The Kill Room (20 page)

I
NTO THE PARLOR OF THE TOWN HOUSE
, the laboratory, Amelia Sachs carted a milk crate containing the evidence from the Lydia Foster crime scene.

“Did Lincoln call?” she asked Mel Cooper, who eyed the crate with interest.

“Nope, not a word.”

Cooper, the expert lab man, was now officially on board, thanks to a call by Lon Sellitto and Captain Myers, to arrange for his reassignment to the Rhyme Precinct. Cooper, an NYPD detective, was balding and diminutive and wore thick Harry Potter glasses that never seemed to remain exactly perched where they should be. You would think his off-hours life would be filled with math puzzles and
Scientific American
but his leisure time was largely taken with ballroom dancing competitions, with his stunningly gorgeous Scandinavian girlfriend, a mathematics professor at Columbia University.

Nance Laurel was at her desk. The woman glanced blankly at the physical evidence, then back to the policewoman, and Sachs didn’t know if this was a greeting or a symptom of one of the pauses before she spoke.

Sachs offered grimly, “I got it wrong. There’re two perps.” She explained about her erroneous assumption. “I was following the sniper. The man who killed Lydia Foster’s somebody else.”

“Who do you think?” Cooper asked.

“Bruns’s backup.”

“Or a specialist hired by Metzger to clean up,” Laurel said. It seemed to Sachs that her voice brightened at this. Good news for the case, good news for the jury—that their primary suspect would order one of his officers to do something so heartless. Not a word of sympathy for the victim, not a frown of concern.

Sachs truly hated the woman at this moment.

She continued, pointedly speaking only to Mel Cooper, “Lon’s agreed to keep it a motive-unknown case for the time being—like the IED at the Java Hut’s still officially a gas main explosion. I thought it was better not to let Metzger know how the investigation’s going.”

Laurel was nodding. “Good.”

Sachs stared at the whiteboards then began to revise them in light of what they’d learned. “Let’s give Lydia Foster’s killer the title Unsub Five Sixteen. After today’s date.”

Laurel asked, “Anything more about the ID of the shooter, the man you followed to NIOS?”

“No. Lon’s got a surveillance team on him. They’ll call as soon as they make an ID.”

Another pause. Laurel said, “I’m just curious: Did you think about getting his fingerprints?”

“His—”

“When you were following the sniper downtown? The reason I’m asking is I was working a case once and an undercover detective dropped a glossy magazine. The subject picked it up for her. We got his prints.”

“Well,” Sachs said evenly, “I didn’t.”

Because if I had done that we’d have his fucking ID by now. Which we don’t.

An impenetrably cryptic nod from Laurel.

Just curious…

That was as irritating as “if you don’t mind.”

Sachs turned away from her, wincing slightly, and handed off the evidence from the Lydia Foster crime scene to Mel Cooper, who regarded the slim pickings with the same dismay that Sachs felt.

“That’s it?”

“Afraid so. Unsub Five Sixteen knows what he’s doing.” Sachs was looking at the photos of Lydia Foster’s bloody corpse, which she was downloading from the crime scene team in Queens and printing out.

Lips tight, she stepped to one of the whiteboards and taped the pictures up.

“He tortured her,” Laurel said softly but with no other reaction.

“And took everything Lydia had about the assignment for Moreno.”

“What could she have known?” the ADA wondered. “If he had a commercial interpreter with him on the business trip, he obviously wasn’t taking her to meet criminals. She’d be a good witness to testify that Moreno wasn’t a terrorist.” She added, “That is,
would
have been a good witness.”

Sachs felt a burst of anger that the woman’s reaction was less about Lydia Foster’s death than that she’d lost a brick in the prosecution against Shreve Metzger. Then recalled her own dismay at seeing the body, part of which stemmed from her being too late to get solid information from the interpreter.

The policewoman said, “I had a brief conversation with her earlier. I know she had meetings with Russian and Emirates charities and the Brazilian consulate. That’s all.”

I never got the chance to find out more, she reflected. Still furious with herself. If Rhyme had been here, he would have speculated that there might be two perps. Shit.

Forget it, she sternly thought. Get on with the case.

She looked at Cooper. “Let’s see if we can make some connections. I want to know whether it was Bruns or the unsub who set the IED. You found anything from the Java Hut scene, Mel?”

Cooper explained that there’d been very few clues but he had in fact made some discoveries. The Bomb Squad had delivered the information that the IED was an off-the-shelf anti-personnel device, loaded with Semtex, the Czech plastic explosive. “They’re available on the arms market, pretty easily if you have the right connections,” Cooper explained. “Most purchasers are military users, both government and mercenaries.”

Cooper had run the latent prints Sachs had been able to lift at the coffeehouse and had sent them to IAFIS. They’d come back negative.

