"What's the point of that? Does the core make it stronger?" Rhyme
asked. "Easier to untie? Harder to untie? What?"
"No idea."
"It's getting mysteriouser," Sachs said with a dramatic flair that Rhyme
would have found irritating if he hadn't agreed with her. "Yup," he confirmed, disconcerted. "That's a new one to me. Let's keep
going. I want something familiar, something we can use."
"And the knot?"
"Tied by an expert but I don't recognize it," Cooper said.
"Get a picture of it to the bureau. And... don't we know somebody at the Maritime Museum?" "They've helped us with knots a few times," Sachs said. "I'll upload a
picture to them too." A call came in from Tobe Geller at the Computer Crimes Unit at New
York's FBI headquarters. "This is fun, Lincoln." "Glad we're keeping you amused," Rhyme murmured. "Anything help
ful you might be able to tell us about our toy?" Geller, a curly-haired young man, was impervious to Rhyme's edge, especially since there was a computer product involved. "It's a digital audio recorder. Fascinating little thing. Your unsub recorded something on it, stored the sounds on a hard drive then programmed it to play back after some delay. We don't know what the sound was-he built in a wiping program so that it destroyed the data."
"It was his voice," Rhyme muttered. 'When he said he had a hostage it was just a recording. Like the chairs. It was to make us think he was still in the room."
"That makes sense. It had a special speaker-small but excellent bass and midtone range. It'd mimic a human voice pretty well."
"There's nothing left on the disk?"
"Nope. Gone for good."
"Damn. I wanted a voiceprint."
"Sorry. It's gone."
Rhyme sighed in frustration and rolled back to the examination trays; it was left to Sachs to tell Geller how much they appreciated the help.
The team then examined the victim's wristwatch, which had been shattered for reasons none of them could figure out. It yielded no evidence except the time it was broken. Perps occasionally broke watches or clocks at crime scenes after they'd set them to the wrong time to mislead investigators. But this was stopped at close to the actual time of death. What should they make of that?
Mysteriouser...
As the aide wrote their observations on the whiteboard Rhyme looked over the bag containing the sign-in book. "The missing name in the book." He mused, "Nine people signed but there're only eight names in the log.... I think we need an expert here." Rhyme ordered into the microphone, "Command, telephone. Call Kincaid comma Parker."
Chapter Six
On the screen the display showed a 703 area code, Virginia, then the number being dialed.
A ring. A young girl's voice said, "Kincaid residence."
"Uhm, yes. Is Parker there? Your father, I mean."
'Who's calling?"
"lincoln Rhyme. In New York."
"Hold on, please."
A moment later the laid-back voice of one of the country's preeminent
document examiners came on the line. "Hey, lincoln. Been a month or two, hasn't it?"
"Busy time," Rhyme offered. "And what're you up to, Parker?"
"Oh, getting into trouble. Nearly caused an international incident. The
British Cultural Society in the District wanted me to authenticate a notebook of King Edward's they'd purchased from a private collector. Note the tense of the verb, lincoln."
"They'd already paid for it."
"Six hundred thousand."
"little pricey. They wanted it that badly?"
"Oh, it had some real nice juicy gossip about Churchill and Chamberlain. Well, not in that sense, of course." "Of course not." As usual Rhyme tried to be patient with those from
whom he was seeking gratuitous help.
"1 looked it over and what could 1 do? 1 had to question it."
The innocuous verb, from a respected document examiner like Kincaid, was synonymous with branding the diary a bad-ass forgery. "Ah, they'll get over it," he continued. "Though, come to think of it, they haven't paid my bill yet.... No, honey, we don't make the frosting till the cake cools.... Because 1 said so." A single father, Kincaid was the former head of the FBI's documents department at headquarters. He'd left the bureau to run his own document examination service so he could spend more time with his children, Robby and Stephanie.
"How's Margaret?" Sachs called into the speaker. "That you, Amelia?"
"Yup."
"She's fine. Haven't seen her for a few days. We took the kids to Planet Play on Wednesday and 1 was just starting to beat her at laser tag when her pager goes off. She had to go kick in some body's door and arrest them. Panama or Ecuador or someplace like that. She doesn't give me the details. So, what's up?"
'We're running a case and 1 need some help. Here's the scenario: perp was seen writing his name in a security desk sign-in book. Okay?"
"Got it. And you need the handwriting analyzed?"
"The problem is we don't have any handwriting."
"It disappeared?"
"Yep."
"And you're sure the writer wasn't faking?"
"Positive. There was a guard who saw ink going on paper, no question." "Anything visible now?"
"Nothing."
Kincaid gave a grim laugh. "That's smart. So there was no record of the perp entering the building. And then somebody else wrote their name over the blank space and ruined whatever impression there might've been of his signature."
"Right."
"Anything on the sheet below the top one?"
Rhyme glanced at Cooper, who shone a bright light at an acute angle on the second sheet in the log-this, rather than covering the page with pencil lead, was the preferred method to raise impression evidence. He shook his head.
"Nothing," Rhyme told the document examiner. Then asked, "So how'd he pull that off?"
"He Ex-Laxed it," Kincaid announced.
"How's that?" Sellitto called.
