Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

Nobody …

I don’t think so.

“Geneva?” Mrs. Barton asked. “You all right?”

She looked back at the counselor. “Sorry. Yeah, it’s fine.”

The woman again studied her father closely and then turned her brown eyes on the girl, who looked away.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“Uhm…”

“What’s the real story here?”

“I -”

It was one of those situations when the truth was going to come out no matter what. “Okay, look, Mrs. Barton, I’m sorry. I wasn’t completely honest. My father’s not a professor. He’s been in prison. But he got released.”

“So where hav e you been living?”

“On my own.”

With no trace of judgment in her eyes the woman nodded. “Your mother?”

“Dead.”

She frowned. “I’m sorry… And is he going to take custody?”

“We haven’t really talked about it. Anything he does he has to get it worked out with the court or something.” She said this to buy time. Geneva had half formulated a plan for her father to come back, technically take custody, but she’d continue to live on her own. “For a few days I’m going to stay with Mr. Rhyme and Amelia, at their place.”

The woman looked once more at her father, who was offering a faint smile toward the pair.

“This’s pretty unusual.”

Geneva said defiantly, “I won’t go into a foster home. I won’t lose everything I’ve been working for. I’ll run away. I’ll -”

“Whoa, slow up.” The counselor smiled. “I don’t think we need to make an issue of anything now. You’ve been through enough. We’ll talk about it in a few days. Where’re you going now?”

“To Mr. Rhyme’s.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

Geneva gestured her father over. The man ambled up to the car, and the girl introduced them.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am. And thanks for looking out for Geneva.”

“Come on, get in.”

Geneva looked across the street. Keesh was still there.

She shouted, “I gotta go. I’ll call you.” She mimicked holding a phone to her ear.

Lakeesha nodded uncertainly, withdrew her hand from her purse.

Geneva climbed into the backseat, behind her father. A glance through the back window at Keesh’s grim face.

Then Mrs. Barton pulled away from the curb and her father started up with another ridiculous history lesson, rambling on and on, you know I did a ’piece once ’bout the Collyer brothers? Homer and Langley. Lived at 128th and Fifth. They were recluses and the weirdest men ever lived. They were terrified of crime in Harlem and barricaded themselves in their apartment, set up booby traps, never threw a single thing out. One of ’em got crushed under a pile of newspapers he’d stacked up. When they died, police had to cart over a hundred tons of trash out of their place. He asked, “You ever hear about them?”

The counselor said she thought she had.

“No,” Geneva replied. And thought: Ask me if I care.

Lincoln Rhyme was directing Mel Cooper to organize the evidence that they’d collected from the bombing scene, in between reviewing some of the evidence-analysis reports that had returned.

A federal team, under Dellray’s direction, had tracked down Jon Earle Wilson, the man whose fingerprints were on the transistor radio bomb in Boyd’s safe house. He’d been collared and a couple of agents were going to bring him over to Rhyme’s for interrogation to shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.

It was then that Bell’s phone rang. He answered, “Bell here…Luis, what’s up?” He cocked his head to listen.

Luis …

This would be Martinez, who had been tailing Geneva and her father on foot since they’d left Rhyme’s to go to Langston Hughes. They were convinced that Jax, Alonzo Jackson, was her father and no threat to the girl, and that the terrorist had been working alone. But that didn’t mean Bell and Rhyme were going to let Geneva go anywhere in the immediate future without protection.

But something was wrong. Rhyme could read it in Bell’s eyes. The detective said to Cooper, “We need a DMV check. Fast.” He jotted a tag number on a Post-it note then hung up, handed the slip of paper to the CS tech.

“What’s happening?” Sachs asked.

“Geneva and her father were at the bus stop near the school. A car pulled up. They got inside. Luis wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t get across the street fast enough to stop them.”

“Car? Who was driving?”

“Heavyset black woman. Way he described her, sounds like it might’ve been that counselor, Barton.”

Nothing to worry about necessarily, Rhyme reflected. Maybe the woman just saw them at the bus stop and offered them a ride.

Information from the DMV flickered over his screen.

“What do we have, Mel?” Rhyme asked.

Cooper squinted as he read. He typed some more. He looked up, eyes wide through his thick glasses. “A problem. We have a problem.”

Mrs. Barton was heading into south-central Harlem, moving slowly though the early evening traffic. She slowed as they drove past yet another real estate redevelopment project.

Her father shook his head. “Look at all this.” He nodded at the billboard. “Developers, banks, architects.” A sour laugh. “Betcha there’s not a single black person running any of ’em.”

Lame, Geneva thought. She wanted to tune him out.

Whining about the past …

The counselor glanced at the site and, shrugged. “You see that a lot around here.” She braked and turned down an alley between one of the old buildings being gutted and a deep excavation site.

In response to her father’s questioning glance, Mrs. Barton said, “Shortcut.”

But her father looked around. “Shortcut?”

“Just to miss some of the southbound traffic.”

He looked again, squinted. Then spat out, “Bullshit.”

“Dad!” Geneva cried.

“I know this block. Road’s closed off up ahead. They’re tearing down some old factory.”

“No,” Mrs. Barton said. “I just came this way and -”

But her father grabbed the parking brake and pulled up as hard as he could, then spun the wheel to the left. The car skidded into the brick wall with the wrenching sound of metal and plastic grinding into stone.

Grabbing the counselor’s arm, the man shouted, “She’s with them, baby. Trying to hurt you! Get out, run!”

“Dad, no, you’re crazy! You can’t -”

But the confirmation came a moment later as a pistol appeared from the woman’s pocket. She aimed it at her father’s chest and pulled the trigger. He blinked in shock and jerked back, gripping the wound. “Oh. Oh, my,” he whispered.

Geneva leapt back as the woman turned the silver gun toward her. Just as it fired, her father swung his fist into the woman’s jaw and stunned her. Flame and bits of gunpowder peppered Geneva’s face but the bullet missed. It blew the car’s rear window into a thousand tiny cubes.

“Run, baby!” her father muttered and slumped against the dashboard.

Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch …

Sobbing, Geneva crawled out the shattered back window and fell to the ground. She struggled to her feet and started sprinting down the ramp into the murky demolition site.

Alina Frazier – the woman fronting as the counselor Patricia Barton – didn’t have the cool of her partner. Thompson Boyd was ice itself. He never got rattled. But Alina had always been emotional. She was furious, cursing, as she scrabbled over the body of Geneva ’s father and stumbled out into the alley, looking left and right for the girl.

Furious that Boyd was in jail, furious that the girl was getting away.