a dozen firemen had scoured the tent and found no sign of a device. The tarp-covered box had turned out to be cartons of toilet paper. The search expanded to the trailers and supply trucks but the officers found nothing there either.

Sachs frowned. They'd been wrong? How could that be? she wondered. The evidence was so clear. It was Rhyme's way to make bold assumptions about evidence and sometimes, sure, he made mistakes. But in the case of the Conjurer it seemed that all the evidence had come together and pointed directly to the Cirque Fantastique as his target.

Had Rhyme heard that they'd found no bombs? she wondered. Rising unsteadily, she went off in search of someone's radio to borrow; her Motorola, now lying in pieces near the south door of the tent, had apparently been the sole fatality of the panic.

• • •

Stepping quietly out of the music room in Charles Grady's apartment, Malerick walked back into the darkened hallway and paused, listening to the voices from the living room and kitchen.

Wondering just how dangerous this would be.

He'd taken steps to make it less likely that Grady's bodyguards would panic and gun him down. At his lunch at the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction two weeks ago, meeting with Jeddy Barnes and other militiamen from upstate New York, Malerick had laid out his plan. He'd decided it'd be best to have someone make an attempt on the prosecutor's life before Malerick's invasion of Grady's apartment today. The universal choice for a fall guy was some pervert of a minister from Canton Falls named Ralph Swensen. (Barnes had some leverage on the reverend but explained to Malerick that he hadn't fully trusted him. So after his escape from the Harlem River yesterday the illusionist had donned his janitor's costume and had followed the reverend from his fleabag hotel to Greenwich Village – just to make sure the loser didn't balk at the last minute.)

Malerick's plan called for Swensen's attempt to fail (the gun Barnes provided had a broken firing pin). Malerick had theorized that catching one assassin would lull Grady's guards into complacency and make them psychologically less likely to react violently when they saw a second killer.

Well, that was the theory, he reflected uneasily. Let's see if it holds up in practice.

Walking silently past more bad art, past more family portraits, past stacks of magazines – law reviews and Vogues and The New Yorkers – and scabby street-fair antiques the Gradys had bought intending to refinish but that sat as permanent testimonials to the proposition that there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Malerick knew his way around the apartment; he'd been here once before briefly – disguised as a maintenance man – but that had been basic reconnaissance, learning the layout, the entrance and escape routes. He hadn't spent any time noticing the personal side of the family's life: the diplomas of Grady and his wife, who was also an attorney. Wedding photos. Snapshots of relatives and a gallery's worth of pictures of their blonde nine-year-old daughter.

Malerick recalled his meeting with Barnes and his associates over lunch. The militiamen had digressed into a cold debate about whether it made sense to kill Grady's wife and daughter too. According to Malerick's plan, sacrificing Swensen made sense. But what was the point, he'd wondered, of killing Grady's family?

He'd posed this question to Barnes and the others between bites of very good roast turkey.

"Well now, Mr. Weir," Jeddy Barnes had said to Malerick. "That's a good question. I'd say you should kill 'em just because."

And Malerick had nodded, offering a thoughtful expression; he knew enough never to condescend to either an audience or fellow performers. "Well, I don't mind killing them," he'd explained. "But wouldn't it make more sense to leave them alive unless they're a risk – like a risk they could identify me? Or, say, the little girl goes for the phone to call the police? Probably there are some of your people who'd object to killing women and children."

"Well, it's your plan, Mr. Weir," Barnes had said. "We'll go with what you think." Though the idea of temperance seemed to leave him vaguely dissatisfied.

Now Malerick stopped outside Grady's living room and hung a fake NYPD badge around his neck, the one he'd flashed at the cops near the Cirque Fantastique when he'd sent them home for the day. He glanced in a flea-market mirror whose surface needed to be recoated.

Yes, he was in role, looking just like a detective here to protect a prosecutor against whom vicious death threats had been made.

A deep breath. No butterflies.

And now, Revered Audience, lights up, curtain up.

The real show is about to begin…

Hands held naturally at his sides, Malerick turned the corner of the corridor and strode into the living room.

Chapter Thirty-two

"Hey, how's it going?" the man in the gray suit asked, startling Luis Martinez, the quiet, bulky detective working for Roland Bell.

The guard was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, a Sunday New York Times in his lap. "Man, surprised me." He nodded a greeting, glanced at the newcomer's badge and ID and then scanned his face. "You the relief?"

"That's right."

"How'd you get in? They give you a key?"

"Got one downtown." He was speaking in a throaty whisper, like he had a cold.

"Lucky you," Luis muttered. "We've gotta share one. Pain in the ass."

"Where's Mr. Grady?"

"In the kitchen. With his wife and Chrissy. How come you're early?"

"I dunno," the man replied. "I'm just the hired help. This's the time they told me."

"Story of our lives, huh?" Luis said. He frowned. "I don't think I know you."

"Name's Joe David," the man said. "Usually work over in Brooklyn."

Luis nodded. "Yeah, that's where I cut my teeth, the Seventy."

"This is my first rotation here. Bodyguard detail, I mean."

A loud commercial came on the TV.

"Sorry," Luis said. "I missed that. Your first rotation, you said?"

"Right."

The big detective said, "Okay, how 'bout your last too?" Luis dropped the newspaper and leaped up from the couch, drawing his Glock smoothly and pointing it at the man he knew was Erick Weir. Normally placid, Luis now shouted into his microphone, "He's here! He got in – in the living room!"

Two other officers who'd been waiting in the kitchen – Detective Bell and that fat lieutenant, Lon Sellitto – shoved through another doorway, both with astonished looks on their faces. They grabbed Weir's arms and pulled a silenced pistol from his belt.

"Down, now, now, now!" Sellitto shouted in a raw, edgy voice, his gun pressed into the man's face. And what an expression was on it! Luis thought. He'd seen a lot of surprised perps over the years. But this guy took the prize. He was gasping, couldn't speak. But Luis supposed he wasn't any more surprised than the cops were.

"Where the hell d'he come from?" Sellitto asked breathlessly. Bell only shook his head in dismay.

As Luis double-cuffed Weir roughly, Sellitto leaned close to the perp. "You alone? You got backup outside?"

"No."

"Don't bullshit us!"

"My arms, you're hurting my arms!" Weir gasped.

"Anybody else with you?"

"No, no, I swear."

Bell was calling the others on his handy-talkie. "Heaven help me – he got inside… I don't know how."

Two uniformed officers assigned to the Saving the Witness's Ass Team hurried into the apartment from the hallway, where they'd been hiding near the elevator.

"Looks like he jimmied the window on this floor," one of them said. "You know, the window at the fire escape."

Bell glanced at Weir and he understood. "The ledge from the Lanham? You jumped?"

Weir said nothing but that had to be the answer. They'd stationed officers in the alley between the Lanham and Grady's building and on the roofs of both structures too. But it had never occurred to them he'd walk along the ledge and leap over the air shaft.

Bell asked the officers, "And no sign of anybody else?"

"Nope. Looks like he was solo."

Sellitto donned latex gloves and patted him down. The search yielded burglary tools and various props and magic supplies. The oddest were the fake fingertips, glued on tightly. Sellitto pulled them off and deposited them in a plastic evidence bag. If the situation weren't so unnerving – that a hired killer had actually gotten into the apartment of the family they were protecting – the image of the ten finger pads in a bag would've been comical.

They looked over their prey as Sellitto continued to search him. Weir was muscular and in excellent shape, despite the fact that the fire had caused some serious damage – the scarring was quite extensive.

"Any ID?" Bell asked.

Sellitto shook his head. "F.A.O. Schwarz." Meaning low-quality fake NYPD badge and ID card. Not much better than toys.

Weir glanced toward the kitchen, which he could see was empty. He frowned.

"Oh, the Gradys aren't here," Bell said, as if it were obvious.

The man closed his eyes and rested his head on the threadbare carpet. "How? How did you figure it out?"

Sellitto supplied an answer of sorts. "Well, guess what? There's somebody who'd love to answer that question for you. Come on, we're going for a ride."

• • •

Looking over the shackled killer standing in the doorway of the lab, Lincoln Rhyme said, "Welcome back."

"But… the fire." Dismayed, the man looked toward the stairway that led up to the bedroom.

"Sorry we ruined your performance," Rhyme said coldly. "I guess you couldn't quite escape from me after all, could you, Weir?"

He turned his gaze back to the criminalist and hissed, "That's not my name anymore."

"You changed it?"

Weir shook his head. "Not legally. But Weir's who I used to be. I go by something else now."

Rhyme recalled psychologist Terry Dobyns's observation that the fire had "murdered" Weir's old persona and he'd become somebody else.

The killer now looked over Rhyme's body. "You understand that, don't you? You'd like to forget the past and become somebody else too, I'd imagine."

"What are you calling yourself?"

"That's between me and my audience."

Ah, yes, his revered audience.

Double-handcuffed, looking bewildered and diminished, Weir wore a gray businessman's suit. The wig he'd worn last night was gone; his real hair was thick, long and dark blond. In the daylight Rhyme could better see the scarring above his collar; it looked quite severe.

"How'd you find me?" the man asked in his wheezing voice. "I led you to…"

"To the Cirque Fantastique? You did." When Rhyme had outthought a perp his mood improved considerably and he was pleased to chat. "You mean you misdirected us there. See, I was looking over the evidence and I got to thinking that the whole case seemed a bit too easy."

"Easy?" He coughed briefly.

"In crime-scene work there're two types of evidence. There're the clues that are inadvertently left by the perp and then there are planted clues, ones that are intentionally left to mislead us."

"After everyone ran off to look for gas bombs at the circus I got this sense that some of the clues had been planted. They seemed obvious – the shoes you left at the second victim's apartment had dog hairs and dirt and trace that led to Central Park. It occurred to me that a smart perp might've ground the dirt and hairs into the shoes and left them at the scene so we'd find them and think about the dog knoll next to the circus. And all the talk of fire when you came to see me last night." He glanced toward Kara. "Verbal misdirection, right, Kara?"

Weir's troubled eyes looked the young woman up and down.

"Yep," she said, pouring sugar in her coffee.

"But I tried to kill you," Weir wheezed. "If I'd told you those things to lead you off I'd need you to be alive."

Rhyme laughed. "You didn't try to kill me at all. You never intended to. You wanted to make it look that way to give what you told me credibility. The first thing you did after you set the fire in my bedroom was to run outside and call nine-one-one from a pay phone. I checked with dispatch. The man who called said he could see the flames from the phone kiosk. Except that it was around the corner. You can't see my room from there. Thom checked on that, by the way. Thank you, Thom," Rhyme called to the aide, who happened to be passing the doorway at that moment.

"Nada," came the harried reply.

Weir closed his eyes, shaking his head as he realized the depth of his mistake.

Rhyme squinted, staring at the evidence board. "All of the victims had jobs or interests reflecting performers in the circus – the musician, makeup artist, horseback riding. And the murder techniques were magic tricks too. But if your motive really was to destroy Kadesky you would've led us away from Cirque Fantastique, not toward it. That meant you were leading us away from something else. What? I looked at the evidence again. At the third scene, by the river, we surprised you – you didn't have time to pick up your jacket with the press pass and hotel key card in the pocket, which meant that those couldn't've been planted clues. They had some legitimate connection to what you were really up to."

"The hotel card key was from one of three hotels – one of them was the Lanham Arms – Detective Bell thought it sounded familiar and checked his logbook. It turned out that he had coffee with Charles Grady in the lobby bar to talk about the security detail for his family a week ago. Roland told me that the Lanham was right next door to Grady's apartment. Then the press pass? I called the reporter you stole it from. He was covering the Andrew Constable trial and had interviewed Charles Grady several times… We found some brass shavings and assumed the worst, that they were from a bomb timer. But they might've just come from a key or a tool."

Sachs took up the narrative. "Then The New York Times page we found in your car in the river? It had an article about the circus, yes. But there was also an article about Constable's trial."

A nod toward the evidence board.

MILITIA MURDER PLOT

TRIAL OPENS MONDAY

Rhyme continued, "The restaurant check too. You should've thrown that out."

"What check?" Weir asked, frowning.

"Also in your jacket. From two Saturdays ago."

"But that weekend I was -" He stopped speaking abruptly.

"Out of town, you were going to say?" Sachs asked. "Yeah, we know. The check was from a restaurant in Bedford Junction."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"A trooper in Canton Falls investigating the Patriot Assembly group called on my phone, asking for Roland," Rhyme said. "I recognized the area code from the caller-ID – it was the same as the number of the restaurant on the check."

Weir's eyes grew still and Rhyme continued, "Bedford Junction turns out to be the town next to Canton Falls, which's where Constable lives."

"Who's this Constable you keep talking about?" he asked quickly. But Rhyme could see telltale signs of recognition in his face.

Sellitto took over. "Was Barnes one of the people you had lunch with? Jeddy Barnes?"

"I don't know who you mean."

"You know the Patriot Assembly though?"

"Just what I've read about in the paper."

"We don't believe you," Sellitto said.

"Believe what you like," Weir snapped. Rhyme could see the fierce anger in the eyes, the anger that Dobyns had predicted. After a pause he asked, "How'd you find out my real name?"

No one answered but Weir's eyes settled on the latest additions about him on the evidence chart. His face grew dark as he gasped, "Somebody betrayed me, didn't they? They told you about the fire and Kadesky. Who was it?" A vicious smile as he glanced from Sachs to Kara and finally settled on Rhyme. "Was it John Keating? He told you that I called him, didn't he? Spineless shit. He never stood up to me. Art Loesser too, right? They're all fucking Judases. I'll remember them. I always remember the people who betray me." He had a coughing fit. When it ended Weir was looking across the room. "Kara… Is that what he said your name is? And who are you?"

"I'm an illusionist," she said defiantly.

"One of us," Weir mocked, looking her up and down. "A girl illusionist. And you're, what? A consultant or something? Maybe after I'm released I'll come visit. Maybe I'll vanish you."

Sachs snapped, "Oh, you ain't getting released in this lifetime, Weir."

The Conjurer's gasping laugh was chilly. "Then how about when I escape? Walls are, after all, just an illusion."

"I don't think escape's much of an option either," Sellitto added.

Rhyme said, "Well, I answered your 'how,' Weir. Or whatever you're calling yourself. How 'bout if you answer my 'why'? We thought it was revenge against Kadesky. But then it turns out you're after Grady. What are you? Some kind of hit-man illusionist?"

"Revenge?" Weir asked, furious. "What the fuck good is revenge? Will it take the scars away and fix my lungs? Will it bring my wife back?… You don't fucking understand! The only thing in my life, the only thing that's ever meant anything to me is performing. Illusion, magic. My mentor groomed me for the profession all my life. The fire took that away from me. I don't have the strength to perform. My hand's deformed. My voice is ruined. Who'd come to see me? I can't do the one thing that God gave me talent for. If the only way I can perform is to break the law, then that's what I'll do."

Phantom of the Opera syndrome…

He glanced at Rhyme's body again. "How did you feel after your accident, thinking you'd never be a cop again?"

Rhyme was silent. But the killer's words hit home. How had he felt? The same anger that fueled Erick Weir, yes. And, true, after the accident the concepts of right and wrong vanished completely. Why not be a criminal? he'd thought in the madness of fury and depression. I can find evidence better than any human being on the face of the earth. That means I can also manipulate it. I could commit the perfect crime…

In the end, of course, thanks to people like Terry Dobyns and other doctors and fellow cops and his own soul, those thoughts had faded. But, yes, he did know exactly what Weir was talking about. Though even at the bleakest and angriest moments he never considered taking another life – except, of course, his own.

"So you sold your talents like a mercenary?"

Weir seemed to realize that he'd lost control for a moment and had said too much. He refused to say anything else.

Sachs's anger got the better of her and she stepped to the whiteboard and ripped down several pictures of the first two victims. Shoving them into Weir's face, she raged, "You killed these people just for diversion? That's all they meant to you."

Weir held her eye, blasé. Then he looked around and laughed. "You really think you can keep me in prison? Do you know that, for a challenge, Harry Houdini was stripped naked and put in death row in Washington D.C. He escaped from his cell so fast that he had time to open all the doors on the cellblock and switch the condemned prisoners to each other's cells – before the challenge panel got back from lunch."

Sellitto said, "Yeah, well that was a long time ago. We're a little more sophisticated than that now." To Rhyme and Sachs he said, "I'll take him downtown, see if he wants to share a little more with us."

But as they started for the doorway Rhyme said, "Hold on." His eyes were on the evidence chart.

"What?" Sellitto asked.

"When he got away from Larry Burke after the crafts fair he slipped the cuffs."

"Right."

"We found saliva, remember? Take a look in his mouth. See if he's got a pick or key hidden there."

Weir said, "I don't. Really."

Sellitto pulled on the latex gloves that Mel Cooper offered. "Open up. You bite me and I'll vanish your balls. Got it? One bite, no balls."

"Understood." The Conjurer opened his mouth and Sellitto shined his flashlight into it, fished around a bit. "Nothing."

Rhyme said, "There's another place we ought to check too."

Sellitto grunted. "I'll make sure they do that downtown, Linc. Some things I do not do for the money they pay me."

As the detective led Weir toward the door Kara said, "Wait. Check his teeth. Wiggle them. Especially the molars."

Weir stiffened as Sellitto approached. "You can't do that."

"Open up," the big detective snapped. "Oh, and the balls comment still applies."

The Conjurer sighed. "Right top molar. Right on my side, I mean."

Sellitto glanced at Rhyme then reached in and gently pulled. His hand emerged with a fake tooth. Inside was a small piece of bent metal. He dumped it on an examining board and replaced the tooth.

The detective said, "It's pretty small. He can actually use that?"

Kara examined it. "Oh, he could open a pair of regulation handcuffs in about four seconds with that."

"You're too much, Weir. Come on."

Rhyme thought of something. "Oh, Lon?" The detective glanced his way. "You have a feeling when he helped us find the pick in his tooth that might've been a little misdirection?"

Kara nodded. "You're right."

Weir looked disgusted as Sellitto searched again. This time the detective checked every tooth. He found a second lock pick in a similar fake tooth on the lower left jaw.

"I'm gonna make sure they put you someplace real special," the detective said ominously. He then called another officer into the room and had him shackle Weir's feet with two sets of cuffs.

"I can't walk this way," Weir complained in a wheeze.

"Baby steps," Sellitto said coldly. "Take baby steps."

Chapter Thirty-three

The man got the message at a diner on Route 244, which because he didn't have a phone in his trailer – didn't want one, didn't trust 'em – is where he took and made all his calls.

Sometimes a few days went by before he picked up the messages but because he was expecting an important call today he'd hurried – to the extent he ever hurried – to Elma's Diner right after Bible school.

Hobbs Wentworth was a bear-sized man with a thin red beard around his face and a fringe of curly hair, lighter than his beard. The word "career" was one that nobody in Canton Falls, New York, had ever associated with Hobbs, which wasn't to say that he didn't work like an ox. He'd give a man his money's worth, as long as the job was out of doors, didn't require too much calculating and his employer was a white Christian.

