The Twelfth Card

but didn’t know how to explain the distinction. “One question. Did you close the fire door downstairs?”
    “No, I left it just the way I found it. Open.”
    “So the scene could be hot.”
    “Hot?”
    “The perp could’ve come back.”
    “I . . . ”
    “You didn’t do anything wrong, Pulaski. I just want to know.”
    “Well, I guess he could’ve, yeah.”
    “All right, you stay in the doorway here. I want you to listen.”
    “For what?”
    “Well, the guy shooting at me, for instance. Butprobably better if you heard footsteps or somebody racking a shotgun first.”
    “Watch your back, you’re saying?”
    She winked. And started forward to the scene.
    *   *   *
    So, she’s Crime Scene, thought Thompson Boyd, watching the woman walk back and forth in the library, studying the floor, looking for fingerprints and clues and whatever it was they looked for. He wasn’t concerned about what she might find. He’d been careful, as always.
    Thompson was standing in the sixth-floor window of the building across Fifty-fifth Street from the museum. After the girl got away, he’d circled around two blocks and made his way into this building, then climbed the stairs to the hallway from which he was now looking over the street.
    He’d had a second chance to kill the girl a few minutes ago; she’d been on the street for a moment, talking to officers, in front of the museum. But there were way too many police around for him to shoot her and get away. Still he’d been able to take a picture of her with the camera in his mobile phone before she and her friend had been hustled off to a squad car, which sped west. Besides, Thompson still had more to do here, and so he’d taken up this vantage point.
    From his prison days Thompson knew a lot about law enforcers. He could easily spot the lazy ones, the scared ones, the ones who were stupid and gullible. He could also spot the talented cops, the smart ones, the ones who were a threat.
    Like the woman he was looking at right now.
    As he put drops in his perpetually troubled eyes,Thompson found himself curious about her. As she searched the scene she had this concentration in her eyes, looking sort of devout, the same look Thompson’s mother sometimes used to get in church.
    She disappeared from view but, whistling softly, Thompson kept his eyes on the window. Finally the woman in white returned to view. He noted the precision with which she did everything, the careful way she walked, her delicate touch as she picked up and examined things so as not to hurt the evidence. Another man might’ve been turned on by her beauty, her figure; even through the jumpsuit, it was easy to imagine what her body was like. But those thoughts, like usual, were far from his mind. Still, he believed he sensed some small enjoyment inside him as he watched her at work.
    Something from his past came back to him . . . . He frowned, looking at her walking back and forth, back and forth . . . Yes, that was it. The pattern reminded him of the sidewinder rattlesnakes his father would point out when they were hunting together or going for walks in the Texas sand near the family trailer, outside Amarillo.
    Look at them, son. Look. Ain’t they something? But don’t you get too close. They’ll kill you in a kiss.
    He leaned against the wall and continued to study the woman in white, moving back and forth, back and forth.

Chapter Four
    “How does it look, Sachs?”
    “Good,” she replied to Rhyme, via their radio connection.
    She was just finishing walking the grid—the word referring to a method of searching a crime scene: examining it the way you’d mow a lawn, walking from one end of the site to the other then returning, slightly to the side. And then doing the same once more, but the second time walking perpendicular to the first search. Looking up and down too, floor to ceiling. This way, no inch or angle was left unseen. There are a number of ways to search crime scenes but Rhyme always insisted on this one.
    “ ‘Good’ means what?” he asked testily. Rhyme didn’t like generalizations, or what he called “soft” assessments.
    “He forgot the rape pack,” she replied. Since the Motorola link between Rhyme and Sachs was mostly a means to bring his surrogate presence to crime scenes, they usually dispensed with the NYPD conventions of radio protocol, like ending each transmission with a K.
    “Did he now? Might be as good as his wallet for ID’ing him.