Chapter Twelve.

The evidence from the second scene had arrived and Mel Cooper was arranging the bags and vials on examining tables in Rhyme's parlor.

Sellitto had just returned from a tense meeting at the Big Building about the Conjurer case. The deputy commissioner and the mayor wanted details on the progress of a case about which there were few details and had been no progress.

Rhyme had heard back about the Ukrainian illusionists with the Cirque Fantastique and learned that they had no record. The two police officers stationed at the tent had also been checking around the circus and reported no leads or suspicious activity.

A moment later Sachs strode into the room, accompanied by the even-keeled Roland Bell. When Sellitto had been ordered to add another detective to the team Rhyme had immediately suggested Bell; he liked the idea of a streetwise cop, who was a crack shot, backing up Sachs in the field.

Greetings and introductions all around. Bell hadn't been told about Kara and she answered his querying glance with: "I'm like him." A nod toward Rhyme. "Sort of a consultant."

Bell said, "Nice to meetcha." And blinked to see her absently rolling three coins back and forth over her knuckles simultaneously.

As Sachs went to work on the evidence with Cooper, Rhyme asked, "Who was he, the vic?"

"Name was Anthony Calvert. Thirty-two. Unmarried. Well, no partner, in his case."

"Any connection with the student at the music school?"

"Doesn't seem to be," Sellitto answered. "Bedding and Saul've checked it out."

"What was his job?" Cooper asked.

"Makeup stylist on Broadway."

And the first one was a musician and music student, Rhyme reflected. One straight female, one gay male victim. Lived and worked in different neighborhoods. What could link the killings? He asked, "Any feel-good stuff?"

But since the first crime hadn't been sexual in nature Rhyme wasn't surprised when Sachs said, "Nope. Not unless he takes his memories home to bed with him . . . And he gets off on this." She stepped to the whiteboard and taped up the digital photos of the body.

Rhyme wheeled closer and studied the gruesome images.

"Sick fuck." Sellitto offered this lethargic observation.

"And the weapon was?" Roland Bell asked.

"Looks like a crosscut saw," Cooper said, examining some close-ups of the wounds.

Bell, who'd seen his share of carnage as a cop both in North Carolina and New York, shook his head. "Well, now that's a tough shell."

As Rhyme continued to study the pictures he was suddenly aware of an odd noise, an erratic hissing from nearby. He turned to see Kara behind him. The sound was her frantic breath. She was looking at the pictures of Calvert's body. She ran her hand compulsively over her short hair as she stared, transfixed, at the photos, tear-filled eyes wide in shock. Her jaw trembled. She turned away from the board.

"Are you-?" Sachs began.

Kara held up a hand, closed her eyes, breathing hard.

Rhyme knew then, seeing the pain in her face, that this was it for her. She'd reached the end. His life-crime-scene work-entailed this type of horror; her world didn't. The risks and dangers in her profession were, of course, illusory and it was too much to expect civilians to confront this revulsion voluntarily.

This was a true shame because they needed her help desperately. But, seeing the horror in her face, he knew they couldn't subject her to any more of this violence. He wondered if she was going to be sick.

Sachs started toward her but stopped when Rhyme shook his head-his message: he knew they were losing the girl and they had to let her go.

Except that he was wrong.

Kara took another deep breath-like a high diver about to plunge off the board-and turned back to the pictures, a determined look in her eyes. She'd just been steeling herself to confront the photos again.

She studied them closely and finally nodded. "P. T. Selbit," she said, wiping her blue eyes.

"That's a person?" From Sachs.

Kara nodded. "Mr. Balzac used to do some of his routines. He was an illusionist who lived a hundred years ago. He did that routine. It's called Sawing a Woman in Half. This's the same, tied down, spread-eagle. The saw. The only difference is he picked a man for the performance." She blinked at the benign word. "I mean, the murder."

Again Rhyme asked, "Would only a limited number of people know it?"

