The Twelfth Card (7 page)

The girl squinted. “Hey, you know, maybe what you could do is check out all the mobile companies in town. See who was on the phone then.”

Rhyme gave a laugh. “That’s a good thought. But at any given moment in Manhattan there’re about fifty thousand cell phone calls in progress. Besides, I doubt he was really on the phone.”

“He was frontin’? How you know that?” Lakeesha asked, furtively slipping two sticks of gum into her mouth.

“I don’t
know
it. I suspect it. Like the laughing. He was probably doing it to make Geneva drop her guard. You tend not to notice people on cell phones. And you rarely think of them as being a threat.”

Geneva was nodding. “Yeah. I was kinda freaked when he first came into the library. But when I heard him on the phone, well, I thought it’s rude to be talking on a phone in a library but I wasn’t scared anymore.”

“What happened then?” Sachs asked.

She explained that she’d heard a second click—she thought it sounded like a gun—and saw a man in a ski mask. She then told how she’d dismantled the mannequin and dressed it in her own clothes.

“That phat,” Lakeesha offered proudly. “My sista here, she smart.”

She sure is, Rhyme thought.

“I hid in the stacks till he walked to the microfiche reader then I ran for the fire door.”

“You didn’t see anything else about him?” Sachs asked.

“No.”

“What color was the mask?”

“Dark. I don’t know exactly.”

“Other clothes?”

“I didn’t see anything else really. Not that I remember. I was pretty freaked.”

“I’m sure you were,” Sachs said. “When you were hiding in the stacks, were you looking in his direction? So you’d know when to run?”

Geneva frowned for a moment. “Well, yeah, that’s right, I
was
looking. I forgot about that. I watched through the bottom shelves so I could run when he got close to my chair.”

“So maybe you saw a little more of him then.”

“Oh, you know, I did. I think he had brown shoes. Yeah, brown. Sort of a lighter shade, not dark brown.”

“Good. And what about his pants?”

“Dark, I’m pretty sure. But that’s all I could see, just the cuffs.”

“You smell anything?”

“No . . . Wait. Maybe I
did.
You know, something sweet, like flowers.”

“And then?”

“He came up to the chair and I heard this crack and then another couple of sounds. Something breaking.”

“The microfiche reader,” Sachs said. “He smashed it.”

“By then I was running as fast as I could. To the fire door. I went down the stairs and when I got to the street I found Keesh and we were going to run. But I was thinking maybe he was going to hurt somebody else. So I turned around and”—she looked at Pulaski—“we saw you.”

Sachs asked Lakeesha, “Did you see the attacker?”

“Nothin’. I was just chillin’ and then Gen come up, runnin’ all fast and buggin’ an’ ever’thing, you know what I’m sayin’? I didn’t see nothin’.”

Rhyme asked Sellitto, “The doer killed Barry because he was a witness—what’d
he
see?”

“He said he didn’t see anything. He gave me the names of the museum’s white, male employees in case it was one of them. There’re two but they checked out. One was taking his daughter to school at the time, the other was in the main office, people around him.”

“So, an opportunistic perp,” Sachs mused. “Saw her go inside and went after her.”

“A museum?” Rhyme asked. “Odd choice.”

Sellitto asked both girls, “Did you see anyone following you today?”

Lakeesha said, “We come down on the C train durin’ rush hour. Eighth Avenue line . . . be all crowded and nasty. Couldn’t see nobody weird. You?”

Geneva shook her head.

“How ’bout recently? Anybody hassling you? Hitting on you?”

Neither of them could think of anybody who’d seemed to be a threat. Embarrassed, Geneva said, “Not exactly a lot of stalkers coming round after me. They’d be looking for a little more booty, you know. Blingier.”

“Blingier?”

“Girl mean flashy,” translated Lakeesha, who obviously typified both booty and bling. She frowned and glanced at Geneva. “Why you gotta go there, girl? Don’t be talkin’ trash ’bout yo’self.”

Sachs looked at Rhyme, who was frowning. “What’re you thinking?”

“Something’s not right. Let’s go over the evidence while Geneva’s here. There might be some things that she can help explain.”

The girl shook her head. “That test?” She held up her watch.

“This won’t take long,” Rhyme said.

Geneva looked at her friend. “You can just make it to study period.”

“I’ma stay with you. I can’t be sittin’ for all them hours in class worryin’ ’bout you and ever’thing.”

