Read Online The Vanished Man by Jeffery Deaver - Free Book Online

FBI. See if their lab people’ve run across it.” Then he squinted into a plastic bag. “That’s the black cloth you found?”
    Might be a clue, might be nothing . . .
    She nodded. “It was in the corner of the lobby where the victim was strangled.”
    “Was it hers?” Cooper wondered.
    “Maybe,” Rhyme said, “but for the time being let’s go on the assumption it’s the killer’s.”
    Cooper carefully lifted out the material. He examined it. “Silk. Hemmed by hand.”
    Rhyme observed that even though it could be folded into a tiny wad it opened up to be quite large, about six by four feet.
    “We know from the timing he was waiting for her in the lobby,” Rhyme said. “I’ll bet that’s how he did it: hid in the corner with that cloth draped over him. He’d be invisible. He probably would’ve taken it with him except the officers showed up and he had to get away.”
    What the poor girl must’ve felt when the killer materialized as if by magic, cuffed her and strung the rope around her neck.
    Cooper found several flecks adhering to the black cloth. He mounted them on a slide. An image soon popped up on the screen. Under magnification the flecks resembled ragged pieces of flesh-colored lettuce. He touched one with a fine probe. The material was springy.
    “What the hell is that? ” Sellitto asked.
    Rhyme suggested, “Rubber of some kind. Shred of balloon—no, too thick for that. And look at the slide, Mel. Something smeared off. Flesh-colored too. Run it through the GC.”
    While they waited for the results the doorbell rang.
    Thom stepped out of the room to open the door and returned with an envelope.
    “Latents,” he announced.
    “Ah, good,” Rhyme said. “Fingerprints are back. Run them through AFIS, Mel.”
    The powerful servers of the FBI’s automated fingerprint identification system, located in West Virginia, would search digitized images of friction ridges—fingerprints—throughout the country and return the results in hours, possibly even minutes if the latents team had found good, clear prints.
    “How do they look?” Rhyme asked.
    “Pretty clean.” Sachs held up the photos for him to see. Many were just partials. But they had a good print of his whole left hand. The first thing Rhyme noticed was that the killer had two deformed fingers on that hand—the ring and little fingers. They were joined, it seemed, and ended in smooth skin, without prints. Rhyme had a working knowledge of forensic pathology but couldn’t tell whether this was a congenital condition or the result of an injury.
    Ironic, Rhyme thought, gazing at the picture, the unsub’s left ring finger is damaged; mine is the only extremity below my neck that can move at all.
    Then he frowned. “Hold off on the scan for a minute, Mel. . . . Closer, Sachs. I want to see them closer.”
    She stepped next to Rhyme and he examined the prints again. “Notice anything unusual about them?”
    She said, “Not really. . . . Wait.” She laughed. “They’re the same.” Flipping through the pictures. “All his fingers—they’re the same. That little scar, it’s in the same position on every one of them.”
    “He must be wearing some kind of glove,” Cooper said, “with fake friction ridges on them. Never seen that before.”
    Who the hell was this perp?
    The results from the chromatograph/spectrometer popped onto a computer screen. “Okay, I’ve got pure latex . . . and what’s this?” he pondered. “Something the computer identifies as an alginate. Never heard of—”
    “Teeth.”
    “What?” Cooper asked Rhyme.
    “It’s a powder you mix with water to make molds. Dentists use it for crowns and dental work. Maybe our doer’d just been to the dentist.”
    Cooper continued to examine the computer screen. “Then we have very minute traces of castor oil, propylene glycol, cetyl alcohol, mica, iron oxide, titanium dioxide, coal tar and some neutral pigments.”
    “Some of those’re found in