The Kill Room (17 page)

A
S SHE SPED DOWNTOWN,
Amelia Sachs disconnected the call from Rodney Szarnek, with the Computer Crimes Unit. She’d used a prepaid mobile—paid for out of her own pocket, with cash, of course—and was confident that the conversation hadn’t been intercepted by the man they were now in the process of tracking down.

Szarnek had told her that the NIOS sniper was presently having a conversation near the Wall Street area of the city while on foot.

The cybercrimes cop had given Sachs the general location of the man and she was speeding there now. When she arrived she’d call back and Rodney’d try to pinpoint the exact coordinates.

She slammed the clutch of her Torino Cobra to the floor and downshifted hard, rev-matched and then sped up, leaving a twin-stripe signature in rubber on the concrete.

She wove through traffic until a jam loomed. “Come on, come on.” She detoured onto a crosstown street east, skidding into what would have been a U-turn, except to avoid a sudden jaywalker she had to make it a Q. She tried again and was soon bolting through side streets, making her way east and south, toward downtown.

“Hell,” Sachs muttered, faced with another jam, and decided to conscript the closest cross street, which was more or less clear, though it happened to be one-way, against her. The maneuver threw drivers into panic and raised a symphony of off-pitch horns. Some single fingers too. Then she zipped past a yellow cab just before the driver sought the sidewalk and she was on Broadway, heading south. She paused for most of the red lights.

There’s a lot of controversy about cell phone companies’ giving law officers details about phone use and location. Generally in an emergency, the providers will cooperate without a warrant. Otherwise, most will require a court order. Rodney Szarnek didn’t want to take any chances and so after learning the sniper’s number from Pulaski in the Bahamas he’d contacted a magistrate and gotten paper issued—both for a five-second listen-in, to snag the voiceprint, and to track the location.

Szarnek had learned that the phone was in use around the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, using basic triangulation for that information, which gave rough estimates. He was presently working on interpolating signal data from the nearby network antennas. Searching in urban areas was much easier because many more towers were erected there than in rural areas. The downside, of course, was that there were many more users in any given area of a city, so it was harder to isolate your particular suspect than, say, in farmland.

Szarnek was hoping to nail down GPS data, which was the gold standard of tracking and would give the location of the sniper to within a few feet.

Finally Sachs arrived in the general vicinity, took a turn at forty, missing both a bus and a hot dog stand by inches, and skidded to a stop on a side street off Broadway. The aroma of baking tires rose, a smell nostalgic and comforting.

She looked around at the hundreds of passersby, about 10 percent of them on their phones. Was the shooter one of the people she was peering at right now? The lean young man with the crew cut, wearing khaki slacks and a work shirt? He looked military. Or the sullen, dark-complected man who was in a badly fitting suit and looking around suspiciously from behind darkly tinted sunglasses? He looked like a hit man but might have been an accountant.

How long would Bruns stay on the line? she wondered. If he disconnected they could still follow him, unless he pulled the battery out. But it was easier to spot someone actually using a phone.

She reminded herself too: This could be a trap. She recalled all too clearly the explosion at Java Hut. The sniper knew about the investigation. He clearly knew about her; Sachs’s phone was the one he’d tapped to learn about the coffee shop. A trickle of electric fear down her spine once more.

Her own mobile trilled.

“Sachs.”

“Got him on GPS,” Rodney Szarnek called excitedly, like a teenager (he’d once said being a cop was nearly as much fun as playing Grand Theft Auto). “We’re in real time, on the provider’s server. He’s walking on the west side of the street, Broadway. Just at Vesey now.”

“I’m on the move.” Sachs started in the direction he’d indicated, feeling the pain in her left hip; the knee alone wasn’t torment enough apparently. She dug into her back pocket—felt past the switchblade and pulled out a blister pack of Advil. Ripped it open with her teeth, swallowed the pills fast and littered the wrapper away.

She closed in on her target as quickly as she could.

Szarnek: “He’s stopped. Maybe for a light.”

Dodging through pedestrian traffic the same way she’d woven through vehicular moments ago, Sachs got closer to the intersection where a red light stopped southbound traffic and pedestrians.

“Still there,” Szarnek said. There was no rock music pumping into his office at the moment.

