The Kill Room (28 page)

L
INCOLN RHYME WAS SAYING,
“And the same evidence we thought exculpated Shales by placing him in New York at the time of the shooting now helps
implicate
him: the phone calls from his mobile to the South Cove Inn to verify when Moreno was checking in, the metadata that placed him at NIOS headquarters in New York at the time of the death. We’ll need more, though. We need to place him at the joystick of the drone.
UAV
, excuse me, rookie. How can we do that?”

“Air traffic control in Florida and the Bahamas,” Sachs said.

“Good.”

Sachs called their federal liaison, Fred Dellray, with the request and had a lengthy conversation with him. Finally Sachs disconnected. “Fred’s calling the FAA here and the Civil Aviation Department in Nassau. But he gave me another idea.” She was typing on her computer.

Rhyme couldn’t see clearly. It appeared that she was examining a map. “Well,” she whispered.

“What?” Rhyme wondered.

“Fred suggested we ought to try to get a look at the Kill Room itself.”

“What?” Sellitto barked. “How?”

Google apparently.

Sachs smiled. She’d called up a satellite image of the block in which NIOS headquarters was located in downtown Manhattan. Behind the building itself was a parking lot, separated from the street with an impressive-looking security fence and overseen by a guard station. In the corner was a large rectangular structure, like a shipping container—the sort you see bolted to decks and cruising down highways behind tractor-trailer semis. Next to it a ten-foot antenna pointed skyward.

“That’s the Ground Control Station, Fred told me. GCS. He said most of the UAVs are controlled from portable facilities like that.”

“The Kill Room,” Mel Cooper said.

“Perfect,” Laurel said briskly to Sachs. “Print that out, if you would.”

Rhyme could see Sachs bristle, hesitate and then with a thumb and finger—with a dot of dried blood behind the nail—tap hard on the keyboard. A printer began to exhale.

When the document was disgorged, Laurel slipped it from the tray and added it to her files.

Sachs’s phone buzzed. “It’s Fred again,” she announced. She hit speaker.

Rhyme called, “Fred. Don’t insult anybody.”

“I can hear. Well, well, you all have yourself quite a case here. Good luck on this one. Hey, see any funny-lookin’ airplanes hovering outside your windows? Might wanta think about closing the blinds.”

This was not as funny as Dellray intended, Rhyme decided, given Barry Shales’s skill at firing million-dollar bullets.

“Hokay, the radar situation. Sentcha screenshots. What we put together is the morning of May nine a small aircraft, no transponder, was tracked heading east over the Atlantic, south of Miami.”

“Where Homestead air base is,” Sellitto pointed out.

“Right you are. Now, the craft was on visual flight rules, no flight plan. Speed was very slow—about a hundred ten miles an hour. Which is typical drone speed. We all together on that?”

“With you, Fred. Keep going.”

“Well, it’s about a hundred eighty miles to Nassau from Miami. Exactly one hour and fifty-two minutes later, ATC in Nassau tracked a small aircraft, no transponder, ascend into radar range, about six hundred feet.” Dellray paused. “And then it stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“They thought it stalled. But it didn’t drop off the screen.”

“It was hovering,” Rhyme said.

“My guess. They figured that with no transponder the plane was an ultralight—one of those homemade gizmos that sometimes just sit like birds in headwinds? It wasn’t in controlled airspace so they didn’t pay any more mind. The time was eleven oh four a.m.”

“Moreno was shot at eleven sixteen,” Sachs said.

“And at eleven eighteen it turned around and descended outta radar. Two hours and five minutes later, a small aircraft, no transponder, crossed into U.S. airspace and headed toward South Miami.”

“That’s our boy,” Rhyme said. “Thanks, Fred.”

“Gooood luck. And forget you ever knew me.”

Click.

Wasn’t conclusive but like all elements in a case it was a solid brick in the wall of establishing a suspect’s guilt.

Nance Laurel got a call. While someone else might have nodded or offered some facial clues as to the content she listened without expression; her powdered face was a mask. She disconnected. “There’s an issue with another case of mine. I have to go interview a prisoner in detention. It shouldn’t be long. I’d like to stay but I have to take care of this.”

The prosecutor gathered up her purse and headed out the door.

Sachs too received a call. She listened and jotted a few notes.

