The Twelfth Card (19 page)

“How do you mean?” asked the ever-placid Average Joe.

“That song. You were whistling.”

“I was whistling?”

“Fuck yes. You didn’t know?”

He said to the guard, “Just something I was doing. Wasn’t thinking.”

“Damn, sounded good.” The guard wandered off, leaving Thompson to laugh to himself. How ’bout that? He had an instrument all along, one he’d been born with, one he carried around with him. Thompson went to the prison library and looked into this. He learned that people would call him an “orawhistler,” which was different from a tin-whistle
player, say—like in Irish bands. Orawhistlers are rare—most people have very limited whistling range—and could make good livings as professional musicians in concerts, advertising, TV and movies (
everybody
knew the
Bridge on the River Kwai
theme, of course; you couldn’t even think about it without whistling the first few notes, at least in your head). There were even orawhistling competitions, the most famous being the International Grand Championship, which featured dozens of performers—many of them appeared regularly with orchestras around the world and had their own cabaret acts.

Wssst . . .

Another tune came into his head. Thompson Boyd exhaled the notes softly, getting a soft trill. He noticed he’d moved his .22 out of reach. That
wasn’t
doing things by the book . . . . He pulled the pistol closer then returned to the instruction booklet again, sticking more Post-it notes onto pages, glancing into the shopping bag to make sure he had everything he needed. He thought that he had the technique down. But, as always when he approached something new, he was going to learn everything cold before executing the job.

*   *   *

“Nothing, Rhyme,” Sachs said into the microphone dangling near her ample lips.

That his prior good mood had vanished like steam was evident when he snapped,
“Nothing?”

“Nobody’s seen him.”

“Where are you?”

“We’ve covered basically all of Little Italy. Lon and I’re at the south end. Canal Street.”

“Hell,” Rhyme muttered.

“We could . . . ” Sachs stopped speaking. “What’s that?”

“What?” Rhyme asked.

“Hold on a minute.” To Sellitto she said, “Come on.”

Displaying her badge she forced her way through four lanes of thick, attitudinal traffic. She looked around then started south on Elizabeth Street, a dark canyon of tenements, retail shops and warehouses. She stopped again. “Smell that?”

Rhyme asked caustically, “Smell?”

“I’m asking Lon.”

“Yeah,” the big detective said. “What
is
that? Something, you know, sweet.”

Sachs pointed to a wholesale herbal products, soap and incense company, two doors south of Canal on Elizabeth Street. A strong flowery scent wafted from the open doors. It was jasmine—the aroma that they’d detected on the rape pack and that Geneva herself had smelled at the museum.

“We might have a lead, Rhyme. I’ll call you back.”

*   *   *

“Yeah, yeah,” the slim Chinese man in the herbal wholesaler said, gazing at the EFIT composite picture of Unsub 109. “I see him some. Upstair. He not there a lot. What he do?”

“Is he up there now?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know. Think I saw him today. What he do?”

“Which apartment?”

The man shrugged.

The herbal import company took up the first floor, but at the end of the dim entryway, past a security door, were steep stairs leading up into darkness.
Sellitto pulled out his radio and called in on the operations frequency. “We’ve got him.”

“Who’s this?” Haumann snapped.

“Oh, sorry. It’s Sellitto. We’re two buildings south of Canal on Elizabeth. We’ve got a positive ID on the tenant. Might be in the building now.”

“ESU Command, all units. You copy, K?”

Affirmative responses filled the airwaves.

Sachs identified herself and transmitted, “Make it a silent roll-up and stay off Elizabeth. He can see the street from the window in the front.”

“Roger, five-eight-eight-five. What’s the address? I’m calling in for a no-knock warrant, K.”

Sachs gave him the street number. “Out.”

Less than fifteen minutes later the teams were on site and S and S officers were checking out the front and rear of the building with binoculars and infrared and sonic sensors. The lead Search and Surveillance officer said, “There’re four floors in the building. Import warehouse is on the ground. We can see into the second and the fourth floors. They’re occupied—Asian families. Elderly couple on the second and the top’s got a woman and four or five kids.”

Haumann said, “And the third floor?”

