The Kill Room (8 page)

J
ACOB SWANN PULLED HIS GRAY
Nissan Altima past the house of Robert Moreno’s limo driver.

His tech people had come through. They’d learned that Moreno had used an outfit called Elite Limousine when he was in the city on May 1. He discovered too that Moreno had a particular driver he always used. His name was Vlad Nikolov. And, being the activist’s regular chauffeur, he probably had information that the investigators would want. Swann had to make sure they didn’t get those facts.

He’d made a fast call via his prepaid—“Sorry, wrong number”—and learned the driver was home at the moment. His thickly Russian- or
Georgia
n-a
ccented
voice sounded a bit groggy, which meant he’d probably worked the late-night shift. Good. He wasn’t going anywhere soon. But Swann knew he’d have to move fast; the police couldn’t datamine with the same impunity as his technical services department but traditional canvassing could reveal the driver’s identity too.

Swann climbed out of his car and stretched, looking around.

Many livery workers lived in Queens. This was because the parking situation in Manhattan was so horrific and the real estate prices so high. And because limo work often involved shuttles to and from LaGuardia and JFK airports, both of which were located in the borough.

Vlad Nikolov’s house was modest but well tended, Swann noted. A spray of flowering plants, thick and brilliant courtesy of the delicate spring temperature and a recent rain, bordered the front of the beige brick bungalow. The grass was trim, the slate slabs leading to the front door had been swept, possibly even scrubbed, in the past day or two. The centerpiece of the yard was two boxwood bushes, diligently shaped.

The utility bill information, including smart electric meter patterns, and food and other purchasing profiles that the tech department had datamined, suggested that the forty-two-year-old Nikolov lived alone. This was unusual for Russian or Georgian immigrants, who tended to be very family-minded. Swann supposed that perhaps he had family back in his native country.

In any event, the man’s solitary life worked to Swann’s advantage.

He continued past the house, glancing briefly at a window, covered with a gauzy curtain. Lace. Maybe Nikolov had a girlfriend who came to visit sporadically. A Russian man would be unlikely to buy lace. Another person inside would be a problem—not because Jacob Swann minded killing her but because two deaths increased the number of people who might miss a victim and bring the police here all the more quickly. It made a bigger news splash too. He hoped to keep the driver’s death quiet for as long as possible.

Swann came to the end of the block, turned and slipped a plain black baseball cap over his head, pulled his jacket off, turned it inside out and slipped it back on. Witnesses see upper garments and headgear mostly. Now, if anyone was looking, it would seem that two different people had walked past the house, rather than one man doing so twice.

Every grain of suspicion counts.

On this second trip he looked the other way—at all the cars on the street in front of and near the house. Obviously no NYPD cruisers but no unmarkeds either that he could sense.

He walked up to the door, reaching into his backpack and withdrawing a six-inch length of capped pipe, filled with lead shot. He wrapped his right hand around this, making a fist. The point of the pipe was to give support to the inside of the fingers so that if he happened to connect with bone or some other solid portion of his victim when he swung, the metacarpals wouldn’t snap. He’d learned this the hard way—by missing a blow to the throat and striking a man on the cheek, which had cracked his little finger. He’d regained control of the situation but the pain in his right hand was excruciating. He’d found it was very difficult to flay skin with the knife in one’s non-dominant hand.

Swann took a blank, sealed envelope from his bag too.

A glance around. Nobody on the street. He rang the bell with his knuckle, put a cheerful smile on his face.

No response. Was he asleep?

He lifted a paper napkin from his pocket and tried the knob. Locked. This was always the case in New York. Not so in the suburbs of Cleveland or Denver—where he’d killed an information broker last month. All the doors in Highlands Ranch were unlocked, windows too. The man hadn’t even locked his BMW.

Swann was about to walk around behind the house and look for a window he might break through.

But then he heard a thud, a click.

He rang the bell again, just to let Mr. Nikolov know that his presence was still requested. This is what any normal visitor would have done.

A grain of suspicion…

A voice, muffled by the thickness of the door. Not impatient. Just tired.

