The Twelfth Card

“See how valuable small crime scenes can be, Sachs? You’re a wealth of helpful information.”

She gave him a minor scowl, then picked up a photocopy. “This’s an article about the fire. It says that the night Potters’ Field burned down, witnesses heard an explosion in the basement and then, almost immediately, the place was engulfed. Arson was suspected but nobody was ever arrested. No fatalities.”

“What did Charles go there for?” Rhyme mused aloud. “What did he mean by ‘justice’? And what’s ’forever hidden beneath clay and soil’?”

Was it a clue, a bit of evidence, a scrap of document that could answer the question of who wanted to murder Geneva Settle?

Sellitto shook his head. “Too bad it was a hundred and forty years ago. Whatever, it’s gone now. We’ll never know.”

Rhyme looked at Sachs. She caught his eye. She smiled.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Oh, you’re lucky in one way,” explained David Yu, a spiky-haired young engineer who worked for the city.

“We could use some,” Amelia Sachs said. “Luck, I mean.”

They were standing on West Eightieth Street, about a half block east of Riverside Park, looking up at a three-story brownstone. A crime scene bus waited nearby, as did another friend of Sachs’s, a policewoman named Gail Davis, from the K9 unit, and her dog Vegas. Most police dogs were German shepherds, Malinois and – for bomb detail – Labrador retrievers. Vegas, though, was a briard, a French breed with a long history of military service; these dogs are known for having keen noses and an unca

The engineer, Yu, nodded at the building that had been constructed on the site where Potters’ Field tavern had burned. The date on the cornerstone read 1879. “To build a tenement like this back then they wouldn’t have excavated and laid a slab. They’d dig a perimeter foundation, pour concrete and set the walls. That was the load-bearing part. The basement floor would have been dirt. But building codes changed. They would’ve put a concrete floor in sometime early in this century. Again, though, it wouldn’t be structural. It’d be for health and safety. So the contractors wouldn’t’ve excavated for that either.”

“So the lucky part is that whatever was under there in the eighteen sixties might still be there,” Sachs said.

Forever hidden…

“Right.”

“And the unlucky part is that it’s under concrete.”

“Pretty much.”

“A foot deep?”

“Maybe less.”

Sachs walked around the building, which was grimy and plain, though she knew the apartments in it would rent for $4,000 or so a month. There was a service entrance in the back that led below ground to the basement.

She was returning to the front of the structure when the phone rang. “Detective Sachs.”

Lon Sellitto was on the other end. He’d found the name of the building’s owner, a businessman who lived several blocks way. The man was on his way to the place to let them inside. Rhyme came on the phone a moment later and she told him what Yu had said.

“Good luck, bad luck,” he said, the scowl clear. “Well, I’ve ordered an S and S team there with SPR and ultrasound.”

Just then the owner of the building arrived, a short, balding man in a suit and white shirt open at the collar. Sachs disco

A Chevy Blazer pulled up and three members of the NYPD Search and Surveillance Unit climbed out. S and S officers were a mixed breed of cop, engineer and scientist, whose job was to back up the tactical forces by locating perps and victims at scenes with telescopes, night vision imagers, infrared, microphones and other equipment. They nodded to the crime scene techs and then unloaded battered black suitcases, very much like the ones that held Sachs’s own crime scene equipment. The owner watched them with a frown.

The S and S officers walked down into the dank, chill basement, smelling of mold and fuel oil, followed by Sachs and the owner. They hooked up probes that resembled vacuum cleaner heads to their computerized equipment,

“The whole area?” one asked Sachs.

“Yup.”

“That’s not going to hurt anything, is it?” the owner asked.

“No, sir,” a tech replied.

They got to work. The men decided to use SPR first. Surface Penetrating Radar sent out radio waves and returned information on objects it struck, just like traditional radar on board a ship or airplane. The only difference was that SPR could go through objects like dirt and rubble. It was as fast as the speed of light and, unlike ultrasound, didn’t have to be in contact with the surface to get a reading.

For an hour they sca

After they’d swept the floor with the radar, the team consulted the unit’s computer screen and then, based on what they learned, walked around the floor again, touching the ultrasound sensor to the concrete in a half dozen areas they’d targeted as important.

When they were finished they called Sachs and Yu over to the computer, flipped through some images. The dark gray screen was unreadable to her: It was filled with blotches and streaks, many of which had small boxes of indecipherable numbers and letters beside them.

One of the techs said, “Most of these are what you’d expect under a building this age. Boulders, a bed of gravel, pockets of decayed wood. That’s a portion of a sewer here.” Pointing to part of the screen.

“There’s an easement for a storm drain that feeds into the main drain going to the Hudson,” Yu said. “That must be it.”

The owner leaned over his shoulder.

“You mind, sir?” Sachs grumbled. The man grudgingly stepped back.

The tech nodded. “But here…” He tapped a spot next to the back wall. “We got a ping but no hit.”

“A -?”

“When something comes back that the computer’s seen before, it suggests what it might be. But this was negative.”

Sachs saw only a less dark area on the dark screen.

“So we ran the ultrasound and got this.”

His partner typed in a command and a different screen appeared, one much lighter and with a clearer image on it: a rough ring, inside of which was a round, opaque object that seemed to have a strand of something coming off it. Filling the ring, in the space below the smaller object, was what appeared to be a pile of sticks or boards – maybe, Sachs speculated, a strongbox that had broken apart over the years.

One officer said, “The outer ring’s about twenty-four inches across. The i

“Is it close to the surface?”

“The slab’s about seven inches deep, and this thing’s about six to eight feet below that.”

“Where exactly?”

The man looked from the computer screen to the floor and back again. He walked over to a spot right beside the wall in the back of the basement, near the door that led outside. He drew a chalk mark. The object was right against the wall. Whoever had built the wall had missed it by only inches.

“I’m guessing it was a well or a cistern. Maybe a chimney.”

“What would it take to get through the concrete?” Sachs asked Yu.

“My permission,” said the owner. “Which you ain’t getting. You’re not breaking up my floor.”