Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“My grades’re fine.”

“Oh, I know that. We’re real happy with your academic work, Geneva. But school’s about children and parents working together. I’d really like to talk to them. What’s their cell number?”

The girl froze.

A dense silence.

Which Lincoln Rhyme finally broke. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

Geneva looked down. Her fists were clenched.

Rhyme said to Barton, “I just got off the phone with her father.”

Everyone else in the room turned and stared at him.

“Are they back home?”

“No, and they won’t be for a while.”

“No?”

“I asked them not to come.”

“You did? Why?” The woman frowned.

“It’s my decision. I did it to keep Geneva safe. As Roland Bell here will tell you” – a glance at the Carolina detective, who nodded, a fairly credible gesture, considering he had no clue what was going on – “when we set up protection details, sometimes we have to separate the people we’re guarding from their families.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Otherwise,” Rhyme continued, vamping, “the attacker could use their relatives to draw them into public.”

Barton nodded. “Makes sense.”

“What’s it called, Roland?” Rhyme glanced at the detective again. And filled in the answer himself, “Isolation of Dependents, right?”

“IOD,” Bell said, nodding. “What we call it. Very important technique.”

“Well, I’m glad to know that,” the counselor said. “But your uncle’ll be looking out for you, right?”

Sellitto said, “No, we think it’s probably best if Geneva stays here.”

“We’re running an IOD with her uncle too,” Bell said. The fabrication sounded particularly slick coming from a law enforcer with a Southern drawl. “Want to keep him out of sight.”

Barton bought it all, Rhyme could see. The counselor said to Geneva, “Well, when this is over, please have them call me. Seems like you’re handling it pretty well. But psychologically it has to be taking a toll. We’ll all sit down together and work through some of the issues.” She added with a smile, “There’s nothing broke that can’t be fixed.”

A sentence that was probably emblazoned on a desk plaque or coffee mug in her office.

“Okay,” Geneva said cautiously. “We’ll see.”

After the woman was gone, Geneva turned to Rhyme. “I don’t know what to say. It means so much to me, what you did.”

“Mostly,” he muttered, uneasy with the gratitude, “it was for our convenience. I can’t very well go calling up Child Welfare and tracking you down in foster homes every time we have a question about the case.”

Geneva laughed. “Front all you want,” she said. “Thanks anyway.” Then she huddled with Bell and told him what books, clothes and other items she needed from the basement on 118th Street. The detective said he’d also get back from the phony uncle whatever she’d paid him for the scam.

“He won’t give it back,” she said. “You don’t know him.”

Bell smiled and said amiably, “Oh, he’ll give it back.” This, from the man with two guns.

Geneva called Lakeesha and told her girlfriend that she’d be staying at Rhyme’s, then, hanging up, she followed Thom upstairs to the guest room.

Sellitto asked, “What if the counselor finds out, Linc?”

“Finds out what?”

“Well, how ’bout that you lied about Geneva ’s parents and made up some department procedures? What the hell was it? The DUI?”

“IOD,” Bell reminded.

“And what’s she going to do?” Rhyme growled. “Make me stay after school?” He gave an abrupt nod at the evidence board. “Now can we get back to work? There is a killer out there. And he’s got a partner. And somebody hired them. Recall that? I’d like to figure out who the hell they are sometime this decade.”

Sachs walked to the table and began organizing the folders and copies of materials that William Ashberry had let her borrow from the foundation library – the “small crime scene.” She said, “This’s mostly about Gallows Heights – maps, drawings, articles. Some things on Potters’ Field.”

She handed the documents to Cooper one by one. He taped up several drawings and maps of Gallows Heights, which Rhyme stared at intently as Sachs told them what she’d learned about the neighborhood. She then walked to the drawing and touched a two-story commercial building. “Potters’ Field was right about here. West Eightieth Street.” She skimmed some of the documents. “Seems like it was pretty disreputable, a lot of crooks hung out there, people like Jim Fisk and Boss Tweed and politicians connected to the Tammany Hall machine.”

“See how valuable small crime scenes can be, Sachs? You’re a wealth of helpful information.”

She gave him a minor scowl, then picked up a photocopy. “This’s an article about the fire. It says that the night Potters’ Field burned down, witnesses heard an explosion in the basement and then, almost immediately, the place was engulfed. Arson was suspected but nobody was ever arrested. No fatalities.”

“What did Charles go there for?” Rhyme mused aloud. “What did he mean by ‘justice’? And what’s ’forever hidden beneath clay and soil’?”

Was it a clue, a bit of evidence, a scrap of document that could answer the question of who wanted to murder Geneva Settle?

Sellitto shook his head. “Too bad it was a hundred and forty years ago. Whatever, it’s gone now. We’ll never know.”

Rhyme looked at Sachs. She caught his eye. She smiled.

“Oh, you’re lucky in one way,” explained David Yu, a spiky-haired young engineer who worked for the city.

“We could use some,” Amelia Sachs said. “Luck, I mean.”

They were standing on West Eightieth Street, about a half block east of Riverside Park, looking up at a three-story brownstone. A crime scene bus waited nearby, as did another friend of Sachs’s, a policewoman named Gail Davis, from the K9 unit, and her dog Vegas. Most police dogs were German shepherds, Malinois and – for bomb detail – Labrador retrievers. Vegas, though, was a briard, a French breed with a long history of military service; these dogs are known for having keen noses and an uncanny ability to sense threats to livestock and humans. Rhyme and Sachs had thought that running a 140-year-old crime scene might benefit from some old-fashioned search methods, in addition to the high-tech systems that would be employed.

The engineer, Yu, nodded at the building that had been constructed on the site where Potters’ Field tavern had burned. The date on the cornerstone read 1879. “To build a tenement like this back then they wouldn’t have excavated and laid a slab. They’d dig a perimeter foundation, pour concrete and set the walls. That was the load-bearing part. The basement floor would have been dirt. But building codes changed. They would’ve put a concrete floor in sometime early in this century. Again, though, it wouldn’t be structural. It’d be for health and safety. So the contractors wouldn’t’ve excavated for that either.”

“So the lucky part is that whatever was under there in the eighteen sixties might still be there,” Sachs said.

Forever hidden …

“Right.”

“And the unlucky part is that it’s under concrete.”

“Pretty much.”

“A foot deep?”

“Maybe less.”

Sachs walked around the building, which was grimy and plain, though she knew the apartments in it would rent for $4,000 or so a month. There was a service entrance in the back that led below ground to the basement.

She was returning to the front of the structure when the phone rang. “Detective Sachs.”