The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  "That's right."

  In the persona of Steve Macy again, Ashberry explained that he was an author from Philadelphia, doing research at the Lehman Library--the Columbia facility devoted to social science and journalism (the Sanford Foundation had given a lot of money to libraries and schools like this one. Ashberry had attended benefits there; he could describe it if he had to). He then said that one of the librarians had heard Mathers had been looking into nineteenth-century New York history, particularly the Reconstruction era. Was that right?

  The professor gave a surprised laugh. "I am, as a matter of fact. It's not for me, actually. I'm helping out a high school student. She's with me right now."

  Thank God. The girl was still there. I can get it all over with now, get on with my life.

  Ashberry said that he'd brought quite a lot of material up from Philly. Would he and this student be interested in taking a look?

  The professor said they definitely would, thanked him then asked what would be a convenient time to come by.

  When he was seventeen Billy Ashberry had held a box cutter against the thigh of an elderly shopkeeper and reminded him that the man's protection payments were past due. The razor was going to cut one inch for every day the payment was late unless he paid up instantly. His voice had been as calm then as it was now, saying to Mathers, "I'm leaving tonight but I could drop by now. You can make copies if you want. You have a Xerox machine?"

  "I do, yes."

  "I'll be there in a few minutes."

  They hung up. Ashberry reached into the box and clicked the safety button on the shotgun to the off position. Then he hefted the carton and started toward the building, through a swirl of autumn leaves spun in tiny cyclones by the cold breeze.

  Chapter Forty

  "Professor?"

  "You're Steve Macy?" The dowdy professor, sporting a bow tie and tweed jacket, was sitting behind piles of papers covering his desk.

  He smiled. "Yes, sir."

  "I'm Richard Mathers. This is Geneva Settle."

  A short teenage girl, her skin as dark as the professor's, glanced at him and nodded. Then she looked eagerly at the box he carted. She was so young. Could he really kill her?

  Then an image of his daughter's wedding on the dock of his summer house flashed through his mind, followed by a series of fast thoughts: the Mercedes AMG his wife wanted, his membership at the Augusta golf course, the dinner plans he had this evening at L'Etoile, to which The New York Times had just given three stars.

  Those images answered his question.

  Ashberry set the box on the floor. No cops inside, he noticed with relief. He shook Mathers's hand. And thought: Fuck, they can lift fingerprints from flesh. After the shootings he'd have to take the time to wipe off the man's palms. (He remembered what Thompson Boyd had told him: When it came to death, you did everything by the book, or you walked away from the job.) Ashberry smiled at the girl. Didn't shake her hand. He looked around the office, judging angles.

  "Sorry for the mess," Mathers said.

  "Mine isn't any better," he said with a faint laugh. The room was filled with books, magazines and stacks of photocopies. On the wall were a number of diplomas. Mathers was, it turned out, not a history but a law professor. And a well-known one, apparently. Ashberry was looking at a photo of the professor with Bill Clinton and another with former mayor Giuliani.

  As he saw these photos, the remorse raised its head again but it was really nothing more than a faint blip on the screen by now. Ashberry was comfortable with the fact that he was in the room with two dead people.

  They chatted for a few minutes, with Ashberry talking in vague terms about schools and libraries in Philadelphia, avoiding any direct comments about what he was looking into. He stayed on the offensive, asking the professor, "What exactly're you researching?"

  Mathers deferred to Geneva, who explained that they were trying to find out about her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a former slave. "It was pretty weird," she said. "The police thought that there was this connection between him and some crimes, ones that just happened. That turned out to be pretty wack, I mean, it was wrong. But we're all curious about what happened to him. Nobody seems to know."

  "Let's take a look at what you've got," Mathers said, clearing a spot on a low table in front of his desk. "I'll get another chair."

  This is it, Ashberry thought. His heart began pounding fast. He then recalled the razor knife slipping into the shopkeeper's flesh, cutting two inches for the two days of missed juice, Ashberry hardly hearing the man's screams.

  Recalled all the years of backbreaking work to get to where he was today.

  Recalled Thompson Boyd's dead eyes.

  He was instantly calm.

  As soon as Mathers stepped into the hallway, the banker glanced out the window. The policeman was still in the car, a good fifty feet away, and the building was so solid he might not even hear the gunshots. With the desk between himself and Geneva, he bent down, shuffling through the papers. He gripped the shotgun.

  "Did you find any pictures?" Geneva asked. "I'd really like to find more about what the neighborhood looked like back then."

  "I have a few, I think."

  Mathers was returning. "Coffee?" he called from the hallway.

  "No, thanks."

  Ashberry turned to the door.

  Now!

  He started to rise, pulling the gun from the box, keeping it below Geneva's eye level.

  Aiming at the doorway, finger around the trigger.

  But something was wrong. Mathers wasn't appearing.

  It was then that Ashberry felt something metallic touch his ear.

  "William Ashberry, you're under arrest. I have a weapon." It was the girl's voice, though a very different sound, an adult voice. "Set that breakdown on the desk. Slow."

  Ashberry froze. "But--"

  "The shotgun. Set it down." The girl nudged his head with the pistol. "I'm a police officer. And I will use my firearm."

  Oh, Lord, no . . . It was all a trap!

  "Listen up, now, you do what she's telling you." This was the professor--though, of course, it wasn't Mathers at all. He was a stand-in too, a cop who was pretending to be the professor. He glanced sideways. The man had come back into the office through a side door. From his neck dangled an FBI identification card. He too held a pistol. How the hell had they gotten onto him? Ashberry wondered in disgust.

  "An' don' move that muzzle so much's a skinny little millimeter. We all together on that?"

  "I'm not going to tell you again," the girl said in a calm voice. "Do it now."

  Still he didn't move.

  Ashberry thought of his grandfather, the mobster, he thought of the screaming shopkeeper, he thought of his daughter's wedding.

  What would Thompson Boyd do?

  Play it by the book and give up.

  No fucking way. Ashberry dropped into a crouch and spun around, lightning fast, lifting the gun.

  Somebody shouted, "Don't!"

  The last word he ever heard.

  Chapter Forty-One

  "Quite a view," Thom said.

  Lincoln Rhyme glanced out the window at the Hudson River, the rock cliffs of the Palisades on the opposite shore and the distant hills of New Jersey. Maybe Pennsylvania too. He turned away immediately, the expression on his face explaining that panoramic views, like people's pointing them out, bored him senseless.

  They were in the Sanford Foundation office of the late William Ashberry atop the Hiram Sanford Mansion on West Eighty-second Street. Wall Street was still digesting the news of the man's death and his involvement in a series of crimes over the past few days. Not that the financial community had ground to a halt; compared with, say, the betrayals visited on shareholders and employees by executives of Enron and Global Crossing, the death of a crooked executive of a profitable company didn't make compelling news.

  Amelia Sachs had already searched the office and removed evidence linking Ashberry to Boyd and taped off certain p
arts 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."

  Chapter Forty-Two

  "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 Manh
attan."

  "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?"