"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."
"Any suggestions on narrowing down which hotel it belongs to?"
'Tm 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, April6-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, Thorn," 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 œTom 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, Me!."
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?" "Oh," Kara said with a laugh. "Any escapist can get cuffed hands in front
of his body in three or four seconds." Cooper tested the saliva traces. Some individuals secrete antibodies into all bodily fluids, which lets investigators determine blood type. The Conjurer, though, turned out not to be a secretor.
Sachs had also found a very tiny piece of serrated-edge metal.
"Yeah, it's his too," Kara said. "Another escapist tool. A razor saw. It's
probably what he used to cut through those plastic bands on his ankles."
'Would that've been in his mouth too? Wouldn't it be too dangerous?"
"Oh, a lot of us hide needles and razor blades in our mouths as part of
the acts. With practice it's pretty safe." Examining the last of the trace from the alley scene, they found more bits of latex and traces of the makeup, identical to what they'd seen earlier. More Tack-Pure oil as well. "At the riverside, Sachs, when he went into the river? You find any
thi
?" ng.
"Just skid marks in the mud." She pinned up the digital photos that Cooper had printed out from his computer. "Some helpful citizen managed to screw up the scene," she explained. "But I spent a half hour going through the muck. I'm pretty sure he didn't drop any evidence or bailout."
Sellitto asked Bell, 'What about the vie, the Marston woman? She have
anything to say?"
The Tarheel detective gave a summary of his interview with her.
An attorney, Rhyme considered. Why pick her? What the hell was the
Conjurer's pattern with the victims? Musician, makeup artist and attorney. Bell added, "She's divorced. Husband's out in California. Wasn't the
friendliest divorce in the world but I don't reckon he's involved. I had
LAPD make some calls and he was accounted for today. And there's no NCIC or VICAP sheet on him."
Cheryl Marston had described the Conjurer as slim, strong, bearded, scars on neck and chest. "Oh, and she confirmed his fingers were deformed, like we'd thought. Fused together, she said. He was hush about the neighborhood he lives in and he picked the alias 'John.' Now there's a clever boy for you."
Useless, Rhyme assessed.
Bell then explained how he'd picked her up and what had happened afterward. Rhyme asked Kara, "Anything sound familiar?" "He could've hypnotized a pigeon or gull, pitched it at the horse then
used some kind of gimmick to keep the horse agitated."
"What kind of gimmick?" Rhyme asked. "You know any manufacturers?"
"No, that's probably homemade too. Magicians used to use electrodes or prods to get lions to roar on cue, things like that. But animal rights activists'd never let you get away with that now." Bell continued, describing what had happened when Marston and the
Conjurer had gone to have coffee. "One thing she said that was odd: it was like he could read her mind." Bell described what Marston had told him about the Conjurer's knowing so much about her. "Body reading," Kara said. "He'd say something and then watch her close, check out her reactions. That'd tell him a lot about her. Coming on to somebody like that's called 'selling them the medicine.' A really good mentalist can find out all kinds of things just by having an innocent conversation with you."
"Then when she was gettin' comfortable with him he drugged her and
took her to the pond. Dunked her upside down." "It was a variation of the Water Torture Cell routine," Kara explained.
"Houdini. One of his most famous."
"And his escape from the pond?" Rhyme asked Sachs.
"At first I wasn't sure it was him-he'd done a quick change," she said. "His clothes were different and"-a glance at Kara-"his eyebrows too. I couldn't get a look at his hand, to see the fingers. But he distracted me, used ventriloquism. I was looking right at his face-I never saw his lips move."
Kara said, 'Tll bet he picked words that didn't have any b's or m's or p's.
Probably no f's or v's either."
"You're right. 1 think it was something like, 'Yo, look out, on your right, that guy in the jogging suit's got a gun.' Perfect black dialect." She grimaced. "I looked away-the same direction he looked, like everybody else. Then he set off that Hash cotton and 1 got blinded. He fired the squibs and 1 thought he was shooting. He got me cold."
Rhyme saw the disgust in her face. Amelia Sachs reserved her worst
anger for herself.
Kara, though, said, "Don't take it too hard. Hearing's the easiest sensa
tion to fool. We don't use sound illusions much in shows. They're cheap shots." Sachs shrugged this reassurance off and continued, "While Roland and 1 were still blinded from the Hash he took off and disappeared, slipped into the crafts fair." Another grimace. "And then 1 saw him fifteen minutes later-this biker, wearing a Harley shirt. 1 mean, for God's sake, he was right there in front of me."
"Man," Kara said, shaking her head, "his coins definitely don't talk." 'What's that?" Rhyme asked. "Coins?"
"Oh, an expression magicians use. Literally it means you can't hear any clinking when you do coin tricks but we use it in general when somebody's really good. We'd also say he's got 'tight tricks.'"
Walking to the whiteboard reserved for the magician profile, she picked up the marker and added to it, commenting, "So, he does close-in and mentalism and even ventriloquism. And animal tricks. We knew he does lock picking-from the second murder-but now we know he's an escapist too. What kind of magic cWesn't he do?"
As Rhyme leaned his head back, watching her write, Thorn brought a
large envelope into the room.
He handed it to Bell. "For you."
'Whatsis?" the Tarheel detective asked, pulling the contents out and
reading them. He nodded slowly as he read. "This's the report on the followup search at Grady's office. The one you asked Peretti to run. You mind taking a gander, Lincoln?"
The curt note on top read: LR-As requested. -VP.
Rhyme read through the details of the report, Thorn Hipping the page
for him with every stem nod. The CS techs had completed a thorough inventory of the secretary's office and had identified and mapped out all the footprints in the room, exactly as Rhyme had asked. He read this carefully several times, closing his eyes and picturing the scene.
Then he turned to the complete analysis of the fibers that'd been found.
Most of the white ones were a polyester/rayon blend. Some were attached to a thick cotton fiber-also white. Most were dull and dirty. The black fibers were wool.
"Mel, what do we think about the black ones there?"
The tech scooted off his stool and examined the images. "Photo work
isn't the best," he said. After a moment he concluded, "From some tight weave, twilled fabric."
"Gabardine?" Rhyme asked.
"Can't tell without a bigger sample to see the diagonal. But I'll go with gabardine." Rhyme read down the page and learned that the single red fiber found in the office was satin. "Okay, okay," he mused, closing his eyes and digesting everything he'd read. The criminalist asked Cooper, 'What do you know about fabric and
clothing, Mel?" "Not a lot. But if I can quote you, Lincoln, the important question isn't 'What do you know about something?' It's 'Do you know where to find out about it?' And the answer to that is yes, I do."
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.
