The Twelfth Card

Wednesday, October 10

Chapter Twenty

At 8 A.M. Thompson Boyd retrieved his car from the alley garage near the bungalow in Astoria where he’d parked it yesterday after escaping from the Elizabeth Street safe house. He pulled the blue Buick into congested traffic, headed for the Queensborough Bridge and, once in Manhattan, made his way Uptown.

Recalling the address from the message on the voice mail, he drove into western Harlem and parked two blocks away from the Settles’ town house. He was armed with his.22 North American Arms pistol and his club and carting the shopping bag, which contained no decorating books today; inside was the device he’d made last night and he treated it very gingerly as he moved slowly down the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street casually several times, seeing people presumably headed for work, an equal mix of blacks and whites, many in business suits, on their way to work, and students heading to Columbia – bikes, backpacks, beards… But he saw nothing threatening.

Thompson Boyd paused by the curb and studied the building the girl lived in.

There was a Crown Vic, parked several doors away from the apartment – smart of them not to flag it. Around the corner was a second unmarked car near a hydrant. Thompson thought he saw some motion on the apartment roof. Sniper? he wondered. Maybe not, but somebody was definitely there, undoubtedly a cop. They were taking this case real serious.

Average Joe turned around and walked back to his average car, climbed in and started the engine. He’d have to be patient. It was too risky for an attempt here; he’d have to wait for the right opportunity. Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” started to play on the radio. He shut it off but continued to whistle the tune to himself, never missing a single note, never a fraction of a tone off pitch.

Her great-aunt had found something.

In Geneva’s apartment Roland Bell got a call from Lincoln Rhyme, who reported that Geneva’s father’s aunt, Lilly Hall, had found some boxes of old letters and souvenirs and artifacts in the storage space of the building where she was staying. She didn’t know if there was anything helpful – her eyes were hopeless – but the cartons were chockablock with papers. Did Geneva and the police want to look through them?

Rhyme had wanted to have everything picked up but the aunt said, no, she’d only give it to her great-niece in person. She didn’t trust anyone else.

“Police included?” Bell had asked Rhyme, who’d answered, “Police especially.”

Amelia Sachs had then broken into the conversation to offer what Bell realized was the real explanation: “I think she wants to see her niece.”

“Ah, yes’m. Got it.”

Not surprisingly Geneva was more than eager to go. Roland Bell truly preferred guarding nervous people, people who didn’t want to set foot on the concrete of New York City sidewalks, who liked to curl up with computer games and long books. Put them in an interior room, no windows, no visitors, no roof access and order out Chinese or pizza every day.

But Geneva Settle was unlike anybody he’d ever guarded.

Mr. Goades, please… I was a witness to a crime, and I’m being held by the police. It’s against my will and -

The detective arranged for two cars for security. There’d be Bell, Geneva and Pulaski in his Crown Vic. Luis Martinez and Barbe Lynch would be in their Chevy. A uniformed officer in another blue-and-white would remain parked near the Settles’ apartment while they were gone.

As he waited for the second squad car to show up, Bell asked if there’d been any more word from her parents. She said that they were at Heathrow now, awaiting the next flight.

Bell, a father of two boys, had some opinions about parents who left their daughter in the care of an uncle while they traipsed off to Europe. (This uncle in particular. No lunch money for the girl? That was a tough row.) Even though Bell was a single father with a demanding job, he still made his boys breakfast in the morning, packed them lunch and made supper most nights, however lame and starchy the meals might be (“Atkins” was not a word to be found in the Roland Bell encyclopedia of cuisine).

But his job was to keep Geneva Settle alive, not comment on parents who weren’t much skilled at child-rearing. He now put aside thoughts of personal matters and stepped outside, hand near his Beretta, scanning the facades and windows and rooftops of nearby buildings and cars, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

The relief squad car pulled up outside and parked, while Martinez and Lynch climbed into the Chevrolet, around the corner from Geneva ’s apartment.

Into his Handi-Talkie, Bell said, “Clear. Bring her out.”

Pulaski appeared, hustling Geneva into the Crown Victoria. He jumped in beside her, and Bell took the driver’s seat. In tandem, the two cars sped across town and eventually arrived at an old tenement east of Fifth Avenue, in el barrio.

The majority of this area was Puerto Rican and Dominican, but other Latin nationalities lived here too, those from Haiti, Bolivia, Ecuador, Jamaica, Central America – both black and nonblack. There were also pockets of new immigrants, legal and otherwise, from Senegal, Liberia and the Central African nations. Most of the hate crimes here weren’t white versus Hispanic or black; they were American-born versus immigrant, of whatever race or nationality. The way of the world, Bell reflected sadly.

The detective now parked where Geneva indicated and he waited until the other officers climbed out of the squad car behind them and checked out the street. A thumbs-up from Luis Martinez and together they hustled Geneva inside.

The building was shabby, the lobby smelling of beer and sour meat. Geneva seemed embarrassed about the condition of the place. As at the school she again suggested the detective wait outside, but it was halfhearted, as if she expected his response, “Prob’ly better I go with you.”

On the second floor she knocked and an elderly voice asked, “Who there?”

“ Geneva. I’m here to see Auntie Lilly.”

Two chains rattled and two deadbolts were undone. The door opened. A slight woman in a faded dress looked at Bell cautiously.

“Morning, Mrs. Watkins,” the girl said.

“Hi, honey. She’s in the living room.” Another uncertain glance at the detective.

“This’s a friend of mine.”

“He yo’ friend?”

“That’s right,” Geneva told her.

The woman’s face suggested that she didn’t approve of the girl spending time in the company of a man three times her age, even if he was a policeman.

“Roland Bell, ma’am.” He showed his ID.

“Lilly said there was something about the police,” she said uneasily. Bell continued to smile and said nothing more. The woman repeated, “Well, she’s in the living room.”

Geneva’s great-aunt, a frail, elderly woman in a pink dress, was staring at the television through large, thick glasses. She looked over at the girl and her face broke into a smile. “Geneva, darling. How are you? And who’s this?”

“Roland Bell, ma’am. Pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Lilly Hall. You’re the one interested in Charles?”

“That’s right.”

“I wish I knew more. I told Geneva everything I know ’bout him. Got hisself that farm, then got arrested. That was all I heard. Didn’t even know if he went to jail or not.”

“Looks like he did, Auntie. We don’t know what happened after that. That’s what we want to find out.”

On the stained floral wallpaper behind her were three photographs: Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and the famous picture of Jackie Kennedy in mourning with young John John and Caroline beside her.

“There’s the boxes right there.” The woman nodded toward three large cartons of papers and dusty books and wooden and plastic objects. They sat in front of a coffee table whose leg had been broken and duct-taped together. Geneva stooped and looked through the largest box.

Lilly watched her. After a moment the woman said, “I feel him sometime.”

“You…?” Bell asked.

“Ou’ kin, Charles. I feel him. Like the other haints.”

Haint… Bell knew the word from North Carolina. An old black term for ghost.

“He restless, I’m feeling,” the great-aunt said.

“I don’t know about that,” her grandniece said with a smile.

No, Bell thought, Geneva hardly seemed like the sort who’d believe in ghosts or anything supernatural. The detective, though, wasn’t so sure. He said, “Well, maybe what we’re doing here’ll bring him some rest.”

“You know,” the woman said, pushing her thick glasses higher on her nose, “you that interested in Charles, there some other relations of ou’s round the country. You ’member yo’ father’s cousin in Madison? And his wife, Ruby? I could call him an’ ask. Or Genna-Louise in Memphis. Or I would, only I don’t have no phone of my own.” A glance at the old Princess model sitting on a TV table near the kitchen, her grim expression evidence of past disputes with the woman she was staying with. The great-aunt added, “And phone cards, they be so expensive.”

“We could call, Auntie.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind talking to some of ’em. Been a while. Miss having family around.”

Bell dug into his jeans pocket. “Ma’am, since this is something Geneva and I’re working on together, let me get you a phone card.”

“No.” This was from Geneva. “I’ll do it.”

“You don’t -”

“I’ve got it,” she said firmly, and Bell put the money away. She gave the woman a twenty.

The great-aunt looked reverently at the bill, said, “I’ma get me that card and call today.”

Geneva said, “If you find out anything, call us again at that number you called before.”

“Why’s the police all interested in Charles? Man musta died a hundred years ago, at least.”

Geneva caught Bell’s eye and shook her head; the woman hadn’t heard that Geneva was in danger, and the niece wanted to keep it that way. Through her Coke-bottle lenses the woman didn’t catch the look. Geneva said, “They’re helping me prove he didn’t commit that crime he was accused of.”

“Are they now? After all them years?”

Bell wasn’t sure the woman exactly believed her niece. The detective’s own aunt, about this woman’s age, was sharp as a needle. Nothing got by her.

But Lilly said, “Be right nice of y’all. Bella, let’s make these folk some coffee. And cocoa for Geneva. I remember that’s what she likes.”

As Roland Bell looked out carefully through a space between the drawn curtains, Geneva started through the box once again.

On this Harlem street:

Two boys tried to outdo each other at skateboarding down the tall banister of a brownstone, flaunting the laws both of gravity and of truancy.

A black woman stood on a porch, watering some spectacular red geraniums that the recent frost hadn’t killed.

A squirrel buried, or dug up, something in the largest plot of dirt nearby: a five-by-four-foot rectangle dusted with yellow grass, in the middle of which rested the carcass of a washing machine.

And on East 123rd Street, near the Iglesia Adventista Church, with the soaring approach to the Triborough Bridge in the background, three police officers looked diligently out over a shabby brownstone and the surrounding streets. Two – a man and a woman – were in plain clothes; the cop in the alley was in uniform. He marched up and down the alley like a recruit on guard duty.

These observations were made by Thompson Boyd, who’d followed Geneva Settle and her guards here and was now standing in a boarded-up building across the street and several doors west. He peered through the cracks in a defaced billboard advertising home equity loans.

Curious that they’d brought the girl out into the open. Not by the book. But that was their problem.

Thompson considered the logistics: He assumed this was a short trip – a hit-and-run, so to speak, with the Crown Victoria and the other car double-parked and no attempt made to hide them. He decided to move fast to take advantage of the situation. Hurrying out of the ruined building, via the back door, Thompson now circled the block, pausing only long enough to buy a pack of cigarettes in a bodega. Easing into the alley behind the tenement where Geneva now was, Thompson peered out. He carefully set the shopping bag on the asphalt and moved forward a few more feet. Hiding behind a pile of garbage bags, he watched the blond officer on his patrol in the alley. The killer began counting the young man’s footsteps. One, two…

At thirteen the officer reached the back of the building and turned around. He was covering a lot of ground in his guard detail; he must’ve been told to watch the entire alleyway, both front and back, and to keep an eye on the windows in the opposite building too.

At twelve he reached the front sidewalk and turned, started back. One, two, three…

It took twelve steps again to get to the rear of the building. He glanced around then paced his way to the front, stepping thirteen times.

The next trip was eleven steps, then twelve.

Not clockwork, but close enough. Thompson Boyd would have at least eleven steps to slip unseen to the rear of the building, while the boy’s back was turned. He’d then have another eleven until he appeared at the rear again. He pulled the ski mask over his head.

The officer now turned and headed toward the street once more.

In an instant Thompson was out of cover and sprinting to the back of the apartment building, counting…three, four, five, six…

Quiet on his Bass walking shoes, Thompson kept his eyes on the boy’s back. The cop didn’t look around. The killer reached the wall on eight, pressed against it, catching his breath; he turned toward the alleyway where the uniformed cop would soon be appearing.

Eleven. The cop would have just reached the street and be turning and starting back. One, two, three…

Thompson Boyd, slowing his breathing.

Six, seven…

Thompson Boyd, gripping the club in both hands.

Nine, ten, eleven…

Feet scraped on the gritty cobblestones.

Thompson stepped quickly out of the alley, swinging the club like a baseball bat, fast as a sidewinder striking. He noted the pure shock on the boy’s face. He heard the whistling of the stick and the cop’s gasp, which stopped at the same moment the club struck his forehead. The boy dropped to his knees, a gurgling sound coming from his throat. The killer then clocked the man on the crown of the head.

The officer fell face forward to the filthy ground. Thompson dragged the quivering young man, still partly conscious, around the back of the building, where they couldn’t be seen from the street.

At the sound of the gunshot, Roland Bell leapt to the window of the apartment, looked out carefully. He unbuttoned his jacket and grabbed his radio.

He ignored Aunt Lilly’s wide-eyed friend, who said, “Lord, what’s going on?”

The great-aunt herself stared silently at the huge gun on the detective’s hip.

“Bell,” the detective said into the microphone. “What’ve we got?”

Luis Martinez replied breathlessly, “Gunshot. Came from the back of the building, boss. Pulaski was there. Barbe’s gone to check.”

“Pulaski,” Bell called into his radio. “Respond.”

Nothing.

“Pulaski!”

“What’s this about?” Lilly demanded, terrified. “Lord.”

Bell held up a finger. Into his radio: “Positions. Report.”

“I’m still on the front porch,” Martinez responded. “Nothing from Barbe.”

“Move to the middle of the ground-floor corridor, keep your eye on the back door. That’s the way I’d come in, I was him. But cover both entrances.”

“Roger.”

Bell turned to Geneva and the two elderly women. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“But -”

“Now, miss. I’ll carry you if I have to but that’ll put us more at risk.”

Barbe Lynch finally transmitted. “Pulaski’s down.” She called in a 10-13, officer needs assistance, and requested medics.

“Back entrance intact?” he asked.

Lynch answered, “Door’s closed and locked. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Stay in position, cover the back alley. I’m taking her out.

“Let’s go,” he said to the girl.

The defiance faded but she said, “I’m not leaving them.” Nodding toward the women.

“You tell me right now what’s this about,” her great-aunt said, eyeing Bell angrily.

“It’s a police matter. Somebody might be trying to hurt Geneva. I want you to leave. Is there a friend’s apartment here you can stay in for a spell?”

“But -”

“Gonna have to insist here, ladies. Is there? Tell me quick.”

They glanced at each other with frightened eyes and nodded. “Ann-Marie’s, I guess,” the aunt said. “Up the hall.”

Bell walked to the doorway and looked out. The empty corridor yawned at him.

“Okay, now. Go.”

The older women moved quickly down the hall. Bell saw them knock on a door. It opened and there were some hushed voices, then the face of an elderly black woman looked out. The women vanished inside, the door closed and the sound of chains and locks followed. The detective and the girl hurried down the stairs, with Bell pausing at every landing to make sure the lower level was cleared, his large, black automatic in hand.

Geneva said nothing. Her jaw was set; fury had blossomed inside her once again.

They paused in the lobby. The detective directed Geneva into the shadows behind him. He shouted, “Luis?”

“This level’s clear, boss, for now at least,” the cop called in a harsh whisper from halfway up the dim corridor that led to the back door.

Barbe’s calm voice said, “Pulaski’s still alive. I found him holding his gun – he got off one round. That was the shot we heard. No sign he hit anything.”

“What’s he say?”

“He’s unconscious.”

So maybe the guy’s rabbited, Bell thought.

Or maybe he planned something else. Was it safer to wait here for backup? That was the logical answer. The real issue, though: Was it the right answer to the question of what Unsub 109 had in mind?

Bell made a decision.

“Luis, I’m taking her out of here. Now. Need your help.”

“With you, boss.”

Thompson Boyd was once again in the burnt-out building across the street from the tenement Geneva Settle and the cops had gone into.

So far, his plan was working.

After beaning the cop, he’d ejected a shell from the man’s Glock. This he’d rubber-banded to a lit cigarette – a fuse, in effect – and set the homemade firecracker in the alley. He’d placed the gun in the unconscious cop’s hand.

He’d stripped off the mask, slipped through another alley, east of the building, into the street. When the cigarette burned down and detonated the bullet, and the two plainclothes cops disappeared, he’d run to the Crown Victoria. He had a slim jim to pop the door but hadn’t needed it; the car had been unlocked. From the shopping bag he took several of the items he’d prepared last night, then assembled and hid them under the driver’s seat and carefully closed the car door.

The improvised device was quite simple: a low, wide jar of sulfuric acid, in which rested a short glass candleholder. And sitting on top of that was a foil ball containing several tablespoons of finely ground cyanide powder. Any motion of the car would roll the ball into the acid, which would melt the foil and dissolve the poison. The lethal gas would spread upward and overcome the occupants before they had time to open a door or window. They’d be dead – or brain dead – soon after.

He peeked out through the crack between the billboard and what was left of the building’s front wall. On the porch was the brown-haired detective who seemed to be in charge of the guard detail. Beside him was the male plainclothes cop and between them the girl.

The trio paused on the porch as the detective scanned the street, the rooftops, cars, alleys.

A gun was in his right hand. Keys in his other. They were going to make a run for the deadly car.

Perfect.

