Lincoln Rhyme 10 - The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Please,” she mouthed, her eyes on the blade. So the pleading wasn’t quite abandoned.

  He examined the knife himself, tested the edge carefully with his thumb. It gave just the right resistance; perfect sharpness. He sipped more wine and then began to remove ingredients from the refrigerator.

  When Jacob Swann was a boy, long before college, long before the military, long before his career after the military, he came to appreciate the value of meals. The only moments when he could count on spending time with his mother and father involved preparing and eating supper.

  Bulky Andrew Swann was not stern or abusive, simply distant and forever lost in his schemes, obligations and distractions, which derived mostly from his job in the gambling world of Atlantic City. Young Jacob never knew exactly what his father did—given his own present career, Andrew might have been on the enforcement side of things. That genetic stuff. But the one thing that Jacob and his mother knew about the man was that he liked to eat and that you could get his attention and hold it through food.

  Marianne was not a natural cook, probably had hated it. She’d begun to work on her skills only after she and Andrew started dating. Jacob had overheard her tell a woman friend about one of the first meals she’d served.

  “Whatsis?” Andrew had demanded.

  “Hamburger Helper and lima beans and—”

  “You told me you could cook.”

  “But I did.” She’d waved at the frying pan.

  Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound.

  So she’d bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work.

  In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pan-sautéing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn’t learn first principles and rules (it’s all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she’d never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted—though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren’t over, at all.

  Unlike her son, Marianne stressed mightily before and during the preparation of each meal and invariably had more than one glass of wine. A bit of whiskey too. Or whatever was in the cabinet.

  But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew’s presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee—Andrew didn’t sip—he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fuck a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fucking.

  After school or weekends, if he wasn’t slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too.

  Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Marianne seemed to think that a boy would be more inclined to use a knife than an egg beater.

  “Look at that, honey. Good job. You’re my little butcher man!”

  He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine.

  Now Swann looked at the woman strapped to his chair.

  He continued to be angry that she’d ruined his plans that afternoon.

  She continued to cry.

  He returned to preparing his three-course dinner for tonight. The starter would be asparagus steamed in a water-vermouth mixture, infused with a fresh bay leaf and a pinch of sage. The spears would rest on a bed of mâche and be dotted with homemade hollandaise sauce—that verb being key, “dotted,” since anytime yolk meets butter, you can easily overdo. The trick about asparagus, of course, is timing. The Romans had a cliché—doing something in the duration it took to cook asparagus meant doing it quickly.

  Swann sipped the wine and prepared the steamer liquid. He then trimmed the herbs from his window box.

  When his mother left them—wine plus eighty-two mph without a seat belt—sixteen-year-old Jacob took over the cooking.

  Just the two of them, dad and son.

  The teenager did the same as his mother, corralling Andrew with meals, the only differences being that the boy enjoyed the act of cooking and was far better than his mother. He took to serving serial courses—like a chef’s tasting menu—to stretch out the time the men could be together. One other difference emerged eventually: He found he liked the cooking better than the hour or so spent consuming the meal; he realized he didn’t really like his father very much. The man didn’t want to talk about the things that Jacob did: video games, kickboxing, wrestling, hunting, guns in general and bare-knuckle boxing. Andrew didn’t want to talk about much at all except Andrew.

  Once, when Jacob was eighteen, his father returned home with a beautiful, a really beautiful blonde. He had told the woman what a good cook “my kid is.” Like he was showing off a tacky pinkie ring. He’d said to Jacob, “Make Cindi here something nice, okay? Make something nice for the pretty lady.”

  Jacob was well aware of E. coli by then. Yet as much as he wanted to see twenty-four-year-old Cindi retch to death, or at least retch, he couldn’t bring himself to intentionally ruin a dish. He received raves from the woman for his chicken Cordon Bleu, which he made not by pounding the poultry breast flat but by slicing the meat into thin sheets to enwrap the Gruyère cheese and—in his recipe—prosciutto ham from Parma.

  Butcher man…

  Not long after that, terrorism struck the nation. When Jacob enlisted in the army, the question of aptitude and interests came up but he didn’t let on he could cook, for fear he’d be assigned to mess hall kitchens for the next four years. He knew there’d be no pleasure in cooking steam-table food for a thousand soldiers at a time. Mostly he wanted to kill people. Or make them scream. Or both. He didn’t see a big distinction between humans and animals for slaughter. In fact, think about it, beef cattle and lambs were innocent and we sliced them up without a second thought; people, on the other hand, were all guilty of some transgression or another, yet we’re oh so reluctant to apply the bullet or knife.

  Some of us.

  He regarded Carol once more. She was very muscular but pale. Maybe she worked out in gyms mostly or wore sunscreen when she ran. He offered her some wine. She shook her head. He gave her water and she drank half the bottle as he held it.

