The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Right."

  "You still have it?"

  Mel Cooper saved everything. He called up the Times article on his computer. The text popped up on his screen. "Got it here."

  Rhyme read the article and learned that the Sanford Foundation had an extensive archive on Upper West Side history. "Call up the director of the place--William Ashberry. Tell him we need to go through his library."

  "Will do." Cooper lifted a phone. He had a brief conversation, then hung up and reported, "They're happy to help. Ashberry'll hook us up with a curator in the archives."

  "Somebody's got to go check it out," Rhyme said, looking at Sachs with a raised eyebrow.

  " 'Somebody'? I drew the short straw without drawing?"

  Who else did she have in mind? Pulaski was in the hospital. Bell and his team were guarding Geneva. Cooper was a lab man. Sellitto was too senior to do grunt work like that. Rhyme chided, "There are no small crime scenes, there are only small crime scene investigators."

  "Funny," she said sourly. She pulled on her jacket, grabbed her purse.

  "One thing," Rhyme said, serious now.

  She lifted an eyebrow.

  "We know he'll target us."

  Police, he meant.

  "Keep that orange paint in mind. Watch out for construction or highway workers . . . . Well, with him, watch out for anybody."

  "Got it," she said. Then took the address of the foundation and left.

  After she'd gone, Professor Mathers looked though the letters and other documents once more then handed them back to Cooper. He glanced at Geneva. "When I was your age they didn't even have African-American studies in high school. What's the program like nowadays? Do you take two semesters?"

  Geneva frowned. "AAS? I'm not taking it."

  "Then what's your term paper for?"

  "Language arts."

  "Ah. So you're taking black studies next year?"

  A hesitation. "I'm not taking it at all."

  "Really?"

  Geneva obviously sensed some criticism in his question. "It's pass/fail. All you have to do is show up. I don't want that kind of grade on my record."

  "It can't hurt."

  "What's the point?" she asked bluntly. "We've heard it all over and over . . . . Amistad, slavers, John Brown, the Jim Crow laws, Brown versus the Board of Education, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X . . . " She fell silent.

  With the detachment of a professional teacher, Mather asked, "Just whining about the past?"

  Geneva finally nodded. "I guess that's how I see it, yeah. I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Time to move on. All those battles are over with."

  The professor smiled, then he glanced at Rhyme. "Well, good luck. Let me know if I can help some more."

  "We'll do that."

  The lean man walked to the door. He paused and turned.

  "Oh, Geneva?"

  "Yes?"

  "Just think about one thing--from somebody who's lived a few years longer than you. I sometimes wonder if the battles really aren't over with at all." He nodded toward the evidence chart and Charles's letters. "Maybe it's just harder to recognize the enemy."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Guess what, Rhyme, there are small crime scenes.

  I know it because I'm looking at one.

  Amelia Sachs stood on West Eighty-second Street, just off Broadway, in front of the impressive Hiram Sanford Mansion, a large, dark Victorian structure. This was the home of the Sanford Foundation. Appropriately, around her were trappings of historical New York: In addition to the mansion, which was more than a hundred years old, there was an art museum that dated to 1910 and a row of beautiful, landmark town houses. And she didn't need unsubs wearing orange-paint-stained overalls to feel spooked; right next door to the foundation was the ornate and eerie Sanford Hotel (rumor was that Rosemary's Baby was originally going to have been filmed in the Sanford).

  A dozen gargoyles looked down at Sachs from its cornices as if they were mocking her present assignment.

  Inside, she was directed to the man Mel Cooper had just spoken with, William Ashberry, the director of the foundation and a senior executive at Sanford Bank and Trust, which owned the nonprofit organization. The trim, middle-aged man greeted her with a look of bemused excitement. "We've never had a policeman here, excuse me, policewoman, I meant to say, well, never had either here actually." He seemed disappointed when she gave a vague explanation that she merely needed some general background on the history of the neighborhood and didn't need to use the foundation for a stakeout or undercover operation.

