The Twelfth Card (11 page)

“They were counted for representation,” Thom pointed out, “but they still couldn’t vote.”

“Oh, of course not,” Geneva said.

“Just like women, by the way,” Sachs added.

The social history of America wasn’t of any interest to Rhyme at the moment. “I’d like to see the other letters. And I want to find another copy of that magazine,
Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated.
What issue?”

“July twenty-third, 1868,” Geneva said. “But I’ve had a tough time finding it.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mel Cooper said. And Rhyme heard the railroad track clatter of his fingers on the keyboard.

Geneva was looking at her battered Swatch. “I really—”

“Hey, y’all,” a man’s voice called from the doorway. Wearing a brown tweed sports coat, blue shirt and jeans, Detective Roland Bell walked into the lab. A law enforcer in his native North Carolina, Bell had moved to New York a few years ago for personal reasons. He had a flop of brown hair, gentle eyes and was so easygoing that his urban coworkers sometimes felt a stab of impatience working with him, though Rhyme suspected the reason he sometimes moved slowly wasn’t Southern heritage at all but his meticulous nature, owing to the importance of his job within the NYPD. Bell’s specialty was protecting witnesses and other potential victims. His operation wasn’t an official unit in the NYPD but it still had a name: “SWAT.” This wasn’t the traditional weapons and tactics acronym, though; it was short for “Saving the Witness’s Ass Team.”

“Roland, this is Geneva Settle.”

“Hey there, miss,” he drawled and shook her hand.

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” she said firmly.

“Don’t you worry—I won’t get in your way,” Bell said. “You got my word of honor on that. I’ll
stay as outa sight as a tick in tall grass.” A glance at Sellitto. “Now what’re we up against here?”

The heavyset detective ran through the details of the case and what they knew so far. Bell didn’t frown or shake his head but Rhyme could see his eyes go still, which signaled his concern. But when Sellitto was done, Bell put on his down-home face again and asked Geneva a number of questions about herself and her family to give him an idea of how to set up the protection detail. She answered hesitatingly, as if she begrudged the effort.

Finally Bell was finished and Geneva said impatiently, “I really have to go. Could somebody drive me home? I’ll get Charles’s letters for you. But then I have to go to school.”

“Detective Bell’ll take you home,” Rhyme said then added with a laugh, “but about school, I thought we’d agreed you’d take the day off. Take a makeup.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I
didn’t
agree to that. You said, ‘Let’s just get some questions out of the way and then we’ll see.’ ”

Not many people quoted Lincoln Rhyme’s words back at him. He grumbled, “Whatever I said, I think you’ll
have
to stay home, now that we know the perp may still be after you. It’s just not safe.”

“Mr. Rhyme, I need to take those tests. Makeups at my school—they sometimes don’t get scheduled, test books get lost, you don’t get credit.” Geneva was angrily gripping an empty belt loop on her jeans. She was so skinny. He wondered if her parents were health freaks, keeping her on a diet of organic granola and tofu. It seemed that a lot of professors leaned in that direction.

“I’ll call the school right now,” Sachs said. “We’ll tell them there’s been an incident and—”

“I think I really want to go,” Geneva said softly, eyes looking steadily into Rhyme’s. “Now.”

“Just stay at home for a day or two until we find out more. Or,” Rhyme added with a laugh, “until we nail his ass.”

It was supposed to be light, to win her over by talking teenage. But he regretted the words instantly. He hadn’t been real with her—solely because she was young. It was like the people who came to visit him and were overly loud and jokey because he was a quad. They pissed him off.

Just like she was pissed at him now.

She said, “I’d really appreciate a ride, if you don’t mind. Or I’ll take the train. But I have to leave
now,
if you want those letters.”

Irritated to have to be fighting this battle, Rhyme said with finality, “I’ll have to say no.”

“Can I borrow your phone?”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“There’s a man I want to call.”

“A man?”

“He’s the lawyer I mentioned. Wesley Goades. He used to work for the biggest insurance company in the country, and now he runs a legal clinic in Harlem.”