Hobbs was married to a quiet, dusty woman named Cindy, who spent most of her time homeschooling, cooking, sewing and visiting with women friends who did the same. Hobbs himself spent most of his time working and hunting and spending evenings with men friends, drinking and arguing (though most of these "arguments" should be called "agreements" since he and his buddies were all extremely likeminded).

A lifelong resident of Canton Falls, he liked it here. There was plenty of good hunting land, virtually none of it posted. People were solid and good-natured and knew their heads from their rumps ("likeminded" applied to almost everyone in Canton Falls). Hobbs had lots of opportunities to do the things he enjoyed.

Like teaching Sunday school, of all things. An eighth-grade graduate with a stolen mortarboard but no learning to show for it, Hobbs had never in the Lord's universe thought anybody'd want him to teach.

But he had a flair for kids' Sunday school, it turned out. He didn't do prayer sessions or counseling or any Jesus-Loves-Me-This-I-Know singing… Nope, all he did was tell Bible stories to the youngsters. But he was an instant hit – thanks largely to his refusal to stick to the party line. For instance, in his account, instead of Jesus feeding the crowds with two fish and five loaves, Hobbs reported how the Son of God went bow hunting and killed a deer from a hundred yards away and gutted and dressed it in the town square himself and he fed the people that way. (To illustrate the story Hobbs brought his compound Clearwater MX Flex to the classroom and, chunk, sent a tempered-tip arrow three inches into a cinder-block wall, to the delight of the kids.)

Having finished one of those classes now, he walked inside Elma's. The waitress walked up to him. "Hey, Hobbs. Pie?"

"Naw, make it a Vernors and a cheese omelette. Extra Kraft. Hey, d'I get a phone -"

Before he could finish she handed him a slip of paper. On it were the words: Call me – JB.

She asked, "That Jeddy? Sounded like him. Since the police've been 'round, those troopers, I mean, I ain't see him 't'all."

He ignored her question and said only, "Hold that order for a minute." As he went to the pay phone, fishing hard for coins in his jeans, his mind went right back to a lunch he'd had two weeks ago at the Riverside Inn over in Bedford Junction. It'd been him and Frank Stemple and Jeddy Barnes from Canton Falls and a man named Erick Weir, who Barnes later took to calling Magic Man, because he was, of all things, a professional conjurer.

Barnes had puffed up Hobbs's day ten times by smiling and standing up when Hobbs arrived, saying to Weir, "Here, sir, meet the best shot we got in the county. Not to mention bow hunter. And a damn sharp operator too." Hobbs had sat over the fancy food at the fancy restaurant, proud but nervous too (he'd never before even dreamed about eating at the Riverside), poking his fork into the daily special and listening as Barnes and Stemple told him how they'd met Weir. He was sort of like a mercenary soldier, which Hobbs knew all about, being a subscriber to Soldier of Fortune. Hobbs noticed the scars on the man's neck and the deformed fingers, wondering what kind of fight he'd been in that'd cause that kind of damage. Napalm, maybe.

Barnes had been reluctant to even meet with Weir at first, of course, thinking entrapment. But Magic Man had put him right at ease by telling them to watch the news on one particular day. The lead story was about the murder of a Mexican gardener – an illegal immigrant – working for a rich family in a town nearby. Weir brought Barnes the dead man's wallet. A trophy, like a buck's antlers.

Weir had been right up-front. He'd told them that he'd picked the Mexican because of Barnes's views on immigrants but he personally didn't believe in their extreme causes – his interest was only in making money with his very special talents. Which suited everybody just fine. Over lunch, Magic Man Weir had laid out his plan about Charles Grady then he shook their hands and left. A few days ago Barnes and Stemple had shipped off the skippy, girl-lovin' Reverend Swensen to New York with instructions to kill Grady on Saturday night. And he'd bobbled the job as predicted.

Hobbs was supposed to "stay on call," Mr. Weir had said. "In case he was needed."

And apparently now he was. He punched in the number of the cell phone Barnes used, the account in someone else's name, and heard an abrupt "Yeah?"

"S'me."

Because of the state police all over the county looking for Barnes they'd agreed to keep all conversations over the phone to a minimum.

Barnes said, "You gotta do what we talked about at lunch."

"Uh-huh. Go to the lake."

"Right."

"Go to the lake and take the fishing gear with me?" Hobbs said.

"That's right."

"Yessir. When?"

"Now. Right away."

"Then I will."

Barnes hung up abruptly and Hobbs changed his omelette to a coffee and a bacon-and-egg sandwich, extra Kraft, to go. When Jeddy Barnes said now, right away, now and right away was how you did whatever you were supposed to do.

When the food was ready he pushed outside, fired up his pickup and drove fast onto the highway. He had one stop to make – his trailer. Then he'd pick up the old junker Dodge registered to somebody who didn't exist and speed down to the "lake," which didn't mean any kind of lake at all; it meant a particular place in New York City.

Just like the "fishing gear" he was supposed to take with him sure didn't mean a rod and reel either.

• • •

Back in the Tombs.

On one side of the floor-bolted table sat a grim-faced Joe Roth, Andrew Constable's pudgy lawyer.

Charles Grady was on the other side, flanked by his second, Roland Bell. Amelia Sachs stood; the pungent interview room, with its jaundiced, milky windows gave her a renewed sense of claustrophobia, which had been receding only slowly after the terrible panic at the Cirque Fantastique. She fidgeted and rocked her weight back and forth.

The door opened and Constable's guard led the prisoner into the room, recuffed his hands in front of him. Then he swung the door closed and returned to the corridor.

"It didn't work," was the first thing Grady said to him. A calm voice, oddly dispassionate, Sachs thought, considering that his family had nearly been wiped out.

"What didn't…?" Constable began. "Is this about that fool Ralph Swensen?"

"No, this is about Erick Weir," Grady said.

"Who?" A frown that seemed genuine crossed the man's face.

The prosecutor went on to explain about the attempt on his family's life by the former illusionist turned professional killer.

"No, no, no… I didn't have anything to do with Swensen. And I didn't have anything to do with this." The man looked helplessly at the scarred tabletop.

There was some graffiti scraped in the gray paint beside his hands. It seemed to be an A then a C then a partial K. "I've told you all along, Charles, there're some people I've known in the past who've gone way overboard with things. They see you and the state as the enemies – working with the Jewish people and the African Americans or whoever – and they're twisting my words around and using me as an excuse to come after you." He said in a low voice, "I'll say it again. I promise you that I had nothing to do with this."

Roth said to the prosecutor, "Let's not play games here, Charles. You're just fishing. If you've got something to connect my client to the break-in of your apartment, then -"

"Weir killed two individuals yesterday – and a police officer. That makes it capital murder."

Constable winced. His lawyer added bluntly, "Well, I'm sorry about that. But I notice you haven't charged my client. Because you don't have any evidence linking him to Weir, right?"

Grady ignored this and continued, "We're negotiating with Weir right now about turning state's evidence."

Constable turned his eyes to Sachs, looked her up and down. He seemed helpless and the gaze suggested that he was imploring her to help in some way. Perhaps she was supposed to provide the voice of female reason. But she remained silent, as did Bell. It wasn't their job to argue with suspects. The detective was here to keep an eye on Grady and see if he could learn more about the attempt on the D. A.'s life and possible future attacks. Sachs was here to see if she might learn more about Constable and his partners to help solidify the case against Weir.

Also, she'd been curious about this man – someone she'd been told was pure evil and yet who seemed to all appearances reasonable, understanding and genuinely troubled by the events of the past few days. Rhyme was content solely to look at the evidence; he had no patience for an examination of a perp's mind or soul.

Sachs, though, was fascinated with questions of good and evil. Was she looking at an innocent man now or another Adolf Hitler?

Constable shook his head. "Look, it makes no sense for me to try and kill you. The state'd send in a replacement D. A. The trial'd go on, only I'd have a murder charge slapped on me. Why'd I want to do that? What possible reason would I have to kill you?"

"Because you're a bigot and a killer and -"

Constable interrupted heatedly, "Listen here. I've put up with a lot, sir. I was arrested, humiliated in front of my family. I've been abused here and in the press. And you know what my only crime is?" He leveled his gaze to Grady. "Asking hard questions."

"Andrew," Roth touched his arm. But, with a loud jangle, the prisoner pulled it away. He was indignant and wouldn't be stopped. "Right here in this room, right now, I'm going to commit the only crimes I've ever been guilty of. First offense: I'm asking if you don't agree that when government gets to be too big it loses touch with the people. That's when cops end up with the power to stick a mop handle up the rectum of a black prisoner in custody – an innocent prisoner, by the way."

"They were caught," Grady countered lethargically.

"Them going to jail's not going to give that poor man back his dignity, now, is it? And how many don't get caught?… Look at what's happened in Washington. They let terrorists walk right into our country, intent to kill us, and we don't dare offend 'em by keeping 'em out or forcing 'em to be fingerprinted and carry ID cards… How about another offense? Let me ask you, why don't we all just admit that there're differences between races and cultures? I've never said one race is better or worse than any other. But I do say you get grief if you go and try to mix them."

"We got rid of segregation some years ago," Bell drawled. "It is a crime, you know."

"Used to be a crime to sell liquor, Detective. Used to be a crime to work on Sunday. Used to be legal for ten-year-olds to work in factories. Then people wised up and changed those laws because they didn't reflect human nature."

He leaned forward and looked from Bell to Sachs. "My two police officer friends here… Let me ask you a hard question. You get a report that a man might've committed a murder and he's black or Hispanic. You see him in an alley. Well, won't your finger be a little tighter on the trigger of your gun than if he's white? Or if he is a white man and looks like a smart man – if he has all his teeth and wears clothes that don't smell like yesterday's piss – well, then, are you going to be just a little slower to pull that trigger? Are you going to frisk him a little more gently?"

The prisoner sat back, shook his head. "Those're my crimes. That's it. Asking questions like those."

Grady said cynically, "Great material, Andrew. But before you play the persecution card, whatta you do with the fact that Erick Weir had lunch with three other people at the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction two weeks ago. Which is two clicks from the Patriot Assembly meeting hall in Canton Falls and about five from your house."

Constable blinked. "The Riverside Inn?" He looked out the window, which was so grimy it was impossible to tell if the sky was blue or polluted yellow or drizzly gray.

Grady's eyes narrowed. "What? You know something about that place?"

"I…"

His lawyer touched his arm to silence him. They whispered to each other for a moment.

Grady couldn't resist pushing. "Do you know somebody who's a regular there?"

Constable glanced at Roth, who shook his head and the prisoner remained silent.

After a moment Grady asked, "How's your cell, Andrew?"

"My -"

"Your cell here in detention."

"Don't much care for it. As I suspect you know."

"It's worse in prison. And you'll have to go into solitary because the black crew in general pop would love to get -"

"Come on, Charles," Roth said wearily. "We don't need any of that."

The prosecutor said, "Well, Joe, I'm about at the end of the line here. All I've been hearing is I didn't do this, I didn't do that. That somebody's setting him up and using him. Well, if that's the case" – he now turned directly to Constable – "get off your ass and prove it to me. Show me you didn't have anything to do with trying to kill me and my family, and you get me the name of the people who did, then we'll talk."

Another whispered consultation between client and attorney.

Roth finally said, "My client's going to make some phone calls. Based on what we find he might be willing to consider cooperating."

"That's not good enough. Give me some names now."

Troubled, Constable said directly to Grady, "That's the way it's got to be. I need to be certain about this."

"Afraid you'll have to turn in some friends?" the prosecutor asked coolly. "Well, you say you like to ask hard questions. Let me ask you one: What kind of friends are they if they're willing to send you to prison for the rest of your life?" Grady stood up. "If I don't hear from you by nine tonight we go to trial tomorrow as planned."

Chapter Thirty-four

It wasn't much of a stage.

When David Balzac had retired from the illusionist circuit ten years ago and had bought Smoke & Mirrors he'd torn out the back half of the store to put in the small theater. Balzac didn't have a cabaret license so he couldn't charge admission but he'd still hold shows here – every Sunday afternoon and Thursday night – so that his students could get up onstage and experience what performing was really like.

And what a difference it was.

Kara knew that practicing at home and performing onstage were night and day.

Something inexplicable happened when you got up in front of people. Impossible tricks that you continually flubbed at home went perfectly, owing to some mysterious spiritual adrenaline that took over your hands and proclaimed, "Thou shalt not fuck this one up."

Conversely, in a performance you might blow a trick that was second nature, like a one-coin French drop, a maneuver so simple that you'd never even think to have an out prepared in case it went south.

A high, wide black curtain separated the theater from the business end of the store. It rippled occasionally in the breeze as the front door opened and closed with a faint Roadrunner meep-meep from the electric-eye alert on the jamb.

Now approaching 4:00 P. M. on Sunday, people were entering the theater and finding seats – always beginning at the back (in magic and illusion performances nobody wants to sit in the front row; you never knew when you might get "volunteered" to be embarrassed up onstage).

Standing behind a backdrop curtain, Kara looked at the stage. The flat black walls were scuffed and streaked and the bowed oak floor was covered with dozens of bits of masking tape, from performers' blocking out their moves during rehearsal. For a backdrop, only a ratty burgundy shawl. And the entire platform was tiny: ten by twelve feet.

Still, to Kara it was Carnegie Hall or the MGM Grand itself and she was prepared to give her audience everything she had.

Like vaudevillians or parlor magicians, most illusionists simply string together a series of routines. The performers might pace the tricks carefully, building up to a thrilling finale, but that approach, Kara felt, was like watching fireworks – each burst more or less spectacular, but on the whole emotionally unsatisfying because there was no theme or continuity to the explosions. An illusionist's act should tell a story, all the tricks linked together, one leading to the next with one or more of the earlier tricks returning at the end to give the audience that delightful one-two punch that left them, she hoped, breathless.

More people were entering the theater now. She wondered if there'd be many here today, though it didn't really make any difference to her. She loved the story about Robert-Houdin, who walked out onstage one night to find three people in the theater. He presented the same show as if the house were full – except the finale was slightly different; he invited the audience to his home for dinner afterward.

She was confident of her routine – Mr. Balzac had her practice, even for these small shows, for weeks. And now, during the last few minutes before curtain time, she didn't think about her tricks but gazed at the audience, enjoying this momentary peace of mind. She supposed she had no right to feel this comfortable.

There were a lot of reasons why she shouldn't be so content: her mother's worsening condition. The growing money problems. Her slow progress in Mr. Balzac's eyes. The brunch-in-bed guy who'd left three weeks ago today, promising he'd call her. Definitely. I promise.

But the Vanished Boyfriend trick, like Evaporating Money and the Wasting Mother, couldn't touch her here. Not when she was onstage.

Nothing mattered to her except the challenge of materializing a certain look in the faces of the audience. Kara could see it so clearly: the mouth faintly smiling, the eyes opening wide with surprise, the eyebrows narrowing, asking the most compelling question in every illusionist show: How do they do that?

In close-in magic there are sleight-of-hand gestures known as takes and puts.

You create the effect of transforming an object from one thing to another by subtly taking away the original and putting a second in its place, though the effect the audience sees is of one object becoming something else. And that's exactly what Kara's philosophy of performing was: taking her audience's sadness or boredom or anger and putting in its place happiness, fascination, serenity – transforming them into people with exhilaration in their hearts, however momentary that might be.

Just about starting time. She peeked out through the curtain again.

Most of the chairs were filled, she was surprised to see. On nice days like this, the attendance was usually quite small. She was pleased when Jaynene from the nursing home arrived, her huge figure blocking the back doorway momentarily.

Several other nurses from Stuyvesant Manor were with her. They walked farther inside and found seats. A few of Kara's other friends too, from the magazine and her apartment building on Greenwich Street.

Then just after 4:00 the back curtain opened wide and one final member of the audience entered – someone she never in a million years would have expected to come see her show.

• • •

"It's accessible," Lincoln Rhyme commented wryly, driving his glossy Storm Arrow to a spot halfway down the aisle in Smoke & Mirrors and parking. "No ADA suits today."

An hour ago he'd surprised Sachs and Thom by suggesting they drive down to the store in his van – the ramp-equipped Rollx – to see Kara's performance.

Then he'd added, "Though it's a shame to waste a beautiful spring afternoon indoors."

When they'd stared at him – even before the accident he'd rarely spent a beautiful spring afternoon outside – he'd said, "I'm kidding. Could you get the van please, Thom."

"A 'please' no less," the aide had said.

As he looked around the shabby theater he noticed a heavyset black woman glance at him. She rose slowly and joined them, sitting next to Sachs, shaking her hand and nodding to Rhyme. She asked him if they were the police officers Kara'd told her about. He said yes and introductions were made.

Her name turned out to be Jaynene and she was a nurse working at the aging care facility where Kara's mother lived.

The woman glanced knowingly at Rhyme, who'd cast her a wry look at this description, and said, "Whoops. D'I really say that? Meant to say 'old folks home.'"

"I'm a graduate of a 'TIMC,'" the criminalist said.

The woman furrowed her brow and finally shook her head. "That's a new one on me."

Thom said, " Traumatic Incident Mitigation Center."

Rhyme said, "I called it the Gimp Inn."

"But he's deliberately provocative," Thom added.

"I've worked spinal units. We always liked the patients best who gave us crap. The quiet, cheerful ones scared us."

Because, Rhyme reflected, they were the ones who had friends slip a hundred Seconal into their drinks. Or who, if they had the use of a hand, poured water onto the pilot lights of their stoves and turned the gas up high.

A four-burner death, it was called.

Jaynene asked Rhyme, "You C4?"

"That's it."

"Off the ventilator. Good for you."

"Is Kara's mother here?" Sachs asked, looking around.

Jaynene frowned briefly and said, "Well, no."

"Does she ever come to see her?"

The woman said cautiously, "Her mother's not really involved with Kara's career."

Rhyme said, "Kara told me she's sick. Is she doing better?"

"A bit, yes," the woman said.

There was a story behind this, Rhyme sensed, but the woman's tone said that it wasn't for the nurse to go into confidential matters with strangers.

Then the lights dimmed and the crowd fell silent.

A white-haired man climbed up onstage. Despite the age and the signs of hard living – a drinker's nose and tobacco-stained beard – his eyes were keen, his posture erect and he floated to center stage with a performer's presence. He stood next to the only prop on the platform – a wooden cutout of a Roman column. The surroundings were shabby but the man wore a well-tailored suit, as if he had some rule that whenever you were up onstage you looked the best for your audience.

Ah, Rhyme deduced, the infamous mentor, David Balzac. He didn't identify himself but looked out over the audience for a moment, his eyes settling on Rhyme's for longer than most others'. Whatever he was thinking, though, remained hidden and he looked away. "Today, ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to present one of my most promising students. Kara has been studying with me for over a year now. She's going to treat you to some of the more esoteric illusions in the history of our profession – and some of my own as well as some of hers. Don't be surprised" – A demonic look that seemed directed at Rhyme himself – "or shocked at anything you see today. And now, ladies and gentlemen… I give you… Kara."

