The Twelfth Card

didn’t touch it.”
    “Good. Go on.”
    “The girl gets away, comes down the fire stairs and into the alley. He’s after her, but he turns the other way.”
    “Anybody see what happened to him?” Sellitto asked.
    “No, sir.”
    He looked over the street. “You set up the press perimeter?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Well, it’s fifty feet too close. Get ’em the hell away. Press’re like leeches. Remember that.”
    “Sure, Detective.”
    You didn’t know. Now you do.
    He hurried off and started moving the line back.
    “Where’s the girl?” Sachs asked.
    The sergeant, a solid Hispanic man with thick, graying hair, said, “An officer took her and her friend to Midtown North. They’re calling her parents.” Sharp autumn sunlight reflected off his many gold decorations. “After they get in touch with them, somebody was going to take ’em to Captain Rhyme’s place to interview her.” He laughed. “She’s a smart one. Know what she did?”
    “What?”
    “She had an idea there might be some trouble, so she dressed up this mannequin in her sweatshirt and hat. The perp went after that. Bought her time to get away.”
    Sachs laughed. “And she’s only sixteen? Smart.”
    Sellitto said to her, “You run the scene. I’m going to get a canvass going.” He wandered up the sidewalk to a cluster of officers—one uniform and two Anti-Crime cops in dress-down plain clothes—and sent them around the crowd and into nearby stores and office buildings to check for witnesses. He rounded up a separate team to interview each of the half dozen pushcart vendors here, some selling coffee and doughnuts at the moment, others setting up for lunches of hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and falafel pita-bread sandwiches.
    A honk sounded and she turned. The CS bus had arrived from the Crime Scene Unit HQ in Queens.
    “Hey, Detective,” the driver said, getting out.
    Sachs nodded a greeting to him and his partner. She knew the young men from prior cases. Shepulled off her jacket and weapon, dressed in white Tyvek overalls, which minimized contamination of the scene. She then strapped her Glock back on her hip, thinking of Rhyme’s constant admonition to his CS crews: Search well but watch your back.
    “Give me a hand with the bags?” she asked, hefting one of the metal suitcases containing basic evidence-collection and -transport equipment.
    “You bet.” A CSU tech grabbed two of the other cases.
    She pulled on a hands-free headset and plugged it into her Handi-Talkie just as Ron Pulaski returned from his press push-back duty. He led Sachs and the Crime Scene officers into the building. They got off the elevator on the fifth floor and walked to the right, to double doors below a sign that said, Booker T. Washington Room.
    “That’s the scene in there.”
    Sachs and the techs opened the suitcases, started removing equipment. Pulaski continued, “I’m pretty sure he came through these doors. The only other exit is the fire stairwell and you can’t enter from the outside, and it wasn’t jimmied. So, he comes through this door, locks it and then goes after the girl. She escaped through the fire door.”
    “Who unlocked the front one for you?” Sachs asked.
    “Guy named Don Barry, head librarian.”
    “He go in with you?”
    “No.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “His office—third floor. I wondered if maybe it was an inside job, you know? So I asked him for a list of all his white male employees and where they were when she was attacked.”
    “Good.” Sachs had been planning to do the same.
    “He said he’d bring the list down to us as soon as he was done.”
    “Now, tell me what I’ll find inside.”
    “The girl was at the microfiche reader. It’s around the corner to the right. You’ll see it easy.” Pulaski pointed to the end of a large room filled with tall rows of bookshelves, beyond which was an open area where Sachs could see mannequins dressed in period clothing, paintings, cases of antique jewelry, purses, shoes, accessories—your typical dusty museum displays, the sort of stuff you look at while you’re really wondering what restaurant to eat at after you’ve had enough culture.
    “What’s security like around here?” Sachs was looking for surveillance cameras on the ceiling.
    “Zip. No cameras. No guards, no sign-in sheets. You just walk in.”
    “Never easy, is it?”
    “No, ma’ . . . No, Detective.”
    She thought about telling him that “ma’am” was okay, not like “lady,”