The Twelfth Card (5 page)

“You bet.” A CSU tech grabbed two of the other cases.

She pulled on a hands-free headset and plugged it into her Handi-Talkie just as Ron Pulaski returned from his press push-back duty. He led Sachs and the Crime Scene officers into the building. They got off the elevator on the fifth floor and walked to the right, to double doors below a sign that said,
Booker T. Washington Room.

“That’s the scene in there.”

Sachs and the techs opened the suitcases, started removing equipment. Pulaski continued, “I’m pretty sure he came through these doors. The only other exit is the fire stairwell and you can’t enter from the outside, and it wasn’t jimmied. So, he comes through this door, locks it and then goes after the girl. She escaped through the fire door.”

“Who unlocked the front one for you?” Sachs asked.

“Guy named Don Barry, head librarian.”

“He go in with you?”

“No.”

“Where is he now?”

“His office—third floor. I wondered if maybe it was an inside job, you know? So I asked him for a list of all his white male employees and where they were when she was attacked.”

“Good.” Sachs had been planning to do the same.

“He said he’d bring the list down to us as soon as he was done.”

“Now, tell me what I’ll find inside.”

“The girl was at the microfiche reader. It’s around the corner to the right. You’ll see it easy.” Pulaski pointed to the end of a large room filled with tall rows of bookshelves, beyond which was an open area where Sachs could see mannequins dressed in period clothing, paintings, cases of antique jewelry, purses, shoes, accessories—your typical dusty museum displays, the sort of stuff you look at while you’re really wondering what restaurant to eat at after you’ve had enough culture.

“What’s security like around here?” Sachs was looking for surveillance cameras on the ceiling.

“Zip. No cameras. No guards, no sign-in sheets. You just walk in.”

“Never easy, is it?”

“No, ma’ . . . No, Detective.”

She thought about telling him that “ma’am” was okay, not like “lady,” but didn’t know how to explain the distinction. “One question. Did you close the fire door downstairs?”

“No, I left it just the way I found it. Open.”

“So the scene could be hot.”

“Hot?”

“The perp could’ve come back.”

“I . . . ”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Pulaski. I just want to know.”

“Well, I guess he could’ve, yeah.”

“All right, you stay in the doorway here. I want you to listen.”

“For what?”

“Well, the guy shooting at me, for instance. But
probably better if you heard footsteps or somebody racking a shotgun first.”

“Watch your back, you’re saying?”

She winked. And started forward to the scene.

*   *   *

So, she’s Crime Scene, thought Thompson Boyd, watching the woman walk back and forth in the library, studying the floor, looking for fingerprints and clues and whatever it was they looked for. He wasn’t concerned about what she might find. He’d been careful, as always.

Thompson was standing in the sixth-floor window of the building across Fifty-fifth Street from the museum. After the girl got away, he’d circled around two blocks and made his way into this building, then climbed the stairs to the hallway from which he was now looking over the street.

He’d had a second chance to kill the girl a few minutes ago; she’d been on the street for a moment, talking to officers, in front of the museum. But there were way too many police around for him to shoot her and get away. Still he’d been able to take a picture of her with the camera in his mobile phone before she and her friend had been hustled off to a squad car, which sped west. Besides, Thompson still had more to do here, and so he’d taken up this vantage point.

From his prison days Thompson knew a lot about law enforcers. He could easily spot the lazy ones, the scared ones, the ones who were stupid and gullible. He could also spot the talented cops, the smart ones, the ones who were a threat.

Like the woman he was looking at right now.

As he put drops in his perpetually troubled eyes,
Thompson found himself curious about her. As she searched the scene she had this concentration in her eyes, looking sort of devout, the same look Thompson’s mother sometimes used to get in church.

She disappeared from view but, whistling softly, Thompson kept his eyes on the window. Finally the woman in white returned to view. He noted the precision with which she did everything, the careful way she walked, her delicate touch as she picked up and examined things so as not to hurt the evidence. Another man might’ve been turned on by her beauty, her figure; even through the jumpsuit, it was easy to imagine what her body was like. But those thoughts, like usual, were far from his mind. Still, he believed he sensed some small enjoyment inside him as he watched her at work.