Geneva gave a wry laugh. “No way, girl.” She asked Rhyme, “You don’t need her, do you?”

He glanced at Sachs, who shook her head. Sellitto jotted down her address and phone number. “We’ll call you if we have any more questions.”

“Take a pass, girl,” she said. “Just kick it an’ stay home.”

“I’ll see you at school,” Geneva said firmly. “You’ll be there?” Then lifted an eyebrow. “Word?”

Two loud snaps of gum. A sigh. “Word.” At the door the girl paused and turned back, said to Rhyme, “Yo, mister, how long fo’ you get outa that chair?”

No one said anything to fill the awkward moment. Awkward to everyone, Rhyme supposed, but himself.

“It’ll probably be a long time,” he said to her.

“Man, that suck.”

“Yeah,” Rhyme said. “Sometimes it does.”

She headed into the hall, toward the front door. They heard, “Damn, watch it, dude.” The outer door slammed.

Mel Cooper entered the room, looking back at the spot where he’d nearly been run down by a teenager who outweighed him by fifty pounds. “Okay,” he said to no one. “I’m not going to ask.” He pulled off his green windbreaker and nodded a greeting to everyone.

The slim, balding man had been working as a forensic scientist for an upstate New York police department some years ago when he’d politely but insistently told Rhyme, then head of NYPD forensics, that one of his analyses was wrong. Rhyme had far more respect for people who pointed out mistakes than for sycophants—provided, of course, they were correct, which Cooper had been. Rhyme had immediately started a campaign to get the man to New York City, a challenge at which he ultimately succeeded.

Cooper was a born scientist but even more important he was a born
forensic
scientist, which is very different. It’s often thought that “forensic” refers to crime scene work, but in fact the word means any aspect of debating issues in courts of law. To be a successful criminalist you have to translate raw facts into a form that’ll be useful to the prosecutor. It’s not enough, for instance, to simply determine the presence of nux vomica plant materials at a suspected crime scene—many of which are used for such innocuous medical purposes as treating ear inflammations. A true forensic scientist like Mel Cooper would know instantly that those same materials produce the deadly alkaloid poison strychnine.

Cooper had the trappings of a computer-game
nerd—he lived with his mother, still wore madras shirts with chinos and had a Woody Allen physique. But looks were deceiving. Cooper’s longtime girlfriend was a tall, gorgeous blonde. Together they would sail in unison across ballroom floors in dance competitions, in which they were often top champions. Recently they’d taken up skeet shooting and winemaking (to which Cooper was meticulously applying principles of chemistry and physics).

Rhyme briefed him on the case and they turned to the evidence. Rhyme said, “Let’s look at the pack.”

Donning latex gloves, Cooper glanced at Sachs, who pointed out the paper bag containing the rape pack. He opened it over a large piece of newsprint—to catch bits of ambient trace—and extracted the bag. It was a thin plastic sack. No store logo was printed on it, only a large yellow smiley face. The tech now opened the bag, then paused. He said, “I smell something . . . . ” A deep inhalation. “Flowery. What is that?” Cooper carried the bag to Rhyme and he smelled it. There was something familiar about the fragrance, but he couldn’t decide what. “Geneva?”

“Yes?”

“Is that what you smelled back in the library?”

She sniffed. “Yeah, that’s it.”

Sachs said, “Jasmine. I think it’s jasmine.”

“On the chart,” Rhyme announced.

“What chart?” Cooper asked, looking around.

In each of his cases, Rhyme made whiteboard charts of evidence found at crime scenes and profiles of the perps. “Start one,” he ordered. “And we need to call him something. Somebody give me a name.”

No one had any inspiration.

Rhyme said, “No time to be creative. October ninth today, right? Ten/nine. So he’ll be Unsub
one-oh-nine. Thom! We need your elegant handwriting.”

“No need to butter up,” the aide said as he stepped into the room with another coffeepot.

“Unsub one-oh-nine. Evidence and profile charts. He’s a white male. Height?”

Geneva said, “I don’t know. Everybody’s tall to me. Six feet, I’d guess.”

“You seem observant. We’ll go with that. Weight?”

“Not too big or small.” She fell quiet for a moment, troubled. “About Dr. Barry’s weight.”

Sellitto said, “Make it one eighty. Age?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face.”

“Voice?”

“I didn’t pay any attention. Average, I guess.”