"Nope. It was a famous trick, even more famous than the Vanished Man. Anybody with the slightest knowledge of magic history'd be aware of it."

He had expected this discouraging answer but said, "Put it on the profile anyway, Thom." Then to Sachs: "Okay, tell us what happened at Calvert's."

"Looks like the vic left through his building's back entrance on his way to work-like he always did, the neighbors said. He walked past an alley and saw that." She pointed to the black toy cat in a plastic bag.

"A toy cat." Kara looked it over. "It's an automaton. Like a robot. We'd call it a feke."

"A-?".

"F-E-K-E. A prop that the audience is supposed to think is real. Like a fake knife with a disappearing blade or a coffee cup with a hidden reservoir in it."

She pushed a switch and suddenly it started to move, giving off a realistic-sounding meow. "The vic must've seen the cat and walked over to it, maybe thought it was hurt," Sachs continued. "That's how the Conjurer got him into the cul-de-sac."

"Source?" Rhyme asked Cooper.

"Sing-Lu Manufacturing in Hong Kong. I checked the website. The toy's available in hundreds of stores around the country."

Rhyme sighed. "Too common to trace" was the theme of the case, it seemed.

Sachs continued, "So Calvert walked to the cat, crouched down to check it out. The perp was hiding somewhere and-"

"The mirror," Rhyme interrupted. A glance at Kara, who was nodding.

"Illusionists do a lot with mirrors. You aim them just right and you can vanish whatever or whoever's behind them completely."

Rhyme recalled the name of her store was Smoke & Mirrors.

"But something went wrong and the vic got away," Sellitto continued. "Now, this is the crazy part. We checked the nine-one-one tape. Calvert got back inside and into his apartment then called emergency. He told them the attacker was outside the building and the doors were locked. But then the line went dead. Somehow the Conjurer got inside."

"Maybe the window-Sachs, did you search the fire escape?"

"No. The window on the escape was locked from the inside."

"Still should've searched it," Rhyme said shortly.

"He didn't get in that way. There wasn't time."

"Well, then he must've had the vic's keys," the criminalist said.

"There were no latents on them," Sachs countered. "Only the vic's."

"He must have," Rhyme insisted.

"No," Kara said. "He picked the lock."

"Impossible," Rhyme said. "Or maybe he'd gotten in before and had a mold made of the key. Sachs, you should go back and check out if he had-"

"He picked the lock," the young woman said adamantly. "I guarantee it."

Rhyme shook his head. "In sixty seconds he got through two doors? He couldn't possibly."

Kara sighed. "I'm sorry, but, yeah, in sixty seconds he got through two doors. And it might've taken him less than that."

"Well, let's assume he didn't," Rhyme said dismissively. "Now-"

The young woman snapped, "Let's assume he did. Look, we can't skip over this. It tells us something else about him-something important: that locked doors don't even slow him up."

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto, who said, "I gotta say, working Larceny I busted a dozen burglars and none of 'em could get through locks that fast."

"Mr. Balzac has me practicing lock picking ten hours a week," Kara said. "I don't have my kit with me but if I did I could open your front door in thirty seconds, the deadbolt in sixty. And I don't know how to scrub a lock. If the Conjurer does he could cut that time in half. Now, I know you like all this, like, evidence stuff. But you're wasting your time to have Amelia go search for something that isn't there."

"You sure?" Sellitto asked.

"If you don't trust my opinion, then why'd you want my help?"

Sachs glanced at Rhyme. He grudgingly accepted Kara's assessment with a stony nod (though privately he was pleased that the woman had shown some grit; it made up a lot for the Look and the Smile). He said to Thom, "Okay, put down on the chart that our boy's a master lock-picker too."

Sachs continued, "No sign of whatever the Conjurer used to knock him out. Blunt-object trauma. Looks like a pipe probably. But he took that with him too."

