The Twelfth Card

The girl squinted and looked down. “I don’t know. I looked out the window a bunch. When I get tired of reading I walk around some, you know. I can’t remember anything specific.”

For ten minutes Sachs talked with Geneva, trying to coax her recollections into coming up with an image. But to recall a specific person and a delivery van on the busy streets of Midtown from a glance a week ago was too much for the girl’s memory.

Rhyme called the director of the American Jewelry Exchange and told him what they’d learned. Asked if he had any idea who might be trying a heist, the man replied, “Fuck, no clue. It happens more than you’d think, though.”

“We found traces of pure carbon in some of the evidence. Diamond dust, we’re thinking.”

“Oh, that’d mean they’d checked the alley near the loading dock probably. Nobody from outside gets near the cutting rooms, but, hey, you polish product, you get dust. It ends up in the vacuum cleaner bags and on everything we throw out.”

The man chuckled, not much troubled by the news of the impending burglary. “I tell you, though, whoever’s going after us’s got some balls. We got the best fucking security in the city. Everybody thinks it’s like on TV. We have guys come in to buy their girlfriends rings and they look around and ask where’s those invisible beams that you wear goggles to see, you know? Well, the answer is they don’t make any fucking invisible-beam machines. ’Cause if you can walk around the beams when you’re wearing special goggles, then the bad guys are going to buy special fucking goggles and walk around them, right? Real alarms aren’t like that. If a fly farts in our vault, the alarm goes off. And, fact is, the system’s so tight a fly can’t even get inside.”

“I should have known,” Lincoln Rhyme snapped after they hung up. “Look at the chart! Look at what we found in the first safe house.” He nodded toward the reference to the map that had been found on Elizabeth Street. It showed only a basic outline of the library where Geneva was attacked. The jewelry exchange across the street was drawn in much greater detail, as were the nearby alleys, doors and loading docks – entrance and exit routes to and from the exchange, not the museum.

Two detectives from downtown had interrogated Boyd to find out the identity of the person behind the heist, the one who’d hired him, but he was stonewalling.

Sellitto then checked NYPD Larceny for suspicious activity reports in the diamond district but there were no particular leads that seemed relevant. Fred Dellray took time off from investigating the rumors of the potential terrorist bombings to look through the FBI’s files about any federal investigations involving jewelry thefts. Since larceny isn’t a federal crime, there weren’t many cases, but several of them – mostly involving money laundering in the New York area – were active and he promised he’d bring the reports over right away.

They now turned to the evidence from Boyd’s safe house and residence, in hopes of finding the mastermind of the theft. They examined the guns, the chemicals, the tools and the rest of the items, but there was nothing that they hadn’t found before: more bits of orange paint, acid stains and crumbs of falafel and smears of yogurt, Boyd’s favorite meal, it seemed. They ran the serial numbers on the money and came up with nothing from Treasury, and none of the bills yielded any fingerprints. To withdraw this much money from an account was risky for the man who hired Boyd because any such large transactions have to be reported under money laundering rules. But a fast check of recent large cash withdrawals from area banks came up with no leads. This was curious, Rhyme reflected, though he concluded that the perp had probably withdrawn small amounts of the cash over time for Boyd’s fee.

The unsub was one of the few people on earth, it seemed, who didn’t own a cell phone, or, if he did, his was an anonymous prepaid unit – there were no billing records – and he’d managed to dispose of it before he was caught. A look at Jea

Sellitto’s heroics had, however, yielded some good evidence: fingerprints on the dynamite and the guts of the explosive transistor radio. The FBI’s IAFIS and local print databases resulted in a name: Jon Earle Wilson. He’d done time in Ohio and New Jersey for an assortment of crimes, including arson, bombmaking and insurance fraud. But he’d fallen off the radar of the local authorities, Cooper reported. LKA was Brooklyn but that was a vacant lot.

“I don’t want the last known address. I want the presently known. Get the feds on it too.”

“Will do.”

The doorbell rang. Everybody was on edge with the main perp and accomplice still unaccounted for and they looked at the doorway cautiously. Sellitto had answered the bell and he stepped into the lab with an African-American boy, midteens, tall, wearing calf-length shorts and a Knicks jersey. He was carrying a heavy shopping bag. He blinked in surprise at the sight of Lincoln Rhyme – and then at everything else in the room.

“Yo, yo, Geneva. What happenin’?”

She looked at him with a frown.

“Yo, I’m Rudy.” He laughed. “You ain’t remember me.”

Geneva nodded. “Yeah. I think so. You’re -”

“Ronelle’s brother.”

The girl said to Rhyme, “A girl in my class.”

“How’d you know I was here?”

“Word up. Ronee hear it from somebody.”

“Keesh probably. I told her,” Geneva said to Rhyme.

The boy looked around the lab again then back to Geneva. “Yo, what it is, some of the girls got some shit together for you. You know, you ain’t be in school and all so they thought you might want something to read. I say, damn, give the girl a GameBoy, but they said, no, she like books. So they got it up for you with these.”

“Really?”

“Word. Ain’t no homework or nothing like that. Shit you can read for the fun of it.”

“Who?”

“Ronelle, some other girls, don’t know. Here. Weigh a ton.”

“Well, thanks.”

She took the bag.

“Girls tell me, say ever’thing go

Geneva gave a sour laugh and thanked him again, told him to say hello to the other kids in her class. The boy left. Geneva glanced down into the bag. She lifted out a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Geneva gave another laugh. “Don’t know what they’re thinking of. I read this, must be seven years ago.” She dropped it back in the bag. “Anyway, it was nice of them.”

“And useful,” Thom said pointedly. “Not much here for you to read, I’m afraid.” A sour glance at Rhyme. “I keep working on him. Music. He listens to music a lot now. Even threatens to write some tunes himself. But reading fiction? We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Geneva gave him an amused smile and she took the heavy bag and walked toward the hallway as Rhyme said, “Thank you for airing laundry, Thom. In any case, now Geneva can read to her heart’s content, which I’m sure she’d rather do than listening to your tedious editorializing. And as for my leisure time? I guess I don’t have much of it, you know, trying to catch killers and all.” His eyes returned to the evidence charts.

THOMPSON BOYD’S RESIDENCE AND PRIMARY SAFE HOUSE

· More falafel and yogurt, orange paint trace, as before.

· Cash (fee for job?) $100,000 in new bills. Untraceable. Probably withdrawn in small amounts over time.

· Weapons (guns, billy club, rope) traced to prior crime scenes.

· Acid and cyanide traced to prior crime scenes, no links to manufacturers.

· No cell phone found. Other telephone records not helpful.

· Tools traced to prior crime scenes.

· Letter revealing that G. Settle was targeted because she was a witness to a jewelry heist in the pla