Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“He was frontin’? How you know that?” Lakeesha asked, furtively slipping two sticks of gum into her mouth.

“I don’t know it. I suspect it. Like the laughing. He was probably doing it to make Geneva drop her guard. You tend not to notice people on cell phones. And you rarely think of them as being a threat.”

Geneva was nodding. “Yeah. I was kinda freaked when he first came into the library. But when I heard him on the phone, well, I thought it’s rude to be talking on a phone in a library but I wasn’t scared anymore.”

“What happened then?” Sachs asked.

She explained that she’d heard a second click – she thought it sounded like a gun – and saw a man in a ski mask. She then told how she’d dismantled the mannequin and dressed it in her own clothes.

“That phat,” Lakeesha offered proudly. “My sista here, she smart.”

She sure is, Rhyme thought.

“I hid in the stacks till he walked to the microfiche reader then I ran for the fire door.”

“You didn’t see anything else about him?” Sachs asked.

“No.”

“What color was the mask?”

“Dark. I don’t know exactly.”

“Other clothes?”

“I didn’t see anything else really. Not that I remember. I was pretty freaked.”

“I’m sure you were,” Sachs said. “When you were hiding in the stacks, were you looking in his direction? So you’d know when to run?”

Geneva frowned for a moment. “Well, yeah, that’s right, I was looking. I forgot about that. I watched through the bottom shelves so I could run when he got close to my chair.”

“So maybe you saw a little more of him then.”

“Oh, you know, I did. I think he had brown shoes. Yeah, brown. Sort of a lighter shade, not dark brown.”

“Good. And what about his pants?”

“Dark, I’m pretty sure. But that’s all I could see, just the cuffs.”

“You smell anything?”

“No…Wait. Maybe I did . You know, something sweet, like flowers.”

“And then?”

“He came up to the chair and I heard this crack and then another couple of sounds. Something breaking.”

“The microfiche reader,” Sachs said. “He smashed it.”

“By then I was running as fast as I could. To the fire door. I went down the stairs and when I got to the street I found Keesh and we were going to run. But I was thinking maybe he was going to hurt somebody else. So I turned around and” – she looked at Pulaski – “we saw you.”

Sachs asked Lakeesha, “Did you see the attacker?”

“Nothin’. I was just chillin’ and then Gen come up, runnin’ all fast and buggin’ an’ ever’thing, you know what I’m sayin’? I didn’t see nothin’.”

Rhyme asked Sellitto, “The doer killed Barry because he was a witness – what’d he see?”

“He said he didn’t see anything. He gave me the names of the museum’s white, male employees in case it was one of them. There’re two but they checked out. One was taking his daughter to school at the time, the other was in the main office, people around him.”

“So, an opportunistic perp,” Sachs mused. “Saw her go inside and went after her.”

“A museum?” Rhyme asked. “Odd choice.”

Sellitto asked both girls, “Did you see anyone following you today?”

Lakeesha said, “We come down on the C train durin’ rush hour. Eighth Avenue line…be all crowded and nasty. Couldn’t see nobody weird. You?”

Geneva shook her head.

“How ’bout recently? Anybody hassling you? Hitting on you?”

Neither of them could think of anybody who’d seemed to be a threat. Embarrassed, Geneva said, “Not exactly a lot of stalkers coming round after me. They’d be looking for a little more booty, you know. Blingier.”

“Blingier?”

“Girl mean flashy,” translated Lakeesha, who obviously typified both booty and bling. She frowned and glanced at Geneva. “Why you gotta go there, girl? Don’t be talkin’ trash ’bout yo’self.”

Sachs looked at Rhyme, who was frowning. “What’re you thinking?”

“Something’s not right. Let’s go over the evidence while Geneva’s here. There might be some things that she can help explain.”

The girl shook her head. “That test?” She held up her watch.

“This won’t take long,” Rhyme said.

Geneva looked at her friend. “You can just make it to study period.”

“I’ma stay with you. I can’t be sittin’ for all them hours in class worryin’ ’bout you and ever’thing.”

Geneva gave a wry laugh. “No way, girl.” She asked Rhyme, “You don’t need her, do you?”

He glanced at Sachs, who shook her head. Sellitto jotted down her address and phone number. “We’ll call you if we have any more questions.”

“Take a pass, girl,” she said. “Just kick it an’ stay home.”

“I’ll see you at school,” Geneva said firmly. “You’ll be there?” Then lifted an eyebrow. “Word?”

Two loud snaps of gum. A sigh. “Word.” At the door the girl paused and turned back, said to Rhyme, “Yo, mister, how long fo’ you get outa that chair?”

No one said anything to fill the awkward moment. Awkward to everyone, Rhyme supposed, but himself.

“It’ll probably be a long time,” he said to her.

“Man, that suck.”

“Yeah,” Rhyme said. “Sometimes it does.”

She headed into the hall, toward the front door. They heard, “Damn, watch it, dude.” The outer door slammed.

Mel Cooper entered the room, looking back at the spot where he’d nearly been run down by a teenager who outweighed him by fifty pounds. “Okay,” he said to no one. “I’m not going to ask.” He pulled off his green windbreaker and nodded a greeting to everyone.

The slim, balding man had been working as a forensic scientist for an upstate New York police department some years ago when he’d politely but insistently told Rhyme, then head of NYPD forensics, that one of his analyses was wrong. Rhyme had far more respect for people who pointed out mistakes than for sycophants – provided, of course, they were correct, which Cooper had been. Rhyme had immediately started a campaign to get the man to New York City, a challenge at which he ultimately succeeded.

Cooper was a born scientist but even more important he was a born forensic scientist, which is very different. It’s often thought that “forensic” refers to crime scene work, but in fact the word means any aspect of debating issues in courts of law. To be a successful criminalist you have to translate raw facts into a form that’ll be useful to the prosecutor. It’s not enough, for instance, to simply determine the presence of nux vomica plant materials at a suspected crime scene – many of which are used for such innocuous medical purposes as treating ear inflammations. A true forensic scientist like Mel Cooper would know instantly that those same materials produce the deadly alkaloid poison strychnine.

Cooper had the trappings of a computer-game nerd – he lived with his mother, still wore madras shirts with chinos and had a Woody Allen physique. But looks were deceiving. Cooper’s longtime girlfriend was a tall, gorgeous blonde. Together they would sail in unison across ballroom floors in dance competitions, in which they were often top champions. Recently they’d taken up skeet shooting and winemaking (to which Cooper was meticulously applying principles of chemistry and physics).

Rhyme briefed him on the case and they turned to the evidence. Rhyme said, “Let’s look at the pack.”

Donning latex gloves, Cooper glanced at Sachs, who pointed out the paper bag containing the rape pack. He opened it over a large piece of newsprint – to catch bits of ambient trace – and extracted the bag. It was a thin plastic sack. No store logo was printed on it, only a large yellow smiley face. The tech now opened the bag, then paused. He said, “I smell something…” A deep inhalation. “Flowery. What is that?” Cooper carried the bag to Rhyme and he smelled it. There was something familiar about the fragrance, but he couldn’t decide what. “Geneva?”