Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Sachs turned quickly. Rhyme backed away from the table and reluctantly rolled the Storm Arrow in a circle. Thinking: Damnit. Should’ve been more careful.

Geneva Settle stood in the doorway.

“You found out something about Charles in the basement of that tavern, didn’t you? You found out that he really did steal the money. Was that his secret, after all?”

A glance at Sachs, then Rhyme said, “No, Geneva. No. We found something else.” A nod toward the box. “Here. Take a look.”

The girl walked closer. She stopped, blinking, staring down at the brown human skull. It was this that they’d seen on the ultrasound image and that had rolled out into Sachs’s lap. With the help of Vegas, Gail Davis’s briard, the detective had recovered the remaining bones. These bones – what Sachs had thought were the slats from a strongbox – were those of a man, Rhyme had determined. The body had apparently been stuffed vertically into the cistern in the basement of Potters’ Field tavern just before Charles had ignited the fire. The ultrasound imaging had picked up the top of the skull and a rib beneath it, which gave the appearance of a fuse for a bomb.

The bones were in a second box on the worktable.

“We’re pretty sure it’s a man that Charles killed.”

“No!”

“And then he burned down the tavern to cover up the crime.”

“You couldn’t know that,” Geneva snapped.

“We don’t, no. But it’s a reasonable deduction.” Rhyme explained: “His letter said he was going to Potters’ Field, armed with his Navy Colt revolver. That was a pistol from the Civil War. It didn’t work like guns nowadays, where you load a bullet into the back of the cylinder. You had to load each chamber from the front with a ball and gunpowder.”

She nodded. Her eyes were on the brown and black bones, the eyeless skull.

“We found some information on guns like his in our database. It’s a.36-caliber but most Civil War soldiers learned to use.39-caliber balls in them. They’re a little bigger and fit more tightly. That makes the gun more accurate.”

Sachs picked up a small plastic bag. “This was in the skull cavity.” Inside was a little sphere of lead. “It’s a.39-caliber ball that was fired out of a.36-caliber gun.”

“But that doesn’t prove anything.” She was staring at the hole in the forehead of the skull.

“No,” Rhyme said kindly. “It suggests. But it suggests very strongly that Charles killed him.”

“Who was he?” Geneva asked.

“We don’t have any idea. If he had any ID on him it burned up or disintegrated, along with his clothes. We found the bullet, a small gun that he probably had with him, some gold coins and a ring with the word…what was the word, Mel?”

“‘Winskinskie.’” He held up a plastic bag with the gold signet ring inside. Above the inscription was an etched profile of an American Indian.

Cooper had quickly found that the word meant “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in the language of the Delaware Indians. This might be the dead man’s name, though his cranial bone structure suggested he wasn’t Native-American. More likely, Rhyme felt, it was a fraternal, school or lodge slogan of some sort and Cooper had queried some anthropologists and history professors via email to see if they’d heard of the word.

“Charles wouldn’t do it,” his descendant said softly. “He wouldn’t murder anyone.”

“The bullet was fired into the forehead,” Rhyme said. “Not from behind. And the Derringer – the gun – that Sachs found in the cistern probably belonged to the victim. That suggests the shooting could’ve been in self-defense.”

Though the fact remained that Charles had voluntarily gone to the tavern armed with a gun. He would have anticipated some sort of violence.

“I should never have started this in the first place,” Geneva muttered. “Stupid. I don’t even like the past. It’s pointless. I hate it!” She turned and ran into the hallway, then up the stairs.

Sachs followed. She returned a few minutes later. “She’s reading. She said she wants to be alone. I think she’ll be all right.” Her voice didn’t sound very certain, though.

Rhyme looked over the information on the oldest scene he’d ever run – 140 years. The whole point of the search was to learn something that might lead them to whoever had hired Unsub 109. But all it had done was nearly get Sachs killed and disappoint Geneva with the news that her ancestor had killed a man.

He looked at the copy of The Hanged Man tarot card, staring at him placidly from the evidence board, mocking Rhyme’s frustration.

Cooper said, “Hey, have something here.” He was looking at his computer screen.

“Winskinskie?” Rhyme asked.

“No. Listen. An answer to our mystery substance – the one that Amelia found in the unsub’s Elizabeth Street safe house and near Geneva’s aunt’s. The liquid.”

“Damn well about time. What the hell is it? Toxin?” Rhyme asked.

“Our bad boy’s got dry eyes,” Cooper said.

“What?”

“It’s Murine.”

“Eyedrops?”

“That’s right. The composition’s exactly the same.”

“Okay. Add that to the chart,” Rhyme ordered Thom. “Might just be temporary – because he’d been working with acid. In which case, won’t help us. But it might be chronic. That’d be good.”

Criminalists loved perps with physical maladies. Rhyme had a whole section in his book on tracing people through prescription or over-the-counter drugs, disposed hypodermic needles, prescription eyeglasses, unique shoe-tread wear from orthopedic problems, and so on.

It was then that Sachs’s phone rang. She listened for a moment. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” The policewoman disconnected, glanced at Rhyme. “Well, this’s interesting.”

When Amelia Sachs walked into the Critical Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital she saw two Pulaskis.

One was in bed, swathed in bandages and hooked up to creepy clear plastic tubes. His eyes were dull, his mouth slack.

The other sat at his bedside, awkward in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Just as blond, just as fresh-faced, in the same crisp blue NYPD uniform Ron Pulaski had been wearing when Sachs had recruited him in front of the African-American museum yesterday and told him to act concerned about a pile of garbage.

How many sugars?…

She blinked at the mirror image.

“I’m Tony. Ron’s brother. Which you probably guessed.”

“Hi, Detective,” Ron managed breathlessly. His voice wasn’t working right. It was slurred, sloppy.

“How you feeling?”

“How ish Geneva?”

“She’s all right. I’m sure you heard – we stopped him at her aunt’s place but he got away… You hurting? Must be.”

He nodded toward the IV drip. “Happy soup…Don’t feel a thing.”

“He’ll be okay.”

“I’ll be okay,” Ron echoed his brother’s words. He took a few deep breaths, blinked.

“A month or so,” Tony explained. “Some therapy. He’ll be back on duty. Some fractures. Not much internal damage. Thick skull. Which Dad always said.”

“Shkull.” Ron grinned.

“You were at the academy together?” She pulled up a chair and sat.

“Right.”

“What’s your house?”

“The Six,” Tony answered.

The Sixth Precinct was in the heart of west Greenwich Village. Not many muggings or carjackings or drugs. Mostly breakins, gay domestics and incidents by emotionally disturbed artists and writers off their meds. The Six was also home to the Bomb Squad.

Tony was shaken, sure, but angry too. “The guy kept at him, even when he was down. He didn’t need to.”