The Twelfth Card

by Jeffery Deaver

  Tears in her eyes, she laughed with delight.

  "How 'bout that," he said.

  "So you'll keep up with the exercises?"

  He nodded.

  "We'll set up the test with Dr. Sherman?" she asked.

  "I suppose we could. Unless something else comes up. Been a busy time lately."

  "We'll set up the test," she said firmly.

  She shut the light out and lay close to him. Which he could sense, though not feel.

  In silence, Rhyme stared at the ceiling. Just as Sachs's breathing stilled, he frowned, aware of an odd sensation trickling through his chest, where there ought to be none. At first he thought it was phantom. Then, alarmed, he wondered if it was perhaps the start of an attack of dysreflexia, or worse. But he realized that, no, this was something else entirely, something not rooted in nerve or muscle or organ. A scientist always, he analyzed the sensation empirically and noted that it was similar to what he'd felt watching Geneva Settle face down the bank's attorney. Similar too to when he was reading about Charles Singleton's mission to find justice at the Potters' Field tavern that terrible night in July so many years ago, or about his passion for civil rights.

  Then, suddenly, Rhyme understood what he was feeling: It was simple pride. Just like he'd been proud of Geneva and of her ancestor, he was proud of his own accomplishment. By tackling his exercises and then tonight testing himself, Lincoln Rhyme had confronted the terrifying, the impossible. Whether he'd regained any movement or not was irrelevant; the sensation came from what he had undeniably achieved: wholeness, the same wholeness that Charles had written of. He realized that nothing else--not politicians or fellow citizens or your haywire body--could make you a three-fifths man; it was solely your decision to view yourself as a complete or partial person and to live your life accordingly.

  All things considered, he supposed, this understanding was as inconsequential as the slight movement he'd regained in his hand. But that didn't matter. He thought of his profession: How a tiny flake of paint leads to a car that leads to a parking lot where a faint footprint leads to a doorway that reveals a fiber from a discarded coat with a fingerprint on the sleeve button--the one surface that the perp forgot to wipe clean.

  The next day a tactical team knocks on his door.

  And justice is served, a victim saved, a family reunited. All thanks to a minuscule bit of paint.

  Small victories--that's what Dr. Sherman had said. Small victories . . . Sometimes they're all you can hope for, Lincoln Rhyme reflected, as he felt sleep closing in.

  But sometimes they're all you need.

  Author's Note

  Authors are only as good as the friends and fellow professionals around them, and I'm extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a truly wonderful ensemble: Will and Tina Anderson, Alex Bonham, Louise Burke, Robby Burroughs, Britt Carlson, Jane Davis, Julie Reece Deaver, Jamie Hodder-Williams, John Gilstrap, Cathy Gleason, Carolyn Mays, Emma Longhurst, Diana Mackay, Tara Parsons, Carolyn Reidy, David Rosenthal, Marysue Rucci, Deborah Schneider, Vivienne Schuster, Brigitte Smith and Kevin Smith.

  Special thanks, as always, to Madelyn Warcholik.

  For those readers browsing through guide books in hopes of taking a walking tour of Gallows Heights, you can stop searching. While my depiction of life in nineteenth-century Manhattan is otherwise accurate and there were indeed a number of such villages on the Upper West Side that ultimately were swallowed up by the city's urban sprawl, Gallows Heights and the nefarious doings I describe there are solely creations of my imagination. The eerie name served my purpose, and I figured that Boss Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall wouldn't mind if I laid a few more crimes at their feet. After all, as Thompson Boyd would say, "It's only a question of where you put the decimal point."

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PROUDLY PRESENTS

  THE COLD MOON

  JEFFERY DEAVER

  Available now from Simon & Schuster

  Turn the page for a preview of The Cold Moon . . . .

  Chapter 1

  12:02 A.M.

  "How long did it take them to die?"

