The Twelfth Card Read online

  "I . . . "

  "You didn't do anything wrong, Pulaski. I just want to know."

  "Well, I guess he could've, yeah."

  "All right, you stay in the doorway here. I want you to listen."

  "For what?"

  "Well, the guy shooting at me, for instance. But probably better if you heard footsteps or somebody racking a shotgun first."

  "Watch your back, you're saying?"

  She winked. And started forward to the scene.

  *

  So, she's Crime Scene, thought Thompson Boyd, watching the woman walk back and forth in the library, studying the floor, looking for fingerprints and clues and whatever it was they looked for. He wasn't concerned about what she might find. He'd been careful, as always.

  Thompson was standing in the sixth-floor window of the building across Fifty-fifth Street from the museum. After the girl got away, he'd circled around two blocks and made his way into this building, then climbed the stairs to the hallway from which he was now looking over the street.

  He'd had a second chance to kill the girl a few minutes ago; she'd been on the street for a moment, talking to officers, in front of the museum. But there were way too many police around for him to shoot her and get away. Still he'd been able to take a picture of her with the camera in his mobile phone before she and her friend had been hustled off to a squad car, which sped west. Besides, Thompson still had more to do here, and so he'd taken up this vantage point.

  From his prison days Thompson knew a lot about law enforcers. He could easily spot the lazy ones, the scared ones, the ones who were stupid and gullible. He could also spot the talented cops, the smart ones, the ones who were a threat.

  Like the woman he was looking at right now.

  As he put drops in his perpetually troubled eyes, Thompson found himself curious about her. As she searched the scene she had this concentration in her eyes, looking sort of devout, the same look Thompson's mother sometimes used to get in church.

  She disappeared from view but, whistling softly, Thompson kept his eyes on the window. Finally the woman in white returned to view. He noted the precision with which she did everything, the careful way she walked, her delicate touch as she picked up and examined things so as not to hurt the evidence. Another man might've been turned on by her beauty, her figure; even through the jumpsuit, it was easy to imagine what her body was like. But those thoughts, like usual, were far from his mind. Still, he believed he sensed some small enjoyment inside him as he watched her at work.

  Something from his past came back to him . . . . He frowned, looking at her walking back and forth, back and forth . . . Yes, that was it. The pattern reminded him of the sidewinder rattlesnakes his father would point out when they were hunting together or going for walks in the Texas sand near the family trailer, outside Amarillo.

  Look at them, son. Look. Ain't they something? But don't you get too close. They'll kill you in a kiss.

  He leaned against the wall and continued to study the woman in white, moving back and forth, back and forth.

  Chapter Four

  "How does it look, Sachs?"

  "Good," she replied to Rhyme, via their radio connection.

  She was just finishing walking the grid--the word referring to a method of searching a crime scene: examining it the way you'd mow a lawn, walking from one end of the site to the other then returning, slightly to the side. And then doing the same once more, but the second time walking perpendicular to the first search. Looking up and down too, floor to ceiling. This way, no inch or angle was left unseen. There are a number of ways to search crime scenes but Rhyme always insisted on this one.

  " 'Good' means what?" he asked testily. Rhyme didn't like generalizations, or what he called "soft" assessments.

  "He forgot the rape pack," she replied. Since the Motorola link between Rhyme and Sachs was mostly a means to bring his surrogate presence to crime scenes, they usually dispensed with the NYPD conventions of radio protocol, like ending each transmission with a K.

  "Did he now? Might be as good as his wallet for ID'ing him. What's he got in his?"

  "Little weird, Rhyme. It's got the typical duct tape, box cutter, condoms. But there's also a tarot card. Picture of this guy hanging from a scaffold."

  "Wonder if he's a genuine sicko, or just a copycat?" Rhyme mused. Over the years many killers had left tarot cards and other occult memorabilia at crime scenes--the most notable recent case being the Washington, D.C., snipers of several years earlier.

  Sachs continued, "The good news is that he kept everything in a nice slick plastic bag."