The report from Latents came in. Eighty-nine separate prints from areas of the crime scene near the victim and the places the Conjurer most likely touched. But Rhyme noticed immediately that some of the prints looked odd and, on closer examination, he could see that they were from the finger cups. He didn't bother to scan the others.

Turning to the trace Sachs had collected at the scene, they found minuscule amounts of the same mineral oil they'd recovered at the music school that morning and more of the latex, makeup and alginate.

Detective Kuan from the Ninth Precinct called and reported that a search of the Dumpsters around Calvert's building had turned up no sign of the man's quick-change outfit or the murder weapons. Rhyme thanked him and told him to keep at it. The man said he would but with such fake enthusiasm that Rhyme knew the search had already ended.

The criminalist asked Sachs, "You said he smashed Calvert's watch?"

"Yep. At noon exactly. A few seconds after."

"And the other victim was at eight. He's on a timetable, looks like. And probably has somebody else lined up for four this afternoon." Less than three hours from now.

Cooper continued, "No luck with the mirror. No manufacturer-that must've been on the frame and he scraped it off. A few real prints but they're covered up by his finger-cup smudges so I'd guess that they're from the clerk where he bought it or the manufacturer. I'll send 'em through APIS anyway."

"Got some shoes," Sachs said, lifting a bag out of a cardboard box.

"His?"

"Probably. They're the same Ecco brand we found at the music school-same size, too."

"He left 'em behind. Why?" Sellitto wondered.

Rhyme suggested, "Probably thought that we knew he was wearing Eccos at the first scene and was worried the respondings'd noticed them on an elderly woman."

Examining the shoes, Mel Cooper said, "We've got some good trace in the indentation in front of the heel and between the upper and sole." He opened a bag and scraped the material out. "Horn o' plenty," the tech said absently and bent over the dirt.

It was hardly a cornucopia but for forensic purposes the residue was as big as a mountain and might reveal a wealth of information. "Scope it, Mel," Rhyme ordered. "Let's see what we've got."

The workhorse of tools in a forensic lab is the microscope and although there've been many refinements over the years the instrument isn't any different in theory from the tiny brass-plate microscope that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented in the Netherlands in the 1500s.

In addition to an ancient scanning electron microscope, which he rarely needed, Rhyme had two other microscopes in his homegrown laboratory. One was a compound Leitz Orthoplan, an older model but one he swore by. It was trinocular-two eyepieces for the operator and a camera tube in the middle.

The second-which Cooper was preparing to use now-was a stereo microscope, which the tech had used to examine the fibers from the first scene. These instruments have relatively low magnification and are used for examining three-dimensional objects like insects and plant materials.

The image popped onto the computer screen for Rhyme and the others to see.

First-year criminalistics students invariably click immediately on a microscope's highest power to examine evidence. But in reality the best magnification for forensic purposes is usually quite low. Cooper began at 4x and then went up to 30x.

"Ah, focus, focus," Rhyme called.

Cooper adjusted the high-ratio screw of the objective so that the image of the material came into perfect clarity.

"Okay, let's walk through it," Rhyme said.

The tech moved the stage, with imperceptible twists of the controls connected to the stage. As he did, hundreds of shapes scrolled past on the screen, some black, some red or green, some translucent. Rhyme felt, as he always did when looking through the eyepiece of a microscope, that he was a voyeur, examining a world that had no idea it was being spied upon.

And a world that could be very revealing.

"Hairs," Rhyme said, studying a long strand. "Animal." He could tell this by the number of scales.

"What kind?" Sachs asked.

"Dog, I'd say," Cooper offered. Rhyme concurred. The tech went on-line and a moment later was running the images through an NYPD database of animal hair.

"Got two breeds, no, three. Looks like a medium-length-coat breed of some land. German shepherd or malinois. And hairs from two longer-haired breeds. English sheepdog, briard."

Cooper brought the screen to a stop. They were looking at a mass of brownish grains and sticks and tubes.

"What's that long stuff?" Sellitto asked.

"Fibers?" Sachs suggested.