Rhyme had decided to pass this hour by being a scientist. He'd enjoy the challenge of spotting the methods of her illusions, noting how she did the tricks, how cards and coins were palmed and where her quick-change costumes were concealed. Kara was still several points ahead in this game of Catch the Moves, which she undoubtedly didn't know they were playing.

The young woman walked out onstage, wearing a tight black bodysuit with a cutout in the shape of a crescent moon on her chest, under a shimmery, see-through drape, like a translucent Roman toga. He'd never thought of Kara as attractive, much less sexy, but the clinging outfit was very sensuous. She moved like a dancer, swift and smooth. There was a long pause while she examined the audience slowly. It seemed that she looked at each person. The tension began to build.

Finally: "Change," she said in a theatrical voice. "Change… How it fascinates us. Alchemy – changing lead and tin into gold…" She held up a silver coin. Closed it in her palm and opened it an instant later to reveal a gold coin, which she flung into the air; it turned into a shower of gold confetti.

Applause from the audience and murmurs of pleasure. "Night…" The houselights suddenly dimmed to blackness and a moment later – no more than a few seconds – came back up. "… becoming day." Kara was now dressed in a similar, clinging outfit, except that it was golden and the cutout pattern on the front was a starburst.

Rhyme had to laugh at the speed of the quick change.

"Life…" A red rose appeared in her hand. "… becoming death…" She cupped the rose in her hands and it changed to a dried yellowish flower. "… becoming life." A bouquet of fresh flowers had somehow replaced the dead stalk. She tossed them to a delighted woman in the audience. Rhyme heard a surprised whisper: "They're real!"

Kara lowered her hands to her sides and looked out over the audience again with a serious expression on her face. "There's a book," she said, her voice filling the room. "A book written thousands of years ago by the Roman writer Ovid. The book is called Metamorphoses. Like 'metamorphosis' – when a caterpillar becomes a…" She opened her hand and a butterfly flew out and disappeared backstage.

Rhyme had taken four years of Latin. He recalled struggling to translate portions of Ovid's book for class. He remembered that it was a series of fourteen or fifteen short myths in poetic form. What was Kara up to? Lecturing about classical literature to an audience of lawyer moms and kids thinking about their Xboxes and Nintendos (though he noticed that her tight costume held the attention of every teenage boy in the audience).

She continued, "Metamorphoses… It's a book about change. About people becoming other people, animals, trees, inanimate objects. Some of Ovid's stories are tragic, some enthralling but all of them have one thing in common." A pause and then she said in a loud voice, "Magic!" With a burst of light and a cloud of smoke she vanished.

For the next forty minutes Kara captivated the audience with a series of illusions and sleight-of-hand tricks based on a few of the poems in the book. As for catching her moves, Rhyme gave up on that completely. True, he was lost in the drama of her stories. But even when he pulled himself back from her spell and concentrated on her hands he couldn't spot her method once. After a long ovation and an encore, during which she quick-changed into a tiny elderly woman and back again ("Young to old… old to young"), she left the stage. Five minutes later Kara emerged in jeans and a white blouse and stepped into the audience to say hello to friends.

A shop clerk laid out a table of jug wine, coffee and soda, cookies.

"No scotch?" Rhyme asked, looking over the cheap spread.

"Sorry, sir," the bearded young man replied.

Sachs, armed with wine, nodded at Kara, who joined them. "Hey, this is great. I never thought I'd see you guys here."

"What can I say?" Sachs offered. "Fantastic."

"Excellent," Rhyme said to her then turned back to the bar. "Maybe there's some whisky in the back, Thom."

Thom nodded at Rhyme and said to Kara, "Can you transform dispositions?" He took two glasses of Chardonnay, slipped a straw in one and held it out for his boss. "This or nothing, Lincoln."

He took a sip then said, "I liked the young-old ending. Didn't expect it. I was worried you were going to become a butterfly at the end. Cliché, you know."

"You were supposed to be worried. With me, expect the unexpected. Sleight of mind, remember?"

"Kara," Sachs said, "you have to try out for the Cirque Fantastique." The woman laughed but said nothing.

"No, I'm serious – this was professional quality," Sachs insisted.

Rhyme could tell that Kara didn't want to pursue the issue. She said lightly, "I'm right on schedule. There's no hurry. A lot of people make the mistake of jumping too fast."

"Let's get some food," Thom suggested. "I'm starving. Jaynene, you come too."

The large woman said she'd love to and suggested a new place near the Jefferson Market at Sixth and Tenth.

Kara demurred, though, saying that she had to stay and work on some of the routines she'd slipped up on during the performance. "Girl, no way," the nurse said, frowning. "You gotta work?"

"It'll only be a couple of hours. That friend of Mr. Balzac's doing some private show tonight and he's going to close up the store early to go watch it." Kara hugged Sachs and said goodbye. They exchanged phone numbers, each promising they'd be in touch.

Rhyme thanked her again for her help in the Weir case. "We couldn't've caught him without you."

"We'll come see you in Las Vegas," Thom called.

Rhyme started to pilot the Storm Arrow toward the front of the store. As he did he glanced to his left and saw Balzac's still eyes watching him from the back room. The illusionist then turned to Kara as she joined him. Immediately, in his presence, she was a very different woman, timid and self-conscious.

Metamorphosis, Rhyme thought, and he watched Balzac slowly push the door closed, shutting out the rest of the world from the sorcerer and his apprentice.

Chapter Thirty-five

"I'm gonna say it again. You can have a lawyer, you want one."

"I understand that," Erick Weir muttered in his breathy whisper.

They were in Lon Sellitto's office at One Police Plaza. It was a small room, mostly gray, decorated with – as the detective himself might've put it in a report – "one infant picture, one male child picture, one adult female picture, one scenic lake picture of indeterminate locale, one plant – dead."

Sellitto had interviewed hundreds of suspects in this office. The only difference between them and the present suspect was that Weir was double-shackled to the gray chair across the desk. And an armed patrol officer stood behind him.

"You understand?"

"I said I did," Weir announced.

And so the interview began.

Unlike Rhyme, who specialized in forensics, Detective First-Grade Lon Sellitto was a full-service cop. He was a detective in the real sense of the word. He "detected" the truth, using all the resources that the NYPD and fellow agencies had to offer, as well as his own street smarts and tenacity. It was the best job in the world, he often said. The work called on you to be an actor, a politician, a chess player and sometimes a gunslinger and tackle.

And one of the best parts was the game of interrogation, getting suspects to confess or reveal the names of associates and the location of loot or victims' bodies.

But it was clear from the beginning that this prick wasn't giving up a dustball of information.

"Now, Erick, what do you know about the Patriot Assembly?"

"Like I said, only what I read about them," Weir replied, scratching his chin on his shoulder as best he could. "You want to undo these cuffs just for a minute?"

"No, I don't. You only read about the Assembly?"

"That's right." Weir coughed for a moment.

"Where?"

"Time magazine, I think."

"And you're educated, you speak good. I wouldn't guess you go along with their philosophy."

"Of course not." He wheezed, "They seem like rabid bigots to me."

"So if you don't believe in their politics then the only reason to kill Charles Grady for them is for money. Which you admitted at Rhyme's. So I'd like to know exactly who hired you."

"Oh, I wasn't going to kill him," the prisoner whispered. "You misunderstood me."

"What's to misunderstand? You broke into his apartment with a loaded weapon."

"Look, I like challenges. Seeing if I can break into places nobody else can. I'd never hurt anybody." This was delivered half to Sellitto and half to a battered video camera aimed at his face.

"Say, how was the meatloaf? Or did you have the roast turkey?"

"The what?"

"In Bedford Junction. At the Riverside Inn. I'd say you had the turkey, and Constable's boys had the meatloaf and the steak and the daily special. Which one did Jeddy have?"

"Who? Oh, that man you asked me about? Barnes. You're talking about that receipt, right?" Weir said, wheezing. "The truth is I just found that. I needed to write something down and I grabbed a scrap of paper."

The truth? Sellitto reflected. Right. "You just needed to write something down?"

Struggling for breath, Weir nodded.

"Where were you?" persisted an increasingly bored Lon Sellitto. "When you needed this paper?"

"I don't know. A Starbucks."

"Which one?"

Weir squinted. "Don't remember."

Criminals had started to cite Starbucks a lot lately when offering up alibis. Sellitto decided it was because there were so many of the coffee outlets and they all looked alike – criminals could credibly sound confused about which one they'd been in at a particular time.

"Why was it blank?" Sellitto continued.

"What was blank?"

"The back of the receipt. If you'd taken it to write something down why didn't you write on it?"

"Oh. I don't think I could find a pen."

"They have pens at Starbucks. People charge things a lot there. They need pens to sign their credit card vouchers."

"The clerk was busy. I didn't want to bother her."

"What was it you wanted to write down?"

"Uhm," came the breathy wheeze, "movie show time."

"Where's Larry Burke's body?"

"Who?"

"The police officer who arrested you on Eighty-eighth Street. You told Lincoln Rhyme last night that you killed him and the body was on the West Side somewhere."

"I was just trying to make him think I was going to attack the circus, lead him off. Feeding him false information."

"And when you admitted killing the other victims? That was false information too?"

"Exactly. I didn't kill anybody. Somebody else did and tried to pin it on me."

Ah, the oldest defense in the book. The lamest. The most embarrassing.

Though one that, of course, did sometimes work, Sellitto knew – depending on the gullibility of the jury.

"Who wanted to frame you?"

"I don't know. But somebody who knows me, obviously."

"Because they'd have access to your clothes and fibers and hairs and things, to plant at the scenes."

"Exactly."

"Good. Then it'd be a short list. Give me some names."

Weir closed his eyes. "Nothing's coming to me." His head slumped. "It's really frustrating."

Sellitto couldn't've put it better himself.

A tedious half hour of this game passed. Finally the detective just gave up. He was angry, thinking that he'd be going home soon to his girlfriend and the dinner she was making – turkey, ironically, just like what'd been on the lunch menu at the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction – but that Officer Larry Burke would never be returning to his wife. He dropped the façade of the friendly but persistent interrogator and muttered, "I want you out of my sight."

Sellitto and the other officers drove the prisoner two blocks to the Manhattan Detention Center for booking on murder, attempt, assault and arson charges. The detective warned the DOC officers about the man's skills at escaping and they assured him that Weir would be placed in Special Detention, a virtually escape-proof facility.

"Oh, Detective Sellitto," Weir called in a throaty whisper.

The detective turned.

"I swear to God I didn't do it," he gasped, his voice echoing with what sounded like genuine remorse. "Maybe after I get some rest I'll remember some things that'll help you find the real killer. I really do want to help."

• • •

Downstairs in the Tombs the two officers, both with a firm grip on the prisoner's arms, let him shuffle his way to the booking station.

Doesn't look so scary to me, Department of Corrections Officer Linda Welles thought. He was strong, she could tell, but not like some of the beasts they'd processed here, those kids from Alphabet City or Harlem with perfect bodies that even huge quantities of crack and smack and malt liquor couldn't soften.

No, she didn't quite know why they were making all this fuss about this skinny old guy, Weir, Erick A.

"Keep a hold on him, watch his hands all the time. Don't take the shackles off."

That'd been Detective Sellitto's warning. But the suspect just looked sad and tired and was having trouble breathing. She wondered what had happened to his hands and neck, the scarring. A fire or hot oil. The thought of the pain made her shiver.

Welles remembered what he'd told Detective Sellitto at the intake door. I really do want to help. Weir had seemed like a schoolchild who'd disappointed his parents.

Despite Detective Sellitto's concerns the fingerprinting and mug shots went without incident and soon he was back in double cuffs and ankle shackles again. Welles and Hank Gersham, a large male DOC officer, took an arm each and then started down the long corridor to intake.

Welles had handled thousands of criminals here and thought she was immune to their pleas and their protests and tears. But there was something about Weir's sad promise to Detective Sellitto that moved her. Maybe he actually was innocent. He hardly seemed like a murderer.

He winced and Welles relaxed her viselike grip on his arm slightly.

A moment later the prisoner moaned and slumped against her. His face was contorted in pain.

"What?" Hank asked.

"Cramp," he gasped. "It hurts… oh, God." He gave a whispered scream. "The shackles!"

His left leg was straight out, quivering, hard as wood.

The guard asked her, "Undo him?"

Welles hesitated. Then said, "No." To Weir: "Let's go down, down on your side. I'll work it out." A runner, she knew how to handle cramps. It probably wasn't fake – he seemed in too much genuine agony and the muscle was rock-hard.

"Oh, Jesus," Weir cried in pain. "The shackles!"

"We've gotta get 'em off," her partner said.

"No," Welles repeated firmly. "Get him on the floor. I'll take care of it."

They eased Weir down and Welles began to massage his stiff leg. Hank stood back and watched her at work. Then she happened to glance up. She noticed that Weir's cuffed hands, still behind his back, had slid to his side and that his slacks had been pulled down a few inches.

She looked closely. She saw that a Band-Aid had been peeled away from his hip and beneath it – what the hell was that? She realized it was a slit in the skin.

It was then that his palm hit her square in the nose, popping the cartilage. A burst of pain seared her face and took her breath away.

A key! He'd had a key or pick hidden in that little crevice of skin under the bandage.

Her partner reached out fast but Weir rose even faster and elbowed him in the throat. The man went down, gasping and clutching his neck, coughing and struggling for air. Weir clamped a hand on Welles's pistol and tried to pull it from her holster. She struggled to control it with both hands, using every ounce of strength. She tried to scream but the blood from her broken nose flowed down her throat and she began to choke.

Still gripping her gun, the prisoner reached down with his left hand and in what seemed like seconds unshackled his legs. Then with both hands he began in earnest to get the Glock away from her.

"Help me!" she cried, coughing blood. "Somebody, help!" Weir managed to pull the weapon out of her holster but Welles, thinking of her children, kept a vise grip on his wrist. The muzzle swung around the empty corridor, past Hank, on his hands and knees, retching and struggling for breath.

"Help! Officer down! Help!" Welles cried.

There was motion from the end of the corridor as a door opened and someone came running. But the hallway seemed to be ten miles long and Weir was getting a better grip on the pistol. They rolled to the floor, his desperate eyes inches from hers, the muzzle of the gun turning slowly toward her. It ended up between them. Gasping, he tried to get his index finger to the trigger.

"No, please, no, no," she whimpered. The prisoner smiled cruelly as she stared at the black eye of the weapon, inches from her face, expecting it to fire at any instant.

Seeing her children, seeing the girl's father, her own mother… No fucking way, Welles thought, furious. She planted her foot against the wall and shoved hard. Weir went over backward and she fell on top of him.

The pistol went off with a stunning explosion, the huge kick of recoil jarring her wrist, the sound deafening her. Blood spattered the wall. No, no, no!

Please let Hank be okay! she prayed.

But Welles saw her partner struggling to his feet. He was unhurt. Then she realized that she wasn't fighting for the weapon. It was in her hand alone; Weir no longer had a grip on it. Quivering, she leaped to her feet and backed away from him. Oh, my God…

The bullet had struck the prisoner directly in the side of the head, leaving a horrible wound. On the wall behind him was a spatter of blood, brain matter and bone. Weir lay on his back, glazed eyes staring at the ceiling. Blood was flowing down his temple to the floor.

Shaking, Welles wailed, "Fuck me, look what I did! Oh, fuck! Help him, somebody!"

As a dozen other officers converged on the scene, she turned to look at the guards but then saw them freeze and drop into defensive crouches.

Welles gasped. Was there some other perp behind her? She spun around and saw that the corridor was empty. She turned back to see the other officers were still crouching, holding up their hands in alarm. Shouting. Ears deafened from the shot, she couldn't understand what they were saying.

Finally she heard, "Jesus, your weapon, Linda! Holster it! Watch where you're pointing it!"

She realized in her panic that she'd been waving the Glock around – toward the ceiling, toward the floor, toward them – like a child with a toy gun.

She barked a manic laugh at her carelessness. As she bolstered the pistol she felt something hard on her belt and pulled it off. She examined the splinter of bloody bone from Weir's skull. "Oh," she said, dropped it and laughed like her daughter during a tickle-fest. She spit on her hand then began wiping her palm on her pants. The scrubbing grew more and more frantic until the laughter suddenly stopped and she dropped to her knees, consumed with wrenching sobs.

Chapter Thirty-six

"You should've seen it, Mum. I think I wowed 'em."

Kara sat on the edge of the chair, cradling the tepid Starbucks cup in her hands, the warmth from the cardboard perfectly matching the temperature of human skin – the temperature of her mother's skin, for instance, still pink, still glowing.

"I had the whole stage to myself for forty-five minutes. How 'bout that?"

"You…?"

This word was not part of an imaginary dialogue. The woman was awake and had asked the question in a firm voice.

You.

Though Kara had no idea what her mother meant.

It might mean: What was it you just said?

Or: Who are you? Why are you coming into my room and sitting down here as if we know each other?

Or: I heard the word "you" once but I don't know what it means and I'm too embarrassed to ask. It's important, I know, but I can't remember. You, you, you…

Then her mother looked out the window, at the clinging ivy, and said, "Everything turned out fine. We got through it just fine."

Kara knew it would only be frustrating to try to carry on a conversation with her when she was in this state of mind. None of her sentences would be related to any other. Sometimes she'd even forget her train of thought within a sentence and her voice would fade to a confused silence.

So Kara herself now just rambled on, talking about the Metamorphoses show she'd just done. And then, even more excitedly, she told her mother about helping the police catch a killer.

For a moment her mother's eyebrow arched in recognition and Kara's heart began to pound. She leaned forward.

"I found the tin. I never thought I'd see it again."

Head back in the pillow.

Kara's hands clenched into knotted fists. Her breath came fast. "It's me, Mum! Me! The Royal Kid. Can't you see me?"

"You?"

Goddamnit! Kara raged silently to the demon who'd possessed the poor woman and muffled her soul. Leave her alone! Give her back to me!

"Hi there." A woman's voice from the doorway startled Kara, who subtly lifted several tears off her cheek, as smoothly as executing a French drop, before she turned around.

"Hey," she said to Amelia Sachs. "You tracked me down."

"I'm a cop. That's what we do." She walked into the room, holding two Starbucks cups. She glanced at the container in Kara's hand. "Sorry. Redundant present."

Kara thumped the carton she was holding. Almost out. She took the second cup gratefully. "Caffeine'll never go to waste around me." She started sipping.

"Thanks. You guys have fun?"

"Sure did. That woman's a scream. Jaynene. Thom's in love with her. And she actually made Lincoln laugh."

"She has that effect on people," Kara said. "A way good soul."

Amelia said, "Balzac dragged you away pretty fast at the end of the show. I just wanted to come by and thank you again. And to say that you should send us a bill for your time."

"I never thought about it. You introduced me to Cuban coffee. That's payment enough."

"No, invoice us something. Send it to me and I'll make sure it goes to the city."

