The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  Protecting her even steadier, he thought, discouraged.

  He stepped into the bushes to get a better view when the door opened, but just then another squad car drove past, slow. It seemed that a cop inside was scanning the park as well as the sidewalk. Jax memorized the number of the building, then turned away and disappeared into the park. He headed north, walking back toward Harlem.

  Feeling the gun in his sock, feeling the tug of his parole officer two hundred miles to the north, who might be thinking about a surprise visit to his Buffalo apartment at this very moment, Jax remembered a question that Ralph the leaning Egyptian prince had asked him: Was what he was doing worth all the risk?

  He considered this now, as he returned home.

  And he thought: Had it been worth the risk twenty years ago, perching on the six-inch iron ledge of the overpass on the Grand Central Parkway, to tag Jax 157 thirty feet above traffic streaming by at sixty miles an hour?

  Had it been worth the risk six years ago, chambering a 12-gauge shell in the breakdown and shoving the muzzle into the face of the armored-truck driver, just to get that $50,000 or $60,000? Enough to help him get over, get his life back on track?

  And he knew that, fuck, Ralph's wasn't a question that made any sense, because it suggested there was a choice. Then and now, right or wrong, didn't matter. Alonzo "Jax" Jackson was going right ahead. If this worked out he'd get back his righteous life in Harlem, his home, the place that for good and bad had made him what he was--and the place that he himself had helped form, with his thousands of cans of spray paint. He was simply doing what he had to do.

  *

  Careful.

  In his safe house in Queens, Thompson Boyd was wearing a gas mask/respirator and thick gloves. He was slowly mixing acid and water, then checking the concentration.

  Careful . . .

  This was the tricky part. Certainly the potassium cyanide powder sitting nearby was dangerous--enough to kill thirty or forty people--but in its dried form it was relatively stable. Just like the bomb he'd planted in the police car, the white powder needed to be mixed with sulfuric acid to produce the deadly gas (the infamous Zyklon-B used by the Nazis in their extermination showers).

  But the big "if" is the sulfuric acid. Too weak a concentration will produce the gas slowly, which could give the victims a chance to detect the odor and escape. But too strong an acid--over 20 percent concentration--will cause the cyanide to explode before it's dissolved, dissipating much of the desired deadly effect.

  Thompson needed the concentration to be as close to 20 percent as possible--for a simple reason: The place he was going to plant the device--that old Central Park West town house where Geneva Settle was staying--would hardly be airtight. After learning that this was where the girl was hiding, Thompson had conducted his own surveillance of the town house and had noted the unsealed windows and an antiquated heating and air-conditioning system. It would be a challenge to turn the large structure into a death chamber.

  . . . you gotta understand 'bout what we're doing here. It's like everything else in life. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent. Nothing runs just the way it ought . . . .

  Yesterday he'd told his employer that the next attempt on Geneva's life would be successful. But now he wasn't too sure about that. The police were far too good.

  We'll just re-rig and keep going. We can't get emotional about it.

  Well, he wasn't emotional or concerned. But he needed to take drastic measures--on several fronts. If the poison gas in the town house now killed Geneva, fine. But that wasn't his main goal. He had to take out at least some of the people inside--the investigators searching for him and his employer. Kill them, put them in a coma, cause brain damage--it didn't matter. The important thing was to debilitate them.

  Thompson checked the concentration once again, and altered it slightly, making up for how the air would alter the pH balance. His hands were a bit unsteady, so he stepped away for a moment to calm himself.

  Wssst . . .

  The song he'd been whistling became "Stairway to Heaven."

  Thompson leaned back and thought about how to get the gas bomb into the town house. A few ideas occurred to him--including one or two he was pretty sure would work quite well. He again tested the concentration of the acid, whistling absently through the mouthpiece of the respirator. The analyzer reported that the strength was 19.99394 percent.

  Perfect.

  Wssst . . .

  The new tune that popped into his head was the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

  *

  Amelia Sachs had been neither crushed to death by clay and soil nor blown up by unstable nineteenth-century ordnance.

  She was now standing, showered and in clean clothes, in Rhyme's lab, looking over what had tumbled from the dry cistern into her lap an hour earlier.

