The Kill Room (19 page)

N
O.

OH, NO.

At close to 5 p.m. she parked in front of Lydia Foster’s apartment building on Third Avenue.

Sachs couldn’t get too close; police cars and ambulances blocked the street.

Logic told her that the reason for the vehicles
couldn’t
be the death of the interpreter. Sachs had been following the sniper for the past hour and a half. He was still in his office downtown. She hadn’t left until Myers’s Special Services surveillance team showed up. Besides, how could the sniper have learned the interpreter’s name and address? She’d been careful to call from landlines and prepaid mobiles.

That’s what logic reported.

Yet instinct told her something very different, that Lydia was dead and Sachs was to blame. Because she’d never considered what she realized was the truth: They had two perps. One was the man she’d been following through the streets of downtown New York—the sniper, she knew, because of the voiceprint match—and the other, Lydia Foster’s killer, an unsub, unidentified subject. He was somebody else altogether, maybe the shooter’s partner, a spotter, as many snipers used. Or a separate contractor, a specialist, hired by Shreve Metzger to clean up after the assassination.

She parked fast, tossed the NYPD placard on the dash and stepped out of the car, hurrying toward the nondescript apartment building, the pale façade marred by off-white water stains as if the air-conditioning units had been crying.

Ducking under the police tape, she hurried up to a detective, who was prepping a canvass team. The slim African American recognized her, though she didn’t know him, and he nodded a greeting. “Detective.”

“Was it Lydia Foster?” Wondering why she bothered to ask.

“Right. This involves a case you’re running?”

“Yeah. Lon Sellitto’s the lead, Bill Myers’s overseeing it. I’m doing the legwork.”

“It’s all yours, then.”

“What happened?”

She noticed the man was shaken up, eyes twitching away from hers as he fiddled with a pen.

He swallowed and said, “Scene was pretty bad, I gotta tell you. She was tortured. Then he stabbed her. Never seen anything like that.”

“Torture?” she asked in a whisper.

“Sliced the skin off her fingers. Slow.”

Jesus…

“How did he get in?”

“Some reason, she let him in. No signs of break-in.”

Dismayed, Sachs now understood. The unsub
had
tapped a line—probably the landline she’d used near Java Hut—and learned about the interpreter. He’d fronted he was a cop, flashing a fake badge, saying he worked with Sachs; he’d know her name by now.

That conversation between Sachs and Sellitto was Lydia Foster’s own personal Special Task Order.

She felt a burst of breathtaking anger toward the killer. What he’d done to Lydia—the pain he’d inflicted—had been unnecessary. To get information from a civilian you needed only to threaten. Physical torture was always pointless.

Unless you enjoyed it.

Unless you got pleasure in wielding a knife, slicing precisely, skillfully.

“Why’d you get the call?” she asked.

“Fucker cut her so much, she bled through the ceiling. Neighbors downstairs saw blood on the wall. Called nine one one.” The detective continued, “The place was ransacked. I don’t know what he was looking for but he went through everything she had. There wasn’t a single drawer untouched. No computer or cell phone either. He took it all.”

The files on the Moreno interpreting assignment, probably already shredded or burned.

“CS on the way?”

“I called a team from Queens. They’ll be here any minute.”

Sachs had a set of basic crime scene gear in the trunk of the Torino. She returned to the vehicle and began to pull on the powder-blue overalls and booties and shower cap. She’d get started now. Every minute that passed degraded evidence.

And every minute that passed let the monster who’d done this get farther and farther away.

WALKING THE GRID.

Garbed like a surgeon, Amelia Sachs was moving through Lydia Foster’s apartment in the classic crime scene search pattern, the grid: one pace at a time from wall to wall, turn, step aside slightly and return. And when that was done you covered the same ground in the same way, only perpendicular to your earlier search.

This was the most time-consuming method of searching a scene but also the most thorough. This was how Rhyme had searched his scenes and it was the way he insisted those working for him did too.

