The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  * Old work shoes.

  PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON

  * Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New York state by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.

  * Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.

  * Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.

  * Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.

  * Involved in some risky activities?

  * Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.

  * The crime, as reported in Coloreds' Weekly Illustrated: * Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedmen's Trust in NY. Broke into the trust's safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.

  * Charles's Correspondence:

  * Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY State, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.

  * Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.

  * Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.

  * Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters' Field with his gun for "justice." Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters' Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Minus the shopping cart, Jax was playing homeless again.

  He wasn't being schizo at the moment, like before. The Graffiti King was fronting he was your typical fired-ass former vet, feeling sorry for himself, begging for change, a shabby Mets cap upturned on the gum-stained sidewalk and filled with, God bless you, thirty-seven cents.

  Cheap pricks.

  No longer in his olive-drab army jacket or the gray sweatshirt, but wearing a dusty black T-shirt under a torn beige sports coat (picked out of the garbage the way a real homeless person would do), Jax was sitting on the bench across from the town house on Central Park West, nursing a can wrapped up in a stained, brown-paper bag. Ought to be malt liquor, he thought sourly. Wished it was. But it was only Arizona iced tea. He sat back, like he was thinking about what kind of job he'd like to try for, though also enjoying the cool fall day, and sipped more of the sweet peach drink. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the stunningly clear sky.

  He was watching the kid from Langston Hughes walk up, the one who'd just left that town house on Central Park West, where he'd delivered the bag to Geneva Settle. Still no sign of anyone checking out the street from inside, but that didn't mean there wasn't anybody there. Besides, two police cars sat out front, one squad car and one unmarked, right by that wheelchair ramp. So Jax had waited here, a block away, for the boy to make the delivery.

  The skinny kid came up and plopped down on the bench next to the not-really-homeless Graffiti King of Blood.

  "Yo, yo, man."

  "Why do you kids say 'yo' all the time?" Jax asked, irritated. "And why the fuck do you say it twice?"

  "Ever'body say it. Wus yo' problem, man?"

  "You gave her the bag?"

  "What up with that dude ain't got legs?"

  "Who?"

  "Dude in there ain't got no legs. Or maybe he got legs but they ain't work."

  Jax didn't know what he was talking about. He would rather've had a smarter kid deliver the package to the town house, but this was the only one he'd found around the Langston Hughes school yard who had any connection at all with Geneva Settle--his sister sort of knew her. He repeated, "You give her the bag?"

  "I give it to her, yeah."

  "What'd she say?"

  "I don't know. Some shit. Thanks. I don't know."

  "She believed you?"

  "She look like she ain't know who I be at first, then she was cool, yeah. When I mention my sister."

  He gave the kid some bills.

  "Phat . . . Yo, you got anything else fo' me to do, I'm down, man. I--"

  "Get outa here."

  The kid shrugged and started away.

  Jax said, "Wait."

  The loping boy stopped. He turned back.

  "What was she like?"

  "The bitch? What she look like?"

  No, that wasn't what he was curious about. But Jax didn't quite know how to phrase the question. And then he decided he didn't want to ask it. He shook his head. "Go on 'bout your business."

  "Later, man."

  The kid strolled off.

  Part of Jax's mind told him to stay here, where he was. But that'd be stupid. Better to put some distance between himself and the place. He'd find out soon enough, one way or the other, what happened when the girl looked through the bag.

  *

  Geneva sat on her bed, lay back, closed her eyes, wondering what she felt so good about.

  Well, they'd caught the killer. But that couldn't be all of the feeling, of course, since the man who'd hired him was still out there somewhere. And then there was also the man with the gun, the one at the school yard, the man in the army jacket.

  She should be terrified, depressed.

  But she wasn't. She felt free, elated.

  Why?

  And then she understood: It was because she'd told her secret. Unburdened her heart about living alone, about her parents. And nobody'd been horrified and shocked and hated her because of the lie. Mr. Rhyme and Amelia had even backed her up, Detective Bell too. They hadn't freaked, and dimed her out to the counselor.

