The Twelfth Card

they don’t make any fucking invisible-beam machines. ’Cause if you can walk around the beams when you’re wearing special goggles, then the bad guys are going to buy special fucking goggles and walk around them, right? Real alarms aren’t like that. If a fly farts in our vault, the alarm goes off. And, fact is, the system’s so tight a fly can’t even get inside.”
    “I should have known,” Lincoln Rhyme snapped after they hung up. “Look at the chart! Look at what we found in the first safe house.” He nodded toward the reference to the map that had been found on Elizabeth Street. It showed only a basic outline of the library where Geneva was attacked. The jewelry exchange across the street was drawn in much greater detail, as were the nearby alleys, doors and loading docks—entrance and exit routes to and from the exchange, not the museum.
    Two detectives from downtown had interrogated Boyd to find out the identity of the person behind the heist, the one who’d hired him, but he was stonewalling.
    Sellitto then checked NYPD Larceny for suspicious activity reports in the diamond district but there were no particular leads that seemed relevant. Fred Dellray took time off from investigating the rumors of the potential terrorist bombings to look through the FBI’s files about any federal investigations involving jewelry thefts. Since larceny isn’t a federal crime, there weren’t many cases, but several of them—mostly involving money laundering in the New York area—were active and he promised he’d bring the reports over right away.
    They now turned to the evidence from Boyd’s safe house and residence, in hopes of finding the mastermind of the theft. They examined the guns, the chemicals, the tools and the rest of the items, but there was nothing that they hadn’t found before: more bits of orange paint, acid stains and crumbs of falafel and smears of yogurt, Boyd’s favorite meal, it seemed. They ran the serial numbers on the money and came up with nothing from Treasury, and none of the bills yielded any fingerprints. To withdraw this much money from an account was risky for the man who hired Boyd because any such large transactions have to be reported under money laundering rules. But a fast check of recent large cash withdrawals from area banks came up with no leads. This was curious, Rhyme reflected, though he concluded that the perp had probably withdrawn small amounts of the cash over time for Boyd’s fee.
    The unsub was one of the few people on earth, it seemed, who didn’t own a cell phone, or, if he did, his was an anonymous prepaid unit—there were nobilling records—and he’d managed to dispose of it before he was caught. A look at Jeanne Starke’s home phone bill yielded nothing suspicious except a half-dozen calls to payphones in Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn, but there was no regular pattern to the locations.
    Sellitto’s heroics had, however, yielded some good evidence: fingerprints on the dynamite and the guts of the explosive transistor radio. The FBI’s IAFIS and local print databases resulted in a name: Jon Earle Wilson. He’d done time in Ohio and New Jersey for an assortment of crimes, including arson, bombmaking and insurance fraud. But he’d fallen off the radar of the local authorities, Cooper reported. LKA was Brooklyn but that was a vacant lot.
    “I don’t want the last known address. I want the presently known. Get the feds on it too.”
    “Will do.”
    The doorbell rang. Everybody was on edge with the main perp and accomplice still unaccounted for and they looked at the doorway cautiously. Sellitto had answered the bell and he stepped into the lab with an African-American boy, midteens, tall, wearing calf-length shorts and a Knicks jersey. He was carrying a heavy shopping bag. He blinked in surprise at the sight of Lincoln Rhyme—and then at everything else in the room.
    “Yo, yo, Geneva. What happenin’?”
    She looked at him with a frown.
    “Yo, I’m Rudy.” He laughed. “You ain’t remember me.”
    Geneva nodded. “Yeah. I think so. You’re—”
    “Ronelle’s brother.”
    The girl said to Rhyme, “A girl in my class.”
    “How’d you know I was here?”
    “Word up. Ronee hear it from somebody.”
    “Keesh probably. I told her,” Geneva said to Rhyme.
    The boy looked around the lab again then back to Geneva. “Yo, what it is, some of the girls got some shit together for you. You know, you ain’t be in school and all so they