The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

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.

The first one hit the thigh of a woman standing on the sidewalk.