"U sed disappearing ink. We call it Ex-laxing in the business. The old ExLax contained phenolphthalein. Before it was banned by the FDA. You'd dissolve a pill in alcohol and make a blue ink. It had an alkaline pH. Then you'd write something. After a while, exposure to the air would make the blue disappear."
"Sure," said Rhyme, recalling his basic chemistry. "The carbon dioxide
in the air turns the ink acidic and that neutralizes the color." "Exactly. You don't see phenolphthalein much anymore. But you can do
the same thing with thymolphthalein indicator and sodium hydroxide."
"Can you buy this stuff anyplace in particular?"
"Hm," Kincaid considered. 'Well.... Just a minute, honey. Daddy's on
the phone.... No, it's okay. All cakes look lopsided when they're in the oven. I'll be there soon.... Lincoln? What I was going to say was that it's a great idea in theory but when I was in the bureau there were never any perps or spies who actually used disappearing ink. It's more of a novelty, you know. Entertainers'd use it."
Entertainment, Rhyme thought grimly, looking at the board on which were taped the pictures of poor Svetlana Rasnikov. 'Where would our doer find ink like that?"
"Most likely toy stores or magic shops."
Interesting...
"Okay, well, that's helpful, Parker."
"Come and visit sometime," Sachs called. "And bring the kids." Rhyme grimaced at the invitation. He whispered to Sachs, "And why don't you invite all their friends too. The whole school..."
Laughing, she shushed him.
After he disconnected the call Rhyme said grumpily, "The more we learn, the less we know." Bedding and Saul called in and reported that Svetlana seemed to be well
liked at the music school and had no enemies there. Her part-time job wasn't likely to have produced any stalkers either; she led sing-alongs at kids' birthday parties.
A package arrived from the medical examiner's office. Inside was a plastic evidence bag containing the old handcuffs the victim had been re
strained with. They were unopened, as Rhyme had ordered. He'd told the M.E. to compress the victim's hands to remove them since drilling out the locks could destroy valuable trace.
"Never seen anything like this," Cooper said, holding them up, "outside
of a movie." Rhyme agreed. They were antique, heavy and made of unevenly forged
iron.
Cooper brushed and tapped all around the lock mechanisms but he found no significant trace. The fact they were antique, though, was encouraging because it would limit the sources they might've come from. Rhyme told Cooper to photograph the cuffs and print out pictures to show to dealers.
Sellitto received another phone call. He listened for a moment then, looking bewildered, said, "Impossible.... You're sure?... Yeah, okay. Thanks." Hanging up, the detective glanced at Rhyme. "I don't get it."
'What's that?" Rhyme asked, in no mood for any more mysteries. "That was the administrator of the music school. There is no janitor." "But the patrol officers saw him," Sachs pointed out.
"The cleaning staff doesn't work on Saturday. Only weekday evenings. And none of 'em look like the guy the respondings saw."
No janitor?
Sellitto looked through his notes. "He was right outside the second door, sweeping up. He-" "Oh, goddamn," Rhyme snapped. "It was him!" A glance at the detec
tive. "The janitor looked completely different from the perp, right?" Sellitto consulted his notebook. "He was in his sixties, bald, no beard,
wearing gray coveralls."
"Gray coveralls!" Rhyme shouted.
"Yeah."
"That's the silk fiber. It was a costume."
'What're you talking about?" Cooper asked.
"Our unsub killed the student. When he was surprised by the respondings he blinded them with the flash and ran into the performance space, set up the fuses and the digital recorder to make them think he was still inside, changed into the janitor outfit and ran out the second door."
"But he didn't just strip off throwaway sweats like some chain-snatcher on the A train, Linc," the rotund policeman pointed out. "How the hell could he've done it? He was out of sight for, what, sixty seconds?"
"Fine. If you have an explanation that doesn't involve divine interven
tion I'm willing to listen."
"Come on. There's no fucking way."
"No way?" Rhyme mused cynically as he wheeled closer to the white
board on which Thorn had taped the printouts of the digital photos Sachs had taken of the footprints. "Then how 'bout some evidence?" He examined the perp's footprints and then the ones that she'd lifted in the corridor near where the janitor had been.
"Shoes," he announced.
"They're the same?" the detective asked.
"Yep," Sachs said, walking to the board. "Ecco, size ten." "Christ," Sellitto muttered.
Rhyme asked, "Okay, what do we have? A perp in his early fifties, medium build, medium height and beardless, two deformed fingers, probably has a record 'cause he's hiding his prints-and that's all we goddamn know." But then Rhyme frowned. "No," he muttered darkly, "that's not all we know. There's something else. He had a change of clothes with him, murder weapons.... He's an organized offender." He glanced at Sellitto and added, "He's going to do this again."
Sachs nodded her grim agreement.
Rhyme gazed at Thorn's flowing lettering on the evidence whiteboards and he wondered: What ties this all together? The black silk, the makeup, the costume change, the disguises, the flashes and the pyrotechnics.
The disappearing ink.
Rhyme said slowly, "I'm thinking that our boy's got some magic training."
Sachs nodded. "Makes sense."
Sellitto nodded. "Okay. Maybe. But whatta we do now?"
"Seems obvious to me," Rhyme said. "Find our own."
"Our own what?" Sellitto asked.
"Magician of course."
"Do it again."
She'd done it eight times so far. "Again?"
The man nodded.
And so Kara did it again.
The Triple Handkerchief Release-developed by the famous magician
