The Kill Room (16 page)

H
IS RIGHT HAND ROSE SLOWLY
to his mouth and Lincoln Rhyme fed himself a conch fritter—crisp outside and tender within—dabbed with homemade hot sauce. He then picked up and sipped from a can of Kalik beer.

Hurricane’s restaurant—curious name, given the local weather—was austere, located on a weedy side street in downtown Nassau. Bright blue and red walls, a warped wooden floor, a few flyblown photographs of the local beaches—or maybe Goa or the Jersey Shore. You couldn’t tell. Several overhead fans revolved slowly and did nothing to ease the heat. Their only effect was to piss off the flies.

The place, though, boasted some of the best food Rhyme had ever had.

Though he decided that any meal you can spear with a fork yourself, and not have to be fed, is by definition very, very good.

“Conch,” Rhyme mused. “Never had any univalve tissue evidence in a case. Oyster shells once. Very flavorful. Could you cook it at home?”

Thom, sitting across from Rhyme, rose and asked the chef for the recipe. The formidible woman in a red bandanna, looking like a Marxist revolutionary, wrote it down for him, cautioning to get fresh conch. “Never canned. Ever.”

The time was nearly three and Rhyme was beginning to wonder if the corporal had given him the tantalizing invitation just to keep him occupied while, as Pulaski suggested, he was preparing an arrest team.

That
is where I have lunch!…

Rhyme decided not to worry about it and had more conch and beer.

At their feet a black-and-gray dog begged for scraps. Rhyme ignored the small, muscular animal but Thom fed it some bits of conch crust and bread. He was about two feet high and had floppy ears and a long face.

“He’ll never leave you alone now,” Rhyme muttered. “You know that.”

“He’s cute.”

The server, a slimmer, younger version of the chef, daughter probably, said, “He’s a potcake dog. You only see them in the Islands here. The name comes from what we feed stray dogs—rice and green peas, potcake.”

“And they hang out in restaurants?” Rhyme asked sardonically.

“Oh, yes. Customers love them.”

Rhyme grunted and stared at the door, through which he expected momentarily to see either Mychal Poitier or a couple of armed, uniformed RBPF officers with an arrest warrant.

His phone buzzed and he lifted it. “Rookie, what do you have?”

“I’m at the South Cove Inn. I got it. The number of the man who called about Moreno’s reservation. It’s a mobile exchange from Manhattan.”

“Excellent. Now, it’ll be a prepaid, untraceable. But Rodney can narrow down the call to a fairly small area. Maybe an office or gym or a Starbucks where our sniper enjoys his lattes. It won’t take—”

“But—”

“No, it’s easy. He can work backward from the cell base stations and then interpolate the signal data from adjacent towers. The sniper will’ve thrown the phone out by now but the records should be able to—”

“Lincoln.”

“
What?
”

“It’s not prepaid and it’s still active.”

Rhyme was speechless for a moment. This was unbelievably good luck.

“And are you ready for this?”

Words returned. “Rookie! Get to the point!”

“It’s registered in the name of Don Bruns.”

“Our sniper.”

“Exactly. He used a Social Security number on the phone account and gave an address.”

“Where?”

“PO box in Brooklyn. Set up by a shell corporation in Delaware. And the social’s fake.”

“But we’ve got the phone. Start Rodney scanning for usage and location. We can’t get a Title Three at this point, but see if Lon or somebody can charm a magistrate into approving a five-second listen-in for a voiceprint.”

This would allow them to compare the vocal pattern with the .wav file the whistleblower had sent and confirm that it was, in fact, the sniper, who was presently using the phone.

“And have Fred Dellray look into who’s behind the company.”

“I will. Now, a couple other things.”

Couple
of
other things. But Rhyme refrained. He’d beaten the kid up enough for one day.

“The reporter, de la Rua? He didn’t leave anything here at the inn. He came to the interview with a bag or briefcase but they’re sure the police took it with them, along with the bodies.”

He wondered if Poitier—if he actually showed up and was in a cooperative mood—would give them access to those items.

“I’m still waiting to talk to the maid about the American who was here the day before the shooting. She gets in in a half hour.”

“A competent job, Pulaski. Now, are you being cautious? Any sign of that Mercury with our dope-smoking surveillers?”

“No, and I’ve been looking. How about with you?…Oh, wait. If you asked
me
, that means you gave ’em the slip.”

Rhyme smiled. The kid was learning.

S
O LYDIA’S NOT A PROSTITUTE,”
Amelia Sachs said.

“Nope,” Lon Sellitto replied, “she’s an interpreter.”

“Translating wasn’t a cover for being a call girl? You’re sure?”

“Positive. She’s legit. Been a commercial interpreter for ten years, works for big companies and law firms. And, I still checked: no rap sheet—city, state or FBI, NCIC. Looks like Moreno had used her before.”

