The Twelfth Card

insurance company employers had led him to betray Geneva.
    But Rhyme hadn’t shared his suspicion of the lawyer and thus no apologies were in order. After Rhyme and Sachs had discovered that the case had taken an unexpected turn, the criminalist had suggested that Goades be retained for what was coming next. Geneva Settle, of course, was all in favor of hiring him.
    Across the marble coffee table from them were Gregory Hanson, the president of Sanford Bank and Trust, his assistant, Stella Turner, and the senior partner at Sanford’s law firm, a trim mid-forties attorney named Anthony Cole. They exuded a collective unease, which, Rhyme assumed, would’ve arisen late yesterday when he’d called Hanson to propose a meeting to discuss the “Ashberry matter.”
    Hanson had agreed but added both quickly and wearily that he was as shocked as anyone about the man’s death in the shootout at Columbia University several days before. He knew nothing about it—or about any jewelry store robbery or terrorist attack—except what he’d read in the news. What exactly did Rhyme and the police want?
    Rhyme had offered standard cop-ese: “Just the answers to a few routine questions.”
    Now, pleasantries disposed of, Hanson asked, “Could you tell us what this is about?”
    Rhyme got right to the point: He explained that William Ashberry had hired Thompson Boyd, a professional killer, to murder Geneva Settle.
    Three horrified glances at the slim young girl in front of them. She looked back at each of them calmly.
    Continuing, the criminalist added that Ashberry felt it was vital that nobody know the reason he wanted her dead so he and Boyd had set up several fake motives for the girl’s death. Originally the kill was supposed to look like a rape. Rhyme, though, had seen through that immediately, and as they continued to search for the killer he and the team had found what appeared to be the real reason for the murder: that Geneva could identify a terrorist planning an attack.
    “But there were some problems with that: The bomber’s death should’ve ended any need to kill Geneva. But it didn’t. Boyd’s partner tried again. What was going on? We tracked down the man who sold the bomb to Boyd, an arsonist in New Jersey. The FBI arrested him. We linked some bills in his possession to Boyd’s safe house. That made him an accomplice to murder and he copped a plea. He told us that he put Ashberry and Boyd together and—”
    “This terrorist thing, though,” the bank’s lawyer said skeptically, with a sour laugh. “Bill Ashberry and terrorists? It—”
    “Getting there,” Rhyme said, equally sour. Maybe more so. He continued his explanation: The bomb maker’s statement wasn’t enough for a warrant to arrest Ashberry. So Rhyme and Sellitto decided they needed to flush him out. They placed an officer at Geneva’s high school, a man pretending to be an assistant principal. Anyone calling to ask about Geneva would be told that she was at Columbia with a professor in the law school. The real professor agreed to let them use not only his name but his office as well. Fred Dellray and Jonette Monroe, theundercover gangsta girl from Geneva’s high school, were more than happy to play the roles of the professor and student. They’d done a fast but thorough job setting up the sting, even having some fake Photoshop pictures made up of Dellray with Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, to make sure Ashberry didn’t tip to the scam and bolt.
    Rhyme now explained these events to Hanson and Cole, adding the details about the attempted murder in Mathers’s office.
    He shook his head. “I should’ve guessed the perp had some connections to a bank. He’d been able to withdraw large amounts of cash and doctor the reporting statements. But”—Rhyme nodded to the lawyer—“what the hell was he up to? I understand that Episcopalians aren’t really a breeding ground for fundamentalist terrorism.”
    No one smiled. Rhyme thought, bankers, lawyers—no sense of humor. He continued, “So I went back to the evidence and noticed something that bothered me: There was no radio transmitter to detonate the bomb. It should’ve been in the wreckage of the van, but it wasn’t.
    “Why not? One conclusion was that Boyd and his partner had planted the bomb and kept the transmitter themselves to kill the Arab deliveryman as a diversion to keep us from finding the real motive for killing Geneva.”
    “Okay,” Hanson said. “The real motive.