  "Excellent." While perps might think to wear gloves at the crime scene itself, they often forgot about prints on the items they carried with them to commit that crime. A discarded condom wrapper had convicted many a rapist who'd otherwise been compulsive about not leaving his prints or bodily fluids at a scene. In this case, even if the killer thought to clean off the tape, knife and condoms, it was possible that he'd forgotten to wipe the bag.

  She now placed the pack in a paper evidence bag--paper was generally better than plastic for preserving evidence--and set it aside. "He left it on a bookshelf near where the girl was sitting. I'm checking for latents." She dusted the shelves with fluorescent powder, donned orange goggles and shone an alternative light source on the area. ALS lamps reveal markings like blood, semen and fingerprints that are otherwise invisible. Playing the light up and down, she transmitted, "No prints. But I can see he's wearing latex gloves."

  "Ah, that's good. For two reasons." Rhyme's voice had a professorial tone. He was testing her.

  Two? she wondered. One came immediately to mind: If they were able to recover the glove they could lift a print from inside the fingers (something else perps often forgot). But the second?

  She asked him.

  "Obvious. It means he's probably got a record, so when we do find a print, AFIS'll tell us who he is." State-based automated fingerprint identification systems and the FBI's Integrated AFIS were computer databases that could provide print matches in minutes, as opposed to days or even weeks with manual examinations.

  "Sure," Sachs said, troubled that she'd blown the quiz.

  "What else rates the assessment 'good'?"

  "They waxed the floor last night."

  "And the attack happened early this morning. So you've got a good canvas for his footprints."

  "Yep. There're some distinct ones here." Kneeling, she took an electrostatic image of the print of the man's tread marks. She was sure they were his; she could clearly see the trail where he'd walked up to Geneva's table, adjusted his stance to get a good grip on the club to strike her and then chased her down the hall. She'd also compared the prints with those of the only other man who'd been here this morning: those of Ron Pulaski, whose mirror-shined issue shoes left a very different impression.

  She explained about the girl's using the mannequin to distract the killer and escape. He chuckled at her ingenuity. She added, "Rhyme, he hit her--well, the mannequin--really hard. A blunt object. So hard he cracked the plastic through her stocking cap. Then he must've been mad she fooled him. He smashed the microfiche reader too."

  "Blunt object," Rhyme repeated. "Can you lift an impression?"

  When he was head of the Crime Scene Unit at the NYPD, before his accident, Rhyme had compiled a number of database files to help identify evidence and impressions found at scenes. The blunt object file contained hundreds of pictures of impact marks left on skin and inanimate surfaces by various types of objects--from tire irons to human bones to ice. But after carefully examining both the mannequin and the smashed microfiche reader, Sachs said, "No, Rhyme. I don't see any. The cap Geneva put on the mannequin--"

  "Geneva?"

  "That's her name."

  "Oh. Go on."

  She was momentarily irritated--as she often was--that he hadn't expressed any interest in knowing anything about the girl or her state of mind. It often troubled her that Rhyme was so detached about
the crime and the victims. This, he said, was how a criminalist needed to be. You didn't want pilots so awed by a beautiful sunset or so terrified of a thunderstorm that they flew into a mountain, the same was true with cops. She saw his point but to Amelia Sachs victims were human beings, and crimes were not scientific exercises; they were horrific events. Especially when the victim was a sixteen-year-old girl.

  She continued, "The cap she put on the mannequin dispersed the force of the blow. And the microfiche reader's shattered too."

  Rhyme said, "Well, bring back some of the pieces of what he hit. There might be some transfer there."

  "Sure."

  There were some voices in the background at Rhyme's. He said in an odd, troubled tone, "Finish up and get back here soon, Sachs."

  "I'm almost done," she told him. "I'm going to walk the grid at the escape route . . . . Rhyme, what's the matter?"

  Silence. When he spoke next he sounded even more bothered. "I have to go, Sachs. It seems I have some visitors."

  "Who--?"

  But he'd already disconnected.

  *

  The woman in white, the pro, had disappeared from the window of the library.

  But Thompson Boyd wasn't interested in her anymore. From his perch sixty feet above the street he was now watching an older cop, walking toward some witnesses. The man was middle-aged, heavy and in a God-wrinkled suit. Thompson knew this sort of officer too. He wasn't brilliant but he'd be like the bulldog he resembled. There was nothing that would stop him from getting to the heart of a case.