Thompson Boyd turned and left the building quickly. He had to put some distance between himself and this place. Other cops were already on their way; sirens were growing louder. As he slipped out of the back of the building he heard the detective’s car start. The squeal of tires followed.

Breathe deep, he thought to the occupants of the car. He thought this for two reasons: First, of course, he wanted this hard job over with. But he also sent the message to them for another reason: Dying by cyanide can be extremely unpleasant. Wishing them a speedy, painless death was what a person with feeling would think, a person who was no longer numb.

Grape, cherry, milk…

Breathe deep.

Sensing the wild rattle of the engine – it shook her hands and legs and back – Amelia Sachs sped toward Spanish Harlem. She was doing sixty before she shifted into third gear.

She’d been at Rhyme’s when they got the report: Pulaski was down, and the killer had managed to get some sort of device into Roland Bell’s car. She’d run downstairs, fired up her red 1969 Camaro and hurried toward the scene of the attack in East Harlem.

Roaring through green lights, slowing to thirty or so at the reds – check left, check right, downshift, punch it!

Ten minutes later she skidded onto East 123rd Street, going against traffic, missing a delivery truck by inches. Ahead of her she could see the flashing lights of the ambulances and three squad cars from the local house. Also: a dozen uniforms and a handful of ESU troops, working their way along the sidewalks. They moved cautiously, as if they were soldiers under fire.

Watch your backs…

She brought the Chevy to a tire-smoking stop and jumped out, glancing at the nearby alleyways and vacant windows for any sign of the killer and his needle gun. Jogging into the alley, flashing her shield, she could see medics working on Pulaski. He was on his back and they’d cleared an airway – at least he was alive. But there was a lot of blood and his face was hugely swollen. She’d hoped he’d be able to tell them something but he was unconscious.

It looked like the kid had been surprised by his attacker, who’d lain in wait as he’d walked down the alley. The rookie had been too close to the side of the building. There would’ve been no warning when the man attacked. You always walked down the center of sidewalks and alleys so nobody could jump out and surprise you.

You didn’t know…

She wondered if he’d live to learn this lesson.

“How’s he doing?”

The medic didn’t look up. “No guess. We’re lucky he’s still with us.” Then to his partner: “Okay, let’s move him out. Now.”

As they got Pulaski onto a backboard and hustled him toward the ambulance, Sachs cleared everybody away from the scene to preserve whatever evidence might be there. Then she returned to the mouth of the alley and dressed in the white Tyvek suit.

Just as she zipped it up a sergeant from the local house walked up to her. “You’re Sachs, right?”

She nodded. “Any sign of the perp?”

“Nothing. You going to run the scenes?”

“Yep.”

“You want to see Detective Bell’s car?”

“Sure.”

She started forward.

“Wait,” the man said. He handed her a face mask.

“That bad?”

He pulled his own on. Through the thick rubber she heard his troubled voice say, “Follow me.”

Chapter Twenty-One

With ESU backing them up, two Bomb Squad Unit cops from the Sixth Precinct were crouched in the backseat of Roland Bell’s Crown Victoria. They weren’t wearing bomb suits but were in full biohazard outfits.

Wearing the thinner, white suit, Amelia Sachs stood back ten yards.

“What’ve you got, Sachs?” Rhyme called into the microphone. She jumped. Then turned the volume down. The line from her radio was plugged into the gas mask.

“I haven’t gotten close yet; they’re still removing the device. It’s cyanide and acid.”

“Probably the sulfuric we found traces of on the desk,” he said.

Slowly, the team removed the glass-and-foil device. They sealed up the pieces in special hazardous materials containers.

Another transmission – from one of the Bomb Squad officers: “Detective Sachs, we’ve rendered it safe. You can run the car, you want. But keep the mask on inside. There’s no gas but the acid fumes could be dangerous.”

“Right. Thanks.” She started forward.

Rhyme’s voice crackled again. “Hold on a minute…” He came back on. “They’re safe, Sachs. They’re at the precinct.”

“Good.”

The “they” were the intended victims of the poison left in the Crown Victoria, Roland Bell and Geneva Settle. They’d come very close to dying. But, as they’d prepared to rush out of the great-aunt’s apartment to the car, Bell had realized that something about the crime scene of Pulaski’s assault seemed odd. Barbe Lynch had found the rookie holding his weapon. But this unsub was too smart to leave a gun in the hand of a downed cop, even if he was unconscious. No, he’d at least pitch it away, if he didn’t want to take it with him. Bell had concluded that somehow the unsub himself had fired the shot and left the gun behind to make them think that the rookie had fired. The purpose? To draw the officers away from the front of the apartment.

And why? The answer was obvious: so that they’d leave the cars unguarded.

The Crown Vic had been unlocked, which meant the unsub might have slipped an explosive device inside. So he’d taken the keys to the locked Chevy that Martinez and Lynch had driven here and used that vehicle to speed Geneva out of danger, warning everyone to stay clear of the unmarked Ford until the Bomb Squad had a chance to go over it. Using fiberoptic cameras they searched under and inside the Crown Vic and found the device under the driver’s seat.

Sachs now ran the scenes: the car, the approach to it and the alley where Pulaski had been attacked. She didn’t find much other than prints of Bass walking shoes, which confirmed the attacker had been Unsub 109, and another device, a homemade one: a bullet from Pulaski’s service automatic had been rubber-banded to a lit cigarette. The unsub had left it burning in the alley and snuck around toward the front of the building. When it went off, the “gunshot” had drawn the officers to the back, giving him a chance to plant the device in Bell’s car.

Damn, that’s slick, she thought with dark admiration.

There was no sign that his partner, the black man in the combat jacket, had been – or still was – nearby.

Donning the mask again, she carefully examined the glass parts of the poison device itself, but they yielded no prints or other clues, which surprised nobody. Maybe the cyanide or acid would tell them something. Discouraged, she reported her results to Rhyme.

He asked, “And what did you search?”

“Well, the car and the alleyway around Pulaski. And then the entrance and exit routes into and out of the alley, the street where he approached the Crown Vic – both directions.”

Silence for a moment, as Rhyme considered this.

She felt uneasy. Was she missing something? “What’re you thinking, Rhyme?”

“You searched by the book, Sachs. Those were the right places. But did you take in the totality of the scene?”

“Chapter Two of your book.”

“Good. At least somebody’s read it. But did you do what I say?”

Although time was always of the essence when searching a crime scene, one of the practices Rhyme insisted on was taking a few moments to get a sense of the entire scene in light of the particular crime. The example he cited in his forensic science textbook was an actual murder in Greenwich Village. The primary crime scene was where the strangled victim was found, his apartment. The secondary was the fire escape by which the killer had gotten away. It was the third scene, though, an unlikely one, at which Rhyme had found the matches bearing the killer’s fingerprints: a gay bar three blocks away. No one would’ve thought to search the bar, except that Rhyme found some gay porno tapes in the victim’s apartment; a canvass of the nearest gay bar turned up a bartender who identified the victim and recalled him sharing a drink with a man earlier that night. The lab raised latents from the book of matches resting on the bar near where the two men had sat; the prints led them to the murderer.

“Let’s keep thinking, Sachs. He sets up this plan – improvised but elaborate – to distract our people and get the device into a car. That meant he had to know where all the players were, what they were doing and how he could make enough time to set the device. Which tells us what?”

Sachs was already scanning the street. “He was watching.”

“Yes, indeed, Sachs. Good. And where might he have been doing that from?”

“Across the street’d have the best visibility. But there’re dozens of buildings he could’ve been in. I have no idea which one.”

“True. But Harlem’s a neighborhood, right?”

“I…”

“Understand what I’m saying?”

“Not exactly.”

“Families, Sachs. Families live there, extended families living together, not yuppie singles. A home invasion wouldn’t go unnoticed. Neither would somebody skulking about in lobbies or alleys. Good word, isn’t that? Skulking. Says it all.”

“Your point, Rhyme?” His good mood had returned but she was irritated that he was more interested in the puzzle of the case than he was about, say, Pulaski’s chances for recovery or that Roland Bell and Geneva Settle had nearly been killed.

“Not an apartment. Not a rooftop – Roland’s people always look there. There’ll be someplace else he was watching from, Sachs. Where do you think it might be?”

Scanning the street again…“There’s a billboard on an abandoned building. It’s full of graffiti and handbills – real busy, you know, hard to spot anybody looking out from behind it. I’m going to see.”

Checking carefully for signs that the unsub was nearby, and finding none, she crossed the street and walked to the back of the old building – a burnt-out store, it seemed. Climbing through the back window, she saw that the floor was dusty – the perfect surface for footprints and, sure enough, she spotted Unsub 109’s Bass walker shoes right away. Still, she slipped rubber bands around the booties of the Tyvek overalls – a trick Rhyme invented to make certain that an officer exploring the crime scene didn’t confuse his or her own prints with those of the suspect. The detective started into the room, her Glock in hand.

Following the unsub’s prints to the front, she paused from time to time, listening for noises. Sachs heard a skitter or two but, no stranger to the sound track of seamier New York, she knew immediately that the intruder was a rat.

In the front she looked out through a gap in the plywood panels of the billboard where he’d stood and noticed that, yes, it provided a perfect view of the street. She collected some basic forensic equipment then returned and hit the walls with ultraviolet spray. Sachs turned the alternative light source wand on them.

But the only marks she found were latex glove prints.

She told Rhyme what she’d found and then said, “I’ll collect trace from where he stood but I don’t see very much. He’s just not leaving anything.”

“Too professional,” Rhyme said, sighing. “Every time we outsmart him, he’s already outsmarted us. Well, bring in what you’ve got, Sachs. We’ll look it over.”

As they waited for Sachs to return, Rhyme and Sellitto made a decision: While they believed that Unsub 109 had fled the area around the apartment they still arranged to have Geneva ’s great-aunt, Lilly Hall, and her friend moved to a hotel room for the time being.

As for Pulaski, he was in intensive care, still unconscious from the beating. The doctors couldn’t say whether he’d live or not. In Rhyme’s lab, Sellitto slammed his phone shut angrily after getting this news. “He was a fucking rookie. I had no business recruiting him for Bell’s team. I should’ve gone myself.”

A curious thing to say. “Lon,” Rhyme said, “you’ve got rank. You graduated from guard detail, when? Twenty years ago?”

But the big cop wouldn’t be consoled. “Put him in over his head. Stupid of me. Goddamn.”

Once again the hand rubbed at the hotspot on his cheek. The detective was edgy and looked particularly rumpled today. He usually wore pretty much what he wore now: light shirt and dark suit. Rhyme wondered, though, if these were the same clothes he’d had on yesterday. It seemed so. Yes, there was a dot of blood from the library shooting on the jacket sleeve – as if he were wearing the clothing as penance.

The doorbell rang.

Thom returned a moment later with a tall, lanky man. Pale skin, bad posture, unruly beard and brown, curly hair. He was dressed in a tan corduroy jacket and brown slacks. Birkenstocks.

His eyes scanned the laboratory then glanced at Rhyme and looked him over. Unsmiling, he asked, “Is Geneva Settle here?”

“Who’re you?” Sellitto asked.

“I’m Wesley Goades.”

Ah, the legal Terminator – who was not fictional, Rhyme was somewhat surprised to find. Sellitto checked his ID and nodded.

The man’s long fingers continually adjusted thick wire-rimmed glasses or tugged absently at his long beard and he never looked anyone in the eye for more than a half second. The constant ocular jitters reminded Rhyme of Geneva’s friend, the gum-snapping Lakeesha Scott.

He offered a card to Thom, who showed it to Rhyme. Goades was director of the Central Harlem Legal Services Corporation and was affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union. The fine print at the bottom said that he was licensed to practice law in New York state, the federal district courts in New York and Washington, D.C., and before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe his days representing capitalist insurance companies had turned him to the other side.

In response to the querying glances from Rhyme and Sellitto, he said, “I’ve been out of town. I got the message that Geneva called my office yesterday. Something about her being a witness. I just wanted to check on her.”

“She’s fine,” Rhyme said. “There’ve been some attempts on her life but we have a full-time guard on her.”

“She’s being held here? Against her will?”

“Not held, no,” the criminalist said firmly. “She’s staying in her home.”

“With her parents?”

“An uncle.”

“What’s this all about?” the unsmiling lawyer asked, his eyes flitting from face to face, taking in the evidence boards, the equipment, the wires.

Rhyme was, as always, reluctant to discuss an active case with a stranger, but the lawyer might have some helpful information. “We think somebody’s worried about what Geneva ’s been researching for a project for school. About an ancestor of hers. Did she ever mention anything to you?”

“Oh, something about a former slave?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s how I met her. She walked into my office last week and asked if I knew where she could get records of old crimes in the city – back in the eighteen hundreds. I let her look through a few of the old books I have but it’s almost impossible to find trial court records going back that far. I couldn’t help her.” The skinny man raised an eyebrow. “She wanted to pay me for my time. Most of my clients don’t even do that.”

With another look around the town house, Goades seemed satisfied that the situation was what it seemed to be. “Are you close to catching this guy?”

“We have some leads,” Rhyme said noncommittally.

“Well, tell her I came by, would you? And if there’s anything she needs, anytime, have her call me.” He nodded at his card and then left.

Mel Cooper chuckled. “A hundred bucks he’s represented a spotted owl at one point or another in his career.”

“No takers on that one,” Rhyme muttered. “And what’d we do to deserve all these distractions? Back to work. Let’s move!”

Twenty minutes later Bell and Geneva arrived with a box of documents and other material from her great-aunt’s apartment, which a patrolman had delivered to them at the precinct house.

Rhyme told her that Wesley Goades had come by.

“To check on me, right? I told you he was good. If I ever sue anybody I’m going to hire him.”

Lawyer of Mass Destruction…

Amelia Sachs walked inside with the evidence from the scene, nodding a greeting to Geneva and the others.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Rhyme said eagerly.

The cigarette that Unsub 109 had used as a fuse for the distracting “gunshot” was a Merit brand, common and untraceable. The cigarette had been lit but not smoked – or at least they could detect no teeth marks or saliva on the filter. This meant he was not a habitual smoker, most likely. No fingerprints on the cigarette, of course. Nor was there anything distinctive about the rubber band he’d affixed the cigarette to the bullet with. They found no manufacturer’s markers in the cyanide. The acid could be purchased in many locations. The contraption that would mix the acid and poison in Bell ’s car was made of household objects: a glass jar, foil and a glass candleholder. Nothing had any markings or indications that could be traced to a particular location.

In the abandoned building where the killer had done his surveillance Sachs had found additional traces of the mysterious liquid she’d recovered from the Elizabeth Street safe house (and whose FBI analysis Rhyme was still impatiently awaiting). In addition she’d recovered a few tiny flakes of orange paint the shade of roadside signs or construction or demolition site warnings. Sachs was sure these were from the unsub because she’d located flakes in two different locations, right next to his footprints, and nowhere else in the abandoned store. Rhyme speculated that the unsub might have masqueraded as a highway, construction or utility worker. Or maybe this was his real job.

Meanwhile Sachs and Geneva had been searching through the box of family memorabilia from her aunt’s house. It contained dozens of old books and magazines, papers, scraps, notes, recipes, souvenirs and postcards.

And, it turned out, a yellowed letter filled with Charles Singleton’s distinctive handwriting. The lettering on this page was, however, far less elegant than in his other correspondence.

Understandable, given the circumstances.

Sachs read it out loud:

“‘July fifteenth, 1868.’ ”

“The day after the theft at the Freedmen’s Trust,” Rhyme noted. “Go on.”

“‘Violet – What madness this is! As near as I have been able to discern, these events are a plan to discredit me, to shame me in the eyes of my colleagues and of the honorable soldiers in the war for freedom.

“‘Today I learned where I might find justice, and this evening, I went to Potters’ Field, armed with my Navy Colt. But my efforts ended in disaster, and the one hope for salvation now lies forever hidden beneath clay and soil.

“‘I will spend the night in hiding from the constables – who now search everywhere for me, – and in the morning, I will steal to New Jersey. You and our son must flee too; I fear they will try to visit their vengeance upon you, as well. Tomorrow at noon-time meet me at the John Stevens Pier in New Jersey. Together, we will repair to Pennsylvania, if your sister and her husband will agree to harbor us.

“‘There is a man who lives in the building above the stable where I am now hiding, who seems not unsympathetic to my plight. He has assured me he will get you this message.’”

Sachs looked up. “Something’s crossed out here. I can’t make it out. Then he goes on: ‘It is dark now. I am hungry and tired, as tested as Job. And yet the source of my tears – the stains you see on this paper, my darling, – are not from pain but from regret for the misery I have visited upon us. All because of my d – ed secret! Had I shouted the truth from the top of City Hall, perhaps these sorrowful events would not have transpired. Now it is too late for the truth. Please forgive my selfishness, and the destruction wrought by my deceit.’”