The door opened and Swann was surprised—and pleased—to see that Robert Moreno’s preferred driver was only about five feet, six inches and couldn’t have weighed more than 160 pounds, 25 fewer than Swann h
imself
.

“Yes?” he asked in a thick Slavic accent, looking at Swann’s left hand, the white envelope. The right was not visible.

“Mr. Nikolov?”

“That’s right.” He was wearing brown pajamas and was in house slippers.

“I’ve got a TLC refund for you. You gotta sign for it.”

“What?”

“Taxi Limousine Commission, the refund.”

“Yeah, yeah, TLC. What refund?”

“They overcharged fees.”

“You with them?”

“No, I’m the contracting agent. I just deliver the checks.”

“Well, they pricks. I don’t know about refund but they pricks, what they charge. Wait, how do I know they not ripping me off? I sign, I sign away my rights? Maybe I should get a lawyer.”

Swann lifted the envelope. “You can read this. Everybody’s taking the checks but it says you don’t have to, you can talk to an arbitrator. I don’t care. I deliver checks. You don’t want it, don’t take it.”

Nikolov unlatched the screen door. “Lemme have it.”

Swann appreciated that he had no sense of humor but he couldn’t help but be struck by the man’s unfortunate choice of words.

When the door opened, Swann stepped forward fast and drove his right fist, holding the pipe, into the man’s solar plexus, aiming not for the ugly brown cloth of the PJs but for a spot about two inches beyond—inside the man’s gut. Which is where blows should always be aimed, never the surface, to deliver the greatest impact.

Nikolov gasped, retched and went down fast.

In an instant Swann stepped past him, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him well inside before the vomiting started. Swann kicked him once, also in the belly, hard, and then looked out a lacy window.

A quiet street, a pleasant street. Not a dog walker, not a passerby. Not a single car.

He pulled on latex gloves, flicked the lock, slipped the pipe away.

“Hellooooo? Helloooo?” Swann called.

Nothing. They were alone.

Gripping the driver by the collar again, he pulled the man along the recently waxed floor, then deposited him in a den, out of view of the
windows
.

Swann looked down at the gasping man, wincing from the pain.

The beef tenderloin, the psoas major muscle tucked against the short loin and sirloin, lives up to its name—you need only a fork to cut it when prepared right. But the elongated trapezoid of meat, known for Wellington and
tournedos
, starts in a much less agreeable state and takes some prep time. Most of this is knife work. You have to remove any tougher side muscle, of course, but most challenging is the silverskin, a thin layer of connective tissue that encases much of the cut.

The trick is to remove the membrane completely but leave as much flesh intact as you can. Doing this involves moving the knife in a sawing motion, while keeping the blade at a precise angle. You need to practice a great deal to get this right.

Jacob Swann was thinking of the technique now as he withdrew the Kai Shun from its waxed wooden sheath and crouched down.

E
N ROUTE TO THE HOUSE
of Robert Moreno’s limo driver, Amelia Sachs enjoyed being out from under the Overseer’s thumb.

Okay, she thought, not fair.

Nance Laurel was seemingly a good prosecutor. From what Dellray said, from the woman’s preparation for the case.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like her.

Find out what church Moreno went to, Amelia, and how much he donated to good causes and how many old ladies he helped across the street.

If you would…

I don’t think so.

Sachs was at least moving. And moving fast. She was driving her maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane. The car delivered 405 sleek horsepower and boasted 447 foot-pounds of torque. Sachs had the optional four-speed transmission, of course. The Hurst shifter was hard and temperamental but for Sachs this was the only way to run through the gears—for her a more sensuous part of the car than the engine. The only incongruous aspect of the vehicle—aside from its anachronistic appearance on the streets of modern-day New York—was the Chevrolet Camaro SS horn button, a memorial from her first and favorite muscle car, which had been the victim of a run-in with a perp a few years ago.

She now piloted the Cobra over the 59th Street Bridge—the Queensboro. Her father had told her that Paul Simon had written a song about the bridge. She’d meant to look it up on iTunes after he’d told her that. Meant to look it up after he died. Meant to look it up every year or so since.

She never had.

A pop song about a bridge. Interesting. Sachs reminded herself to look it up.