The search is perhaps the most important part of a crime scene investigation. Photos and videos and sketches are important. Entrance and exit routes, locations of shell casings, fingerprints, smears of semen, blood spatter. But finding crucial trace is what crime scene work is all about.
Merci, M. Locard.
When you walk the grid you need to open up your whole body to the place, smelling, listening, touching and, of course, looking. Scanning relentlessly.

This is what Amelia Sachs now did.

She didn’t think she was a natural at forensic analysis. She was no scientist. Her mind didn’t make those breathtaking deductions that came so quickly to Rhyme. But one thing that did work to her advantage was her empathy.

When they’d first started working together, Rhyme had apparently spotted within her a skill he himself did not have: the ability to get into the mind of the perpetrator. When she walked the grid she found she was actually able to mentally
become
the killer or rapist or kidnapper or thief. This could be a harrowing, exhausting endeavor. But when it worked, the process meant she would think of places in the scene to examine that a typical searcher might not, hiding places, improbable entrance and escape routes, vantage points.

It was there that she would discover evidence that would otherwise have remained hidden forever.

The techs from Crime Scene in Queens arrived. But, as before, she was handling the preliminary work alone. You’d think more people made for a better search but that was true only in an expansive area like those involving mass shootings. In a typical scene a single searcher is less distracted—and is also aware that there’s no one else to catch what he misses, so he concentrates that much harder.

And one truth about crime scene work: You’ve only got one chance to find the critical clue; you can’t go back and try again.

As she walked through the apartment where Lydia Foster’s corpse sat, head back and bloody, tied to a chair, Sachs felt an urge to speak to Rhyme to tell him what she was seeing and smelling and thinking. And once again, as when walking the grid at Java Hut, the emptiness at being unable to hear his voice chilled her heart. Rhyme was only a thousand miles away but she felt as if he’d ceased to exist.

Involuntarily she thought again of the surgery scheduled for later in the month. Didn’t want to consider it, but couldn’t help herself.

What if he didn’t survive?

Both Sachs and Rhyme lived on the edge—her lifestyle of speed and danger, his physical condition. Possibly,
probably
, this element of risk made life together more intense, their connection closer. And she accepted this most of the time. But now, with him away and her searching a particularly difficult scene involving a perp all too aware of her, she couldn’t help but think that they were always just a gunshot or heartbeat away from being alone forever.

Forget this, Sachs thought harshly. Possibly said it aloud. She didn’t know. Get to work.

She found, though, that her empathy wasn’t kicking in, not on this scene. As she moved through the rooms, she felt blocked. Maybe like a writer or artist who couldn’t quite channel a muse. The ideas wouldn’t come. For one thing, she didn’t know who the hell the killer was. The latest information was confusing. The man who’d done this wasn’t the sniper, but, most likely, another of Metzger’s specialists. Yet who?

The other reason she wasn’t connecting was that she didn’t understand the unsub’s motive. If he wanted to eliminate witnesses and hamper the investigation, then why the horrific torture, the precise knife cuts? The slashes where he flayed off skin, leisurely, it seemed? Sachs found herself distracted as she stared at the strips of flesh on the floor below the chair where Lydia was tied. The blood.

What did he want?

Maybe if Rhyme had been speaking into her ear, working the scene with her via radio or video, it might be different, insights might leap out.

But he wasn’t, and the killer’s psyche eluded her.

The search itself didn’t take long. Whatever his motive, Lydia Foster’s killer had been careful—wearing rubber gloves. She could tell this from the wrinkles in some of the blood smears, where he’d touched her body while slicing her skin. He’d been careful to avoid stepping in the blood and so there were no obvious shoe prints, and an electrostatic wand sweep of the non-carpeted floor revealed no latents. She collected trace, a few receipts and Post-it notes, stuffed into the pockets of jeans hung on the bathroom door. But this was all the documentary evidence Sachs could track down. She processed the body, noting again the appalling wounds, small but precise, as the unsub had flayed the skin from the woman’s fingers. The single, fatal stab wound through the chest. There seemed to be bruises around the site of the incision, as if he had firmly palpated her flesh to find an entrance to her heart free of bones.

Why was that?

Sachs then radioed down to her colleagues to let them know they could come upstairs for the videos and stills.