Sachs gave a brief, cynical laugh. “I was making assumptions. Escort service, terrorist. Brother. If she’s legitimate, Moreno wouldn’t have used her at any illegal meetings but odds are she’ll know something helpful. Probably she’d have a lot of information about him.”

“She’d have to,” Sellitto agreed.

And what exactly
did
Lydia know? Jacob Swann wondered, sitting forward in the front seat of his Nissan, parked in Midtown, listening to this conversation in real time, having tapped once again into Amelia Sachs’s 3G, easily tappable phone. He was now pleased she hadn’t been blown to nothingness by the IED in Java Hut. This lead was golden.

“What languages?” Sachs was asking. Swann had the other caller’s mobile identification number. Lon Sellitto, another NYPD cop, the Tech Services people had told him.

“Russian, German, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese.”

Interesting. Now, more than ever, Swann wanted her surname and address. If you please.

“I’ll go interview her now.”

Well, that would be particularly convenient: Detective Sachs and a witness, together in a private apartment. Along with Jacob Swann and the Kai Shun knife.

“Got a pen?”

“I’m ready.”

So am I, thought Jacob Swann.

Sellitto said, “Her full name’s Lydia—”

“Wait!” Sachs shouted.

Swann winced at the volume and held his mobile away from his ear.

“What?”

“Something’s wrong, Lon. It just occurred to me: How did our perp know about Java Hut?”

“Whatta you mean?”

“He didn’t follow me there. He got there
first
. How did he find out about the place?”

“Fuck. You think he’s got a tap on your phone?”

“Could be.”

Oh, hell. Swann sighed.

Sachs continued, “I’ll find a different phone, a landline, and give you a call through the main number at headquarters.”

“Sure.”

“I’m dumping my mobile. You do the same.”

The line disconnected, leaving Jacob Swann listening to pure silence.

A
T FIRST, AMELIA SACHS WAS CONTENT
to pull the battery out of her phone.

But then paranoia seeped in like water in the badly grouted basement of her Brooklyn town house and she pitched the unit into a sewer grate outside the smoking cave of Java Hut.

She found a Patrol officer and swapped her smallest bill, a ten, for four bucks’ worth of change and called Police Plaza from a nearby pay phone, then was transferred.

“Sellitto.”

“Lon.”

“You think he was really listening?” he asked.

“I’m not taking any chances.”

“Okay, fine with me. But it pisses me off. That was a new Android. Fucker.
Now
are you ready?”

She had pen in hand and a notepad balanced on the stained shelf under the phone. “Go ahead.”

“The interpreter’s name is Lydia Foster.” He gave Sachs her address on Third Avenue. Her phone number too.

“How’d the canvassers find her?”

“Legwork,” Sellitto explained. “Started at the top floor of that office building where Moreno picked her up and worked their way down twenty-nine stories. Naturally, they didn’t get a hit till floor three, took ’em forever. She was working freelance, translating for a bank.”

“I’m going to call her now.” She added, “How the hell did he tap our lines, Lon? It isn’t just anybody who can do that.”

The older detective muttered, “This guy is too fucking connected.”

“And he knows your number too now,” she pointed out. “Watch your back.”

He gave a gruff laugh. “That’s a cliché Linc definitely wouldn’t approve of.”

His words made her miss Rhyme all the more.

“I’ll let you know what I find,” she said.

A few minutes later Sachs was speaking with Lydia Foster, explaining the purpose for the call.

“Ah, Mr. Moreno. Yes, I was very sad to hear that. I interpreted for him three times over the last year.”

“Each time in New York?”

“That’s right. The people he met with spoke pretty good English but he wanted to speak through me in their native languages. He thought he could get a better feel for them. I was supposed to tell him what I thought their attitudes were, in addition to the words.”

“I talked to the driver who took you two around the city on May first. He said you had some general conversations with Mr. Moreno too.”

“That’s right. He was very social.”

Sachs found her heart pounding a bit faster. The woman could be a well of information.

“You and he met how many people on the latest trip?”

“Four, I think. Some nonprofit organizations, run by Russians and some people out of Dubai, and at the Brazilian consulate. He also met somebody by himself. That man he was meeting spoke English and Spanish. He didn’t need me so I waited at Starbucks downstairs in the office building.”

Or maybe he didn’t want you to hear the substance of that meeting.

“I’d like to come over and talk to you.”

“Yes, anything I can do to help. I’m home for the day. I’ll find all my transcripts for the job and organize them.”

“You keep copies of everything?”

“Every word. You’d be surprised how many times clients lose what I send them or don’t back them up.”

Even better.

Just then her phone hummed with an incoming text, marked urgent. “Hold on a second, please,” she told Lydia Foster. And read the message.