Sachs looked up. “He signs it only ‘Charles.’”

The next morning, Rhyme recalled, came the pursuit and arrest described in the magazine Geneva had been reading when she was attacked.

“His one hope? ‘Hidden beneath clay and soil.’” Rhyme looked over the letter again, Sachs holding it up for him. “Nothing specific about the secret…And what happened in Potters’ Field? That’s the pauper’s graveyard, isn’t it?”

Cooper went online and browsed for a few moments. He reported that the city cemetery for indigents was located on Hart’s Island, near the Bronx. The island had been a military base, and the graveyard had just opened on it shortly before Charles went there on his mysterious mission, armed with his Colt pistol.

“Military?” Rhyme asked, frowning. Something had clicked in his memory. “Show me the other letters.”

Cooper produced them.

“Look, Charles’s division was mustered there. Wonder if that’s the connection. Anything else about the graveyard?”

Cooper read. “No. There were only two or three hits.”

Rhyme scanned the white board. “What the hell was Charles up to? Gallows Heights, Potters’ Field, Frederick Douglass, civil rights leaders, congressmen, politicians, the Fourteenth Amendment…What ties them all together?” After a lengthy silence the criminalist said, “Let’s call in an expert.”

“Who’s more expert that you, Lincoln?”

“I don’t mean forensic science, Mel,” Rhyme said. “I’m speaking of history. There are a few subjects I’m not proficient in.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Professor Richard Taub Mathers was lean and tall, with skin dark as mahogany, sharp eyes and an intellect that suggested several post-graduate degrees were tucked into his résumé. He sported a throwback short Afro hairstyle and a self-effacing manner. He was dressed, well, professorially: tweed jacket and bow tie (missing only the de rigueur suede elbow patches).

He nodded to Rhyme, with a brief double-take at the wheelchair, and shook hands with the rest of those present.

Rhyme occasionally lectured at local colleges on forensic science, mostly at John Jay and Fordham; he rarely appeared at such lofty venues as Columbia, but a professor he knew at George Washington down in D.C. had put him in touch with Mathers, who was, it seemed, an institution unto himself in Morningside Heights. He was a professor in the law school – teaching criminal, constitutional and civil rights law as well as various esoteric graduate courses – and lectured in African-American studies in the undergrad program.

Mathers listened attentively as Rhyme related what they knew about Charles Singleton and the civil rights movement, his secret, how it was possible that he’d been framed for robbery. Then he told the professor what had happened to Geneva over the past two days.

The professor blinked in shock at this news. “Tried to kill you?” he whispered.

Geneva said nothing. Holding his eye, she gave a faint nod.

Rhyme said to Sachs, “Show him what we have so far. The letters.”

Mathers unbuttoned his jacket and pulled on thin, stylish glasses. He read Charles Singleton’s correspondence carefully, unhurried. He nodded once or twice, gave one faint smile. When he was finished he looked over them again. “Fascinating man. A freedman, farmer, served in the Thirty-first U.S. Colored Troops – and was at Appomattox.”

He read the letters yet again as Rhyme stifled the urge to tell him to hurry. Finally the man removed his glasses, polished the lenses carefully with a tissue and mused, “So he was involved in the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment?” The professor gave another smile. He was clearly intrigued. “Well, this could be interesting. This could be something.”

Struggling to remain patient, Rhyme asked, “Yes, and what would that be exactly? The ‘interesting something’?”

“I’m speaking of the controversy, of course.”

Had he been able to, Rhyme might’ve grabbed the man’s lapels and shouted for him to speed up. But he offered a casual frown. “And what’s the controversy?”

“A bit of history?” he asked.

Rhyme sighed. Sachs gave him a dark look and the criminalist said, “Go right ahead.”

“The United States Constitution’s the document that set up the American government – the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. It still controls how we operate and supersedes every other law and regulation in the land.

“Now, in this country we’ve always wanted a balance: a government strong enough to protect us from foreign powers and to regulate our lives, but not so strong it becomes oppressive. When the nation’s founders read over the Constitution after it was signed they were worried that it was too powerful – that it could lead to a repressive central government. So they revised it – they passed ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. The first eight are really the crucial ones. They list basic rights that protect citizens against abuse from the federal government. For instance: the FBI can’t arrest you without probable cause. Congress can’t take your house away from you to build an interstate highway without compensation. You get a fair trial with an impartial jury. You can’t be subject to cruel and unusual punishments, and so on. But, did you note the key word?”

Rhyme thought he was actually testing them. But Mathers continued before anyone could speak. “Federal. We’re ruled by two different governments in America: the federal government in Washington and the government of the state we live in. The Bill of Rights only limits what the federal government can do to us: Congress and federal agencies, like the FBI or the DEA. The Bill of Rights gives us virtually no protection against human and civil rights violations by state governments. And state laws are the ones that affect our lives much more directly than the federal government – most criminal police matters, public works, real estate, cars, domestic relations, wills, civil lawsuits are all state issues.

“Got that so far? The Constitution and Bill of Rights protect us from Washington only, not from abuse by New York or Oklahoma.”

Rhyme nodded.

The man eased his lanky frame onto a lab stool, glancing uncertainly at a petri dish containing green mold, and continued, “Let’s go back to the eighteen sixties. The pro-slavery South lost the Civil War so we enact the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery. The country was reunified, involuntary servitude was outlawed…freedom and harmony would reign. Right?”

A cynical laugh. “Wrong. Banning slavery wasn’t enough. There was even more bad feeling toward blacks than before the war – even in the North – because so many young men had died on behalf of freeing them. State legislatures enacted hundreds of laws discriminating against blacks. They were barred from voting, from holding office, owning property, using public facilities, testifying in court… Life for most of them was nearly as bad as under slavery.

“But these were state laws, remember; the Bill of Rights couldn’t stop them. So Congress decided the citizens needed protection from the state governments. They proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to remedy that.” Mathers glanced at a computer. “You mind if I go on-line?”

“No, not at all,” Rhyme told him.

The professor typed in an Alta Vista search and a moment later had downloaded some text. He cut and pasted a passage into a separate window, which everyone in the room could see on the flat-screen monitors around the room.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

“This is part of section one of the Fourteenth,” he explained. “It drastically limits what states can do to their citizens. Another part, which I didn’t print out, gave states incentives to give blacks – well, black men – the right to vote. So, we’re clear so far?” asked the educator.

“We’re with you,” Sachs said.

“Now, the way an amendment to the Constitution works is that it has to be approved by Congress in Washington and then by three-fourths of the states themselves. Congress approved the Fourteenth in the spring of 1866, and it went to the states for ratification. Two years later it was finally ratified by the required number of states.” He shook his head. “But ever since then there’ve been rumors that it was never properly enacted and ratified. That’s the controversy I was referring to. A lot of people think it’s invalid.”

Rhyme frowned. “Really? What do they say is wrong with the enactment?”

“There were a number of arguments. Several states withdrew approval after they’d voted to ratify but Congress ignored the withdrawals. Some people say it wasn’t properly presented or approved in Washington. There were also claims of vote fraud in the state legislatures, bribery and even threats.”

“Threats?” Sachs nodded at the letters. “Like Charles said.”

Mathers explained: “Political life was different then. That was an era when J. P. Morgan got together a private army to shoot it out with troops hired by his competitors Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in a railroad takeover. And the police and the government just sat back and watched it happen.

“And you must understand too that people were utterly passionate about the Fourteenth Amendment: Our country had nearly been destroyed, a half million people died – about as many as we’ve lost in all other wars combined. Without the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could’ve ended up controlled by the South, and we might see the country split up again. Maybe even a second civil war.”

He waved his hand at the material in front of him. “Your Mr. Singleton was apparently one of the men who went out to the states to lobby in favor of the amendment. What if he found proof that the amendment was invalid? That certainly could be the sort of secret that would torment him.”

“So maybe,” Rhyme speculated, “a pro-amendment group set up the fake theft to discredit him. So if he did tell what he knew nobody’d believe him.”

“Not the great leaders back then, of course, not Frederick Douglass or Stevens or Sumner. But, yes, there were certainly plenty of politicians who’d want the amendment passed, and they’d do anything to make sure that happened.” The professor turned toward Geneva. “And that would explain why this young lady’s in danger.”

“Why?” Rhyme asked. He’d followed the history just fine but the broader implications were a bit elusive.

It was Thom who said, “All you have to do is open a newspaper.”

“And what does that mean?” Rhyme snapped.

Mathers replied, “He means that every day there’re stories about how the Fourteenth Amendment affects our lives. You may not hear it mentioned specifically but it’s still one of the most powerful weapons in our human rights arsenal. The language is very vague – what does ‘due process’ mean? Or ‘equal protection’? ‘Privileges and immunities’? The vagueness was intentional, of course, so Congress and the Supreme Court could create new protections to meet the circumstances of every generation.

“Out of those few words have come hundreds of laws about everything imaginable, much more than just racial discrimination. It’s been used to invalidate discriminatory tax laws, to protect homeless people and underage laborers, to guarantee basic medical services for the poor. It’s the basis for gay rights and for thousands of prisoners’ rights cases every year. Maybe the most controversial was using the amendment to protect the right to abortions.

“Without it, states could decide that abortion doctors are capital murderers. And now, after September eleventh, in our Homeland Security frame of mind, it’s the Fourteenth Amendment that stops the states from rounding up innocent Muslims and keeping them detained for as long as the police want.” His face was a mask of ill ease. “If it’s invalid, because of something your Charles Singleton learned, it could be the end of liberty as we know it.”

“But,” Sachs said, “let’s say he did find that out, and it was invalid. The amendment could simply be reratified, couldn’t it?”

This time the professor’s laugh was clearly cynical. “Wouldn’t happen. The one thing that all scholars agree on is that the Fourteenth was approved at the only window of time in our history when it could have been passed. No, if the Supreme Court invalidated the amendment, oh, we might reenact a few of the laws, but the main weapon for civil rights and civil liberties would be gone forever.”

“If that’s the motive,” Rhyme asked, “who’d be behind the attack on Geneva? Who should we be looking for?”

Mathers shook his head. “Oh, the list’s endless. Tens of thousands of people want to make sure the amendment stays in force. They’d be politically liberal or radical, a member of a minority group – racially or in sexual orientation – or in favor of social programs, medical services to the poor, abortion rights, gay rights, prisoners’ rights, workers’ rights… We think of extremists being the religious right – mothers who have their children lie down in abortion clinic driveways – or people who bomb federal buildings. But they don’t have a monopoly on killing for their principles. Most European terrorism has been carried out by left-wing radicals.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t even begin to guess who was behind it.”

“We need to narrow it down somehow,” Sachs said.

Rhyme nodded slowly, thinking: The main focus of their case had to be catching Unsub 109 and hoping he’d tell them who’d hired him, or finding evidence that would lead to that person. But he instinctively sensed this was an important lead too. If there were no answers in the present as to who was behind the attempts on Geneva Settle’s life, they’d have to look to the past. “Whoever it is obviously knows something more about what happened in 1868 than we do. If we can find that out – about what Charles learned, what he was up to, his secret, about the robbery – it might point us somewhere. I want more information on that time period in New York, Gallows Heights, Potters’ Field, everything we can find.” He frowned as a memory returned. He said to Cooper, “When you looked up Gallows Heights the first time you found an article about that place near here, the Sanford Foundation.”

“Right.”

“You still have it?”

Mel Cooper saved everything. He called up the Times article on his computer. The text popped up on his screen. “Got it here.”

Rhyme read the article and learned that the Sanford Foundation had an extensive archive on Upper West Side history. “Call up the director of the place – William Ashberry. Tell him we need to go through his library.”

“Will do.” Cooper lifted a phone. He had a brief conversation, then hung up and reported, “They’re happy to help. Ashberry’ll hook us up with a curator in the archives.”

“Somebody’s got to go check it out,” Rhyme said, looking at Sachs with a raised eyebrow.

“‘Somebody’? I drew the short straw without drawing?”

Who else did she have in mind? Pulaski was in the hospital. Bell and his team were guarding Geneva. Cooper was a lab man. Sellitto was too senior to do grunt work like that. Rhyme chided, “There are no small crime scenes, there are only small crime scene investigators.”

“Funny,” she said sourly. She pulled on her jacket, grabbed her purse.

“One thing,” Rhyme said, serious now.

She lifted an eyebrow.

“We know he’ll target us.”

Police, he meant.

“Keep that orange paint in mind. Watch out for construction or highway workers… Well, with him, watch out for anybody.”

“Got it,” she said. Then took the address of the foundation and left.

After she’d gone, Professor Mathers looked though the letters and other documents once more then handed them back to Cooper. He glanced at Geneva. “When I was your age they didn’t even have African-American studies in high school. What’s the program like nowadays? Do you take two semesters?”

Geneva frowned. “AAS? I’m not taking it.”

“Then what’s your term paper for?”

“Language arts.”

“Ah. So you’re taking black studies next year?”

A hesitation. “I’m not taking it at all.”

“Really?”

Geneva obviously sensed some criticism in his question. “It’s pass/fail. All you have to do is show up. I don’t want that kind of grade on my record.”

“It can’t hurt.”

“What’s the point?” she asked bluntly. “We’ve heard it all over and over… Amistad, slavers, John Brown, the Jim Crow laws, Brown versus the Board of Education, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X…” She fell silent.

With the detachment of a professional teacher, Mather asked, “Just whining about the past?”

Geneva finally nodded. “I guess that’s how I see it, yeah. I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Time to move on. All those battles are over with.”

The professor smiled, then he glanced at Rhyme. “Well, good luck. Let me know if I can help some more.”

“We’ll do that.”

The lean man walked to the door. He paused and turned.

“Oh, Geneva?”

“Yes?”

“Just think about one thing – from somebody who’s lived a few years longer than you. I sometimes wonder if the battles really aren’t over with at all.” He nodded toward the evidence chart and Charles’s letters. “Maybe it’s just harder to recognize the enemy.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Guess what, Rhyme, there are small crime scenes.

I know it because I’m looking at one.

Amelia Sachs stood on West Eighty-second Street, just off Broadway, in front of the impressive Hiram Sanford Mansion, a large, dark Victorian structure. This was the home of the Sanford Foundation. Appropriately, around her were trappings of historical New York: In addition to the mansion, which was more than a hundred years old, there was an art museum that dated to 1910 and a row of beautiful, landmark town houses. And she didn’t need unsubs wearing orange-paint-stained overalls to feel spooked; right next door to the foundation was the ornate and eerie Sanford Hotel (rumor was that Rosemary’s Baby was originally going to have been filmed in the Sanford).

A dozen gargoyles looked down at Sachs from its cornices as if they were mocking her present assignment.

Inside, she was directed to the man Mel Cooper had just spoken with, William Ashberry, the director of the foundation and a senior executive at Sanford Bank and Trust, which owned the nonprofit organization. The trim, middle-aged man greeted her with a look of bemused excitement. “We’ve never had a policeman here, excuse me, policewoman, I meant to say, well, never had either here actually.” He seemed disappointed when she gave a vague explanation that she merely needed some general background on the history of the neighborhood and didn’t need to use the foundation for a stakeout or undercover operation.

Ashberry was more than happy to let her prowl through the archives and library, though he couldn’t help her personally; his expertise was finance, real estate, and tax law, not history. “I’m really a banker,” he confessed, as if Sachs couldn’t tell this from his outfit of dark suit, white shirt and striped tie and the incomprehensible business documents and spreadsheets sitting in precise stacks on his desk.

Fifteen minutes later she was in the care of a curator – a young, tweedy man who led her down dark corridors into the sub-basement archives. She showed him the composite of Unsub 109, thinking maybe the killer had come here too, looking for the article about Charles Singleton. But the curator didn’t recognize his picture and didn’t recall anybody asking about any issues of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated recently. He pointed out the stacks and a short time later she was sitting, edgy and frazzled, on a hard chair in a cubicle small as a coffin, surrounded by dozens of books and magazines, printouts, maps and drawings.

She approached this search the same way Rhyme had taught her to run a crime scene: looking over the whole first, then organizing a logical plan, then executing the search. Sachs first separated the material into four stacks: general information, West Side history and Gallows Heights, civil rights in the mid-1800s and Potters’ Field. She started on the graveyard first. She read every page, confirmed Charles Singleton’s reference to his regiment’s being mustered at Hart’s Island. She learned how the graveyard came into being, and how busy it had been, especially during the cholera and influenza epidemics of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when cheap pine coffins would litter the island, stacked high, awaiting burial.