“Windows are curtained, but the infrared scans positive for heat. Could be a TV or heater. But could be human. And we’re getting some sounds. Music. And the creaking of floors, sounds like.”

Sachs looked at the building directory. The plate above the intercom button for the third floor was empty.

An officer arrived and gave Haumann a piece of paper. It was the search warrant signed by a state court judge and had just been faxed to the ESU command post truck. Haumann looked it over, made sure the address was correct—a wrong no-knock
could subject them to liability and jeopardize the case against the unsub. But the paper was in order. Haumann said, “Two entry teams, four people each, front stairwell and back fire escape. A battering ram at the front.” He pulled eight officers from the group and divided them into two groups. One of them—A team—was to go through the front. B was on the fire escape. He told the second group, “You take out the window on the three count and hit him with a flash-bang, two-second delay.”

“Roger.”

“On zero, take out the front door,” he said to the head of the A team. Then he assigned other officers to guard the innocents’ doors and to be backup. “Now deploy. Move, move, move!”

The troopers—mostly men, two women—moved out, as Haumann ordered. The B team went around to the back of the building, while Sachs and Haumann joined the A team, along with an officer manning the battering ram.

Under normal circumstances a crime scene officer wouldn’t be allowed on an entry team. But Haumann had seen Sachs under fire and knew she could pull her own. And, more important, the ESU officers themselves welcomed her. They’d never admit it, at least not to her, but they considered Sachs one of them and were glad to have her. It didn’t hurt, of course, that she was one of the top pistol shots on the force.

As for Sachs herself, well, she just plain liked doing kick-ins.

Sellitto volunteered to remain downstairs and keep an eye on the street.

Her knees aching from arthritis, Sachs climbed with the other officers to the third floor. She stepped close to the door and listened. She nodded
to Haumann. “I can hear something,” she whispered.

Haumann said into his radio, “Team B, report.”

“We’re in position,” Sachs heard in her earpiece. “Can’t see inside. But we’re ready to go.”

The commander looked at the team around them. The huge officer with the battering ram—a weighted tube about three feet long—nodded. Another cop crouched beside him and closed his fingers around the doorknob to see if it was locked.

Into his mike Haumann whispered, “Five . . . four . . . three . . . ”

Silence. This was the moment when they should’ve heard the sound of breaking glass and then the explosion of the stun grenade.

Nothing.

And something was wrong here too. The officer gripping the knob was shivering fiercely, moaning.

Jesus, Sachs thought, staring at him. The guy was having a fit or something. A tactical entry officer with epilepsy? Why the hell hadn’t that shown up in his medical?

“What’s wrong?” Haumann whispered to him.

The man didn’t reply. The quaking grew worse. His eyes were wide and only the whites showed.

“B team, report,” the commander called into his radio. “What’s going on, K?”

“Command, the window’s boarded up,” the B team leader transmitted. “Plywood. We can’t get a grenade in. Status of Alpha, K?”

The officer at the door had slumped now, his hand frozen on the knob, still shivering. Haumann whispered in a harsh voice, “We’re wasting time! Get him out of the way and take the door out. Now!” Another officer grabbed the seizing one.

The second one began to shake too.

The other officers stepped back. One muttered, “What’s going—”

It was then that the first officer’s hair caught fire.

“He wired the door!” Haumann was pointing to a metal plate on the floor. You saw these often in old buildings—they were used as cheap patches on hardwood floors. This one, though, had been used by Unsub 109 to make an electric booby trap; high voltage was coursing through both men.

Fire was sprouting from the first officer’s head, his eyebrows, the backs of his hands, then his collar. The other cop was unconscious now, but still quivering horribly.

“Jesus,” an officer whispered in Spanish.

Haumann tossed his H&K machine gun to a nearby officer, took the battering ram and swung it hard at the wrist of the officer gripping the knob. Bones probably shattered, but the ram knocked his fingers loose. The circuit broken, the two men collapsed. Sachs beat out the flames, which were filling the hallway with the revolting smell of burnt hair and flesh.

Two of the backup officers began CPR on their unconscious colleagues, while an A-team cop grabbed the handles of the battering ram and swung it into the door, which burst open. The team raced inside, guns up. Sachs followed.

