The Twelfth Card

near his side. Close to his gun. The blond-haired officer trotted up to them a moment later. “Lost him,” he gasped, catching his breath. “Sorry.”
    Bell sighed. “Any description?”
    “Black, six feet, solid build. Limp. Black do-rag. No beard or mustache. Late thirties, early forties.”
    “Did you see anything else, Geneva?”
    She shook her head sullenly.
    Bell said, “Okay. Let’s get out of here.”
    She climbed into the back of the detective’s Ford, with the blond officer beside her. Mr. Bell started for the driver’s side. The counselor they’d met earlier, Mrs. Barton, hurried up, a frown on her face. “Detective, what’s wrong?”
    “We have to get Geneva out of here. Might be that one of the people wants to hurt her was close by. Still could be, for all we know.”
    The heavy woman looked around, frowning. “Here?”
    “We aren’t sure. A possibility, all I’m saying. Just better to play it safe.” The detective added, “We’re thinking he was here about five minutes ago.African-American, good-sized fella. Wearing a green army jacket and do-rag. Clean-shaven. Limping. He was on the far side of the school yard, by that big truck there. Could you could ask students and teachers if they know him or saw anything else?”
    “Of course.”
    He asked her too to see if any school security tapes might have picked him up. They exchanged phone numbers, then the detective dropped into the driver’s seat, started the engine. “Buckle up, everybody. We aren’t exactly going to be moseyin’ on out of here.”
    Just as Geneva clicked her seat belt on, the policeman hit the gas and the car skidded away from the curb and started a roller-coaster ride through the ragged streets of Harlem, as Langston Hughes High School—her last fortress of sanity and comfort—disappeared from view.
    *   *   *
    As Amelia Sachs and Lon Sellitto organized the evidence she’d collected at the safe house on Elizabeth Street, Rhyme was thinking about Unsub 109’s accomplice—the man who’d just gotten real damn close to Geneva at her school.
    There was a possibility that the unsub had been using this man solely for surveillance, except that with the ex-con’s violent background and the fact he was armed, he too was probably prepared to kill her himself. Rhyme had hoped that the man had shed some evidence near the school yard, but no—a crime scene team had looked over the area carefully and found nothing. And a canvass team had located no witnesses on the street who’d seen him or how he got away. Maybe—
    “Hi, Lincoln,” a male voice said.
    Startled, Rhyme looked up and saw a man standing nearby. In his mid-forties, with broad shoulders, a close-cropped cap of silver hair, bangs in the front. He wore an expensive, dark gray suit.
    “Doctor. Didn’t hear the bell.”
    “Thom was outside. He let me in.”
    Robert Sherman, the doctor supervising Rhyme’s physical therapy, ran a clinic that specialized in working with spinal cord injury patients. It was he who’d developed Rhyme’s regimen of therapy, the bicycle and the locomotor treadmill, as well as aquatherapy and the traditional range-of-motion exercises that Thom performed on Rhyme.
    The doctor and Sachs exchanged greetings, then he glanced at the lab, noting the bustle of activity. From a therapeutic point of view, he was pleased that Rhyme had a job. Being engaged in an activity, he’d often said, vastly improved one’s will and drive to improve (though he caustically urged Rhyme to avoid situations where he could be, say, burned to death, which had nearly happened in a recent case).
    The doctor was talented and amiable and damn smart. But Rhyme had no time for him at the moment, now that he knew two armed perps were after Geneva. He greeted the medico in a distracted mood.
    “My receptionist said you canceled the appointment today. I wondered if you were okay.”
    A concern that could easily have been addressed via telephone, the criminalist reflected.
    But that way the doctor couldn’t have put the same pressure on Rhyme to take the tests as he could in person.
    And Sherman had indeed been pressuring him. He wanted to know that the exercise plan was payingoff. Not only for the patient’s sake but also so that the doctor himself could incorporate the information into his ongoing studies.
    “No, everything’s fine,” Rhyme said. “A case just fell into our laps.” He gestured toward the evidence board. Sherman eyed it.
    Thom