Through the speakerphone, Pepper was explaining, “Boyd grew up round these parts. Father was a wildcatter -”
“Oil?”
“Field hand, yes, sir. Mother stayed at home. No other kids. Normal childhood, sounded like. Pretty nice, to hear tell. Always talkin’ ’bout his family, loved ’em. Did a lot for his mother, who lost a arm or leg or whatnot in a twister. Always looking out for her. Like one time, I heard, this kid on the street made fun of her, and Boyd followed him and threatened to slip a sidewinder into the boy’s bed some night if he didn’t apologize.
“Anyway after high school and a year’r two of college he went to work at his daddy’s company for a spell, till they had a string of layoffs. He got fired. His daddy too. Times was bad and he just couldn’t get work round here, and so he moved outa the state. Don’t know where. Got hisself a job at some prison. Started as a block guard. Then there was some problem – their executions officer went sick, I think – and there was nobody to do the job so Boyd done it. The burn went so good -”
“The what?”
“Sorry. The electrocution went so good they give him the job. He stayed for a while, but kept on movin’ from state to state, ’cause he was in demand. Became an expert at executions. He knew chairs -”
“Electric chairs?”
“Like our Ol’ Sparky down here, yes, sir. The famous one. And he knew gas too, was a expert at riggin’ the chamber. Could also tie a hangman’s noose and not many people in the U.S. ’re licensed for that line of work, lemme tell you. The ECO job opened up here and he jumped at it. We’d switched to lethal injections, like most other places, and he became a whiz at them too. Even read up on ’em so he could answer the protesters. There’s some people claim the chemicals’re painful. I myself think that’s the whale people and Democrats, who don’t bother to know the facts. It’s hogwash. I mean, we had these -”
“About Boyd?” asked impatient Lincoln Rhyme.
“Yes, sir, sorry. So he’s back here and things go fine for a spell. Nobody really paid him much mind. He was just kinda invisible. ‘Average Joe’ was his nickname. But somethin’ happened over time. Somethin’ changed. After a time he started to go strange.”
“How so?”
“The more executions he ran, the crazier he got. Kind of blanker and blanker. That make sense? Like he wasn’t quite all there. Give you a for-instance: Told you he and his folks was real tight, got along great. What happens but they get themselves killed in this car accident, his aunt too, and Boyd, he didn’t blink. Hell, he didn’t even go to the funeral. You would’ve thought he was in shock, but it wasn’t that way. He just didn’t seem to care. He went to his normal shift and, when ever’body heard, they asked what he was doin’ there. It was two days till the next execution. He coulda took time off. But he didn’t want to. He said he’d go out to their graves later. Don’t know if he ever did.
“See, it was like he kept gettin’ closer and closer to the prisoners – too close, a lot of folk thought. You don’t do that. Ain’t healthy. He stopped hangin’ out with other guards and spent his time with the condemned. He called ’em ‘my people.’ Word is that he one time even sat down in our old electric chair itself, which is in this sort of museum. Just to see what it was like. Fell asleep. Imagine that.
“Somebody asked Boyd about it, how’d it feel, bein’ in a electric chair. He said it didn’t feel like nothin’. It just felt ‘kinda numb.’ He said that a lot toward the end. He felt numb.”
“You said his parents were killed? Did he move into their house?”
“Think he did.”
“Is it still there?”
The Texans were on a speakerphone too and J. T. Beauchamp called out, “I’ll find that out, sir.” He posed a question to somebody. “Should see in a minute or two, Mr. Rhyme.”
“And could you find out about relatives in the area?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sachs asked, “You recall he whistled a lot, Officer Pepper?”
“Yes’m. And he was right good at it. Sometimes he’d give the condemned a song or two to send ’em off.”
“What about his eyes?”
“That too,” Pepper said. “Thompson had hisself bad eyes. The story is he was runnin’ a electrocution – wasn’t here – and somethin’ went bad. Happened sometimes, when you’d use the chair. A fire started -”
“The man being executed?” Sachs asked, wincing.
“That’s right, ma’am. Caught hisself on fire. He mighta been dead already, or unconscious. Nobody knows. He was still movin’ round but they always do that. So Thompson runs in with a riot gun, gonna shoot the poor fella, put him out of his misery. Now, that’s not part of protocol, I’ll tell you. It’s murder to kill the condemned before they die under the writ of execution. But Boyd was gonna do it anyway. Couldn’t let one of ‘his people’ die like that. But the fire spread. Insulation on the wire or some plastic or somethin’ caught and the fumes knocked Boyd out. He was blinded for a day or two.”
“The inmate?” Sachs asked.
“Thompson didn’t hafta shoot him. The juice did the trick.”
“And he left five years ago?” Rhyme asked.
“’Bout that,” Pepper drawled. “Quit. Think he went up to some place, some prison, in the Midwest. Never heard nothin’ ’bout him after that.”
Midwest – maybe Ohio. Where the other murder that fit the profile took place. “Call somebody at Ohio Corrections,” Rhyme whispered to Cooper, who nodded and grabbed another phone.
“What about Charlie Tucker, the guard who was killed? Boyd left around the time of the murder?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“There bad blood between them?”
Pepper said, “Charlie worked under Thompson for a year ’fore he retired. Only Charlie was what we’d call a Bible thumper, a hard-shell Baptist. He’d lay chapter and verse on pretty thick to the condemned sometimes, tell ’em they was goin’ to hell, and so on. Thompson didn’t hold with that.”
“So maybe Boyd killed him to pay him back for making prisoners’ lives miserable.”
My people…
“Could’ve been.”
“What about the picture we sent? Was that Boyd?”
“J. T. just showed it to me,” Pepper said. “And, yeah, it could be him. Though he was bigger, fatter, I mean, back then. And he had a shaved head and goatee – lotta us did that, tryin’ to look as mean as the prisoners.”
“’Sides,” the warden said, “we were looking for inmates, not guards.”
Which was my mistake, Rhyme thought angrily.
“Well, damn.” The voice of the warden again.
“What’s that, J. T.?”
“My gal went to pull Boyd’s personnel file. And -”
“It’s missing.”
“Sure is.”
“So he stole his record to cover up any connection to Charlie Tucker’s murder,” Sellitto said.
“I’d reckon,” J. T. Beauchamp said.
Rhyme shook his head. “And he was worried about fingerprints because he’d been printed as a state employee, not a criminal.”
“Hold on,” the warden drawled. A woman was speaking to him. He came back on the speakerphone. “We just heard from a fella at county records. Boyd sold the family house five years ago. Didn’t buy anything else in the state. At least not under his name. Must’ve just took the cash and disappeared… And nobody knows about any other relations of his.”
“What’s his full name?” Rhyme asked.
Pepper said, “Think his middle initial was G, but I don’t know what it stood for.” Then he added, “One thing I’ll say for him, Thompson Boyd knew what he was doin’. He knew the EP backward and forward.”
“EP?”
“The Execution Protocol. It’s a big book we have, givin’ all the details of how to execute somebody. He made ever’body who worked the detail memorize it, and made ’em walk around recitin’ to themselves, ‘I have to do it by the book, I have to do it by the book.’ Thompson always said you can’t never cut corners when it comes to death.”
Mel Cooper hung up the phone.
“Ohio?” Rhyme asked.
The tech nodded. “Keegan Falls Maximum Security. Boyd only worked there for about a year. The warden remembers him because of the eye problem, and he did whistle. He said Boyd was a problem from the beginning. Got into fights with guards about the treatment of prisoners, and spent a lot of time socializing with inmates, which was against the rules. The warden thinks he was making contacts to use later to get jobs as a hitman.”
“Like hooking up with the man who hired him to kill that witness there.”
“Could be.”
“And that employment file? Stolen?”
“Missing, yep. Nobody knows where he lived or anything else about him. Fell off the radar.”
Average Joe…
“Well, he’s not Texas’s or Ohio’s problem anymore. He’s ours. Do the full search.”
“Right.”
Cooper ran the standard search – deeds, Department of Motor Vehicles, hotels, traffic tickets, taxes…everything. In fifteen minutes all the results were in. There were several listings of Thompson G. Boyd and one of T. G. Boyd. But their ages and descriptions weren’t close to the suspect’s. The tech also tried variant spellings of those names and had the same results.
“AKAs?” Rhyme asked. Most professional perps, particularly contract killers, used also-known-as names. The ones they picked were usually like passwords for computers and ATMs – they were some variation on a name that meant something to the perp. When you found out what they were, you could kick yourself for the simplicity of the choice. But guessing them was usually impossible. Still, they tried: They transposed the given- and surnames (“Thompson” was, of course, more common as a last name). Cooper even tried an anagram generator to rearrange the letters in “Thompson Boyd,” but came up with no hits in the databases.
Nothing, Rhyme thought, inflamed with frustration. We know his name, we know what he looks like, we know he’s in town…
But we can’t goddamn find him.
Sachs squinted at the chart, cocked her head. She said, “Billy Todd Hammil.”
“Who?” Rhyme demanded.
“The name he used to rent the safe house on Elizabeth Street.”
“What about it?”
She flipped through a number of sheets of paper. She looked up. “Died six years ago.”
“Does it say where?”
“Nope. But I’m betting Texas.”
Sachs called the prison once more and asked about Hammil. A moment later she hung up the phone and nodded. “That’s it. Killed a clerk in a convenience store twelve years ago. Boyd supervised his execution. Seems like he’s got this weird connection with the people he killed. His M.O. comes from the days when he was an executioner. Why not his identities too?”
Rhyme didn’t know, or care, about “weird connections,” but whatever Boyd’s motive, there was some logic to Sachs’s suggestion. He barked, “Get the list of everybody he’s executed and match it to DMV here. Try Texas first then we’ll move on to other states.”
J. T. Beauchamp sent them a list of seventy-nine prisoners Thompson Boyd had put to death as an execution officer in Texas.
“That many?” Sachs asked, frowning. Though Sachs would never hesitate to shoot to kill when it came to saving lives, Rhyme knew she had some doubts about the death penalty, because it was often meted out after trials involving circumstantial or faulty, and sometimes even intentionally altered, evidence.
Rhyme thought of the other implication of the number of executions: that somewhere along the line of nearly eighty executions, Thompson Boyd had lost any distinction between life and death.
What happens but they get themselves killed in this car accident…and Boyd, he didn’t blink. Hell, he didn’t even go to the funeral.
Cooper matched the names of the male prisoners executed to government records.
Nothing.
“Shit,” Rhyme snapped. “We’ll have to find out the other states he worked and who he executed there. It’ll take forever.” Then a thought came to him. “Hold on. Women.”
“What?” Sachs asked.
“Try the women he’s executed. Variations on their names.”
Cooper took this, the smaller, list and ran the names, and all possible spellings, through the DMV computer.
“Okay, may have something here,” the tech said excitedly. “Eight years ago a woman named Randi Rae Silling – a prostitute – was executed in Amarillo for robbing and killing two of her johns. New York DMV’s got one too, same last name, but it’s a male, Randy with a Y and middle name R-A-Y. Right age and right description. Address in Queens – Astoria. Got a blue Buick Century, three years old.”
Rhyme ordered, “Have somebody in plain clothes take the composite picture around to some neighbors.”
Cooper called the deputy inspector – the head of the local precinct, the 114. This house covered Astoria, a largely Greek neighborhood. He explained about the case and then emailed him the picture of Boyd. The dep inspector said he’d send some street-clothes officers out to subtly canvass tenants in Randy Silling’s apartment.
For a tense half hour – with no word from the canvass team in Queens – Cooper, Sachs and Sellitto contacted public records offices in Texas, Ohio and New York, looking for any information they could find about Boyd or Hammil or Silling.
Nothing.
Finally they received a call back from the inspector at the 114. “Captain?” the man asked. Many senior officers still referred to Rhyme by his old title.
“Go ahead.”
“We’ve had two people confirm that your man lives at the DMV address,” the man said. “What are you thinking of in terms of prioritizing our approaches, sir?”
Brass, Rhyme sighed. He dispensed with any caustic responses to the bureaucrat-talk and settled for a slightly bemused, “Let’s go nail his ass.”
A dozen Emergency Services Unit tactical officers were moving into position behind Thompson Boyd’s six-story apartment building on Fourteenth Street in Astoria, Queens.
Sachs, Sellitto and Bo Haumann were standing at the hastily set up command post behind an unmarked ESU van.
“We’re here, Rhyme,” Sachs whispered into the stalk mike.
“But is he there?” the criminalist asked impatiently.
“We’ve got S and S in position… Hold on. Somebody’s reporting.”
A Search and Surveillance Unit officer came up to them.
“Get a look inside?” asked Haumann.
“Negative, sir. He’s masked the front windows.”
The S and S man in Team One explained he’d gotten as close to the apartment’s front windows as he dared; the second team was around back. The officer now added, “I could hear sounds, voices, water running. Children, it sounded like.”
“Kids, hell,” Haumann muttered.
“Might’ve been TV or radio. I just can’t tell.”
Haumann nodded. “CP to S and S Two. Report.”
“S and S Two. Little crack beside the shade – not much, though. Nobody in the back bedroom I can see. But it’s a narrow angle. Lights on in the front. Hear voices, I think. Music, K.”
“See kids’ toys, anything?”
“Negative. But I’ve only got a ten-degree view of the bedroom. That’s all I can see, K.”
“Movement?”
“Negative, K.”
“Roger. Infrared?” Infrared detectors can locate the position of animals, humans or other sources of heat inside a building.
A third S and S technician was playing a monitor over the apartment. “I’m getting heat indications, but they’re too weak to pinpoint the source, K.”
“Sounds, K?”
“Creaks and moans. Could be the structure settling, utilities, HVAC. Or could be him walking around or shifting in a chair. Assume he’s there but I can’t tell you where. He’s really got the place blacked out, K.”
“Okay, S and S, keep monitoring. Out.”
Sachs said into her mike, “Rhyme, you get any of that?”
“And how could I get it?” came his irritated voice.
“They think there’s activity in his apartment.”
“Last thing we need is a firefight,” he muttered. A tactical confrontation was one of the most effective ways to destroy trace and other clues at a crime scene. “We’ve got to secure as much evidence as we can – it could be our only chance to find out who hired him and who his partner is.”
Haumann looked over the apartment once again. He didn’t seem pleased. And Sachs – who was half tactical officer at heart – could understand why. It would be a difficult take-down, requiring many officers. The unsub had two front, three back and six side windows. Boyd could easily leap through any one of them and try to escape. There was also a building next door, only four feet away – an easy jump from the roof if he made his way to the top. He could also have cover from behind the facade on the crown of the building and could target anyone below. Across the street, facing the killer’s apartment, were other houses. If it came to a fight, a stray bullet could easily injure or kill a bystander. Boyd could also intentionally pepper those buildings with gunfire, hoping to inflict random injuries. Sachs was recalling his practice of targeting innocents solely for diversion. There was no reason to think he’d handle this situation any differently. They’d have to clear all these residences before the assault.
Haumann radioed, “We just got somebody into the hallway. There’re no cameras like Boyd had on Elizabeth Street. He won’t know we’re coming.” The tactical cop added darkly, though, “Unless he’s got some other way of telling. Which he very well may, knowing this prick.”
Sachs heard a hiss of breath next to her and turned. Decked out in body armor and absently touching the grip of his service pistol, snug in its holster, Lon Sellitto was examining the apartment. He too looked troubled. But Sachs knew immediately that it wasn’t the difficulty of a residential takedown that was bothering him. She could see how torn he was. As a senior investigating detective, there was no reason for him to be on an entry team – in fact, given his paunchy physique and rudimentary weapons skills, there was every reason for him not to do a kick-in.
But logic had nothing to do with the real reason for his being here. Seeing his hand rise once more compulsively to his cheek and worry the phantom bloodstain, and knowing that he was reliving the accidental discharge of his weapon yesterday, and Dr. Barry’s being shot to death right in front of him, Sachs understood: This was Lon Sellitto’s knuckle time.
The expression had come from her father, who’d done plenty of courageous things on the force but had probably been the bravest during his last fight, against the cancer that ended his life, though hardly defeated him. His girl was a cop by then and he’d taken to giving her advice about the job. Once, he’d told her that sometimes she’d find herself in situations where there was nothing to do but stand up to a risk or challenge all by yourself. “I call it ‘knuckle time,’ Amie. Something you’ve got to muscle your way through. The fight might be against a perp, it might be against a partner. It might even be against the whole NYPD.”
Sometimes, he’d said, the hardest battle was within your own soul.
Sellitto knew what to do. He had to be the first man through the door.
But after the incident at the museum yesterday he was paralyzed with fear at the thought.
Knuckle time…Would he stand up or not?
Haumann now divided his entry officers into three teams and sent several others to the street corners to halt traffic and another one into the shadows beside the building’s front door to intercept anybody who happened to be entering the building – and to be prepared to take down Boyd himself if he happened to wander outside on an errand, unsuspecting. One officer climbed up to the roof. Several more ESU cops secured the apartments next door to Boyd’s – in case he tried to escape the way he’d done on Elizabeth Street.
Haumann then glanced at Sachs. “You’re going in with us?”
“Yup,” she replied. “Somebody from Crime Scene’s got to secure the place. We still don’t know who hired this SOB and we’ve got to find out.”
“Which team you want to be on?”
“With whoever’s going through the front door,” she said.
“That’d be Jenkins’s.”
“Yes, sir.” She then explained about the residences across the street and reminded them that Boyd might target the civilians living there in an attempt to escape. Haumann nodded. “I need somebody to clear those places, at least get people away from the front windows and keep ’em off the streets.”
Nobody wanted this job, of course. If ESU cops had been cowboys, Haumann was asking for somebody to volunteer to be cook.
The silence was broken by a voice. “Hell, I’ll take it.” It was Lon Sellitto. “Perfect for an old guy like me.”