“And you want to call him?” Sellitto asked. “Why?”

“Because I want to ask him if you can keep me from going to school.”

Rhyme scoffed. “It’s for your own good.”

“That’s sort of for me to decide, isn’t it?”

“Your parents or your uncle.”

“They’re not the ones who have to graduate from eleventh grade next spring.”

Sachs chuckled. Rhyme shot her a dark look.

“Just for a day or two, miss,” Bell said.

Geneva ignored him and continued, “Mr. Goades got John David Colson released from Sing-Sing after he’d been in prison for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit. And he’s sued New York, I mean, the state itself, two or three times. He won every trial. And he just did a Supreme Court case. About homeless rights.”

“Won that one too, did he?” Rhyme asked wryly.

“He usually wins. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever lost.”

“This’s crazy,” Sellitto muttered, absently brushing at a dot of blood on his jacket. He muttered, “You’re a kid—”

Wrong thing to say.

Geneva glared at him and snapped, “You’re not going to let me make a phone call? Don’t prisoners get to do that, even?”

The big detective sighed. He gestured toward the phone.

She walked to it, looked in her address book and punched in a number.

“Wesley Goades,” Rhyme said.

Geneva cocked her head as the call was connected. She said to Rhyme, “He went to Harvard. Oh, and he sued the army too. Gay rights, I think.”

She spoke into the phone. “Mr. Goades, please . . . Could you tell him Geneva Settle called? I was a witness to a crime, and I’m being held by the police.” She gave the address of Rhyme’s town house then added, “It’s against my will and—”

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto, who rolled his eyes and said, “All right.”

“Hold on,” Geneva said into the phone. Then turned to the big detective, who towered over her. “I can go to school?”

“For the test. That’s all.”

“There are two of them.”

“All right. Both goddamn tests,” Sellitto muttered. To Bell, he said, “Stay with her.”

“Like a flat-coated retriever, y’all got that right.”

Into the phone Geneva said, “Tell Mr. Goades never mind. We’ve got it worked out.” She hung up.

Rhyme said, “But first I want those letters.”

“Deal.” She slung her book bag over her shoulder.

“You,” Sellitto barked to Pulaski, “go with ’em.”

“Yes, sir.”

After Bell, Geneva and the rookie had left, Sachs looked at the door and laughed. “Now, that’s one spitfire.”

“Wesley Goades.” Rhyme smiled. “I think she was making him up. Probably called time and temperature.”

He nodded toward the evidence board. “Let’s get going on all of this. Mel, you take over street-fair detail. And I want the facts and profile of what we’ve got so far sent to VICAP and NCIC. I want all the libraries and schools in town polled to see if this guy who talked to Barry also called them and asked about Singleton or that
Coloreds’ Weekly
magazine. Oh, and find out who makes smiley-face bags.”

“Tall order,” Cooper called.

“Hey, guess what?
Life’s
a tall order sometimes. Then send a sample of the blood on the rope to CODIS.”

“I thought you didn’t think it was a sex crime.” CODIS was a database that contained the DNA of known sex offenders.

“The operative words are ‘I think,’ Mel. Not ‘I know to a fucking certainty.’ ”

“So much for the mood,” Thom said.

“One other thing . . . ” He wheeled closer and examined the pictures of the librarian’s body and the
diagram of the shooting crime scene, which Sachs had drawn. “The woman was how far from the vic?” Rhyme asked Sellitto.

“Who, the bystander? I’d guess fifteen feet to the side.”

“Who was hit first?”

“She was.”

“And the shots were grouped tight? The ones that hit the librarian?”

“Real tight. Inches apart. He knows how to shoot.”

Rhyme muttered, “It wasn’t a miss, the woman. He shot her on purpose.”

“What?”

The criminalist asked the best pistol shot in the room, “Sachs, when you’re rapid-firing, what’s the one shot that’s bound to be the most accurate?”

“The first. You’re not fighting recoil.”

Rhyme said, “He wounded her intentionally—aimed for a major blood vessel—to draw off as many officers as he could and give him a chance to get away.”