Rhyme turned from her and was regarding the charts once again. “But I want more,” he griped. “Something to
prove
that Shales was at the controls of the drone.”

“Ask and ye shall receive.” This, from Amelia Sachs.

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow.

She said, “We have a lead to the whistleblower. If anybody can place Barry Shales in the Kill Room on May ninth, it’s him.”

SACHS WAS PLEASED
to report that Captain Myers’s officers who’d been canvassing the patrons of Java Hut when the whistleblower uploaded the STO had found some witnesses.

Her computer gave a bleat and she looked toward the screen. “Incoming,” she said.

Sellitto gave a harsh laugh. “Not a good choice of words in this case, you don’t mind.”

She opened the attachment. “People buy a lot more with credit or debit cards nowadays. Even if the bill’s only three, four dollars. Sure helps us, though. The canvassers talked to everybody who charged something around one p.m. on the eleventh. Mostly a bust but one of them got a picture.” She printed out the photo attachments. Not terrible, she decided, but hardly high-def mug shots. “Has to be our man.”

She read the officer’s memo. “‘The photographer was a tourist from Ohio. Shooting pictures of his wife sitting across from him. You can see in the background a man, blurred—because he’s turning away fast and raising his hand to cover his face. Asked the tourists if they got a better look at him. They didn’t and other patrons and the baristas didn’t pay any attention to him.’”

Rhyme looked at the picture. Two tables behind the smiling woman was the presumed whistleblower. White. Solidly built, in a blue suit, an odd color, just shy of navy. He wore a baseball cap—suspicious, given the business attire—but seemed to have light-colored hair. A big laptop sat open before him.

“That’s him,” Sachs said. “He’s got an iBook.” She’d downloaded a picture of every model.

The criminalist observed, “Suit doesn’t fit well. It’s cheap. And see the Splenda packets on the table, along with the stirrer? Confirms he’s our man.”

“Why?” Sellitto asked. “I use Splenda.”

“Not the substance—the fact it’s on the table. Most people add sugar or sweetener at the milk station and throw the empty packets out, and the stirrers too. So there’s less mess at the table. He’s taking his detritus with him. Didn’t want to leave friction ridge evidence.”

Most objects, even paper, retain very good fingerprints where food is served because of grease from the meals.

“Anything else about him?” Pulaski asked.

“You tell me, rookie.”

The young officer said, “Look how he’s holding his right hand, palm cupped upward? Maybe he was about to take a pill. Could be a headache, backache. Wait, look, there’s a box. Is it? A box at the side of the table?”

It seemed that there was. Blue and gold.

Rhyme said, “Good. I think you’re right. And notice he’s drinking tea—see the bag in the napkin?—in a coffeehouse? Looks pale. Maybe it’s herbal. Not that unusual but a reasonable deduction could be stomach issues. Check antacid, reflux, indigestion medicine boxes that come in two colors.”

A moment later Cooper said, “Could be Zantac, maximum strength. Hard to say.”

“We don’t need definitive answers on everything,” Rhyme said softly. “We need direction. So he’s probably got a bum gut.”

“Stress from leaking classified government documents’ll do that,” Mel Cooper offered.

“Age?” Rhyme wondered.

“Can’t tell,” the young officer replied. “How could you tell?”

“Well, I’m not asking you to play a carnival game, rookie. We see he’s stocky, we see he’s got stomach issues. Hair could be blond but could be gray. Conservative dress. It’s reasonable to speculate he’s middle-aged or older.”

“Sure. I see.”

“And his posture. It’s perfect, even though he’s not young. Suggests a military background. Or could still be in the service, dressing civie.”

They stared at the picture and Sachs found herself wondering, Why did you leak the kill order? What was in it for you?

A person with a conscience…

But are you a patriot or a traitor?

Wondering too: And where the hell are you?

Sellitto took a call. Sachs noticed that his face went from curious to dark. He glanced at the others in the room, then turned away.

Whispering now: “What?…That’s fucked up. You can’t just tell me that. I need details.”

Everyone was staring at him.

“Who? I want to know who. All right, find out and let me know.”

He disconnected and the glance in Sachs’s direction, but not directly at her, explained that she was the subject of the call.

“What, Lon?”

“You want to step outside.” He nodded toward the hallway.