Sachs glanced at him. The detective had just flunked his knuckle time. His nerve had broken. He gave a carefree grin, maybe the saddest smile Sachs had ever seen in her life.
Into his mike the ESU head said, “All teams, deploy to holding perimeter. And S and S, let me know the minute there’s a change in the premises, K.”
“Roger. Out.”
Sachs said into her microphone, “We’re going in, Rhyme. I’ll let you know what happens.”
“Got it,” he said tersely.
Nothing more was said between them. Rhyme didn’t like her going into combat. But he knew how driven she was, how any threat to an innocent infuriated her, how it was important for her to make sure people like Thompson Boyd didn’t get away. This was part of her nature and he’d never suggested she stand down at times like this.
Didn’t mean he was going to be cheerful about it, though.
But then thoughts of Lincoln Rhyme faded as they started into position.
Sachs and Sellitto were walking up the alley, she to join the entry team, he to continue on to the residences across the street and get the people there under cover. The lieutenant’s phony grin was gone. The man’s face looked puffy and was dotted with sweat, despite the cool temperature. He wiped it, scratched the invisible bloodstain and noticed her looking at him. “Fucking body armor. Hot.”
“Hate it,” Sachs said. They continued steadily down the alley, until they got close to the back of Boyd’s apartment, where the troops were deploying. Suddenly she grabbed Sellitto’s arm and pulled him back. “Somebody’s watching…” But as they stepped close to the building, Sachs tripped over a trash bag and went down hard on her leg. She gasped, wincing and cradling her knee.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” she said, climbing to her feet with a grimace. She called into her radio, in a breathless voice, “Five Eight Eight Five, I saw movement in a second-floor window, rear of the building. S and S, can you confirm?”
“No hostiles. That’s one of our people you’re seeing, K.”
“Roger. Out.”
Sachs started forward, limping.
“Amelia, you’re hurt.”
“Nothing.”
“Tell Bo.”
“It’s not a problem.”
The fact that she suffered from arthritis was well known to the inner circle – Rhyme, Mel Cooper and Sellitto – but that was about it. She went to great lengths to hide her malady, worried that the brass would sideline her on a medical if they found out. She reached into her slacks pocket and pulled out a packet of painkillers, ripped it open with her teeth and swallowed the pills dry.
Over the radio they heard Bo Haumann’s voice: “All teams form up, K.”
Sachs moved forward to the main entry team. The limp was worse.
Sellitto pulled her aside. “You can’t go in.”
“It’s not like I’m going to run him to ground, Lon. I’m just going to secure the scene.”
The detective turned toward the CP truck, hoping he’d find someone to ask about the situation, but Haumann and the others had already deployed.
“It’s better. It’s fine.” She limped forward.
One of the officers on Team A called in a whisper to Sachs, “Detective, you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“No, she’s not.” Sellitto turned to the officer. “She’s getting the civvies out of the way. I’m going in with you guys.”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. There a fucking problem?”
“No, sir.”
“Lon,” she whispered, “I’m fine.”
The big detective responded, “I know enough about crime scenes to secure the place. Rhyme’s been busting my chops for years to get it right.”
“I’m not going to be sprinting.”
“Yeah, maybe not, but could you drop into a combat pose if he lights you up with that fucking gun of his?”
“Yes, I could,” she answered firmly.
“Well, I don’t think so. So quit arguing and get the civvies safe.” He cinched his body armor tighter and drew his revolver.
She hesitated.
“That’s an order, Detective.”
She looked at him darkly. But as independent as Sachs was – some would use the word “renegade” – the portable’s daughter knew her place in the ranks of the New York City Police Department. She said, “All right…but here, take this.” She drew her fifteen-round Glock and handed it to him, along with an extra clip. She took his six-shot revolver.
He looked down at the large black automatic. It was a gun with a trigger pull as delicate as a moth’s wing. If he handled this weapon wrong, like he’d done on Elizabeth Street yesterday, he could easily kill himself or somebody on the entry team. Rubbing his cheek once more, Sellitto glanced at the apartment. And hurried to join the others.
Crossing the street to clear the apartments and houses, Sachs glanced back and watched them go. She turned and continued on to the apartments and houses across the street.
The limp was gone.
In fact, she was fine. The only pain she felt was disappointment that she wasn’t on point with the entry team. But she’d had to fake the fall and injury. For Lon Sellitto’s sake. She couldn’t think of any way to save him except by forcing him to take on the job. She’d assessed the risk of his going in on a team and decided that there was minimal threat to him or to anybody else – there’d be plenty of backup, everybody was in armor and they were catching their perp by surprise. Sellitto also seemed to have some measure of control over his fear. She recalled the deliberation with which he’d held and examined the Glock, how his quick eyes had looked over the perp’s building.
But in any event there really was no choice. Sellitto was a great cop. But if he stayed skittish he’d cease to be any kind of cop at all and his life would be over with. Those splinters of self-doubt had a way of infecting your entire soul. Sachs knew; she battled them constantly herself. If he didn’t go back into combat now, he’d give up.
She picked up her pace; after all, she did have an important job here, clearing the residences across the street, and she had to move fast; the entry team was going inside at any minute. Sachs started ringing doorbells and getting people out of front rooms and making sure they stayed inside for the time being behind locked doors. She radioed Bo Haumann on the secure tactical frequency and told him that the immediate houses were clear; she’d keep going with those that were farther away, up and down the street.
“Okay, we’re going in,” the man said tersely and disconnected.
Sachs continued along the street. She found her fingernail digging into her thumb. Reflecting on the irony: Sellitto fidgeted going into a fight; Amelia Sachs was edgy when she had to stay out of harm’s way.
Lon Sellitto followed the four officers up the dim stairs, to the second-floor landing of the apartment.
Breathing hard from the climb, he paused, caught his breath. The tactical cops huddled, waiting for word from Haumann that the electricity to the apartment had been cut – they didn’t want any more electrocutions.
While they waited the big detective had a talk with himself: Are you ready for this?
Think about it. Now’s the time to decide. Leave or stay?
Tap, tap, tap…
It all swirled around in his mind: the blood spattering him obscenely, the needles from the bullet ripping apart flesh. The brown eyes that were filled with life one second and then glazed with death a moment later. The icy rush of absolute panic when that basement door on Elizabeth Street opened and his gun went off with a huge, kicking explosion, Amelia Sachs cringing, reaching for her weapon, as the bullet dug chunks of stone out of the wall just a few feet from her.
The bullet from my own goddamn gun!
What was happening? he wondered. Was his nerve gone? He laughed grimly to himself, comparing the kind of nerve he was thinking of to Lincoln Rhyme’s, whose physical nerve, the one in his spine, was literally destroyed. Well, Rhyme fucking well dealt with what happened to him. Why can’t I?
It was a question that had to be answered, because if he stepped up now and he caved or flubbed the takedown again, people might die. Probably would, given the stone-cold perp they were after.
If he stayed back, took himself off the detail, his career would be over, but at least he wouldn’t’ve jeopardized anyone else.
Can you do it? he asked himself.
The leader of the team said, “Detective, we’re going in in about thirty seconds. We’ll batter the door, spread out and clear the apartment. You can come in and secure the crime scene after. That all right with you?”
Leave or stay? the lieutenant asked himself. You can just walk downstairs. That’ll be it. Give up your shield, hire on as a security consultant with some corporation. Double your salary.
Never get shot at again.
Tap, tap, tap…
Never see eyes wincing and going lifeless inches from yours.
Tap…
“Is that okay?” the leader repeated.
Sellitto glanced at the cop “No,” he whispered. “No.”
The ESU officer frowned.
The detective said, “Take the door out with the ram, then I’ll go in. First.”
“But -”
Sellitto muttered, “You heard Detective Sachs. This perp isn’t working alone. We need anything we can find that’ll lead us to the prick who hired him. I’ll know what to look for and I can save the scene if he tries to fuck it up.”
“Let me call in,” the ESU man said doubtfully.
“Officer,” the detective said calmly, “that’s the way it is. I’m senior here.”
The team leader looked at his second in command. They shrugged.
“It’s your…decision.”
Sellitto supposed the third word of that sentence was originally going to be “funeral.”
“As soon as they pull the juice we go in,” the ESU officer said. He put on his gas mask. The team pulled on theirs, Sellitto too. He gripped Sachs’s Glock – kept his finger outside the trigger guard – and stepped to the side of the door.
In his earpiece he heard: “We’re cutting the electricity in three…two…one.”
The leader tapped the shoulder of the officer with the battering ram. The big man swung it hard and the door crashed open.
Flying on adrenaline, forgetting everything but the perp and the evidence, Sellitto charged inside, the tactical officers behind, covering him, kicking doors open and searching the rooms. The second team came in from the kitchen.
No immediate sign of Boyd. On a small TV a sitcom played – the source of the voices and most likely the source of heat and noise that S and S had found.
Most likely.
But maybe not.
Glancing left and right as he entered the small living room, seeing no one, Sellitto headed straight for Boyd’s desk, piled high with evidence: sheets of paper, ammunition, several envelopes, bits of plastic wire, a digital timer, jars of liquid and of white powder, a transistor radio, rope. Using a tissue, Sellitto carefully checked a metal cabinet near the desk for traps. He found none and opened it, noting more jars and boxes. Two more guns. Several stacks of new bills – nearly $100,000, the detective estimated.
“Room’s clear,” one of the ESU officers called. Then another, from a different room.
Finally a voice: “Team Leader A to CP, we’ve cleared the scene, K.”
Sellitto laughed out loud. He’d done it. Confronted whatever the fuck it was that’d been torturing him.
But don’t get too cocky, he told himself, pocketing Sachs’s Glock. You came along on this sleigh ride for a reason, remember? You got work to do. So secure the fucking evidence.
As he looked over the place, though, he realized something was nagging.
What?
Looking over the kitchen, the hallway, the desk. What was odd? Something was wrong.
Then it occurred to him:
Transistor radio?
Did they even make those anymore? Well, if they did, you hardly ever saw ’em, with all the fancier players available for cheap: boom boxes, CD players, MP3s.
Shit. It’s a booby trap, an explosive device! And it’s sitting right next to a big jar of clear liquid, with a glass stopper in the top, which Sellitto knew from science class was what you used to store acid in.
“Christ!”
How long did he have before it detonated? A minute, two?
Sellitto lunged forward and grabbed the radio, stepped to the bathroom, setting it in the sink.
One of the tactical officers asked, “What’s -?”
“We’ve got an IED! Clear the apartment!” the detective shouted, ripping off his gas mask.
“Get the fuck out!” the officer cried.
Sellitto ignored him. When people make improvised explosive devices they never worry about obscuring fingerprints or other clues because once the devices blow up, most evidence is destroyed. They knew Boyd’s identity, of course, but there could be some trace or other prints on the device that might lead to the person hiring him or his accomplice.
“Call the Bomb Squad,” somebody transmitted.
“Shut up. I’m busy.”
There was an on/off switch on the radio but he didn’t trust that to deactivate the explosive charge. Cringing, the detective worked the black plastic back off the radio.
How long, how long?
What’s a reasonable time for Boyd to get into his apartment and disarm the trap?
As he popped the back off and bent down, Sellitto found himself staring at a half stick of dynamite – not a plastic explosive but plenty powerful enough to blow off his hand and blind him. There was no display. It’s only in the movies that bombs have easy-to-read digital timers that count down to zero. Real bombs are detonated by tiny microprocessor timing chips without displays. Sellitto held the dynamite itself in place with a fingernail – to keep from obliterating any prints. He started to work the blasting cap out of the explosive.
Wondering how sophisticated the unsub had been (serious bomb makers use secondary detonators to take out people like Sellitto who were fucking around with their handiwork), he pulled the blasting cap out of the dynamite.
No secondary detonators, or any -
The explosion, a huge ringing bang, echoed through the bathroom, reverberating off the tile.
“What was that?” Bo Haumann called. “Somebody shooting? We have gunshots? All units report.”
“Explosion in the bathroom of the subject’s unit,” somebody called. “Medics to the scene, EMS to the scene!”
“Negative, negative. Everybody take it easy.” Sellitto was running his burned fingers under cold water. “I just need a Band-Aid.”
“That you, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah. It was the blasting cap went off. Boyd had a booby trap rigged to take out the evidence. I saved most of it…” He pressed his hand into his armpit and squeezed. “Fuck, that stings.”
“How big a device?” Haumann asked.
Sellitto glanced at the desk in the other room. “Big enough to blow the shit out of what looks like a gallon jar of sulfuric acid, I’d guess. And I see some jars of powder, probably cyanide. It would’ve taken out most of the evidence – and anybody who was nearby.”
Several of the ESU officers glanced with gratitude toward Sellitto. One said, “Man, this’s one perp I wanna take down personally.”
Haumann, ever the voice of a detached cop, asked matter-of-factly, “Status of unsub?”
“No sign. Heat on the infrared was a fridge, TV and sunlight on furniture, looks like,” one cop transmitted.
Sellitto looked over the room and then radioed, “Got an idea, Bo.”
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s fix the door fast. Leave me and a couple other guys inside, clear everybody else off the streets. He might be back soon. We’ll get him then.”
“Roger, Lon. I like it. Let’s get moving. Who knows carpentry?”
“I’ll do it,” Sellitto said. “One of my hobbies. Just get me some tools. And what kind of fucking entry team is this? Doesn’t anybody have a goddamn Band-Aid?”
Down the street from Boyd’s apartment, Amelia Sachs was listening to the transmitted exchanges about the kick-in. It seemed that her plan for Sellitto might’ve worked – even better than she’d hoped. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened but it was clear that he’d done something ballsy and she heard some newfound confidence in his voice.
She acknowledged the message about the plan to pull everybody off the street and wait for Boyd to return, then she added that she was going to warn the last residents across the street from the safe house and, after that, she’d join the others on the stake-out. She knocked on the front door and told the woman who answered to stay away from the front of the house until she heard it was safe to come out. There was a police action going on across the street.
The woman’s eyes were wide. “Is it dangerous?”
Sachs gave her the standard line: We’re just being cautious, nothing to be alarmed about and so on. Noncommittal, reassuring. Half of being a cop is public relations. Sometimes it’s most of being a cop. Sachs added that she’d seen some children’s toys in the woman’s yard. Were they home now?
It was then that Sachs saw a man emerge from an alleyway up the street. He was walking slowly in the direction of the apartment, head down, wearing a hat and a long overcoat. She couldn’t see his face.
The woman was saying in a concerned voice, “It’s just my boyfriend and me here now. The children are at school. They usually walk home but should we go pick them up?”
“Ma’am, that man there, across the street?”
She stepped forward and glanced. “Him?”
“Do you know him?”
“Sure. He lives in that building right there.”
“What’s his name?”
“Larry Tang.”
“Oh, he’s Chinese?”
“I guess. Or Japanese or something.”
Sachs relaxed.
“He’s not involved in anything, is he?” the woman asked.
“No, he’s not. About your children, it probably would be best to -”
Oh, Jesus…
Looking past the woman, Amelia Sachs stared into a bedroom of the bungalow, which was in the process of being renovated. On the wall were some painted cartoon characters. One was from Winnie-the-Pooh – the character Tigger.
The orange shade of the paint was identical to the samples she’d found near Geneva ’s aunt’s place in Harlem. Bright orange.
Then she glanced at the floor in the entry hall. On a square of newspapers was an old pair of shoes. Light brown. She could just see the label inside. They were Bass. About size 11.
Amelia Sachs understood suddenly that the boyfriend that the woman had referred to was Thompson Boyd and the apartment across the street wasn’t his residence but was another of his safe houses. The reason it was empty at the moment, of course, was that he was somewhere in this very house.
Amelia Sachs, thinking: Get the woman outside. Her eyes aren’t guilty. She’s not part of it.
Thinking: Of course Boyd’s armed.
Thinking: And I just traded my Glock for a fucking six-shooter.
Get her out of here. Fast.
Sachs’s hand was easing toward her waistband, where Sellitto’s tiny pistol rested. “Oh, one more thing, ma’am,” she said calmly. “I saw a van up the street. I wonder if you could tell me whose it is.”
What was that noise? Sachs wondered. Something from within the house. Metallic. But not like a weapon, a faint clatter.
“A van?”
“Yeah, you can’t see it from here. It’s behind that tree.” Sachs stepped back, gesturing her forward. “Could you step outside and take a look, please? It’d be a big help.”
The woman, though, stayed where she was, in the entryway, glancing to her right. Toward where the sound had come from. “Honey?” She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
The clattering, Sachs understood suddenly, had been venetian blinds. Boyd had heard the exchange with his girlfriend and had looked out the window. He’d seen an ESU officer or squad car near his safe house.
“It’s really important,” Sachs tried. “If you could just…”
But the woman froze, her eyes wide.
“No! Tom! What’re you -?”
“Ma’am, come over here!” Sachs shouted, drawing the Smith & Wesson. “Now! You’re in danger!”
“What’re you doing with that? Tom!” She backed away from Boyd but remained in the corridor, a rabbit in headlights. “No!”
“Get down!” Sachs said in a ragged whisper, dropping into a crouch and moving forward into the house.
“Boyd, listen to me,” Sachs shouted. “If you’ve got a weapon, drop it. Throw it out where I can see it. Then get on the floor. I mean now! There’re dozens of officers outside!”
Silence, except for the woman’s sobbing.
Sachs executed a fast feint, looking low around the corner to the left. She caught a glimpse of the man, his face calm, a large, black pistol in his hand. Not the North American.22 magnum, but an automatic, which would have stopping-power bullets and a clip capacity of fifteen rounds or so. She ducked back to cover. Boyd’d been expecting her to present higher and the two slugs he fired missed her, though only by inches, blowing plaster and wood splinters into the air. The brunette was screaming with every breath, scrabbling away, looking from Sachs back to where Boyd was. “No, no, no!”
