Jeffery Deaver: The Twelfth Card

“Well, it’s fifty feet too close. Get ’em the hell away. Press’re like leeches. Remember that.”

“Sure, Detective.”

You didn’t know. Now you do.

He hurried off and started moving the line back.

“Where’s the girl?” Sachs asked.

The sergeant, a solid Hispanic man with thick, graying hair, said, “An officer took her and her friend to Midtown North. They’re calling her parents.” Sharp autumn sunlight reflected off his many gold decorations. “After they get in touch with them, somebody was going to take ’ em to Captain Rhyme ’s place to interview her.” He laughed. “She’s a smart one. Know what she did?”

“What?”

“She had an idea there might be some trouble, so she dressed up this mannequin in her sweatshirt and hat. The perp went after that. Bought her time to get away.”

Sachs laughed. “And she’s only sixteen? Smart.”

Sellitto said to her, “You run the scene. I’m going to get a canvass going.” He wandered up the sidewalk to a cluster of officers – one uniform and two Anti-Crime cops in dress-down plain clothes – and sent them around the crowd and into nearby stores and office buildings to check for witnesses. He rounded up a separate team to interview each of the half dozen pushcart vendors here, some selling coffee and doughnuts at the moment, others setting up for lunches of hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and falafel pita-bread sandwiches.

A honk sounded and she turned. The CS bus had arrived from the Crime Scene Unit HQ in Queens.

“Hey, Detective,” the driver said, getting out.

Sachs nodded a greeting to him and his partner. She knew the young men from prior cases. She pulled off her jacket and weapon, dressed in white Tyvek overalls, which minimized contamination of the scene. She then strapped her Glock back on her hip, thinking of Rhyme’s constant admonition to his CS crews: Search well but watch your back.

“Give me a hand with the bags?” she asked, hefting one of the metal suitcases containing basic evidence-collection and -transport equipment.

“You bet.” A CSU tech grabbed two of the other cases.

She pulled on a hands-free headset and plugged it into her Handi-Talkie just as Ron Pulaski returned from his press push-back duty. He led Sachs and the Crime Scene officers into the building. They got off the elevator on the fifth floor and walked to the right, to double doors below a sign that said, Booker T. Washington Room .

“That’s the scene in there.”

Sachs and the techs opened the suitcases, started removing equipment. Pulaski continued, “I’m pretty sure he came through these doors. The only other exit is the fire stairwell and you can’t enter from the outside, and it wasn’t jimmied. So, he comes through this door, locks it and then goes after the girl. She escaped through the fire door.”

“Who unlocked the front one for you?” Sachs asked.

“Guy named Don Barry, head librarian.”

“He go in with you?”

“No.”

“Where is he now?”

“His office – third floor. I wondered if maybe it was an inside job, you know? So I asked him for a list of all his white male employees and where they were when she was attacked.”

“Good.” Sachs had been planning to do the same.

“He said he’d bring the list down to us as soon as he was done.”

“Now, tell me what I’ll find inside.”

“The girl was at the microfiche reader. It’s around the corner to the right. You’ll see it easy.” Pulaski pointed to the end of a large room filled with tall rows of bookshelves, beyond which was an open area where Sachs could see mannequins dressed in period clothing, paintings, cases of antique jewelry, purses, shoes, accessories – your typical dusty museum displays, the sort of stuff you look at while you’re really wondering what restaurant to eat at after you’ve had enough culture.

“What’s security like around here?” Sachs was looking for surveillance cameras on the ceiling.

“Zip. No cameras. No guards, no sign-in sheets. You just walk in.”

“Never easy, is it?”

“No, ma’…No, Detective.”

She thought about telling him that “ma’am” was okay, not like “lady,” but didn’t know how to explain the distinction. “One question. Did you close the fire door downstairs?”

“No, I left it just the way I found it. Open.”

“So the scene could be hot.”

“Hot?”

“The perp could’ve come back.”

“I…”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Pulaski. I just want to know.”

“Well, I guess he could’ve, yeah.”

“All right, you stay in the doorway here. I want you to listen.”

“For what?”

“Well, the guy shooting at me, for instance. But probably better if you heard footsteps or somebody racking a shotgun first.”

“Watch your back, you’re saying?”

She winked. And started forward to the scene.

So, she’s Crime Scene, thought Thompson Boyd, watching the woman walk back and forth in the library, studying the floor, looking for fingerprints and clues and whatever it was they looked for. He wasn’t concerned about what she might find. He’d been careful, as always.

Thompson was standing in the sixth-floor window of the building across Fifty-fifth Street from the museum. After the girl got away, he’d circled around two blocks and made his way into this building, then climbed the stairs to the hallway from which he was now looking over the street.

He’d had a second chance to kill the girl a few minutes ago; she’d been on the street for a moment, talking to officers, in front of the museum. But there were way too many police around for him to shoot her and get away. Still he’d been able to take a picture of her with the camera in his mobile phone before she and her friend had been hustled off to a squad car, which sped west. Besides, Thompson still had more to do here, and so he’d taken up this vantage point.

From his prison days Thompson knew a lot about law enforcers. He could easily spot the lazy ones, the scared ones, the ones who were stupid and gullible. He could also spot the talented cops, the smart ones, the ones who were a threat.

Like the woman he was looking at right now.

As he put drops in his perpetually troubled eyes, Thompson found himself curious about her. As she searched the scene she had this concentration in her eyes, looking sort of devout, the same look Thompson’s mother sometimes used to get in church.

She disappeared from view but, whistling softly, Thompson kept his eyes on the window. Finally the woman in white returned to view. He noted the precision with which she did everything, the careful way she walked, her delicate touch as she picked up and examined things so as not to hurt the evidence. Another man might’ve been turned on by her beauty, her figure; even through the jumpsuit, it was easy to imagine what her body was like. But those thoughts, like usual, were far from his mind. Still, he believed he sensed some small enjoyment inside him as he watched her at work.

Something from his past came back to him… He frowned, looking at her walking back and forth, back and forth…Yes, that was it. The pattern reminded him of the sidewinder rattlesnakes his father would point out when they were hunting together or going for walks in the Texas sand near the family trailer, outside Amarillo.

Look at them, son. Look. Ain’t they something? But don’t you get too close. They’ll kill you in a kiss.

He leaned against the wall and continued to study the woman in white, moving back and forth, back and forth.

“How does it look, Sachs?”

“Good,” she replied to Rhyme, via their radio connection.