She could see, about forty feet away, the red light yield to green. Those waiting at the curb surged across the street.

“He’s moving.” One block later, Szarnek said unemotionally, “He’s disconnected.”

Shit.

Sachs sped up to see if she could spot anybody holstering a phone. No one. And she couldn’t help but think that maybe the most recent call was the last he’d make with the tainted phone. Their sniper was, after all, a pro. He must know there was some liability in mobiles. Maybe he’d even spotted her and was about to send his cell into the same sewer system graveyard she just had.

At Dey Street the light changed to red. She had to stop. Surrounded by a crowd of perhaps twenty people—businessmen and -women, construction workers, students, tourists. Quite the ethnic mix, of course, Anglo, Asian, Latino, black and all combinations.

“Amelia?” Rodney Szarnek was on the line.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“He’s getting an incoming call. Should be ringing now.”

Just as the phone in the pocket of the man inches to Sachs’s right began to buzz.

They were literally shoulder-to-shoulder.

He fit the rough description of the man in the South Cove Inn, according to Corporal Mychal Poitier, the Bahamian cop: white male, athletic figure, compact. He wore slacks, shirt and a windbreaker. A baseball cap too. She couldn’t tell if he had brown hair; it seemed more dark blond, but a witness could easily have described that as brown. The cut was short, like their sniper’s. His laced shoes were polished to a shine.

Military.

She said cheerfully into her phone, “Sure. That’s interesting.”

Szarnek asked, “You’re next to him?”

“That’s exactly right.” Don’t overdo the playacting, she told herself.

The light changed and she let him step away first.

Sachs wondered if there was anything she could do to get the man’s identity. She and Rhyme had worked a case a few years ago in which they’d sought the help of a young woman illusionist and sleight-of-hand artist, whose skills included pickpocketing—for theatrical entertainment only, she’d laughingly assured them—Sachs could have used her now. Was there any way she herself might slip her fingers into the man’s jacket pocket to boost a wallet or receipt?

Impossible, she decided. Even if she’d had this skill, the man seemed far too vigilant, looking around frequently.

They crossed the street and continued down Broadway, leaving Liberty behind. Then the sniper turned right suddenly and cut through Zuccotti Park, presently unoccupied, just as Szarnek said, “He’s heading west through Zuccotti.”

“You’re right about that.” Keeping up the act even though her target probably couldn’t hear her.

She followed him diagonally through the park. On the west end he headed south on Trinity.

Szarnek asked, “How’re you going to handle it, Amelia? Want me to call in backup?”

She debated. They couldn’t collar him; there wasn’t enough evidence for that. “I’ll stay with him as long as I can, try to get a picture,” she said, risking speaking for real to Szarnek; the sniper was well out of hearing range now. “If I’m lucky he’s going to his car and I’ll pick up the tag. If not, maybe I’ll be taking a subway ride to Far Rockaway. I’ll call you back.”

Pretending to continue the call, Sachs sped up and walked past the sniper, then paused at the next red light. She turned, as if lost in her conversation, aiming the lens of her phone toward him, and pressed the shutter a half dozen times. When the light changed, she let the sniper cross the street before her. He was lost in his own conversation and didn’t seem to notice Sachs.

She resumed the tail and called Szarnek back. The tech cop said, “Okay, he’s disconnected now.”

Sachs watched the man slip his phone into his pocket. He was making for a ten- or twelve-story building on the gloomy canyon of Rector Street. Rather than entering through the front door of the structure, though, he walked around the side into an alleyway. Halfway down that narrow avenue, he turned and, slipping an ID card lanyard over his neck, walked through a gate into what seemed to be a parking lot, bejeweled with serious razor wire.

Staying to the shadows, Sachs had Szarnek transfer her to Sellitto. She told the detective that she’d found the shooter and needed a surveillance team to keep on him.

“Good, Amelia. I’ll get somebody from Special Services on it right away.”

“I’ll upload some pictures of him. Have them contact Rodney. He can keep tracing the phone and let them know when he’s on the move again. I’ll stay here with him until they show up. Then I’ll go interview Lydia Foster.”

“Where are you exactly?” Sellitto asked.

