The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

"Mostly," he muttered, uneasy with the gratitude, "it was for our convenience. I can't very well go calling up Child Welfare and tracking you down in foster homes every time we have a question about the case."

Geneva laughed. "Front all you want," she said. "Thanks anyway." Then she huddled with Bell and told him what books, clothes and other items she needed from the basement on 118th Street. The detective said he'd also get back from the phony uncle whatever she'd paid him for the scam.

"He won't give it back," she said. "You don't know him."

Bell smiled and said amiably, "Oh, he'll give it back." This, from the man with two guns.

Geneva called Lakeesha and told her girlfriend that she'd be staying at Rhyme's, then, hanging up, she followed Thom upstairs to the guest room.

Sellitto asked, "What if the counselor finds out, Linc?"

"Finds out what?"

"Well, how 'bout that you lied about Geneva's parents and made up some department procedures? What the hell was it? The DUI?"

"IOD," Bell reminded.

"And what's she going to do?" Rhyme growled. "Make me stay after school?" He gave an abrupt nod at the evidence board. "Now can we get back to work? There is a killer out there. And he's got a partner. And somebody hired them. Recall that? I'd like to figure out who the hell they are sometime this decade."

Sachs walked to the table and began organizing the folders and copies of materials that William Ashberry had let her borrow from the foundation library--the "small crime scene." She said, "This's mostly about Gallows Heights--maps, drawings, articles. Some things on Potters' Field."

She handed the documents to Cooper one by one. He taped up several drawings and maps of Gallows Heights, which Rhyme stared at intently as Sachs told them what she'd learned about the neighborhood. She then walked to the drawing and touched a two-story comm

ercial building. "Potters' Field was right about here. West Eightieth Street." She skimmed some of the documents. "Seems like it was pretty disreputable, a lot of crooks hung out there, people like Jim Fisk and Boss Tweed and politicians connected to the Tammany Hall machine."

"See how valuable small crime scenes can be, Sachs? You're a wealth of helpful information."

She gave him a minor scowl, then picked up a photocopy. "This's an article about the fire. It says that the night Potters' Field burned down, witnesses heard an explosion in the basement and then, almost immediately, the place was engulfed. Arson was suspected but nobody was ever arrested. No fatalities."

"What did Charles go there for?" Rhyme mused aloud. "What did he mean by 'justice'? And what's 'forever hidden beneath clay and soil'?"

Was it a clue, a bit of evidence, a scrap of document that could answer the question of who wanted to murder Geneva Settle?

Sellitto shook his head. "Too bad it was a hundred and forty years ago. Whatever, it's gone now. We'll never know."

Rhyme looked at Sachs. She caught his eye. She smiled.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"Oh, you're lucky in one way," explained David Yu, a spiky-haired young engineer who worked for the city.

"We could use some," Amelia Sachs said. "Luck, I mean."

They were standing on West Eightieth Street, about a half block east of Riverside Park, looking up at a three-story brownstone. A crime scene bus waited nearby, as did another friend of Sachs's, a policewoman named Gail Davis, from the K9 unit, and her dog Vegas. Most police dogs were German shepherds, Malinois and--for bomb detail--Labrador retrievers. Vegas, though, was a briard, a French breed with a long history of military service; these dogs are known for having keen noses and an uncanny ability to sense threats to livestock and humans. Rhyme and Sachs had thought that running a 140-year-old crime scene might benefit from some old-fashioned search methods, in addition to the high-tech systems that would be employed.

The engineer, Yu, nodded at the building that had been constructed on the site where Potters' Field tavern had burned. The date on the cornerstone read 1879. "To build a tenement like this back then they wouldn't have excavated and laid a slab. They'd dig a perimeter foundation, pour concrete and set the walls. That was the load-bearing part. The basement floor would have been dirt. But building codes changed. They would've put a concrete floor in sometime early in this century. Again, though, it wouldn't be structural. It'd be for health and safety. So the contractors wouldn't've excavated for that either."

"So the lucky part is that whatever was under there in the eighteen sixties might still be there," Sachs said.

Forever hidden . . .

"Right."

"And the unlucky part is that it's under concrete."

"Pretty much."

"A foot deep?"