The Twelfth Card (37 page)

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

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

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

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

Forever hidden . . .

“Right.”

“And the unlucky part is that it’s under concrete.”

“Pretty much.”

“A foot deep?”

“Maybe less.”

Sachs walked around the building, which was grimy and plain, though she knew the apartments in it would rent for $4,000 or so a month. There was a service entrance in the back that led below ground to the basement.

She was returning to the front of the structure when the phone rang. “Detective Sachs.”

Lon Sellitto was on the other end. He’d found the name of the building’s owner, a businessman who lived several blocks way. The man was on his way to the place to let them inside. Rhyme came on the phone a moment later and she told him what Yu had said.

“Good luck, bad luck,” he said, the scowl clear. “Well, I’ve ordered an S and S team there with SPR and ultrasound.”

Just then the owner of the building arrived, a short, balding man in a suit and white shirt open at the collar. Sachs disconnected the cell call with Rhyme and explained briefly to the man that they needed to examine the basement. He looked her up and down suspiciously then opened the basement door and stood back, crossing his arms, near Vegas.
The police dog didn’t seem to like him very much.

A Chevy Blazer pulled up and three members of the NYPD Search and Surveillance Unit climbed out. S and S officers were a mixed breed of cop, engineer and scientist, whose job was to back up the tactical forces by locating perps and victims at scenes with telescopes, night vision imagers, infrared, microphones and other equipment. They nodded to the crime scene techs and then unloaded battered black suitcases, very much like the ones that held Sachs’s own crime scene equipment. The owner watched them with a frown.

The S and S officers walked down into the dank, chill basement, smelling of mold and fuel oil, followed by Sachs and the owner. They hooked up probes that resembled vacuum cleaner heads to their computerized equipment,

“The whole area?” one asked Sachs.

“Yup.”

“That’s not going to hurt anything, is it?” the owner asked.

“No, sir,” a tech replied.

They got to work. The men decided to use SPR first. Surface Penetrating Radar sent out radio waves and returned information on objects it struck, just like traditional radar on board a ship or airplane. The only difference was that SPR could go through objects like dirt and rubble. It was as fast as the speed of light and, unlike ultrasound, didn’t have to be in contact with the surface to get a reading.

For an hour they scanned the floor, clicking computer buttons, making notations, while Sachs stood to the side, trying not to tap her foot or fidget impatiently, figuring that it wouldn’t be good for the instrument’s readings.

After they’d swept the floor with the radar, the
team consulted the unit’s computer screen and then, based on what they learned, walked around the floor again, touching the ultrasound sensor to the concrete in a half dozen areas they’d targeted as important.

When they were finished they called Sachs and Yu over to the computer, flipped through some images. The dark gray screen was unreadable to her: It was filled with blotches and streaks, many of which had small boxes of indecipherable numbers and letters beside them.

One of the techs said, “Most of these are what you’d expect under a building this age. Boulders, a bed of gravel, pockets of decayed wood. That’s a portion of a sewer here.” Pointing to part of the screen.

“There’s an easement for a storm drain that feeds into the main drain going to the Hudson,” Yu said. “That must be it.”

The owner leaned over his shoulder.

“You mind, sir?” Sachs grumbled. The man grudgingly stepped back.

The tech nodded. “But here . . . ” He tapped a spot next to the back wall. “We got a ping but no hit.”

“A—?”

“When something comes back that the computer’s seen before, it suggests what it might be. But this was negative.”

Sachs saw only a less dark area on the dark screen.

“So we ran the ultrasound and got this.”

His partner typed in a command and a different screen appeared, one much lighter and with a clearer image on it: a rough ring, inside of which was a round, opaque object that seemed to have a strand of something coming off it. Filling the ring, in the space below the smaller object, was what appeared to be a
pile of sticks or boards—maybe, Sachs speculated, a strongbox that had broken apart over the years.

One officer said, “The outer ring’s about twenty-four inches across. The inner one’s three-dimensional—a sphere. It’s eight, nine inches in diameter.”

“Is it close to the surface?”

“The slab’s about seven inches deep, and this thing’s about six to eight feet below that.”

“Where exactly?”

The man looked from the computer screen to the floor and back again. He walked over to a spot right beside the wall in the back of the basement, near the door that led outside. He drew a chalk mark. The object was right against the wall. Whoever had built the wall had missed it by only inches.

“I’m guessing it was a well or a cistern. Maybe a chimney.”

“What would it take to get through the concrete?” Sachs asked Yu.

“My permission,” said the owner. “Which you ain’t getting. You’re not breaking up my floor.”

“Sir,” Sachs said patiently, “this is police business.”

“Whatever that thing is, it’s mine.”

“Ownership isn’t the issue. It may be relevant to a police investigation.”

“Well, you’ll have to get a court order. I’m a lawyer. You’re not breaking up my floor.”

“It’s really important we find out what that is.”

“Important?” the man asked. “Why?”

“It has to do with a criminal case from a few years ago.”

“Few years?” the man said, picking up on the weakness of her case immediately. “How ‘few’?” He was probably a really good lawyer.

You lie to people like this and it comes back to get you. She said, “A hundred and forty. Give or take.”

He laughed. “This isn’t an investigation. This is the Discovery Channel. No jackhammer. Uh-uh.”

“A little cooperation here, sir?”

“Get a court order. I don’t have to cooperate until I’m forced to.”

“Then it’s not really cooperation, is it?” Sachs snapped back. She called Rhyme.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She briefed him about what they’d found.