Eastbound traffic was good. The speed nudged a bit higher and she slammed down the clutch and popped the Cobra’s gearbox into third.

Pain. And she winced.

Goddamn it. Her knee again. If it wasn’t the knee it was the hip.

Goddamn.

The arthritis had plagued her all her adult life. Not rheumatoid—that insidious immune system disorder that works its evil in all your joints. Hers was the more common osteo, whose genesis might have been genes or the consequences of a motorcycle race at age twenty-two—or, more precisely, a spectacular landing
after
the Benelli decided to launch itself off the dirt track only a quarter mile from the finish line. But whatever the cause, oh, how the condition tortured her. She’d learned that aspirin and ibuprofen worked some. She’d learned that chondroitin and glucosamine didn’t—at least not for her. Sorry, shark bone lovers. She’d had hyaluronan injections, but they’d sidelined her for several days from inflammation and pain. And, of course, rooster combs could only be a temporary fix. She learned to swallow pills dry and never touch anything that had a
Refill Only 3 Times
label on it.

But the most important thing she’d learned was to smile and pretend the pain wasn’t there and that her joints were those of a healthy twenty-year-old.

When you move they can’t getcha…

And yet this pain, the joints breaking down, meant she couldn’t move nearly as fast as she had. Her metaphor: an emergency brake cable, slack from rusting, that wouldn’t quite disengage the shoe.

Dragging, dragging…

And the worst of all: the specter that she’d be sidelined because of the condition. She wondered again: Had Captain Bill Myers’s eyes been aimed her way that morning in the lab when a jolt nearly made her stumble? Every time she was around brass she struggled to hide the condition. Had she this morning? She believed so.

She cleared the bridge and downshifted hard into second, matched revs to protect the boisterous engine. She’d done this to prove to herself that the pain wasn’t so bad. She was blowing it out of proportion. She could shift whenever she wanted.

Except that lifting her left knee to stomp on the clutch had sent a fierce burst through her.

A reactive tear eased into one eye. She wiped it away furiously.

She drove more moderately toward her destination.

In ten minutes she was easing through a pleasant neighborhood in Queens. Tidy, tiny lawns, shrubs well trimmed, trees rising from perfect circles of mulch.

She checked house numbers. Halfway up the block she found Robert Moreno’s driver’s house. A single-story bungalow, very well maintained. In the driveway, half in the garage, half out, was a Lincoln Town Car, black and polished like a recruit’s gun for parade.

Sachs double-parked and tossed the NYPD card onto the dash. Glancing at the house, she saw the flimsy curtain in the living room open slightly then fall back.

So the driver was home. Good. Sometimes when police come a-calling, residents suddenly remember errands they have to run far across town. Or they simply hide in the basement and don’t answer the door.

She stepped out, testing her left leg.

Acceptable, though it still hurt. She was between pill times and resisted the urge to take another ibuprofen. That little liver failure thing.

Then she grew impatient with herself for fussing. For God’s sake, Rhyme has the use of 5 percent of his body and he never complains. Shut up and get to work. Standing on the front stoop of the driver’s house, she pressed the doorbell, heard a Westminster chime inside, an elaborate trilling that seemed ironic, given the minuscule house.

What could the driver tell them? Had Moreno commented that he’d been followed, that he’d received death threats, that someone had broken into his hotel room? Had the driver gotten a description of someone conducting surveillance?

Then footsteps.

She felt, more than saw, someone peering through the gauzy curtain covering the window in the door.

Perfunctorily, she held her badge and shield up.

The lock clicked.

The door swung open.

H
ELLO, OFFICER. NO, DETECTIVE.
You are a detective? That’s what you said when you called.”

“Detective, yes.”

“And I am Tash. You can call me Tash.” He was cautious, as he’d been on the phone when she called earlier, but perhaps because she was a woman and a not unattractive one, he relaxed his guard. His Mideast accent was just as thick as earlier but he was easier to understand face-to-face.

