The Twelfth Card

states.”
    J. T. Beauchamp sent them a list of seventy-nine prisoners Thompson Boyd had put to death as an execution officer in Texas.
    “That many?” Sachs asked, frowning. Though Sachs would never hesitate to shoot to kill when it came to saving lives, Rhyme knew she had some doubts about the death penalty, because it was often meted out after trials involving circumstantial or faulty, and sometimes even intentionally altered, evidence.
    Rhyme thought of the other implication of the number of executions: that somewhere along the line of nearly eighty executions, Thompson Boyd had lost any distinction between life and death.
    What happens but they get themselves killed in this car accident . . . and Boyd, he didn’t blink. Hell, he didn’t even go to the funeral.
    Cooper matched the names of the male prisoners executed to government records.
    Nothing.
    “Shit,” Rhyme snapped. “We’ll have to find out the other states he worked and who he executed there. It’ll take forever.” Then a thought came to him. “Hold on. Women.”
    “What?” Sachs asked.
    “Try the women he’s executed. Variations on their names.”
    Cooper took this, the smaller, list and ran the names, and all possible spellings, through the DMV computer.
    “Okay, may have something here,” the tech saidexcitedly. “Eight years ago a woman named Randi Rae Silling—a prostitute—was executed in Amarillo for robbing and killing two of her johns. New York DMV’s got one too, same last name, but it’s a male, Randy with a Y and middle name R-A-Y . Right age and right description. Address in Queens—Astoria. Got a blue Buick Century, three years old.”
    Rhyme ordered, “Have somebody in plain clothes take the composite picture around to some neighbors.”
    Cooper called the deputy inspector—the head of the local precinct, the 114. This house covered Astoria, a largely Greek neighborhood. He explained about the case and then emailed him the picture of Boyd. The dep inspector said he’d send some street-clothes officers out to subtly canvass tenants in Randy Silling’s apartment.
    For a tense half hour—with no word from the canvass team in Queens—Cooper, Sachs and Sellitto contacted public records offices in Texas, Ohio and New York, looking for any information they could find about Boyd or Hammil or Silling.
    Nothing.
    Finally they received a call back from the inspector at the 114. “Captain?” the man asked. Many senior officers still referred to Rhyme by his old title.
    “Go ahead.”
    “We’ve had two people confirm that your man lives at the DMV address,” the man said. “What are you thinking of in terms of prioritizing our approaches, sir?”
    Brass, Rhyme sighed. He dispensed with any caustic responses to the bureaucrat-talk and settled for a slightly bemused, “Let’s go nail his ass.”

Chapter Thirty
    A dozen Emergency Services Unit tactical officers were moving into position behind Thompson Boyd’s six-story apartment building on Fourteenth Street in Astoria, Queens.
    Sachs, Sellitto and Bo Haumann were standing at the hastily set up command post behind an unmarked ESU van.
    “We’re here, Rhyme,” Sachs whispered into the stalk mike.
    “But is he there?” the criminalist asked impatiently.
    “We’ve got S and S in position . . . . Hold on. Somebody’s reporting.”
    A Search and Surveillance Unit officer came up to them.
    “Get a look inside?” asked Haumann.
    “Negative, sir. He’s masked the front windows.”
    The S and S man in Team One explained he’d gotten as close to the apartment’s front windows as he dared; the second team was around back. The officer now added, “I could hear sounds, voices, water running. Children, it sounded like.”
    “Kids, hell,” Haumann muttered.
    “Might’ve been TV or radio. I just can’t tell.”
    Haumann nodded. “CP to S and S Two. Report.”
    “S and S Two. Little crack beside the shade—not much, though. Nobody in the back bedroom I can see. But it’s a narrow angle. Lights on in the front. Hear voices, I think. Music, K.”
    “See kids’ toys, anything?”
    “Negative. But I’ve only got a ten-degree view of the bedroom. That’s all I can see, K.”
    “Movement?”
    “Negative, K.”
    “Roger. Infrared?” Infrared detectors can locate the position of animals, humans or other sources of heat inside a building.
    A third S and S technician was playing a monitor over the apartment. “I’m getting heat indications, but