Cooper muttered, “Jesus.”

“Tell Bell. And Bo Haumann and his people at Emergency Services. Let ’em know that’s the kind of perp we’re dealing with—one who’s more than happy to target innocents.”

The big man walked down the Harlem sidewalk, thinking about the phone conversation he’d had an hour ago. It’d made him happy, made him nervous, made him cautious. But mostly he was thinking: Maybe, at last, things are looking up.

Well, he deserved a boost, just
something
to help him get over.

Jax hadn’t had much luck lately. Sure, he’d been glad to get out of the system. But the two months since his release from prison had been coal hard: lonely and without a single lick of anything by way of righteous fortune falling into his lap. But today was different. The phone call about Geneva Settle could change his life forever.

He was walking along upper Fifth Avenue, heading toward St. Ambrose Park, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Enjoying the cold fall air, enjoying the sun. Enjoying the fact that people round here gave him a wide berth. Some of it was his unsmiling face. Some of it the prison tat. The limp too. (Though, truth be told, his wasn’t any hard-ass, playa limp, wasn’t a gimme-respect gangsta limp, it was an oh-fuck-I-been-shot limp. But nobody here knew that.)

Jax wore what he always wore: jeans and a tattered combat jacket and clunky leather work shoes nearly worn through. In his pocket he carried a good-size wad of benjamins, mostly twenties, as well as a horn-handled knife, a pack of cigarettes and
on a single chain a single key to his small apartment on 136th Street. Its two rooms featured one bed, one table, two chairs, a second-hand computer and grocery-store two-for-one cookware. It was only a notch better than his recent residence in the New York State Department of Corrections.

He paused and looked around.

There he was, the skinny dude with dusty-brown skin—a man who could’ve been thirty-five or sixty. He leaned against an unsteady chain-link fence around this park in the heart of Harlem. The sun flared off the wet lip of a malt or wine bottle half-hidden in the yellow grass behind him.

“S’up, man?” Jax asked, lighting another cigarette as he strode up and stopped.

A blink from the skinny guy. He looked at the pack Jax offered. He wasn’t sure what this was about but he took a cigarette anyway. He put it in his pocket.

Jax continued, “You Ralph?”

“Who you?”

“Friend of DeLisle Marshall. Was on S block with him.”

“Lisle?” The skinny guy relaxed. Some. He looked away from the man who could break him in half and surveyed the world from his chain-link perch. “Lisle out?”

Jax laughed. “Lisle put four rounds into some sad motherfucker’s head. There’ll be a nigger in the White House ’fore Lisle gets out.”

“They
do
parole dudes,” Ralph said, his indignation unsuccessfully masking the fact he’d been caught testing Jax. “So what Lisle say?”

“Sends his word. Told me to look you up. He’ll speak for me.”

“Speak for you, speak for you. Okay. Tell me,
what his tat look like?” Skinny little Ralph with a skinny little goatee was recovering some of his bravado. It was testing time again.

“Which one?” Jax responded. “The rose or the blade? And I understand he’s got another one near his dick. But I never got close enough to see it.”

Ralph nodded, unsmiling. “What yo’ name?”

“Jackson. Alonzo Jackson. But I go by Jax.” The tag had a righteous reputation attached to it. He wondered if Ralph had heard about him. But apparently not—no raised eyebrows. This pissed Jax off. “You want to check me out with DeLisle, go right ahead, man, only don’t use my name over the phone, you know what I’m saying? Just tell him the Graffiti King came by to have a confab with you.”

“Graffiti King,” Ralph repeated, clearly wondering what
that
was about. Did it mean Jax spread motherfuckers’ blood around like spray paint? “Okay. Maybe I check. Depending. So you out.”

“I’m out.”

“What was you in fo’?”

“AR and weapons.” Then he added with a lowered voice, “They went after me for a twenty-five, twenty-five attempt. That got knocked down to assault.” A shorthand reference to the Penal Code provision for murder, Section 125.25.