Something from his past came back to him . . . . He frowned, looking at her walking back and forth, back and forth . . . Yes, that was it. The pattern reminded him of the sidewinder rattlesnakes his father would point out when they were hunting together or going for walks in the Texas sand near the family trailer, outside Amarillo.

Look at them, son. Look. Ain’t they something? But don’t you get too close. They’ll kill you in a kiss.

He leaned against the wall and continued to study the woman in white, moving back and forth, back and forth.

“How does it look, Sachs?”

“Good,” she replied to Rhyme, via their radio connection.

She was just finishing walking the grid—the word referring to a method of searching a crime scene: examining it the way you’d mow a lawn, walking from one end of the site to the other then returning, slightly to the side. And then doing the same once more, but the second time walking perpendicular to the first search. Looking up and down too, floor to ceiling. This way, no inch or angle was left unseen. There are a number of ways to search crime scenes but Rhyme always insisted on this one.

“ ‘Good’ means what?” he asked testily. Rhyme didn’t like generalizations, or what he called “soft” assessments.

“He forgot the rape pack,” she replied. Since the Motorola link between Rhyme and Sachs was mostly a means to bring his surrogate presence to crime scenes, they usually dispensed with the NYPD conventions of radio protocol, like ending each transmission with a
K.

“Did he now? Might be as good as his wallet for ID’ing him. What’s he got in his?”

“Little weird, Rhyme. It’s got the typical duct tape, box cutter, condoms. But there’s also a tarot card. Picture of this guy hanging from a scaffold.”

“Wonder if he’s a genuine sicko, or just a copycat?” Rhyme mused. Over the years many killers
had left tarot cards and other occult memorabilia at crime scenes—the most notable recent case being the Washington, D.C., snipers of several years earlier.

Sachs continued, “The good news is that he kept everything in a nice slick plastic bag.”

“Excellent.” While perps might think to wear gloves at the crime scene itself, they often forgot about prints on the items they carried with them to commit that crime. A discarded condom wrapper had convicted many a rapist who’d otherwise been compulsive about not leaving his prints or bodily fluids at a scene. In this case, even if the killer thought to clean off the tape, knife and condoms, it was possible that he’d forgotten to wipe the bag.

She now placed the pack in a paper evidence bag—paper was generally better than plastic for preserving evidence—and set it aside. “He left it on a bookshelf near where the girl was sitting. I’m checking for latents.” She dusted the shelves with fluorescent powder, donned orange goggles and shone an alternative light source on the area. ALS lamps reveal markings like blood, semen and fingerprints that are otherwise invisible. Playing the light up and down, she transmitted, “No prints. But I can see he’s wearing latex gloves.”

“Ah, that’s good. For two reasons.” Rhyme’s voice had a professorial tone. He was testing her.

Two? she wondered.
One
came immediately to mind: If they were able to recover the glove they could lift a print from
inside
the fingers (something else perps often forgot). But the second?

She asked him.

“Obvious. It means he’s probably got a record, so when we
do
find a print, AFIS’ll tell us who he is.”
State-based automated fingerprint identification systems and the FBI’s Integrated AFIS were computer databases that could provide print matches in minutes, as opposed to days or even weeks with manual examinations.

“Sure,” Sachs said, troubled that she’d blown the quiz.

“What else rates the assessment ‘good’?”

“They waxed the floor last night.”

“And the attack happened early this morning. So you’ve got a good canvas for his footprints.”

“Yep. There’re some distinct ones here.” Kneeling, she took an electrostatic image of the print of the man’s tread marks. She was sure they were his; she could clearly see the trail where he’d walked up to Geneva’s table, adjusted his stance to get a good grip on the club to strike her and then chased her down the hall. She’d also compared the prints with those of the only other man who’d been here this morning: those of Ron Pulaski, whose mirror-shined issue shoes left a very different impression.