"Playing G-woman," Kara said. "It'll be a story I'll tell my grandkids… Hey, I'm free for the rest of the night – Mr. Balzac's off with his friend. I was going to see some people down in SoHo. You want to come?"

"Sure," the policewoman said. "We could -" She looked up, over Kara's shoulder. "Hello."

Kara glanced behind her and saw her mother, looking with curiosity at the policewoman, and sized up the gaze. "She's not really with us right now."

"It was during the summer," the elderly woman said. "June, I'm pretty sure." She closed her eyes and lay back.

"Is she okay?"

"Just a temporary thing. She'll come back soon. Her mind's a little funny sometimes." Kara stroked the old woman's arm then asked Sachs, "Your parents?"

"It'll sound familiar, I've got a feeling. Father's dead. My mother lives near me in Brooklyn. Little too close for comfort. But we've come to an… understanding."

Kara knew that understandings between mother and daughter were as complex as international treaties and she didn't ask Amelia to elaborate, not now. There'd be time for that in the future.

A piercing beep filled the room and both women reached for the pagers on their belts. Amelia won. "I shut my cell off when I got here. There was a sign in the lobby that said I couldn't use it. You mind?" She nodded toward the telephone on the table.

"No, go ahead."

She picked up the phone and dialed and Kara rose to straighten the blankets on her mother's bed. "Remember that bed-and-breakfast we stayed at in Warwick, Mum? Near the castle?"

Do you remember? Tell me you remember!

Amelia's voice: "Rhyme? Me."

Kara's unilateral conversation was interrupted a few seconds later, though, when she heard the officer's voice ask a sharp, "What? When?"

Turning to the policewoman, Kara frowned. Amelia was looking at her, shaking her head. "I'll get right down there… I'm with her now. I'll tell her." She hung up.

"What's the matter?" Kara asked.

"Looks like I can't join you guys after all. We must've missed a lock pick or key. Weir got out of his cuffs at detention and went for somebody's gun. He was killed."

"Oh, my God."

Amelia walked to the doorway. "I've got to run the scene down there." She paused and glanced at Kara. "You know, I was worried about keeping him under guard during the trial. That man was just too slippery. But I guess sometimes there is justice. Oh, that bill? Whatever you were going to charge, double it."

• • •

"Constable's got some information," the man's voice came crisply through the phone.

"He's been playing detective, has he?" Charles Grady asked the lawyer wryly.

Wryly – but not sarcastically. The prosecutor had nothing against Joseph Roth, who – though he represented scum – was a defense lawyer who managed to step around the slime trail left by his clients and who treated D. A.'s and cops with honesty and respect. Grady reciprocated.

"Yeah, he has. Made some calls up to Canton Falls and put the fear of God into a couple of the Patriot Assembly folks. They checked things out. Looks like some of the former members've gone rogue."

"Who is it? Barnes? Stemple?"

"We didn't go into it in-depth. All I know is he's pretty upset. He kept saying, 'Judas, Judas, Judas.' Over and over."

Grady couldn't stir up much sympathy. You lie down with dogs.… He said to the lawyer, "He knows I'm not letting him off scot-free."

"He understands that, Charles."

"You know Weir's dead?"

"Yep… I've got to tell you Andrew was happy to hear it. I really believe he didn't have anything to do with trying to hurt you, Charles."

Grady didn't have any use for opinions from defense counsel, even forthright ones like Roth. He asked, "And he's got solid information?"

"He does, yes."

Grady believed him. Roth was a man you simply could not fool; if he thought Constable was going to dime out some of his people then it was going to happen. How successful the resulting case would be was a different matter, of course.

But if Constable gave relatively hard information and if the troopers did a halfway decent job with their investigation and arrest he was confident he could put the perps away. Grady would also make sure that Lincoln Rhyme oversaw the forensics.

Grady had mixed feelings about Weir's death. While he'd publicly express his concern at the man's shooting and promise to look into it officially, he was privately delighted that the fucker'd been disposed of. He was still shocked and infuriated that a killer had walked right into the apartment where his wife and daughter lived, willing to murder them too.

Grady looked at the glass of wine he so dearly wanted a sip of, but realized that a consequence of this phone call was that it precluded alcohol for the time being. The Constable case was so important that he needed all his wits about him.

"He wants to meet you face-to-face," Roth said.

The wine was a Grgich Hills Cabernet Sauvignon. A 1997, no less. Great vineyard, great year.

Roth continued, "How soon can you get down to detention?"

"A half hour. I'll leave now."

Grady hung up and announced to his wife, "The good news is no trial."

Luis, the still-eyed bodyguard, said, "I'll go with you."

After Weir's death Lon Sellitto had cut back the protection team to one officer.

"No, you stay here with my family, Luis. I'd feel better."

His wife asked cautiously, "If that's the good news, honey, what's the bad news?"

"I have to miss dinner," the prosecutor said, tossing a handful of Goldfish crackers into his mouth and washing them down with a very large sip of very nice wine, thinking, hell with it, let's celebrate.

• • •

Sachs's war-torn yellow Camaro SS pulled to a stop outside 100 Center Street.

She tossed the NYPD placard onto the dash then climbed out. She nodded to a crime-scene crew standing beside their RRV. "Where's the scene?"

"First floor in the back. The corridor to intake."

"Sealed?"

"Yep."

"Whose weapon?"

"Linda Welles'. DOC. She's pretty shook up. Asshole broke her nose."

Sachs grabbed one of the suitcases and, hooking it up to a wheelie luggage carrier, started for the front door of the Criminal Courts building. The other CS techs did the same and followed.

This scene'd be a grounder, of course. An accidental shooting involving an officer and a suspect who'd tried to escape? Pro forma. Still, the event was a homicide and required a complete crime scene report for the Shooting Incident Board and any subsequent investigation and lawsuits. Amelia Sachs would run the scene as carefully as any other.

A guard checked their IDs and led the team through a maze of corridors into the basement. Finally they came to a yellow police-line tape across a closed door.

Here she found a detective talking to a uniformed officer, her nose stuffed with tissue and bandaged.

Sachs introduced herself and explained that she was going to be running the scene. The detective stepped aside and Sachs asked Linda Welles what had happened.

In a halting, nasal voice the guard explained that on the way from fingerprinting to intake the suspect had somehow undone his handcuffs. "It took him two, three seconds. All the cuffs. Just like that, they were open. He didn't get my key." She pointed to her blouse pocket, where presumably it resided. "He had a pick or key or something on his hip."

"His pocket?" Sachs asked, frowning. She remembered they'd searched him carefully.

"No, his leg. You'll see." She nodded toward the corridor where Weir's body lay. "There's a cut in his skin. Under a bandage. Everything happened so fast."

Sachs supposed that he'd cut himself to create a hiding space. A queasy thought.

"Then he grabbed my weapon and we were struggling for it. It just discharged. I didn't mean to pull the trigger. I didn't, really. But… I tried to keep control and I couldn't. It just discharged."

Control… Discharge. The words, official copspeak, were perhaps an attempt to insulate her from the guilt she'd be feeling. This had nothing to do with the fact that a killer was dead, or that her life had been endangered, or that a dozen other officers had been taken in by this man; no, it was that this woman had stumbled. Women in the NYPD set the bar high; the falls are always harder than for men.

"We collared and searched him at the takedown," Sachs said kindly. "And we missed the key too."

"Yeah," the officer muttered. "But it's still gonna come up."

At the shooting inquiry, she meant. And, yeah, it would.

Well, Sachs'd do a particularly thorough job on her report to give this officer as much support as possible.

Welles touched her nose gently. "Oh, that hurts." Tears were streaming from her eyes. "What're my kids going to say? They always ask me if I do anything dangerous. And I tell ' em no. Look at this…"

Pulling on latex gloves, Sachs asked for the woman's Glock. She took it, dropped the clip and ejected the round in the chamber. Everything went into a plastic evidence bag.

Slipping into her sergeant mode, Sachs said, "You can take an LOA, you know."

Welles didn't even hear her. "It just discharged," the woman said in a hollow voice. "I didn't want it to. I didn't want to kill anybody."

"Linda?" Sachs said. "You can take an LOA. A week, ten days."

"I can?"

"Talk to your supervisor."

"Sure. Yeah. I could do that." Welles rose and wandered over to the medic treating her partner, who had a nasty bruise on his neck but who otherwise seemed all right.

The CS team set up shop outside the door to the corridor where the shooting had occurred, opening the suitcases and arranging evidence collection equipment, friction ridge supplies and video and still cameras. Sachs dressed in the white Tyvek suit and accessorized with rubber bands around her feet.

She fitted the microphone over her head and asked for a radio patch to Lincoln Rhyme's phone. Ripping down the police tape, she opened the door, thinking: A slit in the skin to hide lock picks and cuff keys? Of all the perps she and Lincoln had been up against, the Conjurer was -

"Oh, goddamn," she spat out.

"Hello to you too, Sachs," Rhyme said acerbically through her headset. "At least I think it's you. Hell of a lot of static."

"I don't believe it, Rhyme. The M. E. took the body before I could process it."

Sachs was looking into the corridor, bloody but empty.

"What?" he snapped. "Who approved that?"

The rule in crime scene work was that emergency medical personnel could enter a scene to save an injured person but, in the case of homicide, the body had to remain untouched by everyone, including the tour doctor from the Medical Examiner's office, until it'd been processed by someone from forensics. This was fundamental police work and the career of whoever'd released the Conjurer's corpse was now in jeopardy.

"There a problem, Amelia?" one of the techs called from the doorway.

"Look," she said angrily, nodding into the corridor. "The M. E. got the body before we processed it. What happened?"

The crew-cut young tech frowned. He glanced at his partner then said, "Uhm, well, the tour doc's outside. He was the guy we were talking to when you showed up. The one feeding the pigeons. He was waiting to move the body till we were finished."

"What's going on?" Rhyme growled. "I hear voices, Sachs."

To him she said, "There's a crew from the M. E.'s office outside, Rhyme. Sounds like they haven't picked up the body. What's -"

"Oh, Jesus Christ. No!"

The chill went straight to her soul. "Rhyme, you don't think -?"

He barked out, "What do you see, Sachs? What's the blood spatter look like?"

She ran to where the shooting had happened and studied the bloodstain on the wall. "Oh, no. It doesn't look normal for a gunshot, Rhyme."

"Brain matter, bone?"

"Gray matter, yeah. But it doesn't look right either. There is some bone. Not much, though, for a close-range shot."

"Do a presumptive blood test. That'll be dispositive."

She sped back to the doorway.

"What's going…?" one of the techs asked but he fell silent as he watched her dig frantically through the suitcases.

Sachs grabbed the Kastle-Meyer catalytic blood kit then returned to the corridor and took a swab from the wall. She treated this with phenolphthalein and a moment later she had the answer. "I don't know what it is but it's definitely not blood." She glanced down at the ruddy smears on the floor. This, however, looked real. She tested a sample and it showed positive. Then she noticed a bloody razor knife blade in the corner. "Christ, Rhyme he faked the shooting. Cut himself somewhere to bleed for real and fool the guards."

"Call security."

Sachs yelled, "It's an escape – have the exits sealed!"

The detective jogged into the hallway and stared at the floor. Linda Welles joined him, her eyes wide. The momentary relief that she hadn't in fact been involved in a man's death faded fast as she realized the far-worse implications of what had happened. "No! He was there. His eyes were open. He looked dead." Her voice was high, frantic. "I mean, his head… it was all bloody. I could see… I could see the wound!"

You could see the illusion of a wound, Sachs thought bitterly.

The detective called out, "They've notified the guards at all the exits. But, Christ, this isn't a lock-down corridor. As soon as we closed the doors here he could've stood up and wandered anywhere. He's probably stealing a car right now or on the subway to Queens."

Amelia Sachs began giving orders. Whatever the detective's rank he was so shaken by the escape that he didn't question her authority. "Get an escape bulletin out now," she said. "All agencies in the metro area. Federal and state. Don't forget MTA. The name is Erick Weir. White male. Early fifties. You've got the mug shot."

"What's he wearing?" the detective asked Welles and her partner, who both struggled to remember. They gave a rough description.

Sachs was thinking, though, that it hardly mattered. He'd be in different clothing now. She gazed down the four tentacles of dim corridors she could see from here and observed silhouettes of dozens of people. Guards, janitors, cops…

Or maybe the Conjurer, disguised as one of them.

But for the moment she left the issue of pursuit in others' hands and turned back to her own area of expertise: the crime scene, whose search was supposed to be a brief formality but had now become a matter of life and death.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Making his way cautiously through the basement of the Manhattan Detention Center, Malerick was reflecting on his escape, offering silent patter to his revered audience.

Let me share with you a trick of the illusionist's trade.

To truly fool people it's not enough to misdirect them during the illusion. This is because when confronted with a phenomenon that defies logic the human brain continues to replay the scene afterward to try to understand what happened. We illusionists call this "reconstruction," and unless we set up our trick cleverly enough an intelligent, suspicious audience will be fooled only briefly and will figure out our method after the routine is over.

So how do we trick audiences like this?

We use the most implausible method we can – either one absurdly simple or overwhelmingly complex.

An example: one famous illusionist appears to push an entire peacock feather through a handkerchief. Audiences rarely can figure out what kind of sleight of hand he uses to make it seem that the feather actually penetrates the cloth.

What's the method? It does penetrate the cloth. There's a hole in the handkerchief! The audience considers this method at first but then invariably decides that it's too simple for such a great performer. They'd rather think he's doing something far more elaborate.

Another: an illusionist met some friends for dinner at a restaurant and was asked to show them a few tricks. He declined at first but finally agreed.

He took a spare tablecloth, held it up in front of a table of two lovers dining nearby and vanished the couple and their table in one second. The friends were astonished. How could he have done it? They never guessed that, supposing that he'd probably be invited to perform, the illusionist had arranged with the maitre d' to have a prepared, collapsible table on hand and hired an actor and actress to play the couple. When he'd held up the cloth they'd disappeared on cue.

In reconstructing what they'd seen, the diners rejected the actual answer as too improbable for such an apparently impromptu performance.

And this is what occurred with the illusion you just witnessed, one I call the Shot Prisoner.

Reconstruction. Many illusionists forget about this psychological process. But Malerick never did. And he'd considered it carefully when planning his escape in the detention center. The officers escorting him down the corridor to the lockup believed they saw a prisoner slip his cuffs, grab a gun and end up shot dead right in front of them.

There was shock, there was dismay, there was horror.

But even at such peak moments the mind does what it must and before the smoke dissipated the officers were analyzing the events and considering options and courses of action. Like any audience they engaged in reconstruction and, knowing that Erick Weir was a skilled illusionist, undoubtedly wondered if the shooting had been faked.

But their ears had heard a real gun fire a real bullet.

Their eyes had seen a head explode under the impact and, a moment later, a limp body in the pose of death and blood, brain, bone and glazed eyes.

The reconstruction resulted in a conclusion that it was far too implausible for a man to go to such elaborate lengths to fake the shooting. So, confident he was dead, they'd left him alone, unshackled, in the corridor while they went off to make their frantic radio or phone calls.

And my method, Revered Audience?

As they'd walked down the corridor Malerick had peeled off the bandage on his hip and removed a universal handcuff key from a tiny slit in his skin. Once out of the cuffs he hit the woman guard in the face, the other in the throat and pulled her gun from her holster. A struggle… and finally he'd aimed the gun behind his head and pulled the trigger. At the same time he tapped the firing circuit of the tiny squib taped to a shaved portion of his scalp under his long hair, blowing up a small bladder of fake blood, bits of gray rubber and fragments of beef bone. To add to the credibility of the act he'd used a razor knife blade – hidden in his hip with the key – to cut his scalp, an area of the body that bleeds profusely but with little pain.

Then he'd lain like a discarded rag doll, breathing as shallowly as he could.

His eyes remained open because he'd filled them with viscous eye-drops that produced a milky appearance and allowed him not to blink.

Fuck me, look what I did! Oh, fuck! Help him, somebody!

Ah, but Officer Welles, it was too late to help me.

I was dead as a roadside deer.

He headed now through winding corridors in the interconnected basements of the government buildings here until he came to the supply closet where he'd stashed his new disguise several days ago. Inside the small room he stripped and then hid the wound appliance, his old clothes and shoes behind some boxes. Donning his new outfit and applying some makeup, he was in role in less than ten seconds.

A glance out the door. The corridor was empty. He stepped outside and hurried for the stairway. It was nearly time for the finale.

• • •

"It was an out," Kara said.

The young woman had been whisked back to Rhyme's townhouse from Stuyvesant Manor a few moments ago.

"An out?" the criminalist asked. "What's that?"

"It means an alternative plan. All good illusionists have one or two backups for every routine. If you screw up or the audience catches your moves, you have an escape plan to save the trick. He must've figured there was a chance he'd get caught so he rigged an out to let him get away."

"How'd he do it?"

"Explosive squib behind a blood bladder hidden in his hair. The shot? It might've been a fake gun," she suggested. "Most catch-the-bullet tricks use fekes, phony guns. They have a second barrel. Or they're real guns, loaded with blanks. He might've switched guns with the officer taking him to his cell."

"I doubt it," Rhyme said, looking at Sellitto.

The rumpled cop agreed. "Yeah, I don't see how he could've switched a service piece. Or unloaded it and reloaded it with funny slugs."

Kara said, "Well, he could've just pretended to shoot himself. Played with the angle of sight."

"What about the eyes?" Rhyme asked. "The wits said his eyes were open. He never blinked. And they looked glazed."

"There're dozens of dead-man fekes and gimmicks. He might've used eye-drops that lubricate the surface. You can keep them open for ten or fifteen minutes. And there're self-lubricating contact lenses too. They have a glazed look, like you're a zombie."

Zombies and fake blood… Christ, what a mess. "How'd he get through the goddamn metal detector?"

"They weren't in the lockdown area yet," Sellitto explained. "That's what they were on their way to."

Rhyme sighed. Then he snapped, "Where the hell's the evidence?" Looking from the door to Mel Cooper, as if the slim technician could make the delivery from the detention center materialize on command. It turned out that there were two crime scenes downtown: one was the corridor where the phony shooting had occurred. The other scene was in the basement of the courthouse – a janitor's closet. One of the search teams had found the fake wound appliance, clothes and some other things hidden in a bag there.

Thom answered the ringing door chime and a moment later Roland Bell hurried into the laboratory. "Can't believe it," he said breathlessly, his hair a sweaty mop on his forehead. "It's confirmed? He's rabbited?"

"Sure has," Rhyme muttered darkly. "ESU's scouring the place. Amelia's down there too. But they haven't found any leads."

Bell drawled, "He might be heading for the hills but I'm thinking it's time to get Charles and his family into a safe house until we find out what's what."

Sellitto said, "Absolutely."

The detective pulled out his cell phone and placed a call. "Luis? It's Roland. Listen here, Weir's escaped… No, no, he wasn't dead at all. Faked it. I want Grady and his family in a safe house till that boy's caught. I'm sending a… What?"

At the sound of this single, shocked word, everyone's attention swiveled to Bell. "Who's with him?… By himself? What're you telling me?"

