The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

There were a half dozen tiny needles, about three-eighths of an inch long. Upon impact, the bullet would shatter and the pins would tumble in a V pattern throughout the body. Though the slugs were small they'd do far more damage than regular rounds. They weren't designed to stop an attacker; their purpose was solely to destroy internal tissue. And without the numbing effect of a large-caliber slug's impact, these shells would result in agonizing wounds.

Lon Sellitto shook his head, eyes fixed on the needles, and scratched the invisible stain on his face, probably thinking how close he'd come to being hit with one of these slugs. "Jesus," he muttered. His voice broke and he cleared his throat, laughed to cover it up and walked away from the table.

Curiously, the lieutenant's reaction was more troubled than the girl's. Geneva didn't seem to pay much attention to the details of her attacker's gruesome rounds. She glanced again at her watch and slouched impatiently.

Cooper scanned the largest pieces of the bullet and ran the information about the slugs through IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, which nearly a thousand police departments around the country subscribe to, as well as the FBI's DRUGFIRE system. These huge databases can match a slug, fragments or brass casing to bullets or weapons on file. A gun found on a suspect today, for instance, can quickly be matched to a bullet recovered from a victim five years ago.

The results on these slugs, though, came back negative. The needles themselves appeared to have been broken off the end of sewing needles, the sort you could buy anywhere. Untraceable.

"Never easy, is it?" Cooper muttered. At Rhyme's direction, he also searched for registered owners of Mini-Masters, and the smaller Black Widows, in .22 magnum, and came back with nearly a thousand owners, none of whom had criminal records. Stores aren't required by law to keep records of who buys ammunition and therefore they never did. For the time being, the weapon was a dead end.

"Pulaski?" Rhyme shouted. "What's with the bug?"

"The exoskeleton--is that what you called it? That's what you mean, sir?"

"Right, right, right. What about it?"

"No matches yet. What exactly is an exoskeleton?"

Rhyme didn't answer. He glanced at the screen and saw that the young man was only a small way into the Hemiptera order of insects. He had a long way to go. "Keep at it."

The GC/MS computer beeped; it had completed its analysis of the white blobs. On the screen was a peak-and-valley chart, below which was a block of text.

Cooper leaned forward and said, "We've got curcumin, demethoxycurcumin, bisdemethoxycurcumin, volatile oil, amino acids, lysine and tryptophan, theronine and isoleucine, chloride, various other trace proteins and large proportion of starches, oils, triglycerides, sodium, polysaccharides . . . Never seen that combination."

The GC/MS was miraculous in isolating and identifying substances, but not necessarily so great in telling you what they added up to. Rhyme was often able to deduce common substances, like gasoline or explosives, just from a list of their ingredients. But these were new to him. He cocked his head and began to categorize those substances in the list that, as a scientist, he knew would logically be found together and which would not. "The curcumin, its compounds and the polysaccharides obviously fit together."

"Obviously," was the wry response of Amelia Sachs, who used to ditch science class in high school to go drag racing.

"We'll call that Substance One. Then the amino acids, other proteins, starches and triglycerides--they're often found together, too. We'll call them Substance Two. The chloride--"

"Poison, right?" asked Pulaski.

"--and sodium," muttered Rhyme, "are most likely salt." A glance at the rookie. "Dangerous only in the case of people with high blood pressure. Or if you're a garden slug."

The kid turned back to the insect database.

"So--with the amino acids and starches and oils--I'm thinking Substance Two is a food, salty food. Go online, Mel, and find out what the hell curcumin is in."

Cooper did. "You're right. It's a vegetable dye used in food products. Usually found in connection with those other items in Substance One. Volatile oils too."

"What sort of food products?"

"Hundreds of them."

"How 'bout some for-instances."

Cooper began to read from a lengthy list. But Rhyme interrupted. "Hold on. Is popcorn on the list?"

"Let's see . . . yeah, it is."

Rhyme turned and called to Pulaski, "You can stop."

"Stop?"

"It's not an exoskeleton. It's a shell from a popcorn kernel. Salt and oil and popcorn. Should've figured that one out up front, damnit." It was a cheerful expletive nonetheless. "On the chart, Thom. Our boy likes junk food."

"Should I write that?"