The Vanished Man (Lincoln Rhyme 5)

"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 out-thought 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.