The tech said, “You got me a lot of good samplars from the Java Hut but there wasn’t a lot of trace that could reasonably be attributed to the perp. Two things were unique, though, which means they might’ve come from our bomber. The first was eroded limestone, coral and very small bits of shell—sand, in other words, and it’s sand from a tropical location. I also found organic crustacean waste.”

“What’s that?” Laurel asked.

“Crab shit,” Sachs answered.

“Exactly,” Cooper confirmed. “Though, to be accurate, it could be from lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles too. There are over sixty-five thousand crustacean species. What I can tell you, though, is that it’s typical of beaches in the Caribbean. And the trace includes residue consistent with evaporated seawater.”

Sachs frowned. “So he might’ve been the man in the South Cove Inn just before Moreno was shot. Would sand still cling after a week?”

“These were fine grains. Yes, it’s possible. They can be very adhesive.”

“What else did you catch, Mel?”

“Something I’ve never found at a crime scene—1,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid.”

“Which is?”

“Cynarine,” Cooper said, reading from a computer database of chemical substances. “Most commonly it’s the biologically active component of artichokes. It gives them the sweet flavor.”

“And our perp left traces of that?”

“Can’t say for sure but I found some on the doorstep of Java Hut, on the knob and on a fragment of the IED.”

Sachs nodded. Artichokes. Curious but that’s how crime scene work went. Many pieces to the puzzle.

“Nothing else.”

“That’s
it
for the Java Hut?”

“Yep.”

“So we still don’t know who planted the bomb.”

Then she and Cooper turned to the Lydia Foster scene.

“First,” the tech said, nodding at the photos of her body, “the knife wounds. They look unusual, very narrow. But there’s no database to let us know.”

The United States, home of the National Rifle Association, was the gunshot capital of the world. Death by knife was common in the United Kingdom and other countries with strict gun control laws but in America, with the ubiquity of guns, knives were relatively rare weapons in homicides. So no law enforcement agency had compiled a knife wound computer image database, at least none that Sachs and Rhyme knew about.

Even though she was sure he’d worn gloves, Sachs had still lifted prints from around—and on—Lydia Foster’s corpse. You never knew if a perp might have taken his gloves off at some point. But as with Java Hut, these came back from the automated database negative.

“Didn’t expect anything different,” she muttered. “But I found a hair that didn’t match the samplars. There, in the envelope.” Sachs handed it to the tech. “Brown and short. Might be the perp’s. Remember Corporal Poitier said the man checking out Moreno’s suite the day before the killing had short brown hair. Oh, the follicle’s attached.”

“Good. I’ll get it to CODIS.”

The nationwide DNA database was expanding at an exponential rate. Whoever the hair belonged to might be in the system; if so, they’d have his identity and, possibly, his present whereabouts soon.

Sachs began looking through the rest of the evidence. Though the killer had taken every single document, computer and media storage device that might have mentioned Robert Moreno, she had found something that might be relevant. A Starbucks receipt. The date and time printed at the top indicated the afternoon of May 1. Sachs recalled that this was probably when Moreno had his private meeting, the one Lydia had not attended. It might be possible to identify the office where the activist went.

Tomorrow she’d go to the location—a building on Chambers Street.

Sachs and Cooper went through the rest of the trace from Lydia’s apartment but weren’t able to isolate very much. Cooper ran a sample through the gas chromatograph and looked up toward the women. “Got something here. A plant. It’s
Glycyrrhiza glabra
—a legume, sort of like a bean or pea. Basically, it’s licorice.”

Sachs said, “Anise or fennel?”

“No, no relation, though the tastes are similar.”

Nance Laurel looked mystified. “You didn’t look anything up. Cynarine,
Glycyrrhiza
…I’m sorry, but how do you
know
all this?”

Cooper shoved his black glasses higher on his nose and said, as if it were obvious, “I work for Lincoln Rhyme.”

F
INALLY A BREAK:
They caught the shooter’s real name.

Captain Myers’s Special Services surveillance team had followed the sniper from NIOS headquarters to his home. He’d gotten off in Carroll Gardens and walked to a house that was owned by Barry and Margaret Shales. A motor vehicle search had returned a picture of Shales. It was clearly the same man whom Sachs had been following that afternoon and taken a picture of with her mobile phone’s camera.

Barry Shales was thirty-nine. Former military—retiring as a captain in the air force and decorated several times. The man was now working civilian as an “intelligence specialist” with NIOS. He and his wife—a teacher—had two children, boys in elementary school. Shales was active in his Presbyterian church and volunteered at the boys’ schools, a reading tutor.