Rhyme continued, “And light brown shoes, dark slacks, dark ski mask. A pack in a bag that smells of jasmine. He smells of it too. Soap or lotion maybe.”

“Pack?” Thom asked. “What do you mean?”

“Rape pack,” Geneva said. A glance at Rhyme. “You don’t need to sugarcoat anything for me. If that’s what you were doing.”

“Fair enough.” Rhyme nodded at her. “Let’s keep going.” He noticed Sachs’s face turn dark as she watched Cooper pick up the bag.

“What’s wrong?”

“The smiley face. On a rape pack bag. What kind of sick asshole’d do that?”

He was perplexed by her anger. “You realize that it’s
good
news he used that, don’t you, Sachs?”

“Good news?”

“It limits the number of stores we have to search for. Not as easy as a bag with an individuated logo on it but better than unprinted plastic.”

“I suppose,” she said, grimacing. “But still.”

Wearing latex gloves, Mel Cooper looked through
the bag. He took out the tarot card first. It showed a man hanging upside down by his foot from a scaffold. Beams of light radiated from his head. His face was oddly passive. He didn’t seem to be in pain. Above him was the Roman numeral for twelve, XII.

“Mean anything to you?” Rhyme asked Geneva.

She shook her head.

Cooper mused, “Some kind of ritual or cult thing?”

Sachs said, “Got a thought.” She pulled out her cell phone, placed a call. Rhyme deduced that the person she’d spoken to would be arriving soon. “I called a specialist—about the card.”

“Good.”

Cooper examined the card for prints and found none. Nor was any helpful trace revealed.

“What else was in the bag?” Rhyme asked.

“Okay,” the tech replied, “we’ve got a brand-new roll of duct tape, a box cutter, Trojan condoms. Nothing traceable. And . . . bingo!” Cooper held up a little slip of paper. “A receipt.”

Rhyme wheeled closer and looked it over. There was no store name; the slip had been printed by an adding machine. The ink was faded.

“Won’t tell us very much,” Pulaski said then seemed to think he shouldn’t be talking.

What was
he
doing here? Rhyme wondered.

Oh, that’s right. Helping Sellitto.

“Sorry to differ,” Rhyme said stridently. “Tells us a lot. He bought all the items in the pack at one store—you can compare the receipt to the price tags—well, along with something else he bought for five ninety-five that wasn’t in the bag. Maybe the tarot deck. So we’ve got a store that sells duct tape, box cutters and condoms. Got to be a variety store or variety drugstore. We know it’s not a chain because
there’s no logo on the bag or receipt. And it’s low-budget since it only has cash drawers, not computerized registers. Not to mention the cheap prices. And the sales tax tells us that the store is in . . . ” He squinted as he compared the subtotal on the receipt with the amount of tax. “Goddamnit, who knows math? What’s the percentage?”

Cooper said, “I’ve got a calculator.”

Geneva glanced at the receipt. “Eight point six two five.”

“How’d you do that?” Sachs asked.

“I just kind of can,” she said.

Rhyme repeated, “Eight point six two five. That’s the combined New York state and city sales tax. Puts the store in one of the five boroughs.” A glance at Pulaski. “So, Patrolman, still think it’s not very revealing?”

“Got it, sir.”

“I’m decommissioned. Sir isn’t necessary. All right. Print everything and let’s see what we can find.”

“Me?” the rookie asked uncertainly.

“No. Them.”

Cooper and Sachs used a variety of techniques to raise prints on the evidence: fluorescent powder, Ardrox spray and superglue fumes on slick surfaces, iodine vapor and ninhydrin on porous, some of which raised prints by themselves, while others displayed the results under an alternative light source.

Looking up at the team through his large orange goggles, the tech reported, “Prints on the receipt, prints on the merchandise. They’re all the same. Only, the thing is, they’re small, too small to be from a six-foot-tall man. A petite woman or a teenage girl, the clerk’s, I’d say. I see smudges too. I’d guess the unsub wiped his own off.”

While it was difficult to remove all the oils and residue left by human fingers, prints could be obliterated easily by a brief rubbing.

“Run what you’ve got through IAFIS.”

Cooper lifted copies of the prints and scanned them. Ten minutes later the FBI’s integrated automated fingerprint identification system had verified that the prints did not belong to anyone on file in the major databases, city, state and federal. Cooper also sent them to some of the local databases that weren’t linked to the FBI’s system.

“Shoes,” Rhyme announced.