  Ashberry was more than happy to let her prowl through the archives and library, though he couldn't help her personally; his expertise was finance, real estate, and tax law, not history. "I'm really a banker," he confessed, as if Sachs couldn't tell this from his outfit of dark suit, white shirt and striped tie and the incomprehensible business documents and spreadsheets sitting in precise stacks on his desk.

  Fifteen minutes later she was in the care of a curator--a young, tweedy man who led her down dark corridors into the sub-basement archives. She showed him the composite of Unsub 109, thinking maybe the killer had come here too, looking for the article about Charles Singleton. But the curator didn't recognize his picture and didn't recall anybody asking about any issues of Coloreds' Weekly Illustrated recently. He pointed out the stacks and a short time later she was sitting, edgy and frazzled, on a hard chair in a cubicle small as a coffin, surrounded by dozens of books and magazines, printouts, maps and drawings.

  She approached this search the same way Rhyme had taught her to run a crime scene: looking over the whole first, then organizing a logical plan, then executing the search. Sachs first separated the material into four stacks: general information, West Side history and Gallows Heights, civil rights in the mid-1800s and Potters' Field. She started on the graveyard first. She read every page, confirmed Charles Singleton's reference to his regiment's being mustered at Hart's Island. She learned how the graveyard came into being, and how busy it had been, especially during the cholera and influenza epidemics of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when cheap pine coffins would litter the island, stacked high, awaiting burial.

  Fascinating details, but not helpful. She turned to the civil rights material. She read a mind-numbing amount of information, including references to the Fourteenth Amendment controversy but nothing that touched on the issues Professor Mathers had suggested to them as a motive for setting up Charles Singleton. She read in an 1867 New York Times article that Frederick Douglass and other prominent civil rights leaders of the time had appeared at a church in Gallows Heights. Douglass had told the reporter afterward that he had come to the neighborhood to meet with several men in the fight for the amendment's passage. But this they already knew, from Charles's letters. She found no mention of Charles Singleton but did come across a reference to a lengthy article in the New York Sun about the former slaves and freedmen who were assisting Douglass. That particular issue, though, was not in the archives.

  Page after page, on and on . . . Hesitating sometimes, worrying that she'd missed those vital few sentences that could shed light on the case. More than once she went back and reread a paragraph or two that she'd looked at without really reading. Stretching, fidgeting, digging at her fingernails, scratching her scalp.

  Then plowing into the documents once more. The material she'd read piled up on the table but the pad of paper in front of her held not a single notation.

  Turning to New York history, Sachs learned more about Gallows Heights. It was one of a half-dozen early settlements on the Upper West Side of New York, separate villages really, like Manhattanville and Vandewater Heights (now Morningside). Gallows Heights extended west from present-day Broadway to the Hudson River and from about Seventy-second Street north to Eighty-sixth. The name dated from colonial times, when the Dutch built a gallows atop a hill in the center of the settlement. When the British purchased the land, their hangmen executed dozens of witches, crimi
nals and rebellious slaves and colonists on the spot until the various sites of justice and punishment in New York City were consolidated downtown.

  In 1811 city planners divided all of Manhattan into the blocks that are used today, though for the next fifty years in Gallows Heights (and much of the rest of the city) those grids could be found only on paper. In the early 1800s the land there was a tangle of country lanes, empty fields, forests, squatters' sheds, factories and dry docks on the Hudson River, and a few elegant, sprawling estates. By the mid-nineteenth century Gallows Heights had developed a multiple personality, reflected in the map that Mel Cooper had found earlier: The big estates existed side by side with working-class apartments and smaller homes. Shantytowns infested with gangs were moving in from the south, on the tide of city sprawl. And--just as crooked as street thieves, though on a larger and slicker scale--William "Boss" Tweed ran much of the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic political machine from the bars and dining rooms in Gallows Heights (Tweed was obsessed with profiting from the development of the neighborhood; in a typical scheme the man pocketed $6,000 in fees for the sale to the city of a tiny lot worth less than $35).

