The Twelfth Card (48 page)

“No, no, please,” Jax said, his face desperate. “They’ll violate me back. I can’t be outside twenty-five miles of Buffalo. I asked permission to leave the jurisdiction twice and both times they denied it. I came anyway.”

Cooper considered this. “I can run him through the general DOC database. It’ll look routine. The P.O.’s won’t see it.”

Rhyme nodded. A moment later a picture of Alonzo Jackson and his record popped up on the screen. Cooper read it. “Confirms what he said. Good-behavior timely discharge. Got himself some college credits. And there’s reference to a daughter, Geneva Settle, as next of kin.”

“Thank you for that,” Jax said, relieved.

“What’s with the books?”

“I couldn’t come up to y’all and just say who I was—I’d get violated back—so I got copies of a bunch of books Geneva read when she was young. So she’d know the note was really from me.”

“What note?”

“Wrote her a note, put it in one of the books.”

Cooper rummaged through the bag. In a battered copy of
The Secret Garden
was a slip of paper. In careful handwriting were the words:
Gen baby, this is from your father. Please call me.
Beneath this message was his phone number.

Sellitto stepped back into the doorway. He nodded. “Talked to the Carlson woman. Everything he said checks out.”

Rhyme asked, “Geneva’s mother was your girlfriend, not wife. That’s why Geneva’s not ‘Jackson’?”

“That’s right.”

“Where do you live?” Bell asked.

“Got a room in Harlem. A Hundred Thirty-sixth. Once I found Geneva I was going to bring her back to Buffalo till I got permission to come back home.” His face grew still and Rhyme saw what he believed was pure sorrow in his eyes. “But I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening now.”

“Why?” Sachs asked.

Jax gave a wistful grin. “I saw where she lives, that nice place near Morningside. I was happy for her, of course, real happy. She’ll have herself two good foster parents taking care of her, maybe a brother or sister, which she always wanted but that didn’t work out, after Venus had such a bad time at the clinic. Why’d Geneva wanta come back with me? She’s got the life she deserves, everything I couldn’t give her.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs with a raised eyebrow. Jax didn’t catch it.

His story was sounding legit to Rhyme. But he had a thick vein of policeman’s skepticism in him. “I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Anything.”

“Who’s the aunt you mentioned?”

“My father’s sister. Lilly Hall. She helped raise me. Widow twice over. She’d’ve turned ninety this year. August. If she’s still with us.”

Rhyme had no clue about her age or birthday but that was the name Geneva had given them. “She’s still alive, yes.”

A smile. “I’m glad about that. I’ve missed her. I couldn’t find her either.”

Bell said, “You told Geneva something about the word ‘sir.’ What would that’ve been?”

“I told her even when she was little to look people in the eye and always be respectful, but never to call anyone ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ unless they earned it.”

The Carolina detective nodded to Rhyme and Sachs.

The criminalist asked, “Who’s Charles Singleton?”

Jax blinked in surprise. “How d’you know about him?”

“Answer the man, scurv,” Dellray snapped.

“He’s my, I don’t know, great-great-great-great-grandfather or something.”

“Keep going,” Rhyme encouraged.

“Well, he was a slave in Virginia. His master freed him and his wife and gave ’em a farm up north. Then he volunteered to be in the Civil War, you know, like in that movie
Glory.
He came back home after, worked his orchard and taught at his school—an African free school. Made money selling cider to workers building boats up the road from his farm. I know he got medals in the war. He even met Abraham Lincoln once in Richmond. Just after the Union troops took it over. Or that’s what my daddy said.” Another sad laugh. “Then there was this story he got himself arrested for stealing some gold or payroll or something and went to jail. Just like me.”

“Do you know what happened to him after prison?”

“No. Never heard anything about that. So, you believe that I’m Geneva’s father?”

Dellray looked at Rhyme, cocked an eyebrow.

The criminalist sized the man up. “Almost. One last thing. Open your mouth.”

*   *   *

“You’re my
father
?”

