The Twelfth Card

mind.” Sighing, the criminalist asked, “And the uric acid was from his shoe when he stepped in some dog pee on the sidewalk?”
    “Can’t say where he stepped on it,” the examiner said, displaying the precision the Bureau was known for. “But the sample does test positive for canine urine.”
    He thanked the man and disconnected. He turned to the team. “Popcorn and cotton candy on his shoesat the same time?” Rhyme mused. “Where’d that put him?”
    “Ball game?”
    “The New York teams haven’t played at home lately. I’m thinking maybe our unsub walked through a neighborhood where there’d been a fair or carnival in the past day or so.” He asked Geneva, “Did you go to any fairs recently? Could he have seen you there?”
    “Me? No. I don’t really go to fairs.”
    Rhyme said to Pulaski, “Since you’re off bug detail, Patrolman, call whoever you need to and find out every permit that’s been issued for a fair, carnival, festival, religious feast, whatever.”
    “I’m on it,” the rookie said.
    “What else do we have?” Rhyme asked.
    “Flakes from the carriage of the microfiche reader, where he hit it with the blunt object.”
    “Flakes?”
    “Bits of varnish, I’d guess, from whatever he used.”
    “Okay, run them through Maryland.”
    The FBI had a huge database of current and past paint samples, located in one of its Maryland facilities. This was mostly used for matching paint evidence to cars. But there were hundreds of samples of varnish as well. After another call from Dellray, Cooper sent the GC/MS composition analysis and other data on the lacquer flakes off to the Bureau. Within a few minutes the phone rang, and this FBI examiner reported that the varnish matched a product sold exclusively to manufacturers of martial arts equipment, like nunchakus and security batons. He added the discouraging news that the substance contained no manufacturer’s markers and was sold in large quantities—meaning it was virtually untraceable.
    “Okay, we’ve got a rapist with a nunchaku, funky bullets, a bloody rope . . . man is a walking nightmare.”
    The doorbell rang and a moment later Thom ushered in a woman in her twenties, his arm around her shoulders.
    “Look who’s here,” the aide announced.
    The slim woman had spiky purple hair and a pretty face. Her stretch pants and sweater revealed an athletic body—actually, a performer’s body, Rhyme knew.
    “Kara,” Rhyme said. “Good to see you again. I deduce you’re the specialist Sachs called.”
    “Hi.” The young woman hugged Sachs, greeted the others and closed her hands around Rhyme’s. Sachs introduced her to Geneva, who looked her over with a reserved face.
    Kara (it was a stage name; she wouldn’t reveal her real one) was an illusionist and performance artist who had helped Rhyme and Sachs as a consultant in a recent murder case, where a killer used his skills as a magician and sleight-of-hand artist to get close to victims, murder them and get away.
    She lived in Greenwich Village, but had been visiting her mother in a care facility uptown when Sachs had called, she explained. They spent a few moments catching up—Kara was putting together a one-woman show for the Performance Warehouse in Soho, and was dating an acrobat—then Rhyme said, “We need some expertise.”
    “You bet,” the young woman said. “Whatever I can do.”
    Sachs explained about the case. She frowned and whispered, “I’m sorry,” to Geneva when she heard about the attempted rape.
    The student just shrugged.
    “He had this with him,” Cooper said, holding up The Hanged Man tarot card from the rape pack.
    “We thought you could tell us something about it.”
    Kara had explained to Rhyme and Sachs that the world of magic was divided into two camps, those who were entertainers, who made no claim to having supernatural skills, and those who asserted they had occult powers. Kara had no patience for the latter—she was solely a performer—but because of her experience working in magic stores for rent and food money she knew something about fortune-telling.
    She explained, “Okay, tarot’s an old method of divining that goes back to ancient Egypt. The tarot deck of cards’re divided into the minor arcana—they correspond to the fifty-two-card playing deck—and the major arcana, zero through twenty-one. They sort of represent a journey through life. The Hanged Man’s the twelfth card in the major arcana.” She shook her head.