The Twelfth Card

Geneva Settle was staying—would hardly be airtight. After learning that this was where the girl was hiding, Thompson had conducted his own surveillance of the townhouse and had noted the unsealed windows and an antiquated heating and air-conditioning system. It would be a challenge to turn the large structure into a death chamber.
     . . . you gotta understand ’bout what we’re doing here. It’s like everything else in life. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent. Nothing runs just the way it ought . . . .
    Yesterday he’d told his employer that the next attempt on Geneva’s life would be successful. But now he wasn’t too sure about that. The police were far too good.
    We’ll just re-rig and keep going. We can’t get emotional about it.
    Well, he wasn’t emotional or concerned. But he needed to take drastic measures—on several fronts. If the poison gas in the town house now killed Geneva, fine. But that wasn’t his main goal. He had to take out at least some of the people inside—the investigators searching for him and his employer. Kill them, put them in a coma, cause brain damage—it didn’t matter. The important thing was to debilitate them.
    Thompson checked the concentration once again, and altered it slightly, making up for how the air would alter the pH balance. His hands were a bit unsteady, so he stepped away for a moment to calm himself.
    Wssst . . .
    The song he’d been whistling became “Stairway to Heaven.”
    Thompson leaned back and thought about how to get the gas bomb into the town house. A few ideas occurred to him—including one or two he was pretty sure would work quite well. He again tested the concentration of the acid, whistling absentlythrough the mouthpiece of the respirator. The analyzer reported that the strength was 19.99394 percent.
    Perfect.
    Wssst . . .
    The new tune that popped into his head was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
    *   *   *
    Amelia Sachs had been neither crushed to death by clay and soil nor blown up by unstable nineteenth-century ordnance.
    She was now standing, showered and in clean clothes, in Rhyme’s lab, looking over what had tumbled from the dry cistern into her lap an hour earlier.
    It wasn’t an old bomb. But there was little doubt now that it’d been left in the well by Charles Singleton on the night of July 15, 1868.
    Rhyme’s chair was parked in front of the examination table beside Sachs, as they peered into the cardboard evidence collection box. Cooper was with them, pulling on latex gloves.
    “We’ll have to tell Geneva,” Rhyme said.
    “Do we?” Sachs said reluctantly. “I don’t want to.”
    “Tell me what?”
    Sachs turned quickly. Rhyme backed away from the table and reluctantly rolled the Storm Arrow in a circle. Thinking: Damnit. Should’ve been more careful.
    Geneva Settle stood in the doorway.
    “You found out something about Charles in the basement of that tavern, didn’t you? You found out that he really did steal the money. Was that his secret, after all?”
    A glance at Sachs, then Rhyme said, “No, Geneva.No. We found something else.” A nod toward the box. “Here. Take a look.”
    The girl walked closer. She stopped, blinking, staring down at the brown human skull. It was this that they’d seen on the ultrasound image and that had rolled out into Sachs’s lap. With the help of Vegas, Gail Davis’s briard, the detective had recovered the remaining bones. These bones—what Sachs had thought were the slats from a strongbox—were those of a man, Rhyme had determined. The body had apparently been stuffed vertically into the cistern in the basement of Potters’ Field tavern just before Charles had ignited the fire. The ultrasound imaging had picked up the top of the skull and a rib beneath it, which gave the appearance of a fuse for a bomb.
    The bones were in a second box on the worktable.
    “We’re pretty sure it’s a man that Charles killed.”
    “No!”
    “And then he burned down the tavern to cover up the crime.”
    “You couldn’t know that,” Geneva snapped.
    “We don’t, no. But it’s a reasonable deduction.” Rhyme explained: “His letter said he was going to Potters’ Field, armed with his Navy Colt revolver. That was a pistol from the Civil War. It didn’t work like guns nowadays, where you load a bullet into the back of the cylinder. You had to load each chamber from the front with a ball and gunpowder.”
    She nodded. Her eyes were on