The Twelfth Card

you, Genie.”
    She was pissed he was using the nickname he’d given her years ago. Short for both “Geneva” and “genius.”
    “She was making that up. To turn you against me. No, no, Genie, I’d never leave you. I got arrested.”
    “Arrested?”
    “It’s true, miss,” Roland Bell said. “We’ve seen his files. He got arrested the day he left you and your mother. He’s been in prison ever since. Just got out.”
    He then told her a story about a robbery, about being desperate to get some money to make their life better, to help her mother.
    But the words were tired, exhausted. He was giving her one of the thousands of limp excuses you heard so often in the neighborhood. The crack dealer, the shoplifter, the welfare scammer, the chain snatcher.
    I did it for you, baby . . . .
    She looked down at the book in her hand. It was used. Who’d it been for when it was new? Where was the parent who’d bought it originally for his or her child? In jail, washing dishes, driving a Lexus, performing neurosurgery?
    Had her father stolen it from a used bookstore?
    “I came back for you, Genie. I’ve been desperate to find you. And I was even more desperate when Betty called and told me you’d been attacked . . . . What happened yesterday? Who’s after you? Nobody ever told me.”
    “I saw something,” she said dismissingly, not wanting to give him too much information. “Maybe somebody committing a crime.” Geneva had no interest in the direction of this conversation. Shelooked him over and said more cruelly than she intended, “You know that Mom’s dead.”
    He nodded. “I didn’t know it till I came back. Then I heard. But I wasn’t surprised. She was a troubled woman. Maybe she’s happier now.”
    Geneva didn’t think so. And in any case no amount of heaven would make up for the unhappiness of dying alone the way she had, her body shrunken but her face puffed up like a yellow moon.
    And it wouldn’t make up for the earlier unhappiness—of getting fucked in stairways for a couple rocks of crack while her daughter waited outside the front door.
    Geneva said none of this.
    He smiled. “You’ve got yourself a real nice place you’re staying.”
    “It was temporary. I’m not there anymore.”
    “You’re not? Where’re you living?”
    “I’m not sure yet.”
    She regretted saying this. It gave him, she realized, a foot in the door. And, sure enough, he pushed his way in: “I’m going to ask my P.O. again if I can move back here. Knowing I’ve got family to take care of, he might say it’s all right.”
    “You don’t have a family here. Not anymore.”
    “I know you’re mad, baby. But I’ll make it up to you. I—”
    She flung the book to the floor. “Six years and nothing. No word. No call. No letter.” Infuriatingly, tears swelled in her eyes. She wiped them with shaking hands.
    He whispered, “An’ where would I write? Where would I call? I tried steady all those six years to get in touch with you. I’ll show you the stack of letters I got, all sent back to me in prison. A hundred of ’em,I’d guess. I tried everything I could think of. I just couldn’t find you.”
    “Well, thanks for the apology, you know. If it is an apology. But I think it’s time for you to go.”
    “No, baby, let me—”
    “Not ‘baby,’ not ‘Genie,’ not ‘daughter.’ ”
    “I’ll make it up to you,” he repeated. He wiped his eyes.
    She felt absolutely nothing, seeing his sorrow—or whatever it was. Nothing, that is, except anger. “Leave!”
    “But, baby, I—”
    “No. Just go away!”
    Once more the detective from North Carolina, the expert at guarding people, did his job smoothly and without wavering. He rose and silently but firmly ushered her father into the hallway. He nodded back at the girl, gave her a comforting smile and closed the door behind him, leaving Geneva to herself.

Chapter Thirty-Six
    While the girl and her father had been upstairs, Rhyme and the others had been going over leads to potential jewelry store heists.
    And having no success.
    The materials that Fred Dellray had brought them about money-laundering schemes involving jewelry were small-time operations, none of them centered in Midtown. And they had no reports from Interpol or local law enforcement agencies containing anything relevant to the case.
    The criminalist was shaking his head in frustration when his phone rang. “Rhyme here.”
    “Lincoln, it’s Parker.”
    The handwriting