  The area was now a prime Upper West Side neighborhood and among the nicest and most affluent in the city, of course. Apartments were going for thousands of dollars a month. (And, as an irritated Amelia Sachs now reflected from her "small crime scene" dungeon, the present-day Gallows Heights was home to some of the best delis and bagel bakeries in the city; she hadn't eaten today.)

  The dense history reeled past her but nothing bore on the case. Damnit, she ought to be analyzing crime scene material, or better yet, working the streets around the unsub's safe house, trying to find some connections to where he lived, what his name was.

  What the hell was Rhyme thinking of?

  Finally she came to the last book in the stack. Five hundred pages, she estimated (she was getting a good eye by this point); it turned out to be 504. The index didn't reveal anything important for the search. Sachs skimmed the pages but finally could take it no longer. Tossing the book aside, she stood, rubbed her eyes and stretched. Her claustrophobia was kicking in, thanks to the suffocating ambiance of the archives, located two flights underground. The foundation may have been renovated last month but this place was still the original basement of the Sanford Mansion, she supposed; it had low ceilings and dozens of stone columns and walls, making the space even more confining.

  That was bad enough but the worst was the sitting. Amelia Sachs hated to sit still.

  When you move they can't getcha . . . .

  No small crime scenes, Rhyme? Brother . . .

  She started to leave.

  But at the door, she paused, looking back over the material, thinking: A few sentences in one of these musty books or yellowing newspapers could make the difference between life and death for Geneva Settle--and the other innocents that Unsub 109 might one day kill.

  Rhyme's voice came back to her. When you're walking the grid at the scene, you search it once and then again and when you're finished, you search it once more. And when you're done with that, you search it again. And . . .

  She glanced at the last book--the one that had defeated her. Sachs sighed, sat back down, pulled the 504-pager toward her and read through it properly and then flipped through the photographs in the middle.

  Which, it turned out, was a good idea.

  She froze, staring at a photograph of West Eightieth Street, taken in 1867. She gave a laugh, read the caption and the text on the opposite page. Then pulled her cell phone off her belt and hit speed-dial button 1.

  *

  "I found Potters' Field, Rhyme."

  "We know where it is," he snapped into the microphone near his mouth. "An island in the--"

  "There's another one."

  "A second cemetery?"

  "Not a cemetery. It was a tavern. In Gallows Heights."

  "A tavern?" Well, this was interesting, he thought.

  "I'm looking at the photo, or daguerreotype, whatever it is. A bar named Potters' Field. It was on West Eightieth Street."

  So, they'd been wrong, Rhyme reflected. Charles Singleton's fateful meeting may not have been on Hart's Island at all.

  "And, it gets better--the place burned down. Suspected arson. Perpetrators and motive unknown."

  "Am I right in supposing that it was the same day Charles Singleton went there to--what did he say? To find justice?"

  "Yep. July fifteenth."

  Forever hidden beneath clay and soil . . .

  "Anything else about him? Or the tavern?"

  "Not yet."

  "Keep digging."

  "You bet, Rhyme."

  They disconnected the call.

  Sachs had been on the speakerphone; Geneva had heard. She asked angrily, "You think Charles burned that place down?"

  "Not necessarily. But one of the major reasons for arson is to destroy evidence. Maybe that's what Charles was up to, covering up something about the robbery."

  Geneva said, "Look at his letter . . . he's saying that the theft was set up to discredit him. Don't you think he's innocent by now?" The girl's voice was low and firm, her eyes bored into Rhyme's.

  The criminalist returned her gaze. "I do, yes."

  She nodded. Gave a faint smile at this acknowledgement. Then she looked at her battered Swatch. "I should get home."

  Bell was concerned that the unsub had learned where Geneva lived. He'd arranged a safe house for her, but it wouldn't be available until tonight. For the time being, he and the protection team would simply have to remain particularly vigilant.

  Geneva gathered up Charles's letters.

  "We'll have to keep those for the time being," Rhyme said.

  "Keep them? Like, for evidence?"