Sachs glanced at Rhyme and said, “No. Here. What is it? Who called?”

He hesitated.

“Lon,” she said firmly. “Tell me.”

“Okay, Amelia, I’m sorry. Look, you’re off the case.”

“What?”

“Actually, gotta say, you’re on mandatory leave altogether. You’ve gotta report down to—”

“What happened?” Rhyme snapped.

“I don’t know for sure. That was my PA. She told me the word came from the chief of detectives’ office. The formal report’s on its way. I don’t know who’s behind this.”

“Oh, I do,” Sachs snapped. She ripped open her purse and looked inside to make sure she had the copy of the document she’d found on Nance Laurel’s desk the other night. At that time, she’d been reluctant to brandish it as a weapon.

Now she no longer was.

S
HREVE METZGER RAN A HAND
through his trim hair, remembered his first day out of the service.

Somebody, a civilian, on the streets of Buffalo had called him a skinhead. Baby-killer too. The guy was drunk. Anti-military. An asshole. All of the above.

The Smoke had filled Metzger fast, though he didn’t call it Smoke then, didn’t call it anything. He proceeded to break at least four bones in the man’s body before the relief shot through him. More than relief—almost sexual.

Sometimes this memory came back, like now, when he happened to touch his hair. Nothing more than that. He remembered the man, his unfocused, slightly crossed eyes. The blood, the remarkably swollen jaw.

And the coffee vendor. No, just ram the stand, scald him, kill him, forget the consequences. The satisfaction would be sublime.

Help me, Dr. Fischer.

But there was no Smoke now. He was in an ecstatic high. Intelligence and surveillance experts were feeding him information about the Rashid operation.

The terrorist—the next task in the queue—was presently meeting with the Matamoros Cartel bomb supplier. Metzger would have given anything to modify the STO to include him as well but the man was a Mexican citizen and getting permission to vaporize him would have meant elaborate discussions with higher-ups in Mexico City and Washington. And heaven knew he had to be careful with them.

Budgetary meetings proceeding apace. Much back-and-forth. Resolution tomorrow. Can’t tell which way the wind is blowing…

He received another call about the progress of the UAV, under the command of Barry Shales in the GCS, the trailer outside Metzger’s window. The craft had launched not from Homestead, as in the Moreno operation, but from the NIOS facility near Fort Hood, Texas. It had crossed into Mexican airspace, with the Federales’ blessing,
unlike
with Moreno in the Bahamas, and was heading through clear weather toward the target.

His phone rang again. Seeing the caller ID he stiffened and glanced at his open door. He could see Ruth’s hands through the sliver of view into the ante office. She was typing. She had a small window too and sunlight glinted off her modest engagement and impressive wedding rings.

He rose and slid the door closed, then answered. “Yes.”

“Found her,” the man’s voice reported.

No names or code names…

Her.

Nance Laurel.

“Where?”

“Detention center, interviewing a suspect. Not on this case, something else. I’ve confirmed it’s her. She’s there now, pretty much alone. Should I?”

No ending verb to that sentence.

Metzger debated, added pluses and negatives. “Yes.”

He disconnected.

Maybe, just maybe this would all go away.

And he turned his attention back to Mexico, where an enemy of the country was about to die. Shreve Metzger felt swollen with joy.

W
HERE’S NANCE LAUREL?
” Sachs asked the rotund African American woman on the fifth floor of the New York detention center.

The Department of Corrections officer stiffened and glanced at Sachs’s badge with disdain. Sachs supposed her voice
was
a bit strident, the greeting rude. It hadn’t been intentional; Nance Laurel simply did this to her.

“Room Five. Box yo weapon.” Back to a
People
magazine. A scandal was breaking among some quasi-celebrities. Or maybe they were honest-to-God celebs. Sachs had never heard of them.

She wanted to apologize to the woman for her bluntness but couldn’t figure out how. Then her anger at Laurel returned and she slipped the Glock into a locker and slammed the door, drawing a criticizing breath from the lockup mistress. With a buzz the door opened and she stepped through into the grim corridor. It was deserted at the moment. This was the area where high-level prisoners—accused of serious felonies—discussed their cases with their lawyers and cut deals with the prosecutors.

The perfume here was disinfectant and paint and pee.

