The Twelfth Card

the brown and black bones, the eyeless skull.
    “We found some information on guns like his in our database. It’s a .36-caliber but most Civil War soldiers learned to use .39-caliber balls in them. They’re a little bigger and fit more tightly. That makes the gun more accurate.”
    Sachs picked up a small plastic bag. “This was in the skull cavity.” Inside was a little sphere of lead. “It’s a .39-caliber ball that was fired out of a .36-caliber gun.”
    “But that doesn’t prove anything.” She was staring at the hole in the forehead of the skull.
    “No,” Rhyme said kindly. “It suggests. But it suggests very strongly that Charles killed him.”
    “Who was he?” Geneva asked.
    “We don’t have any idea. If he had any ID on him it burned up or disintegrated, along with his clothes. We found the bullet, a small gun that he probably had with him, some gold coins and a ring with the word . . . what was the word, Mel?”
    “ ‘Winskinskie.’ ” He held up a plastic bag with the gold signet ring inside. Above the inscription was an etched profile of an American Indian.
    Cooper had quickly found that the word meant “doorman” or “gatekeeper” in the language of the Delaware Indians. This might be the dead man’s name, though his cranial bone structure suggested he wasn’t Native-American. More likely, Rhyme felt, it was a fraternal, school or lodge slogan of some sort and Cooper had queried some anthropologists and history professors via email to see if they’d heard of the word.
    “Charles wouldn’t do it,” his descendant said softly. “He wouldn’t murder anyone.”
    “The bullet was fired into the forehead,” Rhyme said. “Not from behind. And the Derringer—the gun—that Sachs found in the cistern probably belonged to the victim. That suggests the shooting could’ve been in self-defense.”
    Though the fact remained that Charles had voluntarily gone to the tavern armed with a gun. He would have anticipated some sort of violence.
    “I should never have started this in the first place,” Geneva muttered. “Stupid. I don’t even like the past. It’s pointless. I hate it!” She turned and ran into the hallway, then up the stairs.
    Sachs followed. She returned a few minutes later. “She’s reading. She said she wants to be alone. I think she’ll be all right.” Her voice didn’t sound very certain, though.
    Rhyme looked over the information on the oldest scene he’d ever run—140 years. The whole point of the search was to learn something that might lead them to whoever had hired Unsub 109. But all it had done was nearly get Sachs killed and disappoint Geneva with the news that her ancestor had killed a man.
    He looked at the copy of The Hanged Man tarot card, staring at him placidly from the evidence board, mocking Rhyme’s frustration.
    Cooper said, “Hey, have something here.” He was looking at his computer screen.
    “Winskinskie?” Rhyme asked.
    “No. Listen. An answer to our mystery substance—the one that Amelia found in the unsub’s Elizabeth Street safe house and near Geneva’s aunt’s. The liquid.”
    “Damn well about time. What the hell is it? Toxin?” Rhyme asked.
    “Our bad boy’s got dry eyes,” Cooper said.
    “What?”
    “It’s Murine.”
    “Eyedrops?”
    “That’s right. The composition’s exactly the same.”
    “Okay. Add that to the chart,” Rhyme ordered Thom. “Might just be temporary—because he’d been working with acid. In which case, won’t help us. But it might be chronic. That’d be good.”
    Criminalists loved perps with physical maladies. Rhyme had a whole section in his book on tracing people through prescription or over-the-counter drugs, disposed hypodermic needles, prescription eyeglasses, unique shoe-tread wear from orthopedic problems, and so on.
    It was then that Sachs’s phone rang. She listened for a moment. “Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” The policewoman disconnected, glanced at Rhyme. “Well, this’s interesting.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight
    When Amelia Sachs walked into the Critical Care Unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital she saw two Pulaskis.
    One was in bed, swathed in bandages and hooked up to creepy clear plastic tubes. His eyes were dull, his mouth slack.
    The other sat at his bedside, awkward in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Just as blond, just as fresh-faced, in the same crisp blue NYPD uniform Ron Pulaski had been wearing when Sachs had recruited him in front