The Twelfth Card

then.”
    Rhyme gave a laugh. “That’s a good thought. But at any given moment in Manhattan there’re about fifty thousand cell phone calls in progress. Besides, I doubt he was really on the phone.”
    “He was frontin’? How you know that?” Lakeesha asked, furtively slipping two sticks of gum into her mouth.
    “I don’t know it. I suspect it. Like the laughing. He was probably doing it to make Geneva drop her guard. You tend not to notice people on cell phones. And you rarely think of them as being a threat.”
    Geneva was nodding. “Yeah. I was kinda freaked when he first came into the library. But when I heard him on the phone, well, I thought it’s rude to be talking on a phone in a library but I wasn’t scared anymore.”
    “What happened then?” Sachs asked.
    She explained that she’d heard a second click—she thought it sounded like a gun—and saw a man in a ski mask. She then told how she’d dismantled the mannequin and dressed it in her own clothes.
    “That phat,” Lakeesha offered proudly. “My sista here, she smart.”
    She sure is, Rhyme thought.
    “I hid in the stacks till he walked to the microfiche reader then I ran for the fire door.”
    “You didn’t see anything else about him?” Sachs asked.
    “No.”
    “What color was the mask?”
    “Dark. I don’t know exactly.”
    “Other clothes?”
    “I didn’t see anything else really. Not that I remember. I was pretty freaked.”
    “I’m sure you were,” Sachs said. “When you were hiding in the stacks, were you looking in his direction? So you’d know when to run?”
    Geneva frowned for a moment. “Well, yeah, that’s right, I was looking. I forgot about that. I watched through the bottom shelves so I could run when he got close to my chair.”
    “So maybe you saw a little more of him then.”
    “Oh, you know, I did. I think he had brown shoes. Yeah, brown. Sort of a lighter shade, not dark brown.”
    “Good. And what about his pants?”
    “Dark, I’m pretty sure. But that’s all I could see, just the cuffs.”
    “You smell anything?”
    “No . . . Wait. Maybe I did. You know, something sweet, like flowers.”
    “And then?”
    “He came up to the chair and I heard this crack and then another couple of sounds. Something breaking.”
    “The microfiche reader,” Sachs said. “He smashed it.”
    “By then I was running as fast as I could. To the fire door. I went down the stairs and when I got to the street I found Keesh and we were going to run. But I was thinking maybe he was going to hurt somebody else. So I turned around and”—she looked at Pulaski—“we saw you.”
    Sachs asked Lakeesha, “Did you see the attacker?”
    “Nothin’. I was just chillin’ and then Gen come up, runnin’ all fast and buggin’ an’ ever’thing, you know what I’m sayin’? I didn’t see nothin’.”
    Rhyme asked Sellitto, “The doer killed Barry because he was a witness—what’d he see?”
    “He said he didn’t see anything. He gave me the names of the museum’s white, male employees in case it was one of them. There’re two but they checked out. One was taking his daughter to school at the time, the other was in the main office, people around him.”
    “So, an opportunistic perp,” Sachs mused. “Saw her go inside and went after her.”
    “A museum?” Rhyme asked. “Odd choice.”
    Sellitto asked both girls, “Did you see anyone following you today?”
    Lakeesha said, “We come down on the C train durin’ rush hour. Eighth Avenue line . . . be all crowded and nasty. Couldn’t see nobody weird. You?”
    Geneva shook her head.
    “How ’bout recently? Anybody hassling you? Hitting on you?”
    Neither of them could think of anybody who’d seemed to be a threat. Embarrassed, Geneva said, “Not exactly a lot of stalkers coming round after me. They’d be looking for a little more booty, you know. Blingier.”
    “Blingier?”
    “Girl mean flashy,” translated Lakeesha, who obviously typified both booty and bling. She frowned and glanced at Geneva. “Why you gotta go there, girl? Don’t be talkin’ trash ’bout yo’self.”
    Sachs looked at Rhyme, who was frowning. “What’re you thinking?”
    “Something’s not right. Let’s go over the evidence while Geneva’s here. There might be some things that she can help explain.”
    The girl shook her head. “That test?” She held up her watch.
    “This won’t take long,” Rhyme said.
    Geneva looked at her friend. “You can just