Lincoln Rhyme 10 - The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  He now pulled to the airport parking lot’s exit kiosk, paid cash then drove a mile on the Grand Central before pulling over and swapping license plates. He then continued on to his house in Brooklyn.

  Annette…

  Bad luck for the poor prostitute that they’d run into each other when he’d been planning the job at the South Cove. He’d been conducting surveillance when he’d spotted Moreno’s guard, Simon Flores, talking and flirting with the woman. Clearly they’d just come out of a room together and he understood from their body language and banter what they’d been doing.

  Ah, a working girl. Perfect.

  He waited an hour or two and then circled the grounds casually until he found her in the bar, where she was buying herself watered-down drinks and dangling like bait on a hook for another customer.

  Swann, armed with a thousand dollars in untraceable cash, had been happy to swim toward her.

  After the good sex and over the better stew he’d learned a great deal of solid information for the assignment. But he’d never anticipated that there’d be an investigation, so he hadn’t cleaned up as completely as he probably should have. Hence, his trip back to the island.

  Successful. And satisfying.

  He now returned to his town house in the Heights, off Henry Street, and parked in the garage in the alley. He dropped his bag in the front hall, then shed his clothes and took a shower.

  The living room and two bedrooms were modestly furnished, inexpensive antiques mostly, a few Ikea pieces. It looked like the digs of any bachelor in New York City, except for two aspects: the massive green gun safe, in a closet, which held his rifles and pistols, and the kitchen. Which a professional chef might have envied.

  It was to this room that he walked after toweling off and pulling on a terry-cloth robe and slippers. Viking, Miele, KitchenAid, Sub-Zero, separate freezer, wine cooler, radiant bulb cookers—his own making. Stainless steel and oak. Pots and implements sat in glass-doored cabinets along one entire wall. (Those ceiling racks are showy, but why have to wash something before you cook in it?)

  Swann now made French press coffee. He debated what to make for breakfast, sipping the strong brew, which he drank black.

  For the meal he decided on hash. Swann loved challenges in the kitchen and had made recipes that could have been formulated by greats like Heston Blumenthal or Gordon Ramsey. But he knew too that food need not be fancy. When he was in the service he would come back from a mission and in his quarters outside Baghdad whip up meals for his fellow soldiers, using military rations, combined with foods he’d bought at an Arabic market. No one joshed with him about his prissy, sanctimonious approach to cooking. For one thing, the meals were always excellent. For another, they knew Swann had very possibly spent the morning peeling some knuckle skin from a screaming insurgent to find out where a missing shipment of weapons might be.

  You made fun of people like that at your peril.

  He now lifted a one-pound piece of rib-eye steak from the refrigerator and unwrapped the thick white waxed paper. He himself had been responsible for this perfectly sized and edged piece. Every month or so, Swann would buy a half side of beef, which was kept in a cold-storage meat facility for people like him—amateur butchers. He would reserve a whole glorious day to slice the meat from the bones, shape it into sirloin, short ribs, rump, chuck, flank, brisket.

  Some people who bought in bulk enjoyed brains, intestines, stomach and other organ meats. But those cuts didn’t appeal to him and he discarded them. There was nothing morally or emotionally troubling about those portions of an animal; for Swann flesh was flesh. It was merely a question of flavor. Who didn’t love sweetbreads, crisply sautéed? But most offal tended to be bitter and was more trouble than it was worth. Kidneys, for instance, stank up your kitchen for days and brains were overly rich and tasteless (and jam-packed with cholesterol). No, Swann’s time at the two-hundred-pound butcher block, robed in a full apron, wielding saw and knife, was spent excising the classic cuts, working to achieve perfectly shaped specimens while leaving as little on the bone as he possibly could. This was an art, a sport.

  This comforted him.

  My little butcher man…

  Now he set his rib eye on a cutting board—always wood, to save his knives’ edges—and ran his fingers over the meat, sensing the tautness of the flesh, examining the grain, the marbling of the fat.