  It wasn't an old bomb. But there was little doubt now that it'd been left in the well by Charles Singleton on the night of July 15, 1868.

  Rhyme's chair was parked in front of the examination table beside Sachs, as they peered into the cardboard evidence collection box. Cooper was with them, pulling on latex gloves.

  "We'll have to tell Geneva," Rhyme said.

  "Do we?" Sachs said reluctantly. "I don't want to."

  "Tell me what?"

  Sachs turned quickly. Rhyme backed away from the table and reluctantly rolled the Storm Arrow in a circle. Thinking: Damnit. Should've been more careful.

  Geneva Settle stood in the doorway.

  "You found out something about Charles in the basement of that tavern, didn't you? You found out that he really did steal the money. Was that his secret, after all?"

  A glance at Sachs, then Rhyme said, "No, Geneva. No. We found something else." A nod toward the box. "Here. Take a look."

  The girl walked closer. She stopped, blinking, staring down at the brown human skull. It was this that they'd seen on the ultrasound image and that had rolled out into Sachs's lap. With the help of Vegas, Gail Davis's briard, the detective had recovered the remaining bones. These bones--what Sachs had thought were the slats from a strongbox--were those of a man, Rhyme had determined. The body had apparently been stuffed vertically into the cistern in the basement of Potters' Field tavern just before Charles had ignited the fire. The ultrasound imaging had picked up the top of the skull and a rib beneath it, which gave the appearance of a fuse for a bomb.

  The bones were in a second box on the worktable.

  "We're pretty sure it's a man that Charles killed."

  "No!"

  "And then he burned down the tavern to cover up the crime."

  "You couldn't know that," Geneva snapped.

  "We don't, no. But it's a reasonable deduction." Rhyme explained: "His letter said he was going to Potters' Field, armed with his Navy Colt revolver. That was a pistol from the Civil War. It didn't work like guns nowadays, where you load a bullet into the back of the cylinder. You had to load each chamber from the front with a ball and gunpowder."

  She nodded. Her eyes were on the brown and black bones, the eyeless skull.

  "We found some information on guns like his in our database. It's a .36-caliber but most Civil War soldiers learned to use .39-caliber balls in them. They're a little bigger and fit more tightly. That makes the gun more accurate."

  Sachs picked up a small plastic bag. "This was in the skull cavity." Inside was a little sphere of lead. "It's a .39-caliber ball that was fired out of a .36-caliber gun."

  "But that doesn't prove anything." She was staring at the hole in the forehead of the skull.

  "No," Rhyme said kindly. "It suggests. But it suggests very strongly that Charles killed him."

  "Who was he?" Geneva asked.

  "We don't have any idea. If he had any ID on him it burned up or disintegrated, along with his clothes. We found the bullet, a small gun that he probably had with him, some gold coins and a ring with the word . . . what was the word, Mel?"

  " 'Winskinskie.' " He held up a plastic
bag with the gold signet ring inside. Above the inscription was an etched profile of an American Indian.

  Cooper had quickly found that the word meant "doorman" or "gatekeeper" in the language of the Delaware Indians. This might be the dead man's name, though his cranial bone structure suggested he wasn't Native-American. More likely, Rhyme felt, it was a fraternal, school or lodge slogan of some sort and Cooper had queried some anthropologists and history professors via email to see if they'd heard of the word.

  "Charles wouldn't do it," his descendant said softly. "He wouldn't murder anyone."

  "The bullet was fired into the forehead," Rhyme said. "Not from behind. And the Derringer--the gun--that Sachs found in the cistern probably belonged to the victim. That suggests the shooting could've been in self-defense."

  Though the fact remained that Charles had voluntarily gone to the tavern armed with a gun. He would have anticipated some sort of violence.

  "I should never have started this in the first place," Geneva muttered. "Stupid. I don't even like the past. It's pointless. I hate it!" She turned and ran into the hallway, then up the stairs.

  Sachs followed. She returned a few minutes later. "She's reading. She said she wants to be alone. I think she'll be all right." Her voice didn't sound very certain, though.

  Rhyme looked over the information on the oldest scene he'd ever run--140 years. The whole point of the search was to learn something that might lead them to whoever had hired Unsub 109. But all it had done was nearly get Sachs killed and disappoint Geneva with the news that her ancestor had killed a man.

