Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

In Kevin’s case, he wanted her mind. Well, wouldn’t she have been just as upset if she’d been built like Lakeesha and he’d hit on her for booty or boobs?

No, she thought angrily. That was different. That was normal. The counselors at school talked a lot about rape, about saying no, about what to do if a boy got too pushy. What to do after, if it happened.

But they never said a word about what to do if somebody wanted to rape your mind.

Shit, shit, shit!

Her teeth ground together and she wiped the tears, flung them away on her fingertips. Forget him! He’s a lame asshole. The calc test – that’s all that’s important.

d over dx times x to the nth equals…

Motion to her left. Geneva looked in that direction and, squinting against the sun, saw a figure across the street, in the shadows of a tenement, a man with a black do-rag on his head and wearing a dark green jacket. He’d been walking toward the school yard but then disappeared behind a big truck nearby. Her first panicked thought: The man from the library had come for her. But, no, this guy was black. Relaxing, she glanced at her Swatch. Get back inside.

Only…

Despairing, she thought about the looks she’d get. Kevin’s boys, who’d give her the bad eye. The bling girls, who’d stare and laugh.

Get her down, get the bitch down…

Forget about them. Who gives a shit what they think? The test is all that matters.

d over dx times x to the nth equals nx to the nth minus one…

As she started back for the side door she wondered if Kevin would be suspended. Or maybe expelled. She hoped so.

d over dx times…

It was then that she heard the scrape of footsteps from the street. Geneva stopped and turned. She couldn’t see anyone clearly, because of the glare of the bright sun. Was it the black man in the green jacket coming toward her?

The sound of footsteps paused. She turned away, started toward the school, pushing aside every thought but the power rule of calculus.

…equals nx to the nth minus one…

Which is when she heard footsteps again, moving fast now. Somebody was charging forward, headed straight for her. She couldn’t see. Who is it? She held her hand up to block the fierce sunlight.

And heard Detective Bell’s voice call, “ Geneva! Don’t move!”

The man was sprinting forward, with someone else – Officer Pulaski – at his side. “Miss, what happened? Why’d you come outside?”

“I was -”

Three police cars squealed up nearby. Detective Bell looked up, toward the large truck, squinting into the sun. “Pulaski! That’s him . Go, go, go!”

They were looking at the receding form of the man she’d seen a minute ago, the one in the green jacket. He was jogging away quickly, with a slight limp, down an alley.

“I’m on it.” The officer sprinted after him. He squeezed through the gate and disappeared into the alley, in pursuit of the man. Then a half dozen police officers appeared in the school yard. They fanned out and surrounded Geneva and the detectives.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Hurrying her toward the cars, Detective Bell explained that they’d just heard from an FBI agent, somebody named Dellray, who worked with Mr. Rhyme. One of his informants had learned that a man in Harlem had been asking about Geneva that morning, trying to find which school she went to and where she lived. He was African-American and wearing a dark green army jacket. He’d been arrested on a murder charge a few years ago and was now armed. Because the attacker in the museum that morning was white and might not know Harlem very well, Mr. Rhyme concluded, he’d decided to use an accomplice who knew the neighborhood.

After Mr. Bell learned this, the detective had gone into the classroom to get her and found out that she’d slipped out the back door. But Jonette Monroe, the undercover cop, had been keeping an eye on her and followed her. She’d then alerted the police to where Geneva was.

Now, the detective said, they had to get her back to Mr. Rhyme’s immediately.

“But the test. I -”

“No tests, no school until we catch this guy,” Bell said firmly. “Now, come on, miss.”

Furious at Kevin’s betrayal, furious that she’d been dragged into the middle of this mess, she crossed her arms. “I have to take that test.”

“Geneva, you don’t know what kind of muley I can be. I aim to keep you alive and if that means picking you up and carrying you to my car rest assured I will do just that.” His dark eyes, which had seemed so easygoing, were now hard as rocks.

“All right,” she muttered.

They continued toward the cars, the detective looking around them, checking the shadows. She noticed his hand was near his side. Close to his gun. The blond-haired officer trotted up to them a moment later. “Lost him,” he gasped, catching his breath. “Sorry.”

Bell sighed. “Any description?”

“Black, six feet, solid build. Limp. Black do-rag. No beard or mustache. Late thirties, early forties.”

“Did you see anything else, Geneva?”

She shook her head sullenly.

Bell said, “Okay. Let’s get out of here.”

She climbed into the back of the detective’s Ford, with the blond officer beside her. Mr. Bell started for the driver’s side. The counselor they’d met earlier, Mrs. Barton, hurried up, a frown on her face. “Detective, what’s wrong?”

“We have to get Geneva out of here. Might be that one of the people wants to hurt her was close by. Still could be, for all we know.”

The heavy woman looked around, frowning. “Here?”

“We aren’t sure. A possibility, all I’m saying. Just better to play it safe.” The detective added, “We’re thinking he was here about five minutes ago. African-American, good-sized fella. Wearing a green army jacket and do-rag. Clean-shaven. Limping. He was on the far side of the school yard, by that big truck there. Could you could ask students and teachers if they know him or saw anything else?”

“Of course.”

He asked her too to see if any school security tapes might have picked him up. They exchanged phone numbers, then the detective dropped into the driver’s seat, started the engine. “Buckle up, everybody. We aren’t exactly going to be moseyin’ on out of here.”

Just as Geneva clicked her seat belt on, the policeman hit the gas and the car skidded away from the curb and started a roller-coaster ride through the ragged streets of Harlem, as Langston Hughes High School – her last fortress of sanity and comfort – disappeared from view.

As Amelia Sachs and Lon Sellitto organized the evidence she’d collected at the safe house on Elizabeth Street, Rhyme was thinking about Unsub 109’s accomplice – the man who’d just gotten real damn close to Geneva at her school.

There was a possibility that the unsub had been using this man solely for surveillance, except that with the ex-con’s violent background and the fact he was armed, he too was probably prepared to kill her himself. Rhyme had hoped that the man had shed some evidence near the school yard, but no – a crime scene team had looked over the area carefully and found nothing. And a canvass team had located no witnesses on the street who’d seen him or how he got away. Maybe -

“Hi, Lincoln,” a male voice said.

Startled, Rhyme looked up and saw a man standing nearby. In his mid-forties, with broad shoulders, a close-cropped cap of silver hair, bangs in the front. He wore an expensive, dark gray suit.

“Doctor. Didn’t hear the bell.”

“Thom was outside. He let me in.”

Robert Sherman, the doctor supervising Rhyme’s physical therapy, ran a clinic that specialized in working with spinal cord injury patients. It was he who’d developed Rhyme’s regimen of therapy, the bicycle and the locomotor treadmill, as well as aquatherapy and the traditional range-of-motion exercises that Thom performed on Rhyme.