It took only five seconds to learn that the apartment was empty.

Bo Haumann called into his radio, “B Team, B team, we’re inside. No sign of the suspect. Get downstairs, sweep the alley. But remember—he waited around at the last scene. He goes for innocents. And he goes for cops.”

A desk lamp burned and when Sachs touched the seat of the chair she found it was warm. A small closed-circuit TV sat on the desk, the fuzzy screen showing the hallway in front of the door. He’d had a security camera hidden somewhere outside and seen them coming. The killer had gotten away only moments ago. But where? The officers looked around for an escape route. The window by the fire escape was covered with plywood. The other was uncovered but it was thirty feet above the alley. “He
was
here. How the hell’d he get away?”

The answer came a moment later.

“Found this,” an officer called. He’d been looking under the bed. He pulled the cot away from the wall, revealing a hole just big enough for a person to crawl through. It looked like the unsub had cut through the plaster and removed the brick wall between this building and the one next door. When he saw them on the TV monitor he’d simply kicked out the plaster on the other side of the wall and slipped into the adjoining building.

Haumann sent more officers to check the roof and nearby streets, others to find and cover the entrances into the building next door.

“Somebody into the hole,” the ESU commander ordered.

“I’ll go, sir,” a short officer said.

But with his bulky armor, even he couldn’t fit through the gap.

“I’ll do it,” Sachs said, by far the slimmest of the officers present. “But I need this room cleared. To save the evidence.”

“Roger that. We’ll get you inside then pull back.” Haumann ordered the bed moved aside. Sachs knelt down and shone her flashlight through the hole, on the other side of which was a catwalk in a warehouse or factory. To reach it she had a four-foot crawl through the tight space.

“Shit,” muttered Amelia Sachs, the woman who’d drive 160 miles per hour and trade shots face to face with cornered perps but came close to paralysis at the hint of claustrophobia.

Headfirst or feet?

She sighed.

Headfirst would be spookier but safer; at least she’d have a few seconds to find the umsub’s firing position before he could draw a target. She looked into the tight, dark space. A deep breath. Pistol in hand, she started forward.

*   *   *

What the hell’s the matter with me? Lon Sellitto thought, standing in front of the warehouse beside the herbal goods importer, the building whose front door he was supposed to be guarding. He stared at this doorway and at the windows, looking for the escaped unsub, praying the perp would show up so he could nail him.

Praying that he wouldn’t.

What the hell’s the matter?

In his years on the force Sellitto had been in a dozen firefights, taken weapons off cranked-up psychos, even wrestled a suicide off the roof of the Flatiron Building, with nothing but six inches of ornate trim separating him from heaven. He’d gotten shook sometimes, sure. But he’d always bounced right back. Nothing’d ever affected him like Barry’s death this morning. Being in the line of fire had spooked him, no denying that. But this was something else. Something to do with being so close to a person at that one moment . . . the moment of death. He couldn’t get the librarian’s voice out of his head, his last words as a living person.

I didn’t really see—

Couldn’t forget the sound of the three bullets striking his chest either.

Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

They were soft, barely audible, faint slaps. He’d never heard a noise like that. Lon Sellitto now shivered and felt nauseous.

And the man’s brown eyes . . . They were looking right into Sellitto’s when the slugs hit. In a fraction of an instant there was surprise, then pain, then . . . nothing. It was the oddest thing Sellitto had ever seen. Not like drifting off to sleep, not distracted. The only way to describe it: one moment there was something complicated and real behind the eyes and then, an instant later, even before he crumpled to the sidewalk, there was nothing.

The detective had remained frozen, staring at the limp doll lying in front of him—despite the fact that he knew he should be trying to run down the shooter. The medics had actually jostled him aside to get to Barry; Sellitto had been unable to move.

Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

Then, when it came time to call Barry’s next of kin, Sellitto had balked again. He’d made plenty of those difficult calls over the years. None of them easy, of course. But today he simply couldn’t face it. He’d made up some bullshit excuse about his phone and let someone else do the duty. He was afraid his voice would crack. He was afraid he’d cry, which he’d never done in his decades of service.