The Twelfth Card (9 page)

The FBI’s lab is available to handle evidence analysis for state and local law enforcers, at no charge, provided that the requesting agency agrees to two things: to accept the FBI’s results as final and to show them to the defendant’s lawyer. Because of the Bureau’s generosity—and its talent—the agents are inundated with requests for assistance; they run more than 700,000 analyses a year.

Even New York’s finest would stand in line like everyone else to get this bit of sugar analyzed. But Lincoln Rhyme had an in—Fred Dellray, a special agent in the FBI’s Manhattan office, often worked with Rhyme and Sellitto and he carried a lot of weight in the Bureau. Equally important was the fact that Rhyme had helped the FBI set up its PERT system—the Physical Evidence Response Team. Sellitto called Dellray, who was presently on the task force checking out those reports of potential terrorist bombings in New York. Dellray got on the horn to FBI HQ in Washington, D.C., and within minutes a technician had been recruited to help on the Unsub 109 case. Cooper sent him the results of the analyses and compressed digital images of the substance via secure email.

No more than ten minutes passed before the phone rang.

“Command, answer,” Rhyme snapped into his voice recognition control system.

“Detective Rhyme, please.”

“This’s Rhyme.”

“I’m Examiner Phillips down on Ninth Street.” Washington’s Ninth Street, he meant. FBI headquarters.

“What do you have for us?” Rhyme asked briskly.

“And thanks for calling back so fast,” Sachs said quickly. She sometimes had to run interference for Rhyme’s bluntness.

“No worries, ma’am. Well, I was thinking it was pretty odd, what you sent down. So I sent it to Materials Analysis. That did the trick. We’ve got a ninety-seven percent certainty as to the substance.”

How dangerous was the explosive? Rhyme wondered. He said, “Go ahead. What is it?”

“Cotton candy.”

That wasn’t a street name he knew. But there were a number of new-generation explosives that had detonation rates of thirty thousand feet per second, ten times the speed of a bullet. Was this one of those? He asked, “What’re its properties?”

A pause. “It tastes good.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s sweet. It tastes good.”

Rhyme asked, “You mean it’s
real
cotton candy, like you’d find at a fair?”

“Yeah, what’d you think I meant?”

“Never mind.” Sighing, the criminalist asked, “And the uric acid was from his shoe when he stepped in some dog pee on the sidewalk?”

“Can’t say
where
he stepped on it,” the examiner said, displaying the precision the Bureau was known for. “But the sample
does
test positive for canine urine.”

He thanked the man and disconnected. He turned to the team. “Popcorn and cotton candy on his shoes
at the same time?” Rhyme mused. “Where’d that put him?”

“Ball game?”

“The New York teams haven’t played at home lately. I’m thinking maybe our unsub walked through a neighborhood where there’d been a fair or carnival in the past day or so.” He asked Geneva, “Did you go to any fairs recently? Could he have seen you there?”

“Me? No. I don’t really go to fairs.”

Rhyme said to Pulaski, “Since you’re off bug detail, Patrolman, call whoever you need to and find out every permit that’s been issued for a fair, carnival, festival, religious feast, whatever.”

“I’m on it,” the rookie said.

“What else do we have?” Rhyme asked.

“Flakes from the carriage of the microfiche reader, where he hit it with the blunt object.”

“Flakes?”

“Bits of varnish, I’d guess, from whatever he used.”

“Okay, run them through Maryland.”

The FBI had a huge database of current and past paint samples, located in one of its Maryland facilities. This was mostly used for matching paint evidence to cars. But there were hundreds of samples of varnish as well. After another call from Dellray, Cooper sent the GC/MS composition analysis and other data on the lacquer flakes off to the Bureau. Within a few minutes the phone rang, and this FBI examiner reported that the varnish matched a product sold exclusively to manufacturers of martial arts equipment, like nunchakus and security batons. He added the discouraging news that the substance contained no manufacturer’s markers and was sold in large quantities—meaning it was virtually untraceable.

“Okay, we’ve got a rapist with a nunchaku, funky bullets, a bloody rope . . . man is a walking nightmare.”

The doorbell rang and a moment later Thom ushered in a woman in her twenties, his arm around her shoulders.

