Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“The inmate?” Sachs asked.

“Thompson didn’t hafta shoot him. The juice did the trick.”

“And he left five years ago?” Rhyme asked.

“’Bout that,” Pepper drawled. “Quit. Think he went up to some place, some prison, in the Midwest. Never heard nothin’ ’bout him after that.”

Midwest – maybe Ohio. Where the other murder that fit the profile took place. “Call somebody at Ohio Corrections,” Rhyme whispered to Cooper, who nodded and grabbed another phone.

“What about Charlie Tucker, the guard who was killed? Boyd left around the time of the murder?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“There bad blood between them?”

Pepper said, “Charlie worked under Thompson for a year ’fore he retired. Only Charlie was what we’d call a Bible thumper, a hard-shell Baptist. He’d lay chapter and verse on pretty thick to the condemned sometimes, tell ’em they was goin’ to hell, and so on. Thompson didn’t hold with that.”

“So maybe Boyd killed him to pay him back for making prisoners’ lives miserable.”

My people …

“Could’ve been.”

“What about the picture we sent? Was that Boyd?”

“J. T. just showed it to me,” Pepper said. “And, yeah, it could be him. Though he was bigger, fatter, I mean, back then. And he had a shaved head and goatee – lotta us did that, tryin’ to look as mean as the prisoners.”

“’Sides,” the warden said, “we were looking for inmates, not guards.”

Which was my mistake, Rhyme thought angrily.

“Well, damn.” The voice of the warden again.

“What’s that, J. T.?”

“My gal went to pull Boyd’s personnel file. And -”

“It’s missing.”

“Sure is.”

“So he stole his record to cover up any connection to Charlie Tucker’s murder,” Sellitto said.

“I’d reckon,” J. T. Beauchamp said.

Rhyme shook his head. “And he was worried about fingerprints because he’d been printed as a state employee , not a criminal.”

“Hold on,” the warden drawled. A woman was speaking to him. He came back on the speakerphone. “We just heard from a fella at county records. Boyd sold the family house five years ago. Didn’t buy anything else in the state. At least not under his name. Must’ve just took the cash and disappeared… And nobody knows about any other relations of his.”

“What’s his full name?” Rhyme asked.

Pepper said, “Think his middle initial was G, but I don’t know what it stood for.” Then he added, “One thing I’ll say for him, Thompson Boyd knew what he was doin’. He knew the EP backward and forward.”

“EP?”

“The Execution Protocol. It’s a big book we have, givin’ all the details of how to execute somebody. He made ever’body who worked the detail memorize it, and made ’em walk around recitin’ to themselves, ‘I have to do it by the book, I have to do it by the book.’ Thompson always said you can’t never cut corners when it comes to death.”

Mel Cooper hung up the phone.

“Ohio?” Rhyme asked.

The tech nodded. “Keegan Falls Maximum Security. Boyd only worked there for about a year. The warden remembers him because of the eye problem, and he did whistle. He said Boyd was a problem from the beginning. Got into fights with guards about the treatment of prisoners, and spent a lot of time socializing with inmates, which was against the rules. The warden thinks he was making contacts to use later to get jobs as a hitman.”

“Like hooking up with the man who hired him to kill that witness there.”

“Could be.”

“And that employment file? Stolen?”

“Missing, yep. Nobody knows where he lived or anything else about him. Fell off the radar.”

Average Joe …

“Well, he’s not Texas’s or Ohio’s problem anymore. He’s ours . Do the full search.”

“Right.”

Cooper ran the standard search – deeds, Department of Motor Vehicles, hotels, traffic tickets, taxes…everything. In fifteen minutes all the results were in. There were several listings of Thompson G. Boyd and one of T. G. Boyd. But their ages and descriptions weren’t close to the suspect’s. The tech also tried variant spellings of those names and had the same results.

“AKAs?” Rhyme asked. Most professional perps, particularly contract killers, used also-known-as names. The ones they picked were usually like passwords for computers and ATMs – they were some variation on a name that meant something to the perp. When you found out what they were, you could kick yourself for the simplicity of the choice. But guessing them was usually impossible. Still, they tried: They transposed the given- and surnames (“Thompson” was, of course, more common as a last name). Cooper even tried an anagram generator to rearrange the letters in “Thompson Boyd,” but came up with no hits in the databases.

Nothing, Rhyme thought, inflamed with frustration. We know his name, we know what he looks like, we know he’s in town…

But we can’t goddamn find him.

Sachs squinted at the chart, cocked her head. She said, “Billy Todd Hammil.”

“Who?” Rhyme demanded.

“The name he used to rent the safe house on Elizabeth Street.”

“What about it?”

She flipped through a number of sheets of paper. She looked up. “Died six years ago.”

“Does it say where?”

“Nope. But I’m betting Texas.”

Sachs called the prison once more and asked about Hammil. A moment later she hung up the phone and nodded. “That’s it. Killed a clerk in a convenience store twelve years ago. Boyd supervised his execution. Seems like he’s got this weird connection with the people he killed. His M.O. comes from the days when he was an executioner. Why not his identities too?”

Rhyme didn’t know, or care, about “weird connections,” but whatever Boyd’s motive, there was some logic to Sachs’s suggestion. He barked, “Get the list of everybody he’s executed and match it to DMV here. Try Texas first then we’ll move on to other states.”

J. T. Beauchamp sent them a list of seventy-nine prisoners Thompson Boyd had put to death as an execution officer in Texas.

“That many?” Sachs asked, frowning. Though Sachs would never hesitate to shoot to kill when it came to saving lives, Rhyme knew she had some doubts about the death penalty, because it was often meted out after trials involving circumstantial or faulty, and sometimes even intentionally altered, evidence.

Rhyme thought of the other implication of the number of executions: that somewhere along the line of nearly eighty executions, Thompson Boyd had lost any distinction between life and death.

What happens but they get themselves killed in this car accident…and Boyd, he didn’t blink. Hell, he didn’t even go to the funeral.

Cooper matched the names of the male prisoners executed to government records.

Nothing.

“Shit,” Rhyme snapped. “We’ll have to find out the other states he worked and who he executed there. It’ll take forever.” Then a thought came to him. “Hold on. Women.”

“What?” Sachs asked.

“Try the women he’s executed. Variations on their names.”

Cooper took this, the smaller, list and ran the names, and all possible spellings, through the DMV computer.

“Okay, may have something here,” the tech said excitedly. “Eight years ago a woman named Randi Rae Silling – a prostitute – was executed in Amarillo for robbing and killing two of her johns. New York DMV’s got one too, same last name, but it’s a male, Randy with a Y and middle name R-A-Y. Right age and right description. Address in Queens – Astoria. Got a blue Buick Century, three years old.”