The Twelfth Card

“See, it was like he kept gettin’ closer and closer to the prisoners – too close, a lot of folk thought. You don’t do that. Ain’t healthy. He stopped hangin’ out with other guards and spent his time with the condemned. He called ’em ‘my people.’ Word is that he one time even sat down in our old electric chair itself, which is in this sort of museum. Just to see what it was like. Fell asleep. Imagine that.

“Somebody asked Boyd about it, how’d it feel, bein’ in a electric chair. He said it didn’t feel like nothin’. It just felt ‘kinda numb.’ He said that a lot toward the end. He felt numb.”

“You said his parents were killed? Did he move into their house?”

“Think he did.”

“Is it still there?”

The Texans were on a speakerphone too and J. T. Beauchamp called out, “I’ll find that out, sir.” He posed a question to somebody. “Should see in a minute or two, Mr. Rhyme.”

“And could you find out about relatives in the area?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sachs asked, “You recall he whistled a lot, Officer Pepper?”

“Yes’m. And he was right good at it. Sometimes he’d give the condemned a song or two to send ’em off.”

“What about his eyes?”

“That too,” Pepper said. “Thompson had hisself bad eyes. The story is he was ru

“The man being executed?” Sachs asked, wincing.

“That’s right, ma’am. Caught hisself on fire. He mighta been dead already, or unconscious. Nobody knows. He was still movin’ round but they always do that. So Thompson runs in with a riot gun, go

“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 perso

“It’s missing.”

“Sure is.”

“So he stole his record to cover up any co

“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 begi

“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 co

Rhyme didn’t know, or care, about “weird co