Breathless, nearly dizzy from the news, Geneva Settle felt her heart pounding. She looked him over
carefully, her eyes scanning his face, his shoulders, his hands. Her first reaction had been utter disbelief but she couldn’t deny that she recognized him. He still wore the garnet ring that her mother, Venus, had given him for Christmas—when they were still celebrating Christmas. The memory she compared this man with, though, was vague, like looking at someone with bright sun behind them.

Despite the driver’s license, the picture of her as a baby with him and her mother, the photo of one of his old graffiti drawings, she still would’ve denied the connection between them to the last, except for a DNA test that Mr. Cooper had run. There was no doubt they were kin.

They were alone upstairs—alone, of course, except for Detective Bell, her protective shadow. The rest of the police officers were downstairs working on the case, still trying to figure out who was behind the jewelry exchange robbery.

But Mr. Rhyme and Amelia and all the others—as well as the killer and everything else about the frightening events of the past few days—were, for the moment, forgotten. The questions that now consumed Geneva were: How had her father gotten here? And why?

And, most important: What does this mean for me?

A nod at the shopping bag. She picked up the Dr. Seuss book. “I don’t read children’s books anymore.” It was all she could think of to say. “I turned sixteen two months ago.” Her point, she guessed, was to remind him of all the birthdays she’d spent alone.

“I brought you those just so you’d know it was me. I know you’re too old for them.”

“What about your other family?” she asked coldly.

Jax shook his head. “They told me what Venus said to you, Genie.”

She was pissed he was using the nickname he’d given her years ago. Short for both “Geneva” and “genius.”

“She was making that up. To turn you against me. No, no, Genie, I’d never leave you. I got arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“It’s true, miss,” Roland Bell said. “We’ve seen his files. He got arrested the day he left you and your mother. He’s been in prison ever since. Just got out.”

He then told her a story about a robbery, about being desperate to get some money to make their life better, to help her mother.

But the words were tired, exhausted. He was giving her one of the thousands of limp excuses you heard so often in the neighborhood. The crack dealer, the shoplifter, the welfare scammer, the chain snatcher.

I did it for you, baby . . . .

She looked down at the book in her hand. It was used. Who’d it been for when it was new? Where was the parent who’d bought it originally for his or her child? In jail, washing dishes, driving a Lexus, performing neurosurgery?

Had her father stolen it from a used bookstore?

“I came back for you, Genie. I’ve been desperate to find you. And I was even more desperate when Betty called and told me you’d been attacked . . . . What happened yesterday? Who’s after you? Nobody ever told me.”

“I saw something,” she said dismissingly, not wanting to give him too much information. “Maybe somebody committing a crime.” Geneva had no interest in the direction of this conversation. She
looked him over and said more cruelly than she intended, “You know that Mom’s dead.”

He nodded. “I
didn’t
know it till I came back. Then I heard. But I wasn’t surprised. She was a troubled woman. Maybe she’s happier now.”

Geneva didn’t think so. And in any case no amount of heaven would make up for the unhappiness of dying alone the way she had, her body shrunken but her face puffed up like a yellow moon.

And it wouldn’t make up for the earlier unhappiness—of getting fucked in stairways for a couple rocks of crack while her daughter waited outside the front door.

Geneva said none of this.

He smiled. “You’ve got yourself a real nice place you’re staying.”

“It was temporary. I’m not there anymore.”

“You’re not? Where’re you living?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

She regretted saying this. It gave him, she realized, a foot in the door. And, sure enough, he pushed his way in: “I’m going to ask my P.O. again if I can move back here. Knowing I’ve got family to take care of, he might say it’s all right.”

“You
don’t
have a family here. Not anymore.”

“I know you’re mad, baby. But I’ll make it up to you. I—”

She flung the book to the floor. “Six years and nothing. No word. No call. No letter.” Infuriatingly, tears swelled in her eyes. She wiped them with shaking hands.

He whispered, “An’
where
would I write?
Where
would I call? I tried steady all those six years to get in touch with you. I’ll show you the stack of letters I got, all sent back to me in prison. A hundred of ’em,
I’d guess. I tried everything I could think of. I just couldn’t find you.”

“Well, thanks for the apology, you know. If it
is
an apology. But I think it’s time for you to go.”