  When the fat cop nodded toward another man, a tall black man in a brown suit, walking out of the museum, Thompson left his vantage point and hurried downstairs. Pausing at the ground floor, he took his pistol out of his pocket and checked it to make sure nothing had become lodged in the barrel or cylinder. He wondered if it had been this--the sound of opening and closing the cylinder in the library--that had alerted the girl that he was a threat.

  Now, even though nobody seemed to be nearby, he checked the pistol absolutely silently.

  Learn from your mistakes.

  By the book.

  The gun was in order. Hiding it under his coat, Thompson walked down the dim stairway and exited through the far lobby, on Fifty-sixth Street, then stepped into an alley that took him back toward the museum.

  There was no one guarding the entrance to the other end of the alley at Fifty-fifth. Undetected, Thompson eased up to a battered green Dumpster, stinking of rotting food. He looked into the street. It had been reopened to traffic but several dozen people from offices and shops nearby remained on the sidewalks, hoping for a look at something exciting to tell their officemates and families about. Most of the police had left. The woman in white--the kissing snake--was still upstairs. Outside were two squad cars and a Crime Scene Unit van, as well as three uniformed cops, two plainclothes ones and that fat, rumpled detective.

  Thompson gripped the gun firmly. Shooting was a very ineffective way to kill someone. But sometimes, like now, there was no option. If you had to shoot, procedures dictated you aimed for the heart. Never the head. The skull was solid enough to deflect a bullet in many circumstances, and the cranium was also relatively small and hard to hit.

  Always the chest.

  Thompson's keen, blue eyes looked over the heavy cop in the wrinkled suit, as he glanced at a piece of paper.

  Calm as dead wood, Thompson rested the gun on his left forearm, aimed carefully with a steady hand. He fired four fast shots.

  The first one hit the thigh of a woman standing on the sidewalk.

  The others struck his intended victim just where he'd aimed. The three tiny dots appeared in the center of his chest; they'd become three rosettes of blood by the time the body hit the ground.

  *

  Two girls stood in front of him and, though their physiques were totally opposite, it was the difference in their eyes that Lincoln Rhyme noticed first.

  The heavy one--dressed in gaudy clothes and shiny jewelry, her fingernails long and orange--had eyes that danced like skittish insects. Unable to look at Rhyme, or anything else, for more than a second, she made a dizzying visual circuit of his lab: the scientific instruments, the beakers, chemicals, the computers and monitors, wires everywhere. At Rhyme's legs and his wheelchair, of course. She chewed gum loudly.

  The other girl, short, skinny and boyish, had a stillness about her. She gazed at Lincoln Rhyme steadily. One fast glance at the wheelchair, then back to him. The lab didn't interest her.

  "This's Geneva Settle," explained the calm patrolwoman, Jennifer Robinson, nodding at the slim girl, the one with the unwavering eyes. Robinson was a friend of Amelia Sachs, who'd arranged for her to drive the girls here from the Midtown North house.

  "And this's her friend," Robinson continued, "Lakeesha Scott. Lose the gum, Lakeesha."

  The girl gave a beleaguered look but stuffed the wad somewhere in her large purse, without bothering to wrap it.

  The patrolwoman said, "She and Geneva went to the museum together this morning."

  "Only I didn't see nothing," Lakeesha said preemptively. Was the big girl nervous because of the attack, he wondered, or was she uncomfortable because Rhyme was a crip? Both probably.

  Geneva was dressed in a gray T-shirt and black baggy pants and running shoes, which Rhyme guessed was the fashion among high school students nowadays. Sellitto had said the girl was sixteen but she looked younger. While Lakeesha's hair was done in a mass of thin gold and black braids, tied so taut that her scalp showed, Geneva's was cropped short.

  "I told the girls who you are, Captain," Robinson explained, using the title that was some years out of date. "And that you're going to ask them some questions about what happened. Geneva wants to get back to her school but I said she'd have to wait."

  "I have some tests," Geneva said.

  Lakeesha tsked a sound through her white teeth.