Fascinating details, but not helpful. She turned to the civil rights material. She read a mind-numbing amount of information, including references to the Fourteenth Amendment controversy but nothing that touched on the issues Professor Mathers had suggested to them as a motive for setting up Charles Singleton. She read in an 1867 New York Times article that Frederick Douglass and other prominent civil rights leaders of the time had appeared at a church in Gallows Heights. Douglass had told the reporter afterward that he had come to the neighborhood to meet with several men in the fight for the amendment’s passage. But this they already knew, from Charles’s letters. She found no mention of Charles Singleton but did come across a reference to a lengthy article in the New York Sun about the former slaves and freedmen who were assisting Douglass. That particular issue, though, was not in the archives.

Page after page, on and on…Hesitating sometimes, worrying that she’d missed those vital few sentences that could shed light on the case. More than once she went back and reread a paragraph or two that she’d looked at without really reading. Stretching, fidgeting, digging at her fingernails, scratching her scalp.

Then plowing into the documents once more. The material she’d read piled up on the table but the pad of paper in front of her held not a single notation.

Turning to New York history, Sachs learned more about Gallows Heights. It was one of a half-dozen early settlements on the Upper West Side of New York, separate villages really, like Manhattanville and Vandewater Heights (now Morningside). Gallows Heights extended west from present-day Broadway to the Hudson River and from about Seventy-second Street north to Eighty-sixth. The name dated from colonial times, when the Dutch built a gallows atop a hill in the center of the settlement. When the British purchased the land, their hangmen executed dozens of witches, criminals and rebellious slaves and colonists on the spot until the various sites of justice and punishment in New York City were consolidated downtown.

In 1811 city planners divided all of Manhattan into the blocks that are used today, though for the next fifty years in Gallows Heights (and much of the rest of the city) those grids could be found only on paper. In the early 1800s the land there was a tangle of country lanes, empty fields, forests, squatters’ sheds, factories and dry docks on the Hudson River, and a few elegant, sprawling estates. By the mid-nineteenth century Gallows Heights had developed a multiple personality, reflected in the map that Mel Cooper had found earlier: The big estates existed side by side with working-class apartments and smaller homes. Shantytowns infested with gangs were moving in from the south, on the tide of city sprawl. And – just as crooked as street thieves, though on a larger and slicker scale – William “Boss” Tweed ran much of the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic political machine from the bars and dining rooms in Gallows Heights (Tweed was obsessed with profiting from the development of the neighborhood; in a typical scheme the man pocketed $6,000 in fees for the sale to the city of a tiny lot worth less than $35).

The area was now a prime Upper West Side neighborhood and among the nicest and most affluent in the city, of course. Apartments were going for thousands of dollars a month. (And, as an irritated Amelia Sachs now reflected from her “small crime scene” dungeon, the present-day Gallows Heights was home to some of the best delis and bagel bakeries in the city; she hadn’t eaten today.)

The dense history reeled past her but nothing bore on the case. Damnit, she ought to be analyzing crime scene material, or better yet, working the streets around the unsub’s safe house, trying to find some connections to where he lived, what his name was.

What the hell was Rhyme thinking of?

Finally she came to the last book in the stack. Five hundred pages, she estimated (she was getting a good eye by this point); it turned out to be 504. The index didn’t reveal anything important for the search. Sachs skimmed the pages but finally could take it no longer. Tossing the book aside, she stood, rubbed her eyes and stretched. Her claustrophobia was kicking in, thanks to the suffocating ambiance of the archives, located two flights underground. The foundation may have been renovated last month but this place was still the original basement of the Sanford Mansion, she supposed; it had low ceilings and dozens of stone columns and walls, making the space even more confining.

That was bad enough but the worst was the sitting. Amelia Sachs hated to sit still.

When you move they can’t getcha…

No small crime scenes, Rhyme? Brother…

She started to leave.

But at the door, she paused, looking back over the material, thinking: A few sentences in one of these musty books or yellowing newspapers could make the difference between life and death for Geneva Settle – and the other innocents that Unsub 109 might one day kill.

Rhyme’s voice came back to her. When you’re walking the grid at the scene, you search it once and then again and when you’re finished, you search it once more. And when you’re done with that, you search it again. And…

She glanced at the last book – the one that had defeated her. Sachs sighed, sat back down, pulled the 504-pager toward her and read through it properly and then flipped through the photographs in the middle.

Which, it turned out, was a good idea.

She froze, staring at a photograph of West Eightieth Street, taken in 1867. She gave a laugh, read the caption and the text on the opposite page. Then pulled her cell phone off her belt and hit speed-dial button 1.

“I found Potters’ Field, Rhyme.”

“We know where it is,” he snapped into the microphone near his mouth. “An island in the -”

“There’s another one.”

“A second cemetery?”

“Not a cemetery. It was a tavern. In Gallows Heights.”

“A tavern?” Well, this was interesting, he thought.

“I’m looking at the photo, or daguerreotype, whatever it is. A bar named Potters’ Field. It was on West Eightieth Street.”

So, they’d been wrong, Rhyme reflected. Charles Singleton’s fateful meeting may not have been on Hart’s Island at all.

“And, it gets better – the place burned down. Suspected arson. Perpetrators and motive unknown.”

“Am I right in supposing that it was the same day Charles Singleton went there to – what did he say? To find justice?”

“Yep. July fifteenth.”

Forever hidden beneath clay and soil…

“Anything else about him? Or the tavern?”

“Not yet.”

“Keep digging.”

“You bet, Rhyme.”

They disconnected the call.

Sachs had been on the speakerphone; Geneva had heard. She asked angrily, “You think Charles burned that place down?”

“Not necessarily. But one of the major reasons for arson is to destroy evidence. Maybe that’s what Charles was up to, covering up something about the robbery.”

Geneva said, “Look at his letter…he’s saying that the theft was set up to discredit him. Don’t you think he’s innocent by now?” The girl’s voice was low and firm, her eyes bored into Rhyme’s.

The criminalist returned her gaze. “I do, yes.”

She nodded. Gave a faint smile at this acknowledgement. Then she looked at her battered Swatch. “I should get home.”

Bell was concerned that the unsub had learned where Geneva lived. He’d arranged a safe house for her, but it wouldn’t be available until tonight. For the time being, he and the protection team would simply have to remain particularly vigilant.

Geneva gathered up Charles’s letters.

“We’ll have to keep those for the time being,” Rhyme said.

“Keep them? Like, for evidence?”

“Just until we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

Geneva was looking at them hesitantly. There seemed to be a longing in her eye.

“We’ll keep them in a safe place.”

“Okay.” She handed them to Mel Cooper.

He looked at her troubled expression. “Would you like copies of his letters?”

She seemed embarrassed. “Yeah, I would. Just…they’re, you know, from family. That makes ’em kind of important.”

“No problem at all.” He made copies on the Xerox machine and handed them to her. She folded them carefully and they disappeared into her purse.

Bell took a call, listened for a moment and said, “Great, get it over here as soon as you can. Much appreciated.” He gave Rhyme’s address, then hung up. “The school. They found the security tape of the school yard when the unsub’s partner was there yesterday. They’re sending it over.”

“Oh, my God,” Rhyme said sourly, “you mean there’s a real lead in the case? And it’s not a hundred years old?”

Bell switched to the scrambled frequency and radioed Luis Martinez about their plans. He then radioed Barbe Lynch, the officer guarding the street in front of Geneva’s house. She reported the street was clear and she’d be awaiting them.

Finally the North Carolinian hit the speakerphone button on Rhyme’s phone and called the girl’s uncle to make sure he was home.

“‘Lo?” the man answered.

Bell identified himself.

“She’s okay?” the uncle asked.

“She’s fine. We’re headed back now. Everything all right there?”

“Yes, sir, sure is.”

“Have you heard from her parents?”

“Her folk? Yeah, my brother call me from th’ airport. Had some delay or ’nother. But they’ll be leaving soon.”

Rhyme used to fly to London frequently to consult with Scotland Yard and other European police departments. Travel overseas had been no more complicated than flying to Chicago or California. Not so anymore. Welcome to the post-9/11 world of international travel, he thought. He was angry that it was taking so long for her mom and dad to get home. Geneva was probably the most mature child he’d ever met but she was a child nonetheless and should be with her parents.

Then Bell’s radio crackled and Luis Martinez’s staticky voice reported, “I’m outside, boss. The car’s in front, door open.”

Bell hung up the phone and turned to Geneva. “Ready when you are, miss.”

“Here you be,” said Jon Earle Wilson to Thompson Boyd, who was sitting in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, on Broad Street.

The skinny white guy with a mullet haircut and wearing beige jeans, none too clean, handed the shopping bag to Boyd, who glanced inside.

Wilson sat down in the booth across from him. Boyd continued to study the bag. Inside was a large UPS box. A smaller bag sat beside it. From Dunkin’ Donuts, though the contents most definitely were not pastries. Wilson used the chain shop’s bags because they were slightly waxed and protected against moisture.

“Are we eating?” Wilson asked. He saw a salad go past. He was hungry. But although he often met Boyd in coffee shops or restaurants they’d never actually broken bread together. Wilson’s favorite meal was pizza and soda, which he’d have by himself in his one-room apartment, chockablock with tools and wires and computer chips. Though he sort of felt, for all the work he did for Boyd, the man could stand him to a fucking sandwich or something.

But the killer said, “I’ve got to leave in a minute or two.”

A plate of lamb shish kebab sat half eaten in front of the killer. Wilson wondered if he was going to offer it to him. Boyd didn’t. He just smiled at the waitress when she came to collect it. Boyd smiling – that was new. Wilson’d never seen it before (though he had to admit it was a pretty fucking weird smile).

Wilson asked, “Heavy, huh?” Glancing toward the bag. He had a proud look in his eyes.

“Is.”

“Think you’ll like it.” He was proud of what he’d made and a little pissed that Boyd didn’t respond.

Wilson then asked, “So how’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

“Everything’s cool?”

“Little set-back. That’s why…” He nodded toward the bag and said nothing else. Boyd gave a faint whistle, trying to match the notes of ethnic music coming out of the speaker above them. The music was bizarro. Sitars or something from India or Pakistan or who knew where. But Boyd hit the notes pretty good. Killing people and whistling – the two things this man knew how to do.

The counter girl dropped a plate of dishes into the busboy pan with a huge crash. As the diners turned to look, Wilson felt something tap his leg under the booth. He touched the envelope, slipped it into his bell-bottoms pocket. It seemed surprisingly thin to be holding $5,000. But Wilson knew it was all there. One thing about Boyd: He paid what he owed, and he paid on time.

A moment passed. So, they weren’t eating together. They were sitting and Boyd was drinking tea and Wilson was being hungry. Even though Boyd had to leave in a “minute or two.”

What was this about?

Then he got the answer. Boyd glanced out the window and saw a battered, unmarked white van slow and turn into the alley that led to the back of the restaurant. Wilson got a glimpse of the driver, a small man with light brown skin and a beard.

Boyd’s eyes watched it closely. When it disappeared into the alley he rose, hefting the shopping bag. He left money on the table for his bill and nodded to Wilson. Then he started toward the door. He stopped, turned back. “Did I thank you?”

Wilson blinked. “Did you -”

“Did I thank you?” A nod down to the bag.

“Well, no.” Thompson Boyd smiling and thanking people. Must be a fucking full moon.

“I appreciate it,” the killer said. “Your hard work, I mean. Really.” The words came out as if he were a bad actor. Then, this was odd too, he winked a good-bye to the counter girl and walked out the door onto the bustling streets of the financial district, circling through the alley to the back of the restaurant, with the heavy bag at his side.

Chapter Twenty-Four

On 118th Street, Roland Bell eased his new Crown Victoria up in front of Geneva ’s building.

Barbe Lynch nodded from her guard station: the Chevy Malibu, which Bell had returned to them. He hustled Geneva inside and hurried up the stairs to the apartment, where her uncle gave her a big hug and shook Bell ’s hand again, thanking him for looking out for the girl. He said he was going to pick up a few things at the grocery store and stepped outside.

Geneva went on to her room. Bell glanced in and saw her sitting on the bed. She opened her book bag and rummaged through it.

“Anything I can do for you, miss? You hungry?”

“I’m pretty tired,” she said. “I think I’ll just do my homework now. Maybe take a nap.”

“Now that’s a fine idea, after all you’ve been through.”

“How’s Officer Pulaski?” she asked.

“I talked to his commander earlier. He’s still unconscious. They don’t know how he’ll be. Wish I could tell you different, but there it is. I’m going to go stop by and check in on him later.”

She found a book and handed it to Bell. “Could you give him this?”

The detective took it. “I will, you bet… Don’t know that, even if he wakes up, he’ll be in any shape to read it, I oughta say.”

“We’ll hope for the best. If he does wake up, maybe somebody could read it to him. Might help. Sometimes it does. Just hearing a story. Oh, and tell him or his family there’s a good luck charm inside.”

“That’s right kind of you.” Bell closed her door and walked to the living room to call his boys and tell them that he’d be home in a little while. He then checked with the other guards on his SWAT team, who reported that all was secure.

He settled down in the living room, hoping that Geneva’s uncle was doing some serious grocery shopping. That poor niece of his surely needed some meat on her bones.

On his route to Geneva Settle’s apartment, Alonzo “Jax” Jackson slowly made his way down one of the narrow passages separating the brownstones in western Harlem.

He wasn’t, however, at this particular moment Jax the limpin’ ex-con, the blood-spraying Graffiti King of Harlem past. He was some unnamed, wack homeless dude in dusty jeans and a gray sweatshirt, pushing a perped grocery cart, which held five dollars’ worth of newspapers, all wadded up. And a bunch of empties he’d racked from a recycling bin. He doubted that up close anybody would buy the role – he was a little too clean for your typical homeless guy – but there were only a few people he needed to fool: like the cops staying steady on Geneva Settle.

Out of one alleyway, across the street, into another. He was about three blocks from the back door of the apartment building that poor-ass Kevin Cheaney had pointed out.

Nice place, damn.

Feeling shitty again, thinking of his own plans for family gone bad.

Sir, I must talk to you. I am sorry. The baby…We could not save him.

Was a him?

I’m sorry, sir. We did what we could, I promise you but…

It was a him…

He pushed those thoughts away. Fighting a bum wheel on the cart, which kept veering to the left, talking to himself a bit, Jax moved slowly but with determination, thinking: Man, funny if I got nailed for jacking a shopping cart. But then he decided, no, it wouldn’t be so funny at all. It’d be just like a cop to decide to roust him for something little like that and find the gun. Then run the ID and he’d get his ass violated back to Buffalo. Or someplace even worse.

Clatter, clatter – the littered passageway was hell on the broken wheel of the cart. He struggled to keep it straight. But he had to stick to this dark canyon. To approach a nice town house from the sidewalk, in this fancy part of Harlem, would flag him as suspicious. In the alley, though, pushing a cart wasn’t that wack. Rich people throw their empties out more’n the poor. And as for the garbage, it was a better quality round here. Naturally a homeless dude’d rather scrounge in West Harlem than in Central.

How much farther?

Jax the homeless dude looked up and squinted. Two blocks to the girl’s apartment.

Almost there. Almost done.

He felt an itch.

In Lincoln Rhyme’s case this could be literal – he had sensation on his neck, shoulders and head, and, in fact, this was a nondisabled, sensate condition he could do without; for a quadriplegic, not being able to scratch an itch was the most fucking frustrating thing in the world.

But this was a figurative itch he was feeling.

Something wasn’t right. What was it?

Thom asked him a question. He didn’t pay attention.

“Lincoln?”

“I’m thinking. Can’t you see?”

“No, that happens on the inside,” the aide retorted.

“Well, be quiet.”

What was the problem?

More scans of the evidence charts, the profile, the old letters and clippings, the curious expression on the inverted face of The Hanged Man…But somehow the itch didn’t seem to have anything to do with the evidence.

In which case he supposed he should just ignore it.

Get back to -

Rhyme cocked his head. Almost grabbed the thought. It jiggled away.

It was some anomaly, words someone had said recently that didn’t quite mesh.

Then:

“Oh, goddamn it,” he snapped. “The uncle!”

“What?” Mel Cooper asked.

“Jesus, Geneva’s uncle.”

“What about him?”

“Geneva said he was her mother’s brother.”

“And?”

“When we just talked to him, he said that he’d talked to his brother.”

“Well, he probably meant brother-in-law.”

“If you mean brother-in-law, that’s what you say… Command, dial Bell.”

The phone rang and the detective answered on the first note of the cell phone tone that meant the call was from Lincoln Rhyme’s town house.

“ Bell here.”

“Roland, you’re at Geneva ’s?”

“Right.”

“Your cell doesn’t have a speaker, does it?”

“No. Go ahead.” The detective instinctively pulled his jacket aside and unsnapped the thong holding the larger of his two pistols. His voice was as steady as his hand, though his heart ratcheted up a few beats per second.

“Where’s Geneva?”

“Her room.”

“Uncle?”

“Don’t know. He just went to the store.”

“Listen. He flubbed the story about how he’s related to her. He said he’s her father’s brother. She said he’s her mother’s.”

