The Twelfth Card

she’s found any more letters or anything else about Charles?”
    The girl called the woman with whom Aunt Lilly was living. There was no answer but she left a message for one of them to call back at Rhyme’s. She then placed another call. Her eyes brightened. “Mom! Are you home?”
    Thank God, Rhyme thought. Her parents were back at last.
    But a frown crossed the girl’s face a moment later. “No . . . What happened? . . . When?”
    A delay of some sort, Rhyme deduced. Geneva gave her mother an update, reassured them she was safe and being looked out for by the police. She handed the phone to Bell, who spoke to her mother at some length about the situation. He then gave the phone back and Geneva said good-bye to her and to her father. She reluctantly hung up.
    Bell said, “They’re stuck in London. The flight was canceled, and they couldn’t get anything else today. They’re on the earliest plane out tomorrow—it goes to Boston and they’ll catch the next flight here.”
    Geneva shrugged, but Rhyme could see the disappointment in her eyes. She said, “I better get back home. I have some projects for school.”
    Bell checked with his SWAT officers and Geneva’s uncle. Everything seemed safe, he reported.
    “You’ll stay out of school tomorrow?”
    A hesitation. She grimaced. Would there be another battle?
    Then someone spoke. It was Pulaski, the rookie. “The fact is, Geneva, it’s not just you anymore. If that guy today, the one in the combat jacket, had gotten close, and started shooting, there might’ve been other students hurt or killed. He might try again when you’re in a crowd outside of school or on the street.”
    Rhyme could see in her face that his words afffected her. Maybe she was reflecting about Dr. Barry’s death.
    So he’s dead because of me . . . .
    “Sure,” she said in a soft voice. “I’ll stay home.”
    Bell nodded at her. “Thanks.” And cast a grateful glance toward the rookie.
    The detective and Pulaski ushered the girl out the door and the others returned to the evidence from the unsub’s safe house.
    Rhyme was upset to see there wasn’t much. The diagram of the street in front of the African-American museum, which Sachs had found hidden in the man’s bed, yielded no prints. The paper was off-the-shelf generic, the sort sold at Staples and Office Depot. The ink was cheap and untraceable. Thesketch contained far more details of the alleys and buildings across the street than of the museum itself—this map was for the man’s escape route, Rhyme assumed. But Sachs had already searched those locations carefully and detectives had canvassed potential witnesses in the jewelry exchange and other buildings shown on the plan.
    There were more fibers from the rope—his garrotte, they speculated.
    Cooper ran a portion of the map through the GC/MS, and the only trace found in the paper was pure carbon. “Charcoal from a street fair vendor?” he wondered.
    “Maybe,” Rhyme said. “Or maybe he burned evidence. Put it on the chart. Maybe we’ll find a connection later.”
    The other trace evidence on the map—stains and crumbs—were more food: yogurt and ground chickpeas, garlic and corn oil.
    “Falafel,” Thom, a gourmet cook, offered. “Middle Eastern. And often served with yogurt. Refreshing, by the way.”
    “And extremely common,” Rhyme said sourly. “We can narrow down the sources to about two thousand in Manhattan alone, wouldn’t you think? What the hell else do we have?”
    On the way back here Sachs and Sellitto had stopped at the real estate company managing the Elizabeth Street building and had gotten information on the lessee of the apartment. The woman running the office had said the tenant had paid three months’ rent in cash, plus another two months’ security deposit, which he’d told her to keep. (The cash, unfortunately, had been spent; there was none left to fingerprint.) He’d given his name as Billy Todd Hammil on the lease, formeraddress, Florida. The composite picture that Sachs had done bore a resemblance to the man who’d signed the lease, though he’d worn a baseball cap and glasses. The woman confirmed that he had a Southern accent.
    A search of identification databases revealed 173 hits for Billy Todd Hammils throughout the country in the past five years. Of the ones who were white and between thirty-five and fifty, none was in the New York area. The ones in Florida were all elderly or in their twenties. Four