  Robinson continued, "Geneva's parents are out of the country. But they're getting the next flight back. Her uncle's been staying with her while they've been away."

  "Where are they?" Rhyme asked. "Your parents?"

  "My father's teaching a symposium at Oxford."

  "He's a professor?"

  She nodded. "Literature. At Hunter."

  Rhyme chided himself for being surprised that a young girl from Harlem would have intellectual, globe-trotting parents. He was angry for stereotyping but mostly piqued that he'd made a flawed deduction. True, she was decked out like a gangsta but he might've guessed she had academic roots; she'd been attacked during an early-morning visit to a library, not hanging out on the street corner or watching TV before school.

  Lakeesha fished a package of cigarettes out of her purse.

  Rhyme began, "There's no--"

  Thom walked through the doorway. "--smoking in here." He lifted the pack away from the girl and stuffed it back into her bag. Unfazed that two teenagers had suddenly materialized on his watch, Thom smiled. "Soft drinks?"

  "You got coffee?" Lakeesha asked.

  "I do, yes." Thom glanced at Jennifer Robinson and Rhyme, who shook their heads.

  "I like it strong," the big girl announced.

  "Do you?" Thom asked. "So do I." To Geneva: "Anything for you?"

  The girl shook her head.

  Rhyme glanced longingly at the bottle of scotch sitting on a shelf nearby. Thom noticed and laughed. The aide disappeared. To Rhyme's distress, Patrolwoman Robinson said, "I've got to get back to the house, sir."

  "Ah, you do?" Rhyme asked, dismayed. "You sure you couldn't stay a little longer?"

  "Can't, sir. But you need anything else, just gimme a call."

  How about a babysitter?

  Rhyme didn't believe in fate but, if he had, he would have noted a deft jab here: he'd taken on the case to avoid the test at the hospital and now was being paid back for the deception by suffering through an immensely awkward half hour or so in the company of two high school girls. Young people were not his forte.
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br />   "So long, Captain." Robinson walked out the door.

  He muttered, "Yeah."

  Thom returned a few minutes later with a tray. He poured a cup of coffee for Lakeesha and handed Geneva a mug, which, Rhyme smelled, contained hot chocolate.

  "I took a guess you'd like something anyway," the aide said. "You don't want it, you can leave it."

  "No, that's fine. Thanks." Geneva stared at the hot surface. Took a sip, another, lowered the cup and gazed at the floor. Took several more sips.

  "You're all right?" Rhyme asked.

  Geneva nodded.

  "I am too," Lakeesha said.

  "He attacked both of you?" Rhyme asked.

  "Naw, not me." Lakeesha looked him over. "You like that actor broke his neck?" She slurped her coffee, added more sugar. Slurped again.

  "That's right."

  "An' you can't move nothin'?"

  "Not much."

  "Damn."

  "Keesh," Geneva whispered. "Chill, girl."

  "Just, you know, damn."

  Silence again. Only eight minutes had passed since they'd arrived. It seemed like hours. What should he do? Have Thom run out and buy a board game?

  There were, of course, questions that had to be asked. But Rhyme was reluctant to do so himself. Interviewing and interrogation were skills he didn't possess. When he was on the force he'd questioned suspects maybe a dozen times, and had never had one of those oh-Jesus moments when the grillee broke down and confessed. Sachs, on the other hand, was a natural at the art. She warned rookies that you could blow an entire case with a single wrong word. She called it "contaminating the mind," the counterpart to Rhyme's number-one sin: contaminating a crime scene.

  Lakeesha asked, "How you move round in that chair?"

  "Shhh," Geneva warned.

  "I only askin'."

  "Well, don't."

  "Ain't no harm in asking nothin'."

  Lakeesha had lost her skittishness completely now. Rhyme decided she was actually pretty savvy. She acts uneasy at first, making it seem like she's naive, vulnerable, that you have the advantage, but all the while she's sizing things up. Once she's got a handle on the situation, she knows whether or not to trot out the bluster.

  In fact, Rhyme was thankful for something to make conversation about. He explained about the ECU, the environmental control unit, how the touch pad under his left ring finger could direct the movement and speed of the wheelchair.