  He looked at the copy of The Hanged Man tarot card, staring at him placidly from the evidence board, mocking Rhyme's frustration.

  Cooper said, "Hey, have something here." He was looking at his computer screen.

  "Winskinskie?" Rhyme asked.

  "No. Listen. An answer to our mystery substance--the one that Amelia found in the unsub's Elizabeth Street safe house and near Geneva's aunt's. The liquid."

  "Damn well about time. What the hell is it? Toxin?" Rhyme asked.

  "Our bad boy's got dry eyes," Cooper said.

  "What?"

  "It's Murine."

  "Eyedrops?"

  "That's right. The composition's exactly the same."

  "Okay. Add that to the chart," Rhyme ordered Thom. "Might just be temporary--because he'd been working with acid. In which case, won't help us. But it might be chronic. That'd be good."

  Criminalists loved perps with physical maladies. Rhyme had a whole section in his book on tracing people through prescription or over-the-counter drugs, disposed hypodermic needles, prescription eyeglasses, unique shoe-tread wear from orthopedic problems, and so on.

  It was then that Sachs's phone rang. She listened for a moment. "Okay. I'll be there in fifteen minutes." The policewoman disconnected, glanced at Rhyme. "Well, this's interesting."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When Amelia Sachs walked into the Critical Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital she saw two Pulaskis.

  One was in bed, swathed in bandages and hooked up to creepy clear plastic tubes. His eyes were dull, his mouth slack.

  The other sat at his bedside, awkward in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Just as blond, just as fresh-faced, in the same crisp blue NYPD uniform Ron Pulaski had been wearing when Sachs had recruited him in front of the African-American museum yesterday and told him to act concerned about a pile of garbage.

  How many sugars? . . .

  She blinked at the mirror image.

  "I'm Tony. Ron's brother. Which you probably guessed."

  "Hi, Detective," Ron managed breathlessly. His voice wasn't working right. It was slurred, sloppy.

  "How you feeling?"

  "How ish Geneva?"

  "She's all right. I'm sure you heard--we stopped him at her aunt's place but he got away . . . . You hurting? Must be."

  He nodded toward the IV drip. "Happy soup . . . Don't feel a thing."

  "He'll be okay."

  "I'll be okay," Ron echoed his brother's words. He took a few deep breaths, blinked.

  "A month or so," Tony explained. "Some therapy. He'll be back on duty. Some fractures. Not much internal damage. Thick skull. Which Dad always said."

  "Shkull." Ron grinned.

  "You were at the academy together?" She pulled up a chair and sat.

  "Right."

  "What's your house?"

  "The Six," Tony answered.

  The Sixth Precinct was in the heart of west Greenwich Village. Not many muggings or carjackings or drugs. Mostly breakins, gay domestics and incidents by emotionally disturbed artists and writers off their meds. The Six was also home to the Bomb Squad.

  Tony was shaken, sure, but angry too. "The guy kept at him, even when he was down. He didn't need to."

  "But maybe," came Ron's stumbling words, "it took for time . . . took more time on me. So he didn't get . . . didn't get a good chance to go after Geneva."

  Sachs smiled. "You're kind of a glass-is-half-full sorta guy." She didn't tell him that he'd been beaten nearly to death simply so Unsub 109 could use a bullet from his weapon for a distraction.

  "Sorta am. Thank Sheneva. Gen-eva for me. For the book." He couldn't really move his head but his eyes slipped to the side of the bedside table, where a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird lay. "Tony'sh reading to me. He even can read the big wordsh."

  His brother laughed. "You putz."

  "So what can you tell us, Ron? This guy's smart and he's still out there. We need something we can use."

  "I don't know, ma--I don't know, Detective. I wasssh goin' up and down th'alley. He hid when I want to . . . went to the street. Came back to the back, the alley . . . I washn't expecting hih. Him. He was around the corner of the, you know, the bidling . . . the building. I got to the corner. I shaw this guy, in a mask like a ski mashk. And then this thing. Club, bat. Came too fasht. Couldn't shee it really. Got me good." He blinked again, closed his eyes. "Careless. Washhh, was too close to the wall. Won't do that again."

  You didn't know. Now you do.

