The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

*

"So," Rhyme said to Cooper as both men stared at the computer screen. "I'm betting a hundred bucks you're going to find more pure carbon, just like what was on the map hidden under his pillow on Elizabeth Street. You want to put some money on it? Any takers?"

"Too late," said the tech, as the analyzer beeped and the trace-elements analysis from the paper popped up in front of them. "Not that I would've bet anyway." He shoved his glasses higher on his nose and said, "And, yep, carbon. One hundred percent."

Carbon. Which could be found in charcoal or ash or a number of other substances.

But which could also be diamond dust.

"What's the business world's latest abomination of the English language?" the criminalist asked, his mood lighthearted once again. "We were one-eighty on this one."

Oh, they hadn't been off base about Boyd's being the perp or the fact he'd been hired to kill Geneva. No, it was the motive they'd blown completely. Everything they'd speculated about the early civil rights movement, about the present-day implications of Charles Singleton's setup in the Freedmen's Trust robbery, about the Fourteenth Amendment conspiracy . . . they'd been totally wrong.

Geneva Settle had been targeted to die simply because she'd seen something she shouldn't have: a jewelry robbery being planned.

The letter Amelia had found in his safe house contained diagrams of various buildings in Midtown, including the African-American museum. The note read: A black girl, fifth floor in this window, 2 October, about 0830. She saw my delivery van when he was parked in a alley behind the Jewelry echange. Saw enough to guess the plans of mine. Kill her.

The library window near the microfiche reader where Geneva was attacked was circled on the diagram.

In addition to the misspelling, the language of the note was unusual, which, to a criminalist, was good; it's far easier to trace the unusual than the common. Rhyme had Cooper send a copy to Parker Kincaid, a former FBI document examiner outside of D.C., currently in private practice. Like Rhyme, Kincaid was sometimes recruited by his old employer and other law enforcement agencies to consult in cases involving documents and handwriting. Kincaid's reply email said he'd get back to them as soon as he could.

As she looked over the letter Amelia Sachs shook her head angrily. She recounted the incident of the armed man she and Pulaski had seen outside the museum yesterday--the one who turned out to be a security guard, who'd told them about the valuable contents of the exchange, the multimillion-dollar shipments from Amsterdam and Jerusalem every day.

"Should've mentioned that," she said, shaking her head.

But who could have guessed that Thompson Boyd had been hired to kill Geneva because she'd looked out the window at the wrong time?

"But why steal the microfiche?" Sellitto asked.

"To lead us off, of course. Which it did pretty damn well." Rhyme sighed. "Here we were running around, thinking of constitutional law conspiracies. Boyd probably had no clue what Geneva was reading." He turned to the girl, who sat nearby cradling a cup of hot chocolate. "Someone, whoever wrote that note, saw you from the street. He or Boyd contacted the librarian to find out who you were and when you'd be back, so Boyd could be there, waiting for you. Dr. Barry was killed because he could connect you to them . . . . Now, think back to a week ago. You looked out the window at eight-thirty and saw a van and somebody in the alley. Do you remember what you saw?"

The girl squinted and looked down. "I don't know. I looked out the window a bunch. When I get tired of reading I walk around some, you know. I can't remember anything specific."

For ten minutes Sachs talked with Geneva, trying to coax her recollections into coming up with an image. But to recall a specific person and a delivery van on the busy streets of Midtown from a glance a week ago was too much for the girl's memory.

Rhyme called the director of the American Jewelry Exchange and told him what they'd learned. Asked if he had any idea who might be trying a heist, the man replied, "Fuck, no clue. It happens more than you'd think, though."

"We found traces of pure carbon in some of the evidence. Diamond dust, we're thinking."

"Oh, that'd mean they'd checked the alley near the loading dock probably. Nobody from outside gets near the cutting rooms, but, hey, you polish product, you get dust. It ends up in the vacuum cleaner bags and on everything we throw out."

The man chuckled, not much troubled by the news of the impending burglary. "I tell you, though, whoever's going after us's got some balls. We got the best fucking security in the city. Everybody thinks it's like on TV. We have guys come in to buy their girlfriends rings and they look around and ask where's those invisible beams that you wear goggles to see, you know? Well, the answer is they don't make any fucking invisible-beam machines. 'Cause if you can walk around the beams when you're wearing special goggles, then the bad guys are going to buy special fucking goggles and walk around them, right? Real alarms aren't like that. If a fly farts in our vault, the alarm goes off. And, fact is, the system's so tight a fly can't even get inside."

"I should have known," Lincoln Rhyme snapped after they hung up. "Look at the chart! Look at what we found in the first safe house." He nodded toward the reference to the map that had been found on Elizabeth Street. It showed only a basic outline of the library where Geneva was attacked. The jewelry exchange across the street was drawn in much greater detail, as were the nearby alleys, doors and loading docks--entrance and exit routes to and from the exchange, not the museum.

Two detectives from downtown had interrogated Boyd to find out the identity of the person behind the heist, the one who'd hired him, but he was stonewalling.

Sellitto then checked NYPD Larceny for suspicious activity reports in the diamo

nd district but there were no particular leads that seemed relevant. Fred Dellray took time off from investigating the rumors of the potential terrorist bombings to look through the FBI's files about any federal investigations involving jewelry thefts. Since larceny isn't a federal crime, there weren't many cases, but several of them--mostly involving money laundering in the New York area--were active and he promised he'd bring the reports over right away.

They now turned to the evidence from Boyd's safe house and residence, in hopes of finding the mastermind of the theft. They examined the guns, the chemicals, the tools and the rest of the items, but there was nothing that they hadn't found before: more bits of orange paint, acid stains and crumbs of falafel and smears of yogurt, Boyd's favorite meal, it seemed. They ran the serial numbers on the money and came up with nothing from Treasury, and none of the bills yielded any fingerprints. To withdraw this much money from an account was risky for the man who hired Boyd because any such large transactions have to be reported under money laundering rules. But a fast check of recent large cash withdrawals from area banks came up with no leads. This was curious, Rhyme reflected, though he concluded that the perp had probably withdrawn small amounts of the cash over time for Boyd's fee.

The unsub was one of the few people on earth, it seemed, who didn't own a cell phone, or, if he did, his was an anonymous prepaid unit--there were no billing records--and he'd managed to dispose of it before he was caught. A look at Jeanne Starke's home phone bill yielded nothing suspicious except a half-dozen calls to payphones in Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn, but there was no regular pattern to the locations.

Sellitto's heroics had, however, yielded some good evidence: fingerprints on the dynamite and the guts of the explosive transistor radio. The FBI's IAFIS and local print databases resulted in a name: Jon Earle Wilson. He'd done time in Ohio and New Jersey for an assortment of crimes, including arson, bombmaking and insurance fraud. But he'd fallen off the radar of the local authorities, Cooper reported. LKA was Brooklyn but that was a vacant lot.

"I don't want the last known address. I want the presently known. Get the feds on it too."