The Twelfth Card

that kind of grade on my record.”
    “It can’t hurt.”
    “What’s the point?” she asked bluntly. “We’ve heard it all over and over . . . . Amistad, slavers, John Brown, the Jim Crow laws, Brown versus the Board of Education , Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X . . . ” She fell silent.
    With the detachment of a professional teacher, Mather asked, “Just whining about the past?”
    Geneva finally nodded. “I guess that’s how I see it, yeah. I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Time to move on. All those battles are over with.”
    The professor smiled, then he glanced at Rhyme. “Well, good luck. Let me know if I can help some more.”
    “We’ll do that.”
    The lean man walked to the door. He paused and turned.
    “Oh, Geneva?”
    “Yes?”
    “Just think about one thing—from somebody who’s lived a few years longer than you. I sometimes wonder if the battles really aren’t over with at all.” He nodded toward the evidence chart and Charles’s letters. “Maybe it’s just harder to recognize the enemy.”

Chapter Twenty-Three
    Guess what, Rhyme, there are small crime scenes.
    I know it because I’m looking at one.
    Amelia Sachs stood on West Eighty-second Street, just off Broadway, in front of the impressive Hiram Sanford Mansion, a large, dark Victorian structure. This was the home of the Sanford Foundation. Appropriately, around her were trappings of historical New York: In addition to the mansion, which was more than a hundred years old, there was an art museum that dated to 1910 and a row of beautiful, landmark town houses. And she didn’t need unsubs wearing orange-paint-stained overalls to feel spooked; right next door to the foundation was the ornate and eerie Sanford Hotel (rumor was that Rosemary’s Baby was originally going to have been filmed in the Sanford).
    A dozen gargoyles looked down at Sachs from its cornices as if they were mocking her present assignment.
    Inside, she was directed to the man Mel Cooper had just spoken with, William Ashberry, the director of the foundation and a senior executive at Sanford Bank and Trust, which owned the nonprofit organization. The trim, middle-aged man greeted her with a look of bemused excitement. “We’ve never had a policeman here, excuse me, police woman, I meant to say, well, never had either here actually.” He seemed disappointed when she gave a vague explanation that she merely needed some generalbackground on the history of the neighborhood and didn’t need to use the foundation for a stakeout or undercover operation.
    Ashberry was more than happy to let her prowl through the archives and library, though he couldn’t help her personally; his expertise was finance, real estate, and tax law, not history. “I’m really a banker,” he confessed, as if Sachs couldn’t tell this from his outfit of dark suit, white shirt and striped tie and the incomprehensible business documents and spreadsheets sitting in precise stacks on his desk.
    Fifteen minutes later she was in the care of a curator—a young, tweedy man who led her down dark corridors into the sub-basement archives. She showed him the composite of Unsub 109, thinking maybe the killer had come here too, looking for the article about Charles Singleton. But the curator didn’t recognize his picture and didn’t recall anybody asking about any issues of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated recently. He pointed out the stacks and a short time later she was sitting, edgy and frazzled, on a hard chair in a cubicle small as a coffin, surrounded by dozens of books and magazines, printouts, maps and drawings.
    She approached this search the same way Rhyme had taught her to run a crime scene: looking over the whole first, then organizing a logical plan, then executing the search. Sachs first separated the material into four stacks: general information, West Side history and Gallows Heights, civil rights in the mid-1800s and Potters’ Field. She started on the graveyard first. She read every page, confirmed Charles Singleton’s reference to his regiment’s being mustered at Hart’s Island. She learned how the graveyard came into being, and how busy it had been, especially during the cholera and influenza epidemics of the mid-and late-nineteenth century, when cheap pine coffins would litter the island, stacked high, awaiting burial.
    Fascinating details, but not helpful. She turned to the civil rights material. She read a mind-numbing amount of information,