“An old strongbox in a well or cistern inside a burned-down building. Hiding places don’t get much better than that.” Rhyme asked for S and S to send him the images via wireless email. They did so.

“I’ve got the picture here, Sachs,” he said after a moment. “No clue what it is.”

She told him about the unconcerned citizen.

“And I’ll fight it,” the lawyer said, hearing the conversation. “I’ll appear before the magistrate myself. I know ’em all. We’re on a first-name basis.”

She heard Rhyme discussing the matter with Sellitto. When he came back on the line he wasn’t happy. “Lon’s going to try to get a warrant, but it’ll take time. And he’s not even sure the judge’d issue paper in a case like this.”

“Can’t I just clock this guy?” she muttered and hung up. She turned to the owner. “We’ll repair your floor. Perfectly.”

“I have tenants. They’ll complain. And
I’ll
have to deal with it. You won’t. You’ll be long gone.”

Sachs waved her hand in disgust, actually thinking about placing him under arrest for—well, for something—and then digging through the damn floor anyway. How long would a warrant take? Probably forever, she imagined, considering that judges needed
a “compelling” interest in order to allow police to invade someone’s home.

Her phone rang again and she answered.

“Sachs,” Rhyme asked, “is that engineer fellow there?”

“David? Yeah. He’s right next to me.”

“I have a question.”

“What?”

“Ask him who owns the alleys?”

*   *   *

The answer, in this particular instance, though not all, was: the city. The lawyer owned only the footprint of the building itself and what was inside.

Rhyme said, “Have the engineers get some equipment next to the exterior wall and dig down then tunnel under his wall. Would that work?”

Out of hearing of the owner, she posed the question to Yu, who said, “Yeah, we could do that. No risk of structural damage if you keep the hole narrow.”

Narrow, thought the claustrophobic policewoman. Just what I need . . . She hung up and then said to the engineer, “Okay, I want a . . . ” Sachs frowned. “What are those things called with the big scoop on them?” Her knowledge of vehicles whose top speed was ten miles an hour was severely limited.

“Backhoe?”

“Sounds right. How soon can you get one here?”

“A half hour.”

She gave him a pained look. “Ten minutes?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Twenty minutes later, with a loud reverse warning beep, a city backhoe rolled up to the side of the
building. There was no way to hide their strategy anymore. The owner stepped forward, waving his hands. “You’re going underneath from outside! You can’t do that either. I own this property from the heavens to the center of the earth. That’s what the law says.”

“Well, sir,” said slim, young civil servant Yu. “There’s a public utility easement under the building. Which we have a right to access. As I’m sure you know.”

“But the fucking easement’s on the other side of the property.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s on that screen right there.” He pointed to a computer—just as the screen went dark.

“Ooops,” said one of the S and S officers, who’d just shut it off. “Damn thing’s always breaking down.”

The owner scowled at him, then said to Yu, “There is no easement where you’re going to dig.”

Yu shrugged. “Well, you know, when somebody disputes the location of an easement, the burden’s on
him
to get a court order stopping us. You might want to give some of your magistrate friends a call. And you know what, sir? You better do it pretty fast, ’cause we’re going in now.”

“But—”

“Go ahead!” he shouted.

“Is that true?” Sachs whispered to him. “About the easements?”

“Don’t know. But he seemed to buy it.”

“Thanks.”

The backhoe went to work. It didn’t take long. Ten minutes later, guided by the S and S team, the backhoe had dug out a four-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep foxhole. The foundation of the building ended
about six feet below the surface and beneath that was a wall of dark soil and gray clay. Sachs would have to climb to the bottom of the excavation and dig horizontally only about eighteen inches until she found the cistern or well. She donned the Tyvek suit and a hard hat with a light on the top. She called Rhyme back on her radio—not sure how cell phone reception would be in the pit. “I’m ready,” she told him.

K9 officer Gail Davis walked over with Vegas, straining on the leash, pawing at the edge of the hole. “Something’s down there,” the policewoman said.

As if I’m not spooked enough, Sachs thought, looking at the dog’s alert face.

“What’s that noise, Sachs?”

“Gail’s here. Her dog’s got a problem with the site.”

“Anything specific?” Sachs asked Davis.

“Nope. Could be sensing anything.”

Vegas then growled and pawed Sachs’s leg. Davis had told Sachs that another skill of briards was battlefield triage—they’d been used by corpsmen to determine which of the wounded could be saved and which could not. She wondered if Vegas was marking her for the latter ahead of time.

“Keep close,” Sachs said to Davis, with an uneasy laugh. “In case I need digging out.”

Yu volunteered to go down into the pit (he said he liked tunnels and caves, a fact that astonished Amelia Sachs). But she said no. This was, after all, a crime scene, even if it was 140 years old, and the sphere and strongbox, whatever they might be, were evidence to be collected and preserved, according to CS procedure.

The city workers lowered a ladder into the shaft, which Sachs looked down into, sighing.

“You okay?” Yu asked.

“Fine,” she said cheerfully and started into the hole. Thinking: The claustrophobia in the Sanford Foundation’s archives was nothing compared to this. At the bottom she took the shovel and pickax Yu had given her and began the excavation.

Sweating from the effort, shivering from the waves of panic, she dug and dug, picturing with every scoop the foxhole collapsing and trapping her.

Pulling out rocks, dislodging the dense earth.

Forever hidden beneath clay and soil . . .

“What’s in view, Sachs?” Rhyme asked through the radio.

“Dirt, sand, worms, a few tin cans, rocks.”