The Twelfth Card (20 page)

Now, he heard the radio report on the futile pursuit of the perp.

Hearing,
tap, tap, tap . . .

Fuck, I just want to go home.

He wanted to be with Rachel, have a beer with her on their porch in Brooklyn. Well, too early for beer. A coffee. Or maybe it wasn’t too early for a beer. Or a scotch. He wanted to be sitting there, watching the grass and trees. Talking. Or not saying anything. Just to be with her. Suddenly the detective’s thoughts shifted to his teenage son, who lived with Sellitto’s ex. He hadn’t called the boy for three or four days. Had to do that.

He—

Shit. Sellitto realized that he was standing in the middle of Elizabeth Street with his back to the building he was supposed to be guarding, lost in thought. Jesus Christ! What’re you doing? The shooter’s loose around here somewhere, and you’re fucking
daydreaming
? He could be waiting in that alley there, or the other one, just like he was that morning.

Crouching, Sellitto turned back, examining the dark windows, smudged or shaded. The perp could be behind any one of them, sighting down on him right now with that fucking little gun of his.
Tap, tap . . .
The needles from the bullets tearing flesh to shreds as they fanned out. Sellitto shivered and
stepped back, taking refuge between two parked delivery trucks, out of sight of the windows. Peering around the side of one van, he watched the black windows, he watched the door.

But those weren’t what he saw. No, he was seeing the brown eyes of the librarian in front of him, a few feet away.

I didn’t . . .

Tap, tap . . .

Life becoming no life.

Those eyes . . .

He wiped his shooting hand on his suit trousers, telling himself that he was sweating only because of the body armor. What was with the fucking weather? It was too hot for October. Who the hell
wouldn’t
sweat?

*   *   *

“I can’t see him, K,” Sachs whispered into her microphone.

“Say again?” was Haumann’s staticky reply.

“No sign of him, K.”

The warehouse into which Unsub 109 had fled was essentially one big open space divided by mesh catwalks. On the floor were pallets of olive oil bottles and tomato sauce cans, sealed in shrink-wrap. The catwalk she stood on was about thirty feet up, around the perimeter—level with the unsub’s apartment in the building next door. It was a working warehouse, though probably used only sporadically; there were no signs that employees had been here recently. The lights were out but enough illumination filtered through greasy skylights to give her a view of the place.

The floors were swept clean and she could find no
footprints to reveal which way Unsub 109 had gone. In addition to the front door and back loading-dock door, there were two others on the ground-floor level, to the side. One labeled
Restroom,
the other unmarked.

Moving slowly, swinging her Glock ahead of her, her flashlight beam seeking a target, Amelia Sachs soon cleared the catwalks and the open area of the warehouse. She reported this to Haumann. ESU officers then kicked in the loading-dock door of the warehouse and entered, spreading out. Relieved for the reinforcements, she used hand signals to point to the two side doors. The cops converged on them.

Haumann radioed, “We’ve been canvassing but nobody’s seen him outside. He might still be inside, K.”

Sachs quietly acknowledged the transmission. She walked down the stairs to the main floor, joining up with the other officers.

She pointed to the bathroom. “On three,” she whispered.

They nodded. One pointed to himself but she shook her head, meaning she was going in on point. Sachs was furious—that the perp had gotten away, that he had a rape pack in a smiley-face bag, that he’d shot an innocent simply for diversion. She wanted this guy nailed and she wanted to make sure she had a piece of him.

She was in the armored vest, of course, but she couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if one of those needle bullets hit her face or arm.

Or throat.

She held up a single finger.
One . . .

Go in fast, go in low, with two pounds of pressure on the two-and-a-half-pound trigger.

You sure about this, girl?

An image of Lincoln Rhyme came to mind.

Two . . .

Then a memory of her patrolman father imparting his philosophy of life from his deathbed, “Remember, Amie, when you move they can’t getcha.”

So,
move
!

Three
.

She nodded. An officer kicked the door open—nobody was going near any metal doorknobs—and Sachs lunged forward, dropping into a painful crouch and spraying the flashlight beam around the small, windowless bathroom.

