The Twelfth Card (31 page)

Slowly, the team removed the glass-and-foil device. They sealed up the pieces in special hazardous materials containers.

Another transmission—from one of the Bomb Squad officers: “Detective Sachs, we’ve rendered it safe. You can run the car, you want. But keep the mask on inside. There’s no gas but the acid fumes could be dangerous.”

“Right. Thanks.” She started forward.

Rhyme’s voice crackled again. “Hold on a minute . . . . ” He came back on. “They’re safe, Sachs. They’re at the precinct.”

“Good.”

The “they” were the intended victims of the poison
left in the Crown Victoria, Roland Bell and Geneva Settle. They’d come very close to dying. But, as they’d prepared to rush out of the great-aunt’s apartment to the car, Bell had realized that something about the crime scene of Pulaski’s assault seemed odd. Barbe Lynch had found the rookie holding his weapon. But this unsub was too smart to leave a gun in the hand of a downed cop, even if he was unconscious. No, he’d at least pitch it away, if he didn’t want to take it with him. Bell had concluded that somehow the unsub himself had fired the shot and left the gun behind to make them think that the rookie had fired. The purpose? To draw the officers away from the front of the apartment.

And why? The answer was obvious: so that they’d leave the cars unguarded.

The Crown Vic had been unlocked, which meant the unsub might have slipped an explosive device inside. So he’d taken the keys to the locked Chevy that Martinez and Lynch had driven here and used that vehicle to speed Geneva out of danger, warning everyone to stay clear of the unmarked Ford until the Bomb Squad had a chance to go over it. Using fiberoptic cameras they searched under and inside the Crown Vic and found the device under the driver’s seat.

Sachs now ran the scenes: the car, the approach to it and the alley where Pulaski had been attacked. She didn’t find much other than prints of Bass walking shoes, which confirmed the attacker had been Unsub 109, and another device, a homemade one: a bullet from Pulaski’s service automatic had been rubber-banded to a lit cigarette. The unsub had left it burning in the alley and snuck around toward the front of the building. When it went off, the “gunshot”
had drawn the officers to the back, giving him a chance to plant the device in Bell’s car.

Damn, that’s slick, she thought with dark admiration.

There was no sign that his partner, the black man in the combat jacket, had been—or still was—nearby.

Donning the mask again, she carefully examined the glass parts of the poison device itself, but they yielded no prints or other clues, which surprised nobody. Maybe the cyanide or acid would tell them something. Discouraged, she reported her results to Rhyme.

He asked, “And what did you search?”

“Well, the car and the alleyway around Pulaski. And then the entrance and exit routes into and out of the alley, the street where he approached the Crown Vic—both directions.”

Silence for a moment, as Rhyme considered this.

She felt uneasy. Was she missing something? “What’re you thinking, Rhyme?”

“You searched by the book, Sachs. Those were the right places. But did you take in the totality of the scene?”

“Chapter Two of your book.”

“Good. At least
somebody’
s read it. But did you
do
what I say?”

Although time was always of the essence when searching a crime scene, one of the practices Rhyme insisted on was taking a few moments to get a sense of the entire scene in light of the particular crime. The example he cited in his forensic science textbook was an actual murder in Greenwich Village. The primary crime scene was where the strangled victim was found, his apartment. The secondary was the fire escape by which the killer had gotten away. It was the
third
scene, though, an unlikely one, at which Rhyme had found the matches bearing the killer’s fingerprints: a gay bar three blocks away. No one would’ve thought to search the bar, except that Rhyme found some gay porno tapes in the victim’s apartment; a canvass of the nearest gay bar turned up a bartender who identified the victim and recalled him sharing a drink with a man earlier that night. The lab raised latents from the book of matches resting on the bar near where the two men had sat; the prints led them to the murderer.

“Let’s keep thinking, Sachs. He sets up this plan—improvised but elaborate—to distract our people and get the device into a car. That meant he had to know where all the players were, what they were doing and how he could make enough time to set the device. Which tells us what?”

Sachs was already scanning the street. “He was watching.”

“Yes, indeed, Sachs. Good. And where might he have been doing that from?”