“Eighty-Five Rector. He went through a gate at the side of the building, a parking lot. Or maybe a courtyard. I didn’t want to get too close.”

“Sure. What’s the building?”

Sachs gave a laugh. She’d just noticed a subtle sign.

National Intelligence and Operations Service.

She told Sellitto, “It’s his office.”

T
ERRIBLE NEWS: THAT NICE
Mr. Moreno was dead.

In her apartment on Third Avenue, Lydia Foster now made a cup of Keurig coffee, picking hazelnut flavored from the hundreds of capsules, and returned to the living room, wondering when that policewoman was going to be here.

Lydia had liked him quite a bit. Smart, courteous. And quite the gentleman. She knew she was pretty well built and had been described as attractive, but unlike some men using her services as an interpreter, Mr. Moreno hadn’t flirted once. On the first translating job for him, several months ago, he’d shown her pictures of his children—adorable! Which men do sometimes as a prelude to trying to pick you up, which Lydia found incredibly tacky, even for the single dads. But Mr. Moreno had followed the pictures of the bambinos with a picture of his wife and announced that he was looking forward to their wedding anniversary.

What a nice man. Polite—holding the car door for her, even though they had a chauffeur. Moreno had been charming. And talkative. They had some engaging conversations. They were, for instance, both fascinated with language. He was a writer for blogs and magazines and a radio host, while she made her living interpreting other people’s words. They’d spoken about similarities between languages and even technical aspects: nominative and dative and possessive cases, as well as verb conjugations. He told her he disliked English intensely, though it was his mother tongue, which she found curious. One may not like the tonal quality of a tongue for being too harsh—German or Xhosa, for instance—or be dismayed at the difficulty of achieving fluency, like Japanese, but to dislike a language in general was something Lydia had never heard of.

He characterized it as random and lazy (all the irregular constructions), confusing and inelegant. It turned out that his real objection was a bit different. “And it’s rammed down the throats of people throughout the world, like it or not. Just another way to make other nations dependent on the U.S.”

But Mr. Moreno had been opinionated about a lot of things. Once he’d started lecturing about politics, you couldn’t dislodge him. She found herself steering away from those subjects.

She’d have to tell the detective that Mr. Moreno had seemed concerned for his safety. He’d looked around quite a bit as they’d driven through the city and walked to their meetings. Once, they’d left one meeting and were on their way to another when Mr. Moreno had stopped suddenly.

“That man? Haven’t we seen him before, outside the other office? Is he following us?” The person he noted was a young, somber-faced white guy, looking through a magazine. That alone struck Lydia as odd, something out of an old-time detective film, where a PI pretends to read a newspaper on the street while spying on a suspect. Nobody lounges on the streets of New York, browsing through reading material; they check iPhones or BlackBerrys.

Lydia would be sure to tell the police officer about the incident; maybe that man had something to do with Mr. Moreno’s death.

Digging through Redweld folders, she assembled her notes from the assignments she’d had with Mr. Moreno over the past few months. She’d saved everything. As an interpreter, she worked with the police and court system from time to time. She had gotten into the habit of being very conscientious about retaining all her files in such cases because a mistaken phrasing of a detective’s question or a suspect’s answer could easily result in an innocent man being convicted or a guilty one going free. This diligence carried over into her commercial interpreting assignments too.

The police would get nearly a thousand pages of translated material by and about the late Mr. Moreno.

The intercom buzzer rang and she answered. “Yes?”

“Ms. Foster, I’m with the NYPD,” a male voice said. “Detective Sachs spoke to you earlier? She’s been delayed and asked me to come by and ask you a few questions about Robert Moreno.”

“Sure, come on up. Twelve B.”

“Thank you.”

A few minutes later a knock on the door. She looked out through the peephole, to see a pleasant-looking man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He was holding up a leather wallet containing a gold badge.

“Come on in,” she said, unbolting and unchaining.

He nodded a greeting and stepped inside.

As soon as she closed the door she noted that there was something wrong with his hands. They were wrinkled. No, he was wearing flesh-c
olored
gloves.

She frowned. “Wait—”

Before she could scream he struck her hard in the throat with an open hand.

Gurgling, crying, she dropped to the floor.