Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Sachs understood. “He meant to leave the rape pack behind. So we’d find it.”

Pulaski was nodding. “Otherwise, he’d just have wiped everything after he got it home.”

“Ex-actly,” Rhyme said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “I think it was staged evidence. To make us think it was a rape, with some kind of occult overtones. Okay, okay… Let’s step back.” Rhyme was amused at Pulaski’s uneasy glance at Rhyme’s legs when the criminalist used the expression. “An attacker tracks down Geneva in a public museum. Not the typical setting for sexual assault. Then he hits her – well, the mannequin – hard enough to kill her, if not knock her out for hours. If that’s the case then what’s he need the box cutter and duct tape for? And he leaves a tarot card he thinks is scary but is really just about spiritual searching? No, it wasn’t an attempted rape at all.”

“What’s he up to then?” Sellitto asked.

“That’s what we damn well better find out.” Rhyme thought for a moment then asked, “And you said that Dr. Barry didn’t see anything?”

“That’s what he told me,” Sellitto replied.

“But the unsub still comes back and kills him.” Rhyme frowned. “And Mr. One-oh-nine broke up the microfiche reader. He’s a pro, but tantrums’re very un -pro. His vic’s getting away – he’s not going to waste time thumpin’ on things because he’s having a bad morning.” Rhyme asked the girl, “You said you were reading some old newspaper?”

“Magazine,” she corrected.

“On the microfiche reader?”

“Right.”

“Those?” Rhyme nodded at a large plastic evidence bag containing a box of microfiche trays that Sachs had brought back from the library. Two slots, carriages one and three, were empty.

Geneva looked at the box. She nodded. “Yeah. Those were the ones that had the article I was reading, the missing ones.”

“Did you get the one that was in the reader?”

Sachs replied, “There wasn’t one. He must’ve taken it with him.”

“And smashed the machine so we wouldn’t notice that the tray was gone. Oh, this is getting interesting. What was he up to? What the hell was his motive?”

Sellitto laughed. “I thought you didn’t care about motive. Only evidence.”

“You need to draw the distinction, Lon, between using motive to prove a case in court – which is speculation at best – and using motive to lead you to the evidence, which conclusively convicts a perp: A man kills his business partner with a gun that we trace to his garage loaded with bullets he bought per a receipt with his fingerprints on it. In that case who cares if he killed the partner because he thinks a talking dog told him to or because the guy was sleeping with his wife? The evidence makes the case.

“But what if there are no bullets, gun, receipt or tire tracks? Then a perfectly valid question is why was the vic killed? Answering that can point us toward the evidence that will convict him. Sorry for the lecture,” he added with no apology in his voice.

“Good mood gone, is it?” Thom asked.

Rhyme grumbled, “I’m missing something here and I don’t like it.”

Geneva was frowning. Rhyme noticed and asked, “What?”

“Well, I was thinking…Dr. Barry said that somebody else was interested in the same issue of that magazine that I was. He wanted to read it, but Dr. Barry told him he’d have to wait until I was through with it.”

“Did he say who?”

“No.”

Rhyme considered this. “So let’s speculate: The librarian tells this somebody that you’re interested in the magazine. The unsub wants to steal it and he wants to kill you because you’ve read it or will read it.” The criminalist wasn’t convinced this was the situation, of course. But one of the things that made him so successful was his willingness to consider bold, sometimes farfetched theories. “And he took the one article you were reading, right?”

The girl nodded.

“It was like he knew exactly what to look for… What was it about?”

“Nothing important. Just this ancestor of mine. My teacher’s into all this Roots stuff and we had to write about somebody in our past.”

“Who was he, this ancestor?”

“My great-great-great-whatever, a freed slave. I went to the museum last week and found out there was an article about him in this issue of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated . They didn’t have it in the library but Mr. Barry said he’d get the microfiche from storage. It just came in.”

“What was the story about specifically?” Rhyme persisted.

She hesitated then said impatiently, “Charles Singleton, my ancestor, was a slave in Virginia. His master had this change of heart and he freed all of his slaves. And because Charles and his wife had been with the family for so long and had taught their children to read and write, their master gave them a farm in New York state. Charles was a soldier in the Civil War. He came back home afterwards and in eighteen sixty-eight he got accused of stealing some money from a black educational fund. That’s all the article in the magazine was about. I’d just gotten to the part where he jumped into the river to escape from the police when that man showed up.”

Rhyme noted that she spoke well but held on to her words tightly, as if they were squirming puppies trying to escape. With educated parents on one side and homegirl friends like Lakeesha on the other, it was only natural that the girl suffered from some linguistic multiple personality.

“So you don’t know what happened to him?” Sachs asked.

Geneva shook her head.

“I think we have to assume that the unsub had some interest in what you were researching. Who knew what the topic of your paper was? Your teacher, I assume.”

“No, I never told him specifically. I don’t think I told anybody but Lakeesha. She might’ve mentioned it to somebody but I doubt it. Assignments don’t take up a lot of her attention, you know what I’m saying? Not even her own. Last week I went to this law office in Harlem to see if they had any old records about crimes in the eighteen hundreds but I didn’t tell the lawyer there very much. Of course, Dr. Barry would’ve known.”

“And he would’ve mentioned it to that other person who was interested in the magazine too,” Rhyme pointed out. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume there’s something in that article that the unsub doesn’t want known – maybe about your ancestor, maybe something else entirely.” A glance at Sachs. “Anybody still at the scene?”

“A portable.”

“Have ’em canvass the employees. See if Barry mentioned that somebody was interested in that old magazine. Have them go through his desk too.” Rhyme had another thought. “And I want his phone records for the past month.”

Sellitto shook his head. “Linc, really…this’s sounding pretty thin, don’t you think? We’re talking, what? The eighteen hundreds? This isn’t a cold case. It’s a frozen one.”

“A pro who staged a scene, nearly killed one person, and did kill another – right in front of a half dozen cops – just to steal that article? That’s not thin, Lon. That’s got searchlights all over it.”

The big cop shrugged and called the precinct to relay the order to the cop still on duty at the crime scene and then called Warrants to have them issue a phone record subpoena on the museum’s and Barry’s personal phones.

Rhyme looked over the slim girl and decided that he had no choice; he had to deliver the tough news. “You know what all this might mean, don’t you?”

A pause, though he could see in Sachs’s troubled glance at Geneva that the policewoman at least knew exactly what it meant. It was she who said to the girl, “Lincoln’s saying that it’s likely that he’s probably still after you.”