She said, “Ms. Foster, I’ve got to follow up on something but I’ll be there soon.”

R
HYME HAD JUST FINISHED HIS KALIK BEER
at Hurricane’s restaurant when he heard a voice behind him.

“Hello.”

Mychal Poitier.

The corporal’s blue shirt was Rorschached with sweat and his dark slacks, with the regal red stripe, sandy and dotted with mud. He carried a backpack. He waved to the server and she smiled, surprised when he took a seat with the disabled man from America. She put in an order without asking him what he wanted and brought him a coconut soft drink.

“I am late because, I’m sorry to say, we have found the student. She died in a swimming accident. Excuse me for a moment. I will upload my report.” He took an iPad in a battered leather case from the bag and booted it up. He typed some words and then hit the send button.

“This will buy me a little time with you. I’ll tell them I’m following up on several other issues regarding the loss.” He nodded at the iPad. “Unfortunate situation,” he said and his face was grave. It occurred to Rhyme that Traffic, his first assignment, and then Business Inspections and Licensing had probably not provided much opportunity to experience firsthand the tragedies that fundamentally change law enforcement officers—that either temper or weaken them. “She drowned in an area of water that generally isn’t dangerous but she’d been drinking, it seems. We found rum and Coke in her car. Ah, students. They believe they are immortal.”

“May I see?” Rhyme asked.

Poitier turned the device and Rhyme studied the pictures that slowly slideshowed past. The body of the victim was starkly white from loss of blood, and water-wrinkled. Fish or other creatures had eaten away much of her face and neck. Hard to guess her age. Rhyme couldn’t recall from the poster. He asked.

“Twenty-three.”

“What was she studying?”

“Latin American literature for the semester at Nassau College. And working part time—and, of course, partying.” He sighed. “Apparently to excess. Now, I’ve called her family in America. They’re coming to claim the body.” His voice faded. “I have never made a call like that before. It was very difficult.”

She had a trim figure, athletic, a modest tat on her shoulder—a starburst—and she favored gold jewelry, though a silver necklace of small leaves surrounded her neck, now stripped of skin.

“A shark attack?”

“No, barracuda probably. We rarely get shark attacks here. And the barracuda were just feeding, after she died. They’ll occasionally bite a swimmer but the injuries are minor. She probably got caught in the riptide and drowned. Then the fish went to work.”

Rhyme noted the worst damage was around the neck. Stubby tubes of the carotid were visible through tatters of flesh. Much of the skull was exposed. With his fork Rhyme speared and then ate some more conch.

Then he slid the iPad back to the officer. “I assume, Corporal, that you are not here to arrest us.”

He laughed. “It did occur to me. I was quite angry. But, no, I’ve come here to help you again.”

“Thank you, Corporal. And now in fairness I’ll share with you everything that
I
know.” And he explained about NIOS, about Metzger, about the sniper.

“Kill Room. What a cold way to put it.”

Now that he knew Poitier was, more or less, on his side, Rhyme told him that Pulaski was waiting to speak to the maid at the South Cove Inn to learn more about the sniper’s reconnaissance mission the day before he shot Moreno.

Poitier grimaced. “An officer from New York is forced to do my job for me. What a state of things, thanks to politics.”

The server brought the food—a hot stew of vegetables and shreds of dark meat, chicken or goat, Rhyme guessed. Some fried bread too. Poitier tore a piece off the bread and fed it to the potcake dog. He then pulled his plate toward him, tucked his napkin into his shirt, just where the chain that led to his breast pocket was affixed to a collar button. He keyboarded on the iPad then looked up. “I will eat now and while I eat I can tell Thom about the Bahamas, the history, the culture. If he’d like.”

“I would, yes.”

Poitier pushed the iPad close to Rhyme. “And you, Captain, might wish to look at some pictures in the photo gallery of our beautiful scenery here.”

As the corporal turned to Thom and they struck up a conversation Rhyme began scrolling through the gallery.

A picture of the Poitier family, presumably, at the beach. A lovely wife and laughing children. Then they were at a barbecue with a dozen other people.

A picture of the sunset.

A picture of a grade school music recital.

A picture of the first page of the Robert Moreno homicide report.

Like a spy, Poitier had photographed it with the camera in the iPad.

Rhyme looked up at the corporal but the cop ignored him, continuing to share with Thom the history of the colony, and with the potcake dog more lunch.

First, there was an itinerary of Moreno’s last days on earth, as the corporal could piece it together.

The man and his guard, Simon Flores, had arrived in Nassau late Sunday, May 7. They had spent Monday out of the inn, presumably at meetings; Moreno did not seem like the sort to swim with the dolphins or go Jet Skiing. The next day beginning at nine he had several other visitors. Shortly after they left, about ten thirty, the reporter Eduardo de la Rua arrived. The shooting was around eleven fifteen.

