The Vanished Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

to stray to the butt of her Glock. She relaxed momentarily, seeing that there was in fact absolutely no hiding place where a perp could be, no secret doorways or exits. But as she started on the grid here she felt a growing sense of discomfort.
    Spooky . . .
    “Rhyme, this is strange. . . .”
    “I can’t hear you, Sachs.”
    She realized that in her uneasiness she’d been whispering.
    “There’s burned string tied around the chairs that’re lying on the ground. Fuses too, it looks like. I smell nitrate and sulfur residue. The reportings said he fired a round. But it’s not the smell of smokeless powder. It’s something else. Ah, okay. . . . It’s a little gray firecracker. Maybe that was the gunshot they heard. . . . Hold on. There’s something else—under a chair. It’s a small green circuit board with a speaker attached to it.”
    “ ‘Small’?” Rhyme asked caustically. “A foot is small compared with an acre. An acre’s small compared with a hundred acres, Sachs.”
    “Sorry. Measures about two inches by five.”
    “That’d be big compared with a dime, now, wouldn’t it?”
    Got the message, thank you very much, she replied silently.
    She bagged everything, then left by the second door—the fire door—and electrostaticked and photographed the footprints she found there. Finally, she took control samples to compare against the trace found on the victim and where the unsub had walked. “Got everything, Rhyme. I’ll be back in a half hour.”
    “And the trapdoors, the secret passages everybody’s talking about?”
    “I can’t find any.”
    “All right, come on home, Sachs.”
    She returned to the lobby and let Photo and Latents take over the scene. She found Franciscovich and Ausonio by the doorway. “You find the janitor?” she asked. “I need to look at his shoes.”
    Ausonio shook her head. “He told the guard he had to take his wife to work. I left a message with maintenance for him to call.”
    Her partner said solemnly, “Hey, Officer, we were talking, Nancy and me? And we don’t want this scumbag to get away. If there’s anything more we can do, you know, to follow up, let us know.”
    Sachs understood exactly how they felt. “I’ll see what I can do,” she told them.
    Sellitto’s radio crackled and he took the call. Listenedfor a moment. “It’s the Hardy Boys. They’ve finished interviewing the wits and’re in the main lobby.”
    Sachs, Sellitto and the two patrolwomen returned to the front of the school. There they joined Bedding and Saul, one of them tall, one short, one with freckles, one with a clear complexion. These were detectives from the Big Building who specialized in canvassing—post-crime interviewing of witnesses.
    “We talked to the seven people here this morning.”
    “Plus the guard.”
    “No teachers—”
    “—only students.”
    Also called the Twins, despite very different appearances, the duo were skilled at double-teaming perps and witnesses alike. It got too confusing if you tried to tell them apart. Lump them together and consider them one person, they were a lot easier to understand.
    “The information was not the most illuminating.”
    “For one thing everybody was freaked out.”
    “The location’s not helping.” A nod toward a wad of cobwebs hanging from the dark, water-stained ceiling.
    “Nobody knew the victim very well. When she got here this morning she walked to the recital room with a friend. She—”
    “The friend.”
    “—didn’t see anybody inside. They stood in the lobby for five, ten minutes, talking. The friend left around eight.”
    “So,” said Rhyme, who’d overheard on the radio, “he was inside the lobby waiting for her.”
    “The victim,” the shorter of the two sandy-haired detectives said, “had come over here from Georgia—”
    “That’s the Russia Georgia, not the peach-tree Georgia.”
    “—about two months ago. She was kind of a loner.”
    “The consulate’s contacting her