The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

Anger too. Her eyes were black dots of fury. Then she looked at her watch, said to Rhyme, "Those tests I mentioned?"

"Well, let's just get some questions out of the way and then we'll see. Sachs?"

With the evidence now set out on the examining table and chain of custody cards completed, Sachs pulled up a chair beside Rhyme and interviewed the girls. She asked Geneva exactly what had happened. The girl explained she'd been looking up an article in an old magazine when somebody came into the library. She'd heard hesitant footsteps. Then a laugh. The voice of a man ending a conversation and the snap of a closing cell phone.

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."

Genev

a 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."