Poitier had identified and interviewed Moreno’s other visitors. They were local businessmen involved in agriculture and transport companies. Moreno planned to form a joint venture with them when he opened the Bahamian branch of his Local Empowerment Movement. They were legitimate and had been respected members of the Nassau business community for years.

No witnesses reported that Moreno had been under surveillance or that anyone had shown any unusual interest in him—other than the phone call before he arrived and the brown-haired American.

Then Rhyme turned to the pages of the scene itself. He was disappointed. The RBPF crime scene team had found forty-seven fingerprints—other than the victims’—but had analyzed only half of them. Of those identified, all were attributed to the hotel staff. A note reported that the remaining lifted prints were missing.

Little effort had been made to collect trace from the victims themselves. Generally, in a sniper killing, such information about the spot where the victim is shot wouldn’t be that helpful, of course, since the shooter was a distance away. In this case, though, the sniper had been in the hotel, albeit a day earlier, and might even have snuck into the Kill Room to see about vista and shooting angles. He could easily have left some trace, even if he didn’t leave any prints. But virtually no trace had been collected from the room, only some candy wrappers and a few cigarette butts beside an ashtray near the guard’s body.

However, the next pages on the iPad, photos of the Kill Room itself, were illuminating. Moreno had been shot in the living room of the suite. Everything and everyone in the room was covered with shards of glass. Moreno lay sprawled on a couch, head back, mouth open, a bloodstain on his shirt, in the center of which was a large black dot, the entrance wound. The upholstery behind him was covered in dark blood and gore, from what would have been a massive exit wound caused by the sniper’s bullet.

The other victims lay on their backs near the couch, one a large Latino, identified in the photo as Simon Flores, Moreno’s guard, the other a dapper bearded balding man in his fifties, de la Rua, the reporter. They were covered with broken glass and blood, their skin torn and slashed in dozens of places.

The bullet itself was photographed lying on the floor next to a small sandwich board evidence location card bearing the number 14. It was lodged in the carpet a few feet behind the couch.

Rhyme flipped the page, expecting to see more.

But the next image was of the corporal with his wife again, sitting in beach chairs.

Without looking his way, Poitier said, “That’s all there is.”

“Not the autopsy?”

“One has been done. We don’t have the results.”

Rhyme asked, “The victims’ clothing?”

Now he regarded the criminalist. “At the morgue.”

“I asked my associate at the South Cove to track down de la Rua’s camera, tape recorder and anything else he had with him. He said they went to the morgue. I’d love to see them.”

Poitier gave a skeptical laugh. “I would have too.”

“Would
have
?”

“Yes, you caught that, Captain. By the time I inquired about them they were missing, along with the victims’ more valuable personal effects.”

Rhyme had noticed in the picture of the bodies that the guard wore a Rolex watch, and a pair of Oakley sunglasses protruded from his pocket. Near the reporter lay a gold pen.

Poitier added, “Apparently you must be fast here securing evidence when you run a scene. I’m learning that. The lawyer I was mentioning?”

“The
prominent
lawyer.”

“Yes,” Poitier said. “After he was killed and before our detectives got there, half the office was looted.”

Rhyme said, “You have the bullet, though.”

“Yes. In our evidence locker. But that meeting with Assistant Commissioner McPherson after you left headquarters? It was to order me to deliver to him all the evidence in the Moreno case. He has taken custody and sealed the locker. No one else can have access. Oh, he also ordered me to have no contact whatsoever with you.”

Rhyme sighed. “They really don’t want this case to go forward, do they?”

With a bitterness Rhyme had not heard before, he said, “Ah, but the case has gone forward. Indeed, it is concluded. The cartels have murdered the victim out of retribution for one thing or another. Who can tell, with those inscrutable cartels?” The man grimaced. Then his voice lowered. “Now, Captain Rhyme, I couldn’t get you your physical evidence, as I’d hoped. But I can play tour guide.”

“Tour guide?”

“Indeed. We have a wonderful tourist attraction on the southwest coast of New Providence Island. A spit of land a half mile long, ravaged by hurricanes, composed mostly of rock and beaches with tainted sand. The highlights are a trash tip, a metal fabrication plant cited frequently for polluting and a company that shreds tires for recycling.”

“Sounds charming,” Thom said.

“It’s quite popular. At least it was for one American tourist. He visited it on the ninth of May. At around eleven fifteen in the morning. One of the more attractive sights he enjoyed was of the South Cove Inn. An unobstructed view, exactly two thousand one hundred and ten yards away. I thought that you, as a tourist to our country, might enjoy the sights as well. Am I right?”

“You are indeed, Corporal.”

“Then we should go. I will not have a career as a tour guide for much longer.”