The Twelfth Card

wouldn’t listen. He say I can’t see you none.”
    “So you’re choosing him,” Geneva said.
    “I ain’t got no choice.” The big girl looked down. “I can’t take no present from you. Here.” She thrust the necklace into Geneva’s hand and released it fast, as if she were letting go of a hot pan. It fell to the filthy sidewalk.
    “Don’t do it, Keesh. Please!”
    Geneva reached for the girl but her fingers closed on nothing but cool air.

Chapter Forty-Five
    Ten days after the meeting with Sanford Bank President Gregory Hanson and his lawyer, Lincoln Rhyme was having a phone conversation with Ron Pulaski, the young rookie, who was on medical leave but expected to return to duty in a month or so. His memory was coming back and he was helping them shore up the case against Thompson Boyd.
    “So you going to a Halloween party?” Pulaski asked. Then paused and added a quick “Or whatever.” The last two words probably were meant to counteract any faux pas created by suggesting that a quadriplegic might attend parties.
    But Rhyme put him at ease by saying, “I am, as a matter of fact. I’m going as Glenn Cunningham.”
    Sachs stifled a laugh.
    “Really?” the rookie asked. “Uhm, who’s that exactly?”
    “Why don’t you look it up, Patrolman.”
    “Yes, sir. I will.”
    Rhyme disconnected and looked over the main evidence board, on the top of which was taped the twelfth card in the tarot deck, The Hanged Man.
    He was gazing at the card when the doorbell rang.
    Lon Sellitto, probably. He was due soon from a therapy session. He’d stopped rubbing the phantom bloodstain and practicing his Billy the Kid quick draw—which nobody’d yet explained to Rhyme. He’d tried to ask Sachs about it but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say much. Which was fine. Sometimes,Lincoln Rhyme firmly believed, you just didn’t need to know all the details.
    But his visitor at the moment, it turned out, wasn’t the rumpled detective.
    Rhyme glanced into the doorway and saw Geneva Settle standing there, listing against her book bag. “Welcome,” he said.
    Sachs too said hello, pulling off the safety glasses she’d been wearing as she filled out chain-of-custody cards for blood samples she’d collected at a homicide crime scene that morning.
    Wesley Goades had all the paperwork ready to file in the lawsuit against Sanford Bank and reported to Geneva that she could expect a realistic offer from Hanson by Monday. If not, the legal cruise missile had warned his opponents that he would file suit the next day. A press conference would accompany the event (Goades’s opinion was that the bad publicity would last considerably longer than an “ugly ten minutes”).
    Rhyme looked the girl over. Unseasonably warm weather made gangsta sweats and stocking caps impractical so she was in blue jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt with Guess! in glittery letters across the chest. She’d gained a little weight, her hair was longer. She even had some makeup on (Rhyme had wondered what was in the bag that Thom had mysteriously slipped her the other day). The girl looked good.
    Geneva’s life had achieved a certain stability. Jax Jackson had been released from the hospital and was undergoing physical therapy. Thanks to some prodding by Sellitto, the man had been officially transferred to the care and feeding of the New York City parole authorities. Geneva was living in his minuscule apartment in Harlem, an arrangement that was not as dire as she’d anticipated (the girl had confessedthis not to Rhyme or Roland Bell but to Thom—who’d become a mother hen to the girl and invited her to the town house regularly, to give her cooking lessons, watch TV and argue books and politics, none of which Rhyme had any interest in). As soon as they could afford a bigger place, she and her father were going to have Aunt Lilly move in with them.
    The girl had given up her job slinging McHash and was now employed after school by Wesley Goades as a legal researcher and gofer. She was also helping him set up the Charles Singleton Trust, which would disburse the settlement money to the freedman’s heirs. Geneva’s interest in fleeing the city at the earliest opportunity for a life in London or Rome hadn’t flagged, but the cases that Rhyme overheard her passionately talking about all seemed to involve Harlem residents who’d been discriminated against because they were black, Latino, Islamic, women or poor.
    Geneva was also engaged in some project