The Twelfth Card

It was then that the tall, bald detective swallowed and said, “You know, I’ll be right back.” He jogged to a nearby Starbucks, praying he’d make it to the restroom in time.

With Detective Bell at her side, Geneva walked into the laboratory portion of Mr. Rhyme’s town house, downstairs. She glanced at her father, who looked at her with those big puppy-dog eyes of his.

Damnit. She looked away.

Mr. Rhyme said, “We’ve got some news. The man who hired Boyd’s dead.”

“Dead? The jewelry store robber?”

“Things weren’t quite what they seemed,” Mr. Rhyme said. “We were – well, I was wrong. I was thinking whoever it was wanted to rob the jewelry exchange. But, no, he wanted to blow it up.”

“Terrorists?” she asked.

Mr. Rhyme nodded toward a plastic folder that Amelia was holding. Inside was a letter, addressed to The New York Times. It said the bombing of the jewelry exchange was yet another step in the holy war against Zionist Israel and its allies. It was the same paper that was used for the note about killing Geneva and the map of West Fifty-fifth Street.

“Who is he?” she asked, trying to remember a van and a Middle Eastern man in the street outside the museum a week or so ago. She couldn’t.

“An illegal Saudi national,” Detective Sellitto said. “Worked for a restaurant downtown. The owners’re pretty freaked, of course. They think we think they’re a cover for al-Qaeda or something.” He chuckled. “Which they might be. We’ll keep checking. But they all come up clean – citizens, been here for years, couple kids in the army, even. I will say they’re a bunch of very nervous folks at the moment.”

The most important aspect about the bomber, Amelia went on to say, was that this man, Bani al-Dahab, didn’t appear to associate with any suspected terrorists. The women he’d dated recently and coworkers said that they didn’t know of any times he’d met with people who might be in a terrorist cell, and his mosque was religiously and politically moderate. Amelia had searched his Queens apartment and found no other evidence or co

“We’ll keep looking over the evidence,” Mr. Rhyme said, “but we’re ninety-nine percent sure he was working alone. I think it means you’re probably safe.”

He wheeled his chair to the evidence table and looked over some bags of burnt metal and plastic. He said to Mr. Cooper, “Add it to the chart, Mel: Explosive was TOVEX, and we’ve got pieces of the receiver – the detonator – the casing, wire, a bit of blasting cap. All contained in a UPS box addressed to the jewelry exchange, attention of the director.”

“Why’d it go off early?” Jax Jackson asked.

Mr. Rhyme explained that it was very dangerous to use a radio-controlled bomb in the city because there were so many ambient radio waves – from construction-site detonators, walkie-talkies and a hundred other sources.

Detective Sellitto added, “Or he may’ve killed himself. He might’ve heard that Boyd was arrested or that the jewelry exchange was being searched for a bomb. He must’ve thought it was only a matter of time until he’d be nabbed.”

Geneva felt uneasy, confused. These people around her were suddenly strangers. The reason they’d come together in the first place no longer existed. As for her father, he was more alien to her than the police. She wanted to be back in her room in the Harlem basement with her books and her plans for the future, college, dreams about Florence and Paris.

But then she realized Amelia was looking at her closely. The policewoman asked, “What’re you going to do now?”

Geneva glanced at her father. What would happen? She had a parent, true, but one who was an ex-con, who couldn’t even be here in the city. They’d still probably try to put her in a foster home.

Amelia glanced at Lincoln Rhyme. “Until things get sorted out, why don’t we stick with our plan? Have Geneva stay here for a while.”

“Here?” the girl asked.

“Your father’s got to get back to Buffalo and take care of things there.”

Not that living with him is an option anyway, Geneva thought. But kept this to herself.

“Excellent idea.” This came from Thom. “I think that’s what we’ll do.” His voice was firm. “You’ll stay here.”

“Is that all right with you?” Amelia asked Geneva.

Geneva wasn’t sure why they wanted her to stay. She was initially suspicious. But she constantly had to remind herself that, after living alone for so long, suspicion trailed her like a shadow. She thought of another rule about lives like hers: You take your family how you find them.

“Sure,” she said.

Shackled, Thompson Boyd was brought into Rhyme’s lab and the two guards deposited him in front of the officers and Rhyme. Geneva was once again upstairs in her room, guarded at the moment by Barbe Lynch.

The criminalist rarely did this, meeting the perpetrators face-to-face. For him, a scientist, the only passion in his job was the game itself, the pursuit, not the physical incarnation of the suspect. He had no desire to gloat over the man or woman he’d captured. Excuses and pleas didn’t move him, threats didn’t trouble him.

Yet now he wanted to make absolutely certain that Geneva Settle was safe. He wanted to assess her attacker himself.

His face bandaged and bruised from his confrontation with Sachs at the arrest, Boyd looked around the laboratory. The equipment, the charts on the whiteboards.

The wheelchair.

No emotion whatsoever, no flicker of surprise or interest. Not even when he nodded toward Sachs. It was as if he’d forgotten that she’d brained him repeatedly with a rock.

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

He asked, “How’d you find me?”

“A couple of things,” Rhyme answered. “For one, you picked the wrong tarot card to leave as evidence. It put me in mind of executions.”

“The Hanged Man,” Boyd said, nodding. “Right you are. I never thought about that. Just seemed like kind of a spooky one. To lead you off, you know.”

Rhyme continued, “What got us your name, though, was your habit.”

“Habit?”

“You whistle.”

“I do that. I try not to on the job. But sometimes it slips out. So you talked to…”

“Yep, some people in Texas.”

Nodding, Boyd glanced at Rhyme with red, squinting eyes. “So you knew ’bout Charlie Tucker? That unfortunate excuse for a human being. Making the last days of my people’s time on earth miserable. Telling ’em they were going to burn in hell, nonsense talk about Jesus and whatnot.”

My people…

Sachs asked, “Was Bani al-Dahab the only one who hired you?”

He blinked in surprise; it seemed the first true emotion to cross his face. “How -?” He fell silent.

“The bomb went off early. Or he killed himself.”

A shake of the head. “No, he wasn’t any suicide bomber. It would’ve gone off by accident. Fella was careless. Too hotheaded, you know. Didn’t do things by the book. He probably armed it too early.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“He called me. Got my name from somebody in prison, Nation of Islam co

So that was it. Rhyme had wondered how a Texas prison guard had hooked up with Islamic terrorists.

“They’re crazy,” Boyd said. “But they have money, those Arab people.”

“And Jon Earle Wilson? He was your bomb maker?”

“Jo

“Where is he?”

“That I don’t know. We left messages from pay phones to a voice-mail box. And met in public. Never traded more’n a dozen words.”

“The FBI’ll be talking to you about al-Dahab and the bombing. What we want to know about is Geneva. Is there anybody else who’d want to hurt her?”