Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

As he sat in his armchair, which creaked and hissed under his weight, she glanced at the limp paperback but couldn’t see the cover.

“You comfy?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She was lying on the couch.

“Close your eyes.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Close your eyes so you’ll picture what I’m reading.”

“Okay. What’s -?”

“Hush.”

“Okay.”

He’d started the book, To Kill a Mockingbird . For the next week, his reading it out loud to her at bedtime became a ritual.

Geneva Settle decided it was one of the best books ever – and even at that age, she’d read, or heard, a lot of books. She loved the main characters – the calm, strong, widower father; the brother and sister (Geneva’d always wanted a sibling). And the story itself, about courage in the face of hatred and stupidity, was spellbinding.

The memory of the Harper Lee book stayed with her. And funny, when she went back and reread it at age eleven, she got a lot more of it. Then at fourteen she understood even more. She’d read it again last year and wrote a paper on it for English. She got an A-plus.

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the books on the stack that sat beside the bedroom door at the moment, the in-case-of-fire-grab-this pile. It was a book that she tended to cart around in her book bag, even if she wasn’t reading it. This was the book that she’d slipped Kara’s good-luck-charm violet into.

Tonight, though, she picked another one from the stack. Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist . She lay back, rested the book on her chest and opened it to her flattened straw bookmark (she’d never turn down the pages in any book, even a paperback). She began to read. At first the creaks of the town house spooked her, and the image of the man in the mask came back, but soon she lost herself in the story. And not long after that, an hour or so, Geneva Settle’s eyes grew heavy and she was finally lulled to sleep – not by a mother’s good-night kiss, or a father’s deep voice reciting a prayer, but by the litany of a stranger’s beautiful words.

“Time for bed.”

“What?” Rhyme asked, looking up from his computer screen.

“Bed,” Thom repeated. He was a bit wary. Sometimes it was a battle to get Rhyme to stop working.

But the criminalist said, “Yep. Bed.”

He was, in fact, exhausted – discouraged too. He was reading an email from Warden J. T. Beauchamp in Amarillo reporting that nobody in the prison recognized the computer composite of Unsub 109.

The criminalist dictated a brief thank-you and logged off. Then he said to Thom, “Just one call, then I’ll go willingly.”

“I’ll straighten up some,” the aide said. “Meet you upstairs.”

Amelia Sachs had gone back to her place to spend the night, and to see her mother, who lived near her and had been sick lately – some cardiac problems. Sachs spent the night with Rhyme more often than not, but she’d kept her apartment in Brooklyn, where she had other family members and friends. (Jennifer Robinson – the patrolwoman who’d delivered the teenagers to Rhyme’s that morning – lived right up the street.) Besides, Sachs, like Rhyme, needed solitude from time to time, and this arrangement suited them both.

Rhyme called and talked briefly to her mother, wished her well. Sachs came on the line and he told her about the latest developments – few though they were.

“You okay?” Sachs asked him. “You sound preoccupied.”

“Tired.”

“Ah.” She didn’t believe him. “Get some sleep.”

“You too. Sleep well.”

“Love you, Rhyme.”

“Love you.”

After he disconnected, he rolled toward the evidence chart.

He wasn’t, however, gazing at Thom’s precise entries about the case. He was looking at the printout of the tarot card, taped to a board, the twelfth card, The Hanged Man. He reread the block about the meaning of the card. He studied the man’s placid, inverted face. Then he turned and wheeled to the small elevator that connected the laboratory on the first floor to the bedroom on the second, instructed the elevator to ascend and then wheeled out.

He reflected on the tarot card. Just like Kara, their illusionist friend, Rhyme didn’t believe in spiritualism or the psychic. (They were both, in their own ways, scientists.) But he couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that a card showing a scaffold just happened to be a piece of evidence in a case in which the word “Gallows” figured prominently. The word “Hanged” too was a curious coincidence. Criminalists must know about all methods of death, of course, and Rhyme understood exactly how hanging worked. It snapped the neck high, just below the base of the skull. (The actual cause of death in execution-style hangings was suffocation, though not from squeezing the throat shut, but from cutting off the neuron messages to the lungs.) This is what had nearly happened to Rhyme at the subway crime scene accident some years ago.

Gallows Heights …The Hanged Man…

The meaning of the tarot card, though, was the most significant aspect of the happenstance: Its appearance in a reading indicates spiritual searching leading to a decision, a transition, a change of direction. The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is. When this card appears in your reading you must listen to your inner self, even if that message seems to be contrary to logic.

He was amused because he’d been doing plenty of seeking lately – before the Unsub 109 case and the appearance of the fortune-telling card. Lincoln Rhyme needed to make a decision.

A change of direction …

Now he didn’t remain in the bedroom but instead drove to the room that was the epicenter of this churning debate: his therapy room, where he’d spent hundreds of hours hard at work on Dr. Sherman’s exercise regimen.

Parking the wheelchair in the doorway, he studied the rehab equipment in the dim room – the ergometer bike, the treadmill. Then he glanced down at his right hand, strapped at the wrist to the padded arm of his red Storm Arrow wheelchair.

Decision …

Go on, he told himself.

Try it. Now. Move your hand.

Breathing hard. Eyes riveted to his right hand.

No…

His shoulders slumped, to the extent they could, and he looked into the room. Thinking of all the grueling exercise. Sure, the effort had improved his bone density and muscle mass and circulation, reducing infections and the chance of a neurovascular episode.

But the real question surrounding the exercise could be summed up in a two-word euphemism from the medical specialists: functional benefit. Rhyme’s translation was less foggy: feeling and moving.

The very aspects of his recovery he’d dismissed when speaking to Sherman earlier today.

To put it frankly, he’d lied to the doctor. In his heart, not confessed to anyone, was the burning need to know one thing: Had those tortured hours of exercise let him regain sensation and given him the ability to move muscles that had not moved in years? Could he now turn the knob on a Bausch & Lomb microscope to bring a fiber or hair into focus? Could he feel Amelia Sachs’s palm against his?

As for the sensation, perhaps there had been some slight improvement. But a quadriplegic with a C4 level of injury floats in a sea of phantom pain and phony sensation, all ginned up by the brain to taunt and confuse. You feel flies crawling on skin where no flies have landed. You feel no sensation whatsoever as you look down and realize that a spill of scalding coffee is burning off layers of your flesh. Rhyme believed, though, that he had a bit of improved sensation.