Sachs called, “Throw your weapon down!”
“Tom, please! What’s going on?”
Sachs called to her, “Get down, miss!”
A long moment of complete silence. What was Boyd up to? It was as if he was debating what to do next.
Then he fired a single round.
The detective flinched. The bullet was wide, though. It completely missed the wall where Sachs stood.
But, it turned out, Boyd hadn’t been aiming at her at all, and the slug did indeed hit its target.
The brunette was dropping to her knees, her hands on her thigh, which gushed blood. “Tom,” she whispered. “Why?…Oh, Tom.” She rolled onto her back and lay clutching her leg, gasping in pain.
Just like at the museum, Boyd had shot someone to distract the police, to give him a chance to get away. But this time it was his girlfriend.
Sachs heard the crack of glass as Boyd broke through a window to escape.
The woman kept whispering words Sachs couldn’t hear. She radioed Haumann about the woman’s condition and location, and he immediately sent medics and backup. Then she thought: But it’ll take a few minutes for EMS to get here. I have to save her. A tourniquet would slow the bleeding. I can save her life.
But then: No. He’s not getting away. She looked around the corner, low, fast, and saw Boyd drop out of the hall window into the side yard.
Sachs hesitated, looking back at the woman. She’d passed out, and her hand had fallen away from the terrible wound on her leg. Already, blood pooled under her torso.
Christ…
She started toward her. Then stopped. No. You know what you have to do. Amelia Sachs ran to the side window. She looked out, fast again, in case he was waiting for her. But, no, Boyd expected that she’d save the woman. Sachs saw him sprinting away from the apartment down the cobblestoned alley without a glance back.
She looked down. A six-foot drop to the ground. Her story about the pain from the fall she’d told to Sellitto twenty minutes ago was fake; the chronic pain wasn’t.
Oh, brother.
She scooted up onto the sill, clear of the broken glass, and swung her legs out, then pushed off. Trying to ease the shock of the landing, Sachs kept her knees bent. But it was a long drop and as she landed her left leg collapsed and she tumbled onto gravel and grass, crying out at the pain.
Breathing hard, she struggled to her feet and started off after Boyd, now with an honest limp slowing her up. God gets you for lying, she thought.
Shoving her way through a row of anemic bushes, Sachs broke from the yard into an alley that ran behind the houses and apartments. She looked right and left. No sign of him.
Then, a hundred feet ahead of her, she saw a large wooden door swing open. This was typical of older parts of New York – unheated, stand-alone garages lining alleys behind row and town houses. It made sense that Boyd would keep his car garaged; the Search and Surveillance team hadn’t found it anywhere on the surrounding blocks. Jogging forward as best she could, Sachs reported his location to the command post.
“Copy, Five Eight Eight Five. We’re on our way, K.”
Moving unsteadily over the cobblestones, she flipped open the cylinder of Sellitto’s Smittie and grimaced to see that he was among the more cautious gun owners; the cylinder beneath the hammer was empty.
Five shots.
Versus Boyd’s automatic with three times that many and possibly a spare clip or two in his pocket.
Running to the mouth of the alley, she could hear an engine start and a second later the blue Buick backed out, the rear toward her. The alley was too narrow to make the turn in one motion, so Boyd had to stop, drive forward then back up again. This gave Sachs the chance to sprint to within sixty or seventy feet of the garage.
Boyd finished the maneuver and, with the garage door as a shield between him and Sachs, accelerated away fast.
Sachs dropped hard to the cobblestones and saw that the only target she had was under a narrow gap at the bottom of the garage door: the rear tires.
Prone, Sachs sighted on the right one.
It’s a rule in urban-combat shooting never to fire unless you “know your backdrop,” that is, where the bullet will end up if you miss your shot – or if it penetrates your target and continues on. As Boyd’s car peeled away from her, Sachs considered this protocol for a fraction of a second, then – thinking of Geneva Settle – came up with a rule of her own: This fucker’s not getting away.
The best she could do to control the shot was to aim low so that the bullet would ricochet upward and lodge in the car itself if she missed.
Cocking the gun to single action, so the trigger pull was more sensitive, she aimed and squeezed off two rounds, one slightly higher than the other.
The slugs zipped under the garage door and at least one punctured the right rear tire. As the car lurched to the right and collided hard with the brick wall of the alley, Sachs rose and sprinted toward the wreck, wincing from the pain. At the garage door she paused and looked around it. It turned out that both right tires were flattened; she’d hit the front one as well. Boyd tried to drive away from the wall, but the front wheel was bent and frozen against the chassis. He climbed out, swinging the gun back and forth, searching for the shooter.
“Boyd! Drop the weapon!”
His response was to fire five or six shots toward the door. Sachs responded with one shot, which struck the car body inches from him, then she rolled to her right and rose fast, noting that Boyd was fleeing from her into the street beyond.
She could see the backdrop this time – a brick wall across the far street – and squeezed off another round.
But just as the gun fired, Boyd turned aside as if he’d been expecting this. The slug sailed past him, also inches away. He returned fire, a barrage of shots, and she dropped hard to the slimy cobblestones again, her radio shattering. He disappeared around the corner, to the left.
One shot left. Should’ve used only one on the tire, she thought angrily, as she rose and hurried after him as best she could on the painful leg. A pause at the corner where the alley met the sidewalk, a fast glance to the left. She saw his solid form sprinting away from her.
She grabbed the Motorola and pressed transmit. Nope, it was gone. Shit. Call 911 on the cell? Too much to explain, too little time to relay a message. Somebody in one of the buildings had to’ve called in about the shots. She continued after Boyd, breath rasping, feet slapping on the ground.
At the far intersection, the end of the block, a blue-and-white rolled to a stop. The officers didn’t climb out; they hadn’t heard the shots and didn’t know the killer and Sachs were here. Boyd looked up and saw them. He stopped fast and leapt over a small fence then ducked underneath the stairway of an apartment building leading to the first floor. She heard kicking as he tried to break into the basement apartment.
Sachs waved toward the officers but they were looking up and down the cross street and didn’t see her.
It was then that a young couple stepped out the front door of the apartment directly across from Boyd. Closing the door behind them, the young man zipped up his vest against the chill day and the woman took his arm. They started down the stairs.
The kicking stopped.
Oh, no…Sachs realized what was about to happen. She couldn’t see Boyd but she knew what he was going to do. He was sighting on the couple now. He was going to shoot one or both, steal their keys and escape into the apartment – hoping again that the police would divide their forces to look after the wounded.
“Get down!” Sachs shouted.
Nearly a hundred feet away, the couple didn’t hear.
Boyd would be drawing a target on them now, waiting for them to get closer.
“Get down!”
Sachs rose and limped toward them.
The couple noticed her but couldn’t make out what she was saying. They paused, frowning.
“Get down!” she repeated.
The man cupped his hand behind his ear, shaking his head.
Sachs stopped, took a deep breath and fired her last bullet into a metal garbage can about twenty feet from the couple.
The woman screamed and they turned, scrabbling up the stairs into their apartment. The door slammed.
At least she’d managed to -
Beside Sachs a block of limestone exploded, pelting her with hot lead and bits of stone. A half second later she heard the loud pop of Boyd’s gun.
Another shot and another, driving Sachs back, bullets striking feet from her. She stumbled through the yard, tripping over a foot-high wire edging fence and some plaster lawn ornaments, Bambis and elves. One slug grazed her vest, knocking the breath from her lungs. She went down hard in a planting bed. More slugs slammed home nearby. Boyd then turned toward the officers leaping out of their cruiser. He peppered the squad car with several rounds, flattening the tires and driving the officers to cover behind the car. The uniforms were staying put but at least they’d have called the assault in and other troops would be on the way.
Which meant of course that there was only one way for Boyd to go – toward her. She hunkered down for cover behind some bushes. Boyd had stopped firing but she could hear his footsteps getting closer. He was twenty feet away, she guessed. Then ten. She was sure that at any minute she’d see his face, followed by the muzzle of his weapon. Then she’d die…
Thud.
Thud.
Rising on an elbow, she could see the killer, close, kicking at another basement-apartment door, which was slowly starting to give way. His face was eerily calm – like that of The Hanged Man in the tarot card he’d intended to leave beside Geneva Settle’s body. He must’ve believed he’d hit Sachs because he ignored where she’d fallen and was concentrating on breaking through the doorway – the only escape route left. He looked behind him once or twice, toward the far end of the block, where the uniformed officers were making their way toward him – though slowly since he’d turn and fire at them occasionally.
He too would have to be out of ammo pretty soon, she figured. He probably -
Boyd ejected the clip from his pistol and slipped a new one in. Reloaded.
Okay, well…
She could stay where she was, safe, and hope that other officers would get here before he escaped.
But Sachs thought of the brunette lying bloody in the bungalow – maybe dead by now. She thought of the electrocuted officer, the librarian killed yesterday. She thought of the young rookie Pulaski, his face battered and bloody. And mostly she thought of poor young Geneva Settle, who’d be at risk every minute Boyd was free and walking the streets. Clutching the empty gun, she came to a decision.
Thompson Boyd delivered another powerful kick into the basement door. It was starting to give way. He’d get inside, he’d -
“Don’t move, Boyd. Drop the weapon.”
Blinking his stinging eyes in surprise, Thompson turned his head. He lowered his foot, which was poised for another kick.
Well, now, what’s this?
Keeping his gun low, he turned his head slowly and looked toward her. Yes, like he’d thought, it was the woman from the crime scene at the museum library yesterday morning. Walking back and forth, back and forth, like the sidewinder. Red hair, white jumpsuit. The one he’d enjoyed watching, admiring her. There was a lot to admire, he reflected. And a good shot, too.
He was surprised that she was alive. He thought for sure he’d hit her in the last barrage.
“Boyd, I will shoot. Drop your gun, lie down on the sidewalk.”
He thought a few more kicks at this door should break it in. Then into the alley behind the place. Or maybe the people who lived here had a car. He could take the keys and shoot whoever was inside, wound them, draw off more of the police. Escape.
But, of course, there was one question that had to be answered first: Did she have any ammunition left?
“You hearing me, Boyd?”
“So it’s you.” Squinted his stinging eyes. Hadn’t used any Murine lately. “Thought it might be.”
She frowned. She didn’t know what he meant. Maybe she was wondering if he’d seen her before, wondering how he knew her.
Boyd was careful not to move. He had to figure this out. Shoot her or not? But if he made the slightest motion toward her and she did have rounds left she’d fire. He knew that without a doubt. Nothing squeamish about this woman.
They’ll kill you in a kiss…
He debated. Her gun was a six-round Smith & Wesson.38 special. She’d fired five times. Thompson Boyd always counted shots (he knew he himself had eight left in his present clip, and one more fourteen-round clip in his pocket).
Had she reloaded? If not, did she have one more round left?
There are police officers who keep an empty chamber under the hammer on revolvers on the rare chance that accidentally dropping it will cause the gun to fire. But she didn’t seem to be that sort of person. She knew weapons too well. She’d never drop one accidentally. Besides, if she was doing tactical work, she’d want every round possible. No, she wasn’t an empty-cylinder kind of cop.
“Boyd, I’m not telling you again!”
On the other hand, he was thinking, this gun wasn’t hers. Yesterday at the museum she’d worn an automatic on her hip, a Glock. She still had a Glock holster on her belt now. Was the Smittie a backup piece? In the old days, when all cops had six-shooters, they sometimes carried another gun in an ankle holster. But these days, with automatics holding at least a dozen rounds and two extra clips on the belt, they usually didn’t bother with a second weapon.
No, he bet that she’d either lost her automatic or loaned it to somebody and had borrowed this one, which meant she probably didn’t have rounds to reload. Next question: Did the person she borrowed the Smittie from keep an empty chamber under the hammer? That, he’d have no way of knowing, of course.
So the question came down to what kind of person she was. Boyd thought back to the museum, seeing her searching like a rattlesnake. Thinking of her in the hallway outside the Elizabeth Street safe house, going through the door after him. Thinking of her coming after him now – leaving Jeanne to die from the bullet wound in her thigh.
He decided: She was bluffing. If she had a round left she’d have shot him.
“You’re out of ammo,” he announced. He turned toward her and raised his pistol.
She grimaced and the gun slumped. He’d been right. Should he kill her? No, just shoot to wound. But where was the best place? Painful and life-threatening. Screaming and copious blood both attract a lot of attention. She was favoring one leg; he’d shoot the painful one, the knee. When she was down, he’d park another round in her shoulder. And get away.
“So you win,” she said. “What is it now? I’m a hostage?”
He hadn’t thought of this. He hesitated. Did it make sense? Would it be helpful? Usually hostages were more trouble than they were worth.
No, better to shoot her. He began to pull the trigger as she pitched her gun to the sidewalk in defeat. He glanced at it, thinking, Something’s wrong here…What was it?
She’d been holding the revolver in her left hand. But the holster was on her right hip.
Thompson’s eyes returned to her and gasped as he saw the flashing knife cartwheeling toward his face. She’d flung it with her right hand, when he’d glanced at her gun for a second.
The switchblade didn’t stick into him, or even cut – it was the handle that collided with his cheek – but she’d tossed it directly at his poor eyes. Thompson ducked away instinctively, lifting his arm to protect them. Before he could step back and draw a target, the woman was on him, swinging a stone she’d picked up from the garden. He felt a stunning blow on his temple, gasped at the pain.
He pulled the trigger once, and the gun fired. But the shot missed and before he could fire again the rock slammed into his right hand. The gun dropped to the ground. He howled and cradled his wounded fingers.
Thinking she’d go for the gun, he tried to body-block her. But she wasn’t interested in the pistol. She had all the weapon she needed; the rock crashed into his face once more. “No, no…” He tried to hit her, but she was big and strong, and another blow from the rock sent him to his knees, then his side, twisting away from the blows. “Stop, stop,” he cried. But in response he felt another blow of the rock against his cheek. He heard a howl of rage coming from her throat.
They’ll kill you…
What was she doing? he wondered in shock. She’d won… Why was she doing this, breaking the rules? How could she? This wasn’t by the book.
…in a kiss.
In fact, when the uniformed officers sprinted up a moment later, only one of them grabbed Thompson Boyd and cuffed him. The other got his arm around the policewoman and struggled to wrestle the bloody stone from her grip. Through the pain, the ringing in his ears, Thompson heard the cop saying over and over, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you got him, Detective. It’s cool, you can relax. He’s not going anywhere, he’s not going anywhere, he’s not going anywhere…”
Please, please…
Amelia Sachs was hurrying back to Boyd’s bungalow as fast as she was able, ignoring the congratulations from fellow officers and trying to ignore the pain in her leg.
Sweating, breathless, she trotted up to the first EMS medic she saw and asked, “The woman in that house?”
“There?” He nodded to the house.
“Right. The brunette who lives there.”
“Oh, her. I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid.”
Sachs inhaled a deep breath, felt the horror like ice on her flesh. She’d captured Boyd but the woman she could have saved was dead. She dug a fingernail into her thumb’s cuticle and felt pain, felt blood. Thinking: I did exactly what Boyd did. I sacrificed an innocent life for the sake of the job.
The medic continued, “She was shot.”
“I know,” Sachs whispered. Staring down at the ground. Oh, man, this would be hard to live with…
“You don’t have to worry.”
“Worry?”
“She’ll be okay.”
Sachs frowned. “You said you had bad news.”
“Well, like, getting shot’s pretty bad news.”
“Christ, I knew she was shot. I was there when it happened.”
“Oh.”
“I thought you meant she died.”
“Naw. Was a bleeder but we got it in time. She’ll be all right. She’s at St. Luke’s ER. Stable condition.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I’ve got bad news…
Sachs wandered off, limping, and found Sellitto and Haumann in front of the safe house.
“You collared him with an empty weapon?” Haumann asked, incredulous.
“Actually I collared him with a rock.”
The head of ESU nodded, lifting an eyebrow – his sweetest praise.
“Boyd saying anything?” she asked.
“Understood his rights. Then clammed up.”
She and Sellitto swapped weapons. He reloaded. She checked her Glock and reholstered it.
Sachs asked, “What’s the story on the premises?”
Haumann ran a hand over his bristly crew cut and said, “Looks like the bungalow he was living in was rented in his girlfriend’s name, Jeanne Starke. They’re her kids, two daughters. Not Boyd’s. We’ve got Child Welfare involved. That place” – he nodded toward the apartment – “was a safe house. Full of tools of the trade, you know.”
Sachs said, “I better run the scene.”
“We kept it secure,” Haumann said. “Well, he did.” A nod toward Sellitto. The ESU head said, “I gotta debrief the brass. You’ll be around after the scene? They’ll want a statement.”
Sachs nodded. And together she and the heavy detective walked toward the safe house. A silence thick as sand rested between them. Finally Sellitto glanced at her leg and said, “Limp’s back.”
“Back?”
“Yeah, when you were clearing the houses, across the street, I looked out the window. Seemed like you were walking fine.”
“Sometimes it just fixes itself.”
Sellitto shrugged. “Funny how stuff like that happens.”
“Funny.”
He knew what she’d done for him. He was telling her so. Then he added: “Okay, we got the shooter. But that’s only half the job. We need the prick that hired him and his partner – who we gotta assume just took over Boyd’s assignment. Get on the grid, Detective.” Sellitto said this in a voice as gruff as any that Rhyme could muster.
This was the best thanks he could’ve given her: just knowing that he was back.
Often the most important piece of evidence is the last one you find.
Any good CS searcher’ll assess the scene and immediately target the fragile items that are subject to evaporation, contamination by rain, dissipation by wind, and so on, leaving the obvious – like the literal smoking gun – to be collected later.
If the scene’s secure, Lincoln Rhyme often said, the good stuff ain’t going anywhere.
