The Twelfth Card (55 page)

Amelia Sachs had already searched the office and removed evidence linking Ashberry to Boyd and taped off certain parts of the room. This meeting was in a cleared area, which happened to feature stained-glass windows and rosewood paneling.

Sitting beside Rhyme and Thom were Geneva Settle and attorney Wesley Goades. Rhyme was amused that there’d been a few moments when he’d actually suspected Goades of complicity in the case—owing to his suddenly materializing in
Rhyme’s apartment, looking for Geneva, and the Fourteenth Amendment aspect of the intrigue; the lawyer would’ve had a strong motive to make certain that nothing jeopardized an important weapon for civil libertarians. Rhyme had also wondered if the man’s loyalty to his former insurance company employers had led him to betray Geneva.

But Rhyme hadn’t shared his suspicion of the lawyer and thus no apologies were in order. After Rhyme and Sachs had discovered that the case had taken an unexpected turn, the criminalist had suggested that Goades be retained for what was coming next. Geneva Settle, of course, was all in favor of hiring him.

Across the marble coffee table from them were Gregory Hanson, the president of Sanford Bank and Trust, his assistant, Stella Turner, and the senior partner at Sanford’s law firm, a trim mid-forties attorney named Anthony Cole. They exuded a collective unease, which, Rhyme assumed, would’ve arisen late yesterday when he’d called Hanson to propose a meeting to discuss the “Ashberry matter.”

Hanson had agreed but added both quickly and wearily that he was as shocked as anyone about the man’s death in the shootout at Columbia University several days before. He knew nothing about it—or about any jewelry store robbery or terrorist attack—except what he’d read in the news. What exactly did Rhyme and the police want?

Rhyme had offered standard cop-ese: “Just the answers to a few routine questions.”

Now, pleasantries disposed of, Hanson asked, “Could you tell us what this is about?”

Rhyme got right to the point: He explained that William Ashberry had hired Thompson Boyd, a professional killer, to murder Geneva Settle.

Three horrified glances at the slim young girl in front of them. She looked back at each of them calmly.

Continuing, the criminalist added that Ashberry felt it was vital that nobody know the reason he wanted her dead so he and Boyd had set up several fake motives for the girl’s death. Originally the kill was supposed to look like a rape. Rhyme, though, had seen through that immediately, and as they continued to search for the killer he and the team had found what appeared to be the real reason for the murder: that Geneva could identify a terrorist planning an attack.

“But there were some problems with that: The bomber’s death should’ve ended any need to kill Geneva. But it didn’t. Boyd’s partner tried again. What was going on? We tracked down the man who sold the bomb to Boyd, an arsonist in New Jersey. The FBI arrested him. We linked some bills in his possession to Boyd’s safe house. That made him an accomplice to murder and he copped a plea. He told us that he put Ashberry and Boyd together and—”

“This terrorist thing, though,” the bank’s lawyer said skeptically, with a sour laugh. “Bill Ashberry and terrorists? It—”

“Getting there,” Rhyme said, equally sour. Maybe more so. He continued his explanation: The bomb maker’s statement wasn’t enough for a warrant to arrest Ashberry. So Rhyme and Sellitto decided they needed to flush him out. They placed an officer at Geneva’s high school, a man pretending to be an assistant principal. Anyone calling to ask about Geneva would be told that she was at Columbia with a professor in the law school. The real professor agreed to let them use not only his name but his office as well. Fred Dellray and Jonette Monroe, the
undercover gangsta girl from Geneva’s high school, were more than happy to play the roles of the professor and student. They’d done a fast but thorough job setting up the sting, even having some fake Photoshop pictures made up of Dellray with Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, to make sure Ashberry didn’t tip to the scam and bolt.

Rhyme now explained these events to Hanson and Cole, adding the details about the attempted murder in Mathers’s office.

He shook his head. “I should’ve guessed the perp had some connections to a bank. He’d been able to withdraw large amounts of cash and doctor the reporting statements. But”—Rhyme nodded to the lawyer—“what the hell was he up to? I understand that Episcopalians aren’t really a breeding ground for fundamentalist terrorism.”

