The Twelfth Card

Hanson had agreed but added both quickly and wearily that he was as shocked as anyone about the man’s death in the shootout at Columbia University several days before. He knew nothing about it – or about any jewelry store robbery or terrorist attack – except what he’d read in the news. What exactly did Rhyme and the police want?

Rhyme had offered standard cop-ese: “Just the answers to a few routine questions.”

Now, pleasantries disposed of, Hanson asked, “Could you tell us what this is about?”

Rhyme got right to the point: He explained that William Ashberry had hired Thompson Boyd, a professional killer, to murder Geneva Settle.

Three horrified glances at the slim young girl in front of them. She looked back at each of them calmly.

Continuing, the criminalist added that Ashberry felt it was vital that nobody know the reason he wanted her dead so he and Boyd had set up several fake motives for the girl’s death. Originally the kill was supposed to look like a rape. Rhyme, though, had seen through that immediately, and as they continued to search for the killer he and the team had found what appeared to be the real reason for the murder: that Geneva could identify a terrorist pla

“But there were some problems with that: The bomber’s death should’ve ended any need to kill Geneva. But it didn’t. Boyd’s partner tried again. What was going on? We tracked down the man who sold the bomb to Boyd, an arsonist in New Jersey. The FBI arrested him. We linked some bills in his possession to Boyd’s safe house. That made him an accomplice to murder and he copped a plea. He told us that he put Ashberry and Boyd together and -”

“This terrorist thing, though,” the bank’s lawyer said skeptically, with a sour laugh. “Bill Ashberry and terrorists? It -”

“Getting there,” Rhyme said, equally sour. Maybe more so. He continued his explanation: The bomb maker’s statement wasn’t enough for a warrant to arrest Ashberry. So Rhyme and Sellitto decided they needed to flush him out. They placed an officer at Geneva’s high school, a man pretending to be an assistant principal. Anyone calling to ask about Geneva would be told that she was at Columbia with a professor in the law school. The real professor agreed to let them use not only his name but his office as well. Fred Dellray and Jonette Monroe, the undercover gangsta girl from Geneva’s high school, were more than happy to play the roles of the professor and student. They’d done a fast but thorough job setting up the sting, even having some fake Photoshop pictures made up of Dellray with Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, to make sure Ashberry didn’t tip to the scam and bolt.

Rhyme now explained these events to Hanson and Cole, adding the details about the attempted murder in Mathers’s office.

He shook his head. “I should’ve guessed the perp had some co

No one smiled. Rhyme thought, bankers, lawyers – no sense of humor. He continued, “So I went back to the evidence and noticed something that bothered me: There was no radio transmitter to detonate the bomb. It should’ve been in the wreckage of the van, but it wasn’t.

“Why not? One conclusion was that Boyd and his partner had planted the bomb and kept the transmitter themselves to kill the Arab deliveryman as a diversion to keep us from finding the real motive for killing Geneva.”

“Okay,” Hanson said. “The real motive. What was it?”

“Had to do some thinking about that. I thought at first maybe Geneva had seen some tenants being evicted illegally when she was scrubbing graffiti off old buildings for a developer. But I looked into where that’d happened and found that Sanford Bank wasn’t involved in those buildings. So, where did that leave us? I could only come back to what we’d originally thought…”

He explained about the old Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated that Boyd had stolen. “I’d forgotten that somebody had been tracking down the magazine before Geneva supposedly saw the van and terrorist. I think what happened was that Ashberry stumbled on that article when the Sanford Foundation renovated its archives last month. And he did some more research and found something real troubling, something that could ruin his life. He got rid of the foundation’s copy and decided he had to destroy all the copies of the magazine. Over the past few weeks he found most of them – but there was one left in the area: The librarian at the African-American museum in Midtown was getting their copy from storage and must’ve told Ashberry that, coincidentally, there was a girl who was interested in the same issue. Ashberry knew he had to destroy the article and kill Geneva, along with the librarian, because he could co

“But I still don’t understand why,” Cole, the lawyer, said. His sourness had blossomed into full-fledged irritation.

Rhyme explained the final piece of the puzzle: He related the story of Charles Singleton, the farm he’d been given by his master and the Freedmen’s Trust robbery – and the fact that the former slave had a secret. “That was the answer to why Charles was set up in 1868. And it’s the answer to why Ashberry had to kill Geneva.”

“Secret?” Stella, the assistant, asked.

“Oh, yes. I finally figured out what it was. I remembered something that Geneva ’s father had told me. He said that Charles taught at an African free school near his home and that he sold cider to workers building boats up the road.” Rhyme shook his head. “I made a careless assumption. We heard that his farm was in New York state…which it was. Except that it wasn’t upstate, like we were thinking.”

“No? Where was it?” Hanson asked.

“Easy to figure out,” he continued, “if you keep in mind there were working farms here in the city until the late eighteen hundreds.”

“You mean his farm was in Manhattan?” Stella asked.

“Not only,” Rhyme said, allowing himself the colloquialism. “It was right underneath this building.”

Chapter Forty-Two

“We found a drawing of Gallows Heights in the 1800s that shows three or four big, tree-filled estates. One of them covered this and the surrounding blocks. Across the road from it was an African free school. Could that’ve been his school? And on the Hudson River ” – Rhyme glanced out the window – “right about there, at Eighty-first Street, was a dry dock and shipyard. Could the workers there have been the ones Charles sold cider to?

“But was the estate his? There was one simple way to find out. Thom checked the Manhattan recorder’s office and found the record of a deed from Charles’s master to Charles. Yep, it was his. Then everything else fell into place. All the references we found to meetings in Gallows Heights – with politicians and civil rights leaders? It was Charles’s house they were meeting in. That was his secret – that he owned fifteen acres of prime land in Manhattan.”

“But why was it a secret?” Hanson asked.

“Oh, he didn’t dare tell anyone he was the owner. He wanted to, of course. That’s what he was so tormented about: He was proud that he owned a big farm in the city. He believed he could be a model for other former slaves. Show them that they could be treated as whole men, respected. That they could own land and work it, be members of the community. But he’d seen draft riots, the lynchings of blacks, the arson. So he and his wife pretended to be caretakers. He was afraid that somebody would find out that a former slave owned a large plot of choice property and destroy it. Or, more likely, steal it from him.”

“Which,” Geneva said, “is exactly what happened.”