In both Boyd’s residence and the safe house across the street, Sachs had collected latent prints, rolled up the trace, collected fluid samples from the toilet for DNA analysis, scraped floor and furniture surfaces, cut portions of the carpet for fiber samples and photographed and videoed the entire sites. Only then did she turn her attention to the larger and more obvious things. She arranged to have the acid and cyanide transported to the department’s hazardous-evidence holding center in the Bronx, and processed the improvised explosive device contained in the transistor radio.
She examined and logged in weapons and ammunition, the cash, coils of rope, tools. Dozens of other items that might prove helpful.
Finally Sachs picked up a small, white envelope that was sitting on a shelf near the front door of the safe house.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
She read it. Then she gave a fast laugh. She read the letter again. And called Rhyme, thinking to herself: Brother, were we wrong.
“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 diamond 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.”
“Will do.”
The doorbell rang. Everybody was on edge with the main perp and accomplice still unaccounted for and they looked at the doorway cautiously. Sellitto had answered the bell and he stepped into the lab with an African-American boy, midteens, tall, wearing calf-length shorts and a Knicks jersey. He was carrying a heavy shopping bag. He blinked in surprise at the sight of Lincoln Rhyme – and then at everything else in the room.
“Yo, yo, Geneva. What happenin’?”
She looked at him with a frown.
“Yo, I’m Rudy.” He laughed. “You ain’t remember me.”
Geneva nodded. “Yeah. I think so. You’re -”
“Ronelle’s brother.”
The girl said to Rhyme, “A girl in my class.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“Word up. Ronee hear it from somebody.”
“Keesh probably. I told her,” Geneva said to Rhyme.
The boy looked around the lab again then back to Geneva. “Yo, what it is, some of the girls got some shit together for you. You know, you ain’t be in school and all so they thought you might want something to read. I say, damn, give the girl a GameBoy, but they said, no, she like books. So they got it up for you with these.”
“Really?”
“Word. Ain’t no homework or nothing like that. Shit you can read for the fun of it.”
“Who?”
“Ronelle, some other girls, don’t know. Here. Weigh a ton.”
“Well, thanks.”
She took the bag.
“Girls tell me, say ever’thing gonna be cool.”
Geneva gave a sour laugh and thanked him again, told him to say hello to the other kids in her class. The boy left. Geneva glanced down into the bag. She lifted out a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Geneva gave another laugh. “Don’t know what they’re thinking of. I read this, must be seven years ago.” She dropped it back in the bag. “Anyway, it was nice of them.”
“And useful,” Thom said pointedly. “Not much here for you to read, I’m afraid.” A sour glance at Rhyme. “I keep working on him. Music. He listens to music a lot now. Even threatens to write some tunes himself. But reading fiction? We haven’t gotten that far yet.”
Geneva gave him an amused smile and she took the heavy bag and walked toward the hallway as Rhyme said, “Thank you for airing laundry, Thom. In any case, now Geneva can read to her heart’s content, which I’m sure she’d rather do than listening to your tedious editorializing. And as for my leisure time? I guess I don’t have much of it, you know, trying to catch killers and all.” His eyes returned to the evidence charts.
THOMPSON BOYD’S RESIDENCE AND PRIMARY SAFE HOUSE
· More falafel and yogurt, orange paint trace, as before.
· Cash (fee for job?) $100,000 in new bills. Untraceable. Probably withdrawn in small amounts over time.
· Weapons (guns, billy club, rope) traced to prior crime scenes.
· Acid and cyanide traced to prior crime scenes, no links to manufacturers.
· No cell phone found. Other telephone records not helpful.
· Tools traced to prior crime scenes.
· Letter revealing that G. Settle was targeted because she was a witness to a jewelry heist in the planning. More pure carbon – identified as diamond dust trace.
· Sent to Parker Kincaid in Washington, D.C., for document examination.
· Improvised explosive device, as part of booby trap. Fingerprints are those of convicted bomb maker Jon Earle Wilson. Presently searching for him.
POTTERS’ FIELD SCENE (1868)
· Tavern in Gallows Heights – located in the Eighties on the Upper West Side, mixed neighborhood in the 1860s.
· Potters’ Field was possible hangout for Boss Tweed and other corrupt New York politicians.
· Charles came here July 15, 1868.
· Burned down following explosion, presumably just after Charles’s visit. To hide his secret?
· Body in basement, man, presumably killed by Charles Singleton.
· Shot in forehead by.36 Navy Colt loaded with.39-caliber ball (type of weapon Charles Singleton owned).
· Gold coins.
· Man was armed with Derringer.
· No identification.
· Had ring with name “Winskinskie” on it.
· Means “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in Delaware Indian language.
· Currently searching other meanings.
EAST HARLEM SCENE (GENEVA ’S GREAT-AUNT’S APARTMENT)
· Used cigarette and 9mm round as explosive device to distract officers. Merit brand, not traceable.
· Friction ridge prints: None. Glove-prints only.
· Poisonous gas device:
· Glass jar, foil, candleholder. Untraceable.
· Cyanide and sulfuric acid. Neither containing markers. Untraceable.
· Clear liquid similar to that found on Elizabeth Street.
· Determined to be Murine.
· Small flakes of orange paint. Posing as construction or highway worker?
ELIZABETH STREET SAFE HOUSE SCENE
· Used electrical booby trap.
· Fingerprints: None. Glove prints only.
· Security camera and monitor; no leads.
· Tarot deck, missing the twelfth card; no leads.
· Map with diagram of museum where G. Settle was attacked and buildings across the street.
Trace:
· Falafel and yogurt.
· Wood scrapings from desk with traces of pure sulfuric acid.
· Clear liquid, not explosive. Sent to FBI lab.
· Determined to be Murine.
· More fibers from rope. Garrotte?
· Pure carbon found in map.
· Determined to be additional diamond dust.
· Safe house was rented, for cash, to Billy Todd Hammil. Fits Unsub 109’s description, but no leads to an actual Hammil.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM SCENE
Rape pack:
· Tarot card, twelfth card in deck, The Hanged Man, meaning spiritual searching.
· Smiley-face bag.
· Too generic to trace.
· Box cutter.
· Trojan condoms.
· Duct tape.
· asmine scent.
· Unknown item bought for $5.95. Probably a stocking cap.
· Receipt, indicating store was in New York City, discount variety store or drugstore.
· Most likely purchased in a store on Mulberry Street, Little Italy. Unsub identified by clerk.
Fingerprints:
· Unsub wore latex or vinyl gloves.
· Prints on items in rape pack belonged to person with small hands, no IAFIS hits. Positive ID for clerk’s.
Trace:
· Cotton-rope fibers, some with traces of human blood. Garrotte?
· Sent to CODIS.
· No DNA match in CODIS.
· Popcorn and cotton candy with traces of canine urine.
Weapons:
· Billy club or martial arts weapon.
· Pistol is a North American Arms.22 rimfire magnum, Black Widow or Mini-Master.
· Makes own bullets, bored-out slugs filled with needles. No match in IBIS or DRUGFIRE.
Motive:
· G. Settle was a witness to a crime in the planning – at the American Jewelry Exchange across the street from the African-American museum.
Profile of incident sent to VICAP and NCIC.
· Murder in Amarillo, TX, five years ago. Similar M.O. – staged crime scene (apparently ritual killing, but real motive unknown).
· Victim was a retired prison guard.
· Composite picture sent to Texas prison.
· Identified as Thompson G. Boyd, executions control officer.
· Murder in Ohio, three years ago. Similar M.O. – staged crime scene (apparently sexual assault, but real motive probably hired killing). Files missing.
PROFILE OF UNSUB 109
· Determined to be Thompson G. Boyd, former executions control officer, from Amarillo, TX.
· Presently in custody.
PROFILE OF PERSON HIRING UNSUB 109
· No information at this time.
PROFILE OF UNSUB 109’S ACCOMPLICE
· Black male.
· Late 30’s, early 40’s.
· Six feet.
· Solidly built.
· Wearing green combat jacket.
· Ex-convict.
· Has a limp.
· Reportedly armed.
· Clean-shaven.
· Black do-rag.
· Awaiting additional witnesses and security tapes.
· Tape inconclusive, sent to lab for analysis.
· Old work shoes.
PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON
· Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New York state by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.
· Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.
· Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.
· Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.
· Involved in some risky activities?
· Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.
· The crime, as reported in Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated:
· Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedmen’s Trust in NY. Broke into the trust’s safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.
Charles’s Correspondence:
· Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY State, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.
· Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.
· Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.
· Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters’ Field with his gun for “justice.” Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters’ Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.
Minus the shopping cart, Jax was playing homeless again.
He wasn’t being schizo at the moment, like before. The Graffiti King was fronting he was your typical fired-ass former vet, feeling sorry for himself, begging for change, a shabby Mets cap upturned on the gum-stained sidewalk and filled with, God bless you, thirty-seven cents.
Cheap pricks.
No longer in his olive-drab army jacket or the gray sweatshirt, but wearing a dusty black T-shirt under a torn beige sports coat (picked out of the garbage the way a real homeless person would do), Jax was sitting on the bench across from the town house on Central Park West, nursing a can wrapped up in a stained, brown-paper bag. Ought to be malt liquor, he thought sourly. Wished it was. But it was only Arizona iced tea. He sat back, like he was thinking about what kind of job he’d like to try for, though also enjoying the cool fall day, and sipped more of the sweet peach drink. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the stunningly clear sky.
He was watching the kid from Langston Hughes walk up, the one who’d just left that town house on Central Park West, where he’d delivered the bag to Geneva Settle. Still no sign of anyone checking out the street from inside, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody there. Besides, two police cars sat out front, one squad car and one unmarked, right by that wheelchair ramp. So Jax had waited here, a block away, for the boy to make the delivery.
The skinny kid came up and plopped down on the bench next to the not-really-homeless Graffiti King of Blood.
“Yo, yo, man.”
“Why do you kids say ‘yo’ all the time?” Jax asked, irritated. “And why the fuck do you say it twice?”
“Ever’body say it. Wus yo’ problem, man?”
“You gave her the bag?”
“What up with that dude ain’t got legs?”
“Who?”
“Dude in there ain’t got no legs. Or maybe he got legs but they ain’t work.”
Jax didn’t know what he was talking about. He would rather’ve had a smarter kid deliver the package to the town house, but this was the only one he’d found around the Langston Hughes school yard who had any connection at all with Geneva Settle – his sister sort of knew her. He repeated, “You give her the bag?”
“I give it to her, yeah.”
“What’d she say?”
“I don’t know. Some shit. Thanks. I don’t know.”
“She believed you?”
“She look like she ain’t know who I be at first, then she was cool, yeah. When I mention my sister.”
He gave the kid some bills.
“Phat…Yo, you got anything else fo’ me to do, I’m down, man. I – ”
“Get outa here.”
The kid shrugged and started away.
Jax said, “Wait.”
The loping boy stopped. He turned back.
“What was she like?”
“The bitch? What she look like?”
No, that wasn’t what he was curious about. But Jax didn’t quite know how to phrase the question. And then he decided he didn’t want to ask it. He shook his head. “Go on ’bout your business.”
“Later, man.”
The kid strolled off.
Part of Jax’s mind told him to stay here, where he was. But that’d be stupid. Better to put some distance between himself and the place. He’d find out soon enough, one way or the other, what happened when the girl looked through the bag.
Geneva sat on her bed, lay back, closed her eyes, wondering what she felt so good about.
Well, they’d caught the killer. But that couldn’t be all of the feeling, of course, since the man who’d hired him was still out there somewhere. And then there was also the man with the gun, the one at the school yard, the man in the army jacket.
She should be terrified, depressed.
But she wasn’t. She felt free, elated.
Why?
And then she understood: It was because she’d told her secret. Unburdened her heart about living alone, about her parents. And nobody’d been horrified and shocked and hated her because of the lie. Mr. Rhyme and Amelia had even backed her up, Detective Bell too. They hadn’t freaked, and dimed her out to the counselor.
Damn, it felt fine. How hard it’d been, carrying around this secret – just like Charles had carted his with him (whatever it was). If the former slave had told somebody, would he have avoided all the heartache that followed? According to his letter, he seemed to think so.
Geneva glanced at the shopping bag of books the girls at Langston Hughes had gotten for her. Curiosity got the better of her and she decided to look through them. She lifted the bag onto the bed. As Ronelle’s brother had said, it weighed a ton.
She reached inside and lifted out the Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Then the next one: Geneva laughed out loud. This was even stranger: It was a Nancy Drew mystery. Was this wack, or what? She looked at a few of the other titles, books by Judy Blume, Dr. Seuss, Pat McDonald. Children’s and young adult books. Wonderful authors, she knew them all. But she’d read their stories years ago. What was up with this? Didn’t Ronelle and the kids know her? The most recent books she’d read for pleasure had been novels for adults: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. The last time she’d read Green Eggs and Ham had been ten years ago.
Maybe there was something better in the bottom. She started to reach into it.
A knock on the door startled her.
“Come in.”
Thom entered, carrying a tray with a Pepsi and some snacks on it.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Thought you’d need some sustenance.” He opened the soda for her. She shook her head at the glass he was about to pour it into. “The can’s fine,” she said. She wanted to keep all the empties so she knew exactly how much to repay Mr. Rhyme.
“And…health food.” He handed her a Kit Kat candy bar, and they laughed.
“Maybe later.” Everybody was trying to fatten her up. Fact was, she just wasn’t used to eating. That was something you did with family around a table, not by yourself, hunched over an unsteady table in a basement as you read a book or jotted notes for a paper about Hemingway.
Geneva sipped the soda, as Thom took over unloading the books for her. He held them up one by one. There was a novel by C. S. Lewis. Another: The Secret Garden .
Still nothing for adults.
“There’s a big one at the bottom,” he said, lifting it out. It was a Harry Potter book, the first one in the series. She’d read it when it had first come out.
“You want it?” Thom asked.
She hesitated. “Sure.”
The aide handed her the heavy volume.
A jogger, a man in his forties, approached, glancing toward Jax, the homeless vet, wearing his trash-picked jacket, sporting a hidden pistol in his sock and thirty-seven cents of charity in his pocket.
The jogger’s expression didn’t change as he ran past. But the man altered course just a tiny bit, to put an extra foot or so between him and the big black guy, a shift so little you could hardly see it. Except to Jax it was as clear as if the man had stopped, turned around and fled, calling out, “Keep your distance, nigger.”
He was sick of this racial-dodgeball shit. Always the same. Is it ever going to change?
Yes. No.
Who the hell knew?
Jax bent down casually and adjusted the pistol that was stuffed into his sock and pressing uncomfortably against bone, then continued up the street, moving slow with his scar-tissue limp.
“Yo, you got some change?” He heard the voice from behind him as a man approached.
He glanced back at a tall, hunched-over man with very dark skin, ten feet behind him. The guy repeated, “Yo, change, man?”
He ignored the beggar, thinking, This’s pretty funny: All day he’d been fronting he was some homeless dude or another and here comes a real one. Serves me right.
“Yo, change?”
He said brusquely, “No, I don’t have any.”
“Come on. Ever’body got change. An’ they fuckin’ hate it. They wanta get rid of it. All them coins be heavy and you can’t buy shit with it. I be doing you a favor, brother. Come on.”
“Get lost.”
“I ain’t ate for two days.”
Jax glanced back, snapped, “Course not. ’Cause you spent all your paper on those Calvin Kleins.” He glanced at the man’s clothes – a dirty but otherwise nice-looking set of royal-blue Adidas workout clothes. “Go get a job.” Jax turned away and started up the street.
“Hokay,” the bum said. “You ain’t gimme any change, then how’s ’bout you gimme your motherfuckin’ hands?”
“My -?”
Jax found his legs pulled out from underneath him. He slammed face-down onto the sidewalk. Before he could twist around and grab his gun both wrists were pinned behind his back and what seemed to be a large pistol was shoved into the nook behind his ear.
“The fuck you doing, man?”
“Shut up.” Hands patted him down and found the hidden pistol. Handcuffs ratcheted on and Jax was jerked into a sitting position. He found himself looking over an FBI identification card. The first name on it was Frederick. The second was Dellray.
“Oh, man,” Jax said, his voice hollow. “I don’t need this shit.”
“Well, guess what, sonny, there a lot more manure comin’ yo’ way. So you better get used to it.” The agent stood up and a moment later Jax heard, “This is Dellray. I’m outside. I think I got Boyd’s boyfriend down. I just saw him slip some bills to a kid coming out of Lincoln’s town house. Black kid, maybe thirteen. What was he doing there?…A bag? Fuck, it’s a device! Probably gas. Boyd must’ve given it to this piece of crap to sneak inside. Get everybody out and call in a ten thirty-three… And get somebody to Geneva now!”
In Rhyme’s lab the big man sat cuffed and leg-shackled in a chair, surrounded by Dellray, Rhyme, Bell, Sachs and Sellitto. He’d been relieved of a pistol, wallet, knife, keys, a cell phone, cigarettes, money.
For a half hour, utter chaos had reigned in Lincoln Rhyme’s town house. Bell and Sachs had literally grabbed Geneva and hustled her out the back door and into Bell ’s car, which sped off in case there was yet another assailant planning to move on Geneva outside. Everyone else evacuated into the alley. The Bomb Squad, again in bio suits, had gone upstairs and X-rayed and then chemically tested the books. No explosives, no poison gas. They were just books, the purpose being, Rhyme assumed, to make them think there was a device in the bag. After they’d evacuated the town house, the accomplice would sneak in through the back door or enter with fire-fighters or police and wait for a chance to kill Geneva.
So this was the man Dellray had heard rumors about yesterday, who’d almost gotten to Geneva at the Langston Hughes school yard, who’d found out where she lived and who’d followed her to Rhyme’s to carry out yet another attempt on her life.
