The Twelfth Card

Which could be found in charcoal or ash or a number of other substances.
    But which could also be diamond dust.
    “What’s the business world’s latest abomination of the English language?” the criminalist asked, his mood lighthearted once again. “We were one-eighty on this one.”
    Oh, they hadn’t been off base about Boyd’s beingthe perp or the fact he’d been hired to kill Geneva. No, it was the motive they’d blown completely. Everything they’d speculated about the early civil rights movement, about the present-day implications of Charles Singleton’s setup in the Freedmen’s Trust robbery, about the Fourteenth Amendment conspiracy . . . they’d been totally wrong.
    Geneva Settle had been targeted to die simply because she’d seen something she shouldn’t have: a jewelry robbery being planned.
    The letter Amelia had found in his safe house contained diagrams of various buildings in Midtown, including the African-American museum. The note read:
    A black girl, fifth floor in this window, 2 October, about 0830. She saw my delivery van when he was parked in a alley behind the Jewelry echange. Saw enough to guess the plans of mine. Kill her.
    The library window near the microfiche reader where Geneva was attacked was circled on the diagram.
    In addition to the misspelling, the language of the note was unusual, which, to a criminalist, was good; it’s far easier to trace the unusual than the common. Rhyme had Cooper send a copy to Parker Kincaid, a former FBI document examiner outside of D.C., currently in private practice. Like Rhyme, Kincaid was sometimes recruited by his old employer and other law enforcement agencies to consult in cases involving documents and handwriting. Kincaid’s reply email said he’d get back to them as soon as he could.
    As she looked over the letter Amelia Sachs shook her head angrily. She recounted the incident of thearmed man she and Pulaski had seen outside the museum yesterday—the one who turned out to be a security guard, who’d told them about the valuable contents of the exchange, the multimillion-dollar shipments from Amsterdam and Jerusalem every day.
    “Should’ve mentioned that,” she said, shaking her head.
    But who could have guessed that Thompson Boyd had been hired to kill Geneva because she’d looked out the window at the wrong time?
    “But why steal the microfiche?” Sellitto asked.
    “To lead us off, of course. Which it did pretty damn well.” Rhyme sighed. “Here we were running around, thinking of constitutional law conspiracies. Boyd probably had no clue what Geneva was reading.” He turned to the girl, who sat nearby cradling a cup of hot chocolate. “Someone, whoever wrote that note, saw you from the street. He or Boyd contacted the librarian to find out who you were and when you’d be back, so Boyd could be there, waiting for you. Dr. Barry was killed because he could connect you to them . . . . Now, think back to a week ago. You looked out the window at eight-thirty and saw a van and somebody in the alley. Do you remember what you saw?”
    The girl squinted and looked down. “I don’t know. I looked out the window a bunch. When I get tired of reading I walk around some, you know. I can’t remember anything specific.”
    For ten minutes Sachs talked with Geneva, trying to coax her recollections into coming up with an image. But to recall a specific person and a delivery van on the busy streets of Midtown from a glance a week ago was too much for the girl’s memory.
    Rhyme called the director of the American JewelryExchange and told him what they’d learned. Asked if he had any idea who might be trying a heist, the man replied, “Fuck, no clue. It happens more than you’d think, though.”
    “We found traces of pure carbon in some of the evidence. Diamond dust, we’re thinking.”
    “Oh, that’d mean they’d checked the alley near the loading dock probably. Nobody from outside gets near the cutting rooms, but, hey, you polish product, you get dust. It ends up in the vacuum cleaner bags and on everything we throw out.”
    The man chuckled, not much troubled by the news of the impending burglary. “I tell you, though, whoever’s going after us’s got some balls. We got the best fucking security in the city. Everybody thinks it’s like on TV. We have guys come in to buy their girlfriends rings and they look around and ask where’s those invisible beams that you wear goggles to see, you know? Well, the answer is