Sachs strode past the first several rooms, all of which were empty. At Interview #5, she looked through smeared glass and saw a shackled man in an orange jumpsuit sitting across from Laurel at a table bolted to the floor. In the corner was another D of C guard, a huge man whose nearly white shaved head glistened with sweat. His arms were crossed and he looked at the prisoner like a biologist examining yet another specimen of toxic but dead bug.

The doors were self-locking; you needed a key to open them from either side so Sachs banged on the door with her palm.

This must have been strident too, since everybody in the room jumped and swiveled. The guard had no gun but his hand dipped toward the pepper spray on his belt. He saw Sachs, apparently recognized her as a cop and relaxed. The prisoner gazed narrowly at Sachs and the look morphed from startled to hungry.

Sex crime, Sachs deduced.

Laurel’s lips tightened slightly.

She rose. The guard unlocked the door and let the ADA out, then he locked it again and returned to his watchful state.

The women walked to the end of the corridor, away from the door. Laurel asked, “Have you got something on Metzger or Shales?”

“Why ask me?” Sachs countered. “Since I’m not really in the equation.”

“Detective,” Laurel said evenly, “what are you talking about?”

She didn’t start with the news Sellitto had just informed her of, the suspension. She went chronologically. “You took my name off all the memos, all the emails. You replaced my name with yours.”

“I’m not—”

“Anything to help you get elected, right, Assemblywoman Laurel?”

Sachs withdrew the copy she’d made from Laurel’s secret files and thrust the sheet forward. It was a petition to put Laurel on the ballot to run for the office of assemblywoman in her district. The assembly was the lower house of the legislature in New York.

The woman’s eyes dipped. “Ah.”

Busted.

But an instant later she was gazing coolly back into Sachs’s face.

Sachs snapped, “You took me off the documents to take credit for yourself. Is that what this case is all about, Nance? ‘Your’ case, by the way. Not ‘
our
case’ or ‘
the
case.’ Because you wanted big media defendants to make a big splash. Forget Unsub Five Sixteen’s torturing innocent women. You don’t want him. You want the highest government official you can bag.

“And to make sure that happens you had me running around town digging up all the good things about Moreno I could find. Anything substantive on the case, you co-opted, put your name on it and took credit.”

The assistant DA, though, didn’t seem the least fazed. “Did you happen to look up my application to go on the ballot?”

“No, I didn’t need to. I had this, the petition with the signatures.” She lifted the photocopy.

Laurel said, “Those
support
the ballot application. You still need to submit one.”

Sachs was pinged by that feeling she sometimes got, a nagging concern, that she might have missed something at a crime scene. Something fundamental. She was silent.

“I’m
not
running for office.”

“The petition…”

“The petition was filed, yes. But I changed my mind. I never filed the application to run.”

More silence.

Laurel continued, “Yes, I’d wanted to run in the Democratic primary but the party felt I was a little too opinionated for them. I filed a petition to run as an independent. But as time went by I decided not to.”

Ping…

Now, curiously, Laurel’s eyes were averted. She, not Sachs, seemed the more uneasy. And her shoulders, usually completely upright, sagged. “Last winter I went through a very hard breakup. He was…Well, I thought we’d get married. I understand that those things don’t always work out. Fine. But it just wouldn’t go away, the pain.” Her jaw was set, her thin lips trembling. “It was exhausting.”

Sachs recalled her observation from earlier, when Laurel had gotten the phone call in the town house.

She’s vulnerable, even defenseless…

“I thought I needed to try something different. I’d run for office, devote myself to politics. I’d always wanted to. I have very strong ideas about this country and government’s role. I was class president in high school and college. That was a happy time for me and I guess I wanted to re-create it. But I decided I was a better DA than I would be a politician. This is where I belong.”

A nod toward the interview room. “The perp in there? History of sexual assault. He’s in here because he groped three high school students. The original prosecutor didn’t have time for the case and was going to charge him with forcible touching. Misdemeanor. He couldn’t be bothered. I know about people like this suspect, though. Next it’ll be raping an eleven-year-old and the time after that he’ll kill the girl once he’s finished. I took over and I’m going for first-degree sexual act.”

“Class B felony,” Sachs said.

