The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

brary that morning kept barging into her mind. Oh, she talked big in front of the police. But of course she was scared. The ski mask, the thonk as the club hit the mannequin, the slap of his feet after her. And now the other one too, the black man at the school yard with the gun.

Those memories killed sleep quickly.

She opened her eyes and lay awake, restless, thinking of another sleepless night, years ago: Seven-year-old Geneva had crawled out of bed and wandered into the living room of their apartment. There she'd turned on the TV and watched some stupid sitcom for ten minutes before her father stepped into the living room.

"What're you doing there, watching that?" He'd blinked at the light.

"I can't sleep."

"Read a book. Better for you."

"I don't feel like reading."

"All right. I will." He'd walked to the shelves. "You'll like this one. One of the best books ever."

As he sat in his armchair, which creaked and hissed under his weight, she glanced at the limp paperback but couldn't see the cover.

"You comfy?" he asked.

"Yeah." She was lying on the couch.

"Close your eyes."

"I'm not sleepy."

"Close your eyes so you'll picture what I'm reading."

"Okay. What's--?"

"Hush."

"Okay."

He'd started the book, To Kill a Mockingbird. For the next week, his reading it out loud to her at bedtime became a ritual.

Geneva Settle decided it was one of the best books ever--and even at that age, she'd read, or heard, a lot of books. She loved the main characters--the calm, strong, widower father; the brother and sister (Geneva'd always wanted a sibling). And the story itself, about courage in the face of hatred and stupidity, was spellbinding.

The memory of the Harper Lee book stayed with her. And funny, when she went back and reread it at age eleven, she got a lot more of it. Then at fourteen she understood even more. She'd read it again last year and wrote a paper on it for English. She got an A-plus.

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the books on the stack that sat beside the bedroom door at the moment, the in-case-of-fire-grab-this pile. It was a book that she tended to cart around in her book bag, even if she wasn't reading it. This was the book that she'd slipped Kara's good-luck-charm violet into.

Tonight, though, she picked another one from the stack. Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist. She lay back, rested the book on her chest and opened it to her flattened straw bookmark (she'd never turn down the pages in any book, even a paperback). She began to read. At first the creaks of the town house spooked her, and the image of the man in the mask came back, but soon she lost herself in the story. And not long after that, an hour or so, Geneva Settle's eyes grew heavy and she was finally lulled to sleep--not by a mother's good-night kiss, or a father's deep voice reciting a prayer, but by the litany of a stranger's beautiful words.

Chapter Nineteen

"Time for bed."

"What?" Rhyme asked, looking up from his computer screen.

"Bed," Thom repeated. He was a bit wary. Sometimes it was a battle to get Rhyme to stop working.

But the criminalist said, "Yep. Bed."

He was, in fact, exhausted--discouraged too. He was reading an email from Warden J. T. Beauchamp in Amarillo reporting that nobody in the prison recognized the computer composite of Unsub 109.

The criminalist dictated a brief thank-you and logged off. Then he said to Thom, "Just one call, then I'll go willingly."

"I'll straighten up some," the aide said. "Meet you upstairs."