The Twelfth Card

“Sir,” Sachs said patiently, “this is police business.”

“Whatever that thing is, it’s mine.”

“Ownership isn’t the issue. It may be relevant to a police investigation.”

“Well, you’ll have to get a court order. I’m a lawyer. You’re not breaking up my floor.”

“It’s really important we find out what that is.”

“Important?” the man asked. “Why?”

“It has to do with a criminal case from a few years ago.”

“Few years?” the man said, picking up on the weakness of her case immediately. “How ‘few’?” He was probably a really good lawyer.

You lie to people like this and it comes back to get you. She said, “A hundred and forty. Give or take.”

He laughed. “This isn’t an investigation. This is the Discovery Cha

“A little cooperation here, sir?”

“Get a court order. I don’t have to cooperate until I’m forced to.”

“Then it’s not really cooperation, is it?” Sachs snapped back. She called Rhyme.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She briefed him about what they’d found.

“An old strongbox in a well or cistern inside a burned-down building. Hiding places don’t get much better than that.” Rhyme asked for S and S to send him the images via wireless email. They did so.

“I’ve got the picture here, Sachs,” he said after a moment. “No clue what it is.”

She told him about the unconcerned citizen.

“And I’ll fight it,” the lawyer said, hearing the conversation. “I’ll appear before the magistrate myself. I know ’ em all. We ’re on a first-name basis.”

She heard Rhyme discussing the matter with Sellitto. When he came back on the line he wasn’t happy. “Lon’s going to try to get a warrant, but it’ll take time. And he’s not even sure the judge’d issue paper in a case like this.”

“Can’t I just clock this guy?” she muttered and hung up. She turned to the owner. “We’ll repair your floor. Perfectly.”

“I have tenants. They’ll complain. And I’ll have to deal with it. You won’t. You’ll be long gone.”

Sachs waved her hand in disgust, actually thinking about placing him under arrest for – well, for something – and then digging through the damn floor anyway. How long would a warrant take? Probably forever, she imagined, considering that judges needed a “compelling” interest in order to allow police to invade someone’s home.

Her phone rang again and she answered.

“Sachs,” Rhyme asked, “is that engineer fellow there?”

“David? Yeah. He’s right next to me.”

“I have a question.”

“What?”

“Ask him who owns the alleys?”

The answer, in this particular instance, though not all, was: the city. The lawyer owned only the footprint of the building itself and what was inside.

Rhyme said, “Have the engineers get some equipment next to the exterior wall and dig down then tu

Out of hearing of the owner, she posed the question to Yu, who said, “Yeah, we could do that. No risk of structural damage if you keep the hole narrow.”

Narrow, thought the claustrophobic policewoman. Just what I need…She hung up and then said to the engineer, “Okay, I want a…” Sachs frowned. “What are those things called with the big scoop on them?” Her knowledge of vehicles whose top speed was ten miles an hour was severely limited.

“Backhoe?”

“Sounds right. How soon can you get one here?”

“A half hour.”

She gave him a pained look. “Ten minutes?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty minutes later, with a loud reverse warning beep, a city backhoe rolled up to the side of the building. There was no way to hide their strategy anymore. The owner stepped forward, waving his hands. “You’re going underneath from outside! You can’t do that either. I own this property from the heavens to the center of the earth. That’s what the law says.”

“Well, sir,” said slim, young civil servant Yu. “There’s a public utility easement under the building. Which we have a right to access. As I’m sure you know.”

“But the fucking easement’s on the other side of the property.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s on that screen right there.” He pointed to a computer – just as the screen went dark.

“Ooops,” said one of the S and S officers, who’d just shut it off. “Damn thing’s always breaking down.”

The owner scowled at him, then said to Yu, “There is no easement where you’re going to dig.”

Yu shrugged. “Well, you know, when somebody disputes the location of an easement, the burden’s on him to get a court order stopping us. You might want to give some of your magistrate friends a call. And you know what, sir? You better do it pretty fast, ’cause we’re going in now.”

“But -”

“Go ahead!” he shouted.

“Is that true?” Sachs whispered to him. “About the easements?”

“Don’t know. But he seemed to buy it.”

“Thanks.”

The backhoe went to work. It didn’t take long. Ten minutes later, guided by the S and S team, the backhoe had dug out a four-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep foxhole. The foundation of the building ended about six feet below the surface and beneath that was a wall of dark soil and gray clay. Sachs would have to climb to the bottom of the excavation and dig horizontally only about eighteen inches until she found the cistern or well. She do

K9 officer Gail Davis walked over with Vegas, straining on the leash, pawing at the edge of the hole. “Something’s down there,” the policewoman said.

As if I’m not spooked enough, Sachs thought, looking at the dog’s alert face.

“What’s that noise, Sachs?”

“Gail’s here. Her dog’s got a problem with the site.”

“Anything specific?” Sachs asked Davis.

“Nope. Could be sensing anything.”

Vegas then growled and pawed Sachs’s leg. Davis had told Sachs that another skill of briards was battlefield triage – they’d been used by corpsmen to determine which of the wounded could be saved and which could not. She wondered if Vegas was marking her for the latter ahead of time.

“Keep close,” Sachs said to Davis, with an uneasy laugh. “In case I need digging out.”

Yu volunteered to go down into the pit (he said he liked tu

The city workers lowered a ladder into the shaft, which Sachs looked down into, sighing.

“You okay?” Yu asked.

“Fine,” she said cheerfully and started into the hole. Thinking: The claustrophobia in the Sanford Foundation’s archives was nothing compared to this. At the bottom she took the shovel and pickax Yu had given her and began the excavation.

Sweating from the effort, shivering from the waves of panic, she dug and dug, picturing with every scoop the foxhole collapsing and trapping her.

Pulling out rocks, dislodging the dense earth.

Forever hidden beneath clay and soil…

“What’s in view, Sachs?” Rhyme asked through the radio.

“Dirt, sand, worms, a few tin cans, rocks.”

She progressed about one foot under the building, then two.

Her spade gave a tink and stopped cold. She scraped away soil and found herself facing a rounded brick wall, very old, the mortar clumsily smeared between the bricks.

“Got something here. The side of the cistern.”

Dirt from the edges of the foxhole skittered to the floor. It scared her more than if a rat had traipsed across her thigh. A fast image came to mind: being held immobile while dirt flooded around her, crushing her chest, then filling her nose and mouth. Drowning on dirt…