The Twelfth Card

garbage bags, but the perp was clearly not here.
    She radioed Haumann what they’d found. No one else had seen a sign of the unsub. All the officers were going to rendezvous at the command post truck to continue the canvass of the neighborhood, while Sachs searched the scenes for evidence—with everybody keeping in mind that, as at the museum earlier, the killer might still be nearby.
     . . . watch your back.
    Sighing, she replaced her weapon and turned toward the stairs. Then paused. If she took the same flight of steps back up to the main floor—a nightmare on her arthritic knees—she’d still have to walk down another flight to street level. An easier alternative was to take the much shorter stairway directly to the sidewalk.
    Sometimes, she reflected, turning toward it, you just have to pamper yourself.
    *   *   *
    Lon Sellitto had become obsessed with one particular window.
    He’d heard the transmission that the warehouse was clear, but he wondered if ESU had actually gotten into all the nooks and crannies. After all, everybody’dmissed the unsub that morning at the museum. He’d easily gotten within pistol range.
    Tap, tap, tap.
    That one window, far right, second floor . . . It seemed to Sellitto that it had quivered once or twice.
    Maybe just the wind. But maybe the motion was from somebody trying to open it.
    Or aiming through it.
    Tap.
    He shivered and stepped back.
    “Hey,” he called to an ESU officer, who’d just come out of the herbal importer’s. “Take a look—you see anything in that window?”
    “Where?”
    “That one.” Sellitto leaned out of cover just a bit and pointed to the black glass square.
    “Naw. But the place’s cleared. Didn’t you hear?”
    Sellitto leaned out from cover a bit farther, hearing tap, tap, tap, seeing brown eyes going lifeless. He squinted and, shivering, looked the window over carefully. Then in his periphery he suddenly saw motion to his left and heard the squeal of a door opening. A flash of light as the cold sun reflected off something metallic.
    It’s him!
    “God,” Sellitto whispered. He went for his gun, crouching and spinning toward the glint. But instead of following procedures when speed-drawing a weapon and keeping his index finger outside the trigger guard, he yanked the Colt from his holster in a panic.
    Which is why the gun discharged an instant later, sending the slug directly toward the spot where Amelia Sachs was emerging from the basement door to the warehouse.

Chapter Fourteen
    Standing at the corner of Canal and Sixth, a dozen blocks from his safe house, Thompson Boyd waited for the light to change. He caught his breath and wiped his damp face.
    He wasn’t shaken, he wasn’t freaked out—the breathlessness and sweat were from the sprint to safety—but he was curious how they’d found him. He was always so careful with his contacts and the phones he used, and always checking to see if he was being followed, that he guessed it had to be through physical evidence. Made sense—because he was pretty sure that the woman in white, walking through the museum library scene like a sidewinder snake, had been in the hallway outside the apartment on Elizabeth Street. What had he left behind at the museum? Something in the rape bag? Some bits of trace from his shoes or clothes?
    They were the best investigators he’d ever encountered. He’d have to keep that in mind.
    Gazing at the traffic, he reflected on the escape. When he’d seen the officers coming up the stairs, he’d quickly placed the book and the purchases from the hardware store into the shopping bag, grabbed his attaché case and gun, then clicked on the switch that turned the doorknob live. He’d kicked through the wall and escaped into the warehouse next door, climbed to its roof and then hurried south to the end of the block. Climbing down a fire escape,he’d turned west and started sprinting, taking the course he’d charted out and practiced dozens of times.
    Now, at Canal and Sixth, he was lost in a crowd waiting for the light to change, hearing the sirens of the police cars joining in the search for him. His face was emotionless, his hands didn’t shake, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t panicked. This was the way he had to be. He’d seen it over and over again—dozens of professional killers he’d known had been caught because they panicked, lost their cool in front of the police and broke down under routine questioning. That, or they got rattled