No one smiled. Rhyme thought, bankers, lawyers—no sense of humor. He continued, “So I went back to the evidence and noticed something that bothered me: There was no radio transmitter to detonate the bomb. It should’ve been in the wreckage of the van, but it wasn’t.

“Why not? One conclusion was that Boyd and his partner had planted the bomb and kept the transmitter themselves to kill the Arab deliveryman as a diversion to keep us from finding the real motive for killing Geneva.”

“Okay,” Hanson said. “The real motive. What
was
it?”

“Had to do some thinking about that. I thought at first maybe Geneva had seen some tenants being evicted illegally when she was scrubbing graffiti off old buildings for a developer. But I looked into where that’d happened and found that Sanford Bank wasn’t involved in those buildings. So, where did
that leave us? I could only come back to what we’d originally thought . . . . ”

He explained about the old
Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated
that Boyd had stolen. “I’d forgotten that somebody had been tracking down the magazine
before
Geneva supposedly saw the van and terrorist. I think what happened was that Ashberry stumbled on that article when the Sanford Foundation renovated its archives last month. And he did some more research and found something real troubling, something that could ruin his life. He got rid of the foundation’s copy and decided he had to destroy all the copies of the magazine. Over the past few weeks he found most of them—but there was one left in the area: The librarian at the African-American museum in Midtown was getting their copy from storage and must’ve told Ashberry that, coincidentally, there was a girl who was interested in the same issue. Ashberry knew he had to destroy the article and kill Geneva, along with the librarian, because he could connect them.”

“But I still don’t understand
why,
” Cole, the lawyer, said. His sourness had blossomed into full-fledged irritation.

Rhyme explained the final piece of the puzzle: He related the story of Charles Singleton, the farm he’d been given by his master and the Freedmen’s Trust robbery—and the fact that the former slave had a secret. “
That
was the answer to why Charles was set up in 1868. And it’s the answer to why Ashberry had to kill Geneva.”

“Secret?” Stella, the assistant, asked.

“Oh, yes. I finally figured out what it was. I remembered something that Geneva’s father had told me. He said that Charles taught at an African free school near his home and that he sold cider to workers
building boats up the road.” Rhyme shook his head. “I made a careless assumption. We heard that his farm was in New York state . . . which it was. Except that it wasn’t
upstate,
like we were thinking.”

“No? Where was it?” Hanson asked.

“Easy to figure out,” he continued, “if you keep in mind there were working farms here in the city until the late eighteen hundreds.”

“You mean his farm was in Manhattan?” Stella asked.

“Not only,” Rhyme said, allowing himself the colloquialism. “It was right underneath this building.”

“We found a drawing of Gallows Heights in the 1800s that shows three or four big, tree-filled estates. One of them covered this and the surrounding blocks. Across the road from it was an African free school. Could that’ve been his school? And on the Hudson River”—Rhyme glanced out the window—“right about there, at Eighty-first Street, was a dry dock and shipyard. Could the workers there have been the ones Charles sold cider to?

“But was the estate his? There was one simple way to find out. Thom checked the Manhattan recorder’s office and found the record of a deed from Charles’s master to Charles. Yep, it was his. Then everything else fell into place. All the references we found to meetings in Gallows Heights—with politicians and civil rights leaders? It was
Charles’
s house they were meeting in.
That
was his secret—that he owned fifteen acres of prime land in Manhattan.”

“But why was it a secret?” Hanson asked.

“Oh, he didn’t dare tell anyone he was the owner. He wanted to, of course. That’s what he was so tormented about: He was proud that he owned a big farm in the city. He believed he could be a model for other former slaves. Show them that they could be treated as whole men, respected. That they could own land and work it, be members of the community. But he’d seen draft riots, the lynchings of blacks, the arson. So he and his wife pretended to be
caretakers. He was afraid that somebody would find out that a former slave owned a large plot of choice property and destroy it. Or, more likely, steal it from him.”

“Which,” Geneva said, “is exactly what happened.”