  Damn, it felt fine. How hard it'd been, carrying around this secret--just like Charles had carted his with him (whatever it was). If the former slave had told somebody, would he have avoided all the heartache that followed? According to his letter, he seemed to think so.

  Geneva glanced at the shopping bag of books the girls at Langston Hughes had gotten for her. Curiosity got the better of her and she decided to look through them. She lifted the bag onto the bed. As Ronelle's brother had said, it weighed a ton.

  She reached inside and lifted out the Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Then the next one: Geneva laughed out loud. This was even stranger: It was a Nancy Drew mystery. Was this wack, or what? She looked at a few of the other titles, books by Judy Blume, Dr. Seuss, Pat McDonald. Children's and young adult books. Wonderful authors, she knew them all. But she'd read their stories years ago. What was up with this? Didn't Ronelle and the kids know her? The most recent books she'd read for pleasure had been novels for adults: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. The last time she'd read Green Eggs and Ham had been ten years ago.

  Maybe there was something better in the bottom. She started to reach into it.

  A knock on the door startled her.

  "Come in."

  Thom entered, carrying a tray with a Pepsi and some snacks on it.

  "Hi there," he said.

  "Hi."

  "Thought you'd need some sustenance." He opened the soda for her. She shook her head at the glass he was about to pour it into. "The can's fine," she said. She wanted to keep all the empties so she knew exactly how much to repay Mr. Rhyme.

  "And . . . health food." He handed her a Kit Kat candy bar, and they laughed.

  "Maybe later." Everybody was trying to fatten her up. Fact was, she just wasn't used to eating. That was something you did with family around a table, not by yourself, hunched over an unsteady table in a basement as you read a book or jotted notes for a paper about Hemingway.

  Geneva sipped the soda, as Thom took over unloading the books for her. He held them up one by one. There was a novel by C. S. Lewis. Another: The Secret Garden.

  Still nothing for adults.

  "T
here's a big one at the bottom," he said, lifting it out. It was a Harry Potter book, the first one in the series. She'd read it when it had first come out.

  "You want it?" Thom asked.

  She hesitated. "Sure."

  The aide handed her the heavy volume.

  *

  A jogger, a man in his forties, approached, glancing toward Jax, the homeless vet, wearing his trash-picked jacket, sporting a hidden pistol in his sock and thirty-seven cents of charity in his pocket.

  The jogger's expression didn't change as he ran past. But the man altered course just a tiny bit, to put an extra foot or so between him and the big black guy, a shift so little you could hardly see it. Except to Jax it was as clear as if the man had stopped, turned around and fled, calling out, "Keep your distance, nigger."

  He was sick of this racial-dodgeball shit. Always the same. Is it ever going to change?

  Yes. No.

  Who the hell knew?

  Jax bent down casually and adjusted the pistol that was stuffed into his sock and pressing uncomfortably against bone, then continued up the street, moving slow with his scar-tissue limp.

  "Yo, you got some change?" He heard the voice from behind him as a man approached.

  He glanced back at a tall, hunched-over man with very dark skin, ten feet behind him. The guy repeated, "Yo, change, man?"

  He ignored the beggar, thinking, This's pretty funny: All day he'd been fronting he was some homeless dude or another and here comes a real one. Serves me right.

  "Yo, change?"

  He said brusquely, "No, I don't have any."

  "Come on. Ever'body got change. An' they fuckin' hate it. They wanta get rid of it. All them coins be heavy and you can't buy shit with it. I be doing you a favor, brother. Come on."

  "Get lost."

  "I ain't ate for two days."

  Jax glanced back, snapped, "Course not. 'Cause you spent all your paper on those Calvin Kleins." He glanced at the man's clothes--a dirty but otherwise nice-looking set of royal-blue Adidas workout clothes. "Go get a job." Jax turned away and started up the street.