Empty.

She backed out and turned to the other door. The same routine here.

On three, another powerful kick. The door cracked inward.

Guns and flashlights up. Sachs thought, Brother, never easy, is it? She was looking down a long stairway that descended into pitch-black darkness. She noted that there were no backs on the stairs, which meant that the unsub could stand behind them and shoot into their ankles, calves or backs as they descended.

“Dark,” she whispered.

The men shut out their flashlights, mounted to the barrels of their machine guns. Sachs went first, knees aching. Twice she nearly tumbled down the uneven, loose steps. Four ESU officers followed her.

“Corner formation,” she whispered, knowing she wasn’t technically in charge, but unable to stop herself at this point. The troops didn’t question her. Touching one another’s shoulders to orient themselves, they formed a rough square, each facing outward and guarding a quadrant of the basement.

“Lights!”

The beams of the powerful halogens suddenly filled the small space as the guns sought targets.

She saw no threat, heard no sounds. Except one fucking loud heartbeat, she thought.

But that’s mine.

The basement contained a furnace, pipes, oil tanks, about a thousand empty beer bottles. Piles of trash. A half dozen edgy rats.

Two officers probed the stinking garbage bags, but the perp was clearly not here.

She radioed Haumann what they’d found. No one else had seen a sign of the unsub. All the officers were going to rendezvous at the command post truck to continue the canvass of the neighborhood, while Sachs searched the scenes for evidence—with everybody keeping in mind that, as at the museum earlier, the killer might still be nearby.

 . . . watch your back.

Sighing, she replaced her weapon and turned toward the stairs. Then paused. If she took the same flight of steps back up to the main floor—a nightmare on her arthritic knees—she’d still have to walk down another flight to street level. An easier alternative was to take the much shorter stairway directly to the sidewalk.

Sometimes, she reflected, turning toward it, you just have to pamper yourself.

*   *   *

Lon Sellitto had become obsessed with one particular window.

He’d heard the transmission that the warehouse was clear, but he wondered if ESU had actually gotten into all the nooks and crannies. After all, everybody’d
missed the unsub that morning at the museum. He’d easily gotten within pistol range.

Tap, tap, tap.

That one window, far right, second floor . . . It seemed to Sellitto that it had quivered once or twice.

Maybe just the wind. But maybe the motion was from somebody trying to open it.

Or aiming through it.

Tap.

He shivered and stepped back.

“Hey,” he called to an ESU officer, who’d just come out of the herbal importer’s. “Take a look—you see anything in that window?”

“Where?”

“That one.” Sellitto leaned out of cover just a bit and pointed to the black glass square.

“Naw. But the place’s cleared. Didn’t you hear?”

Sellitto leaned out from cover a bit farther, hearing
tap, tap, tap,
seeing brown eyes going lifeless. He squinted and, shivering, looked the window over carefully. Then in his periphery he suddenly saw motion to his left and heard the squeal of a door opening. A flash of light as the cold sun reflected off something metallic.

It’s him!

“God,” Sellitto whispered. He went for his gun, crouching and spinning toward the glint. But instead of following procedures when speed-drawing a weapon and keeping his index finger outside the trigger guard, he yanked the Colt from his holster in a panic.

Which is why the gun discharged an instant later, sending the slug directly toward the spot where Amelia Sachs was emerging from the basement door to the warehouse.

Standing at the corner of Canal and Sixth, a dozen blocks from his safe house, Thompson Boyd waited for the light to change. He caught his breath and wiped his damp face.

He wasn’t shaken, he wasn’t freaked out—the breathlessness and sweat were from the sprint to safety—but he
was
curious how they’d found him. He was always so careful with his contacts and the phones he used, and always checking to see if he was being followed, that he guessed it had to be through physical evidence. Made sense—because he was pretty sure that the woman in white, walking through the museum library scene like a sidewinder snake, had been in the hallway outside the apartment on Elizabeth Street. What had he left behind at the museum? Something in the rape bag? Some bits of trace from his shoes or clothes?

They were the best investigators he’d ever encountered. He’d have to keep that in mind.