  "Just until we get to the bottom of what's going on."

  Geneva was looking at them hesitantly. There seemed to be a longing in her eye.

  "We'll keep them in a safe place."

  "Okay." She handed them to Mel Cooper.

  He looked at her troubled expression. "Would you like copies of his letters?"

  She seemed embarrassed. "Yeah, I would. Just . . . they're, you know, from family. That makes 'em kind of important."

  "No problem at all." He made copies on the Xerox machine and handed them to her. She folded them carefully and they disappeared into her purse.

  Bell took a call, listened for a moment and said, "Great, get it over here as soon as you can. Much appreciated." He gave Rhyme's address, then hung up. "The school. They found the security tape of the school yard when the unsub's partner was there yesterday. They're sending it over."

  "Oh, my God," Rhyme said sourly, "you mean there's a real lead in the case? And it's not a hundred years old?"

  Bell switched to the scrambled frequency and radioed Luis Martinez about their plans. He then radioed Barbe Lynch, the officer guarding the street in front of Geneva's house. She reported the street was clear and she'd be awaiting them.

  Finally the North Carolinian hit the speakerphone button on Rhyme's phone and called the girl's uncle to make sure he was home.

  " 'Lo?" the man answered.

  Bell identified himself.

  "She's okay?" the uncle asked.

  "She's fine. We're headed back now. Everything all right there?"

  "Yes, sir, sure is."

  "Have you heard from her parents?"

  "Her folk? Yeah, my brother call me from th' airport. Had some delay or 'nother. But they'll be leaving soon."

  Rhyme used to fly to London frequently to consult with Scotland Yard and other European police departments. Travel overseas had been no more complicated than flying to Chicago or California. Not so anymore. Welcome to the post-9/11 world of international travel, he thought. He was angry that it was taking so long for her mom and dad to get home. Geneva was probably the most mature child he'd ever met but she was a child nonetheless and should be with her parents.

  Then Bell's radio crackled and Luis Martinez
's staticky voice reported, "I'm outside, boss. The car's in front, door open."

  Bell hung up the phone and turned to Geneva. "Ready when you are, miss."

  *

  "Here you be," said Jon Earle Wilson to Thompson Boyd, who was sitting in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, on Broad Street.

  The skinny white guy with a mullet haircut and wearing beige jeans, none too clean, handed the shopping bag to Boyd, who glanced inside.

  Wilson sat down in the booth across from him. Boyd continued to study the bag. Inside was a large UPS box. A smaller bag sat beside it. From Dunkin' Donuts, though the contents most definitely were not pastries. Wilson used the chain shop's bags because they were slightly waxed and protected against moisture.

  "Are we eating?" Wilson asked. He saw a salad go past. He was hungry. But although he often met Boyd in coffee shops or restaurants they'd never actually broken bread together. Wilson's favorite meal was pizza and soda, which he'd have by himself in his one-room apartment, chockablock with tools and wires and computer chips. Though he sort of felt, for all the work he did for Boyd, the man could stand him to a fucking sandwich or something.

  But the killer said, "I've got to leave in a minute or two."

  A plate of lamb shish kebab sat half eaten in front of the killer. Wilson wondered if he was going to offer it to him. Boyd didn't. He just smiled at the waitress when she came to collect it. Boyd smiling--that was new. Wilson'd never seen it before (though he had to admit it was a pretty fucking weird smile).

  Wilson asked, "Heavy, huh?" Glancing toward the bag. He had a proud look in his eyes.

  "Is."

  "Think you'll like it." He was proud of what he'd made and a little pissed that Boyd didn't respond.

  Wilson then asked, "So how's it going?"

  "It's going."

  "Everything's cool?"

  "Little set-back. That's why . . . " He nodded toward the bag and said nothing else. Boyd gave a faint whistle, trying to match the notes of ethnic music coming out of the speaker above them. The music was bizarro. Sitars or something from India or Pakistan or who knew where. But Boyd hit the notes pretty good. Killing people and whistling--the two things this man knew how to do.