The Twelfth Card

Chapter Thirty-Three

Please, please…

Amelia Sachs was hurrying back to Boyd’s bungalow as fast as she was able, ignoring the congratulations from fellow officers and trying to ignore the pain in her leg.

Sweating, breathless, she trotted up to the first EMS medic she saw and asked, “The woman in that house?”

“There?” He nodded to the house.

“Right. The brunette who lives there.”

“Oh, her. I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid.”

Sachs inhaled a deep breath, felt the horror like ice on her flesh. She’d captured Boyd but the woman she could have saved was dead. She dug a fingernail into her thumb’s cuticle and felt pain, felt blood. Thinking: I did exactly what Boyd did. I sacrificed an i

The medic continued, “She was shot.”

“I know,” Sachs whispered. Staring down at the ground. Oh, man, this would be hard to live with…

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Worry?”

“She’ll be okay.”

Sachs frowned. “You said you had bad news.”

“Well, like, getting shot’s pretty bad news.”

“Christ, I knew she was shot. I was there when it happened.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you meant she died.”

“Naw. Was a bleeder but we got it in time. She’ll be all right. She’s at St. Luke’s ER. Stable condition.”

“Okay, thanks.”

I’ve got bad news…

Sachs wandered off, limping, and found Sellitto and Hauma

“You collared him with an empty weapon?” Hauma

“Actually I collared him with a rock.”

The head of ESU nodded, lifting an eyebrow – his sweetest praise.

“Boyd saying anything?” she asked.

“Understood his rights. Then clammed up.”

She and Sellitto swapped weapons. He reloaded. She checked her Glock and reholstered it.

Sachs asked, “What’s the story on the premises?”

Hauma

Sachs said, “I better run the scene.”

“We kept it secure,” Hauma

Sachs nodded. And together she and the heavy detective walked toward the safe house. A silence thick as sand rested between them. Finally Sellitto glanced at her leg and said, “Limp’s back.”

“Back?”

“Yeah, when you were clearing the houses, across the street, I looked out the window. Seemed like you were walking fine.”

“Sometimes it just fixes itself.”

Sellitto shrugged. “Fu

“Fu

He knew what she’d done for him. He was telling her so. Then he added: “Okay, we got the shooter. But that’s only half the job. We need the prick that hired him and his partner – who we gotta assume just took over Boyd’s assignment. Get on the grid, Detective.” Sellitto said this in a voice as gruff as any that Rhyme could muster.

This was the best thanks he could’ve given her: just knowing that he was back.

Often the most important piece of evidence is the last one you find.

Any good CS searcher’ll assess the scene and immediately target the fragile items that are subject to evaporation, contamination by rain, dissipation by wind, and so on, leaving the obvious – like the literal smoking gun – to be collected later.

If the scene’s secure, Lincoln Rhyme often said, the good stuff ain’t going anywhere.

In both Boyd’s residence and the safe house across the street, Sachs had collected latent prints, rolled up the trace, collected fluid samples from the toilet for DNA analysis, scraped floor and furniture surfaces, cut portions of the carpet for fiber samples and photographed and videoed the entire sites. Only then did she turn her attention to the larger and more obvious things. She arranged to have the acid and cyanide transported to the department’s hazardous-evidence holding center in the Bronx, and processed the improvised explosive device contained in the transistor radio.

She examined and logged in weapons and ammunition, the cash, coils of rope, tools. Dozens of other items that might prove helpful.

Finally Sachs picked up a small, white envelope that was sitting on a shelf near the front door of the safe house.

Inside was a single sheet of paper.

She read it. Then she gave a fast laugh. She read the letter again. And called Rhyme, thinking to herself: Brother, were we wrong.

“So,” Rhyme said to Cooper as both men stared at the computer screen. “I’m betting a hundred bucks you’re going to find more pure carbon, just like what was on the map hidden under his pillow on Elizabeth Street. You want to put some money on it? Any takers?”

“Too late,” said the tech, as the analyzer beeped and the trace-elements analysis from the paper popped up in front of them. “Not that I would’ve bet anyway.” He shoved his glasses higher on his nose and said, “And, yep, carbon. One hundred percent.”

Carbon. Which could be found in charcoal or ash or a number of other substances.

But which could also be diamond dust.

“What’s the business world’s latest abomination of the English language?” the criminalist asked, his mood lighthearted once again. “We were one-eighty on this one.”

Oh, they hadn’t been off base about Boyd’s being the perp or the fact he’d been hired to kill Geneva. No, it was the motive they’d blown completely. Everything they’d speculated about the early civil rights movement, about the present-day implications of Charles Singleton’s setup in the Freedmen’s Trust robbery, about the Fourteenth Amendment conspiracy…they’d been totally wrong.

Geneva Settle had been targeted to die simply because she’d seen something she shouldn’t have: a jewelry robbery being pla

The letter Amelia had found in his safe house contained diagrams of various buildings in Midtown, including the African-American museum. The note read:

A black girl, fifth floor in this window, 2 October, about 0830. She saw my delivery van when he was parked in a alley behind the Jewelry echange. Saw enough to guess the plans of mine. Kill her.

The library window near the microfiche reader where Geneva was attacked was circled on the diagram.

In addition to the misspelling, the language of the note was unusual, which, to a criminalist, was good; it’s far easier to trace the unusual than the common. Rhyme had Cooper send a copy to Parker Kincaid, a former FBI document examiner outside of D.C., currently in private practice. Like Rhyme, Kincaid was sometimes recruited by his old employer and other law enforcement agencies to consult in cases involving documents and handwriting. Kincaid’s reply email said he’d get back to them as soon as he could.

As she looked over the letter Amelia Sachs shook her head angrily. She recounted the incident of the armed man she and Pulaski had seen outside the museum yesterday – the one who turned out to be a security guard, who’d told them about the valuable contents of the exchange, the multimillion-dollar shipments from Amsterdam and Jerusalem every day.

“Should’ve mentioned that,” she said, shaking her head.

But who could have guessed that Thompson Boyd had been hired to kill Geneva because she’d looked out the window at the wrong time?

“But why steal the microfiche?” Sellitto asked.

“To lead us off, of course. Which it did pretty damn well.” Rhyme sighed. “Here we were ru