  "Hokay," the bum said. "You ain't gimme any change, then how's 'bout you gimme your motherfuckin' hands?"

  "My--?"

  Jax found his legs pulled out from underneath him. He slammed facedown onto the sidewalk. Before he could twist around and grab his gun both wrists were pinned behind his back and what seemed to be a large pistol was shoved into the nook behind his ear.

  "The fuck you doing, man?"

  "Shut up." Hands patted him down and found the hidden pistol. Handcuffs ratcheted on and Jax was jerked into a sitting position. He found himself looking over an FBI identification card. The first name on it was Frederick. The second was Dellray.

  "Oh, man," Jax said, his voice hollow. "I don't need this shit."

  "Well, guess what, sonny, there a lot more manure comin' yo' way. So you better get used to it." The agent stood up and a moment later Jax heard, "This is Dellray. I'm outside. I think I got Boyd's boyfriend down. I just saw him slip some bills to a kid coming out of Lincoln's town house. Black kid, maybe thirteen. What was he doing there? . . . A bag? Fuck, it's a device! Probably gas. Boyd must've given it to this piece of crap to sneak inside. Get everybody out and call in a ten thirty-three . . . . And get somebody to Geneva now!"

  *

  In Rhyme's lab the big man sat cuffed and leg-shackled in a chair, surrounded by Dellray, Rhyme, Bell, Sachs and Sellitto. He'd been relieved of a pistol, wallet, knife, keys, a cell phone, cigarettes, money.

  For a half hour, utter chaos had reigned in Lincoln Rhyme's town house. Bell and Sachs had literally grabbed Geneva and hustled her out the back door and into Bell's car, which sped off in case there was yet another assailant planning to move on Geneva outside. Everyone else evacuated into the alley. The Bomb Squad, again in bio suits, had gone upstairs and X-rayed and then chemically tested the books. No explosives, no poison gas. They were just books, the purpose being, Rhyme assumed, to make them think there was a device in the bag. After they'd evacuated the town house, the accomplice would sneak in through the back door or enter with firefighters or police and wait for a chance to kill Geneva.

  So this was the man Dellray had heard rumors about yesterday, who'd almost gotten to Geneva at the Langston Hughes school yard, who'd found out where she lived and who'd followed her to Rhyme's to carry out yet another attempt on her life.

  He was also the man, Rhyme hoped, who could tell them who'd hired Boyd.

  The criminalist now looked him over carefully, this large, unsmiling man. He'd traded in his combat jacket for a tattered tan sports coat, probably assuming that they'd spotted him at the school yesterday in the green jacket.

  He blinked and looked down at the floor, diminished by his arrest but not intimidated by the crescent of officers around him. Finally he said, "Look, you don't--"

  "Shhhhh," Dellray said ominously and continued to rifle through the man's wallet, as he explained to the team what had happened. The agent had been coming to deliver reports about the FBI's jewelry district money-laundering investigations when he'd seen the teenage boy come out of Rhyme's. "Saw the beast pass the kid some bills then get his ass up off a bench and leave. Descrip and the limp matched what we heard before. Looked funny to me, 'specially when I saw he had a de-formed ankle." The agent nodded toward the small .32 automatic he'd found in the man's sock. Dellray explained that he'd pulled off his own jacket, wrapped it around the files and slipped them behind some bushes, then smeared some dirt on his running suit to impersonate a homeless man, a role he'd made famous in New York when he was an undercover agent. He'd then proceeded to collar the man.

  "Let me say something," Boyd's partner began.

  Dellray wagged a huge finger at the man. "We'll give ya this real clear little nod, we want any words trickling outa yo' mouth. We altogether on that?"

  "I--"

  "Al-to-gether?"

  He nodded grimly.

  The FBI agent held up what he'd found in the wallet: money, a few family pictures, a faded, shabby photograph. "What's this?" he asked.

  "My tag."

  The agent held the snapshot closer to Rhyme. It was an old boxy New York City subway. The colorful graffiti on the side read, Jax 157.