At the door she paused, glancing back for one last look at Lydia Foster’s body.

I’m sorry, Lydia. I didn’t think!

I should have considered that he’d tap the landlines near Java Hut. I should have thought there might be two perps.

Sachs had another thought too: She regretted being too late to get the information that the woman would have provided. The details the interpreter had known and the records she had were clearly crucial. Otherwise, why interrogate her?

And she apologized to Lydia Foster a second time, for having this selfish thought.

Outside, she stripped off the overalls and deposited them in a burn bag; they were streaked with Lydia’s blood. She used cleanser on her hands. Checked her Glock. Scanned the area for any threats. All she saw were a hundred black windows, dim cul-de-sacs, paused cars. Each a perfect vantage point for the unsub to be standing to target her.

Sachs was about to hook her phone holster into place too but she paused. Thinking: I really want to talk to Rhyme.

She hit speed dial on her most recent prepaid mobile; it was his number. But the call went right to voice mail. Sachs thought about leaving a message but hung up. She found she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say.

Maybe just that she missed him.

L
INCOLN RHYME BLINKED.
His eyes stung like hell and in his mouth were conflicting tastes, the sweetness of oil and the sourness of chemicals.

He’d just come back to consciousness and was, to his surprise, not coughing as much as he thought he ought to be. An oxygen mask was over his mouth and nose and he was breathing deeply. His throat hurt, though, and he guessed he had been coughing plenty earlier, when he’d been dead to the world.

He looked around, noting that he was in the back of an ambulance, excessively hot, parked on the spit of land where the attack had taken place; he could see the South Cove Inn in the distance, over the choppy blue-and-green bay. A stocky medic with a round black face was leaning forward, manning a flashlight, examining his eyes. He removed the oxygen mask to study Rhyme’s mouth and nose.

The man’s own face, very dark, gave away nothing. Finally he said in an American inflection, not British: “That water. Very bad. Runoff. Chemicals. All kinds of things. But it doesn’t look too bad. Irritation. It hurts?”

“Stings. Bad. Yes.”

As if the medic’s staccato syntax were contagious.

Rhyme inhaled deeply. “But please, you have to tell me! The two men who were with me? What—?”

“How’re his lungs?”

The question was from Thom Reston, who was approaching the back of the ambulance. The aide coughed once then twice, hard.

Rhyme squelched his own cough and muttered in astonishment, “You’re…you’re all right?”

Thom pointed to his eyes, which were bright red. “Nothing serious. Just a lot of crap in that water.”

Very bad. Runoff…

His clothes were soaking, Rhyme noted, and that answered several questions. First, that the aide had been the one who’d rescued him.

And, second, that the two shots he’d heard had been meant for Mychal Poitier.

I have a wife and two children I am supporting. I love them very much…

Rhyme was heartsick at the man’s death. After the corporal had been killed Thom must have dived into the water to save Rhyme as the attackers fled.

The medic listened to his chest again. “Surprising. They’re good, your lungs. I see the scar, the ventilator, but it’s an old scar. You’ve done well. You work out. And your right arm, the prosthetic system. I’ve read about that. Very impressive.”

Except not impressive enough to save Mychal Poitier.

The paramedic rose and said, “I would rinse them, your eyes and mouth. Water. Nothing else. Bottled. Three, four times a day. And see your own doctor. When you get home. I’ll be back in a moment.” He turned and stepped away, his feet crunching on the sand and gravel.

Rhyme said, “Thank you, Thom. Thank you. Saved my life yet again and not with clonidine.” The medicine to bring down blood pressure after an attack of autonomic dysreflexia. “I tried the ventilator.”

“I know. It was tangled around your neck. I had to pull it off. Wish I’d had Amelia’s switchblade.”

Rhyme sighed. “But Mychal. It’s terrible…”

Thom lifted a sphygmomanometer from a rack in the ambulance. He took Rhyme’s blood pressure himself. As he did this, he shrugged. “It’s not that serious.”

“The blood pressure?”

“No, I mean Poitier. Quiet. I need to hear the pulse.”

