The Twelfth Card

car that was blocking the man’s escape route.
    Bell stood his ground. He lifted the Beretta. He saw the uncle’s panicked eyes, Geneva’s horrified expression, her mouth open in a scream. But he couldn’t fire. The squad car was directly behind the Dodge. Even if he hit the kidnapper, the jacketed rounds could go right through their target and the car and hit the officers.
    Bell jumped aside, but the cobblestones were slick with garbage and he went down hard on his side, grunting. He lay directly in the path of the Dodge. The detective tried to pull himself to safety. But with the car going so fast he wasn’t going to make it.
    But . . . but what was happening?
    The uncle was hitting the brakes. The car skidded to a stop five feet from Bell. The doors flew open and both Geneva and her uncle were out, running to him, the man shouting, “You all right? You all right?”
    “Detective Bell,” Geneva said, frowning, bending down and helping him up.
    Wincing in pain, Bell trained the big gun on the uncle and said, “Don’t move a damn muscle.”
    The man blinked and frowned.
    “Lie down. And your arms—stretch ’em out.”
    “Detective Bell—” Geneva began.
    “Just a minute, miss.”
    The uncle did as he was told. Bell cuffed him, as the uniforms from the RMP trotted through the alley.
    “Frisk him.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The uncle said, “Look, you don’t know what you doin’, sir.”
    “Quiet,” Bell said to him and took Geneva aside,put her in a recessed doorway so she’d be out of the line of fire from anyone on rooftops nearby.
    “Roland!” Barbe Lynch hurried down the alley.
    Bell leaned against the brick wall, catching his breath. He glanced to the left, seeing the homeless guy he’d noticed earlier squint uneasily at the police and turn around, then head in the opposite direction. Bell ignored him.
    “You didn’t need to do that,” Geneva said to the detective, nodding at the cuffed man.
    “But he’s not your uncle,” the detective said, calming slowly, “is he?”
    “No.”
    “What was he doing with you just now?”
    She looked down, a sorrowful expression on her face.
    “Geneva,” Bell said sternly, “this’s serious. Tell me what’s going on.”
    “I asked him to take me someplace.”
    “Where?”
    She lowered her head. “To work,” she said. “I couldn’t afford to miss my shift.” She opened her jacket, revealing a McDonald’s uniform. The cheery name tag read, Hi, my name’s Gen.

Chapter Twenty-Six
    “What’s the story?” Lincoln Rhyme asked. He was concerned but, despite the fright at her disappearance, there was no accusation in his voice.
    Geneva was sitting in a chair near his wheelchair, on the ground floor of the town house. Sachs stood beside her, arms crossed. She’d just arrived with a large stack of material she’d brought from the Sanford Foundation archives where she’d made the Potters’ Field discovery. It sat on the table near Rhyme, ignored now that this new drama had intruded.
    The girl looked defiantly into his eyes. “I hired him to play my uncle.”
    “And your parents?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    “You don’t—”
    “— have any,” she repeated through clenched teeth.
    “Go on,” Sachs said kindly.
    She didn’t speak for a moment. Finally: “When I was ten, my father left us, my moms and me. He moved to Chicago with this woman and got married. Had himself a whole new family. I was torn up—oh, it hurt. But deep down I didn’t really blame him much. Our life was a mess. My moms, she was hooked on crack, just couldn’t get off it. They’d have these bad fights—well, she fought. Mostly he tried to straighten her out and she’d get mad at him. To pay for what she needed she’d perp stuff from stores.” Geneva held Rhyme’s eyes as she added,“And she’d go to girlfriends’ places and they’d have some men over—you know what for. Dad knew all about it. I guess he put up with it for as long as he could then moved on.”
    She took a deep breath and continued, “Then moms got sick. She was HIV positive but didn’t take any medicine. She died of an infection. I lived with her sister in the Bronx for a while but then she moved back to Alabama and left me at Auntie Lilly’s apartment. But she didn’t have any money either and kept getting evicted, moving in with friends, just like now. She couldn’t afford to have me with her anyway. So I talked to the superintendent of the building where my moms had