  "Graffiti artist," Sachs said, lifting an eyebrow. "Pretty good, too."

  "You still go by Jax?" Rhyme asked.

  "Usually."

  Dellray was holding up a picture ID card. "You may've been Jax to the fine folk at the Transit Authority, but it's lookin' like you're Alonzo Jackson to the rest of the world. Also known by the illuminating moniker Inmate Two-two-oh-nine-three-fo', hailin' from the Department of Co-rrections in the bee-yootiful city of Alden, New York."

  "That's Buffalo, right?" Rhyme asked.

  Boyd's accomplice nodded.

  "The prison connection again. That how you know him?"

  "Who?"

  "Thompson Boyd."

  "I don't know anybody named Boyd."

  Dellray barked, "Then who hired ya for the job?"

  "I don't know what you're asking. 'Bout a job. I swear I don't." He seemed genuinely confused. "And all this other stuff, gas or whatever you're saying. I--"

  "You were lookin' for Geneva Settle. You bought a gun and you showed up at her school yesterday," Sellitto pointed out.

  "Yeah, that's right." He looked mystified at the level of their information.

  "An' you showed up here," Dellray continued. "That's the job we're waggin' our tongues about."

  "There's no job. I don't know what you mean. Honest."

  "What's the story with the books?" Sellitto asked.

  "Those're just books my daughter read when she was little. They were for her."

  The agent muttered, "Wonnerful. But 'xplain to us why you paid somebody to deliver 'em to . . . " He hesitated and frowned. For once words seemed to fail Fred Dellray.

  Rhyme asked, "You're saying--?"

  "That's right." Jax sighed. "Gen
eva. She's my little girl."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  "From the beginning," Rhyme said.

  "Okay. What it is--I got busted six years ago. Went six to nine at Wende."

  The DOC's maximum security prison in Buffalo.

  "For what?" Dellray snapped. "The AR and murder we heard about?"

  "One count armed robbery. One count firearm. One count assault."

  "The twenty-five, twenty-five? The murder?"

  He said firmly, "That was not a righteous count. Got knocked down to assault. And I didn't do it in the first place."

  "Never heard that before," Dellray muttered.

  "But you did the robbery?" Sellitto asked.

  A grimace. "Yeah."

  "Keep going."

  "Last year I got upped to Alden, minimum security. Work-release. I was working and going to school there. Got paroled seven weeks ago."

  "Tell me about the AR."

  "Okay. Few years back, I was a painter, working in Harlem."

  "Graffiti?" Rhyme asked, nodding at the picture of the subway car.

  Laughing, Jax said, "House painting. You don't make money at graffiti, 'less you were Keith Haring and his crowd. And they were just claimers. Anyway I was getting killed by the debt. See, Venus--Geneva's mother--had righteous problems. First it was blow, then smack then cookies--you know, crack. And we needed money for bail and lawyers too."

  The sorrow in his face seemed real. "There were signs she was a troubled soul when we hooked up. But, you know, nothing like love to make you a blind fool. Anyways, we were going to be kicked out of the apartment and I didn't have money for Geneva's clothes or schoolbooks or even food sometimes. That girl needed a normal life. I thought if I could get together some benjamins I'd get Venus into treatment or something, get her straight. And if she wouldn't do it, then I'd take Geneva away from her, give the girl a good home.

  "What happened was this buddy, Joey Stokes, told me 'bout this deal he had going on up in Buffalo. Word was up there was some armored car making fat runs every Saturday, picking up receipts from malls outside of town. Couple of lazy guards. It'd be a milk run.

  "Joey and me left on Saturday morning, thinking we'd be back with fifty, sixty thousand each that night." A sad shake of the head. "Oh, man, I don't know what I was doing, listening to that claiming dude. The minute the driver handed over the money, everything went bad. He had this secret alarm we didn't know about. He hit it and next thing there're sirens all over the place.