He was also the man, Rhyme hoped, who could tell them who’d hired Boyd.
The criminalist now looked him over carefully, this large, unsmiling man. He’d traded in his combat jacket for a tattered tan sports coat, probably assuming that they’d spotted him at the school yesterday in the green jacket.
He blinked and looked down at the floor, diminished by his arrest but not intimidated by the crescent of officers around him. Finally he said, “Look, you don’t -”
“Shhhhh,” Dellray said ominously and continued to rifle through the man’s wallet, as he explained to the team what had happened. The agent had been coming to deliver reports about the FBI’s jewelry district money-laundering investigations when he’d seen the teenage boy come out of Rhyme’s. “Saw the beast pass the kid some bills then get his ass up off a bench and leave. Descrip and the limp matched what we heard before. Looked funny to me, ’specially when I saw he had a de-formed ankle.” The agent nodded toward the small.32 automatic he’d found in the man’s sock. Dellray explained that he’d pulled off his own jacket, wrapped it around the files and slipped them behind some bushes, then smeared some dirt on his running suit to impersonate a homeless man, a role he’d made famous in New York when he was an undercover agent. He’d then proceeded to collar the man.
“Let me say something,” Boyd’s partner began.
Dellray wagged a huge finger at the man. “We’ll give ya this real clear little nod, we want any words trickling outa yo’ mouth. We altogether on that?”
“I -”
“Al-to-gether?”
He nodded grimly.
The FBI agent held up what he’d found in the wallet: money, a few family pictures, a faded, shabby photograph. “What’s this?” he asked.
“My tag.”
The agent held the snapshot closer to Rhyme. It was an old boxy New York City subway. The colorful graffiti on the side read, Jax 157.
“Graffiti artist,” Sachs said, lifting an eyebrow. “Pretty good, too.”
“You still go by Jax?” Rhyme asked.
“Usually.”
Dellray was holding up a picture ID card. “You may’ve been Jax to the fine folk at the Transit Authority, but it’s lookin’ like you’re Alonzo Jackson to the rest of the world. Also known by the illuminating moniker Inmate Two-two-oh-nine-three-fo’, hailin’ from the Department of Co-rrections in the bee-yootiful city of Alden, New York.”
“That’s Buffalo, right?” Rhyme asked.
Boyd’s accomplice nodded.
“The prison connection again. That how you know him?”
“Who?”
“Thompson Boyd.”
“I don’t know anybody named Boyd.”
Dellray barked, “Then who hired ya for the job?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking. ’Bout a job. I swear I don’t.” He seemed genuinely confused. “And all this other stuff, gas or whatever you’re saying. I – ”
“You were lookin’ for Geneva Settle. You bought a gun and you showed up at her school yesterday,” Sellitto pointed out.
“Yeah, that’s right.” He looked mystified at the level of their information.
“An’ you showed up here,” Dellray continued. “That’s the job we’re waggin’ our tongues about.”
“There’s no job. I don’t know what you mean. Honest.”
“What’s the story with the books?” Sellitto asked.
“Those’re just books my daughter read when she was little. They were for her.”
The agent muttered, “Wonnerful. But ’xplain to us why you paid somebody to deliver ’em to…” He hesitated and frowned. For once words seemed to fail Fred Dellray.
Rhyme asked, “You’re saying -?”
“That’s right.” Jax sighed. “ Geneva. She’s my little girl.”
“From the beginning,” Rhyme said.
“Okay. What it is – I got busted six years ago. Went six to nine at Wende.”
The DOC’s maximum security prison in Buffalo.
“For what?” Dellray snapped. “The AR and murder we heard about?”
“One count armed robbery. One count firearm. One count assault.”
“The twenty-five, twenty-five? The murder?”
He said firmly, “That was not a righteous count. Got knocked down to assault. And I didn’t do it in the first place.”
“Never heard that before,” Dellray muttered.
“But you did the robbery?” Sellitto asked.
A grimace. “Yeah.”
“Keep going.”
“Last year I got upped to Alden, minimum security. Work-release. I was working and going to school there. Got paroled seven weeks ago.”
“Tell me about the AR.”
“Okay. Few years back, I was a painter, working in Harlem.”
“Graffiti?” Rhyme asked, nodding at the picture of the subway car.
Laughing, Jax said, “House painting. You don’t make money at graffiti, ’less you were Keith Haring and his crowd. And they were just claimers. Anyway I was getting killed by the debt. See, Venus – Geneva ’s mother – had righteous problems. First it was blow, then smack then cookies – you know, crack. And we needed money for bail and lawyers too.”
The sorrow in his face seemed real. “There were signs she was a troubled soul when we hooked up. But, you know, nothing like love to make you a blind fool. Anyways, we were going to be kicked out of the apartment and I didn’t have money for Geneva ’s clothes or schoolbooks or even food sometimes. That girl needed a normal life. I thought if I could get together some benjamins I’d get Venus into treatment or something, get her straight. And if she wouldn’t do it, then I’d take Geneva away from her, give the girl a good home.
“What happened was this buddy, Joey Stokes, told me ’bout this deal he had going on up in Buffalo. Word was up there was some armored car making fat runs every Saturday, picking up receipts from malls outside of town. Couple of lazy guards. It’d be a milk run.
“Joey and me left on Saturday morning, thinking we’d be back with fifty, sixty thousand each that night.” A sad shake of the head. “Oh, man, I don’t know what I was doing, listening to that claiming dude. The minute the driver handed over the money, everything went bad. He had this secret alarm we didn’t know about. He hit it and next thing there’re sirens all over the place.
“We headed south but came to a railroad crossing we hadn’t noticed. This freight train was stopped. We turned around and took some roads that weren’t on the map and had to go through a field. We got two flats and ran off on foot. The cops caught up with us a half hour later. Joey said let’s fight and I said no and called out we were giving up. But Joey got mad and shot me in the leg. The state troopers thought we were shooting at them. That was the attempted murder.”
“Crime don’t pay,” Dellray said, with the intonation, if not the grammar, of the amateur philosopher that he was.
“We were in a holding cell for a week, ten days ’fore they let me make a phone call. I couldn’t call Venus anyway; our phone’d been shut off. My lawyer was some Legal Aid kid who didn’t do shit for me. I called some friends but nobody could find Venus or Geneva. They’d been kicked out of our apartment.
“I wrote letters from prison. They kept coming back. I called everybody I could think of. I wanted to find her so bad! Geneva’s mother and me lost a baby a while ago. And then I lost Geneva when I went into the system. I wanted my family back.
“After I got released I came here to look for her. Even spent what paper I had on this old computer to see if I could find her on the Internet or something. But I didn’t have any luck. All I heard was Venus was dead and Geneva was gone. It’s easy to fall through the cracks in Harlem. I couldn’t find my aunt either, who they stayed with some. Then yesterday morning this woman I know from the old days, works in Midtown, saw this hubbub at that black museum, some girl getting attacked and heard her name was Geneva and she was sixteen and lived in Harlem. She knew I was looking for my girl and called. I got myself hooked up with this claimer hangs out Uptown and he checked out the schools yesterday. Found out she went to Langston Hughes High. I went there to find her.”
“When they spotted you,” Sellitto said. “By the school yard.”
“That’s right. I was there. When y’all came after me I took off. But I went back and found out from this kid where she lived, over in West Harlem, by Morningside. I went there today, was going to leave the books but I saw you put her in a car and take off.” He nodded at Bell.
The detective frowned. “You were pushing a cart.”
“I was fronting that, yeah. I got a cab and followed y’all here.”
“With a gun,” Bell pointed out.
He snapped, “Somebody’d tried to hurt my little girl! Hells yeah, I got myself that piece. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.”
“You use it?” Rhyme asked. “The weapon?”
“No.”
“We’re going to test it.”
“All I did was pull it out and scare that asshole kid told me where Geneva lived, boy name of Kevin, who was speaking bad about my girl. Worst that happened to him was he peed his pants when I pointed it at him…which he deserved. But that’s all I did – ’side from busting him up some. You can track him down and ask him.”
“What’s her name, the woman who called you yesterday?”
“Betty Carlson. She works next to the museum.” He nodded at his phone. “Her number’s on the incoming-call list. Seven-one-eight – that’s the area code.”
Sellitto took the man’s mobile and stepped into the hallway.
“What about your family in Chicago?”
“My what?” He frowned.
“ Geneva ’s mother said you moved to Chicago with somebody, married her,” Sachs explained.
Jax closed his eyes in disgust. “No, no…That was a lie. I never even been to Chicago. Venus must’ve told her that to poison the girl against me… That woman, why’d I ever fall in love with her?”
Then Rhyme glanced at Cooper. “Call DOC.”
“No, no, please,” Jax said, his face desperate. “They’ll violate me back. I can’t be outside twenty-five miles of Buffalo. I asked permission to leave the jurisdiction twice and both times they denied it. I came anyway.”
Cooper considered this. “I can run him through the general DOC database. It’ll look routine. The P.O.’s won’t see it.”
Rhyme nodded. A moment later a picture of Alonzo Jackson and his record popped up on the screen. Cooper read it. “Confirms what he said. Good-behavior timely discharge. Got himself some college credits. And there’s reference to a daughter, Geneva Settle, as next of kin.”
“Thank you for that,” Jax said, relieved.
“What’s with the books?”
“I couldn’t come up to y’all and just say who I was – I’d get violated back – so I got copies of a bunch of books Geneva read when she was young. So she’d know the note was really from me.”
“What note?”
“Wrote her a note, put it in one of the books.”
Cooper rummaged through the bag. In a battered copy of The Secret Garden was a slip of paper. In careful handwriting were the words: Gen baby, this is from your father. Please call me. Beneath this message was his phone number.
Sellitto stepped back into the doorway. He nodded. “Talked to the Carlson woman. Everything he said checks out.”
Rhyme asked, “Geneva’s mother was your girlfriend, not wife. That’s why Geneva’s not ‘Jackson’?”
“That’s right.”
“Where do you live?” Bell asked.
“Got a room in Harlem. A Hundred Thirty-sixth. Once I found Geneva I was going to bring her back to Buffalo till I got permission to come back home.” His face grew still and Rhyme saw what he believed was pure sorrow in his eyes. “But I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening now.”
“Why?” Sachs asked.
Jax gave a wistful grin. “I saw where she lives, that nice place near Morningside. I was happy for her, of course, real happy. She’ll have herself two good foster parents taking care of her, maybe a brother or sister, which she always wanted but that didn’t work out, after Venus had such a bad time at the clinic. Why’d Geneva wanta come back with me? She’s got the life she deserves, everything I couldn’t give her.”
Rhyme glanced at Sachs with a raised eyebrow. Jax didn’t catch it.
His story was sounding legit to Rhyme. But he had a thick vein of policeman’s skepticism in him. “I want to ask you a few questions.”
“Anything.”
“Who’s the aunt you mentioned?”
“My father’s sister. Lilly Hall. She helped raise me. Widow twice over. She’d’ve turned ninety this year. August. If she’s still with us.”
Rhyme had no clue about her age or birthday but that was the name Geneva had given them. “She’s still alive, yes.”
A smile. “I’m glad about that. I’ve missed her. I couldn’t find her either.”
Bell said, “You told Geneva something about the word ‘sir.’ What would that’ve been?”
“I told her even when she was little to look people in the eye and always be respectful, but never to call anyone ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ unless they earned it.”
The Carolina detective nodded to Rhyme and Sachs.
The criminalist asked, “Who’s Charles Singleton?”
Jax blinked in surprise. “How d’you know about him?”
“Answer the man, scurv,” Dellray snapped.
“He’s my, I don’t know, great-great-great-great-grandfather or something.”
“Keep going,” Rhyme encouraged.
“Well, he was a slave in Virginia. His master freed him and his wife and gave ’em a farm up north. Then he volunteered to be in the Civil War, you know, like in that movie Glory. He came back home after, worked his orchard and taught at his school – an African free school. Made money selling cider to workers building boats up the road from his farm. I know he got medals in the war. He even met Abraham Lincoln once in Richmond. Just after the Union troops took it over. Or that’s what my daddy said.” Another sad laugh. “Then there was this story he got himself arrested for stealing some gold or payroll or something and went to jail. Just like me.”
“Do you know what happened to him after prison?”
“No. Never heard anything about that. So, you believe that I’m Geneva’s father?”
Dellray looked at Rhyme, cocked an eyebrow.
The criminalist sized the man up. “Almost. One last thing. Open your mouth.”
“You’re my father?”
Breathless, nearly dizzy from the news, Geneva Settle felt her heart pounding. She looked him over carefully, her eyes scanning his face, his shoulders, his hands. Her first reaction had been utter disbelief but she couldn’t deny that she recognized him. He still wore the garnet ring that her mother, Venus, had given him for Christmas – when they were still celebrating Christmas. The memory she compared this man with, though, was vague, like looking at someone with bright sun behind them.
Despite the driver’s license, the picture of her as a baby with him and her mother, the photo of one of his old graffiti drawings, she still would’ve denied the connection between them to the last, except for a DNA test that Mr. Cooper had run. There was no doubt they were kin.
They were alone upstairs – alone, of course, except for Detective Bell, her protective shadow. The rest of the police officers were downstairs working on the case, still trying to figure out who was behind the jewelry exchange robbery.
But Mr. Rhyme and Amelia and all the others – as well as the killer and everything else about the frightening events of the past few days – were, for the moment, forgotten. The questions that now consumed Geneva were: How had her father gotten here? And why?
And, most important: What does this mean for me?
A nod at the shopping bag. She picked up the Dr. Seuss book. “I don’t read children’s books anymore.” It was all she could think of to say. “I turned sixteen two months ago.” Her point, she guessed, was to remind him of all the birthdays she’d spent alone.
“I brought you those just so you’d know it was me. I know you’re too old for them.”
“What about your other family?” she asked coldly.
Jax shook his head. “They told me what Venus said to you, Genie.”
She was pissed he was using the nickname he’d given her years ago. Short for both “Geneva” and “genius.”
“She was making that up. To turn you against me. No, no, Genie, I’d never leave you. I got arrested.”
“Arrested?”
“It’s true, miss,” Roland Bell said. “We’ve seen his files. He got arrested the day he left you and your mother. He’s been in prison ever since. Just got out.”
He then told her a story about a robbery, about being desperate to get some money to make their life better, to help her mother.
But the words were tired, exhausted. He was giving her one of the thousands of limp excuses you heard so often in the neighborhood. The crack dealer, the shoplifter, the welfare scammer, the chain snatcher.
I did it for you, baby…
She looked down at the book in her hand. It was used. Who’d it been for when it was new? Where was the parent who’d bought it originally for his or her child? In jail, washing dishes, driving a Lexus, performing neuro-surgery?
Had her father stolen it from a used bookstore?
“I came back for you, Genie. I’ve been desperate to find you. And I was even more desperate when Betty called and told me you’d been attacked… What happened yesterday? Who’s after you? Nobody ever told me.”
“I saw something,” she said dismissingly, not wanting to give him too much information. “Maybe somebody committing a crime.” Geneva had no interest in the direction of this conversation. She looked him over and said more cruelly than she intended, “You know that Mom’s dead.”
He nodded. “I didn’t know it till I came back. Then I heard. But I wasn’t surprised. She was a troubled woman. Maybe she’s happier now.”
Geneva didn’t think so. And in any case no amount of heaven would make up for the unhappiness of dying alone the way she had, her body shrunken but her face puffed up like a yellow moon.
And it wouldn’t make up for the earlier unhappiness – of getting fucked in stairways for a couple rocks of crack while her daughter waited outside the front door.
Geneva said none of this.
He smiled. “You’ve got yourself a real nice place you’re staying.”
“It was temporary. I’m not there anymore.”
“You’re not? Where’re you living?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
She regretted saying this. It gave him, she realized, a foot in the door. And, sure enough, he pushed his way in: “I’m going to ask my P.O. again if I can move back here. Knowing I’ve got family to take care of, he might say it’s all right.”
“You don’t have a family here. Not anymore.”
“I know you’re mad, baby. But I’ll make it up to you. I -”
She flung the book to the floor. “Six years and nothing. No word. No call. No letter.” Infuriatingly, tears swelled in her eyes. She wiped them with shaking hands.
He whispered, “An’ where would I write? Where would I call? I tried steady all those six years to get in touch with you. I’ll show you the stack of letters I got, all sent back to me in prison. A hundred of ’em, I’d guess. I tried everything I could think of. I just couldn’t find you.”
“Well, thanks for the apology, you know. If it is an apology. But I think it’s time for you to go.”
“No, baby, let me -”
“Not ‘baby,’ not ‘Genie,’ not ‘daughter.’”
“I’ll make it up to you,” he repeated. He wiped his eyes.
She felt absolutely nothing, seeing his sorrow – or whatever it was. Nothing, that is, except anger. “Leave!”
“But, baby, I -”
“No. Just go away!”
Once more the detective from North Carolina, the expert at guarding people, did his job smoothly and without wavering. He rose and silently but firmly ushered her father into the hallway. He nodded back at the girl, gave her a comforting smile and closed the door behind him, leaving Geneva to herself.
While the girl and her father had been upstairs, Rhyme and the others had been going over leads to potential jewelry store heists.
And having no success.
The materials that Fred Dellray had brought them about money-laundering schemes involving jewelry were small-time operations, none of them centered in Midtown. And they had no reports from Interpol or local law enforcement agencies containing anything relevant to the case.
The criminalist was shaking his head in frustration when his phone rang. “Rhyme here.”
“Lincoln, it’s Parker.”
The handwriting expert analyzing the note from Boyd’s safe house. Parker Kincaid and Rhyme traded newsbites about health and family. Rhyme learned that Kincaid’s live-in partner, FBI agent Margaret Lukas, was fine, as were Parker’s children, Stephie and Robby.