  His second course for this evening would be a variation on potatoes Anna. Sliced and peeled russets, layered in a spiral and then cooked in butter and olive oil, with plenty of sea salt and pepper. In the middle would be a dollop of crème fraîche, which he whipped up with, of all things, a little—very little—fresh maple syrup. To finish, black truffle slivers. This dish he made in a small cast-iron skillet. He would start the potatoes on the stove then crisp the top under the Miele’s broiler.

  Potatoes and maple and truffles. Who would have thought?

  Okay, he was getting hungry.

  When Jacob was in his early twenties, his father died of what could be called gastric problems, though not ulcers or tumors. Four 9mm rounds to the belly.

  The young soldier had vowed revenge but nothing ever came of that. A lot of people might have killed the man—Andrew, it turned out, had been up to all kinds of double crosses he should have known were not a good idea in Atlantic City. Finding the killers would have taken ages. Besides, truth be told, Jacob wasn’t all that upset. In fact, when he hosted a reception after the funeral, the murderer might very well have been among the business associates who’d attended. There was, however, some subtle vengeance played out at the event. The main course was penne alla puttanesca, the spicy
tomato-based dish whose name in Italian means “in the style of a whore.” He’d made it in honor of his father’s present girlfriend, who wasn’t Cindi but could easily have been.

  Tonight, Jacob Swann’s third course, the main course, would be special. The Moreno assignment had been difficult and he wanted to pamper himself.

  The entrée would be Veronique-style, which he prepared with grapes sliced into disks and shallots, equally thin, in a beurre blanc sauce—made with slightly less wine (he never used vinegar) because of the presence of the grapes.

  He would slice the very special meat into nearly translucent ovals, dredge them in type 45 French pastry flour then quickly sauté them in a blend of olive oil and butter (always the two, of course; butter alone burns faster than an overturned tanker).

  He offered Carol more water. She wasn’t interested. She’d given up.

  “Relax,” he whispered.

  The liquid was boiling in the asparagus steamer, the potatoes browning nicely under the broiler, the oil and butter slowly heating, off-gassing their lovely perfume.

  Swann wiped down the cutting board he’d use to slice the meat for the main course.

  But before getting to work, the wine. He opened and poured a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a Cloudy Bay, one of the best on the planet. He’d debated about the vineyard’s fine sparkling wine, the Pelorus, but he didn’t think he could finish a whole bottle alone, and bubbles, of course, don’t keep.

  THURSDAY, MAY 18

  V

  THE MILLION-DOLLAR BULLET

  CHAPTER 56

  YOU’VE GOT A TAN,” SELLITTO SAID.

  “I don’t have a tan.”

  “You do. You oughta wear sunscreen, Linc.”

  “I don’t have a goddamn tan,” he muttered.

  “I think you do,” Thom added.

  It was nearly 8 a.m. Thom, Pulaski and Rhyme had arrived from LaGuardia airport late, nearly eleven last night, and the aide had insisted that Rhyme get some sleep immediately. The case could wait till this morning.

  There’d been no argument; the criminalist had been exhausted. The dunk in the water had taken its toll. The whole trip had, for that matter. But that didn’t stop Rhyme from summoning Thom the moment he’d awakened at six thirty with the push-button call switch beside the bed. (The aide had called the device very Downton Abbey, a reference Rhyme did not get.)

  The parlor was humming now, with Sellitto, Cooper and Sachs present. And Ron Pulaski—who did seem to have a tan—was just walking through the door. Nance Laurel had a court appearance on one of her other cases and would arrive later.

  Rhyme was in a new wheelchair, a Merits Vision Select. Gray with red fenders. It had been delivered and assembled yesterday, before Rhyme’s return from the Bahamas. Thom had called their insurance company from Nassau and negotiated a speedy purchase. (“They didn’t know what to say,” the aide reported, “when I gave the reason for the loss as ‘immersion in ten feet of water.’”)

  Rhyme had picked this particular model because it was known for off-road navigation. His old reticence to be in public had disappeared—largely because of his trip to the Bahamas. He wanted more travel and he wanted to work scenes himself again. That required a chair that would get him to as many places as possible.

  The Merits had been pimped out a bit to make allowances for Rhyme’s particular condition—such as the strap for his immobile left arm, a touchpad under his working left ring finger and, of course, a cup holder, big enough for both whiskey tumbler and coffee mug. He was now enjoying the latter beverage through a thick straw. He looked over Sellitto, Sachs and Pulaski, then studied the whiteboard, which contained Sachs’s notations of the investigation in his absence.

  “Time’s a-wasting.” He nodded at the STO order. “Mr. Rashid is going to meet his maker in a day or two if we don’t do something about it. Let’s see what we have.” He now wheeled back and forth in front of the whiteboards containing the analysis of the evidence Sachs had collected at the IED scene at Java Hut and Lydia Foster’s apartment.

  “A blue airplane?” he asked, regarding that notation.

  Sachs explained about what Henry Cross had told her. The private jet that seemed to be dogging Moreno around the United States and Central and South America.

