They stopped and looked into the dim canyon. The alley was empty. "Isn't this it?" Bell asked.
"He said Eight-eight, right?" Sachs asked. "A block and a half east of West End. I'm sure that was the call."
"Me too," a detective said.
"This's gotta be the place." She looked up and down the street. "No other alleys."
Three more officers joined them. 'We get it wrong?" one asked, looking
around. "This the place or not?"
Bell called on his Motorola, "Portable Five Two One Two, respond, K." No answer.
"Portable Five Two, what street are you on, K?"
Sachs squinted down the alley. "Oh, no." Her heart sank.
Running folWard, she found, resting on the cobblestones near a pile of garbage, a pair of handcuffs, open. Next to them was a plastic hog tie, which had been severed. Bell ran up beside her.
"He got out of the goddamn cuffs and cut the restraint." Sachs looked around.
"Well, where are they?" one of the uniformed officers asked. "Where's Larry?" another one called.
"In pursuit?" somebody else offered. "Maybe he's out of reception area." "Maybe," drawled Bell, the concern in his tone reflecting the fact that the workhorse Motorolas rarely malfunctioned and their reception in the city was better than most cell phones'.
Bell called in a 10-39, escaped suspect, with an officer missing or in pursuit. He asked the dispatcher if there'd been any transmissions from Burke but was told there'd been none. No third-party reports of shots fired in the vicinity either.
Sachs walked the length of the alley, looking for any clues that might suggest where the killer had gone or where the Conjurer might've dumped the patrol officer's body ifhe' d gotten control of Burke's gun and killed him. But neither she nor Bell found any sign of the officer or the perp. She returned to the cluster of cops at the mouth of the alley.
What a terrible day. Two dead this morning. Kara too. And now a police officer was missing.
Her hand rose to the speaker/mike of her SP-50 handy-talkie and pulled it off her shoulder. Time to tell Rhyme. Oh, brother. Don't want to make this call. She called in to Central on the radio and asked for a patch. As she was waiting for the call to go through she felt a tug on her sleeve.
Sachs turned. As she inhaled a shocked breath the mike slipped from
her hand and swung at her side, a pendulum. Two people stood in front of her. One was the balding officer Sachs had
been giving orders to at the fair ten minutes ago. The other was Kara, wearing an NYPD windbreaker. Frowning, the
young woman looked up and down the alley. She asked, "So where is he?"
Chapter Nineteen
"Are you all right?" Sachs stammered. "What... Wait, what happened?" "All right? Yeah, I'm fine...." Kara took in the woman's astonished gaze
and said, "You mean you didn't know?" The balding officer said to Sachs, "1 tried to tell you. But you ran off be
fore 1 had a chance." "Tell me... ?" Sachs's voice stopped working. She was so stunned-and
riddled with relief-that she couldn't speak.
"You thought I was really hurt?" Kara said. "Oh, God."
Bell walked up, nodding a greeting to Kara, who said, "Amelia didn't
know."
"About?"
"Our plan. The fake stabbing."
The expression on Bell's face was pure shock. "Lord, you thought she was really dead?" The patrol officer repeated to Bell, "1 tried to let her know. First, 1 couldn't find her and then, when 1 did, she just tells me to seal the scene and call the M.E. and takes off." Kara explained, "Roland and 1 were talking? And we figured that the Conjurer was going to hurt somebody for real-maybe set a fire or shoot or stab somebody. You know, to misdirect us so he could get away. So we thought we'd make up our own misdirection."
"To Hush that boy outta the brush," Bell added. "She got some catsup at
the concession stand, squirted it on herself, screamed then fell down." Kara opened the blue windbreaker to reveal the red stain on her purple
tank top. The detective continued, 'Was worried a few folks at the fair'd be all
tore up over it-"
Well, I'd guess...
"-but we were thinking that'd be better than somebody really getting
clocked or stabbed by the Conjurer." Bell added proudly, 'Was her idea. No foolin'."
'Tm getting a feel for how he thinks," the young woman said.
"Jesus." Sachs found herself trembling. "It was so real."
Bell nodded. "She does dead good."
Sachs gave her a hug then said sternly, "But from now on, stay close. Or keep me in the loop. I'm too young for heart attacks."
They waited a short while but no reports came in of suspects spotted in the area. Finally Bell said, "You search the scene here, Amelia. I'm going to go interview the victim. See if she can tell us anything. Meet you back at the fair."
A crime scene bus was parked on Eighty-Eighth Street. She walked to it and began to collect her equipment to run the scene. A voice clattered through her dangling speaker, startling her. She pulled her hands-free headset off her belt and plugged it in. "Five Eight Eight Five. Repeat, K."
"Sachs, what the hell's going on? I heard you had him and now he's
gone?" She told Rhyme what had happened, about Hushing the Conjurer from
the fair. "Kara's idea? Playing dead? Hmm." The final sound-a grunt really
was a high compliment, coming from Lincoln Rhyme. "But he's disappeared," Sachs added. "And we can't find that officer either. Maybe he's in pursuit. But we don't know. Roland's interviewing the woman we saved. See if she has any leads."
"Okay, well, run the scene, Sachs."
"Scenes plural," she corrected sourly. "The coffee shop, the pond and
the alley here. Too damn many." "Not too many at all," he replied. "Three times the chance to find some
good evidence."
...Rhyme had been right.
The three scenes had yielded a good amount of evidence.
They'd been difficult to work, though for an unusual reason: the Con
jurer had been present at each one-his phantom, at least. Hovering nearby. Making her pause often to tap the grip of her Glock, turning around and making sure the killer hadn't materialized behind her.
