The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

"Good."

The "they" were the intended victims of the poison left in the Crown Victoria, Roland Bell and Geneva Settle. They'd come very close to dying. But, as they'd prepared to rush out of the great-aunt's apartment to the car, Bell had realized that something about the crime scene of Pulaski's assault seemed odd. Barbe Lynch had found the rookie holding his weapon. But this unsub was too smart to leave a gun in the hand of a downed cop, even if he was unconscious. No, he'd at least pitch it away, if he didn't want to take it with him. Bell had concluded that somehow the unsub himself had fired the shot and left the gun behind to make them think that the rookie had fired. The purpose? To draw the officers away from the front of the apartment.

And why? The answer was obvious: so that they'd leave the cars unguarded.

The Crown Vic had been unlocked, which meant the unsub might have slipped an explosive device inside. So he'd taken the keys to the locked Chevy that Martinez and Lynch had driven here and used that vehicle to speed Geneva out of danger, warning everyone to stay clear of the unmarked Ford until the Bomb Squad had a chance to go over it. Using fiberoptic cameras they searched under and inside the Crown Vic and found the device under the driver's seat.

Sachs now ran the scenes: the car, the approach to it and the alley where Pulaski had been attacked. She didn't find much other than prints of Bass walking shoes, which confirmed the attacker had been Unsub 109, and another device, a homemade one: a bullet from Pulaski's service automatic had been rubber-banded to a lit cigarette. The unsub had left it burning in the alley and snuck around toward the front of the building. When it went off, the "gunshot" had drawn the officers to the back, giving him a chance to plant the device in Bell's car.

Damn, that's slick, she thought with dark admiration.

There was no sign that his partner, the black man in the combat jacket, had been--or still was--nearby.

Donning the mask again, she carefully examined the glass parts of the poison device itself, but they yielded no prints or other clues, which surprised nobody. Maybe the cyanide or acid would tell them something. Discouraged, she reported her results to Rhyme.

He asked, "And what did you search?"

"Well, the car and the alleyway around Pulaski. And then the entrance and exit routes into and out of the alley, the street where he approached the Crown Vic--both directions."

Silence for a moment, as Rhyme considered this.

She felt uneasy. Was she missing something? "What're you thinking, Rhyme?"

"You searched by the book, Sachs. Those were the right places. But did you take in the totality of the scene?"

"Chapter Two of your book."

"Good. At least somebody's read it. But did you do what I say?"

Although time was always of the essence when searching a crime scene, one of the practices Rhyme insisted on was taking a few moments to get a sense of the entire scene in light of the particular crime. The example he cited in his forensic science textbook was an actual murder in Greenwich Village. The primary crime scene was where the strangled victim was found, his apartment. The secondary was the fire escape by which the killer had gotten away. It was the third scene, though, an unlikely one, at which Rhyme had found the matches bearing the killer's fingerprints: a gay bar three blocks away. No one would've thought to search the bar, except that Rhyme found some gay porno tapes in the victim's apartment; a canvass of the nearest gay bar turned up a bartender who identified the victim and recalled him sharing a drink with a man earlier that night. The lab raised latents from the book of matches resting on the bar near where the two men had sat; the prints led them to the murderer.

"Let's keep thinking, Sachs. He sets up this plan--improvised but elaborate--to distract our people and get the device into a car. That meant he had to know where all the players were, what they were doing and how he could make enough time to set the device. Which tells us what?"

Sachs was already scanning the street. "He was watching."

"Yes, indeed, Sachs. Good. And where might he have been doing that from?"

"Across the street'd have the best visibility. But there're dozens of buildings he could've been in. I have no idea which one."

"True. But Harlem's a neighborhood, right?"

"I . . . "

"Understand what I'm saying?"

"Not exactly."

"Families, Sachs. Families live there, extended families living together, not yuppie singles. A home invasion wouldn't go unnoticed. Neither would somebody skulking about in lobbies or alleys. Good word, isn't that? Skulking. Says it all."

"Your point, Rhyme?" His good mood had returned but she was irritated that he was more interested in the puzzle of the case than he was about, say, Pulaski's chances for recovery or that Roland Bell and Geneva Settle had nearly been killed.

"Not an apartment. Not a rooftop--Roland's people always look there. There'll be someplace else he was watching from, Sachs. Where do you think it might be?"

Scanning the street again . . . "There's a billboard on an abandoned building. It's full of graffiti and handbills--real busy, you know, hard to spot anybody looking out from behind it. I'm going to see."

Checking carefully for signs that the unsub was nearby, and finding none, she crossed the street and walked to the back of the old building--a burnt-out store, it seemed. Climbing through the back window, she saw that the floor was dusty--the perfect surface for footprints and, sure enough, she spotted Unsub 109's Bass walker shoes right away. Still, she slipped rubber bands around the booties of the Tyvek overalls--a trick Rhyme invented to make certain that an officer exploring the crime scene didn't confuse his or her own prints with those of the suspect. The detective started into the room, her Glock in hand.

Following the unsub's prints to the front, she paused from time to time, listening for noises. Sachs heard a skitter or two but, no stranger to the sound track of seamier New York, she knew immediately that the intruder was a rat.