The Twelfth Card

his nickname. But somethin’ happened over time. Somethin’ changed. After a time he started to go strange.”
    “How so?”
    “The more executions he ran, the crazier he got. Kind of blanker and blanker. That make sense? Like he wasn’t quite all there. Give you a for-instance: Told you he and his folks was real tight, got along great. What happens but they get themselves killed in this car accident, his aunt too, and Boyd, he didn’t blink. Hell, he didn’t even go to the funeral. You would’ve thought he was in shock, but it wasn’t that way. He just didn’t seem to care. He went to his normal shift and, when ever’body heard, they asked what he was doin’ there. It was two days till the next execution. He coulda took time off. But he didn’t want to. He said he’d go out to their graves later. Don’t know if he ever did.
    “See, it was like he kept gettin’ closer and closer to the prisoners —too close, a lot of folk thought. Youdon’t do that. Ain’t healthy. He stopped hangin’ out with other guards and spent his time with the condemned. He called ’em ‘my people.’ Word is that he one time even sat down in our old electric chair itself, which is in this sort of museum. Just to see what it was like. Fell asleep. Imagine that.
    “Somebody asked Boyd about it, how’d it feel, bein’ in a electric chair. He said it didn’t feel like nothin’. It just felt ‘kinda numb.’ He said that a lot toward the end. He felt numb.”
    “You said his parents were killed? Did he move into their house?”
    “Think he did.”
    “Is it still there?”
    The Texans were on a speakerphone too and J. T. Beauchamp called out, “I’ll find that out, sir.” He posed a question to somebody. “Should see in a minute or two, Mr. Rhyme.”
    “And could you find out about relatives in the area?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Sachs asked, “You recall he whistled a lot, Officer Pepper?”
    “Yes’m. And he was right good at it. Sometimes he’d give the condemned a song or two to send ’em off.”
    “What about his eyes?”
    “That too,” Pepper said. “Thompson had hisself bad eyes. The story is he was runnin’ a electrocution—wasn’t here—and somethin’ went bad. Happened sometimes, when you’d use the chair. A fire started—”
    “The man being executed?” Sachs asked, wincing.
    “That’s right, ma’am. Caught hisself on fire. He mighta been dead already, or unconscious. Nobody knows. He was still movin’ round but they alwaysdo that. So Thompson runs in with a riot gun, gonna shoot the poor fella, put him out of his misery. Now, that’s not part of protocol, I’ll tell you. It’s murder to kill the condemned before they die under the writ of execution. But Boyd was gonna do it anyway. Couldn’t let one of ‘his people’ die like that. But the fire spread. Insulation on the wire or some plastic or somethin’ caught and the fumes knocked Boyd out. He was blinded for a day or two.”
    “The inmate?” Sachs asked.
    “Thompson didn’t hafta shoot him. The juice did the trick.”
    “And he left five years ago?” Rhyme asked.
    “ ’Bout that,” Pepper drawled. “Quit. Think he went up to some place, some prison, in the Midwest. Never heard nothin’ ’bout him after that.”
    Midwest—maybe Ohio. Where the other murder that fit the profile took place. “Call somebody at Ohio Corrections,” Rhyme whispered to Cooper, who nodded and grabbed another phone.
    “What about Charlie Tucker, the guard who was killed? Boyd left around the time of the murder?”
    “Yes, sir, that’s right.”
    “There bad blood between them?”
    Pepper said, “Charlie worked under Thompson for a year ’fore he retired. Only Charlie was what we’d call a Bible thumper, a hard-shell Baptist. He’d lay chapter and verse on pretty thick to the condemned sometimes, tell ’em they was goin’ to hell, and so on. Thompson didn’t hold with that.”
    “So maybe Boyd killed him to pay him back for making prisoners’ lives miserable.”
    My people . . .
    “Could’ve been.”
    “What about the picture we sent? Was that Boyd?”
    “J. T. just showed it to me,” Pepper said. “And,yeah, it could be him. Though he was bigger, fatter, I mean, back then. And he had a shaved head and goatee—lotta us did that, tryin’ to look as mean as the prisoners.”
    “ ’Sides,” the warden said, “we were looking for inmates, not guards.”
    Which was my mistake, Rhyme thought angrily.
    “Well,