“Look who’s here,” the aide announced.

The slim woman had spiky purple hair and a pretty face. Her stretch pants and sweater revealed an athletic body—actually, a
performer’s
body, Rhyme knew.

“Kara,” Rhyme said. “Good to see you again. I deduce
you’re
the specialist Sachs called.”

“Hi.” The young woman hugged Sachs, greeted the others and closed her hands around Rhyme’s. Sachs introduced her to Geneva, who looked her over with a reserved face.

Kara (it was a stage name; she wouldn’t reveal her real one) was an illusionist and performance artist who had helped Rhyme and Sachs as a consultant in a recent murder case, where a killer used his skills as a magician and sleight-of-hand artist to get close to victims, murder them and get away.

She lived in Greenwich Village, but had been visiting her mother in a care facility uptown when Sachs had called, she explained. They spent a few moments catching up—Kara was putting together a one-woman show for the Performance Warehouse in Soho, and was dating an acrobat—then Rhyme said, “We need some expertise.”

“You bet,” the young woman said. “Whatever I can do.”

Sachs explained about the case. She frowned and whispered, “I’m sorry,” to Geneva when she heard about the attempted rape.

The student just shrugged.

“He had this with him,” Cooper said, holding up The Hanged Man tarot card from the rape pack.

“We thought you could tell us something about it.”

Kara had explained to Rhyme and Sachs that the world of magic was divided into two camps, those who were entertainers, who made no claim to having supernatural skills, and those who asserted they had occult powers. Kara had no patience for the latter—she was solely a performer—but because of her experience working in magic stores for rent and food money she knew something about fortune-telling.

She explained, “Okay, tarot’s an old method of divining that goes back to ancient Egypt. The tarot deck of cards’re divided into the minor arcana—they correspond to the fifty-two-card playing deck—and the major arcana, zero through twenty-one. They sort of represent a journey through life. The Hanged Man’s the twelfth card in the major arcana.” She shook her head. “But something doesn’t make sense.”

“What’s that?” Sellitto asked, subtly rubbing his skin.

“It’s not a bad card at all. Look at the picture.”

“He
does
look pretty peaceful,” Sachs said, “considering he’s hanging upside down.”

“The figure in the picture’s based on the Norse god Odin. He hung upside down for nine days on a search for inner knowledge. You get this card in a reading, it means you’re about to start a quest for spiritual enlightenment.” She nodded at a computer. “You mind?”

Cooper waved her to it. She typed a Google search and a few seconds later found a website. “How do I print this out?”

Sachs helped her, and a moment later a sheet
rolled out of the laser printer. Cooper taped it up on the evidence board. “That’s the meaning,” she said.

The Hanged Man does not refer to someone being punished. Its appearance in a reading indicates spiritual searching leading to a decision, a transition, a change of direction. The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is. When this card appears in your reading you must listen to your inner self, even if that message seems to be contrary to logic.

Kara said, “It has nothing to do with violence or death. It’s about being spiritually suspended and waiting.” She shook her head. “It’s not the kind of thing a killer would leave—if he knew anything at all about tarot cards. If he’d wanted to leave something destructive, it would’ve been The Tower or one of the cards from the sword suit in the minor arcana. Those’re bad news.”

“So he picked it only because it looked scary,” Rhyme summarized. And because he planned to garrotte, or “hang,” Geneva.

“That’s what I’d guess.”

“That’s helpful,” Rhyme said.

Sachs too thanked her.

“I should get back. Have to rehearse.” Kara shook Geneva’s hand. “Hope things work out okay for you.”

“Thanks.”

Kara walked to the door. She stopped and looked at Geneva. “You like illusion and magic shows?”

“I don’t get out too much,” the girl said. “Pretty busy in school.”

“Well, I’m doing a show in three weeks. If you’re interested, all the details are on the ticket.”

“The . . . ?”

“Ticket.”

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“Yes, you do,” Kara said. “It’s in your purse. Oh, and the flower with it? Consider it a good luck charm.”

She left, and they heard the door close.

“What’s she talking about?” Geneva asked, looking down at her purse, which was closed.

Sachs laughed. “Open it up.”