Rhyme was looking at Bell 's face, the dark, cryptic frown in the otherwise comfortingly lackadaisical visage. Once again, as had happened so often on this case, Rhyme had a sense that events that seemed unforeseeable but had in fact been planned a long time ago were beginning to unfold.

Bell turned to Sellitto. "Luis said you called and had the baby-sitting team stand down."

"Called who?"

"Called Grady's house. You told Luis to send everybody but him home."

"Why would I do that?" Sellitto asked. "Fuck, he did it again. Just like sending the guards at the circus home."

Bell said to the team, "It gets worse – Grady's on his way downtown by himself to meet with Constable about some plea-bargain deal." Into the phone he said, "Keep the family together, Luis. And call the others on the team. Get 'em back right now. Don't let anybody into the apartment less you know 'em. I'll try and find Charles." He hung up and dialed another number. He listened into the receiver for a long moment. "No answer." He left a message: "Charles, this is Roland. Weir's escaped and we don't know where he'd be or what he's getting up to. As soon as you hear this, get next to an armed officer you know personally and then call me."

He gave his number and then made another call, to Bo Haumann, head of Emergency Services. He alerted him that Grady was on his way to the detention center, unprotected.

The man with two guns hung up and shook his head. "Missed this one by a mile." He stared at the evidence charts. "So, what is this boy up to?"

"One thing I know," Rhyme said. "He's not leaving town. He's enjoying this."

• • •

The only thing in my life, the only thing that's ever meant anything to me is performing. Illusion, magic…

"Thank you, sir. Thank you."

The guard hesitated slightly at these gentle words as he ushered the man who'd spoken them – Andrew Constable – into the interview room atop the Tombs in lower Manhattan.

The prisoner smiled like a preacher thanking his parishioners for tithes.

The guard uncuffed Constable's hands from behind his back and then recuffed them in front.

"Is Mr. Roth here yet, sir?"

"Siddown, shutup."

"Sure thing." Constable sat.

"Shutup."

Did that too.

The guard left and, alone in the room, the prisoner gazed out the greasy window at the city. He was a country boy through and through but he still appreciated New York. He'd felt stunned and angry beyond words at September 11. If he and the Patriot Assembly had had their way, the incident never would have happened because the people who wished to do harm to the American way of life would have been rooted out and exposed.

Hard questions…

A moment later the heavy metal door opened and the guard let Joseph Roth into the room.

"Hi, Joe. Grady's agreed to negotiate?"

"Yeah. Should be here in about ten minutes, I'd guess. He's going to need something substantive from you, though, Andrew."

"Oh, hell get it." The man sighed. "And I've found out more since I talked to you last. I'll tell you, Joseph, I'm heartsick about what's happening up in Canton Falls. And it's been going on, right under my nose, for a year or so. That story Grady kept harping on – about killing those troopers? I thought it was nonsense. But, nope, there were some folk actually planning that."

"You have names?"

Constable said, "You bet I have names. Friends of mine. Good friends. Used to be, at least. That lunch at the Riverside Inn? Some of them did hire that man Weir to kill Grady. I've got names, dates, places, phone numbers. And there's more coming. There're a lot of Patriots're going to cooperate to the hilt. Don't worry."

"Good," Roth said, looking relieved. "Grady'll be tough to deal with at first. That's his style. But I think things're going to work out."

"Thanks, Joe." Constable sized up his attorney. "I'm glad I hired you."

"I have to tell you, Andrew, I was little surprised at first, you hiring a lawyer that was Jewish. You know, with what I heard about you."

"But then you got to know me."

"Then I got to know you."

"That reminds me, Joe, I've been meaning to ask. When's Passover?"

"What?"

"That holiday of yours. When is it?"

"About a month ago. Remember that night I left early?"

"Right." He nodded. "What's it mean, 'Passover'?"

"When the firstborn of the Egyptians were killed, God 'passed over' the Jews' houses. He spared their sons."

"Oh. I thought it meant like you passed over a border to safety or something. Like the Red Sea."

Roth laughed. "Yeah, that makes sense."

"Anyway. Sorry I didn't wish you a happy holiday."

"I appreciate that, Andrew." Then he looked into the man's eyes. "If things work out the way I'm hoping they will, maybe you and your wife could come to our Seder next year. That's a dinner, a celebration. We have about fifteen people. They're not all Jewish. It's a good time."

"You can consider that invitation accepted." The men shook hands. "All the more incentive to get me out of here. So let's get to work. Tell me about the charges again and what you think we can get Grady to agree to." Constable stretched.

Felt good to have his hands in front of him and the shackles off his ankles. He felt so good, in fact, that he actually found it amusing to hear his lawyer recite the laundry list of reasons why the people of the state of New York found him unfit for social relations. This monologue was interrupted, though, a moment later when the guard came to the door. He motioned Roth outside.

When he returned the lawyer looked troubled and said, "We're supposed to sit tight here for a bit. Weir's escaped."

"No! Is Grady safe?"

"I don't know. I assume he's got guards looking out for him."

The prisoner sighed in disgust. "You know who's going to come off the heavy? Me, that's who. I've had it. I'm just sick and tired of this crap. I'm going to find out where Weir is and what he's up to."

"You? How?"

"I'll have everybody I can muster up in Canton Falls track down Jeddy Barnes. Maybe they can convince him to let us know where Weir is and what he's doing."

"Hold on, Andrew," Roth said uneasily. "Nothing illegal up there."

"No. I'll make sure of that."

"I'm sure Grady'll appreciate it."

"Between you and me, Joe, I don't give a rat's ass about Grady. This's for me. Giving 'em Weir and Jeddy's head on a platter – I do that and maybe at last everybody'll believe I'm on the up-and-up. Now let's make some phone calls and get to the bottom of this mess."

Chapter Thirty-eight

Hobbs Wentworth didn't get away from Canton Falls very often.

Dressed like a janitor, wheeling a cart containing push brooms, mops and his "fishing gear" (that is, his Colt AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle), Hobbs Wentworth realized that life in the big city had changed quite a bit in the past twenty years, the last time he'd been here.

And he noted that everything he'd heard about the slow cancer eating away the white race was true.

Lord above our green pastures, look at this: there were more Japanese people or Chinese or something – who could tell? – than in Tokyo. And Hispanics everywhere in this part of New York City, like mosquitoes. And rag-heads too, who he didn't see why they weren't simply rounded up and shot because of the Trade Towers. A woman in one of those Moslem outfits, all covered up, was crossing the street.

He had a fast urge to kill her because she might know somebody who knew somebody who'd attacked his country.

And Indians and Pakistanis too, who should be sent back home because he couldn't understand what the fuck they were saying, not to mention they weren't Christians.

Hobbs was furious at what the government had done, opening up the borders and letting these animals inside, to gobble up the country and force decent people into little islands of safety – places like Canton Falls – which were getting smaller and smaller every day.

But God had winked at sharp-operator Hobbs Wentworth and given him the blessed role of freedom fighter. Because Jeddy Barnes and his friends knew that Hobbs had one other talent aside from teaching Bible stories to children. He killed people. And he did it very, very well. Sometimes his fishing gear was a Ka-Bar knife, sometimes a garrote, sometimes the sweet Colt, sometimes the compound bow. His dozen or so missions over the past few years had gone perfectly. A spic in Massachusetts, a leftist politician in Albany, a nigger in Burlington, a baby-killing doc in Pennsylvania.

And now he was going to add a prosecutor to his list. He pushed the cart through the nearly empty underground parking garage off Center Street and paused at one of the doors, waiting. Looking apathetic about starting his night shift as a janitor. After a few minutes the door opened and he nodded pleasantly at the woman stepping out of the downstairs lobby, a middle-aged woman with a briefcase, wearing jeans and a white blouse. She smiled but pulled the door shut firmly behind her and said, sorry, she couldn't let him inside, he understood, with security being what it was.

He said, sure, he understood. And smiled back.

A minute later he dumped her twitching body into the cart and pulled her ID card lanyard over her head. He slid it through the electronic reader and the door clicked open.

He now took the elevator to the third floor, rolling the cart in front of him, the woman's body obscured by wads of garbage bags. Hobbs found the office that Mr. Weir had decided would be the best one to use. It offered a good view of the street and, since it belonged to the Department of Highway Statistics, wasn't likely to have any emergencies that would require employees to be here on Sunday evening. The door was locked but the big man simply kicked his way inside (Mr. Weir had said there wasn't time to teach him how to pick locks).

Inside, Hobbs took his gun from the cart, mounted the scope and sighted on the street below. A perfect shooting blind. He couldn't miss. Truth be told, though, he was uneasy.

It wasn't actually bagging Grady that troubled him; he could easily catch that trophy, no problem. It was getting away afterward that had him somewhat concerned. He liked his life in Canton Falls, liked telling his Bible stories to the children, liked hunting and fishing and sitting around with all his likeminded friends. Even Cindy was fun on some nights, given the right lighting and a bit of liquor.

But Magic Man Weir's plan had made provisions for his escape. When Grady appeared Hobbs would shoot five rounds, one right after the other, at him through the sealed window. The first bullet would shatter the glass and might be deflected but the rest would kill the prosecutor. Then, Mr. Weir explained, Hobbs should push open a fire door – but not actually leave that way. It would "misdirect" the police into thinking that was his escape route. Instead he should return to the parking garage. He'd move the old Dodge in a handicapped spot and climb into the trunk. At some point – possibly that night but more likely tomorrow – the car'd be towed to the parking-violations impound garage.

The towing crews were prohibited from opening either the locked doors or the trunk of cars they were towing and so they'd take the car to the garage, driving right past any barricades, without a clue that it contained a passenger. When it seemed safe Hobbs would pop the trunk from the inside and escape back to Canton Falls. There was plenty of water and food in the trunk and an empty jar if he had to pee.

It was a smart plan.

And, as a God-winked sharp operator, Hobbs would try his best to pull it off.

Sighting on random passersby to get a feel for the killing field, Hobbs reflected that Mr. Weir must put on some damn fine magic shows. He wondered if, after this was all over, he could get the man to come back to Canton Falls and put on a show for the Sunday school.

At the very least, Hobbs decided, he'd make up some stories about Jesus being a magician and using his tricks to make the Romans and heathens disappear.

• • •

Sweating.

Chills from the cold perspiration trickling down Amelia Sachs's sides and back.

Chills from fear too.

Search well…

She turned down another dim corridor of the Criminal Courts building, hand near her weapon.

… but watch your back.

Ah, you bet, Rhyme. Love to. But watch out for who? A lean-faced fifty-something who might be wearing a beard or might not? An elderly woman in a cafeteria worker's uniform? A workman, a DOC guard, a janitor cop medic cook fireman nurse? Any one of the dozens of people who were legitimately here on a Sunday.

Who, who, who?

Her radio clattered. It was Sellitto. "I'm on the third floor, Amelia. Nothing."

"I'm in the basement. I've seen a dozen people. All their IDs match but, hell, who knows if he's been planning this for weeks and planted a fake badge here."

"I'm going up to four."

They ended the transmission and she resumed the search. Down more corridors. Dozens of doors. All locked.

But of course simple locks like these meant nothing to him. He could open one in seconds and hide inside a dark storage room. He could get into a judge's chambers, hide until Monday. He could slip through one of the padlocked grates that led down to the utility tunnels, which in turn would give him access to half the buildings in downtown Manhattan, as well as the subway.

She turned a corner and plunged down another dark corridor. Testing knobs as she went, she found one door unlocked.

If he was inside the closet he would've heard her – the click of the knob, if not her footsteps – so there was nothing to do but go in fast. Shoving the door inward, flashlight up, ready to jump to her left if she saw a weapon turn her way (recalling that there's a tendency for a right-handed shooter to pull the gun to the left when panic firing, which sends the slug to the target's right).

Arthritic knees screaming at the partial crouch, she swung the halogen beam throughout the room. A few boxes and file cabinets. Nothing else. Though as she turned to leave she recalled that he'd hidden in shadows by using a simple black cloth. She looked around the room again more slowly, probing with the flashlight.

As she did she felt a touch on her neck.

A gasp and she spun around, bringing the gun up – aiming at the center of the dust-coated cobweb that had caressed her skin.

Back into the corridor.

More locked doors. More dead ends.

Footsteps approached. A man walked past her now, bald, in his sixties, dressed in a guard's uniform and wearing an appropriate ID badge. He nodded as he walked past. He was taller than Weir so she let him pass with no more than a glance.

But then she thought there might be a way for a quick-change artist to change his height.

Turning back, fast.

The man was gone; she saw only an empty corridor. Or an apparently empty corridor. She recalled again the silk the Conjurer had hidden beneath to kill Svetlana Basnikov, the mirror to kill Tony Calvert. Her body a knot of tension, she unholstered her weapon and started toward where the guard – the apparent guard – had disappeared.

• • •

Where? Where was Weir?

Trotting along Center Street, Roland Bell surveyed the landscape in front of him. Cars, trucks, hot dog vendors in front of their steaming metal carts, young people who'd been working at their perpetual-motion law firms or investment banks, others woozy from pitchers of beer at the South Street Seaport, dog walkers, shoppers, dozens of the Manhattanites who roam the streets on days beautiful and days gray simply because the city's energy draws them outside.

Where?

Bell thought much of life was like driving a nail – shooting, in his local vernacular. He'd been raised in the Albemarle Sound area of North Carolina, where guns were a necessity, not a fetish, and he'd been taught to respect them.

Part of this involved concentration. Even simple shots – at a paper target, a rattlesnake or copperhead, a deer – could go wide and dangerous if you didn't stay focused on the target.

Well, life was just like that. And Bell knew that whatever was going on inside the Tombs right now, he had to remain focused on his single job: protecting Charles Grady.

Amelia Sachs called in and reported that she was checking out every human being she could find in the Criminal Courts building, of whatever age, race or size (she'd just tracked down and ID'd a bald guard, who was far taller than Weir and looked nothing like the killer but who had only passed muster because it turned out that he'd known her late father). She'd finished one wing of the basement and was about to start on another.

Teams under Sellitto and Bo Haumann were still searching upper floors of the building, and the oddest addition of all to the hunt was none other than Andrew Constable himself, who was tracking down leads to Weir in upstate New York. Now that'd be a kick, Bell thought – if the man accused of the attempted murder in the first place turned out to be the one who found out where the real suspect was.

Looking into the cars he jogged past, looking at trucks on the street, looking down alleyways, guns ready but not drawn. Bell had decided that it made the most sense for them to hit Grady here on the street, before he entered the building, where there was a better chance of escaping alive. He doubted that these people were suicidal – that didn't fit the profile. In the moment between the time Grady parked his car and stepped out until he walked into the massive doors of the grimy Criminal Courts building the killer would go for his shot. And an easy one it would be – there was virtually no cover here.

Where was Weir?

And, just as important, where was Grady?

His wife had said he'd taken the family car, not the city one. Bell had put out an emergency vehicle locator for the prosecutor's Volvo but no one had spotted it.

Bell turned slowly, surveying the scene, revolving like a lighthouse. His eyes rose to the building across the street, a government office building, a new one, with dozens of windows facing Center Street. Bell had been involved in a brief hostage-taking in the building and he knew that it was practically deserted now, on Sunday. A perfect place to hide and wait for Grady.

But then the street would be a good vantage point too – for a drive-by, say.

Where, where?

Roland Bell recalled a time he'd gone hunting with his daddy up in the Great Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia. They'd been charged by a wild boar and his father'd winged the animal. It had disappeared into the brush. The man had sighed and said, "We gotta go git him. Can't ever leave a wounded animal."

"But he tried to attack us," the boy had protested.

"Well now, son, we walked into his world. He didn't walk into ours. But that's neither here nor there. It's not a question of fairness. It's a question of we got to find him if it takes all day. Not humane to him and now he's twice as dangerous to anybody else comes along."

Looking around them at the impossible tangle of brush and reeds and swamp grass and loblolly, stretching for miles, young Roland said, "But he could be anywhere, Dad."

His father laughed grimly. "Oh, don't worry 'bout finding him. He'll find us. Keep your thumb on that safety, son. You may have to shoot fast. You comfortable with that?"

"Yessir, I am."

Bell now made another visual circuit of the vans, the alleyways nearby, the buildings next to and across the street from the courthouse.

Nothing.

No Charles Grady.

No Erick Weir, no sign of any of the killer's confederates.

Bell tapped the butt of his gun.

Don't worry 'bout finding him. He'll find us…

Chapter Thirty-nine

"I'm doing a door-to-door, Rhyme. The last wing of the basement."

"Let ESU handle it." He found his head craning forward tensely as he spoke into the microphone.

"We need everybody," Sachs whispered. "It's a damn big building." She was in the Tombs now, working her way through the corridors. "Eerie too. Like the music school."

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser…

"Someday you oughta add a chapter to your book about running crime scenes in spooky locations," she joked out of nervousness. "Okay, I'm going silent now, Rhyme. I'll call you back."

Rhyme and Cooper returned to the evidence. In the corridor on the way to intake in the Tombs Sachs had recovered the blade from the razor knife and fragments of beef bone and gray sponge – to simulate skull and brain matter – as well as samples of the fake blood: sugar syrup with red food coloring. He'd used his jacket or shirt to wipe up as much of his real blood as he could from the floor and the cuffs but Sachs had run the scene as methodically as ever and she'd recovered enough of a sample for analysis. He'd taken with him the key or lock picks he'd used to undo the cuffs. There was no other helpful evidence in the corridor scene.

The janitor's closet downstairs where he'd done his quick change yielded more – a paper bag in which he'd hidden the bloody squib and bladder and what he'd been wearing when they'd collared him at Grady's: the gray suit, the white shirt he'd used to wipe up and a pair of Oxford businessman's shoes. Cooper had found substantial trace evidence on these items: additional latex and makeup, bits of magician's adhesive wax, streaks of ink similar to those they'd found earlier, thick nylon fibers and dried smears of more fake blood.

The fibers turned out to be charcoal-gray carpet. The phony blood was paint. The databases they had access to didn't give any information about either of these materials so he sent the chemical-composition analysis and photos down to the FBI, with an urgent request for sourcing.

Then an idea occurred to Rhyme. "Kara," he called, seeing the girl sitting next to Mel Cooper, rolling a quarter over her fingers as she stared at the computer image of a fiber. "Can you help us out with one thing?"

"Sure."

"Could you go over to the Cirque Fantastique and find Kadesky? Tell him about the escape and see if there's anything else he can remember about Weir. Any illusions he particularly liked, characters or disguises he kept going back to, what sort of routines he repeated most often… Anything that'll give us an idea of what he might look like."

"Maybe he's got some old clippings or pictures of Weir in costume," she suggested, slinging her black-and-white purse over her shoulder.

He told her that was a good idea and then returned to the evidence chart, which still stood as testimony to his earlier observation: the more they learned, the less they knew.

THE CONJURER

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 janitor.

• No apparent motive.

• Victim: Svetlana Rasnikov.

• Full-time music student.