“Hell, he’s a ringer.”

“Get to Geneva and stay with her until we figure it out. I’m sending another couple of RMPs over there.”

Bell walked fast to the girl’s room. He knocked but got no response.

Heart pumping fast now, he drew his Beretta. “Geneva!”

Nothing.

“Roland,” Rhyme called, “what’s going on?”

“Just a second,” the detective whispered.

In a combat shooting crouch, he pushed the door open and, lifting his weapon, stepped inside.

The room was empty. Geneva Settle was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Central, I have a ten twenty-nine, possible abduction.”

In his calm drawl Bell repeated the ominous message and gave his location. Then: “Vic is a black female, age sixteen, five-two, one hundred pounds. Suspect is a black male, stocky, early to mid forties, short hair.”

“Roger. Units en route, K.”

Bell clipped his radio to his belt and sent Martinez and Lynch to search the apartment building itself while he hurried downstairs. The street in front of the building had been under surveillance by Lynch, while Martinez had been on the roof. But they’d been expecting Unsub 109 or his accomplice to be heading toward the building, not going away from it. Martinez thought he’d seen a girl and a man, who could have been the uncle, walking away from the apartment about three minutes ago. He hadn’t paid attention.

Scanning the street, Bell saw no one but a few businesspeople. He jogged down the service alley beside the building. He noticed a homeless man pushing a grocery cart but he was two blocks away. Bell ’d talk to him in a minute and find out if he’d seen the girl. Now, he opted for the other possible witnesses, some young girls playing double-Dutch jump rope.

“Hi.” The rope went slack as they looked up at the detective.

“Hey there. I’m a police officer. I’m looking for this teenage girl. She’s black, thin, got short hair. She’d be with an older man.”

The sirens from the responding officers’ cars filled the air, growing closer.

“You got a badge?” one girl asked.

Bell tamped down his anxiety, kept smiling and flashed his shield.

“Wow.”

“Yeah, we saw ’em,” one tiny, pretty girl offered. “They went up that street there. Turned right.”

“No, left.”

“You weren’t looking.”

“Was too. You gotta gun, mister?”

Bell jogged to the street they’d pointed to. A block away, to his right, he saw a car pulling away from the curb. He grabbed his radio. “Units responding to that ten two nine. Anybody close to One One Seven Street…there’s a maroon sedan moving west. Stop it and check occupants. Repeat: We’re looking for a black female, sixteen. Suspect is black male, forties, K. Assume he’s armed.”

“RPM Seven Seven Two. We’re almost there, K… Yeah, we’ve got a visual. We’ll light him up.”

“Roger, Seven Seven Two.”

Bell saw the squad car, its lights flashing, speed toward the maroon sedan, which skidded to a stop. His heart beating fast, Bell started toward them, as a patrolman climbed from the squad car, stepped to the sedan’s window and bent down, his hand on the butt of his pistol.

Please, let it be her.

The officer waved the car on.

Damn, Bell said to himself angrily as he jogged up to the officer.

“Detective.”

“Wasn’t them?”

“No, sir. A black female. In her thirties. She’s alone.”

Bell ordered the RMP to cruise up and down the nearby streets to the south, and radioed the others to cover the opposite directions. He turned and picked another street at random, plunged down it. His cell phone rang.

“ Bell here.”

Lincoln Rhyme asked what was happening.

“Nobody’s spotted her. But I don’t get it, Lincoln. Wouldn’t Geneva know her own uncle?”

“Oh, I can think of a few scenarios where the unsub could get a substitute in. Or maybe he’s working with the unsub. I don’t know. But something’s definitely wrong. Think about how he speaks. Hardly sounds like the brother of a professor. He’s got some street in him.”

“That’s true… I want to check with my team. I’ll call you back.” Bell hung up then radioed his partners. “Luis, Barbe, report in. What’d y’all find?”

The woman said that the people she’d canvassed on 118th hadn’t seen either the girl or the uncle. Martinez reported that they weren’t in any of the common areas of the building and there’d been no sign of intruders or forced entry. He asked Bell, “Where’re you?”

“Block east of the building, heading east. I got RMPs sweeping the streets. One of y’all get over here with me. The other keep the apartment covered.”

“K.”

“Out.”

Bell jogged across a street and looked to his left. He saw the homeless man again, pausing, glancing toward him then bending down and scratching his ankle. Bell started in his direction to ask if he’d seen anything.

But then he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut. Where had it come from? The sound reverberated off the walls and he couldn’t tell.

An engine began grinding.

In front of him…He started forward.

No, to the right.

He sprinted up the street. Just then he saw a battered gray Dodge pull away from the curb. It started forward but skidded to a stop as a patrol car cruised slowly into the intersection. The driver of the Dodge put the car into reverse and rolled backward over the curb, into a vacant lot, out of sight of the RMP. Bell believed he saw two people inside… He squinted. Yes! It was Geneva and the man who’d claimed to be her uncle. The car bucked slightly as he put it in gear.

Bell grabbed his radio and called the RMPs, ordering them to blockade both intersections.

But the patrolman at the wheel of the closest squad car turned into the street, rather than just barricading it; Geneva ’s uncle saw him. He slipped his car into reverse, flooring the accelerator and skidding in a circle around the vacant lot and into the alley behind a row of buildings. Bell lost sight of the Dodge. He didn’t know which way it had turned. Sprinting toward where he’d last seen the car, the detective ordered the squad cars to circle the block.

He ran into the alley and looked to his right, just in time to see the rear fender of the car disappearing. He raced for it, pulling his Beretta from his holster. He sprinted at full speed and turned the corner.

Bell froze.

Tires squealing, the old Dodge was racing in reverse right toward him, escaping from the squad car that was blocking the man’s escape route.

Bell stood his ground. He lifted the Beretta. He saw the uncle’s panicked eyes, Geneva’s horrified expression, her mouth open in a scream. But he couldn’t fire. The squad car was directly behind the Dodge. Even if he hit the kidnapper, the jacketed rounds could go right through their target and the car and hit the officers.

Bell jumped aside, but the cobblestones were slick with garbage and he went down hard on his side, grunting. He lay directly in the path of the Dodge. The detective tried to pull himself to safety. But with the car going so fast he wasn’t going to make it.

But…but what was happening?

The uncle was hitting the brakes. The car skidded to a stop five feet from Bell. The doors flew open and both Geneva and her uncle were out, running to him, the man shouting, “You all right? You all right?”

“Detective Bell,” Geneva said, frowning, bending down and helping him up.

Wincing in pain, Bell trained the big gun on the uncle and said, “Don’t move a damn muscle.”

The man blinked and frowned.

“Lie down. And your arms – stretch ’em out.”

“Detective Bell – ” Geneva began.

“Just a minute, miss.”

The uncle did as he was told. Bell cuffed him, as the uniforms from the RMP trotted through the alley.

“Frisk him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The uncle said, “Look, you don’t know what you doin’, sir.”

“Quiet,” Bell said to him and took Geneva aside, put her in a recessed doorway so she’d be out of the line of fire from anyone on rooftops nearby.

“Roland!” Barbe Lynch hurried down the alley.

Bell leaned against the brick wall, catching his breath. He glanced to the left, seeing the homeless guy he’d noticed earlier squint uneasily at the police and turn around, then head in the opposite direction. Bell ignored him.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Geneva said to the detective, nodding at the cuffed man.

“But he’s not your uncle,” the detective said, calming slowly, “is he?”

“No.”

“What was he doing with you just now?”

She looked down, a sorrowful expression on her face.

“ Geneva,” Bell said sternly, “this’s serious. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I asked him to take me someplace.”

“Where?”

She lowered her head. “To work,” she said. “I couldn’t afford to miss my shift.” She opened her jacket, revealing a McDonald’s uniform. The cheery name tag read, Hi, my name’s Gen.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“What’s the story?” Lincoln Rhyme asked. He was concerned but, despite the fright at her disappearance, there was no accusation in his voice.

Geneva was sitting in a chair near his wheelchair, on the ground floor of the town house. Sachs stood beside her, arms crossed. She’d just arrived with a large stack of material she’d brought from the Sanford Foundation archives where she’d made the Potters’ Field discovery. It sat on the table near Rhyme, ignored now that this new drama had intruded.

The girl looked defiantly into his eyes. “I hired him to play my uncle.”

“And your parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

“You don’t -”

“- have any,” she repeated through clenched teeth.

“Go on,” Sachs said kindly.

She didn’t speak for a moment. Finally: “When I was ten, my father left us, my moms and me. He moved to Chicago with this woman and got married. Had himself a whole new family. I was torn up – oh, it hurt. But deep down I didn’t really blame him much. Our life was a mess. My moms, she was hooked on crack, just couldn’t get off it. They’d have these bad fights – well, she fought. Mostly he tried to straighten her out and she’d get mad at him. To pay for what she needed she’d perp stuff from stores.” Geneva held Rhyme’s eyes as she added, “And she’d go to girlfriends’ places and they’d have some men over – you know what for. Dad knew all about it. I guess he put up with it for as long as he could then moved on.”

She took a deep breath and continued, “Then moms got sick. She was HIV positive but didn’t take any medicine. She died of an infection. I lived with her sister in the Bronx for a while but then she moved back to Alabama and left me at Auntie Lilly’s apartment. But she didn’t have any money either and kept getting evicted, moving in with friends, just like now. She couldn’t afford to have me with her anyway. So I talked to the superintendent of the building where my moms had worked some, cleaning. He said I could stay in the basement – if I paid him. I have a cot down there, an old dresser, a microwave, a bookshelf. I put his apartment down as my address for mail.”

Bell said, “You didn’t seem real at home in that place. Whose was it?”

“This retired couple. They live here half the year and go to South Carolina for the fall and winter. Willy has an extra key.” She added, “I’ll pay them back for the electric bill and replace the beer and things that Willy took.”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Yes, I do,” she said firmly.

“Who’d I talk to before, if it wasn’t your mother?” Bell asked.

“Sorry,” Geneva said, sighing. “That was Lakeesha. I asked her to front she was my moms. She’s kind of an actress.”

“She had me fooled.” The detective grinned at being taken in so completely.

“And your own language?” Rhyme asked. “You sure sound like a professor’s daughter.”

She slipped into street talk. “Don’t be talkin’ like no homegirl, you sayin’?” A grim laugh. “I’ve worked on my Standard English ever since I was seven or eight.” Her face grew sad. “The only good thing about my father – he always had me into books. He used to read to me some too.”

“We can find him and -”

“No!” Geneva said in a harsh voice. “I don’t want anything to do with him. Anyway, he’s got his own kids now. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“And nobody found out you were homeless?” Sachs asked.

“Why would they? I never applied for welfare or food stamps so no social workers came to see me. I never even signed up for free meals at school ’cause it’d blow my cover. I forged my parents’ names on the school papers when I needed their signatures. And I have a voice-mail box at a service. That was Keesh again. She recorded the outgoing message, pretending to be my mother.”

“And the school never suspected?”

“Sometimes they asked why I never had anybody at parent-teacher conferences, but nobody thought anything about it because I have straight A’s. No welfare, good grades, no problems with the police…Nobody notices you if there’s nothing wrong.” She laughed. “You know the Ralph Ellison book, Invisible Man? No, not that science fiction movie. It’s about being black in America, being invisible. Well, I’m the invisible girl.”

It made sense now: the shabby clothes and cheap watch, not at all what jet-setting parents would buy for their girl. The public school, not a private one. Her friend, the homegirl Keesh – not the sort who’d be close to the daughter of a college professor.

Rhyme nodded. “We never saw you actually call your parents in England. But you did call the super yesterday, after what happened at the museum, right? Had him pretend to be your uncle?”

“He said he’d agree if I paid him extra, yeah. He wanted me to stay in his place – but that wouldn’t be a good idea. You know what I’m saying? So I told him to use Two-B, with the Reynolds being away. I had him take their name off the mailbox.”

“Never thought that man seemed much like kin,” Bell said and Geneva responded with a scoffing laugh.

“When your parents never showed up, what were you going to say?”

“I didn’t know.” Her voice broke and for an instant she looked hopelessly young and lost. Then she recovered. “I’ve had to improvise the whole thing. When I went to get Charles’s letters yesterday?” She glanced at Bell, who nodded. “I snuck out the back door and went down to the basement. That’s where they were.”

“You have any family here?” Sachs asked. “Other than your aunt?”

“I don’t have no – ” The flash of true horror in the girl’s eyes was the first that Rhyme had seen. And its source was not a hired killer but the near slip into hated nonstandard grammar. She shook her head. “I don’t have anybody.”

“Why don’t you go to Social Services?” Sellitto asked. “That’s what they’re there for.”

Bell added, “You more’n anybody’re entitled to it.”

The girl frowned and her dark eyes turned darker. “I don’t take anything for free.” A shake of the head. “Besides, a social worker’d come to check things out and see my situation. I’d get sent down to my aunt’s in ’Bama. She lives in a town outside of Selma, three hundred people in it. You know what kind of education I’d get there? Or, I stay here, and end up in foster in Brooklyn, living in one room with four gangbanger girls, boxes playing hip-hop and BET on, twenty-four hours a day, dragged to church…” She shivered and shook her head.

“That’s why the job.” Rhyme glanced at the uniform.

“That’s why the job. Somebody hooked me up with this guy makes fake driver’s licenses. According to it, I’m eighteen.” A laugh. “I don’t look it, I know. But I applied to a place where the manager’s an old white guy. He didn’t have a clue how old I was from looking at me. Been at the same place ever since. Never missed a single shift. Until today.” A sigh. “My boss’ll find out. He’ll have to fire me. Shit. And I just lost my other job last week.”

“You had two jobs?”

The girl nodded. “Scrubbing graffiti. There’s all this renovation going on in Harlem. You see it everywhere now. Some big insurance or real estate companies fix up old buildings and rent ’em for a lot of money. The crews hired some kids to clean the walls. It was great money. But I got fired.”

“Because you were underage?” Sachs asked.

“No, because I saw these workers, three big white guys who worked for some real estate company. They were hassling this old couple who’d lived in the building forever. I told ’em to stop or I’d call the police…” She shrugged. “They fired me. I did call the police but they weren’t interested… So much for doing good deeds.”

“And that’s why you didn’t want that Mrs. Barton, the counselor, to help,” Bell said.

“She finds out I’m homeless, and, bang, my ass’s in foster.” She shuddered. “I was so close! I could’ve done it. A year and a half and I’d be gone. I’d be in Harvard or Vassar. Then that guy shows up at the museum yesterday and ruins everything!”

Geneva rose and walked to the chart that had the details about Charles Singleton on it. She gazed at it. “That’s why I was writing about him. I had to find out he was innocent. I wanted him to be nice and be a good husband and father. The letters were so wonderful. He could write so pretty, all his words. Even his handwriting was beautiful.” She added breathlessly, “And he was a hero in the Civil War and taught children and saved the orphans from the draft rioters. Suddenly I had a relative who was good, after all. Who was smart, who knew famous people. I wanted him to be somebody I could admire, not like my father or mother.”

Luis Martinez stuck his head in the doorway. “He checks out. Right name and address, no priors, no warrants.” He’d run the name of the phony uncle. Rhyme and Bell weren’t trusting anybody at this point.

“You must be lonely,” Sachs said.

A pause. “My daddy took me to church some, ’fore he ran off. I remember this gospel song. It used to be our favorite. It’s called ‘Ain’t Got Time to Die.’ That’s what my life’s like. I ain’t got time to be lonely.”

But Rhyme knew Geneva well by now. She was fronting. He said, “So you’ve got a secret just like your ancestor. Who knows yours?”

“Keesh, the super, his wife. That’s all.” She fixed Rhyme with a defiant look. “You’re going to turn me in, aren’t you?”

“You can’t live alone,” Sachs said.

“I have for two years,” she snapped. “I have my books, school. I don’t need anything else.”

“But -”

“No. If you tell, it’ll ruin everything.” She added, “Please.” The word was muted, as if saying it came very hard to her.

Silence for a moment. Sachs and Sellitto looked at Rhyme, the one person in the room who didn’t have to answer to city brass and regulations. He said, “No need to make any decisions right away. We’ve got our hands full catching the unsub. But I’m thinking you ought to stay here, not a safe house.” He glanced at Thom. “I think we can find room for you upstairs, can’t we?”

“You bet we can.”

“I’d rather – ” the girl started.

Rhyme said with a smile, “I think we’ll insist this time.”

“But my job. I can’t afford to lose it.”

“I’ll take care of it.” Rhyme got the number from her and called the girl’s boss at McDonald’s and explained in general terms about the attack and said that Geneva wouldn’t be coming in for a few days. The manager sounded truly concerned and told him that Geneva was their most conscientious employee. She could take as much time off as she needed and could be sure that her job would be waiting for her when she returned.