“Across the street’d have the best visibility. But there’re dozens of buildings he could’ve been in. I have no idea which one.”

“True. But Harlem’s a neighborhood, right?”

“I . . . ”

“Understand what I’m saying?”

“Not exactly.”

“Families, Sachs. Families live there, extended families living together, not yuppie singles. A home invasion wouldn’t go unnoticed. Neither would somebody skulking about in lobbies or alleys. Good word, isn’t that? Skulking. Says it all.”

“Your point, Rhyme?” His good mood had returned but she was irritated that he was more interested in the puzzle of the case than he was about,
say, Pulaski’s chances for recovery or that Roland Bell and Geneva Settle had nearly been killed.

“Not an apartment. Not a rooftop—Roland’s people always look there. There’ll be someplace
else
he was watching from, Sachs. Where do
you
think it might be?”

Scanning the street again . . . “There’s a billboard on an abandoned building. It’s full of graffiti and handbills—real busy, you know, hard to spot anybody looking out from behind it. I’m going to see.”

Checking carefully for signs that the unsub was nearby, and finding none, she crossed the street and walked to the back of the old building—a burnt-out store, it seemed. Climbing through the back window, she saw that the floor was dusty—the perfect surface for footprints and, sure enough, she spotted Unsub 109’s Bass walker shoes right away. Still, she slipped rubber bands around the booties of the Tyvek overalls—a trick Rhyme invented to make certain that an officer exploring the crime scene didn’t confuse his or her own prints with those of the suspect. The detective started into the room, her Glock in hand.

Following the unsub’s prints to the front, she paused from time to time, listening for noises. Sachs heard a skitter or two but, no stranger to the sound track of seamier New York, she knew immediately that the intruder was a rat.

In the front she looked out through a gap in the plywood panels of the billboard where he’d stood and noticed that, yes, it provided a perfect view of the street. She collected some basic forensic equipment then returned and hit the walls with ultraviolet spray. Sachs turned the alternative light source wand on them.

But the only marks she found were latex glove prints.

She told Rhyme what she’d found and then said, “I’ll collect trace from where he stood but I don’t see very much. He’s just not leaving anything.”

“Too professional,” Rhyme said, sighing. “Every time we outsmart him, he’s already outsmarted us. Well, bring in what you’ve got, Sachs. We’ll look it over.”

*   *   *

As they waited for Sachs to return, Rhyme and Sellitto made a decision: While they believed that Unsub 109 had fled the area around the apartment they still arranged to have Geneva’s great-aunt, Lilly Hall, and her friend moved to a hotel room for the time being.

As for Pulaski, he was in intensive care, still unconscious from the beating. The doctors couldn’t say whether he’d live or not. In Rhyme’s lab, Sellitto slammed his phone shut angrily after getting this news. “He was a fucking rookie. I had no business recruiting him for Bell’s team. I should’ve gone myself.”

A curious thing to say. “Lon,” Rhyme said, “you’ve got rank. You graduated from guard detail, when? Twenty years ago?”

But the big cop wouldn’t be consoled. “Put him in over his head. Stupid of me. Goddamn.”

Once again the hand rubbed at the hotspot on his cheek. The detective was edgy and looked particularly rumpled today. He usually wore pretty much what he wore now: light shirt and dark suit. Rhyme wondered, though, if these were the same clothes he’d had on yesterday. It seemed so. Yes, there was a dot of blood from the library shooting on the jacket sleeve—as if he were wearing the clothing as penance.

The doorbell rang.

Thom returned a moment later with a tall, lanky man. Pale skin, bad posture, unruly beard and brown, curly hair. He was dressed in a tan corduroy jacket and brown slacks. Birkenstocks.

His eyes scanned the laboratory then glanced at Rhyme and looked him over. Unsmiling, he asked, “Is Geneva Settle here?”

“Who’re you?” Sellitto asked.

“I’m Wesley Goades.”

Ah, the legal Terminator—who was not fictional, Rhyme was somewhat surprised to find. Sellitto checked his ID and nodded.

The man’s long fingers continually adjusted thick wire-rimmed glasses or tugged absently at his long beard and he never looked anyone in the eye for more than a half second. The constant ocular jitters reminded Rhyme of Geneva’s friend, the gum-snapping Lakeesha Scott.