• Checking family, friends, students, coworkers for possible leads.

• No boyfriends, no known enemies. Performed at children's birthday parties.

• Circuit board with speaker attached.

• Sent to FBI lab, NYC.

• Digital recorder, probably containing perp's voice. All data destroyed.

• Voice recorder is a "gimmick." Homemade.

• Used antique iron handcuffs to restrain victim.

• Handcuffs are Darby irons. Scotland Yard. Checking with Houdini Museum in New Orleans for leads.

• Sold to Erick Weir last month. Sent to Denver P.O. box. No other leads.

• Destroyed victim's watch at exactly 8:00 A. M.

• Cotton string holding chairs. Generic. Too many sources to trace.

• Squib for gunshot effect. Destroyed.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Fuse. Generic.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Responding officers reported flash in air. No trace material recovered.

• Was from flash cotton or flash paper.

• Too many sources to trace.

• Perp's shoes: size 10 Ecco.

• Silk fibers, dyed gray, processed to a matte finish.

• From quick-change janitor's outfit.

• Unsub is possibly wearing brown wig.

• Red pignut hickory and Parmelia conspersa lichen, both found primarily in Central Park.

• Dirt impregnated with unusual mineral oil. Sent to FBI for analysis.

• Tack-Pure oil for saddles and leather.

• Black silk, 72 x 48". Used as camouflage. Not traceable.

• Illusionists use this frequently.

• Wears caps to cover up prints.

• Magician's finger cups.

• Traces of latex, castor oil, makeup.

• Theatrical makeup.

• Traces of alginate.

• Used in molding latex appliances.

• Murder weapon: white silk-knit rope with black silk core.

• Rope is a magic trick. Color-changing. Not traceable.

• Unusual knot.

• Sent to FBI and Maritime Museum – no information.

• Knots are from Houdini routines, virtually impossible to untie.

• Used disappearing ink on sign-in register.

East Village Crime Scene

• Victim Two: Tony Calvert.

• Makeup artist, theater company.

• No known enemies.

• No apparent connection with first victim.

• No apparent motive.

Cause of death:

• Blunt-object trauma to head followed by postmortem dismemberment with crosscut saw.

• Perp escaped portraying woman in her 70s. Checking vicinity for discarded costume and other evidence.

• Nothing recovered.

• Watch smashed at 12:00 exactly.

• Pattern? Next victim presumably at 4:00 P. M.

• Perp hid behind mirror. Not traceable. Fingerprints sent to FBI.

• No matches.

• Used cat toy ("feke") to lure victim into alley. Toy is untraceable.

• Additional mineral oil found, same as at first scene. Awaiting FBI report.

• Tack-Pure oil for saddles and leather.

• Additional latex and makeup from finger cups.

• Additional alginate.

• Ecco shoes left behind.

• Dog hairs found in shoes, from three different breeds of dog. Manure too.

• Manure from horses, not dogs.

Hudson River and Related Crime Scenes

• Victim: Cheryl Marston.

• Attorney.

• Divorced but husband not a suspect.

• No motive.

• Perp gave name as "John." Had scars on neck and chest. Deformed hand confirmed.

• Perp did quick change to unbearded businessman in chinos and dress shirt, then biker in denim Harley shirt.

• Car is in Harlem River.

• Duct tape gag. Can't be traced.

• Squibs, same as before. Can't be traced.

• Chains and snap fixtures, generic, not traceable.

• Rope, generic, not traceable.

• Additional makeup, latex and Tack-Pure.

• Gym bag, made in China, not traceable.

Containing:

• Traces of date-rape drug flunitrazepam.

• Adhesive magician's wax, not traceable.

• Brass (?) shavings. Sent to FBI.

• Consistent with clockwork mechanism, possible bomb timer.

• Permanent ink, black.

• Navy-blue windbreaker found, no initials or laundry marks.

Containing:

• Press pass for CTN cable network, issued to Stanley Saferstein. (He's not suspect – NCIC, VICAP search negative.)

• Plastic hotel key card, American Plastic Cards, Akron, Ohio. Model APC-42, negative on prints.

• CEO is searching for sales records.

• Dets. Bedding and Saul canvassing hotels.

• Narrowed down to Chelsea Lodge, Beckman and Lanham Arms.

• Hotel is Lanham Arms.

• Restaurant check from Riverside Inn, Bedford Junction, NY, indicating four people ate lunch, table 12, Saturday, two weeks prior. Turkey, meatloaf, steak, daily special. Soft drinks. Staff doesn't know who diners were. (Accomplices?)

Alley where Conjurer was arrested:

• Picked the cuff locks.

• Saliva (picks hidden in mouth).

• No blood type determined.

• Small razor saw for getting out of restraints (also hidden in mouth).

• No indication of Officer Burke's whereabouts.

• Report body somewhere on Upper West Side.

Harlem River scene:

• No evidence on riverbank, except skid marks in mud.

• Newspaper recovered from the car.

Headlines:

ELECTRICAL BREAKDOWN CLOSES POLICE STATION FOR ALMOST 4 HOURS

NEW YORK IN RUNNING FOR GOP CONVENTION

PARENTS PROTEST POOR SECURITY AT GIRLS' SCHOOL

MILITIA MURDER PLOT TRIAL OPENS MONDAY

WEEKEND GALA AT MET TO BENEFIT CHARITIES

SPRING ENTERTAINMENT FOR KIDS YOUNG AND OLD

GOVERNOR, MAYOR MEET ON NEW WEST SIDE PLAN

Lincoln Rhyme Crime Scene

• Victim: Lincoln Rhyme.

• Perp's identity: Erick A. Weir.

• LKA Las Vegas.

• Burned in fire in Ohio, three years ago. Hasbro and Keller Brothers Circus. Disappeared after. Third-degree burns. Producer was Edward Kadesky.

• Conviction in New Jersey for reckless endangerment.

• Obsessed with fire.

• Manic. Referred to "Revered Audience."

• Performed dangerous tricks.

• Married to Marie Cosgrove, killed in fire.

• He hasn't contacted her family since.

• Weir's parents dead, no next of kin.

• No VICAP or NCIC on Weir.

• Referred to himself as "Wizard of the North."

• Attacked Rhyme because he had to stop him before Sunday afternoon.

• Eye color – brown.

• Psychological profile (per Terry Dobyns, NYPD): Revenge motivates him though he may not realize it. He wants to get even. Angry all the time. By killing he takes away some of the pain because of death of his wife, loss of ability to perform.

• Weir contacted assistants recently: John Keating and Arthur Loesser, in Nevada. Asking about the fire and people involved with it. Described Weir as crazed, overbearing, manic, dangerous, but brilliant.

• Killed victims because of what they represented – possibly happy or traumatic moments before the fire.

• Gasoline-soaked handkerchief, not traceable.

• Ecco shoes, no trace.

Detention Center Escape Scenes

• Squibs and bladder from fake wound – homemade, no source.

• Artificial blood (sugar syrup + red food coloring), fragments of beef bone, gray sponge to simulate brain, real blood, razor knife blade.

• DOC officer's Glock.

• Handcuffs.

• Unsuccessful attempt to clean up blood.

• Additional bits of latex and makeup, as at prior scenes.

• Adhesive wax.

• Permanent ink, black, similar to that found earlier.

• Dried artificial blood (paint), sent to FBI.

• Carpet fibers, sent to FBI.

Profile as Illusionist

• Perp will use misdirection against victims and in eluding police.

• Physical misdirection (for distraction).

• Psychological (to eliminate suspicion).

• Escape at music school was similar to Vanished Man illusion routine. Too common to trace.

• Perp is primarily an illusionist. Talented at sleight-of-hand.

• Also knows protean (quick-change) magic. Will use breakaway clothes, nylon and silk, bald cap, finger cups and other latex appliances. Could be any age, gender or race.

• Calvert's death = Selbit's Cutting a Woman in Half routine.

• Proficient at lock-picking (possibly lock "scrubbing").

• Knows escapism techniques.

• Experience with animal illusions.

• Used mentalism to get information on victim.

• Used sleight of hand to drug her.

• Tried to kill third victim with Houdini escape. Water Torture Cell.

• Ventriloquism.

• Razor blades.

• Familiar with Burning Mirror routine. Very dangerous, rarely performed now.

• • •

The Cirque Fantastique was coming alive, an hour before that night's performance.

Kara walked past the banner of Arlecchino and noticed a police car, which Lincoln Rhyme had ordered to remain after the scare that afternoon. Feeling a camaraderie with them since she herself had been playing cop, she smiled and waved to the officers, who, though they didn't know her, waved back.

No one was selling tickets yet so Kara wandered inside and made her way backstage. She noticed a young man holding a clipboard. An employee pass sat high on his belt like Amelia's gun.

"Excuse me," she said.

"Yes?" he replied in a thick French or French-Canadian accent.

"I'm looking for Mr. Kadesky."

"He is not here. I am one of his assistants."

"Where is he?"

"Not here. Who are you?"

"I'm working with the police. Mr. Kadesky met with them earlier. They have some more questions for him."

The young man glanced at her chest, presumably, though not necessarily, looking for ID.

"Uh-huh. Ah. Police. Well, he's at dinner. He will be back soon."

"Do you know where he's eating?" she asked.

"No. You'll have to leave. You can't be back here."

"I only need to see him -"

"Do you have a ticket?"

"No, I -"

"Then you can't wait. You must leave. He never said anything about the police."

"Well, I really need to see him," she said firmly to the man with Gallic good looks and a chill demeanor.

"Really, you must go. You can wait outside for him."

"I might miss him."

"I'll have to call a guard," he threatened in his thick accent. "I will do that."

"I'll buy a ticket," she said.

"They're sold out. And even if you could buy one you could not be back here. I will walk you out."

He herded her out the main door, where the ticket-takers were now on duty.

Outside she paused and pointed over his shoulder toward a trailer on which was a sign, BOX OFFICE. "That's where I could buy a ticket?"

A demi-sneer crossed his face. "That's what a box office is. But, as I said, there are no more tickets. You can call Mr. Kadesky's company if you need to ask him something."

After he'd gone, Kara waited a moment or two, then turned the corner of the tent and proceeded to the stage entrance in back. She smiled at the security guard and he smiled back, giving only a cursory glance at her belt, where now sat the French-Canadian's employee pass, which she'd easily unhooked from his belt when she'd pointed and asked the foolish, but quite misdirecting, question about the box office.

Now, there's a rule for you, she reflected: Never fuck with somebody who knows sleight of hand.

Inside the backstage portion of the tent once again she hid the badge in her pocket and found a friendlier employee. The woman, Katherine Tunney, nodded sympathetically when Kara explained what she was doing there – that a former illusionist wanted for murder had been identified as someone Mr. Kadesky had worked with a long time ago. The woman had heard about the killings and she invited Kara to wait until the producer returned from dinner. Katherine gave Kara a pass to sit in one of the VIP boxes and then left on another errand, promising that she'd tell the guards to make sure Mr. Kadesky came to see her as soon as he returned. On her way to the box seat her pager sounded, an urgent beeping. She gasped when she saw the number, ran to a bank of temporary pay phones and, hand shaking, made the call.

"Stuyvesant Manor," the voice said.

"Jaynene Williams, please."

A huge wait.

"'Lo?"

"It's me. Kara. Is Mom okay?"

"Oh, she's fine, girl. But I wanted to tell you – don't get your hopes up. It might be nothin'. But a few minutes ago she woke up and asked for you. She knows it's Sunday night and she remembered you coming by earlier."

"You mean, 'me,' the real me?"

"Yep, your real name. Then she gave this little frown and said, 'Unless all she goes by is that crazy stage name of hers, Kara.'"

My God… Could she be back?

"And she knew me and she asked where you were. Said she wanted to tell you something."

Kara's heart accelerated.

Tell me something…

"Better get over here soon, honey. Might last. But it might not. You know how that goes."

"I'm in the middle of something, Jaynene. I'll get there as soon as I can." They hung up and, frantic, Kara returned to her seat. The tension was unbearable.

Right this instant her mother might be asking where her daughter was. Frowning and disappointed that the girl wasn't there. Please, she prayed, looking again toward the doorway for Kadesky. Nothing.

Wishing she could tap a hickory magic wand on the battered metal railing in front of her, point it at the doorway and materialize the producer.

Please, she thought again, aiming the imaginary wand toward the doorway. Please…

Nothing for a moment. Then several figures entered. None of them was Kadesky, though. They were just three women dressed in medieval costumes and wearing masks whose forlorn expressions were belied by the buoyant spring in the step of actors about to begin their evening's performance.

• • •

Roland Bell was standing in one of the canyons of downtown Manhattan: Center Street between the grimy, towering Criminal Courts building, crowned by the Bridge of Sighs, and the nondescript office building across the street from it.

Still no sign of Charles Grady's Volvo.

The lighthouse rotation once again. Where, where, where?

A honk nearby, in the direction of the entrance to the bridge. A shout.

Bell turned and jogged a few steps toward the sounds, wondering: Misdirection?

But, no, it was just a traffic dispute.

He turned back, toward the entrance to the Criminal Courts building, and found himself looking right at Charles Grady, who was strolling casually up the street, a block away. The prosecutor was walking with his head down, lost in his thoughts. The detective sprinted toward the man, calling, "Charles! Get down! Weir's escaped!"

Grady paused, frowning.

"Down!" Bell called breathlessly.

The alarmed man crouched on the sidewalk, between two parked cars. "What happened?" he shouted. "My family!"

"I've got people with them," the detective said. Then, to the pedestrians: "Everybody! Police action here! Clear the street!"

People scattered instantly.

"My family!" Grady called desperately. "You're sure?"

"They're fine."

"But Weir -"

"Faked the shooting in detention. He's out and somewhere around here. I've got an armored van on its way."

Turning again, squinting, surveying the scenery.

Roland Bell finally reached Grady and stood over him, his back to the dark windows of the government office building across the street.

"Just stay right where you are, Charles," Bell said. "We'll get out of this fine." And pulled his handy-talkie off his belt.

• • •

What was this?

Hobbs Wentworth watched his target below him – the prosecutor – cowering on the sidewalk behind a man in a sports coat, a cop obviously.

The crosshairs of Hobbs 's scope poked around the officer's back, searching unsuccessfully for an unprotected shot at Grady.

The prosecutor was low, the cop standing. It seemed to Hobbs that if he shot through the cop's lower back he'd probably hit Grady in the upper chest, since he was crouching. But the risk was that the shot would be deflected and Grady'd only be wounded and fall to safety behind a car.

Well, he had to do something pretty soon. The cop was talking on his radio. There'd be a hundred more of 'em here in a minute. Come on, sharp operator, he said to himself. Whatcha gonna do?

Below him the cop was still looking around, covering Grady, who squatted like a bitch retriever peeing.

All right. What he'd do was shoot the cop in the upper leg, the thigh. That way, most likely, the cop would fall backward, exposing the prosecutor. The Colt was semiauto so he could fire five shots in two seconds. Not perfect but it was the best Hobbs could think of.

He'd give the cop a moment or two longer to step aside or sway out of the way.

Both eyes open as the right one stared through the scope, painting the back of the detective with the crosshairs and thinking that when he got back to Canton Falls he'd make up a Bible story about this. Jesus would play his role and would be armed with a kick-ass compound bow, about to ambush a bunch of Roman soldiers, who'd been torturing Christians. Julius Caesar would be hiding behind one soldier and thinking he was safe but Jesus would shoot through the soldier and kill the son-of-a-bitch.

Good story. The kids'd love it.

The cop was still huddled over the prosecutor.

Well, that's it, Hobbs thought, clicking off the safety of the big Colt. No time left. Burn in brimstone, Christ-killing Romans.

He centered the crosshairs on the back of the cop's leg and began to apply slow pressure on the trigger, thinking that his only regret was that the officer was white, not black.

But one thing Hobbs Wentworth'd learned in life: you take your targets the way you find 'em.

Chapter Forty

Roland Bell smelled the distinctive plastic/sweat/metal scent of the Motorola handy-talkie as he clutched it to his face.

"ESU Four, you 'bout ready, K?" he drawled into the mike.

"Roger that, K," one of them replied.

"Okay, now -"

Which is when the muffled cracks of multiple shots resounded through the canyon of the street.

Bell jumped.

"Gunshots!" Charles Grady cried. "I heard shots! Are you hit?"

"Just stay down," Bell said as he dropped into a crouch. He spun around, lifting his gun and squinting hard at the government office building across the street.

He was counting furiously.

"Got the location," he called into the radio. "I make it the third floor, fifth office from the north end of the building." Then Bell examined the glass. "Ouch."

"Say again, K?" one of the officers called.

"I said, 'Ouch.'"

"Uhm. Roger. Out."

Grady, lying on the sidewalk, said, "What's going on?" He started to get up.

"Sit tight there," the detective told him, standing up cautiously. Turning now from the window and scanning the sidewalk around him. There was a possibility that more shooters were nearby. A moment later an armored Emergency Services van pulled up and five seconds after that Bell and Grady were inside, squealing away from the attempted hit and taking the prosecutor back to the Upper East Side and his family.

Bell glanced behind him to see more ESU troopers streaming into the building across the street from the courthouse.

Don't worry… He'll find us.

Well, he sure as hell had.

Bell had concluded that the best way to try to hit Grady would be from the office building across the street. It was most likely that the killer would break into one of the lower offices facing the sidewalk. The roof was unlikely because it was monitored by dozens of CCTV cameras. Bell had remained in the open as bait because of something he knew about this particular building from the hostage situation he'd run there: the windows, as in many of the newer government buildings here, couldn't be opened and were made from bomb-proof glass.

There'd been a small risk, he supposed, that the shooter would use armor-piercing rounds, which might penetrate the inch-thick glass. But Bell had recalled an expression he'd heard during a case a couple of years ago: "God don't give out certain."

He'd taken the chance of luring the sniper into shooting, in hopes that the bullet would spider the window and reveal the man's location.

And his idea had worked – though with a variation, as Bell had mentioned to the ESU team. Ouch…

"ESU Four to Bell. It's Haumann. You were right, K."

"Go ahead, K."

The tactical commander continued, "We're inside. Scene is secure. Only what do they call those? The Darwin Awards? You know, where criminals do stupid things, K?"

"Roger that," Bell responded. "Where'd he hit himself, K?" Bell had spotted the shooter's location not because of cracked glass but because of a large spatter of blood on the window. The ESU chief explained that the copper-jacketed slugs that the man had fired toward Bell had ricocheted off the glass, shattered and struck the shooter himself in a half-dozen places, most significantly his groin, where they apparently severed a large artery or vein. The man had bled out by the time the ESU team had made its way to the office.

"Tell me it's Weir, K," Bell said.

"Nup. Sorry. It's somebody named Hobbs Wentworth. Address, Canton Falls."

Bell scowled angrily. So Weir and maybe others working with him were still around. He asked, "Find anything that'll give us a clue what Weir's up to or where he might be?"