“She’s the best employee we’ve got,” the man said over the speakerphone. “A teenager who’s more responsible than somebody twice that age. You don’t see that very often.”

Rhyme and Geneva shared a smile and he disconnected the call.

It was then that the doorbell rang. Bell and Sachs immediately grew vigilant, their hands slipping toward their weapons. Sellitto, Rhyme noted, still looked spooked, and though he glanced down at his weapon, he didn’t reach for it. His fingers remained on his cheek, rubbing gently, as if the gesture could conjure up a genie to calm his troubled heart.

Thom appeared in the doorway. He said to Bell, “There’s a Mrs. Barton here, from the school. She’s brought a copy of some security video.”

The girl shook her head in dismay. “No,” she whispered.

“Send her in,” Rhyme said.

A large African-American woman walked in, wearing a purple dress. Bell introduced her. She nodded to everyone and, like most of the counselors Rhyme himself had met, had no reaction to his disabled condition. She said, “Hello, Geneva.”

The girl nodded. Her face was a still mask. Rhyme could tell she was thinking about the threat this woman represented to her: rural Alabama or a foster home.

Barton continued, “How’re you doing?”

“Okay, fine, thank you,” the girl said with a deference that wasn’t typical of her.

“This’s got to be tough on you,” the woman said.

“I’ve been better.” Geneva now tried a laugh. It sounded flat. She glanced at the woman once and then looked away.

Barton said, “I spoke to maybe a dozen or so people about that man near the school yard yesterday. Only two or three remember seeing anybody. They couldn’t describe him, except he was of color, wore a green combat jacket and old work shoes.”

“That’s new,” Rhyme said. “The shoes.” Thom wrote this on the board.

“And here’s the tape from our security department.” She handed a VHS cassette to Cooper, who played it.

Rhyme wheeled close to the screen and felt his neck straining with the tension as he studied the images.

It wasn’t much help. The camera was aimed mostly at the school yard, not the surrounding sidewalks and streets. In the periphery it was possible to see some vague images of passersby, but nothing distinctive. Without much hope that they’d pick up anything, Rhyme ordered Cooper to send the cassette off to the lab in Queens to see if it could be digitally enhanced. The tech filled out the chain-of-custody card and packed it up, called for a pickup.

Bell thanked the woman for her help.

“Anything we can do.” She paused and looked the girl over. “But I really do need to talk to your parents, Geneva.”

“My parents?”

She nodded slowly. “I have to say – I’ve been talking to some of the students and teachers, and to be honest, most of them say your folks haven’t been very involved in your classes. In fact, I haven’t found anybody who’s actually met them.”

“My grades’re fine.”

“Oh, I know that. We’re real happy with your academic work, Geneva. But school’s about children and parents working together. I’d really like to talk to them. What’s their cell number?”

The girl froze.

A dense silence.

Which Lincoln Rhyme finally broke. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

Geneva looked down. Her fists were clenched.

Rhyme said to Barton, “I just got off the phone with her father.”

Everyone else in the room turned and stared at him.

“Are they back home?”

“No, and they won’t be for a while.”

“No?”

“I asked them not to come.”

“You did? Why?” The woman frowned.

“It’s my decision. I did it to keep Geneva safe. As Roland Bell here will tell you” – a glance at the Carolina detective, who nodded, a fairly credible gesture, considering he had no clue what was going on – “when we set up protection details, sometimes we have to separate the people we’re guarding from their families.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Otherwise,” Rhyme continued, vamping, “the attacker could use their relatives to draw them into public.”

Barton nodded. “Makes sense.”

“What’s it called, Roland?” Rhyme glanced at the detective again. And filled in the answer himself, “Isolation of Dependents, right?”

“IOD,” Bell said, nodding. “What we call it. Very important technique.”

“Well, I’m glad to know that,” the counselor said. “But your uncle’ll be looking out for you, right?”

Sellitto said, “No, we think it’s probably best if Geneva stays here.”

“We’re running an IOD with her uncle too,” Bell said. The fabrication sounded particularly slick coming from a law enforcer with a Southern drawl. “Want to keep him out of sight.”

Barton bought it all, Rhyme could see. The counselor said to Geneva, “Well, when this is over, please have them call me. Seems like you’re handling it pretty well. But psychologically it has to be taking a toll. We’ll all sit down together and work through some of the issues.” She added with a smile, “There’s nothing broke that can’t be fixed.”

A sentence that was probably emblazoned on a desk plaque or coffee mug in her office.

“Okay,” Geneva said cautiously. “We’ll see.”

After the woman was gone, Geneva turned to Rhyme. “I don’t know what to say. It means so much to me, what you did.”

“Mostly,” he muttered, uneasy with the gratitude, “it was for our convenience. I can’t very well go calling up Child Welfare and tracking you down in foster homes every time we have a question about the case.”

Geneva laughed. “Front all you want,” she said. “Thanks anyway.” Then she huddled with Bell and told him what books, clothes and other items she needed from the basement on 118th Street. The detective said he’d also get back from the phony uncle whatever she’d paid him for the scam.

“He won’t give it back,” she said. “You don’t know him.”

Bell smiled and said amiably, “Oh, he’ll give it back.” This, from the man with two guns.

Geneva called Lakeesha and told her girlfriend that she’d be staying at Rhyme’s, then, hanging up, she followed Thom upstairs to the guest room.

Sellitto asked, “What if the counselor finds out, Linc?”

“Finds out what?”

“Well, how ’bout that you lied about Geneva ’s parents and made up some department procedures? What the hell was it? The DUI?”

“IOD,” Bell reminded.

“And what’s she going to do?” Rhyme growled. “Make me stay after school?” He gave an abrupt nod at the evidence board. “Now can we get back to work? There is a killer out there. And he’s got a partner. And somebody hired them. Recall that? I’d like to figure out who the hell they are sometime this decade.”

Sachs walked to the table and began organizing the folders and copies of materials that William Ashberry had let her borrow from the foundation library – the “small crime scene.” She said, “This’s mostly about Gallows Heights – maps, drawings, articles. Some things on Potters’ Field.”

She handed the documents to Cooper one by one. He taped up several drawings and maps of Gallows Heights, which Rhyme stared at intently as Sachs told them what she’d learned about the neighborhood. She then walked to the drawing and touched a two-story commercial building. “Potters’ Field was right about here. West Eightieth Street.” She skimmed some of the documents. “Seems like it was pretty disreputable, a lot of crooks hung out there, people like Jim Fisk and Boss Tweed and politicians connected to the Tammany Hall machine.”

“See how valuable small crime scenes can be, Sachs? You’re a wealth of helpful information.”

She gave him a minor scowl, then picked up a photocopy. “This’s an article about the fire. It says that the night Potters’ Field burned down, witnesses heard an explosion in the basement and then, almost immediately, the place was engulfed. Arson was suspected but nobody was ever arrested. No fatalities.”

“What did Charles go there for?” Rhyme mused aloud. “What did he mean by ‘justice’? And what’s ’forever hidden beneath clay and soil’?”

Was it a clue, a bit of evidence, a scrap of document that could answer the question of who wanted to murder Geneva Settle?

Sellitto shook his head. “Too bad it was a hundred and forty years ago. Whatever, it’s gone now. We’ll never know.”

Rhyme looked at Sachs. She caught his eye. She smiled.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Oh, you’re lucky in one way,” explained David Yu, a spiky-haired young engineer who worked for the city.

“We could use some,” Amelia Sachs said. “Luck, I mean.”

They were standing on West Eightieth Street, about a half block east of Riverside Park, looking up at a three-story brownstone. A crime scene bus waited nearby, as did another friend of Sachs’s, a policewoman named Gail Davis, from the K9 unit, and her dog Vegas. Most police dogs were German shepherds, Malinois and – for bomb detail – Labrador retrievers. Vegas, though, was a briard, a French breed with a long history of military service; these dogs are known for having keen noses and an uncanny ability to sense threats to livestock and humans. Rhyme and Sachs had thought that running a 140-year-old crime scene might benefit from some old-fashioned search methods, in addition to the high-tech systems that would be employed.

The engineer, Yu, nodded at the building that had been constructed on the site where Potters’ Field tavern had burned. The date on the cornerstone read 1879. “To build a tenement like this back then they wouldn’t have excavated and laid a slab. They’d dig a perimeter foundation, pour concrete and set the walls. That was the load-bearing part. The basement floor would have been dirt. But building codes changed. They would’ve put a concrete floor in sometime early in this century. Again, though, it wouldn’t be structural. It’d be for health and safety. So the contractors wouldn’t’ve excavated for that either.”

“So the lucky part is that whatever was under there in the eighteen sixties might still be there,” Sachs said.

Forever hidden…

“Right.”

“And the unlucky part is that it’s under concrete.”

“Pretty much.”

“A foot deep?”

“Maybe less.”

Sachs walked around the building, which was grimy and plain, though she knew the apartments in it would rent for $4,000 or so a month. There was a service entrance in the back that led below ground to the basement.

She was returning to the front of the structure when the phone rang. “Detective Sachs.”

Lon Sellitto was on the other end. He’d found the name of the building’s owner, a businessman who lived several blocks way. The man was on his way to the place to let them inside. Rhyme came on the phone a moment later and she told him what Yu had said.

“Good luck, bad luck,” he said, the scowl clear. “Well, I’ve ordered an S and S team there with SPR and ultrasound.”

Just then the owner of the building arrived, a short, balding man in a suit and white shirt open at the collar. Sachs disconnected the cell call with Rhyme and explained briefly to the man that they needed to examine the basement. He looked her up and down suspiciously then opened the basement door and stood back, crossing his arms, near Vegas. The police dog didn’t seem to like him very much.

A Chevy Blazer pulled up and three members of the NYPD Search and Surveillance Unit climbed out. S and S officers were a mixed breed of cop, engineer and scientist, whose job was to back up the tactical forces by locating perps and victims at scenes with telescopes, night vision imagers, infrared, microphones and other equipment. They nodded to the crime scene techs and then unloaded battered black suitcases, very much like the ones that held Sachs’s own crime scene equipment. The owner watched them with a frown.

The S and S officers walked down into the dank, chill basement, smelling of mold and fuel oil, followed by Sachs and the owner. They hooked up probes that resembled vacuum cleaner heads to their computerized equipment,

“The whole area?” one asked Sachs.

“Yup.”

“That’s not going to hurt anything, is it?” the owner asked.

“No, sir,” a tech replied.

They got to work. The men decided to use SPR first. Surface Penetrating Radar sent out radio waves and returned information on objects it struck, just like traditional radar on board a ship or airplane. The only difference was that SPR could go through objects like dirt and rubble. It was as fast as the speed of light and, unlike ultrasound, didn’t have to be in contact with the surface to get a reading.

For an hour they scanned the floor, clicking computer buttons, making notations, while Sachs stood to the side, trying not to tap her foot or fidget impatiently, figuring that it wouldn’t be good for the instrument’s readings.

After they’d swept the floor with the radar, the team consulted the unit’s computer screen and then, based on what they learned, walked around the floor again, touching the ultrasound sensor to the concrete in a half dozen areas they’d targeted as important.

When they were finished they called Sachs and Yu over to the computer, flipped through some images. The dark gray screen was unreadable to her: It was filled with blotches and streaks, many of which had small boxes of indecipherable numbers and letters beside them.

One of the techs said, “Most of these are what you’d expect under a building this age. Boulders, a bed of gravel, pockets of decayed wood. That’s a portion of a sewer here.” Pointing to part of the screen.

“There’s an easement for a storm drain that feeds into the main drain going to the Hudson,” Yu said. “That must be it.”

The owner leaned over his shoulder.

“You mind, sir?” Sachs grumbled. The man grudgingly stepped back.

The tech nodded. “But here…” He tapped a spot next to the back wall. “We got a ping but no hit.”

“A -?”

“When something comes back that the computer’s seen before, it suggests what it might be. But this was negative.”

Sachs saw only a less dark area on the dark screen.

“So we ran the ultrasound and got this.”

His partner typed in a command and a different screen appeared, one much lighter and with a clearer image on it: a rough ring, inside of which was a round, opaque object that seemed to have a strand of something coming off it. Filling the ring, in the space below the smaller object, was what appeared to be a pile of sticks or boards – maybe, Sachs speculated, a strongbox that had broken apart over the years.

One officer said, “The outer ring’s about twenty-four inches across. The inner one’s three-dimensional – a sphere. It’s eight, nine inches in diameter.”

“Is it close to the surface?”

“The slab’s about seven inches deep, and this thing’s about six to eight feet below that.”

“Where exactly?”

The man looked from the computer screen to the floor and back again. He walked over to a spot right beside the wall in the back of the basement, near the door that led outside. He drew a chalk mark. The object was right against the wall. Whoever had built the wall had missed it by only inches.

“I’m guessing it was a well or a cistern. Maybe a chimney.”

“What would it take to get through the concrete?” Sachs asked Yu.

“My permission,” said the owner. “Which you ain’t getting. You’re not breaking up my floor.”

“Sir,” Sachs said patiently, “this is police business.”

“Whatever that thing is, it’s mine.”

“Ownership isn’t the issue. It may be relevant to a police investigation.”

“Well, you’ll have to get a court order. I’m a lawyer. You’re not breaking up my floor.”

“It’s really important we find out what that is.”

“Important?” the man asked. “Why?”

“It has to do with a criminal case from a few years ago.”

“Few years?” the man said, picking up on the weakness of her case immediately. “How ‘few’?” He was probably a really good lawyer.

You lie to people like this and it comes back to get you. She said, “A hundred and forty. Give or take.”

He laughed. “This isn’t an investigation. This is the Discovery Channel. No jackhammer. Uh-uh.”

“A little cooperation here, sir?”

“Get a court order. I don’t have to cooperate until I’m forced to.”

“Then it’s not really cooperation, is it?” Sachs snapped back. She called Rhyme.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She briefed him about what they’d found.

“An old strongbox in a well or cistern inside a burned-down building. Hiding places don’t get much better than that.” Rhyme asked for S and S to send him the images via wireless email. They did so.

“I’ve got the picture here, Sachs,” he said after a moment. “No clue what it is.”

She told him about the unconcerned citizen.

“And I’ll fight it,” the lawyer said, hearing the conversation. “I’ll appear before the magistrate myself. I know ’ em all. We ’re on a first-name basis.”

She heard Rhyme discussing the matter with Sellitto. When he came back on the line he wasn’t happy. “Lon’s going to try to get a warrant, but it’ll take time. And he’s not even sure the judge’d issue paper in a case like this.”

“Can’t I just clock this guy?” she muttered and hung up. She turned to the owner. “We’ll repair your floor. Perfectly.”

“I have tenants. They’ll complain. And I’ll have to deal with it. You won’t. You’ll be long gone.”

Sachs waved her hand in disgust, actually thinking about placing him under arrest for – well, for something – and then digging through the damn floor anyway. How long would a warrant take? Probably forever, she imagined, considering that judges needed a “compelling” interest in order to allow police to invade someone’s home.

Her phone rang again and she answered.

“Sachs,” Rhyme asked, “is that engineer fellow there?”

“David? Yeah. He’s right next to me.”

“I have a question.”

“What?”

“Ask him who owns the alleys?”

The answer, in this particular instance, though not all, was: the city. The lawyer owned only the footprint of the building itself and what was inside.

Rhyme said, “Have the engineers get some equipment next to the exterior wall and dig down then tunnel under his wall. Would that work?”

Out of hearing of the owner, she posed the question to Yu, who said, “Yeah, we could do that. No risk of structural damage if you keep the hole narrow.”

Narrow, thought the claustrophobic policewoman. Just what I need…She hung up and then said to the engineer, “Okay, I want a…” Sachs frowned. “What are those things called with the big scoop on them?” Her knowledge of vehicles whose top speed was ten miles an hour was severely limited.

“Backhoe?”

“Sounds right. How soon can you get one here?”

“A half hour.”

She gave him a pained look. “Ten minutes?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty minutes later, with a loud reverse warning beep, a city backhoe rolled up to the side of the building. There was no way to hide their strategy anymore. The owner stepped forward, waving his hands. “You’re going underneath from outside! You can’t do that either. I own this property from the heavens to the center of the earth. That’s what the law says.”

“Well, sir,” said slim, young civil servant Yu. “There’s a public utility easement under the building. Which we have a right to access. As I’m sure you know.”

“But the fucking easement’s on the other side of the property.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s on that screen right there.” He pointed to a computer – just as the screen went dark.

“Ooops,” said one of the S and S officers, who’d just shut it off. “Damn thing’s always breaking down.”

The owner scowled at him, then said to Yu, “There is no easement where you’re going to dig.”

Yu shrugged. “Well, you know, when somebody disputes the location of an easement, the burden’s on him to get a court order stopping us. You might want to give some of your magistrate friends a call. And you know what, sir? You better do it pretty fast, ’cause we’re going in now.”