Learning this bio, Sachs was troubled. Most of the perps she and Rhyme pursued were hardened criminals, serial offenders, organized crime bosses, psychotics, terrorists. But this case was different. Shales was probably a devoted civil servant, probably a decent husband and father. Just doing his duty, even if it happened to involve shooting terrorists in cold blood. Upon his arrest and conviction, a family would be destroyed. Metzger might have been using NIOS for his own delusional approach in safeguarding the country and using a specialist for clean-up. But Shales? He might have been just following orders.

Still, even if he hadn’t been the one who’d tortured and killed Lydia Foster, he was part of the organization that possibly had.

Sachs called Lon Sellitto and told him of their discovery. Then she placed a call to Information Services, requesting every fact they could dig up on Barry Shales—most important where he’d been and what he was doing on May 9, the day of the shooting.

The lab phone rang and Sachs, noting the caller ID, hit speaker. “Fred.”

She wasn’t worried that Unsub 516 was tapping this particular phone line; Rodney Szarnek had sent over a device he called a “tap-trap,” which could detect anyone’s listening in. The monitor showed that the conversation was private.

“Amelia. Is it true what I’m hearing? Your friend and mine is sunning himself in the Caribbean.”

His astonishment was so exaggerated that Sachs had to smile. Cooper did too. Nance Laurel did not.

“He sure is, Fred.”

“Why oh why do
my
assignments take me to the prime vacation spots of the South Bronx and Newark? While Mr. Lincoln Rhyme’s on a beach, courtesy of the city of New York? Where’s the fairness in that? Is he enjoying those sissy drinks with umbrellas and plastic sea horses?”

“I think he’s paying for it himself, Fred. And how do you know they serve drinks down there with plastic sea horses?”

“Busted,” the agent admitted. “The coconut ones, they’re my personal favorites. Now, how’s the case goin’? That homicide on Third Avenue, that was related? Lydia Foster. Saw it on the wire.”

“Afraid it was. We think it’s a clean-up op, probably that Metzger ordered.”

“Fuck,” Dellray spat out. “Man’s gone rogue big time.”

“He sure has.” Sachs told him too that they’d found there were two perps. “We still don’t know which of them set the bomb at the coffee shop.”

“Well, I gotcha a few things you might be interested in.”

“Go ahead. Anything.”

“First off, the mobile your sniper was using—the one registered to Mr. Code Name Don Bruns, with that fake Social Security number and a Delaware corporation? The company’s buried way deep but I traced it to some shell outfits that NIOS’s used in the past. Probably why the phone’s still active. Lotta time the government thinks they’re too smart to get found out. Or too big. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Good. Thanks, Fred.”

“And turns out your friend the late and great Mr. Moreno was
not
planning to detonate a big bang of mass destruction and move into a cave.”

He explained he was referring to Robert Moreno’s mysterious message about “vanishing into thin air, May twenty-fourth.”

“What was it about?” Sachs asked.

The FBI agent continued, “Was a play on words, seems. What it is: Some of our folk down in Venezuela found out that Moreno and his family were moving into a new house on the twenty-fourth.”

He gave them the details: Robert Moreno had bought a four-bedroom home in the Venezuelan city of San Cristóbal, one of the more upscale locales in the country. It was on a mountaintop.

Thin air…

Laurel nodded at his words, obviously pleased. So Moreno might not be the Western Hemisphere’s answer to Bin Laden.

Gotta keep the jury happy, Sachs thought cynically.

The agent continued, “Oh, and the IED attack in Mexico City on May thirteen? Now, this one’s almost funny. The only thing with a Moreno connection on that date in Mexico City was a big fund-raiser for a charity he was involved with. Classrooms for the Americas. Called Balloon Day. Everbody bought a balloon for ten dollars then you popped it and got a prize inside. They had over a thousand balloons. I gotta say,
my
lungs aren’t up to a task like that.”

Sachs slumped, closing her eyes. Jesus.

Can we find somebody to blow them up?…

“Thanks, Fred.” She disconnected.

Upon hearing these revelations, Laurel said, “Interesting how first impressions can be so completely wrong. Isn’t it?” She didn’t seem to be gloating but Sachs couldn’t tell.

If you don’t mind…

I’m just curious…

Sachs fished out her phone and called Lincoln Rhyme.

His answering words: “I’m thinking we should get a chameleon.”

Not “Hello” or “Sachs.”

“A…lizard?”

“They’re quite interesting. I haven’t seen one change color yet. Do you know how they do it, Sachs? Metachrosis is what it’s called, you know. They use hormonal cell signaling to trigger changes in the chromatophore cells in their skin. I find it truly fascinating. So how’s the case going up
there
?”

She ran through the developments.

Rhyme considered this. “I suppose that makes sense, two different perps. Metzger isn’t going to use his star sniper in New York to clean up. I should have thought of that.”

I should have too, she reflected sadly. Picturing Lydia Foster’s body.