  Before slicing, however, he washed and re-edged the Kai Shun on his Dan’s Black Hard Arkansas whetstone, which cost nearly as much as the knife itself and was the best sharpening device on the planet. When he’d been sitting atop Annette, he’d moved from tongue to finger, and the blade had an unfortunate encounter with bone. It now needed to be honed back to perfection.

  Finally, the knife was ready and he turned back to the steak, slowly slicing the piece into quarter-inch cubes.

  He could have made them bigger and he could have worked faster.

  But why rush something you enjoy?

  When he was done he dusted the cubes in a mixture of sage and flour (his contribution to the classic recipe) and sautéed them in a cast-iron skillet, scooping them aside while still internally pink. He then diced two red potatoes and half a Vidalia onion. These vegetables he cooked in oil in the skillet and returned the meat. He mixed in a bit of veal stock and chopped Italian parsley and set the pan under the broiler to crisp the top.

  A minute or two later, the dish was finished. He added salt and pepper to the hash and sat down to eat the meal, along with a rosemary scone, at a very expensive teak table in the bay window of his kitchen. He’d baked the scone several days ago. Better with age, he reflected, as the herbs had bonded well with the hand-milled flour.

  Swann ate slowly, as he always did. He had nothing but pity bordering on contempt for people who ate fast, who inhaled their food.

  He had just finished when he received an email. It seemed that Shreve Metzger’s great national security intelligence machine was grinding away as efficiently as ever.

  Received your text. Good to hear success today.

  Liabilities you need to minimize/eliminate:

  Witnesses and allied individuals with knowledge base of the STO operation. Suggest searching Moreno’s trip to NY,

  April 30–May 2.

  Identified Nance Laurel as lead prosecutor. IDs of the NYPD investigators to follow soon.

  Individual who leaked STO. Someone is searching for identity now. You may have thoughts on how to learn ID. Proceed at your own discretion.

  Swann called the Tech Services people and requested some datamining. Then he pulled on thick yellow rubber gloves. To clean the skillet, he scrubbed it with salt and treated the surface with hot oil; cast-iron should never meet soap and water, of course. He then began to wash the dishes and utensils in very, very hot water. He enjoyed the process and found that he did much of his best thinking standing here, looking out at a dogged ginkgo in a small garden in front of the building. The nuts from that plant were curious. They’re used in Asian cuisine—the centerpiece of the delicious custard chawanmushi in Japan. They can also be toxic, when consumed in large quantities. But dining can be dangerous, of course; when we sit down to a meal who doesn’t occasionally wonder if we’ve been dealt the salmonella or E. coli card? Jacob Swann had eaten fugu—the infamous puffer fish with toxic organs—in Japan. He faulted the dish not for its potential for lethality (training of chefs makes poisoning virtually impossible) but for a flavor too mild for his liking.

  Scrubbing, scrubbing, removing every trace of food from metal and glass and porcelain.

  And thinking hard.

  To eliminate witnesses would cast suspicion on NIOS and its affiliates, of course, since the kill order was now public. That was unfortunate and under other circumstances he would have tried to arrange accidents or construct some fictional players to take the blame for the murders that were about to happen: the cartels Metzger had claimed were really responsible for Moreno’s death, or perps the police and prosecutor
had put in jail, out for revenge.

  But that wouldn’t work here. Jacob Swann would simply have to do what he did best; while Shreve Metzger would deny that kill orders even existed, Swann would make absolutely certain that no evidence of or witnesses to his clean-up operation could possibly tie NIOS or anyone connected with it to the killing.

  He could do that. Jacob Swann was a very meticulous man.

  Besides, he had no choice but to eliminate these threats. There was no way he’d let anybody jeopardize his organization; its work was too important.

  Swann dried the dishes, silver and coffee cup, using thick linen, with the diligence of a surgeon completing the stitches after a successful procedure.

  CHAPTER 13

  Robert Moreno Homicide

  Crime Scene 1. Suite 1200, South Cove Inn, New Providence Island, Bahamas (the “Kill Room”).