"Negative," said the raspy-voiced commander. "Only his ID. And, get this, a book of Bible stories for kids." There was a pause. "Hate to say it but we got another victim, Roland. He killed a woman to get into the building, looks like… Okay, we're going to secure the place and keep looking for Weir. Out."

The detective shook his head and said to Grady, "No sign of him."

Except that, of course, that was the whole problem. Maybe they had found plenty of signs of Weir, maybe they'd even found Weir himself – in the form of another cop, a med tech, an ESU officer, a reporter, a soft-clothed detective, a passerby or homeless man – and they simply didn't know it.

• • •

Through the yellowing window in the interview room Andrew Constable could see the grim face of a large black guard peer in and look at him. The face disappeared as the man stepped away from the door.

Constable rose from the metal table and walked past his lawyer to the window. He looked outside and saw two guards in the hall, speaking gravely to each other.

All right then.

"What's that?" Joseph Roth asked his client.

"Nothing," Constable responded. "I didn't say anything."

"Oh, I thought you did."

"No."

Though he wondered if he had. Made some comment, uttered a prayer.

He returned to the table, where the lawyer looked up from a pad of yellow foolscap that contained a half dozen names and phone numbers, which Constable's associates in Canton Falls had just provided in response to their questions about what Weir might have planned, where he might be.

Roth looked uneasy. They'd just learned that a man with a rifle had made an attempt on Grady's life in front of the building a few minutes ago. But it hadn't been Weir, who was still unaccounted for.

The lawyer said, "I'm worried that Grady'll be too spooked to deal with us. I think we should call him at home and tell him what we've found." Tapping the sheets. "Or at least give this stuff to that detective. What was his name? Bell, right?"

"That's it," Constable said.

Moving his pudgy finger over the sheet of names and numbers, Roth said, "You think anybody here'll know something specific about Weir? That's what they'll want, something specific."

Constable leaned forward and looked at the list. Then at his lawyer's watch. He shook his head slowly. "I doubt it," he said.

"You… You doubt it?"

"Yeah. See this first number?"

"Yeah."

"It's the dry cleaner on Harrison Street in Canton Falls. And the one below it's the IGA. The next one's the Baptist church. And those names?" the prisoner continued. "Ed Davis, Brett Samuels, Joe James Watkins?"

"Right," Roth said.

"Jeddy Barnes' associates." Constable gave a chuckle. "Gosh no. They're all made up."

"What?" Roth frowned.

Leaning close to his lawyer, the prisoner stared into the man's confused eyes. "I'm saying that those names and numbers're fake."

"I don't understand."

Constable whispered, "Of course you don't, you pathetic fucking Jew," and slammed his fists into the side of the shocked lawyer's face before Roth could raise his arms to protect himself.

Chapter Forty-one

Andrew Constable was a strong man, strong from hiking to remote hunting and fishing grounds, from dressing deer and sawing bones, from chopping wood.

Paunchy Joe Roth was no match for him. The lawyer tried to rise and call for help but Constable struck him hard in the throat. The man's shout became a gurgling sound.

The prisoner pulled him to the floor and began pummeling the bleeding man with his cuffed fists. In a moment Roth was unconscious, his face swollen like a melon. Constable dragged him back to the table and propped him up on it, his back to the door. If one of the guards happened to glance in again it would look as if he were reading the papers, head down. Constable bent down, pulled off one of the lawyer's shoes and socks and wiped the blood off the table as best he could and covered the rest with documents and pads of paper. He'd kill the lawyer later. For now, for a few minutes at least, he needed this innocent-looking tableau.

A few minutes – until he was free.

Freedom…

Which was the whole point of Erick Weir's plan.

Constable's best friend, Jeddy Barnes, the second in command of the Patriot Assembly, had hired Weir not to kill Grady but to break the prisoner out of the notoriously secure Manhattan Detention Center, transport him to freedom over the Bridge of Sighs and ultimately into the New England wilderness, where the Assembly could resume its mission to wage war against the impure, the unclean, the ignorant. To rid the land of blacks, gays, Jews, Hispanics, foreigners – the "Them" that Constable railed against in his weekly lectures at the Patriot Assembly and in the secret websites subscribed to by the thousands of right-thinking citizens around the country.

Constable now rose, walked to the door, looked out again. The guards had no clue about what had just happened inside the interview room.

It occurred to the prisoner that he ought to have a weapon of some kind and so he lifted a metal mechanical pencil from the lawyer's bloody shirt and then nestled the butt of the pencil in the wadded-up sock to protect his palm. The sharp point would make a fine stabbing implement.

Then he sat back, across from Roth, and waited, thinking about the plan created by Weir, or "Magic Man," as Barnes called him. It was a masterpiece, involving dozens of tricks of the illusionist's trade. Feint and double feint, careful timing, clever diversions. It began with Weir carefully planting the idea with the police that there was a conspiracy to kill Grady. The Reverend Ralph Swensen laid the groundwork for this by making one attempt on the prosecutor's life. The bungled killing would reinforce the cops' belief that there was a plot to kill the prosecutor and they'd stop looking for any other crimes – such as the planned jailbreak.

Weir himself would then intentionally get caught during a second attempt to kill Grady and be taken to detention.

Meanwhile, Constable was supposed to do some misdirection of his own. He'd disarm his captors by being the voice of reason, pleading his innocence and winning sympathy and luring Grady to the courthouse this evening by offering to incriminate Barnes and other conspirators. Constable would even try to help track down the illusionist, further disarming the police and giving him the chance to deliver a coded message about his exact location in the detention center, which Barnes would pass on to Weir.

When Grady arrived, Hobbs Wentworth would try to kill the prosecutor but whether he succeeded or not didn't matter; the important thing was that Hobbs would divert the police from the detention center. Then Weir – who was roaming free in the building after faking his own death – would sneak up here in disguise, kill the guards and break Constable out.

There was one more part to the plan – an aspect that Constable'd been looking forward to for weeks. Just before Weir arrived at the interview room, Jeddy Barnes had told him, Constable was "supposed to take care of your lawyer."

"What's that mean?"

"Weir said it's up to you. He just said you're supposed to take care of Roth so he's not in the way."

Now, watching the blood drip from the lawyer's eyes and mouth, he thought, Well, the Jew's took care of.

Constable was wondering how Weir would kill the guards, what kind of disguises he'd have with him, what their escape route would be, when – right on schedule – he heard the distinctive buzz of the outer door. Ah, his chariot to freedom had arrived.

Constable dragged Roth off the bench and dumped him in the corner of the interview room. He thought about killing him now, stomping on his windpipe. But he supposed Weir had a gun with a silencer. Or a knife. He could use that.

Hearing the click of the key in the lock of the interview room. The door swung open.

For a split second he thought: Amazing! Weir'd managed to turn himself into a woman.

But then he remembered her; this was the redheaded officer who'd been with Detective Bell yesterday.

"Injury here," she shouted as she glanced down at Roth. "Call EMS!" Behind her one guard grabbed a phone and the other hit a red button on the wall, sending a klaxon alarm braying into the hallway.

What was going on? Constable didn't understand. Where was Weir? He glanced back at the woman to see the pepper spray – the only permissible weapon in detention – in her hand. He thought fast and began moaning loud, holding his belly. "Somebody got in here! Another prisoner. He tried to kill us!" Hiding the sharp pencil, he clutched his bloody hands to his belly. "I'm hurt. I've been stabbed!"

A fast glance outside. Still no sign of the Magic Man. The woman frowned and looked around the cell as Constable slumped to the floor. Thinking: When she gets closer he'd stab toward her face with the pencil. Maybe hit her eye. He could get the spray away, blast her in the mouth or eyes with it. Maybe hold the pencil to her back; the guards would think it was a gun and open the door for him. Weir had to be close – maybe he was just outside the security doors.

Come on, honey. A little closer. She might have a bulletproof vest on, he reminded himself; aim for her pretty face.

"Your lawyer?" she asked, leaning over Roth. "Is he stabbed too?"

"Yes! It was some black prisoner. He said I was a racist. He said he wanted to teach me a lesson." His head was down but he could sense her stepping closer.

"Joe's hurt bad. We have to save him!"

Just a few more feet…

Or if he is a white man and looks like a smart man – if he has all his teeth and wears clothes that don't smell like yesterday's piss – well, then, are you going to be just a little slower to pull that trigger?

Constable moaned.

He sensed her very close.

She said, "Let me see how badly you're hurt."

He gripped the pencil firmly. Got ready to spring. He looked up to find his target.

And saw the nozzle of the pepper spray, a foot away from his eyes.

She pushed the button and the stream shot him square in the face. A hundred hot needles pierced his mouth and nose and eyes.

Constable screamed as the policewoman ripped the pen out of his hand and kicked him onto his back.

"Why'd you do that?" he cried, rising up on one elbow. "Why?"

Her answer was to debate for a brief moment then hit him with a second stream of fiery spray.

Chapter Forty-two

Amelia Sachs put the pepper spray canister away.

The potential sergeant in her was a bit troubled by the gratuitous second blast into Constable's face.

But having noticed the fourteen-karat shiv half concealed in his hand, Sachs the street cop with wire thoroughly enjoyed hearing the vicious bigot squeal like a pig as she sprayed him again. She stepped aside as the two floor guards grabbed the prisoner and dragged him out.

"A doctor! Get me to a doctor. My eyes! I have a right to a doctor!"

"I keep tellin' yo t'shuddup." The guards dragged him down the hall. Constable lashed out with his feet. They stopped, shackled his ankles, and then pulled him around the corner.

Sachs and two more guards looked over Joseph Roth. He was breathing but unconscious and badly hurt. She decided it was best not to move him. Soon a city EMS team arrived and, after Sachs checked their IDs, went to work on the lawyer, clearing his airway and getting a neck brace around him then strapping him onto a backboard, which they placed on a gurney. They took him out of the secure area for the drive to the hospital.

Sachs stood back and surveyed the room and the lobby to make sure that Weir hadn't slipped in unnoticed. No, she was sure he hadn't. She then went outside and it was only when she got her Glock back from the officer at the desk that she began to feel more at ease. She called Rhyme to tell him what had happened.

Then she added, "Constable was expecting him, Rhyme."

"Expecting Weir?"

"I think so. He was surprised when I opened the door. He tried to recover but I could tell he was waiting for somebody."

"So that's what Weir's up to – breaking Constable out?"

"That's what I think."

"Goddamn misdirection," he muttered. "He's had us focused on the plot to kill Grady. I never thought they'd be going for a breakout." Then he added, "Unless the escape is misdirection and Weir's job really is to kill Grady."

She considered this. "That'd work too."

"And no sign of Weir anywhere?"

"None."

"Okay, I'm still going over what you found at Detention, Sachs. Come on back and we'll look over it."

"I can't, Rhyme," she said, studying the hallway in which a dozen onlookers stood gazing at the excitement in the secure portion of the lobby. "He's got to be here someplace. I'm going to keep hunting."

• • •

Suzuki piano lessons for children involve working through a series of progressively more difficult music books containing a dozen or so pieces. When a student completes a book successfully the parents often throw a small party for friends, family and the music teacher, during which the student gives a short recital.

Christine Grady's Suzuki Volume Three party was scheduled for a week from tonight and she'd been practicing hard for her mini concert. She was now sitting in the yanno room of the family's apartment, finishing up Schumann's "The Wild Rider."

The yanno room was dark and small but Chrissy loved it here. It contained only a few chairs, shelves of sheet music and a beautiful, shiny baby grand piano – hence her nickname for the place.

With some effort she played the andante movement of Clementi's Sonatina in C and then rewarded herself by playing the Mozart Sonatina, one of her favorites. She didn't think her playing was all that good, though. She was distracted by the police in their apartment. The men and women were all very nice and talked cheerfully about Star Wars or Harry Potter or Xbox games with big smiles on their faces. But Chrissy knew they weren't really smiling at all; they were only doing it to make her feel comfortable. But all the fake grins really did was make her more scared.

Because, even though they didn't say it, the fact that the police were here meant that somebody was trying to hurt her daddy. She wasn't worried about somebody trying to hurt her. What scared her was that some bad man would take her daddy away from her. She wished he'd stop doing the court job he had. Once, she'd worked up her courage and asked him. But he'd said to her, "How much do you like playing the yanno, honey?"

"Lots."

"Well, that's how much I like doing my job."

"Oh. Okay," she'd said. Even though it wasn't okay at all. Because playing music didn't make people hate you and want to kill you. She now squinted harder and concentrated. Flubbed a passage once and then tried again.

And now, she'd learned, they were going to have to go live someplace else for a while. Just a day or two, her mom'd said. But what if it was for longer than that? What if they had to cancel the Suzuki party? Upset, she gave up playing, closed the music book and started to put it in her book bag.

Hey, look at this!

Resting on the music stand was a York peppermint patty. Not a little one but a full-sizer, the kind they sell at the checkout stands at Food Emporium. She wondered who'd left it. Her mother didn't like anybody to eat in the yanno room and Chrissy was never allowed to have candy or anything sticky when she was playing.

Maybe it'd been her daddy. She knew he felt bad for her because of all the policemen around and because she hadn't been able to go to her recital last night at the Neighborhood School.

That was it – this was a secret treat from her father.

Chrissy glanced behind her, through the crack in the door. She saw people walking back and forth. Heard the calm voice of that nice policeman from North Carolina, who had two boys she was going to meet someday. Her mother brought a suitcase out of the bedroom. She had her unhappy face on and was saving, "This is crazy. Why can't you find him? He's one man. There're hundreds of you. I don't understand it."

Chrissy sat back, opened up the foil covering and slowly ate the candy. When she was finished she carefully examined her fingers. Yep, there was chocolate on them. She'd go the bathroom and wash them off. And while she was there she'd flush the wrapper down the toilet so her mother wouldn't find out. That was called "disposing of the evidence," which she'd learned from that CSI television program her parents wouldn't let her watch, even though she managed to, every once in a while.

• • •

Roland Bell had returned safely with Charles Grady to the apartment, where the family was now packing up to go to an NYPD safe house in the Murray Hill area of town. He'd pulled the shades down and told the family to stay away from the windows. He could see that this fueled their uneasiness. But his job wasn't to coddle psyches. It was to keep a very clever killer from taking their lives.

His cell phone rang. It was Rhyme. "Everything secure there?" the criminalist asked.

"Tight as a bed baby," Bell replied.

"Constable's in a secure cell."

"And we know his guards, right?" Bell asked.

"Amelia said Weir might be good but he's not good enough to turn himself into two Shaquille O'Neal look-alikes."

"Got it. How's the lawyer?"

"Roth? He'll live. Was a bad beating though. I'm…" Rhyme stopped talking as someone else in the room began speaking. Bell believed he heard the soft voice of Mel Cooper.

He then resumed speaking to Bell. "I'm still going through what Amelia found at the scenes in the detention center. Don't have any specific leads yet. But we've got something else I wanted to mention. Bedding and Saul finally tracked down which room at the Lanham Arms the key card belonged to."

"Who was it registered to?"

"Fake name and address," Rhyme explained. "But the desk clerk said the guest fit Weir's description perfectly. CS didn't get much but they found a discarded syringe behind the dresser. We don't know whether Weir left it or not but I'm going on the assumption he did. Mel found traces of chocolate and sucrose on the needle."

"Sucrose – that's sugar?"

"Right. And arsenic in the barrel of the syringe."

Bell said, "So he injected poison into some sweets."

"Sounds like it. Ask the Gradys if anybody's sent them any candy lately."

Bell relayed the question to the prosecutor and his wife and they shook their heads, dismayed to even hear the question.

"No, we don't keep candy in the house," the prosecutor's wife said.

The criminalist then asked Bell, "You said he surprised you by getting into Grady's apartment itself this afternoon."

"Yup. We thought we'd nail him in the lobby, the basement or the roof. We never expected him to get in the front door."

"After he broke in, where did he go?"

"He just showed up in the living room. Shook us all up."

"So he might've had time to leave some candy in the kitchen."

"No, couldn't've been in the kitchen," Bell explained. "Lon and I were in there."

"What other rooms could he have gotten into?"

Bell posed the question to Grady and his wife.

"What's going on, Roland?" the prosecutor asked.

" Lincoln just found some more evidence and's thinking that Weir might've tried to get some poison into your house. It looks like it was in some candy. We're not sure he did but -"

"Candy?" From a soft, high voice behind them.

Bell, the Gradys and two of the other cops on protection detail turned to see the prosecutor's daughter staring at the detective, eyes wide with fear.

"Chrissy?" her mother asked. "What is it?"

"Candy?" the girl whispered again.

A foil wrapper fell from her hand and she began to sob.

• • •

Hands sweating, Bell looked at the passersby on the sidewalk in front of Charles Grady's apartment.

Dozens of people.

Was one of them Weir?

Or somebody else from that goddamn Patriot Assembly?

The ambulance rolled up and two techs jumped out. But before they got through the front door the detective carefully examined their IDs.

"What's all this about?" one of them asked, offended.

Bell ignored him and checked out the cars on the street, the passersby, the windows in the buildings nearby. When it was safe he gave a whistle and Luis Martinez, the quiet bodyguard, hustled the girl out and into the ambulance, accompanied by her mother.

Chrissy wasn't showing symptoms of poisoning yet though she was pale and shook from fearful crying. The girl had eaten a peppermint patty that had mysteriously appeared in her piano room. This was beyond evil to Bell – hurting children and, though he'd been suckered in by Constable's smooth talk momentarily, this incident clarified the complete depravity of people like those in the Patriot Assembly.

Differences between cultures? Between races? No, sir. There's only one difference. There's good and decency on the one side and evil on the other.

If the girl died Bell would make it his personal quest to see that both Weir and Constable received the punishment that corresponded to what he'd done to Chrissy – lethal injection.

"Don't you worry, honey," he now said to her as one of the medics took her blood pressure. "You're going to be just fine."

The response to this was the girl's silent sobbing. He glanced at Chrissy's mother, on whose face was a look of tenderness that couldn't quite hide a fury exponentially greater than Bell 's.

The detective radioed to Central and was patched through to Emergency Services at the hospital they were careening toward at the moment. He said to the supervisor, "We're gonna be at the admission dock in two minutes. Now listen here – I want that area and a route to a poison-control center cleared of people. I don't want a soul around less they're wearing a picture ID badge."

"Well, Detective, we can't do that," the woman said. "That's a very busy section of the hospital."

"I'm gonna be muley on this one, ma'am."

"You're going to be what?"

"Stubborn. There's an armed perpetrator who's after this little girl and her family. And if I do see anybody in our line of sight without a badge, they're gonna get handcuffed and in a pretty impatient way."

"This's an emergency room in a city hospital, Detective," the woman responded testily. "Do you know how many people I'm looking at right now?"

"No, ma'am, I do not. But imagine lookin' at every one of 'em on their bellies and hog-tied. Which is what they're gonna be if they're not gone by the time we get there. And, by the by, that's looking to be all of two minutes from right now."

Chapter Forty-three

"Cases change color."

Charles Grady sat hunched forward in an orange plastic chair in a room off the Urgent Care waiting area, staring at the green linoleum, scuffed by thousands of despairing feet.

