The Twelfth Card

including references to the Fourteenth Amendment controversy but nothing that touched on the issues Professor Mathers had suggested to them as a motive for setting up Charles Singleton. She read in an 1867 New York Times article that Frederick Douglass and other prominent civil rights leaders of the time had appeared at a church in Gallows Heights. Douglass had told the reporter afterward that he had come to the neighborhood to meet with several men in the fight for the amendment’s passage. But this they already knew, from Charles’s letters. She found no mention of Charles Singleton but did come across a reference to a lengthy article in the New York Sun about the former slaves and freedmen who were assisting Douglass. That particular issue, though, was not in the archives.
    Page after page, on and on . . . Hesitating sometimes, worrying that she’d missed those vital few sentences that could shed light on the case. More than once she went back and reread a paragraph or two that she’d looked at without really reading. Stretching, fidgeting, digging at her fingernails, scratching her scalp.
    Then plowing into the documents once more. The material she’d read piled up on the table but the pad of paper in front of her held not a single notation.
    Turning to New York history, Sachs learned more about Gallows Heights. It was one of a half-dozen early settlements on the Upper West Side of New York, separate villages really, like Manhattanville andVandewater Heights (now Morningside). Gallows Heights extended west from present-day Broadway to the Hudson River and from about Seventy-second Street north to Eighty-sixth. The name dated from colonial times, when the Dutch built a gallows atop a hill in the center of the settlement. When the British purchased the land, their hangmen executed dozens of witches, criminals and rebellious slaves and colonists on the spot until the various sites of justice and punishment in New York City were consolidated downtown.
    In 1811 city planners divided all of Manhattan into the blocks that are used today, though for the next fifty years in Gallows Heights (and much of the rest of the city) those grids could be found only on paper. In the early 1800s the land there was a tangle of country lanes, empty fields, forests, squatters’ sheds, factories and dry docks on the Hudson River, and a few elegant, sprawling estates. By the mid–nineteenth century Gallows Heights had developed a multiple personality, reflected in the map that Mel Cooper had found earlier: The big estates existed side by side with working-class apartments and smaller homes. Shantytowns infested with gangs were moving in from the south, on the tide of city sprawl. And—just as crooked as street thieves, though on a larger and slicker scale—William “Boss” Tweed ran much of the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic political machine from the bars and dining rooms in Gallows Heights (Tweed was obsessed with profiting from the development of the neighborhood; in a typical scheme the man pocketed $6,000 in fees for the sale to the city of a tiny lot worth less than $35).
    The area was now a prime Upper West Side neighborhood and among the nicest and most affluent inthe city, of course. Apartments were going for thousands of dollars a month. (And, as an irritated Amelia Sachs now reflected from her “small crime scene” dungeon, the present-day Gallows Heights was home to some of the best delis and bagel bakeries in the city; she hadn’t eaten today.)
    The dense history reeled past her but nothing bore on the case. Damnit, she ought to be analyzing crime scene material, or better yet, working the streets around the unsub’s safe house, trying to find some connections to where he lived, what his name was.
    What the hell was Rhyme thinking of?
    Finally she came to the last book in the stack. Five hundred pages, she estimated (she was getting a good eye by this point); it turned out to be 504. The index didn’t reveal anything important for the search. Sachs skimmed the pages but finally could take it no longer. Tossing the book aside, she stood, rubbed her eyes and stretched. Her claustrophobia was kicking in, thanks to the suffocating ambiance of the archives, located two flights underground. The foundation may have been renovated last month but this place was still the original basement of the Sanford Mansion, she supposed; it had low ceilings and dozens of stone columns and walls, making the space even more