Sachs sent her greetings and then Kincaid got down to business. “I’ve been working on your letter nonstop since you sent me the scan. I’ve got a profile of the writer.”
Serious handwriting analysis never seeks to determine personality from the way people form their letters; handwriting itself is relevant only when comparing one document with another, say, when determining forgeries. But that didn’t interest Rhyme at the moment. No, what Parker Kincaid was talking about was deducing characteristics of the writer based on the language he used – the “unusual” phrasing that Rhyme had noted earlier. This could be extremely helpful in identifying suspects. Grammatical and syntactical analysis of the Lindbergh baby ransom note, for instance, gave a perfect profile of the kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann.
With the enthusiasm he typically felt for his craft, Kincaid continued, “I found some interesting things. You’ve got the note handy?”
“It’s right in front of us.”
A black girl, fifth floor in this window, 2 October, about 0830. She saw my delivery van when he was parked in an alley behind the Jewelry exchange. Saw enough to guess the plans of mine. Kill her.
Kincaid said, “To start with, he’s foreign born. The awkward syntax and the misspellings tell me that. So does the way he indicates the date – putting the day before the month. And the time is given in the twenty-four-hour clock. That’s rare in America.”
The handwriting expert continued, “Now, another important point: he -”
“Or she,” Rhyme interrupted.
“I’m leaning toward male,” Kincaid countered. “Tell you why in a minute. He uses the gendered pronoun ‘he,’ referring, it seems, to his van. That’s typical of several different foreign languages. But what really narrows it down is the two-member nominal phrase in the genitive construction.”
“The what?” Rhyme asked.
“The genitive construction – a way to create the possessive. Your unsub wrote ‘my delivery van’ at one point.”
Rhyme scanned the note. “Got it.”
“But later he wrote ‘plans of mine.’ That makes me think your boy’s first language is Arabic.”
“Arabic?”
“I’ll say it’s a ninety percent likelihood. There’s a genitive construction in Arabic called i.daafah. The possessive’s usually formed by saying, ‘The car John.’ Meaning, ‘The car of John.’ Or, in your note, the ‘plans of mine.’ But the rules of Arabic grammar require that only one word is used for the thing that’s possessed – the ‘delivery van’ won’t work in Arabic; it’s a two-word phrase, so he can’t use i.daafah. He simply says ‘my delivery van.’ The other clue is the misuse of the indefinite article ‘a’ in ‘a alley.’ That’s common among Arabic speakers; the language doesn’t use indefinite articles, only the definite ‘the.’” Kincaid added, “That’s true of Welsh, too, but I don’t think this guy’s from Cardiff.”
“Good, Parker,” Sachs said. “Very subtle, but good.”
A faint laugh came from the speakerphone. “I’ll tell you, Amelia, everybody in the business’s been doing a lot of boning up on Arabic in the last few years.”
“That’s why you think it’s a man.”
“How many women Arab perps you see?”
“Not many…Anything else?”
“Get me some more samples and I’ll compare them if you want.”
“We may take you up on that.” Rhyme thanked Kincaid and they disconnected the call. Rhyme shook his head, staring at the evidence boards. He gave a scoffing laugh.
“What’re you thinking, Rhyme?”
“You know what he’s up to, don’t you?” the criminalist asked in an ominous voice.
Sachs nodded. “He’s not going to rob the exchange. He’s going to blow it up.”
“Yep.”
Dellray said, “Sure – those reports we’ve had, about terrorists goin’ after Israeli targets in the area.”
Sachs said, “The guard across the street from the museum said they get shipments of jewelry every day from Jerusalem… Okay, I’ll get the exchange evacuated and swept.” She pulled out her cell phone.
Rhyme glanced at the evidence board and said to Sellitto and Cooper, “Falafel and yogurt…and a delivery van. Find out if there are any restaurants around the exchange that serve Middle Eastern food and, if so, who makes deliveries and when. And what kind of van they use.”
Dellray shook his head. “Half the city eats that stuff. You can get gyros and falafel on every street corner in the city. They…” The agent stopped talking as his eyes met Rhyme’s.
“Pushcarts!”
Sellitto said, “There were a half dozen of them around the museum yesterday.”
“Perfect for surveillance,” Rhyme snapped. “And what a cover. He delivers supplies to them every day, so nobody pays attention to him. I want to know who supplies the street vendors. Move!”
According to the board of health, only two companies delivered Middle Eastern food to the pushcarts in the blocks around the jewelry exchange. Ironically, the largest of them was owned by two Jewish brothers with family in Israel and who were active in their temple; they were hardly suspects.
The other company didn’t own the carts but sold gyros, kabobs and falafel, along with the condiments and sodas (as well as the heathen but ever-profitable pork hot dogs), to dozens of carts in Midtown. The operation was based out of a restaurant/deli down on Broad Street, whose owners hired a man to make the deliveries around town.
With Dellray and a dozen other agents and cops surrounding them, these owners became extremely – almost tearfully – cooperative. The name of their deliveryman was Bani al-Dahab, and he was a Saudi national, here on a visa long expired. He’d been a professional of some sort in Jeddah and had worked as an engineer for a time in the U.S. but after he went illegal he’d taken what work he could – cooking occasionally and delivering food to pushcarts and other Middle Eastern restaurants around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The jewelry exchange had been evacuated and swept – no devices were found there – and an emergency vehicle locator was out on al-Dahab’s delivery van, which, according to the owners, might be anywhere in the city; the man was free to set his own delivery schedule.
It was at moments like this that Rhyme would have paced, had he been able to. Where the hell is he? Is the man driving around with a van full of explosives at the moment? Maybe he’d given up on the jewelry exchange and was going after a secondary target: a synagogue or an El-Al airlines office.
“Let’s get Boyd down here, put some pressure on him,” he snapped. “I want to know where the hell this guy is!”
It was at that moment that Mel Cooper’s phone rang.
Then Sellitto’s, followed by Amelia Sachs’s.
Finally, the main laboratory phone began to chirp.
The callers were different but the message was virtually the same.
Rhyme’s question about the bomber’s whereabouts had just been answered.
Only the driver died.
Which considering the force of the explosion and the fact that the van was in the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Fifty-fourth, surrounded by other cars, was pretty miraculous.
When the bomb went off, the direction of the blast was mostly upward, through the roof, and out the windows, scattering shrapnel and glass and injuring a score of people, but the main damage was confined to the interior of the E250. The burning van had lurched up on the sidewalk, where it slammed into a light post. A crew from the fire station up the street on Eighth Avenue got the flames out fast and kept the crowd back. As for the driver, there was no point in even trying to save him; the two largest pieces of his remains were separated by several yards.
The Bomb Squad had cleared the scene and the main job of the police now was to wait for the medical examiner tour doctor and the crime scene crew.
“What’s that smell?” the detective from Midtown North asked. The tall, balding officer was creeped out by the stink, which he took to be burnt human flesh. The problem was that it smelled good.
One of the detectives from the Bomb Squad laughed at the green-faced detective. “Gyros.”
“Gear-o, what?” the detective asked, thinking it was short for something – like FUBAR, meaning “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
“Look.” The Bomb Squad cop held up a chunk of burnt meat in his latex-gloved hands. He smelled it. “Tasty.”
The Midtown North detective laughed and didn’t reveal how close to puking he was.
“It’s lamb.”
“It’s -”
“The driver was delivering food. That was his job. The back of the van’s filled with meat and falafel and shit like that.”
“Oh.” The cop still didn’t feel any less nauseous.
It was then that a bright red Camaro SS – one hell of a car – skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, just kissing the yellow police tape. Out climbed a stunning redhead, who looked over the scene, nodding to the detective.
“Hey,” he said.
As the woman detective hooked a headset onto her Motorola and waved to the crime scene bus, just pulling up as well, she sniffed the air, taking several deep breaths. She nodded. “Haven’t run the scene yet,” she said into the microphone, “but from the smell, Rhyme, I’d say we’ve got him.”
It was then that the tall, bald detective swallowed and said, “You know, I’ll be right back.” He jogged to a nearby Starbucks, praying he’d make it to the restroom in time.
With Detective Bell at her side, Geneva walked into the laboratory portion of Mr. Rhyme’s town house, downstairs. She glanced at her father, who looked at her with those big puppy-dog eyes of his.
Damnit. She looked away.
Mr. Rhyme said, “We’ve got some news. The man who hired Boyd’s dead.”
“Dead? The jewelry store robber?”
“Things weren’t quite what they seemed,” Mr. Rhyme said. “We were – well, I was wrong. I was thinking whoever it was wanted to rob the jewelry exchange. But, no, he wanted to blow it up.”
“Terrorists?” she asked.
Mr. Rhyme nodded toward a plastic folder that Amelia was holding. Inside was a letter, addressed to The New York Times. It said the bombing of the jewelry exchange was yet another step in the holy war against Zionist Israel and its allies. It was the same paper that was used for the note about killing Geneva and the map of West Fifty-fifth Street.
“Who is he?” she asked, trying to remember a van and a Middle Eastern man in the street outside the museum a week or so ago. She couldn’t.
“An illegal Saudi national,” Detective Sellitto said. “Worked for a restaurant downtown. The owners’re pretty freaked, of course. They think we think they’re a cover for al-Qaeda or something.” He chuckled. “Which they might be. We’ll keep checking. But they all come up clean – citizens, been here for years, couple kids in the army, even. I will say they’re a bunch of very nervous folks at the moment.”
The most important aspect about the bomber, Amelia went on to say, was that this man, Bani al-Dahab, didn’t appear to associate with any suspected terrorists. The women he’d dated recently and coworkers said that they didn’t know of any times he’d met with people who might be in a terrorist cell, and his mosque was religiously and politically moderate. Amelia had searched his Queens apartment and found no other evidence or connections to other terrorist cells. His phone records were being checked for possible links to other fundamentalists, though.
“We’ll keep looking over the evidence,” Mr. Rhyme said, “but we’re ninety-nine percent sure he was working alone. I think it means you’re probably safe.”
He wheeled his chair to the evidence table and looked over some bags of burnt metal and plastic. He said to Mr. Cooper, “Add it to the chart, Mel: Explosive was TOVEX, and we’ve got pieces of the receiver – the detonator – the casing, wire, a bit of blasting cap. All contained in a UPS box addressed to the jewelry exchange, attention of the director.”
“Why’d it go off early?” Jax Jackson asked.
Mr. Rhyme explained that it was very dangerous to use a radio-controlled bomb in the city because there were so many ambient radio waves – from construction-site detonators, walkie-talkies and a hundred other sources.
Detective Sellitto added, “Or he may’ve killed himself. He might’ve heard that Boyd was arrested or that the jewelry exchange was being searched for a bomb. He must’ve thought it was only a matter of time until he’d be nabbed.”
Geneva felt uneasy, confused. These people around her were suddenly strangers. The reason they’d come together in the first place no longer existed. As for her father, he was more alien to her than the police. She wanted to be back in her room in the Harlem basement with her books and her plans for the future, college, dreams about Florence and Paris.
But then she realized Amelia was looking at her closely. The policewoman asked, “What’re you going to do now?”
Geneva glanced at her father. What would happen? She had a parent, true, but one who was an ex-con, who couldn’t even be here in the city. They’d still probably try to put her in a foster home.
Amelia glanced at Lincoln Rhyme. “Until things get sorted out, why don’t we stick with our plan? Have Geneva stay here for a while.”
“Here?” the girl asked.
“Your father’s got to get back to Buffalo and take care of things there.”
Not that living with him is an option anyway, Geneva thought. But kept this to herself.
“Excellent idea.” This came from Thom. “I think that’s what we’ll do.” His voice was firm. “You’ll stay here.”
“Is that all right with you?” Amelia asked Geneva.
Geneva wasn’t sure why they wanted her to stay. She was initially suspicious. But she constantly had to remind herself that, after living alone for so long, suspicion trailed her like a shadow. She thought of another rule about lives like hers: You take your family how you find them.
“Sure,” she said.
Shackled, Thompson Boyd was brought into Rhyme’s lab and the two guards deposited him in front of the officers and Rhyme. Geneva was once again upstairs in her room, guarded at the moment by Barbe Lynch.
The criminalist rarely did this, meeting the perpetrators face-to-face. For him, a scientist, the only passion in his job was the game itself, the pursuit, not the physical incarnation of the suspect. He had no desire to gloat over the man or woman he’d captured. Excuses and pleas didn’t move him, threats didn’t trouble him.
Yet now he wanted to make absolutely certain that Geneva Settle was safe. He wanted to assess her attacker himself.
His face bandaged and bruised from his confrontation with Sachs at the arrest, Boyd looked around the laboratory. The equipment, the charts on the whiteboards.
The wheelchair.
No emotion whatsoever, no flicker of surprise or interest. Not even when he nodded toward Sachs. It was as if he’d forgotten that she’d brained him repeatedly with a rock.
Somebody asked Boyd about it, how’d it feel, bein’ in a electric chair. He said it didn’t feel like anythin’. It just felt “kinda numb.” He said that a lot toward the end. He felt numb.
He asked, “How’d you find me?”
“A couple of things,” Rhyme answered. “For one, you picked the wrong tarot card to leave as evidence. It put me in mind of executions.”
“The Hanged Man,” Boyd said, nodding. “Right you are. I never thought about that. Just seemed like kind of a spooky one. To lead you off, you know.”
Rhyme continued, “What got us your name, though, was your habit.”
“Habit?”
“You whistle.”
“I do that. I try not to on the job. But sometimes it slips out. So you talked to…”
“Yep, some people in Texas.”
Nodding, Boyd glanced at Rhyme with red, squinting eyes. “So you knew ’bout Charlie Tucker? That unfortunate excuse for a human being. Making the last days of my people’s time on earth miserable. Telling ’em they were going to burn in hell, nonsense talk about Jesus and whatnot.”
My people…
Sachs asked, “Was Bani al-Dahab the only one who hired you?”
He blinked in surprise; it seemed the first true emotion to cross his face. “How -?” He fell silent.
“The bomb went off early. Or he killed himself.”
A shake of the head. “No, he wasn’t any suicide bomber. It would’ve gone off by accident. Fella was careless. Too hotheaded, you know. Didn’t do things by the book. He probably armed it too early.”
“How’d you meet him?”
“He called me. Got my name from somebody in prison, Nation of Islam connection.”
So that was it. Rhyme had wondered how a Texas prison guard had hooked up with Islamic terrorists.
“They’re crazy,” Boyd said. “But they have money, those Arab people.”
“And Jon Earle Wilson? He was your bomb maker?”
“Jonny, yes, sir.” He shook his head. “You know ’bout him too? You people’re good, I must say.”
“Where is he?”
“That I don’t know. We left messages from pay phones to a voice-mail box. And met in public. Never traded more’n a dozen words.”
“The FBI’ll be talking to you about al-Dahab and the bombing. What we want to know about is Geneva. Is there anybody else who’d want to hurt her?”
Boyd shook his head. “From what he told me, al-Dahab was working alone. I suspect he talked to people over in the Middle East some. But nobody here. He didn’t trust anyone.” The Texas drawl came and went, as if he’d been working on losing it.
Sachs said ominously, “If you’re lying, if something happens to her, we can make sure the rest of your life’s totally miserable.”
“How?” Boyd asked, genuinely curious, it seemed.
“You killed the librarian, Dr. Barry. You attacked and tried to kill police officers. You could get consecutive lifetimes. And we’re looking into the death of a girl yesterday on Canal Street. Somebody pushed her in front of a bus near where you were escaping from Elizabeth Street. We’re running your picture past witnesses. You’ll go away forever.”
A shrug. “Doesn’t hardly matter.”
“You don’t care?” Sachs asked.
“I know you people don’t understand me. I don’t blame you. But, see, I don’t care about prison. I don’t care about anything. Y’all can’t really touch me. I’m dead already. Killing somebody doesn’t matter to me, saving a life doesn’t matter.” He glanced at Amelia Sachs, who was staring at him. Boyd said, “I see that look. You’re wond’ring what kinda monster is this fella? Well, fact is, y’all made me who I am.”
“We did?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, ma’am…You know my profession.”
“Executions control officer,” Rhyme said.
“Yes, sir. Now something I’ll tell you ’bout that line of work: You can find the names of every human legally executed in these United States. Which is a lot. And you can find the names of all the governors who waited up till midnight or whenever to commute them if the inclination was there. You can find the names of all the victims the condemned murdered, and much of the time the names of their next of kin. But do you know the one name you won’t find?”
He looked at the officers around him. “Us people who push the button. The executioners. We’re forgotten. Ever’body thinks ’bout how capital punishment affects the families of the condemned. Or society. Or the victims’ families. Not to mention the man or woman gets put down like a dog in the process. But nobody ever spends a drop of sweat on us executioners. Nobody ever stops and thinks what happens to us.
“Day after day, living with our people – men, women too, course, who’re gonna die, getting to know ’em. Talking to ’em. ’Bout everything under the sun. Hearing a black man ask how come is it the white guy who did the exact same crime gets off with life, or maybe even less, but he himself’s gonna die? The Mexican swearing he didn’t rape and kill that girl. He was just buying beer at 7-Eleven and the police come up and next he knows he’s on Death Row. And a year after he’s in the ground they do a DNA test and find out they did have the wrong man, and he was innocent all along.
“Course, even the guilty ones’re human beings too. Living with all of them, day after day. Being decent to them because they’re decent to you. Getting to know ’em. And then…then you kill ’em. You, all by yourself. With your own hands, pushing the button, throwing the switch…It changes you.
“You know what they say? You heard it. ‘Dead man walking.’ It’s supposed to mean the prisoner. But it’s really us. The executioners. We’re the dead men.”
Sachs muttered, “But your girlfriend? How could you shoot her?”
