The Twelfth Card

What would happen?She had a parent, true, but one who was an ex-con, who couldn’t even be here in the city. They’d still probably try to put her in a foster home.
    Amelia glanced at Lincoln Rhyme. “Until things get sorted out, why don’t we stick with our plan? Have Geneva stay here for a while.”
    “Here?” the girl asked.
    “Your father’s got to get back to Buffalo and take care of things there.”
    Not that living with him is an option anyway, Geneva thought. But kept this to herself.
    “Excellent idea.” This came from Thom. “I think that’s what we’ll do.” His voice was firm. “You’ll stay here.”
    “Is that all right with you?” Amelia asked Geneva.
    Geneva wasn’t sure why they wanted her to stay. She was initially suspicious. But she constantly had to remind herself that, after living alone for so long, suspicion trailed her like a shadow. She thought of another rule about lives like hers: You take your family how you find them.
    “Sure,” she said.
    *   *   *
    Shackled, Thompson Boyd was brought into Rhyme’s lab and the two guards deposited him in front of the officers and Rhyme. Geneva was once again upstairs in her room, guarded at the moment by Barbe Lynch.
    The criminalist rarely did this, meeting the perpetrators face-to-face. For him, a scientist, the only passion in his job was the game itself, the pursuit, not the physical incarnation of the suspect. He had no desire to gloat over the man or woman he’d captured.Excuses and pleas didn’t move him, threats didn’t trouble him.
    Yet now he wanted to make absolutely certain that Geneva Settle was safe. He wanted to assess her attacker himself.
    His face bandaged and bruised from his confrontation with Sachs at the arrest, Boyd looked around the laboratory. The equipment, the charts on the whiteboards.
    The wheelchair.
    No emotion whatsoever, no flicker of surprise or interest. Not even when he nodded toward Sachs. It was as if he’d forgotten that she’d brained him repeatedly with a rock.
    Somebody asked Boyd about it, how’d it feel, bein’ in a electric chair. He said it didn’t feel like anythin’. It just felt “kinda numb.” He said that a lot toward the end. He felt numb.
    He asked, “How’d you find me?”
    “A couple of things,” Rhyme answered. “For one, you picked the wrong tarot card to leave as evidence. It put me in mind of executions.”
    “The Hanged Man,” Boyd said, nodding. “Right you are. I never thought about that. Just seemed like kind of a spooky one. To lead you off, you know.”
    Rhyme continued, “What got us your name, though, was your habit.”
    “Habit?”
    “You whistle.”
    “I do that. I try not to on the job. But sometimes it slips out. So you talked to . . . ”
    “Yep, some people in Texas.”
    Nodding, Boyd glanced at Rhyme with red, squinting eyes. “So you knew ’bout Charlie Tucker? That unfortunate excuse for a human being. Making the last days of my people’s time on earth miserable.Telling ’em they were going to burn in hell, nonsense talk about Jesus and whatnot.”
    My people . . .
    Sachs asked, “Was Bani al-Dahab the only one who hired you?”
    He blinked in surprise; it seemed the first true emotion to cross his face. “How—?” He fell silent.
    “The bomb went off early. Or he killed himself.”
    A shake of the head. “No, he wasn’t any suicide bomber. It would’ve gone off by accident. Fella was careless. Too hotheaded, you know. Didn’t do things by the book. He probably armed it too early.”
    “How’d you meet him?”
    “He called me. Got my name from somebody in prison, Nation of Islam connection.”
    So that was it. Rhyme had wondered how a Texas prison guard had hooked up with Islamic terrorists.
    “They’re crazy,” Boyd said. “But they have money, those Arab people.”
    “And Jon Earle Wilson? He was your bomb maker?”
    “Jonny, yes, sir.” He shook his head. “You know ’bout him too? You people’re good, I must say.”
    “Where is he?”
    “That I don’t know. We left messages from pay phones to a voice-mail box. And met in public. Never traded more’n a dozen words.”
    “The FBI’ll be talking to you about al-Dahab and the bombing. What we want to know about is Geneva. Is there anybody else who’d want to hurt her?”
    Boyd shook his head. “From what he told me, al-Dahab was working alone. I suspect he talked to people over in the Middle East some. But nobody here. He didn’t trust