He offered a card to Thom, who showed it to Rhyme. Goades was director of the Central Harlem Legal Services Corporation and was affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union. The fine print at the bottom said that he was licensed to practice law in New York state, the federal district courts in New York and Washington, D.C., and before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe his days representing capitalist insurance companies had turned him to the other side.

In response to the querying glances from Rhyme and Sellitto, he said, “I’ve been out of town. I got the message that Geneva called my office yesterday. Something about her being a witness. I just wanted to check on her.”

“She’s fine,” Rhyme said. “There’ve been some attempts on her life but we have a full-time guard on her.”

“She’s being held here? Against her will?”

“Not
held,
no,” the criminalist said firmly. “She’s staying in her home.”

“With her parents?”

“An uncle.”

“What’s this all about?” the unsmiling lawyer asked, his eyes flitting from face to face, taking in the evidence boards, the equipment, the wires.

Rhyme was, as always, reluctant to discuss an active case with a stranger, but the lawyer might have some helpful information. “We think somebody’s worried about what Geneva’s been researching for a project for school. About an ancestor of hers. Did she ever mention anything to you?”

“Oh, something about a former slave?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s how I met her. She walked into my office last week and asked if I knew where she could get records of old crimes in the city—back in the eighteen hundreds. I let her look through a few of the old books I have but it’s almost impossible to find trial court records going back that far. I couldn’t help her.” The skinny man raised an eyebrow. “She wanted to pay me for my time. Most of my
clients
don’t even do that.”

With another look around the town house, Goades seemed satisfied that the situation was what it seemed to be. “Are you close to catching this guy?”

“We have some leads,” Rhyme said noncommittally.

“Well, tell her I came by, would you? And if there’s anything she needs, anytime, have her call me.” He nodded at his card and then left.

Mel Cooper chuckled. “A hundred bucks he’s represented a spotted owl at one point or another in his career.”

“No takers on that one,” Rhyme muttered. “And what’d we do to deserve all these distractions? Back to work. Let’s
move
!”

Twenty minutes later Bell and Geneva arrived with a box of documents and other material from her great-aunt’s apartment, which a patrolman had delivered to them at the precinct house.

Rhyme told her that Wesley Goades had come by.

“To check on me, right? I told you he was good. If I ever sue anybody I’m going to hire him.”

Lawyer of Mass Destruction . . .

Amelia Sachs walked inside with the evidence from the scene, nodding a greeting to Geneva and the others.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Rhyme said eagerly.

The cigarette that Unsub 109 had used as a fuse for the distracting “gunshot” was a Merit brand, common and untraceable. The cigarette had been lit but not smoked—or at least they could detect no teeth marks or saliva on the filter. This meant he was not a habitual smoker, most likely. No fingerprints on the cigarette, of course. Nor was there anything distinctive about the rubber band he’d affixed the cigarette to the bullet with. They found no manufacturer’s markers in the cyanide. The acid could be purchased in many locations. The contraption that would mix the acid and poison in Bell’s car was made of household objects: a glass jar, foil and a glass candleholder. Nothing had any markings or indications that could be traced to a particular location.

In the abandoned building where the killer had done his surveillance Sachs had found additional traces of the mysterious liquid she’d recovered from the Elizabeth Street safe house (and whose FBI analysis Rhyme was still impatiently awaiting). In
addition she’d recovered a few tiny flakes of orange paint the shade of roadside signs or construction or demolition site warnings. Sachs was sure these were from the unsub because she’d located flakes in two different locations, right next to his footprints, and nowhere else in the abandoned store. Rhyme speculated that the unsub might have masqueraded as a highway, construction or utility worker. Or maybe this was his real job.

Meanwhile Sachs and Geneva had been searching through the box of family memorabilia from her aunt’s house. It contained dozens of old books and magazines, papers, scraps, notes, recipes, souvenirs and postcards.

And, it turned out, a yellowed letter filled with Charles Singleton’s distinctive handwriting. The lettering on this page was, however, far less elegant than in his other correspondence.