The Twelfth Card

and Amelia, at their place.”
    The woman looked once more at her father, who was offering a faint smile toward the pair.
    “This’s pretty unusual.”
    Geneva said defiantly, “I won’t go into a foster home. I won’t lose everything I’ve been working for. I’ll run away. I’ll—”
    “Whoa, slow up.” The counselor smiled. “I don’t think we need to make an issue of anything now. You’ve been through enough. We’ll talk about it in a few days. Where’re you going now?”
    “To Mr. Rhyme’s.”
    “I’ll give you a ride.”
    Geneva gestured her father over. The man ambled up to the car, and the girl introduced them.
    “Nice to meet you, ma’am. And thanks for looking out for Geneva.”
    “Come on, get in.”
    Geneva looked across the street. Keesh was still there.
    She shouted, “I gotta go. I’ll call you.” She mimicked holding a phone to her ear.
    Lakeesha nodded uncertainly, withdrew her hand from her purse.
    Geneva climbed into the backseat, behind her father. A glance through the back window at Keesh’s grim face.
    Then Mrs. Barton pulled away from the curb and her father started up with another ridiculous history lesson, rambling on and on, you know I did a ’piece once ’bout the Collyer brothers? Homer and Langley. Lived at 128th and Fifth. They were recluses and the weirdest men ever lived. They were terrified of crime in Harlem and barricaded themselves in their apartment, set up booby traps, never threw a single thing out. One of ’em got crushed under a pile of newspapers he’d stacked up. When they died, police had to cart over a hundred tons of trash out of their place. He asked, “You ever hear about them?”
    The counselor said she thought she had.
    “No,” Geneva replied. And thought: Ask me if I care.
    *   *   *
    Lincoln Rhyme was directing Mel Cooper to organize the evidence that they’d collected from the bombing scene, in between reviewing some of the evidence-analysis reports that had returned.
    A federal team, under Dellray’s direction, had tracked down Jon Earle Wilson, the man whose fingerprints were on the transistor radio bomb in Boyd’s safe house. He’d been collared and a couple of agents were going to bring him over to Rhyme’s for interrogation to shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.
    It was then that Bell’s phone rang. He answered, “Bell here . . . Luis, what’s up?” He cocked his head to listen.
    Luis . . .
    This would be Martinez, who had been tailing Geneva and her father on foot since they’d left Rhyme’s to go to Langston Hughes. They were convincedthat Jax, Alonzo Jackson, was her father and no threat to the girl, and that the terrorist had been working alone. But that didn’t mean Bell and Rhyme were going to let Geneva go anywhere in the immediate future without protection.
    But something was wrong. Rhyme could read it in Bell’s eyes. The detective said to Cooper, “We need a DMV check. Fast.” He jotted a tag number on a Post-it note then hung up, handed the slip of paper to the CS tech.
    “What’s happening?” Sachs asked.
    “Geneva and her father were at the bus stop near the school. A car pulled up. They got inside. Luis wasn’t expecting that and couldn’t get across the street fast enough to stop them.”
    “Car? Who was driving?”
    “Heavyset black woman. Way he described her, sounds like it might’ve been that counselor, Barton.”
    Nothing to worry about necessarily, Rhyme reflected. Maybe the woman just saw them at the bus stop and offered them a ride.
    Information from the DMV flickered over his screen.
    “What do we have, Mel?” Rhyme asked.
    Cooper squinted as he read. He typed some more. He looked up, eyes wide through his thick glasses. “A problem. We have a problem.”
    *   *   *
    Mrs. Barton was heading into south-central Harlem, moving slowly though the early evening traffic. She slowed as they drove past yet another real estate redevelopment project.
    Her father shook his head. “Look at all this.” He nodded at the billboard. “Developers, banks, architects.”A sour laugh. “Betcha there’s not a single black person running any of ’em.”
    Lame, Geneva thought. She wanted to tune him out.
    Whining about the past . . .
    The counselor glanced at the site and, shrugged. “You see that a lot around here.” She braked and turned down an alley between one of the old buildings being gutted and a deep excavation site.
    In response to her father’s questioning