"Well," the man said in his throaty whisper, looking over the Flexicair bed. "You're not what I expected."
"The car," Rhyme said. "In the river? How?"
"Oh, that?" he said dismissively. "The Submerged Car trick? I was never in the car. I got out in the bushes at the end of that street. A simple trick: a closed window--so the witnesses would see mostly glare--and my hat on the headrest. It was my audience's imagination that saw me. Houdini was never even in some of the trunks and barrels he pretended to escape from."
"So they weren't skid marks from braking," Rhyme said. "They were skid marks from accelerating tires." He was angry that he'd missed this. "You put a brick on the accelerator."
"A brick wouldn't've looked natural when the divers found the car; I wedged it down with a shoe." The Conjurer looked Rhyme over closely and asked in a wheezing voice, "But you never believed I was dead." Not a question.
"How did you get into the room without me hearing you?"
"I was here first. I slipped upstairs ten minutes ago. I was downstairs too in your war room, or whatever you call it. Nobody noticed me."
"You brought that evidence in?" Rhyme recalled being vaguely aware of two patrolmen carting in boxes of the evidence collected outside the Neighborhood School and Reverend Swensen's hotel room.
"That's right. I was waiting on the sidewalk. This cop came up with a couple of boxes. I said hello and offered to help. Nobody ever stops you if you're in a uniform and you seem to have a purpose."
"And you've been hiding up here--covered up with a piece of silk that was the color of the walls."
"You caught on to that trick, did you?"
Rhyme frowned, looking at the man's uniform. It seemed genuine, not a costume. But contrary to regulations there was no nameplate on the breast. His heart suddenly sank. He knew where it had come from. "You killed him, Larry Burke. . . . You killed him and stole his clothes."
The Conjurer glanced down at the uniform and shrugged. "Reverse. Stole the uniform first," came the whispery, disembodied voice. "Convinced him that I wanted him naked to give me a chance to escape. He saved me the effort of stripping him afterward. Then I shot him."
Repulsed, Rhyme reflected that he'd considered the danger that the Conjurer had taken Burke's radio and his weapon. It hadn't occurred to him, though, that he'd use the man's uniform as a quick-change costume to attack his pursuers. He asked in a whisper, "Where's his body?"
"On the West Side."
"Where?"
"Keep that to myself, I think. Somebody'll find him in a day or two. Sniff him out. The weather's warm."
"You son-of-a-bitch," the criminalist snapped. He might be civilian now but in his heart Lincoln Rhyme would always be a cop. And there is no bond closer than that between fellow police officers.
The weather's warm. . . .
But he struggled to remain calm and asked casually, "How did you find me?"
"At the crafts fair. I got close to your partner. That redheaded policewoman. Very close. As close as I was to you just now. I breathed on her neck too--I'm not sure which I enjoyed more. . . . Anyway I heard her talking to you on her radio. She mentioned your name. Then it just took a little research to find you. You've been in the papers, you know. You're famous."
"Famous? A freak like me?"
"Apparently."
Rhyme shook his head and said slowly, "I'm old news. The chain of command passed me by a long time ago."
The word "command" zipped from Rhyme's lips through the microphone mounted to the headboard into the voice recognition software in his computer. "Command" was the latch word that told the computer to be prepared for instructions. A window opened up on the monitor, which he could see but the Conjurer could not. Instruction? it asked silently.
"Chain of command?" the Conjurer asked. "What do you mean?"
"I used to be in charge of the department. Now, sometimes the young officers, they won't even return my telephone call."
The computer seized the last two words of the sentence. Its response: Whom would you like to call?
Rhyme sighed. "I'll tell you a story: I needed to get in touch with an officer the other
day. A lieutenant. Lon Sellitto."