  May 9.

  Victim 1: Robert Moreno. COD: Gunshot wound, details to come.

  Supplemental information: Moreno, 38, U.S. citizen, expatriate, living in Venezuela. Vehemently anti-American. Nickname: “the Messenger of Truth.”

  Spent three days in NYC, April 30–May 2. Purpose?

  Victim 2: Eduardo de la Rua. COD: Gunshot wound, details to come.

  Supplemental information: Journalist, interviewing Moreno. Born Puerto Rico, living in Argentina.

  Victim 3: Simon Flores. COD: Gunshot wound, details to come.

  Supplemental information: Moreno’s bodyguard. Brazilian national, living in Venezuela.

  Suspect 1: Shreve Metzger. Director, National Intelligence and Operations Service.

  Mentally unstable? Anger issues.

  Manipulated evidence to illegally authorize Special Task Order?

  Divorced. Law degree, Yale.

  Suspect 2: Sniper. Code name: Don Bruns.

  Information Services datamining Bruns.

  Voiceprint obtained.

  Crime scene report, autopsy report, other details to come.

  Rumors of drug cartels behind the killings. Considered unlikely.

  Crime Scene 2. Sniper nest of Don Bruns, 2000 yards from Kill Room, New Providence Island, Bahamas.

  May 9.

  Crime scene report to come.

  Supplemental Investigation. Determine identity of Whistleblower. Unknown subject who leaked the Special Task Order.

  Sent via anonymous email.

  Contacted NYPD Computer Crimes Unit to trace; awaiting results.

  Hands on her hips, Amelia Sachs studied the whiteboard.

  She noted Rhyme glance without interest at her flowing script. He wouldn’t pay much attention to what she’d written until hard facts—evidence, mostly, in his case—began to appear.

  It was just the three of them at the moment, Sachs, Laurel and Rhyme. Lon Sellitto had gone downtown to recruit a specially picked canvass-and-surveillance team from Captain Bill Myers’s Special Services operation; with secrecy a priority, Laurel didn’t want to use regular Patrol Division officers.

  Sachs returned to her desk. She didn’t do well sitting still and that was largely what she’d been doing for the past two hours. Confined here, the bad habits returned: She’d dig one nail into another, scratch her scalp to bleeding. Fidgety by nature, she felt a compulsion to walk, to be outside, to drive. Her father had coined an expression that was her anthem:

  When you move they can’t getcha…

  The line had meant several things to Herman Sachs. Certainly it could refer to his job, their job—he too had been a cop, a portable, walking his beat in the Deuce, Times Square, at a time when the murder rate in the city was at an all-time high. Fast of foot, fast of thought, fast of eye could keep you alive.

  Life in general too. Moving… The briefer you were a target for any harm, the better, whether from lovers, bosses, rivals. He’d recited those words a lot, up until he died (some things, your own failing body, for instance, you can’t outrun).

  But all cases require backgrounding and paperwork and that was particularly true in this one, where facts were hard to come by and the crime scene inaccessible. So Sachs was in desk job prison at the moment, plowing through documents and canvassing—discreetly—via phone. She turned from the board and sat once more as she absently dug a thumbnail into the quick of a finger. Pain spread. She ignored it. A faint swirl of red appeared on a piece of intelligence she was reading and she ignored this too.

  Some of the tension was due to the Overseer, which was how Sachs had come to think of Nance Laurel. She wasn’t used to anyone looking over her shoulder, even her superiors—and as a detective third, Amelia Sachs had a lot of those. Laurel had fully moved in now—with two impressive laptops up and running—and had had even more thick files delivered.

  Was she going to have a folding cot brought in next?

  The unsmiling, focused Laurel, on the other hand, wasn’t the least edgy. She hunched over documents, clattered away loudly and irritatingly at the keyboards and jotted notes in extremely small, precise lettering. Page after page was examined, notated and organized. Passages on the computer screen were read carefully and then rejected or given a new incarnation via the laser printer and joined their comrades in the files of People v. Metzger, et al.