  "A woosh." He winced.

  "You okay?" his brother asked.

  "I'm okay."

  "A woosh," Sachs encouraged, nudged her chair closer.

  "What?"

  "You heard a woosh."

  "Yes, I heard it, ma'am. Not 'ma'am.' Detective."

  "It's okay, Ray. Call me whatever. You see anything? Anything at all?"

  "This thing. Like a bat. No, not Batman and Robin. Ha. A baseball bat. Right at my face. Oh, I told you that. And I went down. I mean, Detective. Not 'ma'am.' "

  "That's okay, Ron. What do you remember then?"

  "I don't know. I remember lying on the ground. Thinking . . . I was thinking he was going for my weapon. I tried to control my weapon. Wash . . . was in the book, not to let it go. 'Always control your weapon.' But I didn't. He got it anyway. I wash dead. I knew I was dead."

  She encouraged softly, "What do you remember seeing?"

  "A tangle."

  "A what?"

  He laughed. "I didn't mean tangle. A triangle. Cardboard. On the ground. I couldn't move. It was all I could see."

  "And this cardboard. It was the unsub's?"

  "The trangle? No. I mean, triangle. No, it was jusht trash. I mean, it's all I could see. I tried to crawl. I don't think I did."

  Sachs sighed. "You were found on your back, Ron."

  "I washhh? . . . I was on my back?"

  "Think back. Did you see the sky maybe?"

  He squinted.

  Her heart beat faster. Did he get a look at something?

  "Bluh."

  "What?"

  "Bluh in my eyes by then."

  "Blood?" his brother offered.

  "Yeah. Blood. Couldn't shee anything then. No trangles, no building. He got my piece. He stayed neareye for a few minutes. Then I don't remember anything elshe."

  "He was nearby? How close?"

  "I don't know. Not close. Couldn't see. To
o much bluh."

  Sachs nodded. The poor man looked exhausted. His breathing was labored, his eyes much more unfocused than when she'd arrived. She rose. "I'll let him get some rest." She asked, "You heard of Terry Dobyns?"

  "No. Ishh he . . . Who ishh?" A grimace crossed the injured officer's face. "Who is he?

  "Department psychologist." She glanced at Ron with a smile. "This'll take the starch out of you for a while. You should talk to him about it. He's the man. He rules."

  Ron said, "Don't need to--"

  "Patrolman?" she said sternly.

  He lifted an eyebrow, winced.

  "It's an order."

  "Yes, ma'am. I mean . . . ma'am."

  Anthony said, "I'll make sure he does."

  "You'll thank . . . Geneva for me? I like that book."

  "I will." Sachs slung her bag over her shoulder and started for the door. She just stepped through it when she stopped abruptly, turned back. "Ron?"

  "Wusthat?"

  She returned to his bedside, sat down again.

  "Ron, you said the unsub was near you for a few minutes."

  "Yuh."

  "Well, if you couldn't see him, with the blood in your eyes, how did you know he was there?"

  The young officer frowned. "Oh . . . yeah. There's shomething I forgot to tell you."

  *

  "Our boy's got a habit, Rhyme."

  Amelia Sachs was back in the laboratory.

  "What's that?"

  "He whistles."

  "For taxis?"

  "Music. Pulaski heard him. After he'd been hit the first time and was lying on the ground the unsub took his weapon and, I'm guessing, spent a few minutes to hook the bullet to the cigarette. While he was doing that, he was whistling. Real softly, Ron said, but he's sure it was whistling."

  "No pro's going to whistle on the job," Rhyme said.

  "You wouldn't think. But I heard it too. At the safe house on Elizabeth Street. I thought it was the radio or something--he was good."

  "How's the rookie doing?" Sellitto asked. He hadn't rubbed his invisible bloodstain recently but he was still edgy.

  "They say he'll be okay. A month of therapy or so. I told him to see Terry Dobyns. Ron was pretty out of it but his brother was there. He'll look after him. He's a uniform too. Identical twin."

  Rhyme wasn't surprised. Being on the force often ran in the family. "Cop" could be the name of a human gene.

  But Sellitto shook his head at the news of a sibling. He seemed all the more upset, as if it was his fault that an entire family had been affected by the attack.