The Vanished Man (Lincoln Rhyme 5)

"All right," Rhyme sighed. "What else is there?"

"Chains. Two lengths."

He'd wrapped these around Cheryl Marston's chest, arms and ankles and secured them with snap clasps, like on the end of dog leashes. Cooper and Rhyme examined all of these items carefully. There were no manufacturers' markings on any of them. The story was the same with the rope and the duct tape he'd gagged her with.

The gym bag that the killer had collected from the car, presumably containing the chains and rope, was unbranded and had been made in China. Given enough manpower, it was sometimes possible to find a source for common items like this by canvassing discount stores and street vendors. But for a cheap, mass-produced bag a search of that magnitude was impossible.

Cooper inverted the bag above a porcelain examining tray and repeatedly tapped the bottom to dislodge whatever might be inside. A bit of white powder drifted out. The tech did a drug analysis and the substance turned out to be flunitrazepam.

"Date rape drug of choice," Sachs told Kara.

There were also tiny pellets of a sticky translucent material inside. It looked like a similar substance was lodged in the zipper and smeared on the handle. "I don't recognize it," Cooper said.

But Kara looked it over, smelled the substance and said, "Magician's adhesive wax. We use it to stick things together temporarily onstage. Maybe he had an open capsule of the drug stuck to the palm of his hand. When he reached over her drink or coffee he tipped it in."

"Sources for the wax are?" Rhyme asked cynically. "Let me guess--any magic supply store in the free world?"

Kara nodded. "Sorry."

Within the bag Cooper also found some tiny metallic shavings and a circular black mark--as if from some residue on the bottom of a small bottle of paint.

An examination through the microscope revealed the metal was probably brass and there were unique machining patterns on the metal. But any deductions were beyond Lincoln Rhyme. "Send some pictures down to our friends in the bureau." Cooper took the images, compressed them and sent them off via encrypted email to Washington.

The black stains turned out not to be paint but permanent ink. But the database couldn't identify what kind specifically; there were no markers to individuate it.

"What's that?" Rhyme asked, looking toward a plastic bag containing some navy-blue cloth.

"We were lucky there," Sachs said. "That's the windbreaker he was wearing when he picked up the Marston woman. He didn't get a chance to take it with him when he bolted."

"Individuate?" Rhyme asked, hoping that there might be some initials or laundry marks inside.

After a lengthy examination of the garment Cooper said, "Nope. And all the tags've been removed."

"But," Sachs said, "we found some things in the pockets."

The first item they examined was a press pass issued by one of the big cable-TV networks. The CTN reporter's name was Stanley Saferstein and the photo on the pass revealed a thin, brown-haired man with a beard. Sellitto called the network and spoke to the head of security. It turned out that Saferstein was one of their senior reporters and had worked the metro desk for years. His pass had been stolen last week--lifted during or after a press conference downtown. The reporter had never felt a thing as the thief had apparently cut the lanyard and pocketed the ID.

The Conjurer had snatched Saferstein's card, Rhyme assumed, because the reporter bore a slight resemblance: in his fifties, narrow-faced and dark-haired.

The stolen pass had been canceled, the security chief had explained, "but the guy could still flash it and get past a checkpoint. Guards and police don't check too close if they see our logo."

After they hung up, Rhyme said to Cooper, "Run 'Saferstein' through VICAP and NCIC."

"Sure. But why?"

"Just because," Rhyme answered.

He wasn't surprised when the results came back negative. He hadn't actually thought that the reporter had any connection with the Conjurer but with this particular perp Rhyme was taking no chances.

The jacket also contained a gray plastic hotel key card. Rhyme was delighted at this find. Even though there was no hotel name on it--just a picture of a key and an arrow to show the guest which end to insert in the lock--he assumed it would have codes in the magnetic strip to tell them which hotel and room it belonged to.

Cooper found the manufacturer's name in small type on the back of the card: APC INC., AKRON, OHIO. This, he found out from a search of a trademark database, stood for American Plastic Cards, a company that made hundreds of different identification and key cards.

In a few minutes the team was on the speakerphone with the president of APC himself--a shirtsleeve CEO, Rhyme imagined, who had no problem working on Saturday or picking up his own phone. Rhyme explained the situation to him, described the key and asked how many hotels in the New York City metro area it w

as sold to.

"Ah, that's the APC-42. It's our most popular model. We make them for all the big locking systems. Ilco, Saflok, Tesa, Ving, Sargent, all the others."