“Upload a picture of Shales, DMV or military.”

“Sure. I’ll do it when we hang up.” Then in a somber voice she told him in detail about the death of Moreno’s interpreter, Lydia.

“Torture?”

She described the knife work.

“Distinctive technique,” he assessed. “That might be helpful.”

He’d be referring to the fact that perps who use knives or other mechanical weapons, like clubs, tended to leave wounds that were consistent from one victim to another, which can often identify them. She noted too that this detached, clinical comment was his only reaction to the horrific attack.

But this was just Lincoln Rhyme. She knew it; she accepted it. And wondered in passing why the same attitude in Nance Laurel set her so on edge.

She asked, “How’s it going down in the balmy Caribbean?”

“Not making much headway, Sachs. We’re under house arrest.”

“
What?
”

“One way or the other, it’ll be resolved tomorrow.” He clearly wasn’t going to say any more, maybe concerned that
his
line was tapped. “I should go. Thom’s making something for dinner. I think it’s ready. And you really should try dark rum sometime. It’s quite good. Made from sugar, you know.”

“I may pass on the rum. There are some unpleasant memories. Though I guess they’re not memories if you can’t remember them.”

“What do you think of the case now, Sachs? You still in the policy and politics camp? Leaving it all to Congress?”

“Nope. Not anymore. One look at the crime scene at Lydia Foster’s convinced me. There’re some real bad sons of bitches involved in this. And they’re going down. Oh, and Rhyme, by the way: If you hear something about an IED blast up here, don’t worry, I’m fine.” She explained about the explosion that took out the computer at the coffee shop, without going into the details of the near miss.

He then said, “It’s rather pleasant down here, Sachs. I’m thinking we might want to come back some time—unofficially.”

“A vacation. Yeah, Rhyme, let’s do it.”

“You couldn’t drive very fast. Traffic’s terrible.”

She said, “I’ve always wanted to try a Jet Ski. And you could go to a beach.”

“I’ve already been in the water,” he told her.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, indeed. I’ll tell you about it later.”

She said, “Miss you.” She disconnected before he had a chance to say the same.

Or not.

Nance Laurel received a call on her own mobile. Sachs was aware of her reacting stiffly as she glanced at caller ID. When she answered, the tone in the ADA’s voice told Sachs immediately that this was a private matter, unrelated to the case. “Well, hi…How are you?”

The woman turned away from Sachs and Cooper, turned as far as she could. But Sachs could still hear. “You need them? I didn’t think you did. I packed them up.”

Odd. Sachs had not thought of the prosecutor as having a personal life. She wore no wedding or engagement ring—very little jewelry at all. Sachs could imagine her vacationing with her mother or sister; Nance Laurel as a wife or lover was hard to picture.

Still coddling her conversation, Laurel said into the phone, “No, no. I know where they are.”

What was that tone?

Sachs realized: She’s vulnerable, defenseless. Whoever she was talking to had some kind of personal power over her. A breakup that isn’t completely broken yet? Probably.

Laurel disconnected, sat for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. And then she rose, picked up her purse. “There’s something I have to take care of.”

Odd to see her so shaken.

Sachs found herself asking, “Anything I can do?”

“No. I’ll see you in the morning. I…I’ll be back in the morning.”

Clutching her briefcase, the prosecutor walked from the parlor and out the front door of the town house. Sachs noted that her workstation remained cluttered, documents shuffled and scattered about—completely the opposite of how she’d left things last night.

As Sachs gazed toward the table, one piece of paper stood out. She walked over and picked it up. She read:

Sachs was taken aback. The memo was nearly identical to the email she had sent to Laurel earlier, as instructed by the Overseer. Except for a few variations.

Laurel stole my work.

And not only that but she had to fucking edit it too.

Sachs went through the half dozen other memos that she’d dutifully written and sent to the ADA.

If you don’t mind…

Well, Sachs
did
mind—because they were all doctored to make it sound like Laurel had done the research. In fact, Sachs’s name didn’t appear on a single piece of paper. Rhyme’s was prominently featured but Sachs was virtually cut out of the investigation altogether.

Goddamn it. What was this about?

Looking for answers, she dug through the stacks. Many of the documents were copies of court opinions and legal briefs.

But one at the bottom was different.

And it explained a great deal.

Sachs glanced at Mel Cooper, who was hunched over a microscope. He hadn’t seen her pilfering Laurel’s paperwork. Sachs took the document she’d just uncovered and photocopied it, slipping the sheet into her purse. She returned the original to Laurel’s workstation and was very careful to put it back exactly where she’d found it. Even though the space seemed cluttered, Sachs wouldn’t have been surprised if the prosecutor had memorized the position of every paper—and paper clip—before leaving.

Sachs wanted to be sure the woman had no idea she’d been busted.