“No, baby, let me—”

“Not ‘baby,’ not ‘Genie,’ not ‘daughter.’ ”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he repeated. He wiped his eyes.

She felt absolutely nothing, seeing his sorrow—or whatever it was. Nothing, that is, except anger. “Leave!”

“But, baby, I—”

“No. Just go away!”

Once more the detective from North Carolina, the expert at guarding people, did his job smoothly and without wavering. He rose and silently but firmly ushered her father into the hallway. He nodded back at the girl, gave her a comforting smile and closed the door behind him, leaving Geneva to herself.

While the girl and her father had been upstairs, Rhyme and the others had been going over leads to potential jewelry store heists.

And having no success.

The materials that Fred Dellray had brought them about money-laundering schemes involving jewelry were small-time operations, none of them centered in Midtown. And they had no reports from Interpol or local law enforcement agencies containing anything relevant to the case.

The criminalist was shaking his head in frustration when his phone rang. “Rhyme here.”

“Lincoln, it’s Parker.”

The handwriting expert analyzing the note from Boyd’s safe house. Parker Kincaid and Rhyme traded newsbites about health and family. Rhyme learned that Kincaid’s live-in partner, FBI agent Margaret Lukas, was fine, as were Parker’s children, Stephie and Robby.

Sachs sent her greetings and then Kincaid got down to business. “I’ve been working on your letter nonstop since you sent me the scan. I’ve got a profile of the writer.”

Serious handwriting analysis never seeks to determine personality from the way people form their letters; handwriting itself is relevant only when comparing one document with another, say, when determining forgeries. But that didn’t interest Rhyme at the moment. No, what Parker Kincaid
was talking about was deducing characteristics of the writer based on the language he used—the “unusual” phrasing that Rhyme had noted earlier. This could be extremely helpful in identifying suspects. Grammatical and syntactical analysis of the Lindbergh baby ransom note, for instance, gave a perfect profile of the kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann.

With the enthusiasm he typically felt for his craft, Kincaid continued, “I found some interesting things. You’ve got the note handy?”

“It’s right in front of us.”

A black girl, fifth floor in this window, 2 October, about 0830. She saw my delivery van when he was parked in a alley behind the Jewelry echange. Saw enough to guess the plans of mine. Kill her.

Kincaid said, “To start with, he’s foreign born. The awkward syntax and the misspellings tell me that. So does the way he indicates the date—putting the day before the month. And the time is given in the twenty-four-hour clock. That’s rare in America.”

The handwriting expert continued, “Now, another important point: he—”

“Or
she,
” Rhyme interrupted.

“I’m leaning toward male,” Kincaid countered. “Tell you why in a minute. He uses the gendered pronoun ‘he,’ referring, it seems, to his van. That’s typical of several different foreign languages. But what really narrows it down is the two-member nominal phrase in the genitive construction.”

“The
what
?” Rhyme asked.

“The genitive construction—a way to create the possessive. Your unsub wrote ‘my delivery van’ at one point.”

Rhyme scanned the note. “Got it.”

“But later he wrote ‘plans of mine.’ That makes me think your boy’s first language is Arabic.”

“Arabic?”

“I’ll say it’s a ninety percent likelihood. There’s a genitive construction in Arabic called
i.daafah
. The possessive’s usually formed by saying, ‘The car John.’ Meaning, ‘The car
of
John.’ Or, in your note, the ‘plans of mine.’ But the rules of Arabic grammar require that only
one
word is used for the thing that’s possessed—the ‘delivery van’ won’t work in Arabic; it’s a two-word phrase, so he can’t use
i.daafah
. He simply says ‘my delivery van.’ The other clue is the misuse of the indefinite article ‘a’ in ‘a alley.’ That’s common among Arabic speakers; the language doesn’t use indefinite articles, only the definite ‘the.’ ” Kincaid added, “That’s true of Welsh, too, but I don’t think this guy’s from Cardiff.”

“Good, Parker,” Sachs said. “Very subtle, but good.”

A faint laugh came from the speakerphone. “I’ll tell you, Amelia, everybody in the business’s been doing a lot of boning up on Arabic in the last few years.”

“That’s why you think it’s a man.”

“How many women Arab perps you see?”