Rhyme was sure he’d misheard; his ears were still clogged with water. “But—”

“Shhh.” The aide was holding a purloined stethoscope to Rhyme’s arm.

“You said—”

“Quiet!” A moment later he nodded. “Pressure’s fine.” A glance in the direction in which the medic had disappeared. “Not that I didn’t trust him but I wanted to see for—”

“What do you mean it isn’t that serious, about Mychal?”

“Well, you saw: He got kicked and hit. But nothing too bad.”

“He was shot!”

“Shot? No, he wasn’t.”

“I heard two gunshots.”

“Oh, that.”

Rhyme snapped, “What do you mean, ‘Oh, that’?”

Thom explained, “The guy who kicked you into the water, in the gray shirt? He was shooting at Ron.”

“Pulaski? Jesus, he all right?”

“He’s fine too.”

“What the fuck happened?” Rhyme blurted.

Thom laughed. “Glad you’re feeling better.”

“What. Happened?”

“Ron finished up at the South Cove and came over here. You told him that’s where we’d be. He drove up in the rental just after you went for your swim. He saw what was going on and drove right toward the one with the gun, really floored it. The guy shot at the car twice but must’ve figured Ron was the first of the reinforcements and since there was only one way out they jumped in the Mercury and the pickup and beat it.”

“Mychal’s all right?”

“That’s what I said.”

The relief was immeasurable. Rhyme said nothing for a moment as his eyes took in the choppy water nearby, an arc of spray in the sunlight, low to the west. “The wheelchair?”

Thom shook his head. “That’s
not
so all right.”

“Pricks,” Rhyme muttered. He had no sentimental feelings about hardware, either professional or personal. But he’d grown quite attached to the Storm Arrow as a practical matter because it was such a fine piece of machinery and he’d worked hard to master it. Operating a wheelchair is a true skill. He was furious at the thugs.

The aide continued, “I’m borrowing one of theirs.” A glance at the medical team. “Non-motorized. Well, motorized by yours truly.”

Another figure appeared.

“Well, the rookie saves the day.”

“You don’t look too bad,” Pulaski said. “Damp. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you damp, Lincoln.”

“What’d you find at the inn?”

“Not much else. The maid confirmed pretty much what Corporal Poitier told us. A tough-looking American was asking about Moreno and suite twelve hundred. He said he was a friend and was thinking of throwing a party for him. Wanted to know who was with him, what his schedule was, who was his friend—I assume that was his guard.”

“Party,” Rhyme grunted and looked around the ambulance. The medic returned with burly assistants, one of whom was pushing a battered wheelchair. Rhyme asked, “You have any brandy or anything?”

“Brandy?”

“Medicinal brandy.”

“Medicinal brandy?” The man’s large face drew into a frown. “Let me think. I suppose doctors down here do administer that some—being a third-world island, of course. I’m afraid I missed that course when I got my emergency health services degree at the University of Maryland.”

Touché.

But the doctor was clearly amused, not offended, and gestured to the assistants, who got Rhyme into the battered chair. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in one that didn’t have a battery and motor, and he didn’t like the sensation of helplessness. It took him back to the days just after the accident.

“I want to see Mychal,” he said. Instinctively he reached for the chair’s controller before recalling it wasn’t there. He didn’t bother to go for the handgrip on the wheel to propel himself forward. If he couldn’t pull the fucking trigger of a gun he wasn’t going to be able to move his own deadweight over broken asphalt and sand with one hand.

Thom wheeled him the thirty feet to where Poitier sat on a creosote-soaked eight-by-eight beam, beside the two RBPF officers who’d responded to the emergency call.

Poitier rose. “Ah, Captain. I heard you were safe. Good, good. You look none the worse for wear.”

“Damp,” Pulaski repeated. Drawing a smile from Thom and scowl from Rhyme.

“And you?”

“Fine. Little groggy. They gave me some pain medicine. My first fight in five years on the force and I didn’t do very well. Blindsided. I was blindsided.”

“Did anyone see tag numbers?” Rhyme asked.

