The Vanished Man (Lincoln Rhyme 5)

"Any suggestions on narrowing down which hotel it belongs to?"

"I'm afraid you'll just have to start calling hotels and see who uses gray APC-42s. We have that information here someplace but I wouldn't know how to dig it up myself. I'll try and track down my sales manager or his assistant. But it could be a day or two."

"Ouch," Sellitto said.

Yeah, ouch.

After they hung up, Rhyme decided he wasn't content to wait for APC so he had Sellitto send the key to Bedding and Saul with instructions to start canvassing hotels in Manhattan to find out who used the very fucking popular APC-42. He also ordered both the press pass and the key card fingerprinted--but the results were negative on this too. They revealed just smudges and two more of the finger-cup prints.

Roland Bell returned from the scenes on the West Side and Cooper briefed him on what the team had learned so far. They then returned to the evidence and found that the Conjurer's running jacket contained something else: a restaurant check from a place called the Riverside Inn in Bedford Junction, New York. The bill revealed that four people had eaten lunch at table 12 on Saturday, April 6--two weeks ago. The meal consisted of turkey, meatloaf, a steak and one daily special. No one drank alcohol. It was soft drinks all around.

Sachs shook her head. "Where the hell's Bedford Junction?"

"Way upstate, I do believe," Mel Cooper said.

"There's a phone number on the receipt," Bell drawled. "Call 'em up. Ask Debby or Tanya or whoever's the charmin' waitress if any regular foursome sits at"--he squinted at the receipt--"table twelve. Or at least if she remembers who ordered those things. Long shot, but who knows?"

"What's the number?" Sellitto asked.

Bell called it out.

It was a long shot--too long, as Rhyme had expected. The manager and the waitresses there had no idea who might've been in on that Saturday.

"It's a 'bustlin' spot,' " Sellitto reported, rolling his eyes. "That's a quote."

"I don't like it," Sachs said.

"What?"

"What's he doing having lunch with three other people?"

"Good point," Bell said. "You think he's working with somebody?"

Sellitto replied, "Naw, I doubt it. Pattern doers're almost always loners."

Kara disagreed. "I'm not sure. Close-in artists, parlor magicians--they work alone. But he's an illusionist, remember? They always work with other people. You've got volunteers from the audience. Then assistants onstage that the audience knows're working with the performer. And then there're confederates too. Those're people who're working for the illusionist but the audience doesn't know it. They might be disguised as stagehands, members of the audience, volunteers. In a good show you're never quite sure who's who."

Christ, Rhyme thought, this one perp was bad enough, with his skills at quick change, escape and illusionism. Working with assistants would make him a hundred times more dangerous.

"Mark it down, Thom," he barked. Then: "Let's look at what you found in the alley--where Burke collared him."

The first item was the officer's handcuffs.

"He got out of them in seconds. Had to've had a key," Sachs said. To the dismay of cops around the country most handcuffs can be opened with generic keys, available from law enforcement supply houses for a few dollars.

Rhyme wheeled over to the examination table and studied them carefully. "Turn them over. . . . Hold them up. . . . He might've used a key, true, but I see fresh scratches in the hole. I'd say it was picked. . . ."

"But Burke would've frisked him," Sachs pointed out. "Where'd he get a pick?"

Kara offered, "Could've been hidden anywhere. His hair, his mouth."

"Mouth?" Rhyme mused. "Hit the cuffs with the ALS, Mel."

Cooper donned goggles and shone an alternative light source on the cuffs. "Yep, we've got some tiny smears and dots around the keyhole." This meant, Rhyme explained to Kara, the presence of bodily fluid, saliva most likely.

"Houdini did that all the time. Sometimes he'd let somebody from the audience check his mouth out. Then just before he did the escape his wife'd kiss him--he said it was for luck but she was really passing a key from her mouth to his."

"But he'd be cuffed behind his back," Sellitto said. "How could he even reach his mouth?"