Rhyme continued, “When Charles was convicted all his property was confiscated—including the farm—and sold . . . . Now, that’s a nice
theory:
setting up someone with false charges to steal his property. But was there any proof? A tall order a hundred and forty years later—talk about cold cases . . . Well, there
was
some evidence. The Exeter Strongbow safes—the type that Charles allegedly broke into at the Freedmen’s Trust—they were made in England so I called a friend at Scotland Yard. He talked to a forensic locksmith, who said it’d be impossible to break into a nineteenth-century Exeter safe with only a hammer and chisel, which is what they found at the scene. Even steam-powered drills of that era would take three or four hours—and the article about the theft said that Charles was inside the trust for only twenty minutes.

“Next conclusion: Somebody else robbed the place, planted some of Charles’s tools at the scene and then bribed a witness to lie about him. I think that the actual thief was a man we found buried in the basement of the Potters’ Field tavern.” He explained about the Winskinskie ring and the man who’d worn it—that he was an officer in the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine.

“He was one of Boss Tweed’s cronies. And another one was William Simms, the detective who arrested Charles. Simms was later indicted for graft and planting false evidence on suspects. Simms, the Winskinskie man, and the judge and prosecutor engineered
Charles’s conviction. And they kept the money from the trust that wasn’t recovered.

“So, we’ve established Charles owned a huge estate in Gallows Heights and he was set up so somebody could steal it.” His eyebrow rose. “The next logical question? The big one?”

No takers.

“Obviously: Who the hell was the
perp
?” Rhyme snapped. “Who robbed Charles? Well, given that the motive was to steal his farm, all I had to do was find out who took title to the land.”

“Who was it?” Hanson asked, troubled but seemingly caught up in the historical drama.

The assistant smoothed her skirt and suggested, “Boss Tweed?”

“No. It was a colleague of his. A man who was seen regularly at the Potters’ Field tavern, along with some of the other notorious figures back then—Jim Fisk, Jay Gould and Detective Simms.” A glance at each of the people across the table. “His name was Hiram Sanford.”

The woman blinked. After a moment she said, “The founder of our bank.”

“The one and only.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Cole, the attorney. “How could he do that? He was one of the pillars of New York society.”

“Just like William Ashberry?” the criminalist asked sarcastically. “The business world wasn’t really any different then than it is now. Lots of financial speculation—one of Charles’s letters quoted the New York
Tribune
referring to the ‘bursting bubbles’ on Wall Street. Railroads were the Internet companies of the 1800s. Their stocks were overvalued and crashed. Sanford probably lost his fortune when that happened and Tweed agreed to bail him
out. But, being Tweed, he naturally wanted to use somebody else’s money to do it. So the two of them set up Charles, and Sanford bought the orchard at a rigged auction for a fraction of its value. He tore down Charles’s house and built his mansion on it, where we’re sitting right now.” A nod out the window toward the blocks nearby. “And then he and his heirs developed the land or sold it off little by little.”

“Didn’t Charles claim he was innocent, tell them what happened?” Hanson asked.

Rhyme scoffed, “A former slave against the anti-black Tammany Hall Democratic machine? How successful would
that
have been? Besides, he’d killed the man in the tavern.”

“So he was a murderer,” the attorney, Cole, pointed out quickly.

“Of course not,” Rhyme snapped. “He needed the Winskinskie man alive—to prove his innocence. The death was self-defense. But Charles had no choice but to hide the body and cover up the shooting. If they’d found out, he’d be hanged.”

Hanson shook his head. “Only there’s one thing that doesn’t make any sense: Why would what Hiram Sanford did way back then affect Bill Ashberry? Granted it’s bad PR—a bank founder stealing a former slave’s property? That’d be an ugly ten minutes on the nightly news. But frankly there
are
spin doctors who can handle that sort of thing. It’s not worth killing somebody for.”

“Ah.” Rhyme nodded. “Very good question . . . We’ve done a little research. Ashberry was in charge of your real estate division, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And if it were to go under he’d lose his job and most of his fortune?”

“I suppose so. But why would it go under? It’s our most profitable unit.”

Rhyme looked at Wesley Goades. “You’re up.”

The lawyer glanced briefly at the people across the table, then down again. The man simply could not hold eye contact. Nor was he given to Rhyme’s pointed explanations—and occasional digressions. He said simply, “We’re here to inform you that Ms. Settle intends to file a lawsuit against your bank seeking restitution for her loss.”