  Sachs rose, walked to the whiteboards again and then returned to the dreaded chair, trying to learn what she could about Moreno’s trip to New York on April 30 through May 2. She’d been canvassing hotels and car services. She was getting through to human beings about two-thirds of the time, leaving messages the rest.

  She glanced across the room toward Rhyme; he was on the phone, trying to get the Bahamian police to cooperate. His expression explained that he wasn’t having any more luck than she was.

  Then Sachs’s phone buzzed. The call was from Rodney Szarnek, with the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit, an elite group of thirty or so detectives and support staff. Although Rhyme was a traditional forensic scientist, he and Sachs had worked more and more closely with CCU in recent years; computers and cell phones—and the wonderful evidence they retained, seemingly forever—were crucial to running successful investigations nowadays. Szarnek was in his forties, Sachs estimated, but his age was hard to determine for sure. Szarnek projected youth—from his shaggy hair to his uniform of wrinkled jeans and T-shirt to his passionate love of “boxes,” as he called computers.

  Not to mention his addiction to loud and usually bad rock music.

  Which now blared in the background.

  “Hey, Rodney,” Sachs now said, “could we de-volume that a bit. You mind?”

  “Sorry.”

  Szarnek was key to finding the whistleblower who’d leaked the STO. He was tracing the anonymous email with its STO kill order attachment, working backward from the destination, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and trying to find where the leaker had been when he sent it.

  “It’s taking some time,” the man reported, over a faint 4/4 rock beat of bass and drum. “The email was routed through proxies halfway around the world. Well, actually all the way around the world. So far I’ve traced it back from the DA’s Office to a remailer in Taiwan and from there to Romania. And I’ll tell you, the Romanians are not in a cooperating mode. But I got some information on the box he was using. He tried to be smart but he tripped up.”

  “You mean you found the brand of his computer?”

  “Possibly. His agent user string…Uhm, do you know what that is?”

  Sachs confessed she didn’t.

  “It’s information your computer sends out to routers and servers and other computers when you’re online. Anybody can see it and find out exactly what your operating system and browser are. Now, your whistleblower’s box was running Apple’s OS Nine two two and Internet Explorer Five for Mac. That goes back a long time. It really narrows the field. I’m guessing he had an iBook laptop. That was the first portable Mac to have an antenna built in so he could’ve logged into Wi-Fi for the upload without any separate modem or server.”

  An iBook? Sachs had never heard
of it. “How old, Rodney?”

  “Over ten years. Probably one he bought secondhand and paid cash for it, so it couldn’t be traced back to him. That’s where he tried to be smart. But he didn’t figure that we could find out the brand.”

  “What would it look like?”

  “If we’re lucky it’ll be a clamshell model—they came two-toned, white and some bright colors, like green or tangerine. They’re shaped just what they sound like.”

  “Clams.”

  “Well, rounded. There’s a standard rectangular model too, solid graphite, square. But it’d be big. Twice as thick as today’s laptops. That’s how you could recognize it.”

  “Good, Rodney. Thanks.”

  “I’ll stay on the router. The Romanians’ll cave. I just need to negotiate.”

  Up with the music, and the line went dead.

  Sachs glanced around and found Nance Laurel looking at her, the expression on the ADA’s face both blank and inquisitive. How did she manage that? Sachs told the woman and Rhyme about the cybercrime cop’s response. Rhyme nodded, unimpressed, and returned to the phone. He said nothing. Sachs supposed he was on hold.

  Laurel nodded approvingly, it seemed. “If you could document that and send it to me.”

  “What?”

  A pause. “What you just told me about the tracing and the type of computer.”

  Sachs said, “I was just going to write it up on the board.” A nod toward the whiteboard.

  “I’d actually like everything documented in as close to real time as possible.” The ADA’s nod was toward her own stacks of files. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  The prosecutor wielded the words “if you…” like a bludgeon.

  Sachs did mind but wasn’t inclined to fight this battle. She pounded out the brief memo on her keyboard.