She unzipped the top and blinked in surprise. Sitting just inside was a ticket to one of Kara’s performances. Next to it was a pressed violet. “How did she do that?” Geneva whispered.

“We’ve never quite been able to catch her,” Rhyme said. “All we know is, she’s pretty damn good.”

“Man, I’ll say.” The student held up the dried purple flower.

The criminalist’s eyes slipped to the tarot card, as Cooper taped it to the evidence board, next to its meaning. “So, it
seems
like the sort of thing a killer would leave in an occult assault. But he didn’t have a clue what it was. He picked it for effect. So that means . . . . ” But his voice faded as he stared at the rest of the evidence chart. “Jesus.”

The others looked at him.

“What?” Cooper asked.

“We’ve got it all wrong.”

Taking a break from rubbing his face, Sellitto asked, “Whatta you mean?”

“Look at the prints on what was in the rape pack. He wiped his own off, right?”

“Yeah,” Cooper confirmed.

“But there
are
prints,” the criminalist offered. “And they’re probably the clerk’s, since they’re the same that’re on the receipt.”

“Right.” Sellitto shrugged. “So?”

“So he wiped his prints
before
he got to the cash register. While he was in the store.” Silence in the room. Irritated that nobody caught on, the criminalist continued, “Because he
wanted
the clerk’s prints on everything.”

Sachs understood. “He
meant
to leave the rape pack behind. So we’d find it.”

Pulaski was nodding. “Otherwise, he’d just have wiped everything after he got it home.”

“Ex-actly,” Rhyme said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “I think it was staged evidence. To make us
think
it was a rape, with some kind of occult overtones. Okay, okay . . . . Let’s step back.” Rhyme was amused at Pulaski’s uneasy glance at Rhyme’s legs when the criminalist used the expression. “An attacker tracks down Geneva in a public museum. Not the typical setting for sexual assault. Then he hits her—well, the mannequin—hard enough to kill her, if not knock her out for hours. If that’s the case then what’s he need the box cutter and duct tape for? And he leaves a tarot card he thinks is scary but is really just about spiritual searching? No, it wasn’t an attempted rape at all.”

“What’s he up to then?” Sellitto asked.

“That’s what we damn well better find out.” Rhyme thought for a moment then asked, “And you said that Dr. Barry didn’t see anything?”

“That’s what he told me,” Sellitto replied.

“But the unsub still comes back and kills him.” Rhyme frowned. “And Mr. One-oh-nine broke up the microfiche reader. He’s a pro, but tantrums’re very
un
-pro. His vic’s getting away—he’s not going
to waste time thumpin’ on things because he’s having a bad morning.” Rhyme asked the girl, “You said you were reading some old newspaper?”

“Magazine,” she corrected.

“On the microfiche reader?”

“Right.”

“Those?” Rhyme nodded at a large plastic evidence bag containing a box of microfiche trays that Sachs had brought back from the library. Two slots, carriages one and three, were empty.

Geneva looked at the box. She nodded. “Yeah. Those were the ones that had the article I was reading, the missing ones.”

“Did you get the one that was in the reader?”

Sachs replied, “There wasn’t one. He must’ve taken it with him.”

“And smashed the machine so we wouldn’t notice that the tray was gone. Oh, this is getting interesting. What was he up to? What the hell was his motive?”

Sellitto laughed. “I thought you didn’t care about motive. Only evidence.”

“You need to draw the distinction, Lon, between using motive to
prove
a case in court—which is speculation at best—and using motive to lead you to the evidence, which conclusively convicts a perp: A man kills his business partner with a gun that we trace to
his
garage loaded with bullets
he
bought per a receipt with
his
fingerprints on it. In that case who cares if he killed the partner because he thinks a talking dog told him to or because the guy was sleeping with his wife? The
evidence
makes the case.

“But what if there
are
no bullets, gun, receipt or tire tracks? Then a perfectly valid question is
why
was the vic killed? Answering that can point us toward
the evidence that
will
convict him. Sorry for the lecture,” he added with no apology in his voice.

“Good mood gone, is it?” Thom asked.

Rhyme grumbled, “I’m missing something here and I don’t like it.”