Gazing at the traffic, he reflected on the escape. When he’d seen the officers coming up the stairs, he’d quickly placed the book and the purchases from the hardware store into the shopping bag, grabbed his attaché case and gun, then clicked on the switch that turned the doorknob live. He’d kicked through the wall and escaped into the warehouse next door, climbed to its roof and then hurried south to the end of the block. Climbing down a fire escape,
he’d turned west and started sprinting, taking the course he’d charted out and practiced dozens of times.

Now, at Canal and Sixth, he was lost in a crowd waiting for the light to change, hearing the sirens of the police cars joining in the search for him. His face was emotionless, his hands didn’t shake, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t panicked. This was the way he had to be. He’d seen it over and over again—dozens of professional killers he’d known had been caught because they panicked, lost their cool in front of the police and broke down under routine questioning. That, or they got rattled during the job, leaving evidence or living witnesses. Emotion—love, anger, fear—makes you sloppy. You had to be cool, distant.

Numb . . .

Thompson gripped his pistol, hidden in his raincoat pocket, as he watched several squad cars speed up Sixth Avenue. The vehicles skidded around the corner and turned east on Canal. They were pulling out all the stops looking for him. Not surprising, Thompson knew. New York’s finest would frown on a perp electrocuting one of their own (though in Thompson’s opinion it was the cop’s own fault for being careless).

Then a faint tone of concern sounded in his brain as he watched another squad car skid to a stop three blocks away. Officers got out and began interviewing people on the street. Then another rolled to a stop only two hundred feet from where he now stood. And they were moving this way. His car was parked near Hudson, about five minutes away. He had to get to it now. But still the stoplight remained red.

More
sirens filled the air.

This was becoming a problem.

Thompson looked at the crowd around him, most of them peering east, intent on the police cars and the officers. He needed some distraction, some cover to get across the street. Just something . . . didn’t have to be flamboyant. Just enough to deflect people’s attention for a time. A fire in a trash bin, a car alarm, the sound of breaking glass . . . Any other ideas? Glancing south, to his left, Thompson noticed a large commuter bus headed up Sixth Avenue. It was approaching the intersection where the cluster of pedestrians stood. Set fire to the trash bin, or this? Thompson Boyd decided. He eased closer to the curb, behind an Asian girl, slim, in her twenties. All it took was an easy push in her lower back to send her into the bus’s path. Twisting in panic, gasping, she slid off the curb.

“She fell!” Thompson cried in a drawl-free shout. “Get her!”

Her wail was cut off as the right sideview mirror of the bus struck her shoulder and head and flung her body, tumbling, along the sidewalk. Blood spattered the window and those standing nearby. The brakes screamed. So did several of the women in the crowd.

The bus skidded to a stop in the middle of Canal, blocking traffic, where it would have to remain until the accident investigation. A fire in a trash basket, a breaking bottle, a car alarm—they might’ve worked. But he’d decided that killing the girl was more efficient.

Traffic was instantly frozen, including two approaching police cars on Sixth Avenue.

He crossed the street slowly, leaving the gathering
crowd of horrified passersby, who were crying, or shouting, or just staring in shock at the limp, bloody body, crumpled against a chain-link fence. Her unseeing eyes stared blankly skyward. Apparently nobody thought the tragedy was anything more than a terrible accident.

People running toward her, people calling 911 on mobile phones . . . chaos. Thompson now calmly crossed the street, weaving through the stopped traffic. He’d already forgotten the Asian girl and was considering more important matters: He’d lost one safe house. But at least he’d escaped with his weapons, the things he’d bought at the hardware store and his instruction book. There were no clues at the apartment to lead to him or the man who’d hired him; not even the woman in white could find any connection. No, this wasn’t a serious problem.

He paused at a pay phone, called voice mail and received some good news. Geneva Settle, he learned, was attending Langston Hughes High School in Harlem. She was also, he found out, being guarded by police, which was no surprise, of course. Thompson would find out more details soon—presumably where she lived or even, with some luck, the fact that an opportunity had presented itself, and the girl had already been shot to death, the job finished.