She explained about the girl’s using the mannequin to distract the killer and escape. He chuckled at her ingenuity. She added, “Rhyme, he hit her—well, the mannequin—really hard. A blunt object. So hard he cracked the plastic through her stocking cap. Then he must’ve been mad she fooled him. He smashed the microfiche reader too.”

“Blunt object,” Rhyme repeated. “Can you lift an impression?”

When he was head of the Crime Scene Unit at the NYPD, before his accident, Rhyme had compiled a number of database files to help identify evidence and impressions found at scenes. The blunt object file contained hundreds of pictures of impact marks left on skin and inanimate surfaces by various types
of objects—from tire irons to human bones to ice. But after carefully examining both the mannequin and the smashed microfiche reader, Sachs said, “No, Rhyme. I don’t see any. The cap Geneva put on the mannequin—”

“Geneva?”

“That’s her name.”

“Oh. Go on.”

She was momentarily irritated—as she often was—that he hadn’t expressed any interest in knowing anything about the girl or her state of mind. It often troubled her that Rhyme was so detached about the crime and the victims. This, he said, was how a criminalist needed to be. You didn’t want pilots so awed by a beautiful sunset or so terrified of a thunderstorm that they flew into a mountain, the same was true with cops. She saw his point but to Amelia Sachs victims were human beings, and crimes were not scientific exercises; they were horrific events. Especially when the victim was a sixteen-year-old girl.

She continued, “The cap she put on the mannequin dispersed the force of the blow. And the microfiche reader’s shattered too.”

Rhyme said, “Well, bring back some of the pieces of what he hit. There might be some transfer there.”

“Sure.”

There were some voices in the background at Rhyme’s. He said in an odd, troubled tone, “Finish up and get back here soon, Sachs.”

“I’m almost done,” she told him. “I’m going to walk the grid at the escape route . . . . Rhyme, what’s the matter?”

Silence. When he spoke next he sounded even more bothered. “I have to go, Sachs. It seems I have some visitors.”

“Who—?”

But he’d already disconnected.

*   *   *

The woman in white, the pro, had disappeared from the window of the library.

But Thompson Boyd wasn’t interested in her anymore. From his perch sixty feet above the street he was now watching an older cop, walking toward some witnesses. The man was middle-aged, heavy and in a God-wrinkled suit. Thompson knew this sort of officer too. He wasn’t brilliant but he’d be like the bulldog he resembled. There was nothing that would stop him from getting to the heart of a case.

When the fat cop nodded toward another man, a tall black man in a brown suit, walking out of the museum, Thompson left his vantage point and hurried downstairs. Pausing at the ground floor, he took his pistol out of his pocket and checked it to make sure nothing had become lodged in the barrel or cylinder. He wondered if it had been this—the sound of opening and closing the cylinder in the library—that had alerted the girl that he was a threat.

Now, even though nobody seemed to be nearby, he checked the pistol absolutely silently.

Learn from your mistakes.

By the book.

The gun was in order. Hiding it under his coat, Thompson walked down the dim stairway and exited through the far lobby, on Fifty-sixth Street, then stepped into an alley that took him back toward the museum.

There was no one guarding the entrance to the other end of the alley at Fifty-fifth. Undetected,
Thompson eased up to a battered green Dumpster, stinking of rotting food. He looked into the street. It had been reopened to traffic but several dozen people from offices and shops nearby remained on the sidewalks, hoping for a look at something exciting to tell their officemates and families about. Most of the police had left. The woman in white—the kissing snake—was still upstairs. Outside were two squad cars and a Crime Scene Unit van, as well as three uniformed cops, two plainclothes ones and that fat, rumpled detective.

Thompson gripped the gun firmly. Shooting was a very ineffective way to kill someone. But sometimes, like now, there was no option. If you had to shoot, procedures dictated you aimed for the heart. Never the head. The skull was solid enough to deflect a bullet in many circumstances, and the cranium was also relatively small and hard to hit.

Always the chest.

Thompson’s keen, blue eyes looked over the heavy cop in the wrinkled suit, as he glanced at a piece of paper.

Calm as dead wood, Thompson rested the gun on his left forearm, aimed carefully with a steady hand. He fired four fast shots.