“But -”

“Go ahead!” he shouted.

“Is that true?” Sachs whispered to him. “About the easements?”

“Don’t know. But he seemed to buy it.”

“Thanks.”

The backhoe went to work. It didn’t take long. Ten minutes later, guided by the S and S team, the backhoe had dug out a four-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep foxhole. The foundation of the building ended about six feet below the surface and beneath that was a wall of dark soil and gray clay. Sachs would have to climb to the bottom of the excavation and dig horizontally only about eighteen inches until she found the cistern or well. She donned the Tyvek suit and a hard hat with a light on the top. She called Rhyme back on her radio – not sure how cell phone reception would be in the pit. “I’m ready,” she told him.

K9 officer Gail Davis walked over with Vegas, straining on the leash, pawing at the edge of the hole. “Something’s down there,” the policewoman said.

As if I’m not spooked enough, Sachs thought, looking at the dog’s alert face.

“What’s that noise, Sachs?”

“Gail’s here. Her dog’s got a problem with the site.”

“Anything specific?” Sachs asked Davis.

“Nope. Could be sensing anything.”

Vegas then growled and pawed Sachs’s leg. Davis had told Sachs that another skill of briards was battlefield triage – they’d been used by corpsmen to determine which of the wounded could be saved and which could not. She wondered if Vegas was marking her for the latter ahead of time.

“Keep close,” Sachs said to Davis, with an uneasy laugh. “In case I need digging out.”

Yu volunteered to go down into the pit (he said he liked tunnels and caves, a fact that astonished Amelia Sachs). But she said no. This was, after all, a crime scene, even if it was 140 years old, and the sphere and strongbox, whatever they might be, were evidence to be collected and preserved, according to CS procedure.

The city workers lowered a ladder into the shaft, which Sachs looked down into, sighing.

“You okay?” Yu asked.

“Fine,” she said cheerfully and started into the hole. Thinking: The claustrophobia in the Sanford Foundation’s archives was nothing compared to this. At the bottom she took the shovel and pickax Yu had given her and began the excavation.

Sweating from the effort, shivering from the waves of panic, she dug and dug, picturing with every scoop the foxhole collapsing and trapping her.

Pulling out rocks, dislodging the dense earth.

Forever hidden beneath clay and soil…

“What’s in view, Sachs?” Rhyme asked through the radio.

“Dirt, sand, worms, a few tin cans, rocks.”

She progressed about one foot under the building, then two.

Her spade gave a tink and stopped cold. She scraped away soil and found herself facing a rounded brick wall, very old, the mortar clumsily smeared between the bricks.

“Got something here. The side of the cistern.”

Dirt from the edges of the foxhole skittered to the floor. It scared her more than if a rat had traipsed across her thigh. A fast image came to mind: being held immobile while dirt flooded around her, crushing her chest, then filling her nose and mouth. Drowning on dirt…

Okay, girl, relax. Sachs took several deep breaths. Scraped away more soil. Another gallon or so of it spilled out on her knees. “Should we shore this up, you think?” she called to Yu.

“What?” Rhyme asked.

“I’m taking to the engineer.”

Yu called, “I think it’ll probably hold. The soil’s damp enough to be cohesive.”

Probably.

The engineer continued, “If you want we can, but it’ll take a few hours to build the frame.”

“Never mind,” she called to him. Into the speaker she asked, “Lincoln?”

There was a pause.

She felt a jolt, realizing she’d used his first name. Neither of them was superstitious but there was one rule they stuck to: It was bad luck to use their first names on the job.

The hesitation told her that he too was aware she’d broken the rule. Finally he said, “Go ahead.”

Gravel and dry dirt again trickled down the side of the foxhole and sprayed her neck and shoulders. It hit the Tyvek suit, which amplified the sound. She jumped back, thinking the walls were coming down. A gasp.

“Sachs? You all right?”

She looked around. No, the walls were holding. “Fine.” She continued to scrape away dirt from the rounded brick cistern. With the pickax she chipped away mortar. She asked Rhyme, “Any more thoughts about what’s inside?” The question was meant mostly for the comfort of hearing his voice.

A sphere with a tail.

“No idea.”

A fierce bash with the ax. One brick came out. Then two. Earth poured out from inside the well and covered her knees.

Damn, I hate this.

More bricks, more sand and pebbles and dirt. She stopped, cleared the heavy pile off her kneeling legs and turned back to her task.

“How you doing?” Rhyme asked.

“Hanging in there,” she said softly and removed several more bricks. A dozen of them lay around her. She turned her head, shining the light on what was behind the bricks: a wall of black dirt, ash, bits of charcoal and scraps of wood.

She started to dig into the dense dry earth that was inside the cistern. Nothing cohesive about this goddamn dirt, she thought, watching the loose brown rivulets stream downward, glistening in the beam from her hard-hat light.

“Sachs!” Rhyme shouted. “Stop!”

She gasped. “What’s -”

“I just looked over the story of the arson again. It said there was an explosion in the basement of the tavern. Grenades back then were spheres with fuses. Charles must’ve taken two with him. That’s the sphere in the well! You’re right next to the one that didn’t go off. The bomb could be as unstable as nitroglycerine. That’s what the dog was sensing, the explosives! Get out of there fast.”

She gripped the side of the well to pull herself to her feet.

But the brick she was holding suddenly gave way, and she fell onto her back as an avalanche of dry earth from inside the well poured out into the foxhole. Stones and gravel and dirt flowed around her, pinning her bent, cramping legs and spreading fast toward her chest and face.

She screamed, trying desperately to climb to her feet. But she couldn’t; the flood had reached her arms.

“Sa -” She heard Rhyme’s voice as the headset cord was ripped from the radio.

More dirt cascaded over her body, helplessly frozen under the crushing weight that rose like flooding water.

Then Sachs screamed once more – as the sphere, carried by the current of dirt, dropped from the gaping hole in the brick wall and rolled against her immobilized body.

Jax was out of his area.

He’d left Harlem behind, both the place and the state of mind. Left behind the empty lots filled with malt liquor bottles, left behind the storefront tabernacles, the faded, weather-battered posters for Red Devil lye, which black men had used to conk their hair straight in the Malcolm X era, left behind the teenage rapper wannabees and bucket percussion ensembles in Marcus Garvey Park, the stands selling toys and sandals and bling and kente-cloth wall hangings. Left behind all the new redevelopment construction, left behind the tour buses.

He was now in one of the few places where he’d never bombed a Jax 157, never painted a throw-up. The elegant part of Central Park West.

Staring at the building where Geneva Settle now was.

After the incident in the alley, near her house on 118th Street, with Geneva and the guy in the gray car, Jax had jumped in another cab and followed the police cars here. He didn’t know what to make of this place: the two police cars out front, and from the stairs to the sidewalk a ramp, like they make for people in wheelchairs.

Limping slowly through the park, scoping the building out. What was the girl doing inside? He tried to get a look. But the blinds were drawn.

Another car – a Crown Vic, the kind the police drive a lot – pulled up and two cops got out, carrying a cheap suitcase, taped together, and boxes of books. Probably Geneva ’s, he guessed. She was moving in.

Protecting her even steadier, he thought, discouraged.

He stepped into the bushes to get a better view when the door opened, but just then another squad car drove past, slow. It seemed that a cop inside was scanning the park as well as the sidewalk. Jax memorized the number of the building, then turned away and disappeared into the park. He headed north, walking back toward Harlem.

Feeling the gun in his sock, feeling the tug of his parole officer two hundred miles to the north, who might be thinking about a surprise visit to his Buffalo apartment at this very moment, Jax remembered a question that Ralph the leaning Egyptian prince had asked him: Was what he was doing worth all the risk?

He considered this now, as he returned home.

And he thought: Had it been worth the risk twenty years ago, perching on the six-inch iron ledge of the overpass on the Grand Central Parkway, to tag Jax 157 thirty feet above traffic streaming by at sixty miles an hour?

Had it been worth the risk six years ago, chambering a 12-gauge shell in the breakdown and shoving the muzzle into the face of the armored-truck driver, just to get that $50,000 or $60,000? Enough to help him get over, get his life back on track?

And he knew that, fuck, Ralph’s wasn’t a question that made any sense, because it suggested there was a choice. Then and now, right or wrong, didn’t matter. Alonzo “Jax” Jackson was going right ahead. If this worked out he’d get back his righteous life in Harlem, his home, the place that for good and bad had made him what he was – and the place that he himself had helped form, with his thousands of cans of spray paint. He was simply doing what he had to do.

Careful.

In his safe house in Queens, Thompson Boyd was wearing a gas mask/ respirator and thick gloves. He was slowly mixing acid and water, then checking the concentration.

Careful…

This was the tricky part. Certainly the potassium cyanide powder sitting nearby was dangerous – enough to kill thirty or forty people – but in its dried form it was relatively stable. Just like the bomb he’d planted in the police car, the white powder needed to be mixed with sulfuric acid to produce the deadly gas (the infamous Zyklon-B used by the Nazis in their extermination showers).

But the big “if” is the sulfuric acid. Too weak a concentration will produce the gas slowly, which could give the victims a chance to detect the odor and escape. But too strong an acid – over 20 percent concentration – will cause the cyanide to explode before it’s dissolved, dissipating much of the desired deadly effect.

Thompson needed the concentration to be as close to 20 percent as possible – for a simple reason: The place he was going to plant the device – that old Central Park West town house where Geneva Settle was staying – would hardly be airtight. After learning that this was where the girl was hiding, Thompson had conducted his own surveillance of the town house and had noted the unsealed windows and an antiquated heating and air-conditioning system. It would be a challenge to turn the large structure into a death chamber.

…you gotta understand ’bout what we’re doing here. It’s like everything else in life. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent. Nothing runs just the way it ought…

Yesterday he’d told his employer that the next attempt on Geneva ’s life would be successful. But now he wasn’t too sure about that. The police were far too good.

We’ll just re-rig and keep going. We can’t get emotional about it.

Well, he wasn’t emotional or concerned. But he needed to take drastic measures – on several fronts. If the poison gas in the town house now killed Geneva, fine. But that wasn’t his main goal. He had to take out at least some of the people inside – the investigators searching for him and his employer. Kill them, put them in a coma, cause brain damage – it didn’t matter. The important thing was to debilitate them.

Thompson checked the concentration once again, and altered it slightly, making up for how the air would alter the pH balance. His hands were a bit unsteady, so he stepped away for a moment to calm himself.

Wssst…

The song he’d been whistling became “Stairway to Heaven.”

Thompson leaned back and thought about how to get the gas bomb into the town house. A few ideas occurred to him – including one or two he was pretty sure would work quite well. He again tested the concentration of the acid, whistling absently through the mouthpiece of the respirator. The analyzer reported that the strength was 19.99394 percent.

Perfect.

Wssst…

The new tune that popped into his head was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Amelia Sachs had been neither crushed to death by clay and soil nor blown up by unstable nineteenth-century ordnance.

She was now standing, showered and in clean clothes, in Rhyme’s lab, looking over what had tumbled from the dry cistern into her lap an hour earlier.

It wasn’t an old bomb. But there was little doubt now that it’d been left in the well by Charles Singleton on the night of July 15, 1868.

Rhyme’s chair was parked in front of the examination table beside Sachs, as they peered into the cardboard evidence collection box. Cooper was with them, pulling on latex gloves.

“We’ll have to tell Geneva,” Rhyme said.

“Do we?” Sachs said reluctantly. “I don’t want to.”

“Tell me what?”

Sachs turned quickly. Rhyme backed away from the table and reluctantly rolled the Storm Arrow in a circle. Thinking: Damnit. Should’ve been more careful.

Geneva Settle stood in the doorway.

“You found out something about Charles in the basement of that tavern, didn’t you? You found out that he really did steal the money. Was that his secret, after all?”

A glance at Sachs, then Rhyme said, “No, Geneva. No. We found something else.” A nod toward the box. “Here. Take a look.”

The girl walked closer. She stopped, blinking, staring down at the brown human skull. It was this that they’d seen on the ultrasound image and that had rolled out into Sachs’s lap. With the help of Vegas, Gail Davis’s briard, the detective had recovered the remaining bones. These bones – what Sachs had thought were the slats from a strongbox – were those of a man, Rhyme had determined. The body had apparently been stuffed vertically into the cistern in the basement of Potters’ Field tavern just before Charles had ignited the fire. The ultrasound imaging had picked up the top of the skull and a rib beneath it, which gave the appearance of a fuse for a bomb.

The bones were in a second box on the worktable.

“We’re pretty sure it’s a man that Charles killed.”

“No!”

“And then he burned down the tavern to cover up the crime.”

“You couldn’t know that,” Geneva snapped.

“We don’t, no. But it’s a reasonable deduction.” Rhyme explained: “His letter said he was going to Potters’ Field, armed with his Navy Colt revolver. That was a pistol from the Civil War. It didn’t work like guns nowadays, where you load a bullet into the back of the cylinder. You had to load each chamber from the front with a ball and gunpowder.”

She nodded. Her eyes were on the brown and black bones, the eyeless skull.

“We found some information on guns like his in our database. It’s a.36-caliber but most Civil War soldiers learned to use.39-caliber balls in them. They’re a little bigger and fit more tightly. That makes the gun more accurate.”

Sachs picked up a small plastic bag. “This was in the skull cavity.” Inside was a little sphere of lead. “It’s a.39-caliber ball that was fired out of a.36-caliber gun.”

“But that doesn’t prove anything.” She was staring at the hole in the forehead of the skull.

“No,” Rhyme said kindly. “It suggests. But it suggests very strongly that Charles killed him.”

“Who was he?” Geneva asked.

“We don’t have any idea. If he had any ID on him it burned up or disintegrated, along with his clothes. We found the bullet, a small gun that he probably had with him, some gold coins and a ring with the word…what was the word, Mel?”

“‘Winskinskie.’” He held up a plastic bag with the gold signet ring inside. Above the inscription was an etched profile of an American Indian.

Cooper had quickly found that the word meant “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in the language of the Delaware Indians. This might be the dead man’s name, though his cranial bone structure suggested he wasn’t Native-American. More likely, Rhyme felt, it was a fraternal, school or lodge slogan of some sort and Cooper had queried some anthropologists and history professors via email to see if they’d heard of the word.

“Charles wouldn’t do it,” his descendant said softly. “He wouldn’t murder anyone.”

“The bullet was fired into the forehead,” Rhyme said. “Not from behind. And the Derringer – the gun – that Sachs found in the cistern probably belonged to the victim. That suggests the shooting could’ve been in self-defense.”

Though the fact remained that Charles had voluntarily gone to the tavern armed with a gun. He would have anticipated some sort of violence.

“I should never have started this in the first place,” Geneva muttered. “Stupid. I don’t even like the past. It’s pointless. I hate it!” She turned and ran into the hallway, then up the stairs.

Sachs followed. She returned a few minutes later. “She’s reading. She said she wants to be alone. I think she’ll be all right.” Her voice didn’t sound very certain, though.

Rhyme looked over the information on the oldest scene he’d ever run – 140 years. The whole point of the search was to learn something that might lead them to whoever had hired Unsub 109. But all it had done was nearly get Sachs killed and disappoint Geneva with the news that her ancestor had killed a man.

He looked at the copy of The Hanged Man tarot card, staring at him placidly from the evidence board, mocking Rhyme’s frustration.

Cooper said, “Hey, have something here.” He was looking at his computer screen.

“Winskinskie?” Rhyme asked.

“No. Listen. An answer to our mystery substance – the one that Amelia found in the unsub’s Elizabeth Street safe house and near Geneva’s aunt’s. The liquid.”

“Damn well about time. What the hell is it? Toxin?” Rhyme asked.

“Our bad boy’s got dry eyes,” Cooper said.

“What?”

“It’s Murine.”

“Eyedrops?”

“That’s right. The composition’s exactly the same.”

“Okay. Add that to the chart,” Rhyme ordered Thom. “Might just be temporary – because he’d been working with acid. In which case, won’t help us. But it might be chronic. That’d be good.”

Criminalists loved perps with physical maladies. Rhyme had a whole section in his book on tracing people through prescription or over-the-counter drugs, disposed hypodermic needles, prescription eyeglasses, unique shoe-tread wear from orthopedic problems, and so on.

It was then that Sachs’s phone rang. She listened for a moment. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” The policewoman disconnected, glanced at Rhyme. “Well, this’s interesting.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When Amelia Sachs walked into the Critical Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital she saw two Pulaskis.

One was in bed, swathed in bandages and hooked up to creepy clear plastic tubes. His eyes were dull, his mouth slack.

The other sat at his bedside, awkward in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Just as blond, just as fresh-faced, in the same crisp blue NYPD uniform Ron Pulaski had been wearing when Sachs had recruited him in front of the African-American museum yesterday and told him to act concerned about a pile of garbage.

How many sugars?…

She blinked at the mirror image.