"Criminal cases, I mean."

Roland Bell sat next to him. Luis's vigilant form filled one doorway and nearby, at the entrance to a busy hallway, was another of Bell 's SWAT officers, Graham Wilson, a handsome, intense detective with keen, stern eyes and a talent for spotting people packing weapons as if he had X-ray vision.

Grady's wife had accompanied Chrissy into the ER itself, along with Luis and another protection-team officer.

"I had a law school professor one time," Grady continued, still as wood. "He'd been a prosecutor and then a judge. He told us once in class that in all his years of practicing law he'd never seen a black-and-white case come through the door. They were all different shades of gray. There was pretty damn dark gray and there was damn light gray. But they were all gray."

Bell glanced up the corridor, toward the impromptu waiting room that the duty nurse had made for the injured skateboarders and bicyclists. As Bell had insisted, this portion of the hospital had been cleared.

"But then, once you got involved in the case yourself, it changed color. It became black and white. Whether you were prosecuting or defending, the gray disappeared. Your side was one hundred percent good. The other side was one hundred percent evil. Right or wrong. My professor said you have to guard against that. You have to keep reminding yourself that cases were really gray."

Bell noticed an orderly. The young Latino seemed harmless but the detective nodded to Wilson, who stopped him and checked his badge nonetheless. He gave an okay sign to Bell.

Chrissy'd been in an operating room for fifteen minutes. Why couldn't somebody come out and at least give them some progress?

Grady continued, "But you know, Roland, all these months since we found out about that conspiracy in Canton Falls I kept seeing the Constable case as black and white. I never once considered it gray. I went after him with everything I had." A sad laugh. He looked up the hall again, the grim smile fading. "Where the hell's that doctor?"

Lowered his head again.

"But maybe if I'd seen more gray, maybe if I hadn't gone after him so hard, if I'd compromised more, he might not've hired Weir. He might not've…" He nodded toward where his daughter was at the moment. He choked and cried silently for a moment.

Bell said, "I'm thinking your professor was wrong, Charles. At least about people like Constable. Anybody who'd do what he's done, well, there is no gray with people like that."

Grady wiped his face.

"Your boys, Roland. They ever been in the hospital?"

Visiting their mother toward the end was the detective's first thought. But Bell didn't say anything about that. "Off and on. Nothing serious – fixin' up whatever a softball can do to a forehead or a little finger. Or a shortstop running you down armed with a softball."

"Well," Grady said, "it takes your breath away." Another look up the empty hall. "Takes it clean away."

A few minutes later the detective was aware of motion in the corridor. A doctor wearing green scrubs noticed Grady and walked slowly toward them. Bell could read nothing on his face.

"Charles," the detective said softly.

But, though his head was down, Grady was already watching the man's approach.

"Black and white," he whispered. "Lord." He rose to meet the doctor.

• • •

Gazing out the window at the evening sky, Lincoln Rhyme heard his phone ring.

"Command, answer phone."

Click.

"Yes?"

" Lincoln? It's Roland."

Mel Cooper turned gravely to look at him. They knew Bell was at the hospital with Christine Grady and her family.

"What's the word?"

"She's all right."

Cooper closed his eyes momentarily and if ever a Protestant came close to blessing himself this was the moment. Rhyme too felt a surge of relief.

"No poison?"

"Nothing. It was just candy. Not a lick of toxin anywhere."

"So that was misdirection too," the criminalist mused.

"Seems to be."

"But what the hell does it mean?" Rhyme asked in a faint voice, the question directed not so much to Bell but to himself.

The detective offered, "For my money, Weir pointing us to Grady? I'm thinking that means he's still going to try something else to spring Constable from detention. He's in the courthouse somewhere."

"You on your way to the safe house?"

"Yup. Whole family. We'll sit it out there till you catch this fella."

Till?

How about if?

They hung up and Rhyme turned from the window and wheeled back to the evidence chart.

The hand is quicker than the eye.

Except that it's not.

What did master illusionist Erick Weir have in mind? Feeling his neck muscles tense to the point of cramping, he gazed out the window as he considered the enigma they were facing: Hobbs Wentworth, the hit-man, was dead and Grady and his family were safe.

Constable had clearly been preparing to escape from the interview room at the Tombs but there'd been no overt attempt by Weir to actually spring him. So it appeared that Weir's plans were falling apart.

But Rhyme couldn't accept that obvious conclusion. With the supposed attempt on Christine Grady he'd taken their attention away from downtown and Rhyme now leaned toward Bell's conclusion that there was soon going to be another attempt to rescue Constable.

Or was there something else going on – maybe an attempt to kill Constable to keep him from testifying.

The frustration scared him. Rhyme had long ago accepted that with his condition he would never physically capture a perp. But the compensation was the sinewy strength of a clever mind. Sitting motionless in his chair or bed, he could at least outthink the criminals he pursued.

Except that with Erick Weir, the Conjurer, he couldn't. This was a man whose soul was devoted to deception.

Rhyme considered if there was anything else to be done to find answers to the impossible questions raised by the case.

Sachs, Sellitto and ESU were scouring the detention center and courts. Kara was at the Cirque Fantastique awaiting Kadesky. Thom was placing calls to Keating and Loesser, the killer's former assistants, to see if the man had contacted them in the past day or if they'd happened to remember something else that could be helpful. A Physical Evidence Response Team, on loan from the FBI, was searching the scene of the office building where Hobbs Wentworth had shot himself, and technicians in Washington were still analyzing the fiber and fake-blood paint found by Sachs at the detention center.

What else could Rhyme do to find out what Weir had in mind?

Only one thing.

He decided to try something he hadn't done for years.

Rhyme himself began to walk some grids. This search started at the bloody escape scene in the detention center and took him through winding corridors, lit with algae-green fluorescence. Around corners banged dull from years of careening supply carts and pallets. Into closets and furnace rooms. Trying to follow the footsteps – and discern the thoughts – of Erick Weir.

The walk was, of course, conducted with his eyes closed and took place exclusively in his mind. Still, it seemed appropriate that he should engage in a hot pursuit that was wholly imaginary when the prey he sought was a vanished man.

• • •

The stoplight changed to green and Malerick accelerated slowly.

He was thinking about Andrew Constable, a conjurer in his own right, to hear Jeddy Barnes tell it. Like a mentalist Constable could size up a man in seconds and assume a countenance that would put him instantly at ease. Speaking humorously, intelligently, with understanding. Taking rational, sympathetic positions.

Selling the medicine to the gullible.

Of which there were plenty, of course. You'd think that people would tip to the nonsense that groups like the Patriot Assembly spewed. But as the great impresario of Malerick's own art, P. T. Barnum, noted, there's a sucker born every minute.

As he picked his way through the Sunday evening traffic Malerick was amused to think of Constable's utter bewilderment at the moment. Part of the plan for the prisoner's escape required Constable to incapacitate his lawyer. Two weeks ago, in the restaurant in Bedford Junction, Jeddy Barnes had said to him, "Well, Mr. Weir, the thing is, Roth's Jewish. Andrew'll enjoy hurting him pretty good."

"Makes no difference to me," Malerick had replied. "He can kill him if he wants to. That won't affect my plan. I just want him taken care of. Out of the way."

Barnes had nodded. "Suspect that'll be good news to Mr. Constable."

He could imagine the growing dismay and panic within Constable as he sat over the cooling body of his lawyer, waiting for Weir to arrive with guns and disguises to sneak him out of the building – an event that, of course, was never going to happen.

The jail door would open and a dozen guards would haul the man back to his cell. The trial would go on and Andrew Constable – as confused as Barnes and Wentworth and everyone else in his Neanderthal clan in upstate New York – would never know how they'd been used.

As he waited at another stoplight he wondered how the other misdirection of his was unfolding. The Poisoned Little Girl routine (melodramatic, Malerick had assessed, if not an outright cliché, but he'd learned from years of performing that audiences do much better with the obvious). Not the best misdirection in the world, of course; he wasn't sure they'd discover the syringe in the Lanham. Nor could he be certain the girl or anyone else would eat the candy. But Rhyme and his people were so good that he guessed there was a chance they would leap to the horrifying conclusion that this was another attempt on the life of the prosecutor and his family. Then they'd find there was no poison in the candy after all.

What would they make of that?

Was there other tainted candy?

Or was this misdirection – to lead them away from Manhattan Detention, where Malerick might be planning some other way to break Constable out?

In short, the police too would be floating in a soup of confusion, having no idea what was actually going on.

Well, what's been going on for the past two days, Revered Audience, is a sublime performance featuring the perfect combination of physical and psychological misdirection.

Physical – by directing the attention of the police toward both Charles Grady's apartment and the detention center.

Psychological – by shifting suspicion away from what Malerick was really doing and toward the very credible motive that Lincoln Rhyme proudly believed he'd figured out: the hired killing of Grady and the orchestration of Andrew Constable's escape. Once the police had deduced that, their minds stopped looking for any other explanation as to what he was really up to.

Which had absolutely nothing to do with the Constable case. All of the clues he'd left so obviously – the illusionist-trick attacks on the first three victims, who represented aspects of the circus, the shoe with the dog hairs and dirt ground into it leading to Central Park, the references to the fire in Ohio and the connection with the Cirque Fantastique… all of those had convinced the police that his intent couldn't really be revenge against Kadesky because that, as Lincoln Rhyme had told him, was too obvious. He had to be up to something else.

But he wasn't.

Now, dressed in a medical technician's uniform, he eased the ambulance he was driving through the service entrance of the tent housing the World Renowned Internationally Heralded Critically Acclaimed Cirque Fantastique.

He parked under the box seats scaffolding, climbed out and locked the door. None of the stagehands, police or the many security guards paid any attention to him or the ambulance. After the bomb scare earlier in the day, it was perfectly normal for an emergency vehicle to be parked here – perfectly natural, an illusionist would note.

Look, Revered Audience, here is your illusionist, center stage yet completely invisible.

He's the Vanished Man, present but unseen.

No one even glanced at the vehicle, which wasn't an ordinary ambulance at all, but a feke. In place of medical equipment it now held a dozen plastic drums containing a total of seven hundred gallons of gasoline, attached to a simple detonation device, which would soon spark the liquid to life, sending the deadly flood erupting into the bleachers, into the canvas, into the audience of more than two thousand people.

Among whom would be Edward Kadesky.

See, Mr. Rhyme, when we talked before? My words were just patter. Kadesky and the Cirque Fantastique destroyed my life and my love and I'm going to destroy him. Revenge is what this is all about.

Ignored by everyone, the illusionist now walked casually out of the tent and into Central Park. He'd change out of the medical worker's uniform and into a new disguise and would return under cover of night, becoming, for a change, a member of the audience himself and finding a good vantage spot to enjoy the finale of his show.

Chapter Forty-four

Families, clusters of friends, couples, children were slowly entering the tent, finding their seats, filling in the bleachers and box seats, slowly changing from individuals into that creature called an audience, the whole becoming very different from the parts.

Metamorphosis…

Kara turned away from the sight and stopped a security guard. "I've been waiting for a while. You have any idea when Mr. Kadesky'll be back? It's really important."

No, he didn't know and neither did the two other people she asked.

Another glance at her watch. She felt heartsick. An image came to her of her mother, lying in the Stuyvesant home, looking around the room, pierced with clarity and wondering where her daughter was. Kara wanted to cry in frustration at being trapped here. Knowing that she had to stay, do what she could to stop Weir, yet wanting so desperately to be at her mother's side.

She turned back to the brightly lit interior of the huge circus tent. Performers waited in the wings, getting ready for the opening act, wearing their eerie commedia dell'arte masks. The kids in the audience were wearing the face gear too, overpriced souvenirs from the stands outside. Pug and hooked noses, beaks.

They gazed around, mostly excited and giddy. But some were uneasy, she could see. The masks and otherworldly decorations probably made the circus seem to them like a scene from a horror movie.

Kara loved performing for children but she knew that you had to be careful; their reality was different from adults' and an illusionist could easily destroy youngsters' shaky sense of comfort. She only did funny illusions in her young children's shows and would often gather the kids around her afterward and tip the gaff.

Looking at all the magic around her, feeling the excitement, the anticipation… Her palms were sweating as if she herself were about to go on. Oh, what she wouldn't give to be standing in the prep tent right now. Content, confident, yet wired, feeling the accelerating heartbeat of anticipation as the clock ticked toward show time. There was no sensation like that in the world.

She laughed sadly to herself. Well, here she'd made it to Cirque Fantastique.

But as an errand girl.

She wondered now, Am I good enough? Despite what David Balzac said, sometimes she believed she was. At least as good as, say, Harry Houdini during his early shows – the only escapism at those had been the audience members who snuck out of the halls, bored or embarrassed to watch him flub simple sleights. Robert-Houdin was so uncomfortable in his initial performances that he ended up offering the audience clockwork automatons like a wind-up Turk who played chess.

But as she gazed backstage, at the hundreds of performers who'd been in the business since childhood, Balzac's firm voice looped through her mind: Not yet, not yet, not yet… She heard these words with both disappointment yet comfort. He was right, she decided with finality. He was the expert, she was the apprentice. She had to have confidence in him. A year or two. The wait would be worth it.

Besides, there was her mother…

Who was maybe sitting up in bed right now, chatting with Jaynene, wondering where her daughter was – the daughter who'd abandoned her on the one night when she should've been there.

Kadesky's assistant, Katherine Tunney, appeared at the top of the stairs and gestured toward her.

Was Kadesky here? Please.…

But the woman said, "He just called. He had a radio interview after dinner and he's running late. He'll be here soon. That's his box in the front. Why don't you wait there?"

Kara nodded and, discouraged, walked to the seat Katherine indicated, sat down and gazed back at the tent. She saw that the magic transformation was finally complete; every seat was filled. The children, the men, the women were now an audience.

Thud.

Kara jumped as a loud, hollow drum resonated through the tent.

The lights went down, extinguished completely, plunging them into a darkness broken only by the red exit lights.

Thud.

The crowd was instantly silent.

Thud… thud… thud.

The drumbeat sounded slowly. You could feel it in your chest.

Thud… thud…

A brilliant spotlight shot into the center of the ring, illuminating the actor playing Arlecchino, dressed in his black-and-white-checkered bodysuit, wearing his matching half mask. Holding a long scepter high in the air, he looked around mischievously.

Thud.

He stepped forward and began to march around the ring as a procession of performers appeared behind him: other commedia dell'arte characters, as well as spirits, fairies, princesses and princes, wizards. Some walking, some dancing, some cartwheeling slowly as if underwater, some on high stilts stepping more gracefully than most people stroll down the sidewalk, some riding in chariots or carts decorated with tulle and feathers and lace and tiny glowing lights.

Everyone moving in perfect time to the drum.

Thud… thud…

Faces masked, faces painted white or black or silver or gold, faces dotted with glitter. Hands juggling glowing balls, hands carrying orbs or flares or candles or lanterns, hands scattering confetti like glittering snow.

Solemn, regal, playful, grotesque.

Thud…

Both medieval and futuristic, the parade was hypnotic. And its message was unmistakable: whatever existed outside the tent was invalid here. You could forget everything you'd learned about life, about human nature, about the laws of physics themselves. Your heart was now beating not to its own rhythm but in time to the crisp drum, and your soul was no longer yours; it had been captured by this unearthly parade making its deliberate way into the world of illusion.

Chapter Forty-five

We come now to the finale of our show, Revered Audience.

It's time to present our most celebrated – and controversial – illusion. A variation on the infamous Burning Mirror.

During our show this weekend you've seen the performances of illusions created by such masters as Harry Houdini and P. T. Selbit and Howard Thurston. But not even they would attempt an act like the Burning Mirror.

Our performer, trapped in a likeness of hell, surrounded by flames that close in inexorably – and the only route for escape, a tiny doorway protected by a wall of fire.

Though, of course, the door might not be an escape route at all.

Maybe it's just an illusion.

I have to warn you, Revered Audience, that the most recent attempt to perform this trick resulted in tragedy.

I know, because I was there.

So, please, for your own sake, spend a moment looking around the tent and consider what you will do should disaster strike…

But on reflection, no, it's too late for that. Perhaps the best you can hope for now is simply to pray.

• • •

Malerick had returned to Central Park and was standing under a tree about fifty yards from the glowing white tent of the Cirque Fantastique.

Bearded once more, he was dressed in a jogging suit and a high-necked knit shirt. Tufts of sweaty blond hair poked from underneath a Chase Manhattan 10K Run for the Cure cap. Faux sweat stains – out of a bottle – attested to his present persona: a minor financial executive at a major bank out for his Sunday-night run. He'd stopped for a breather and was absently looking at the circus tent.

Perfectly natural.

He found himself oddly calm. This serenity reminded him of that moment just after the Hasbro circus fire in Ohio, before the full implications of the disaster had become clear. While by rights he should have been screaming, he in fact found himself numb. In an emotional coma. He felt the same at this moment, listening to the music, the bass notes amplified, it seemed, by the taut canvas of the tent itself. The diffuse applause, laughter, gasps of astonishment.

In his years of performing he'd rarely gotten stage fright. When you knew your act cold, when you'd rehearsed sufficiently, what was there to be nervous about?

This is what he now experienced. Everything had been so carefully planned that he knew his show would unfold as intended.

Scanning the tent in its last few minutes on earth, he saw two figures just outside the large service doorway through which he'd driven the ambulance not long before. A man and a young woman. Speaking to each other, ear close to mouth so they could converse over the sound of the music.

Yes! One of them was Kadesky. He'd been worried that the producer might not be present at the time of the explosion. The other was Kara.

Kadesky pointed inside and together they walked in the direction he'd indicated.

Malerick estimated that they had to be no more than ten feet from the ambulance.

A look at his watch. Almost time.

And now, my friends, my Revered Audience…

Exactly at nine P. M. a spume of fire shot from the doorway of the tent. A moment later the silhouette of the huge flames inside rolled across the glowing canvas of the tent as they consumed the bleachers, the audience, the decorations. The music stopped abruptly, replaced by screams, and coils of dark smoke began to pour from the top of the tent.

He leaned forward, mesmerized by the horror of the sight.

More smoke, more screams.

Struggling not to let an unnatural smile slide onto his face, he offered a prayer of thanks. There was no deity Malerick believed in but he sent these words of gratitude to the soul of Harry Houdini, his namesake and idol, and the patron saint of magicians.

Gasps and cries as those around him in this secluded part of the park ran forward to help or to gape. Malerick waited a few moments longer but he knew that soon hundreds of police would fill the park. Looking concerned, pulling out his cell phone to pretend to call the fire department, he eased toward the sidewalk. Still, he couldn't help pausing once more. He looked back to see, half obscured by smoke, the huge banners in front of the tent. On one of them masked Arlecchino, reached outward, holding up his empty palms.

Look, Revered Audience, nothing in my hands.

Except that, like a sleight-of-hand artist, the character was holding something – something hidden from view in a perfect backhand finger conceal.

And only Malerick knew what it was.

The coy Harlequin was holding death.