  The man this question was posed to didn't seem to hear it. He looked in the rearview mirror again and concentrated on his driving. The hour was just past midnight and the streets in lower Manhattan were icy. A cold front had swept the sky clear and turned an earlier snow to slick glaze on the asphalt and concrete. The two men were in the rattling Band-Aid-mobile, as Clever Vincent had dubbed the tan-colored SUV. It was a few years old; the brakes needed servicing and the tires replacing. But taking a stolen vehicle in for work would not be a wise idea, especially since two of its recent passengers were now murder victims.

  The driver--a lean man in his fifties, with trim black hair--made a careful turn down a side street and continued his journey, never speeding, making precise turns, perfectly centered in his lane. He'd drive the same whether the streets were slippery or dry, whether the vehicle had just been involved in murder or not.

  Careful, meticulous.

  How long did it take?

  Big Vincent--with long sausage fingers, always damp, and a taut brown belt stretching the first hole--shivered hard. He'd been waiting on the street corner after his night shift as a word-processing temp. It was bitterly cold, but Vincent didn't like the lobby of his building. The light was greenish and the walls were covered with big mirrors where he could see his oval body from all angles. So he'd stepped into the clear, cold December air and paced and eaten a candy bar. Okay, two.

  As Vincent was glancing up at the full moon--a shockingly white disk visible for a moment through a canyon of buildings--the Watchmaker reflected aloud, "How long did it take them to die? Interesting."

  Vincent had known the Watchmaker--whose real name was Gerald Duncan--for only a short time, but he realized that you asked the man questions at your own risk. Even a simple query could open the door to a monologue. Man, could he talk. And his answers were always organized, like a college professor's. Vincent knew that the silence of the last few minutes was due to Duncan's carefully considering his answer.

  Vincent opened a can of Pepsi. He was cold, but he needed something sweet. He chugged it and put the empty can into his pocket. He ate a packet of peanut butter crackers. Duncan looked over to make sure Vincent was wearing gloves. They always wore gloves in the Band-Aid-mobile.

  Meticulous . . .

  "I'd say there are several answers to that," Duncan said in his soft, detached voice. "For instance, the first one I killed was twenty-four, so you could say it took him twenty-four years to die."

  Like, yeah . . . thought Clever Vincent with the sarcasm of a teenager, though he had to admit that this obvious answer hadn't occurred to him.

  "The other was thirty-two, I think."

  A police car drove by, going the opposite way. The blood in Vincent's temples began pounding, but Duncan didn't react. The cops showed no interest in the stolen Explorer.

  "Another way to answer the question," Duncan said, "is to consider the elapsed time from the moment I started until their hearts stopped beating. That's probably what you meant. See, people want to put time into easy-to-digest frames of reference. That's valid, as long as it's helpful. Knowing the contractions come every twenty seconds is helpful. So is knowing that the athlete ran a mile in three minutes, fifty-eight seconds, so he wins the race. Specifically, how long it took them tonight to die . . . well, that isn't important, as long as it wasn't fast." A glance at Vincent. "I'm not being critical of your question."

  "No," Vincent said, not caring even if he was critical. Vincent Reynolds didn't have many friends and could put up with a lot from Gerald Duncan. "I was just curious."

  "I understand. But I didn't really pay any attention. But the next one, I'll time it."

  "The girl? Tomorrow?" Vincent's heart beat just a bit faster.

  He nodded. "Later today, you mean."

  It was after midnight. With Gerald Duncan you had to be precise, especially when it came to time.

&
nbsp; "Right."

  Hungry Vincent had nosed out Clever Vincent, since he was thinking of Joanne, the girl who'd die next.

  Later today . . .

  The killer drove in a complicated pattern back to their temporary home in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, south of Midtown, near the river. The streets were deserted; the temperature was in the teens and the wind flowed steadily through the narrow streets.

  Duncan parked at a curb and shut the engine off, set the parking brake. The men stepped out. They walked for a half block through the icy wind. Duncan glanced down at his shadow on the sidewalk, cast by the moon above and behind them. "I've thought of another answer. About how long it took them to die."

  Vincent shivered again--mostly, but not only, from the cold.

  "When you look at it from their point of view," the killer said, "you could say that it took forever."

  Chapter 2

  7:01 A.M.

  What is that?