  “I’ve got one of Captain Myers’s Special Services officers searching but they aren’t having much luck. There’s no database of aircraft by color. If it was sold recently, though, brokers might have sales literature with pictures. He’s still checking.”

  “All right. Now, let’s look at what we found in the Bahamas. Number one, the Kill Room.”

  Rhyme explained to Sachs and Cooper how unsub 516 or Barry Shales had ruined the scene at the inn, but he had some things, including the preliminary report that the local police had done, along with the photos, which Sachs now taped up on a separate whiteboard, along with the paltry crime scene report that the RBPF had originally prepared.

  For the next half hour, Sachs and Cooper carefully unpacked and analyzed the shoes and clothing of the three victims who’d been in suite 1200 on the morning of May 9. Each plastic bag was opened over a large sheet of sterile newsprint, and each item of clothing and the shoes were picked over and scraped for trace.

  The shoes of Moreno, his guard and de la Rua produced fibers identical to those in the hotel carpet and dirt that matched samples taken from the sidewalk and grounds in front of the inn. Their clothing contained similar trace as well as elements of recent meals, presumably breakfast; they died before lunch. Cooper found pastry flakes, jam and bits of bacon in the case of Moreno and his guard, and allspice and some indeterminate type of pepper sauce on the reporter’s jacket. Moreno and his guard also had traces of crude oil on their shoes, cuffs and sleeves, probably from their meeting on Monday out of the hotel; there weren’t many refineries in New Providence so maybe they had eaten dinner by the docks. The guard had some trace of cigarette ash on his shirt.

  This information went up on the board and Rhyme noted but didn’t dwell on any of it; after all, their killer had been a mile away when he’d fired the bullet. Unsub 516 had been in the hotel but even if he’d snuck into the Kill Room itself, none of that trace remained.

  He said, “Now. The autopsy report.”

  No surprises here either. Moreno had been killed by a massive gunshot trauma to the chest, and the others by blood loss due to multiple lacerations from the flying glass, of varying sizes, mostly three or four millimeters wide, two to three centimeters long.

  Cooper looked over the cigarette butts and the candy wrapper that Poitier’s original crime scene searchers had found in the Kill Room but these yielded nothing helpful. The butts were the same brand as the pack of Marlboros found on the guard’s body, the candy had come from a gift basket for Moreno when he arrived. The fingerprints that Pulaski had lifted, not surprisingly, were negative for hits in any database.

  “Let’s move on to the prostitute’s apartment. Annette Bodel.”

  Pulaski’d done a good job, collecting plenty of trace from near where the killer had searched, along with samplars to eliminate any that was probably not from him. Cooper examined the items and, occasionally, ran samples through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He finally announced, “First, we’ve got two-stroke fuel.”

  These were smaller engines, two-strokes, like those in snowmobiles and chain saws, in which the lubricating oil is mixed directly with gasoline.

  “Jet Ski maybe,” Rhyme said. “She worked in a dive shop part-time. Might not be from our perp but we’ll keep it in mind.”

  “And sand,” the tech announced. “Along with seawater residue.” He compared the chemical breakdown of these items with what was on the board for two of the prior scenes. “Yep, it’s virtually the same as what Amelia found at Java Hut.”

  Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at this. “Ah, a definitive link between Unsub Five Sixteen and the Bahamas. We know he was in Annette’s apartment and I’m ninety-nine percent sure he was the one in
the South Cove on May eighth. Now, anything linking him to Lydia Foster?”

  Pulaski pointed out, “The brown hair, which is what Corporal Poitier said the man in the South Cove Inn had, the one who was there just before Moreno was killed.”

  “It suggests; it doesn’t prove. Keep going, Mel.”

  The tech was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. “Something odd here. Some membrane, orange. I’ll run part of it through the GC/MS.”

  Some minutes later he had the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.

  Cooper read, “DHA, C22:6n-3—docosahexaenoic acid.”

  “Fish oil,” Rhyme said, looking at the screen on which the microscopic image was being projected. “And with that membrane, see in the upper right corner? I’d say fish eggs: Roe. Or caviar.”

  “Also some C8H8O3,” Cooper said.

  “You’ve got me,” Rhyme muttered.

  The lookup took thirty seconds. “Vanillin.”

  “As in vanilla extract?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thom! Thom, get in here. Where the hell are you?”

  The aide’s voice drifted into the room. “What do you need?”

  “You. Present. Here. In the room.”

  Rolling down his sleeves, the aide joined them. “How could I resist such a polite summons?”

  Sachs laughed.

  Rhyme frowned. “Look over those charts, Thom. Put your culinary skills to work. Tell me what you think about those entries, knowing that the docosahexaenoic acid and the C8H8O3 are, respectively, caviar and vanilla.”

  The aide stood for a moment, looking over the charts. His face shifted into a smile. “Familiar…Hold on a minute.” He went to a nearby computer and pulled up the New York Times. He did some browsing. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he was looking at. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Ah, could you share the interesting part?”

  “The other two scenes—Lydia Foster and the Java Hut—have traces of artichoke and licorice, right?”