Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“An’ don’ move that muzzle so much’s a skinny little millimeter. We all together on that?”

“I’m not going to tell you again,” the girl said in a calm voice. “Do it now.”

Still he didn’t move.

Ashberry thought of his grandfather, the mobster, he thought of the screaming shopkeeper, he thought of his daughter’s wedding.

What would Thompson Boyd do?

Play it by the book and give up.

No fucking way. Ashberry dropped into a crouch and spun around, lightning fast, lifting the gun.

Somebody shouted, “Don’t!”

The last word he ever heard.

“Quite a view,” Thom said.

Lincoln Rhyme glanced out the window at the Hudson River, the rock cliffs of the Palisades on the opposite shore and the distant hills of New Jersey. Maybe Pennsylvania too. He turned away immediately, the expression on his face explaining that panoramic views, like people’s pointing them out, bored him senseless.

They were in the Sanford Foundation office of the late William Ashberry atop the Hiram Sanford Mansion on West Eighty-second Street. Wall Street was still digesting the news of the man’s death and his involvement in a series of crimes over the past few days. Not that the financial community had ground to a halt; compared with, say, the betrayals visited on shareholders and employees by executives of Enron and Global Crossing, the death of a crooked executive of a profitable company didn’t make compelling news.

Amelia Sachs had already searched the office and removed evidence linking Ashberry to Boyd and taped off certain parts of the room. This meeting was in a cleared area, which happened to feature stained-glass windows and rosewood paneling.

Sitting beside Rhyme and Thom were Geneva Settle and attorney Wesley Goades. Rhyme was amused that there’d been a few moments when he’d actually suspected Goades of complicity in the case – owing to his suddenly materializing in Rhyme’s apartment, looking for Geneva, and the Fourteenth Amendment aspect of the intrigue; the lawyer would’ve had a strong motive to make certain that nothing jeopardized an important weapon for civil libertarians. Rhyme had also wondered if the man’s loyalty to his former insurance company employers had led him to betray Geneva.

But Rhyme hadn’t shared his suspicion of the lawyer and thus no apologies were in order. After Rhyme and Sachs had discovered that the case had taken an unexpected turn, the criminalist had suggested that Goades be retained for what was coming next. Geneva Settle, of course, was all in favor of hiring him.

Across the marble coffee table from them were Gregory Hanson, the president of Sanford Bank and Trust, his assistant, Stella Turner, and the senior partner at Sanford ’s law firm, a trim mid-forties attorney named Anthony Cole. They exuded a collective unease, which, Rhyme assumed, would’ve arisen late yesterday when he’d called Hanson to propose a meeting to discuss the “Ashberry matter.”

Hanson had agreed but added both quickly and wearily that he was as shocked as anyone about the man’s death in the shootout at Columbia University several days before. He knew nothing about it – or about any jewelry store robbery or terrorist attack – except what he’d read in the news. What exactly did Rhyme and the police want?

Rhyme had offered standard cop-ese: “Just the answers to a few routine questions.”

Now, pleasantries disposed of, Hanson asked, “Could you tell us what this is about?”

Rhyme got right to the point: He explained that William Ashberry had hired Thompson Boyd, a professional killer, to murder Geneva Settle.

Three horrified glances at the slim young girl in front of them. She looked back at each of them calmly.

Continuing, the criminalist added that Ashberry felt it was vital that nobody know the reason he wanted her dead so he and Boyd had set up several fake motives for the girl’s death. Originally the kill was supposed to look like a rape. Rhyme, though, had seen through that immediately, and as they continued to search for the killer he and the team had found what appeared to be the real reason for the murder: that Geneva could identify a terrorist planning an attack.

“But there were some problems with that: The bomber’s death should’ve ended any need to kill Geneva. But it didn’t. Boyd’s partner tried again. What was going on? We tracked down the man who sold the bomb to Boyd, an arsonist in New Jersey. The FBI arrested him. We linked some bills in his possession to Boyd’s safe house. That made him an accomplice to murder and he copped a plea. He told us that he put Ashberry and Boyd together and -”

“This terrorist thing, though,” the bank’s lawyer said skeptically, with a sour laugh. “Bill Ashberry and terrorists? It -”

“Getting there,” Rhyme said, equally sour. Maybe more so. He continued his explanation: The bomb maker’s statement wasn’t enough for a warrant to arrest Ashberry. So Rhyme and Sellitto decided they needed to flush him out. They placed an officer at Geneva’s high school, a man pretending to be an assistant principal. Anyone calling to ask about Geneva would be told that she was at Columbia with a professor in the law school. The real professor agreed to let them use not only his name but his office as well. Fred Dellray and Jonette Monroe, the undercover gangsta girl from Geneva’s high school, were more than happy to play the roles of the professor and student. They’d done a fast but thorough job setting up the sting, even having some fake Photoshop pictures made up of Dellray with Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, to make sure Ashberry didn’t tip to the scam and bolt.

Rhyme now explained these events to Hanson and Cole, adding the details about the attempted murder in Mathers’s office.

He shook his head. “I should’ve guessed the perp had some connections to a bank. He’d been able to withdraw large amounts of cash and doctor the reporting statements. But” – Rhyme nodded to the lawyer – “what the hell was he up to? I understand that Episcopalians aren’t really a breeding ground for fundamentalist terrorism.”

No one smiled. Rhyme thought, bankers, lawyers – no sense of humor. He continued, “So I went back to the evidence and noticed something that bothered me: There was no radio transmitter to detonate the bomb. It should’ve been in the wreckage of the van, but it wasn’t.

“Why not? One conclusion was that Boyd and his partner had planted the bomb and kept the transmitter themselves to kill the Arab deliveryman as a diversion to keep us from finding the real motive for killing Geneva.”

“Okay,” Hanson said. “The real motive. What was it?”

“Had to do some thinking about that. I thought at first maybe Geneva had seen some tenants being evicted illegally when she was scrubbing graffiti off old buildings for a developer. But I looked into where that’d happened and found that Sanford Bank wasn’t involved in those buildings. So, where did that leave us? I could only come back to what we’d originally thought…”

He explained about the old Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated that Boyd had stolen. “I’d forgotten that somebody had been tracking down the magazine before Geneva supposedly saw the van and terrorist. I think what happened was that Ashberry stumbled on that article when the Sanford Foundation renovated its archives last month. And he did some more research and found something real troubling, something that could ruin his life. He got rid of the foundation’s copy and decided he had to destroy all the copies of the magazine. Over the past few weeks he found most of them – but there was one left in the area: The librarian at the African-American museum in Midtown was getting their copy from storage and must’ve told Ashberry that, coincidentally, there was a girl who was interested in the same issue. Ashberry knew he had to destroy the article and kill Geneva, along with the librarian, because he could connect them.”