He fell silent. For the first time a darkness clouded his face. “I pondered firing that shot. I’d hoped maybe I’d have this feeling that I shouldn’t do it. That she meant too much to me. I’d let her be and run, just take my chances. But…” He shook his head. “Didn’t happen. I looked at her and all I felt was numb. And I knew that it’d make sense to shoot her.”
“And if the children had been home and not her?” Sachs gasped. “You’d’ve shot one of them to escape?”
He considered this for a moment. “Well, ma’am, I guess we know that would’ve worked, wouldn’t it? You would’ve stopped to save one of the girls ’stead of coming after me. Like my daddy told me: It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”
The darkness seemed to lift from his face, as if he’d finally received some answer or come to some conclusion in a debate that had been troubling him for a long time.
The Hanged Man…The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is.
He glanced at Rhyme. “Now, you don’t mind, I think it’s time for me to get back home.”
“Home?”
He looked at them curiously. “Jail.”
As if, what else would he possibly mean?
Father and daughter got off the C train at 135th street and started east, toward Langston Hughes High.
She hadn’t wanted him to come but he’d insisted on looking after her – which Mr. Rhyme and Detective Bell had insisted on too. Besides, she reflected, he’d be back in Buffalo by tomorrow and she supposed she could tolerate an hour or two with him.
He nodded back at the subway. “Used to love to write on C trains. Paint stuck real nice…I knew a lot of people’d see it. Did an end-to-end in 1976. It was the Bicentennial that year. Those tall ships were in town. My ’piece was of one of those boats, ’long with the Statue of Liberty.” He laughed. “The MTA didn’t scrub that car for at least a week, I heard. Maybe they were just busy but I like to think somebody liked what I painted and kept it up for longer than normal.”
Geneva grunted. She was thinking that she had a story to tell him. A block away she could see the construction scaffolding in front of the same building she’d been working on when she’d been fired. How’d her father like to know that her job had been scrubbing graffiti off the redeveloped buildings? Maybe she’d even erased some of his. Tempted to tell him. But she didn’t.
At the first working pay phone they found on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Geneva stopped, fished for some change. Her father offered her his cell phone.
“That’s okay.”
“Take it.”
She ignored him, dropped the coins in and called Lakeesha, while her father pocketed his cell and wandered to the curb, looking around the neighborhood like a boy in front of the candy section in a bodega.
She turned away as her friend answered. “’Lo?”
“It’s all over with, Keesh.” She explained about the jewelry exchange, the bombing.
“That what was goin’ on? Damn. A terrorist? That some scary shit. But you okay?”
“I’m down. Really.”
Geneva heard another voice, a male one, saying something to her friend, who put her hand over the receiver for a moment. Their muted exchange seemed heated.
“You there, Keesh?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody. Where you at? You not in that basement crib no more, right?”
“I’m still where I told you – with that policeman and his girlfriend. The one in the wheelchair.”
“You there now?”
“No, I’m Uptown. Going to school.”
“Now?”
“Pick up my homework.”
The girl paused. Then: “Listen, I’ma hook up with you at school. Wanna see you, girl. When you be there?”
Geneva glanced at her father, nearby, hands in his pockets, still surveying the street. She decided she didn’t want to mention him to Keesha, or anybody else, just yet.
“Let’s make it tomorrow, Keesh. I don’t have any time now.”
“Daymn, girl.”
“Really. Better tomorrow.”
“Wha-ever.”
Geneva heard the click of the disconnect. Yet she stayed where she was for some moments, delaying going back to her father.
Finally she joined him and they continued toward the school.
“You know what was up there, three or four blocks?” he asked, pointing north. “Strivers Row. You ever seen it?
“No,” she muttered.
“I’ll take you up there sometime. Hundred years ago, this land developer fellow, named King, he built these three big apartments and tons of town houses. Hired three of the best architects in the country and told ’em to go to work. Beautiful places. King Model Homes was the real name but they were so expensive and so nice, this’s the story, the place was called Strivers Row ’cause you had to strive to live there. W. C. Handy lived there for a time. You know him? Father of the blues. Most righteous musician ever lived. I did a ’piece up that way one time. I ever tell you about that? Took me thirty cans to do. Wasn’t a throw-up; I spent two days on it. Did a picture of W. C. himself. Photographer from the Times shot it and put it in the paper.” He nodded north. “It was there for -”
She stopped fast. Her hands slapped her hips. “Enough!”
“Genie?”
“Just stop it. I don’t want to hear this.”
“You -”
“I don’t care about any of what you’re telling me.”
“You’re mad at me, honey. Who wouldn’t be after everything? Look, I made a mistake,” he said, his voice cracking. “That was the past. I’m different now. Everything’s going to be different. I’ll never put anybody ahead of you again, like I did when I was with your moms. You’re the one I should’ve been trying to save – and not by taking that trip to Buffalo.”
“No! You don’t get it! It’s not about what you did. It’s your whole goddamn world I don’t want any part of. I don’t care about Strivers whatever it is, I don’t care about the Apollo or the Cotton Club. Or the Harlem Renaissance. I don’t like Harlem. I hate it here. It’s guns and crack and rapes and people getting fiended for a cheap-ass plated bling and drugstore hoops. It’s girls, all they care about is extensions and braids. And -”
“And Wall Street’s got insider traders and New Jersey ’s got the mob and Westchester ’s got trailer parks,” he replied.
She hardly heard him. “It’s boys, all they care about is getting girls in bed. It’s ignorant people who don’t care how they talk. It’s -”
“What’s wrong with AAVE?”
She blinked. “How do you know about that?” He himself had never talked ghetto – his own father had made sure he’d worked hard in school (at least until he dropped out to start the “career” of defacing city property). But most people who lived here didn’t know that the official name for what they spoke was African-American Vernacular English.
“When I was inside,” he explained, “I got my high school diploma and a year of college.”
She said nothing.
“I mostly studied reading and words. Maybe won’t help me get a job but it’s what drew me. I always liked books and things, you know that. I’m the one had you reading from jump… I studied Standard. But I studied Vernacular too. And I don’t see anything wrong with it.”
“You don’t speak it,” she pointed out sharply.
“I didn’t grow up speaking it. I didn’t grow up speaking French or Mandingo either.”
“I’m sick of hearing people say, ‘Lemme axe you a question.’”
Her father shrugged. “‘Axe’ is just an Old-English version of ‘ask.’ Royalty used to say it. There’re Bible translations that talk about ‘axing’ God for mercy. It’s not a black thing, like people say. The combination of saying s and k next to each other’s hard to pronounce. It’s easier to transpose. And ‘ain’t’? Been in the English language since Shakespeare’s day.”
She laughed. “Try getting a job talking Vernacular.”
“Well, what if somebody from France or Russia ’s trying for that same job? Don’t you think the boss’d give them a chance, listen to ’em, see if they’d work hard, were smart, even if they spoke different English? Maybe the problem’s that the boss is using somebody’s language as a reason not to hire him.” He laughed. “People in New York damn well better be able to speak some Spanish and Chinese in the next few years. Why not Vernacular?”
His logic infuriated her even more.
“I like our language, Genie. It sounds natural to me. Makes me feel at home. Look, you’ve got every right to be mad at me for what I did. But not for who I am or what we came out of. This’s home. And you know what you do with your home, don’t you? You change what oughta be changed and learn to be proud of what you can’t.”
Geneva jammed her eyes closed and lifted her hands to her face. The years and years she dreamed of a parent – not even the luxury of two, but just one person to be there when she came home in the afternoons, to look over her homework, to wake her up in the morning. And when that wasn’t going to happen, when she’d finally managed to shore up her life on her own and start working her way out of this godforsaken place, here comes the past to yoke and choke her and drag her back.
“But that’s not what I want,” she whispered. “I want something more than this mess.” She waved her hand around the streets.
“Oh, Geneva, I understand that. All I’m hoping for is maybe we have a couple of nice years here, ’fore you off into the world. Give me a chance to make up for what we did to you, your mother and me. You deserve the world… But honey, I gotta say – can you name me one place that’s perfect? Where all the streets’re paved with gold? Where everybody loves their neighbors?” He laughed and slipped into Vernacular. “You say it a mess here? Well, damn straight. But where ain’t it a mess one way or th’other, baby? Where ain’t it?”
He put his arm around her. She stiffened but she didn’t otherwise resist. They started for the school.
Lakeesha Scott sat on the bench in Marcus Garvey Park, where she’d been for the past half hour, after she’d come back from her counter job in the restaurant downtown.
She lit another Merit, thinking: There are things we do ’cause we want to and things we do ’cause we gotta. Survival things.
And what she was about now was one of those had-to things.
Why the fuck didn’t Geneva say that after all this shit she was booking on out of town and never coming back?
She was going to Detroit or ’Bama?
Sorry, Keesh, we can’t see each other anymore. I’m talking forever. Bye.
That way, the whole fucking problem’d be gone for good.
Why, why, why?
And it was worse than that: Gen had to go and tell her exactly where she was going to be for the next few hours. Keesh had no excuse to miss the girl now. Oh, she’d kept up her ghetto patter when they’d been talking a while ago so her friend wouldn’t hop to something going down. But now, sitting alone, she sank into sorrow.
Man, I’m feeling bad.
But ain’t got no choice here.
Things we do ’cause we gotta…
Come on, Keesha said to herself. Got to get over. Let’s go. Bring it on…
She crushed out her cigarette and left the park, headed west then north on Malcolm X, past church after church. They were everywhere. Mt. Morris Ascension, Bethelite Community, Ephesus Adventist church, Baptist – plenty of those. A mosque or two, a synagogue.
And the stores and shops: Papaya King, a botanica, a tuxedo-rental shop, a check-cashing outlet. She passed a gypsy cab garage, the owner sitting outside, holding his taped-together dispatch radio, the long cord disappearing into the unlit office. He smiled at her pleasantly. How Lakeesha envied them: the reverends in the grimy storefronts under the neon crosses, the carefree men slipping hot dogs into the steamed buns, the fat man on the cheap chair, with his cigarette and his fucked-up microphone.
They ain’t betraying nobody, she thought.
They ain’t betraying the person was one of their best friends for years.
Snapping her gum, gripping her purse strap hard with her pudgy fingers tipped in black and yellow nails. Ignoring three Dominican boys.
“Psssst.”
She heard “booty.” She heard “bitch.”
“Pssssst.”
Keesh reached into her purse and gripped her spring knife. She nearly flicked it open, just to see ’ em flinch. She glared but left the long, sharp blade where it was, deciding she’d have a world of trouble when she got to the school. Let it go for now.
“Pssst.”
She moved on, her nervous hands opening a pack of gum. Shoving two fruity pieces into her mouth, Lakeesha struggled to find her angry heart.
Get yourself mad, girl. Think of everything Geneva done to piss you off, think of everything she be that you ain’t and never gonna be. The fact the girl was so smart it hurt, that she came to school every single fucking day, that she kept her skinny little white-girl figure without looking like some AIDS ho, that she managed to keep her legs together and told other girls to do the same like some prissy moms.
Acting like she better than us all.
But she wasn’t. Geneva Settle was just another kid from a mommy-got-a-habit, daddy-done-run-off family.
She one of us.
Get mad at the fact that she’d look you in the eye and say, “You can do it, girl, you can do it, you can do it, you can get outa here, you got the world ahead of you.”
Well, no, bitch, sometimes you just can’t do it. Sometimes it’s just too fucking much to bear. You need help to get over. You need somebody with benjamins, somebody watching your back.
And for a moment the anger at Geneva boiled up inside her and she gripped the purse strap even tighter.
But she couldn’t hold it. The anger vanished, blew away like it was nothing more than the light brown baby powder she’d sprinkle on her twin cousins’ buns when she changed their diapers.
As Lakeesha walked in a daze past Lenox Terrace toward their school, where Geneva Settle would soon be, she realized that she couldn’t rely on anger or excuses.
All she could rely on was survival. Sometimes you gotta look out for yourself and take the hand somebody offers you.
Things we do ’cause we gotta…
At school, Geneva collected her homework and wouldn’t you know it, her next language arts assignment was to report on Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, the 1928 book that was the first best-selling novel by a black author.
“Can’t I have e. e. cummings?” she asked. “Or John Cheever?”
“It’s our African-American sequence, Gen,” her language arts teacher pointed out, smiling.
“Then Frank Yerby,” she bargained. “Or Octavia Butler.”
“Ah, they’re wonderful authors, Gen,” her teacher said, “but they don’t write about Harlem. That’s what we’re studying in this segment. But I gave you McKay because I thought you’d like him. He’s one of the most controversial writers to come out of the Renaissance. McKay took a lot of flak because he looked at the underside of Harlem. He wrote about the primitive aspects of the place. That upset DuBois and a lot of other thinkers at the time. It’s right up your alley.”
Maybe her father could help her interpret, she thought cynically, since he loved the neighborhood and its patois so much.
“Try it,” the man offered. “You might like it.”
Oh, no, I won’t, Geneva thought.
Outside the school, she joined her father. They came to the bus stop and both closed their eyes as a swirl of chill, dusty air swept around them. They’d reached a detente of sorts and she’d agreed to let him take her to a Jamaican restaurant that he’d been dreaming about for the past six years.
“Is it even still there?” she asked coolly.
“Dunno. But we’ll find something. Be an adventure.”
“I don’t have much time.” She shivered in the cold.
“Where’s that bus?” he asked.
Geneva looked across the street and frowned. Oh, no… There was Lakeesha. This was so her; she hadn’t even listened to what Geneva’d said and had come here anyway.
Keesh waved.
“Who’s that?” her father asked.
“My girlfriend.”
Lakeesha glanced uncertainly toward her father and then gestured for Gen to cross the street.
What’s wrong? The girl’s face was smiling but it was clear she had something on her mind. Maybe she was wondering what Geneva was doing with an older man.
“Wait here,” she told her father. And she started toward Lakeesha, who blinked and seemed to take a deep breath. She opened her purse and reached inside.
What’s the 411 on this? Geneva wondered. She crossed the street and paused at the curb. Keesha hesitated then stepped forward. “Gen,” she said, her eyes going dark.
Geneva frowned. “Girl, what’s -”
Keesh stopped fast as a car pulled to the curb past Geneva, who blinked in surprise. Behind the wheel was the school counselor, Mrs. Barton. The woman gestured the student to the car. Geneva hesitated, told Keesh to wait a minute and joined the counselor.
“Hey, Geneva. I just missed you inside.”
“Hi.” The girl was cautious, not sure what the woman knew and didn’t about her parents.
“Mr. Rhyme’s assistant told me that they caught the man who tried to hurt you. And your parents finally got back.”
“My father.” She pointed. “That’s him right there.”
The counselor regarded the stocky man in the shabby T-shirt and jacket. “And everything’s okay?”
Out of earshot, Lakeesha watched them with a frown. Her expression was even more troubled than before. She’d seemed cheerful on the phone, but now that Geneva thought about it, maybe she’d been fronting. And who was that guy she’d been talking to?
Nobody…
I don’t think so.
“Geneva?” Mrs. Barton asked. “You all right?”
She looked back at the counselor. “Sorry. Yeah, it’s fine.”
The woman again studied her father closely and then turned her brown eyes on the girl, who looked away.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“Uhm…”
“What’s the real story here?”
“I -”
It was one of those situations when the truth was going to come out no matter what. “Okay, look, Mrs. Barton, I’m sorry. I wasn’t completely honest. My father’s not a professor. He’s been in prison. But he got released.”
“So where have you been living?”
“On my own.”
With no trace of judgment in her eyes the woman nodded. “Your mother?”
“Dead.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry… And is he going to take custody?”
“We haven’t really talked about it. Anything he does he has to get it worked out with the court or something.” She said this to buy time. Geneva had half formulated a plan for her father to come back, technically take custody, but she’d continue to live on her own. “For a few days I’m going to stay with Mr. Rhyme and Amelia, at their place.”
The woman looked once more at her father, who was offering a faint smile toward the pair.
“This’s pretty unusual.”
Geneva said defiantly, “I won’t go into a foster home. I won’t lose everything I’ve been working for. I’ll run away. I’ll -”
“Whoa, slow up.” The counselor smiled. “I don’t think we need to make an issue of anything now. You’ve been through enough. We’ll talk about it in a few days. Where’re you going now?”
“To Mr. Rhyme’s.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
Geneva gestured her father over. The man ambled up to the car, and the girl introduced them.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am. And thanks for looking out for Geneva.”
“Come on, get in.”
Geneva looked across the street. Keesh was still there.
She shouted, “I gotta go. I’ll call you.” She mimicked holding a phone to her ear.
Lakeesha nodded uncertainly, withdrew her hand from her purse.
Geneva climbed into the backseat, behind her father. A glance through the back window at Keesh’s grim face.
Then Mrs. Barton pulled away from the curb and her father started up with another ridiculous history lesson, rambling on and on, you know I did a ’piece once ’bout the Collyer brothers? Homer and Langley. Lived at 128th and Fifth. They were recluses and the weirdest men ever lived. They were terrified of crime in Harlem and barricaded themselves in their apartment, set up booby traps, never threw a single thing out. One of ’em got crushed under a pile of newspapers he’d stacked up. When they died, police had to cart over a hundred tons of trash out of their place. He asked, “You ever hear about them?”
The counselor said she thought she had.
“No,” Geneva replied. And thought: Ask me if I care.
Lincoln Rhyme was directing Mel Cooper to organize the evidence that they’d collected from the bombing scene, in between reviewing some of the evidence-analysis reports that had returned.
A federal team, under Dellray’s direction, had tracked down Jon Earle Wilson, the man whose fingerprints were on the transistor radio bomb in Boyd’s safe house. He’d been collared and a couple of agents were going to bring him over to Rhyme’s for interrogation to shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.