Beaming, he ushered her into the house, decorated largely with Islamic art. He was a slight man, with a dark complexion, thick black hair, and Semitic features. Iranian, she guessed. He was wearing a white shirt and chino slacks. His full name was Atash Farada and he’d been a driver with Elite Limousines for the past ten years, he explained. Somewhat proudly.

A woman about the same age—Sachs made it mid-forties—greeted her pleasantly and asked if she wanted tea or anything else.

“No, thank you.”

“My wife, Faye.”

They shook hands.

Sachs said to Farada, “Your company, Elite, said Robert Moreno generally used another driver, right?”

“Yes, Vlad Nikolov.”

She asked for the spelling, which he gave. Sachs jotted.

“But he was sick on May first and so they called me instead to drive. Could you tell me what this is about, please?”

“I have to tell you that Mr. Moreno was killed.”

“No!” Farada’s expression darkened. He was clearly upset. “Please, what happened?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“This is such bad news. He was quite the gentleman. Was it robbery?”

Demurring further, she said, “I’d like to know where you drove Mr. Moreno.”

“Dead?” He turned to his wife. “Dead, you heard. How terrible.”

“Mr. Farada?” Sachs repeated with patient insistence. “Could you tell me where you drove him?”

“Where we drove, where we drove.” He looked troubled. But he looked too troubled. Studiously troubled.

Sachs wasn’t surprised when he said, “Sadly I am not sure I can remember.”

Ah. She got it. “Here’s an idea. I could hire you to re-create the route. To start where you picked him up. That might refresh your memory.”

His eyes pendulumed away. “Oh. Yes, it might. But I could have a regular assignment for Elite. I—”

“I’ll double your fee,” Sachs said, thinking about the ethics of paying a potential witness in a homicide investigation. But this case was fat with moral ambiguity from the top down.

Farada said, “I think that might work. I’m so very sad that he died. Let me make a call or two.”

He vanished toward a den or study, pulling his mobile from its holster.

Farada’s wife asked again, “There is nothing you’d like?”

“No, thank you. Really.”

“You are very pretty,” the woman said with admiration and envy.

Faye was attractive too, though short and round. Sachs reflected that one always envies whatever one is not. The first thing that she’d noticed about Faye, for instance, was that when she walked forward to shake the detective’s hand she did so without any hitch in her gait.

Farada returned, wearing a black jacket over the same slacks and shirt. “I am free. I will drive you. I hope I can recall everywhere we went.”

She gave him a focused look and he added quickly, “But once we start I think the places will return to me. That’s how the memory is, isn’t it? Almost a living creature unto itself.”

He kissed his wife and said he’d be back before dinner—with a glance toward Sachs so that she could confirm this would be the case.

She said, “A couple of hours, I’d guess.”

He and Sachs walked outside and they got into the black Lincoln Town Car.

“You don’t want to sit in the back?” he asked, perplexed by her choice of the front passenger seat.

“No.”

Amelia Sachs was not a limo girl. She’d been in one only once—at her father’s funeral. She had no bad associations with long black sedans based on that experience; she simply didn’t do well being driven by others, and sitting in the rear seat exponentially increased her discomfort.

They got under way. The man drove expertly through traffic, unwavering but polite and never using the horn, though they encountered several idiots whom Sachs would have blared onto the sidewalk. The first stop was the Helmsley on Central Park South.

“Okay, so I pick him up here about ten thirty a.m.”

She climbed out and walked inside to the hotel’s check-in desk. The mission, though, was a bust. The clerks were helpful but didn’t have any information that bore on the investigation. Moreno had had several room service charges—food for one—but no outgoing or incoming calls. No one remembered if he had had any visitors.

Back into the limo.

“Where next?” she asked.

“A bank. I don’t remember the name but I remember where.”

“Let’s go.”

Farada drove her to a branch of American Independent Bank and Trust on 55th Street. She went inside. It was near closing time and some of the staff had left. The receptionist rounded up a manager. Without a warrant, Sachs couldn’t get much information. But the woman, one of those template vice presidents, did tell her that Robert Moreno’s visit on May first was to close his accounts and move his assets to a bank in the Caribbean. She wouldn’t say which one.

“How much? Can you tell me?”

Only: “Mid six figures.”