  From his squeaky chair in the warm office, the big man sipped coffee and squinted through the bright morning light toward the far end of the pier. He was the a.m. supervisor of the tugboat repair operation, located on the Hudson River just north of Greenwich Village. There was a Moran with a bum diesel due to dock in forty minutes, but at the moment, the pier was empty and the supervisor was enjoying the warmth of the shed, where he sat with his feet up on the desk, coffee cradled against his chest. He wiped some condensation off the window and looked again.

  What is it?

  A small black box sat by the edge of the pier, the side that faced Jersey. It hadn't been there when the facility closed at six yesterday, and nobody would have docked after that. Had to come from the land side. There was a chain-link fence to prevent pedestrians and passersby from getting into the facility, but, as the man knew from the missing tools and trash drums (go figure), if somebody wanted to break in, they would.

  But why leave something?

  He stared for a while, thinking, It's cold out, it's windy, the coffee's just right. Then he decided, Oh, hell, better check. He pulled on his thick gray jacket, gloves, and hat and, taking a last slug of coffee, stepped outside into the breathtaking air.

  The supervisor made his way through the wind along the pier, his watering eyes focused on the black box.

  The hell is it? The thing was rectangular, less than a foot high, and the low sunlight reflected off something on the front. He squinted against the glare. The white-capped water of the Hudson sloshed against the pilings below.

  Ten feet away from the box he paused, realizing what it was.

  A clock. An old-fashioned one, with those funny numbers--Roman numerals--and a moon face on the front. Looked expensive. He glanced at his watch and saw the clock was working; the time was accurate. Who'd leave a nice thing like that here? Well, all right, I got myself a present.

  As he stepped forward to pick it up, though, his legs went out from under him and he had a moment of pure panic, thinking he'd tumble into the river. But he went straight down on the patch of ice he hadn't seen, and slid no farther.

  Wincing in pain, gasping, he pulled himself to his feet. The man glanced down and realized that this wasn't normal ice. It was reddish brown.

  "Oh, Christ," he whispered as he realized that he was staring at a huge patch of blood, which had pooled near the clock and frozen slick. He leaned forward, and his shock deepened when he realized how the blood had gotten there. He saw what looked like bloody fingernail marks on the wooden decking of the pier, as if someone with slashed fingers or wrists had been holding on to keep from falling into the churning waters of the river.

  He crept to the edge and looked down. No one was floating in the choppy water. He wasn't surprised; if what he imagined was true, the frozen blood meant the poor bastard had been here a while ago, and if he hadn't been saved, his body'd be halfway to Liberty Island by now.

  Fumbling for his cell phone, he backed away and pulled his glove off with his teeth. A final glance at the clock, then he hurried back to the shed, calling the police with a stubby, quaking finger.

  Before and After.

  The city was different now, after that morning in September, after the explosions, the huge tails of smoke, the buildings that disappeared.

  You couldn't deny it. You could talk about the resilience, the mettle, the get-back-to-work attitude of New Yorkers and that was true. But people still paused when planes made that final approach to La Guardia and seemed a bit lower than normal. You crossed the street, wide, around an abandoned shopping bag. You weren't surprised to see soldiers or police dressed in dark uniforms carrying black military-style machine guns.

  The Thanksgiving Day parade had come and gone without incident, and now Christmas was in full swing, crowds everywhere. But floating atop the festivities, like a reflection in a department store's holiday window, was the persistent image of the towers that no longer were, the people no longer with us. And, of course, the big question: What would happen next?

  Lincoln Rhyme had his own Before and After and he understood this concept very well. There was a time when he could walk and function, and then came the time when he could not. One moment he was as healthy as everyone else, searching a crime scene, and a minute later a beam had snapped his neck and left him a C-4 quadriplegic, almost completely paralyzed from the shoulders down.

  Before and After . . .

  There are moments that change you forever.

  And yet, Lincoln Rhyme believed, if you make too grave an icon of them, then the events become more potent. And the bad guys win.