It was then that Bell’s phone rang. He answered, “Bell here…Luis, what’s up?” He cocked his head to listen.
Luis…
This would be Martinez, who had been tailing Geneva and her father on foot since they’d left Rhyme’s to go to Langston Hughes. They were convinced that Jax, Alonzo Jackson, was her father and no threat to the girl, and that the terrorist had been working alone. But that didn’t mean Bell and Rhyme were going to let Geneva go anywhere in the immediate future without protection.
But something was wrong. Rhyme could read it in Bell’s eyes. The detective said to Cooper, “We need a DMV check. Fast.” He jotted a tag number on a Post-it note then hung up, handed the slip of paper to the CS tech.
“What’s happening?” Sachs asked.
“Geneva and her father were at the bus stop near the school. A car pulled up. They got inside. Luis wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t get across the street fast enough to stop them.”
“Car? Who was driving?”
“Heavyset black woman. Way he described her, sounds like it might’ve been that counselor, Barton.”
Nothing to worry about necessarily, Rhyme reflected. Maybe the woman just saw them at the bus stop and offered them a ride.
Information from the DMV flickered over his screen.
“What do we have, Mel?” Rhyme asked.
Cooper squinted as he read. He typed some more. He looked up, eyes wide through his thick glasses. “A problem. We have a problem.”
Mrs. Barton was heading into south-central Harlem, moving slowly though the early evening traffic. She slowed as they drove past yet another real estate redevelopment project.
Her father shook his head. “Look at all this.” He nodded at the billboard. “Developers, banks, architects.” A sour laugh. “Betcha there’s not a single black person running any of ’em.”
Lame, Geneva thought. She wanted to tune him out.
Whining about the past…
The counselor glanced at the site and, shrugged. “You see that a lot around here.” She braked and turned down an alley between one of the old buildings being gutted and a deep excavation site.
In response to her father’s questioning glance, Mrs. Barton said, “Shortcut.”
But her father looked around. “Shortcut?”
“Just to miss some of the southbound traffic.”
He looked again, squinted. Then spat out, “Bullshit.”
“Dad!” Geneva cried.
“I know this block. Road’s closed off up ahead. They’re tearing down some old factory.”
“No,” Mrs. Barton said. “I just came this way and -”
But her father grabbed the parking brake and pulled up as hard as he could, then spun the wheel to the left. The car skidded into the brick wall with the wrenching sound of metal and plastic grinding into stone.
Grabbing the counselor’s arm, the man shouted, “She’s with them, baby. Trying to hurt you! Get out, run!”
“Dad, no, you’re crazy! You can’t -”
But the confirmation came a moment later as a pistol appeared from the woman’s pocket. She aimed it at her father’s chest and pulled the trigger. He blinked in shock and jerked back, gripping the wound. “Oh. Oh, my,” he whispered.
Geneva leapt back as the woman turned the silver gun toward her. Just as it fired, her father swung his fist into the woman’s jaw and stunned her. Flame and bits of gunpowder peppered Geneva’s face but the bullet missed. It blew the car’s rear window into a thousand tiny cubes.
“Run, baby!” her father muttered and slumped against the dashboard.
Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…
Sobbing, Geneva crawled out the shattered back window and fell to the ground. She struggled to her feet and started sprinting down the ramp into the murky demolition site.
Alina Frazier – the woman fronting as the counselor Patricia Barton – didn’t have the cool of her partner. Thompson Boyd was ice itself. He never got rattled. But Alina had always been emotional. She was furious, cursing, as she scrabbled over the body of Geneva ’s father and stumbled out into the alley, looking left and right for the girl.
Furious that Boyd was in jail, furious that the girl was getting away.
Breathing deeply, looking up and down the deserted alley. Stalking back and forth. Where could the little bitch -?
A flash of gray to her right: Geneva was crawling out from behind a scabby blue Dumpster and disappearing deeper into the job site. The woman started off in pursuit, panting. She was large, yes, but also very strong and she moved quickly. You could let prison soften you, or you could let prison turn you into stone. She’d chosen the second.
Frazier’d been a gangsta in the early nineties, the leader of a girl wolf pack roaming Times Square and the Upper East Side, where tourists and residents – who’d be suspicious of a cluster of teen boys – didn’t think anything of a handful of boisterous sistas, toting Daffy Dan and Macy’s shopping bags. That is, until the knives or guns appeared and the rich bitches lost their cash and jewelry. After stints in juvie she’d gone down big and done time for manslaughter – it should’ve been murder, but the kid prosecutor had fucked up. After release she’d returned to New York. Here, she’d met Boyd through the guy she was living with, and when Frazier broke up with the claimer, Boyd had called her. At first she thought it was just one of those white-guy-hot-for-a-black-girl things. But when she’d taken up his invitation for coffee, he hadn’t come on to her at all. He’d just looked her over with those weird, dead eyes of his and said that it’d be helpful to have a woman work with him on some jobs. Was she interested?
Jobs? she’d asked, thinking drugs, thinking guns, thinking perped TVs.
But he’d explained in a whisper what his line of work was.
She’d blinked.
Then he’d added it could net her upwards of fifty thousand bucks for a few days’ work.
A brief pause. Then a grin. “Damn straight.”
For the Geneva Settle job, though, they were making five times that. This turned out to be a fair price, since it was the hardest kill they’d ever worked. After the hit at the museum yesterday morning hadn’t worked out, Boyd had called her and asked for her help (even offering an extra $50,000 if she killed the girl herself). Frazier, always the smartest in her crews, had come up with the idea of fronting as the counselor and had a fake board of education ID made up. She’d started calling public schools in Harlem, asking to speak to any of Geneva Settle’s teachers, and had received a dozen variations on, “She’s not enrolled here. Sorry.” Until Langston Hughes High, where some office worker had said that, yes, this was her school. Frazier had then simply put on a cheap business suit, dangled the ID over her imposing chest and strolled into the high school like she owned the place.
There, she’d learned about the girl’s mysterious parents, the apartment on 118th Street and – from that Detective Bell and the other cops – about the Central Park West town house and who was guarding Geneva. She’d fed all this information to Boyd to help in planning the kill.
She staked out the girl’s apartment near Morningside – until it got too risky because of Geneva’s bodyguards. (She’d been caught in the act this afternoon, when a squad car pulled her over near the place, but it turned out the cops hadn’t been looking for her.)
Frazier had talked a guard at Langston Hughes into giving her the security video of the school yard, and with that prop, she managed to get inside the crippled man’s town house, where she learned yet more information about the girl.
But then Boyd had been nailed – he’d told her all along how good the police were – and now it was up to Alina Frazier to finish the job if she wanted the rest of the fee, $125,000.
Gasping for breath, the big woman now paused thirty feet down a ramp that led to the foundation level of the excavation site. Squinting against a blast of low sun from the west, trying to see where the little bitch had gone. Damn, girl, show yourself.
Then: movement again. Geneva was making her way to the far side of the deserted job site, crawling fast over the ground, using cement mixers, Bobcats and piles of beams and supplies for cover. The girl disappeared behind an oil drum.
Stepping into the shadows for a better view, Frazier aimed at the middle of the drum and fired, hitting the metal with a loud ring.
It seemed to her that dirt danced up into the air just past the container. Had it slammed through the girl too?
But, no, she was up and moving fast to a low wall of rubble – brick, stone, pipes. Just as she vaulted it, Frazier fired again.
The girl tumbled over the other side of the wall with a shrill scream. Something puffed into the air. Dirt and stone dust? Or blood?
Had Frazier hit the girl? She was a good shot – she and her ex-boyfriend, a gunrunner in Newark, had spent hours picking off rats in abandoned buildings on the outskirts of town, trying out his products. She thought she’d been on the mark now. But she couldn’t wait long to find out; people would’ve heard the gunshots. Some’d ignore them, sure, and some’d think the workers were still on the job with heavy equipment. But at least one or two good citizens might be calling 911 just about now.
Well, go see…
She started slowly down the truck ramp, making sure she didn’t fall; the incline was very steep. But then a car horn began blaring from the alley, behind and above her. It was coming from her car.
Fuck, she thought angrily, the girl’s father was still alive.
Frazier hesitated. Then decided: time to get the hell out of here. Finish dad off. Geneva was probably hit and wouldn’t survive long. But even if she wasn’t wounded, Frazier could track her down later. There’d be plenty of opportunities.
Fucking horn…It seemed louder than the gunshot and had to be attracting attention. Worse, it would cover up the sound of any approaching sirens. Frazier climbed to the street level up the dirt ramp, gasping from the effort. But as she got to the car, she frowned, seeing that it was empty. Geneva’s father wasn’t in the driver’s seat, after all. A trail of blood led to a nearby alleyway, where his body lay. Frazier glanced inside her car. That’s what’d happened: Before he’d crawled away he’d pulled out the car’s jack and wedged it against the horn panel on the steering wheel.
Furious, Frazier yanked it away.
The piercing sound stopped.
She tossed the jack into the backseat and glanced at the man. Was he dead? Well, if not he soon would be. She walked toward him, her gun at her side. Then she paused, frowning… How had a man as badly wounded as this poor motherfucker opened the trunk, unscrewed the jack, lugged it to the front seat and rigged it against the wheel?
Frazier started to look around.
And saw a blur to her right, heard the whoosh of air as the tire iron swept down and crashed into her wrist, sending the gun flying and shooting a breathtaking jolt of pain through her body. The big woman screamed and dropped to her knees, lunging for the gun with her left hand. Just as she grabbed it, Geneva swung the iron again and caught the woman in the shoulder with a solid clonk. Frazier rolled to the ground, the gun sliding out of her reach. Blinded by the pain and the rage, the woman lunged and tackled the girl before she could swing the rod again. Geneva went down hard, the breath knocked out of her.
The woman turned toward where the pistol lay but, choking and gasping, Geneva crawled forward, grabbed her right arm and bit Frazier’s shattered wrist. The pain that could be no worse rose like a shriek through her. Frazier swung her good fist into the girl’s face and connected with her jaw. Geneva gave a cry and blinked tears as she rolled, helpless, onto her back. Frazier climbed unsteadily to her feet, cradling her bloody, broken wrist, and kicked the girl in the belly. The teenager began to retch.
Standing unsteadily, Frazier looked for the gun, which was ten feet away. Don’t need it, don’t want it. The tire iron’d do just fine. Seething with anger, she picked it up and started forward. She looked down at the girl with undiluted hate and lifted the metal rod above her head. Geneva cringed and covered her face with her hands.
Then a voice from behind the big woman shouted, “No!”
Frazier turned to see that redheaded policewoman from the crippled man’s apartment walking slowly forward, her large automatic pistol held in both hands.
Alina Frazier looked down at the revolver nearby.
“I’d like the excuse,” the policewoman said. “I really would.”
Frazier slumped, tossed the tire iron aside and, feeling faint, dropped into a sitting position. She cradled her shattered hand.
The cop moved close and kicked the pistol and tire iron away, as Geneva rose to her feet and staggered toward a duo of medics who were running forward. The girl directed them toward her father.
Tears of pain in her eyes, Frazier demanded, “I need a doctor.”
“You’ll have to wait in line,” the policewoman muttered and slipped a plastic restraint around her wrists with what, under the circumstances, Frazier decided, was really a pretty gentle touch.
“He’s in stable condition,” Lon Sellitto announced. He’d fielded the phone call from an officer on duty at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. “He didn’t know what that means. But there you have it.”
Rhyme nodded at this news about Jax Jackson. Whatever “stable” meant, at least the man was alive, for which Rhyme was immensely grateful – for Geneva ’s sake.
The girl herself had been treated for contusions and abrasions and released.
It had been a photo finish to save her from Boyd’s accomplice. Mel Cooper had run the tags on the car that the girl and her father had gotten into and found it registered to someone named Alina Frazier. A fast check of NCIC and state databases revealed that she had a record: a manslaughter charge in Ohio and two assaults with deadly weapons in New York, as well as a slew of sealed juvie offenses.
Sellitto had put out an Emergency Vehicle Locator, which alerted all law enforcers in the area to look for Frazier’s sedan. A traffic enforcement cop had radioed a short time later that the vehicle had been seen near a demolition site in South Harlem. There’d also been a report of shots fired in the vicinity. At Rhyme’s town house Amelia Sachs jumped into her Camaro and sped to the scene, where she found Frazier about to beat Geneva to death.
Frazier had been interrogated but was no more cooperative than her accomplice. Rhyme guessed that one had to think long and hard about betraying Thompson Boyd, especially in jail, given the long reach of his prison connections.
Was Geneva finally safe or not? Most likely she was. Two killers under wraps and the main actor blown to pieces. Sachs had searched Alina Frazier’s apartment and found nothing except weapons and cash – no information that would suggest there was anyone else who wanted to kill Geneva Settle. Jon Earle Wilson, the ex-con from New Jersey who’d made the booby trap in Boyd’s Queens safe house, was presently en route to Rhyme’s, and the criminalist hoped he’d confirm their conclusions. Still, Rhyme and Bell decided to dedicate a uniformed officer in a squad car to protection detail for Geneva.
Now, a computer sounded a friendly chirp and Mel Cooper looked over at the screen. He opened an email. “Ah, the mystery is solved.”
“Which mystery would that be?” Rhyme said this gruffly. His moods, forever fragile, tended to sour toward the end of a case, when boredom loomed.
“‘Winskinskie.’”
The Indian word on the ring Sachs had found around the finger bone beneath the ruins of Potters’ Field tavern.
“And?”
“This’s from a professor at the University of Maryland. Aside from the literal translation in the Delaware language, ‘Winskinskie’ was a title in the Tammany Society.”
“Title?”
“Sort of like a sergeant at arms. Boss Tweed was the Grand Sachem, the big chief. Our boy” – a nod toward the bones and skull Sachs had found in the cistern – “was the Winskinskie, the doorkeeper.”
“Tammany Hall…” Rhyme nodded as he considered this, letting his mind wander back in time, past this case, into the smoky sepia world of nineteenth-century New York. “And Tweed hung out in Potters’ Field. So he and the Tammany Hall machine were probably behind setting Charles up.”
He ordered Cooper to add the recent findings to the chart. He then spent some moments looking over the information. He nodded. “Fascinating.”
Sellitto shrugged. “The case is over with, Linc. The hitmen, excuse me, hit people’ve been collared. The terrorist is dead. Why’s something that happened a hundred years ago so fascinating?”
“Nearly a hundred and forty years, Lon. Let’s be accurate.” He was frowning as he stared intently at the evidence chart, the maps – and the placid face of the Hanged Man. “And the answer to your question is: You know how much I hate loose ends.”
“Yeah, but what’s loose?”
“What’s the one thing we’ve forgotten all about in the heat of battle, if we may tread through a minefield of clichés again, Lon?”
“I give,” Sellitto grunted.
“Charles Singleton’s secret. Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with constitutional law or terrorists, I, at least, am dying to know what it was. I think we should find out.”
VAN BOMBING SCENE
· Van registered to Bani al-Dahab (see profile).
· Delivered food to Middle Eastern restaurants and carts.
· Letter taking responsibility for jewelry exchange bombing recovered. Paper matches earlier documents.
· Components of explosive device recovered: residue of Tovex, wires, battery, radio receiver detonator, portions of container, UPS box.
THOMPSON BOYD’S RESIDENCE AND PRIMARY SAFE HOUSE
· More falafel and yogurt, orange paint trace, as before.
· Cash (fee for job?) $100,000 in new bills. Untraceable. Probably withdrawn in small amounts over time.
· Weapons (guns, billy club, rope) traced to prior crime scenes.
· Acid and cyanide traced to prior crime scenes, no links to manufacturers.
· No cell phone found. Other telephone records not helpful.
· Tools traced to prior crime scenes.
· Letter revealing that G. Settle was targeted because she was a witness to jewelry heist in the planning. More pure carbon – identified as diamond dust trace.
· Sent to Parker Kincaid in Washington, D.C., for document examination.
· Writer’s first language most likely Arabic.
· Improvised explosive device, as part of booby trap. Fingerprints are those of convicted bomb maker Jon Earle Wilson.
· Located. En route to Rhyme’s for interviewing.
POTTERS’ FIELD SCENE (1868)
· Tavern in Gallows Heights – located in the Eighties on the upper West Side, mixed neighborhood in the 1860s.
· Potters’ Field was possible hangout for Boss Tweed and other corrupt New York politicians.
· Charles came here July 15, 1868.
· Burned down following explosion, presumably just after Charles’s visit. To hide his secret?
· Body in basement, man presumably killed by Charles Singleton.
· Shot in forehead by.36 Navy Colt loaded with.39-caliber ball (type of weapon Charles Singleton owned).
· Gold coins.
· Man was armed with Derringer.
· No identification.
· Had ring with name “Winskinskie” on it.
· Means “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in Delaware Indian language.
· Currently searching other meanings.
· Was title of official in Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine.
PROFILE OF UNSUB 109
· Determined to be Thompson G. Boyd, former executions control officer, from Amarillo, TX.
· Presently in custody.
PROFILE OF PERSON HIRING UNSUB 109
· Bani al-Dahab, Saudi national, in country illegally after visa expired.
· Deceased.
· Search of apartment revealed no other terrorist connections. Presently checking phone records.
· Currently investigating his employers for possible terrorist links.
PROFILE OF UNSUB 109’S ACCOMPLICE
· Determined not to be man originally described, but Alina Frazier, presently in custody.
· Search of apartment revealed weapons and money, nothing else relevant to case.
PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON
· Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New York state by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.
· Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.
· Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.
· Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.
· Involved in some risky activities?
· Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.
· The crime, as reported in the Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated:
· Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedmen’s Trust in NY. Broke into the trust’s safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.
Charles’s correspondence:
· Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY state, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.
· Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.
· Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.
· Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters’ Field with his gun for “justice.” Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters’ Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.