Not like he was laundering huge sums for the cartels. Still, this was suspicious.

“Did he leave any money here?”

“No. And he mentioned he was doing the same for all of his accounts in other banks.”

Returning to Tash Farada, Sachs dropped into the passenger seat. “And after this?”

“A beautiful woman,” the driver said.

She thought for a moment that Farada was talking about her. She then laughed to herself when he explained that he’d driven Moreno to the East Side and collected a woman who’d accompanied him for the rest of the day. Moreno had given the address—an intersection, Lexington and 52nd—and told the driver to pause in front of the building.

They drove there now and Sachs regarded the structure. A tall, boxy glass office building.

“Who was she?”

He answered, “Dark hair. I am thinking she was about five-eight, in her thirties but youthful, attractive as I was saying. Voluptuous. And her skirt was short.”

“Actually I was more interested in her name and business affiliation.”

“I caught her first name only. Lydia. And as for business…Well.” Farada offered a coy smile.

“Well what?”

“Let me put it this way, I’m sure they hadn’t known each other before he picked her up.”

“That’s not telling me much,” Sachs said.

“You see, Detective, we learn things in this job. We learn human nature. Some things our clients do not want us to know, some things
we
do not want to know. We are to be invisible. But we are observant. We drive and we ask no questions except, ‘Where do you want to go, sir?’ And yet we see.”

The esoterica on the Mystic Order of Limo Drivers was wearing and Sachs lifted an impatient eyebrow.

He said in a soft voice, as if someone else were listening, “It was clear to me she was a…You understand?”

“An escort?”

“Voluptuous, you know.”

“One does not necessarily mean the other.”

“But then there was the money.”

“Money.”

“Much of our job is learning not to see things.”

Brother
. She sighed. “What money?”

“I saw Mr. Moreno give her an envelope. The way they both handled it, I knew it contained money. And he said, ‘As we agreed.’”

“And she said?”

“‘Thank you.’”

Sachs wondered what prim ADA Nance Laurel would think of her noble victim picking up a hooker in the middle of the day. “Did there seem to be any connection between this woman and the building? A particular office she worked in?”

“She was in the lobby when we pulled up out front.”

Sachs doubted the escort service would have a cover operation here. Maybe this Lydia worked as a temp or had another part-time job. She called Lon Sellitto and explained about the woman, describing her.

“And voluptuous,” Tash Farada interjected.

Sachs ignored him and gave the detective the address.

Sellitto said, “I got that canvass team together—from Myers’s division. I’ll get ’em started on the building. See if anybody’s heard of a Lydia.”

After they disconnected she asked Farada, “Where did they go from here?”

“Downtown. Wall Street.”

“Let’s go.”

The man eased the Town Car into traffic. Speeding up, the big, spongy Lincoln wove through the congested traffic. If she had to be a prisoner in the passenger seat, at least she could take comfort that the driver wasn’t a plodder. She’d rather have a fender-bender than a hesitant ride. And in her opinion faster was safer.

When you move…

As they made their way downtown she asked, “Did you hear what they talked about, Mr. Moreno and Lydia?”

“Yes, yes. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be, about her job, so to speak.”

Voluptuous…

“He talked much about politics. Lecturing in a way. Lydia, she was polite and asked questions but they were the questions you ask at a wedding or funeral when you’re a stranger. Questions you don’t care about the answers to. Small talk.”

Sachs persisted. “Tell me what he said.”

“Well, I remember he was angry with America. This I found troubling, offensive really. Perhaps he thought he could say these things in front of me because of my accent and I am of Middle Eastern descent. As if we had something in common. Now, I cried when the Trade Towers came down. I lost clients that day, who were my friends too. I love this country as a brother. Sometimes you are angry at your brother. Do you have?”

He sped around a bus and two taxis.

“No, I’m an only child.” Trying to be patient.

“Well, at times you are angry with your brother but then you make up and all is well. That makes your love real. Because after all you’re joined by blood, forever. But Mr. Moreno wasn’t willing to forgive the country for what it had done to him.”

“Done to him?”

“Yes, do you know that story?”

“No,” Sachs said, turning toward him. “Please tell me.”