  Now, early on a cold Tuesday morning, these were Rhyme's thoughts as he listened to a National Public Radio announcer, in her unshakable FM voice, report about a parade planned for the day after tomorrow, followed by some ceremonies and meetings of government officials, all of which logically should have been held in the nation's capital. But the up-with-New-York attitude had prevailed, and spectators, as well as protesters, would be present in force and clogging the streets, making the life of security-sensitive police around Wall Street far more difficult. As with politics, so with sports: Playoffs that should occur in New Jersey were now scheduled for Madison Square Garden--as a show, somehow, of patriotism. Rhyme wondered cynically if next year's Boston Marathon would be held in New York City.

  Before and After . . .

  Rhyme had come to believe that he himself really wasn't much different in the After. His physical condition, his skyline, you could say, had changed. But he was essentially the same person as in the Before: a cop and scientist who was impatient, temperamental (okay, sometimes obnoxious), relentless, and intolerant of incompetence and laziness. He didn't play the gimp card, didn't whine, didn't make an issue of his condition (though good luck to any building owners who didn't meet the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for door width and ramps when he was at a crime scene in their buildings).

  Listening to the report now, the fact that certain people in the city seemed to be giving in to self-pity irritated him. "I'm going to write a letter," he announced to Thom.

  The slim young aide, in dark slacks, white shirt, and thick sweater (Rhyme's Central Park West town house suffered from a bad heating system and ancient insulation), glanced up from where he was overdecorating for Christmas. Rhyme enjoyed the irony of his placing a miniature evergreen tree on top of a table below which a present, though an unwrapped one, already waited: a box of adult disposable diapers.

  "Letter?"

  He explained his theory that it was more patriotic to go about business as usual. "I'm going to give 'em hell. The Times, I think."

  "Why don't you?" asked the aide, whose profession was known as "caregiver" (though Thom said that, being in the employ of Lincoln Rhyme, his job description was really "saint").

  "I'm going to," Rhyme said adamantly.

  "Good for you . . . . Though, one thing?"

  Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. The criminalist could--and did--get great expression out of his extant body parts: shou
lders, face, and head.

  "Most of the people who say they're going to write a letter don't. People who do write letters just go ahead and write them. They don't announce it. Ever notice that?"

  "Thank you for the brilliant insight into psychology, Thom. You know that nothing's going to stop me now."

  "Good," repeated Thom.

  Using the touchpad controller, the criminalist maneuvered his red Storm Arrow wheelchair closer to one of the half-dozen large, flat-screen monitors in the room.

  "Command," he said into the voice-recognition system via a microphone attached to the chair. "Word processor."

  WordPerfect dutifully opened on the screen.

  "Command, type. 'Dear sirs.' Command, colon. Command, paragraph. Command, type, 'It has come to my attention--' "

  The doorbell rang and Thom went to see who the visitor was.

  Rhyme closed his eyes and was composing his rant to the world, when a voice intruded. "Hey, Linc. Merry Christmas."

  "Um, ditto," Rhyme grumbled to the paunchy, disheveled Lon Sellitto, walking through the doorway. The big detective had to maneuver carefully; the room had been a quaint parlor in the Victorian era but now was chock-a-block with forensic science gear: optical microscopes, an electron microscope, a gas chromatograph, laboratory beakers and racks, pipettes, petri dishes, centrifuges, chemicals, books and magazines, computers--and thick wires that ran everywhere. (When Rhyme began doing forensic consulting out of his town house, the power-hungry equipment would trip circuit breakers frequently. The juice running into the place probably equaled the combined usage by everyone else on the block.)

  "Command, volume, level three." The environmental control unit obediently turned down NPR.

  "Not in the spirit of the season, are we?" the detective asked.

  Rhyme didn't answer. He looked back at the monitor.

  "Hey, Jackson." Sellitto bent down and petted a small, long-haired dog, curled up in an NYPD evidence box. He was temporarily living here, after his owner, Thom's elderly aunt, had passed away recently in Westport, Connecticut, after a long illness. Among the young man's inheritances was Jackson, a Havanese. The breed, related to the bichon frise, originated in Cuba. Jackson was staying here until Thom could find a good home for him.