The Twelfth Card

make it to study period.”
    “I’ma stay with you. I can’t be sittin’ for all them hours in class worryin’ ’bout you and ever’thing.”
    Geneva gave a wry laugh. “No way, girl.” She asked Rhyme, “You don’t need her, do you?”
    He glanced at Sachs, who shook her head. Sellitto jotted down her address and phone number. “We’ll call you if we have any more questions.”
    “Take a pass, girl,” she said. “Just kick it an’ stay home.”
    “I’ll see you at school,” Geneva said firmly. “You’ll be there?” Then lifted an eyebrow. “Word?”
    Two loud snaps of gum. A sigh. “Word.” At the door the girl paused and turned back, said to Rhyme, “Yo, mister, how long fo’ you get outa that chair?”
    No one said anything to fill the awkward moment. Awkward to everyone, Rhyme supposed, but himself.
    “It’ll probably be a long time,” he said to her.
    “Man, that suck.”
    “Yeah,” Rhyme said. “Sometimes it does.”
    She headed into the hall, toward the front door. They heard, “Damn, watch it, dude.” The outer door slammed.
    Mel Cooper entered the room, looking back at the spot where he’d nearly been run down by a teenager who outweighed him by fifty pounds. “Okay,” he said to no one. “I’m not going to ask.” He pulled off his green windbreaker and nodded a greeting to everyone.
    The slim, balding man had been working as a forensic scientist for an upstate New York police department some years ago when he’d politely but insistently told Rhyme, then head of NYPD forensics, that one of his analyses was wrong. Rhyme had far more respect for people who pointed out mistakes than for sycophants—provided, of course, they were correct, which Cooper had been. Rhyme had immediately started a campaign to get the man to New York City, a challenge at which he ultimately succeeded.
    Cooper was a born scientist but even more important he was a born forensic scientist, which is very different. It’s often thought that “forensic” refers to crime scene work, but in fact the word means any aspect of debating issues in courts of law. To be a successful criminalist you have to translate raw facts into a form that’ll be useful to the prosecutor. It’s not enough, for instance, to simply determine the presence of nux vomica plant materials at a suspected crime scene—many of which are used for such innocuous medical purposes as treating ear inflammations. A true forensic scientist like Mel Cooper would know instantly that those same materials produce the deadly alkaloid poison strychnine.
    Cooper had the trappings of a computer-gamenerd—he lived with his mother, still wore madras shirts with chinos and had a Woody Allen physique. But looks were deceiving. Cooper’s longtime girlfriend was a tall, gorgeous blonde. Together they would sail in unison across ballroom floors in dance competitions, in which they were often top champions. Recently they’d taken up skeet shooting and winemaking (to which Cooper was meticulously applying principles of chemistry and physics).
    Rhyme briefed him on the case and they turned to the evidence. Rhyme said, “Let’s look at the pack.”
    Donning latex gloves, Cooper glanced at Sachs, who pointed out the paper bag containing the rape pack. He opened it over a large piece of newsprint—to catch bits of ambient trace—and extracted the bag. It was a thin plastic sack. No store logo was printed on it, only a large yellow smiley face. The tech now opened the bag, then paused. He said, “I smell something . . . . ” A deep inhalation. “Flowery. What is that?” Cooper carried the bag to Rhyme and he smelled it. There was something familiar about the fragrance, but he couldn’t decide what. “Geneva?”
    “Yes?”
    “Is that what you smelled back in the library?”
    She sniffed. “Yeah, that’s it.”
    Sachs said, “Jasmine. I think it’s jasmine.”
    “On the chart,” Rhyme announced.
    “What chart?” Cooper asked, looking around.
    In each of his cases, Rhyme made whiteboard charts of evidence found at crime scenes and profiles of the perps. “Start one,” he ordered. “And we need to call him something. Somebody give me a name.”
    No one had any inspiration.
    Rhyme said, “No time to be creative. October ninth today, right? Ten/nine. So he’ll be Unsubone-oh-nine. Thom! We need your elegant handwriting.”
    “No need to butter up,” the aide said as he stepped into the room with another