“There were none, no number plates. And it won’t do any good to look up gold-and-black Mercurys or white pickup trucks. I’m sure they were stolen. I will look at mug shots back in the station but that will be useless too. Still we have to go through the motions.”

Suddenly a plume of dust rose from the direction of the SW Road. A car, no, two cars were moving in fast.

The RBPF officers who were standing nearby stiffened uneasily.

Not because these cars represented a physical threat. Rhyme could see that the unmarked Ford sported red grille lights, which flashed dramatically. He wasn’t surprised that the man in the backseat was Assistant Commissioner McPherson. A second car, a marked RBPF cruiser, was behind.

They both skidded to a stop near the ambulance and McPherson climbed angrily from the car, slammed the door.

Storming toward Poitier, he said, “What has happened here?”

Rhyme explained, shouldering the blame.

The assistant commissioner glared at him then turned and raged in a low growl at his corporal, “I will not have this insubordination. You should have told me.”

Rhyme expected the young man would roll over. But he stared into his boss’s eyes.

“Sir, with all respect. I was given the Moreno homicide to handle.”

“It was your case to handle according to proper procedures. And that doesn’t include bringing an interloper into the field with you.”

“This was a lead. The sniper was here. I should have searched last week.”

“We have to see what the—”

Poitier interjected, “Venezuelan authorities have to say.”

“Do not interrupt me again, Corporal. And do not take that attitude with me.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Rhyme said, “This is an important case, Commissioner, with implications for both our countries.”

“And you, Captain Rhyme, you. Do you understand you nearly got a policeman on my force killed?”

The criminalist fell silent.

His voice flinty he added, “And yourself too. We don’t need any more dead Americans in the Bahamas. We’ve had our share.” A cool glance to his side. “You’re suspended, Corporal. There will be an inquiry that may result in your termination. At the very least, you’ll be reassigned back to Traffic.”

Dismay flooded Poitier’s face. “But—”

“And you, Captain Rhyme, you are leaving the Bahamas immediately. My officers here will escort you to the airport, along with your associates. Your belongings will be collected from your motel and given to you there. We have already called the airline. You have seats on a flight that leaves in two hours. You’ll be in custody until then. And you, Corporal, you will surrender your weapon and your identification at headquarters.”

“Yes, sir.”

But suddenly Ron Pulaski strode forward and confronted the assistant commissioner, who was easily twice his weight and several inches taller. “No,” the young patrolman said.

“I beg your pardon?”

The young officer said firmly, “We’re going to spend the night at our motel. Leave in the morning.”

“What?” McPherson blinked.

“We are not leaving tonight.”

“That’s not acceptable, Officer Pulaski.”

“Lincoln nearly died. He’s not getting on an airplane until he’s had some rest.”

“You’ve committed crimes—”

Pulaski unholstered his phone. “Should we call the embassy and discuss the matter with them? Of course, I’d have to mention what we’re doing down here, the specific crime we’re investigating.”

Silence, except for the clang of the mysterious machinery in the factory behind them and the lapping of the shimmering waves.

The brass glowered. “All right,” McPherson muttered. “But you take the first flight in the morning. You’ll be escorted to your motel and confined to your room until then.”

Rhyme said, “Thank you, Commissioner. I appreciate it. I apologize for any difficulties I’ve caused your force. Good luck with this case. And with the murder investigation of the American student.” He looked at Poitier. “And again, I’m sorry to you too, Corporal.”

Five minutes later Rhyme, Thom and Pulaski were in the Ford van, leaving the spit, with a police escort behind them to make sure they arrived—and stayed put—at their motel. The two large officers in the squad car were unsmiling and wary. Rhyme in fact didn’t mind their presence; after all, the trio from the gold Mercury was still at large.

“Goddamn good job, rookie.”

“Better than competent?”

“You exceeded competence.”

The young officer laughed. “I had a hunch you needed to buy some time.”

“That’s exactly right. I liked the embassy part, by the way.”

“Improvising. So what do we do next?”

“We let the bread bake,” Rhyme said cryptically. “And see if we can’t rustle up some of this Bahamian rum I’ve been hearing about.”