The Twelfth Card

judges neededa “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 thebuilding. 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 endedabout 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,