Search well but watch your back.
She never actually saw anyone. But then Svetlana Rasnikov hadn't seen
her killer shed the black camouflage and creep up behind her from the shadows.
Tony Calvert hadn't seen him hiding behind the mirror in the alley when
he'd walked toward the fake cat. And even Cheryl Marston hadn't truly seen the Conjurer though she'd sat and talked with him. She'd seen someone else entirely, never suspecting the terrible death he had planned for her. Sachs walked the grids at the various locations, took digital photos and released the scenes to Latents and Photo. She then returned to the fair, where she met Roland Bell. He'd interviewed Cheryl Marston at the hospital. They of course couldn't rely on anything the killer had told her ("Pack of goddamn lies," Marston had summarized bitterly) but she remembered some details from before the drug reached its full effect. She gave a good description of him, including particulars about the scars. She also recalled that he'd stopped at a car. She remembered the make and the first few letters of the tag. This was good news. There are a hundred ways to trace a car to a perpetrator or witness. Lincoln Rhyme called cars "evidence generators."
DMV had reported that a car matching the description-a 2001 tan Mazda 626 had been stolen from the White Plains airport a week ago. Sellitto put out an emergency vehicle locator request to all law enforcement agencies in the metro area and sent officers to check the blocks around the site of the attack to see if they could find the car, though neither officer had much faith that it would still be there.
Bell was concluding his narrative about Cheryl Marston's harrowing or
deal when a patrol officer taking a radio call interrupted him.
"Detective Bell? What was that car again? The one the perp was driving?"
"Tan Mazda. Six two six. Tag's F-E-T two three seven."
"That's it," the officer said into his mike. Then to Bell and Sachs he added, "Just got a report-RMP spotted him on Central Park West. They went after him but-get this-he drove over the curb into the park itself. The RMP tried to follow but got stuck on the embankment."
"CPW and what?" Sachs asked. "Around Nine-two."
"He probably bailed," Bell said. "He will bail," Sachs said. "But he's going to get some distance first." She nodded to the evidence crates. "Get all this to Rhyme," she called and ten seconds later she was in the seat of her Camaro and had the big engine rattling. She snapped the race-car harness on and pulled the canvas straps snug.
"Amelia, wait!" Bell called. "ESU is on the way."
But the squeal of rubber and the cloud of blue smoke the Goodyears left behind were her only response to Bell's words.
Skidding onto Central Park West, heading north, Sachs concentrated on avoiding pedestrians, poky cars, bicyclists and Rollerbladers.
Baby strollers too. They were everywhere. Man, why weren't these kids
home taking naps? She pitched the blue flasher onto the dash and plugged it into the cigarette lighter outlet. The brilliant light began rotating and as she hurtled forward she found herself slapping the horn in time to the flash. A streak of gray in front of her.
Shit.... As she braked hard to avoid the U -turner the Camaro ended up a scant foot from the side of a car that was worth twice her annual income. Then she crunched the accelerator again and the General Motors horses responded instantly. She managed to keep the needle under fifty until the traffic thinned out, around Ninetieth Street, and then she went to the floor. In a few seconds she hit seventy.
A clatter through the headset of her Motorola, which lay on the front passenger seat. She grabbed it with one hand and pulled it on. "'Lo?" she called, dispensing with any pretense of requisite police radio
codes. "Amelia? Roland here," Bell called. He'd also given up on standard
communication protocols. "Go ahead."
'We've got cars on the way."
"Where is he?" she asked, shouting over the roar of the engine. "Hold on.... Okay, he drove out of the park on Central Park North. Sideswiped a truck and kept going."
"Headed where?"
"That was... It was less'n a minute ago. He's going north."
"Got it."
Heading north in Harlem? Sachs considered. There were several routes out of the city from that area of town but she doubted that he'd take them; they all involved bridges and most were via controlled-access highways, where he'd easily be trapped.
More likely he'd abandon the sedan in a relatively quiet neighborhood and carjack a new one.
A new voice resounded in her headset. "Sachs, we've got him!" 'Where, Rhyme?"
He'd turned westbound on 125th Street, the criminalist explained. "Near Fifth Avenue."
'Tm just about at One-two-five and Adam Clayton Powell. I'll try to
block him. But get me some backup," she called.
'We're on it, Sachs. Just how fast are you going?"
'Tm not really looking at the speedometer."
"Probably just as well. Keep your eyes on the road."
Sachs honked her way into the busy intersection at 125th Street. She parked crosswise, blocking the westbound lanes. She jumped out of her car, her Glock in her hand. Several cars were stopped in the eastbound lanes. Sachs shouted to the drivers, "Out! Police action. Get out of those cars and get under cover. The drivers-a delivery man and a woman in a McDonald's uniform-instantly did as they were told.
Now all the lanes of 125th Street were blocked. "Everybody," she shouted. "Get under cover! Now!" "Motherfuck."
"Yo."
She glanced to her right to see four gangbangers leaning against a chainlink fence, staring with jaded interest at the Austrian gun, the Detroit car and the redhead they belonged to.
Most other people on the street had taken cover but these four teenagers stayed right where they were, looking casual as Sunday. Why move? It wasn't often that a Wesley Snipes movie came to their 'hood.
In the distance Sachs saw the Mazda weaving frantically through traffic as it sped west toward her impromptu roadblock. The Conjurer didn't notice the blockade until he was past the street that he could've taken to avoid her. He skidded to a halt. Behind him a garbage truck making a turn braked hard. The driver and the trash collectors saw what was happening and they bailed, leaving the truck to block him from the rear.