“Exactly. And I’m going to get it. Running cases like this’s my talent, not politics. Stopping rapists and people like Shreve Metzger, who’re hiding behind the government and doing whatever the fuck they want, to hell with the Constitution.”

An obscenity. She was angry. Sachs suspected this was the real Nance Laurel, rarely visible beneath the buttoned-up suits, the spray-painted makeup, the if-you-don’t-mind verbiage.

“Amelia, yes, I took your name off the memos and emails. But that was purely for
your
sake and the sake of your career. It never occurred to me that you’d want credit. Who would?” She gave a shrug. “You know how dangerous this prosecution is? It’s a career-ender, if the slightest thing goes wrong. Washington might cut Metzger and Barry Shales loose and let them swing in the wind. But they might also make this their Gettysburg, take a stand against me. And if they do and I lose on the immunity issue, then I’m history. The feds’ll pressure Albany to get rid of me, and the attorney general will. In a heartbeat. That’ll happen to everybody involved in the case, Amelia.”

My
case…

“I wanted to shelter you and the others as much as I could. Lon Sellitto’s not mentioned in any of the memos. Ron Pulaski, the same.”

Sachs pointed out, “But one of us’ll have to testify in court as experts—to the evidence.” Then she understood. “Lincoln.”

Laurel said, “He’s a consultant. He
can’t
be fired.”

“I didn’t understand any of this,” Sachs said. She apologized for her outburst.

“No, no. I should’ve shared the strategy with you.”

Sachs felt her phone vibrate and she glanced at the screen. A text from Lon Sellitto.

So that was it. Laurel had had nothing to do with getting her sidelined. Thank God she hadn’t blurted what she’d been thinking earlier. But then: How the hell had Myers gotten her private records? She never made insurance claims through the department. She herself paid for the appointments with her orthopedist—for this very reason: so no one in the Big Building would find out.

“Everything okay?” Laurel asked, nodding at the phone.

“Sure, fine.”

At that moment a buzz sounded from the end of the corridor. The door swung open and a man stepped inside, in his thirties, athletic, wearing a dark suit. He blinked in surprise, seeing the women at the end of the hall. Then he started forward, eyes taking in the rest of the hallway and the empty rooms.

Sachs spent a lot of time here. She knew many of the officers and guards. The detectives, of course. But she’d never seen this man before.

Maybe he was the sex pervert’s lawyer. But the expression on Laurel’s face said that she didn’t recognize him either.

Sachs turned back to Laurel. “I do have some news. Before I left we got a lead to the whistleblower.”

“Really?” Laurel lifted an eyebrow.

Sachs explained about the tourist’s photos of the tea-drinker who liked Splenda and had a bum stomach. His inexpensive, odd-colored suit. His possible connection to the military.

Laurel asked a question but by then Sachs’s instinct had kicked in and she wasn’t paying attention.

The man who’d been buzzed in was ignoring the interrogation rooms. He seemed purposefully, but warily, making his way toward the women.

“You know that guy?” Sachs whispered.

“No.” Laurel seemed troubled by the detective’s concern.

A scenario played itself out in Sachs’s imagination, honed by instinct: This wasn’t Barry Shales—they’d seen his picture—but could it be Unsub 516? Sachs had been careful with the cell phones but who knew what NIOS was capable of. The man could have tracked her here—or followed Laurel. Maybe he’d just killed the guard out front and buzzed himself in.

Sachs looked for options. She had her switchblade but if this was the unsub he’d be armed. She recalled the terrible knife wounds on Lydia Foster’s body. And he could easily have a gun. She’d have to get him in close before she could use the blade.

But as he approached he slowed and stopped, well out of knife range. She couldn’t possibly draw the knife and attack before he opened fire. His smooth face, and cautious eyes, looked from one to the other. “Nance Laurel?”

“That’s me. Who are you?”

The man had no interest in answering her question.

With a fast, assessing look at Sachs, he reached into his jacket.

Sachs prepared to launch herself into him, muscles tensing, fingers folding into fists.

Can I get to him in time to grab his hand when it appears, pull my knife out, flick it open?

She crouched and felt a stab of pain. Then got ready to surge forward.

Wondering too if, as before in the alley, her knee would give out again and send her sprawling to the floor, in helpless agony, giving the man all the time he needed to shoot or slash them both to death.