“I’m Tony. Ron’s brother. Which you probably guessed.”

“Hi, Detective,” Ron managed breathlessly. His voice wasn’t working right. It was slurred, sloppy.

“How you feeling?”

“How ish Geneva?”

“She’s all right. I’m sure you heard – we stopped him at her aunt’s place but he got away… You hurting? Must be.”

He nodded toward the IV drip. “Happy soup…Don’t feel a thing.”

“He’ll be okay.”

“I’ll be okay,” Ron echoed his brother’s words. He took a few deep breaths, blinked.

“A month or so,” Tony explained. “Some therapy. He’ll be back on duty. Some fractures. Not much internal damage. Thick skull. Which Dad always said.”

“Shkull.” Ron grinned.

“You were at the academy together?” She pulled up a chair and sat.

“Right.”

“What’s your house?”

“The Six,” Tony answered.

The Sixth Precinct was in the heart of west Greenwich Village. Not many muggings or carjackings or drugs. Mostly breakins, gay domestics and incidents by emotionally disturbed artists and writers off their meds. The Six was also home to the Bomb Squad.

Tony was shaken, sure, but angry too. “The guy kept at him, even when he was down. He didn’t need to.”

“But maybe,” came Ron’s stumbling words, “it took for time…took more time on me. So he didn’t get…didn’t get a good chance to go after Geneva.”

Sachs smiled. “You’re kind of a glass-is-half-full sorta guy.” She didn’t tell him that he’d been beaten nearly to death simply so Unsub 109 could use a bullet from his weapon for a distraction.

“Sorta am. Thank Sheneva. Gen-eva for me. For the book.” He couldn’t really move his head but his eyes slipped to the side of the bedside table, where a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird lay. “Tony’sh reading to me. He even can read the big wordsh.”

His brother laughed. “You putz.”

“So what can you tell us, Ron? This guy’s smart and he’s still out there. We need something we can use.”

“I don’t know, ma – I don’t know, Detective. I wasssh goin’ up and down th’alley. He hid when I want to…went to the street. Came back to the back, the alley…I washn’t expecting hih. Him. He was around the corner of the, you know, the bidling…the building. I got to the corner. I shaw this guy, in a mask like a ski mashk. And then this thing. Club, bat. Came too fasht. Couldn’t shee it really. Got me good.” He blinked again, closed his eyes. “Careless. Washhh, was too close to the wall. Won’t do that again.”

You didn’t know. Now you do.

“A woosh.” He winced.

“You okay?” his brother asked.

“I’m okay.”

“A woosh,” Sachs encouraged, nudged her chair closer.

“What?”

“You heard a woosh.”

“Yes, I heard it, ma’am. Not ‘ma’am.’ Detective.”

“It’s okay, Ray. Call me whatever. You see anything? Anything at all?”

“This thing. Like a bat. No, not Batman and Robin. Ha. A baseball bat. Right at my face. Oh, I told you that. And I went down. I mean, Detective. Not ‘ma’am.’”

“That’s okay, Ron. What do you remember then?”

“I don’t know. I remember lying on the ground. Thinking…I was thinking he was going for my weapon. I tried to control my weapon. Wash…was in the book, not to let it go. ‘Always control your weapon.’ But I didn’t. He got it anyway. I wash dead. I knew I was dead.”

She encouraged softly, “What do you remember seeing?”

“A tangle.”

“A what?”

He laughed. “I didn’t mean tangle. A triangle. Cardboard. On the ground. I couldn’t move. It was all I could see.”

“And this cardboard. It was the unsub’s?”

“The trangle? No. I mean, triangle. No, it was jusht trash. I mean, it’s all I could see. I tried to crawl. I don’t think I did.”

Sachs sighed. “You were found on your back, Ron.”

“I washhh?…I was on my back?”

“Think back. Did you see the sky maybe?”

He squinted.

Her heart beat faster. Did he get a look at something?

“Bluh.”

“What?”

“Bluh in my eyes by then.”

“Blood?” his brother offered.

“Yeah. Blood. Couldn’t shee anything then. No trangles, no building. He got my piece. He stayed neareye for a few minutes. Then I don’t remember anything elshe.”

“He was nearby? How close?”

“I don’t know. Not close. Couldn’t see. Too much bluh.”

Sachs nodded. The poor man looked exhausted. His breathing was labored, his eyes much more unfocused than when she’d arrived. She rose. “I’ll let him get some rest.” She asked, “You heard of Terry Dobyns?”

“No. Ishh he…Who ishh?” A grimace crossed the injured officer’s face. “Who is he?

“Department psychologist.” She glanced at Ron with a smile. “This’ll take the starch out of you for a while. You should talk to him about it. He’s the man. He rules.”

Ron said, “Don’t need to -”

“Patrolman?” she said sternly.

He lifted an eyebrow, winced.

“It’s an order.”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean…ma’am.”

Anthony said, “I’ll make sure he does.”

“You’ll thank…Geneva for me? I like that book.”

“I will.” Sachs slung her bag over her shoulder and started for the door. She just stepped through it when she stopped abruptly, turned back. “Ron?”

“Wusthat?”

She returned to his bedside, sat down again.

“Ron, you said the unsub was near you for a few minutes.”

“Yuh.”

“Well, if you couldn’t see him, with the blood in your eyes, how did you know he was there?”

The young officer frowned. “Oh…yeah. There’s shomething I forgot to tell you.”

“Our boy’s got a habit, Rhyme.”

Amelia Sachs was back in the laboratory.

“What’s that?”

“He whistles.”

“For taxis?”

“Music. Pulaski heard him. After he’d been hit the first time and was lying on the ground the unsub took his weapon and, I’m guessing, spent a few minutes to hook the bullet to the cigarette. While he was doing that, he was whistling. Real softly, Ron said, but he’s sure it was whistling.”

“No pro’s going to whistle on the job,” Rhyme said.

“You wouldn’t think. But I heard it too. At the safe house on Elizabeth Street. I thought it was the radio or something – he was good.”

“How’s the rookie doing?” Sellitto asked. He hadn’t rubbed his invisible bloodstain recently but he was still edgy.

“They say he’ll be okay. A month of therapy or so. I told him to see Terry Dobyns. Ron was pretty out of it but his brother was there. He’ll look after him. He’s a uniform too. Identical twin.”

Rhyme wasn’t surprised. Being on the force often ran in the family. “Cop” could be the name of a human gene.

But Sellitto shook his head at the news of a sibling. He seemed all the more upset, as if it was his fault that an entire family had been affected by the attack.

There was no time, though, to deal with the detective’s demons. Rhyme said, “All right. We’ve got some new information. Let’s put it to use.”

“How?” Cooper asked.

“The murder of Charlie Tucker’s still the closest lead we have to Mr. One-oh-nine. So, obviously,” the criminalist added, “we call Texas.”

“Remember the Alamo,” Sachs offered and hit the speaker button on the phone.

POTTERS’ FIELD SCENE (1868)

· Tavern in Gallows Heights – located in the Eighties on the Upper West Side, mixed neighborhood in the 1860s.

· Potters’ Field was possible hangout for Boss Tweed and other corrupt New York politicians.

· Charles came here July 15, 1868.

· Burned down following explosion, presumably just after Charles’s visit. To hide his secret?

· Body in basement, man, presumably killed by Charles Singleton.

· Shot in forehead by.36 Navy Colt loaded with.39-caliber ball (type of weapon Charles Singleton owned).

· Gold coins.

· Man was armed with Derringer.

· No identification.

· Had ring with name “Winskinskie” on it.

· Means “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in Delaware Indian language.

· Currently searching other meanings.

EAST HARLEM SCENE (GENEVA ’S GREAT-AUNT’S APARTMENT)

· Used cigarette and 9mm round as explosive device to distract officers. Merit brand, not traceable.

· Friction ridge prints: None. Glove-prints only.

· Poisonous gas device:

· Glass jar, foil, candleholder. Untraceable.

· Cyanide and sulfuric acid. Neither containing markers. Untraceable.

· Clear liquid similar to that found on Elizabeth Street.

· Determined to be Murine.

· Small flakes of orange paint. Posing as construction or highway worker?

ELIZABETH STREET SAFE HOUSE SCENE

· Used electrical booby trap.

· Fingerprints: None. Glove prints only.

· Security camera and monitor; no leads.

· Tarot deck, missing the twelfth card; no leads.

· Map with diagram of museum where G. Settle was attacked and buildings across the street.

Trace:

· Falafel and yogurt.

· Wood scrapings from desk with traces of pure sulfuric acid.

· Clear liquid, not explosive. Sent to FBI lab.

· Determined to be Murine.

· More fibers from rope. Garrotte?

· Pure carbon found in map.

· Safe house was rented, for cash, to Billy Todd Hammil. Fits Unsub 109’s description, but no leads to an actual Hammil.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM SCENE

Rape pack:

· Tarot card, twelfth card in deck, The Hanged Man, meaning spiritual searching.

· Smiley-face bag.

· Too generic to trace.

· Box cutter.

· Trojan condoms.

· Duct tape.

· Jasmine scent.

· Unknown item bought for $5.95. Probably a stocking cap.

· Receipt, indicating store was in New York City, discount variety store or drugstore.

· Most likely purchased in a store on Mulberry Street, Little Italy. Unsub identified by clerk.

· Fingerprints:

· Unsub wore latex or vinyl gloves.

· Prints on items in rape pack belonged to person with small hands, no IAFIS hits. Positive ID for clerk’s.

Trace:

· Cotton-rope fibers, some with traces of human blood. Garrotte?

· Sent to CODIS.

· No DNA match in CODIS.

· Popcorn and cotton candy with traces of canine urine.

Weapons:

· Billy club or martial arts weapon.

· Pistol is a North American Arms.22 rimfire magnum, Black Widow or Mini-Master.

· Makes own bullets, bored-out slugs filled with needles. No match in IBIS or DRUGFIRE.

Motive:

· Uncertain. Rape was probably staged.

· True motive may have been to steal microfiche containing July 23, 1868, issue of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated magazine and kill G. Settle because of her interest in an article for reasons unknown. Article was about her ancestor Charles Singleton (see accompanying chart).

· Librarian victim reported that someone else wished to see article.

· Requesting librarian’s phone records to verify this.

· No leads.

· Requesting information from employees as to other person wishing to see story.

· No leads.

· Searching for copy of article.

· Several sources report man requested same article. No leads to identity. Most issues missing or destroyed. One located. (See accompanying chart.)

· Conclusion: G. Settle still at risk.

· Motive may be to keep secret the fact that her ancestor found the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is invalid, threatening most of the U.S. civil rights and civil liberties laws.

· Profile of incident sent to VICAP and NCIC.

· Murder in Amarillo, TX, five years ago. Similar M.O. – staged crime scene (apparently ritual killing, but real motive unknown).

· Victim was a retired prison guard.

· Composite picture sent to Texas prison.

· Not recognized.

· Murder in Ohio, three years ago. Similar M.O. – staged crime scene (apparently sexual assault, but real motive probably hired killing). Files missing.

PROFILE OF UNSUB 109

· White male.

· 6 feet tall, 180 lbs.

· Middle-aged.

· Average voice.

· Used cell phone to get close to victim.

· Wears three-year-old, or older, size-11 Bass walkers, light brown. Right foot slightly outturned.

· Additional jasmine scent.

· Dark pants.

· Ski mask, dark.

· Will target innocents to help in killing victims and escaping.

· Most likely is a for-hire killer.

· Possibly a former prisoner in Amarillo, TX.

· Talks with a Southern accent.

· Has trim, light-brown hair, clean-shaven.

· Nondescript.

· Seen wearing dark raincoat.

· Probably not a regular smoker.

· Construction, utility, highway worker?

· Uses Murine.

· Whistles.

PROFILE OF PERSON HIRING UNSUB 109

· No information at this time.

PROFILE OF UNSUB 109’S ACCOMPLICE

Black male.

· Late 30’s, early 40’s.

· Six feet.

· Solidly built.

· Wearing green combat jacket.

· Ex-convict.

· Has a limp.

· Reportedly armed.

· Clean-shaven.

· Black do-rag.

· Awaiting additional witnesses and security tapes.

· Tape inconclusive, sent to lab for analysis.

· Old work shoes.

PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON

· Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New York state by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.

· Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.

· Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.

· Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.

· Involved in some risky activities?

· Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.

· The crime, as reported in Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated:

· Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedman’s Trust in NY. Broke into the Trust’s safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.

· Charles’s correspondence:

· Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY state, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.

· Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.

· Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.

· Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters’ Field with his gun for “justice.” Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters’ Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.

“’Lo?”

“Hey there, J. T. This’s Lincoln Rhyme in New York.” Speaking to someone who went by initials and lived in the Lone Star State – not to mention his drawl – made you tend to drop words like “hey,” and “listen here” into your speech.

“Oh, yes, sir, how you doing? Say, I read up on you after we talked last time. Didn’t know you were famous.”

“Ah, just a former civil servant,” Rhyme said with a modesty that rang like dull tin. “Nothing more or less than that. Any better luck with the picture we sent you?”

“Sorry, Detective Rhyme. Fact is, he looks like half the white guys who graduated from here. ’Sides, we’re like most correctional outfits – got ourselves a big turnover. Aren’t hardly any employees still here from the time when Charlie Tucker was killed.”

“We’ve got a little more information about him. This might help narrow down the list. You got a minute?”

“Shoot.”

“He may have an eye problem. He uses Murine regularly. That could be recent but maybe he did it when he was a prisoner there. And then we think he may’ve had the habit of whistling.”

“Whistling? Like at a woman or some such?”

“No, whistling a tune. Songs.”

“Oh. Okay. Hold on.” Five impossibly long minutes later he came back on the line. “Sorry. Nobody could remember anything about anybody whistling, or having bad eyes, not particular. But we’ll keep looking.”

Rhyme thanked him and disconnected. He stared at the evidence chart in frustration. In the early 1900s, one of the greatest criminalists who ever lived, Edmond Locard of France, came up with what he called the exchange principle, which holds that at every crime scene there is some exchange of evidence, however minute, between the criminal and the scene or the victim. Finding that evidence was the goal of the forensic detective. Locard’s principle, however, didn’t go on to guarantee that simply establishing that connection would lead you to the perp’s door.

He sighed. Well, he’d known it would be a long shot. What’d they have? A vague computer drawing, a possible eye condition, a possible habit, a grudge against a prison guard.

What else should the -?

Rhyme frowned. He was staring at the twelfth card in the tarot deck.

The Hanged Man does not refer to someone being punished…

Maybe not, but it still depicted a man dangling from a scaffold.

Something clicked in his mind. He glanced at the evidence chart again. Noting: the baton, the electricity hookup on Elizabeth Street, the poison gas, the cluster of bullets in the heart, the lynching of Charlie Tucker, the rope fibers with traces of blood…

“Oh, hell!” he spat out.

“Lincoln? What’s the matter?” Cooper glanced over at his boss, concerned.

Rhyme shouted, “Command, redial!”

The computer responded on the screen: I did not understand what you said. What would you like me to do?

“Redial the number.”

I did not understand what you said.

“Fuck it! Mel, Sachs…somebody hit redial!”

Cooper did and a few minutes later the criminalist was speaking once again to the warden in Amarillo.

“J. T., it’s Lincoln again.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Forget inmates. I want to know about guards.”

“Guards?”

“Somebody who used to be on your staff. With eye problems. Who whistled. And he might’ve worked on Death Row before or around the time Tucker was killed.”

“We all weren’t thinkin’ ’bout employees. And, again, most of our staff wasn’t here five, six years ago. But hold on here. Lemme ask around.”

The image of The Hanged Man had put the thought into Rhyme’s head. He then considered the weapons and the techniques that Unsub 109 had employed. They were methods of execution: cyanide gas, electricity, hanging, shooting a group of bullets into the heart, like a firing squad. And his weapon to subdue his victims was a baton, like a prison guard would carry.

A moment later he heard, “Hey there, Detective Rhyme?”

“Go ahead, J. T.”

“Sure ’nough, somebody said that rings a bell. I called one of our retired guards at home, worked execution detail. Name of Pepper. He’s agreed to come into the office and talk to you. Lives nearby. Should be here in just a few minutes. We’ll call you right back.”

Another glance at the tarot card.

A change of direction…

Ten insufferably long minutes later the phone rang.

Fast introductions were made. Retired Texas Department of Justice officer Halbert Pepper spoke in a drawl that made J. T. Beauchamp’s accent sound like the Queen’s English. “Thinkin’ I might be able to help y’all out some.”

“Tell me,” Rhyme said.

“Till ’bout five years ago we had us a executions control officer fit the bill of who y’all were describin’ to J. T. Had hisself eye trouble and he whistled up a storm. I was just ’bout to retire round then but I worked with him some.”

“Who was he?”

“Fella name of Thompson Boyd.”