The Kill Room

Yes, she certainly wanted her partner to feel good about himself. But didn’t he know the truth – that he, like everyone else, was mind and heart first, before he was body? That our physical incarnations always disappoint in one way or another? So he got stared at on the street. He wasn’t the only one; when she  was perused, it was usually by an observer who was a lot creepier than in his case.

She thought now of those days as a fashion model, marginalized because of her good looks and height and flowing red hair. She’d grown angry – even hurt – at being treated like nothing more than a pricey collectible. She’d risked the wrath of her mother to leave the profession and join the NYPD, following in her father’s footsteps.

What you believed, what you knew, how you made choices, when you stood your ground…those were the qualities that defined you as a cop. Not what you looked like.

Of course, Lincoln Rhyme was severely disabled. Who in his condition wouldn’t want to be better, to grasp with both hands, to walk? But she sometimes wondered if he was undergoing the risky surgery not for himself but for her. This was a topic that had rarely come up and when it did, their words glanced off the subject like bullets on flat rock. But the understood meaning was clear: What the hell are you hanging around with a crip for, Sachs? You can do better than me.

For one thing, “doing better” suggested she was in the market for Mr. Perfect, which was simply not the case and never had been. She’d been in only one other serious relationship – with another cop – and it had ended disastrously (though Nick was finally out of prison). She’d dated some, usually to fill time, until she realized that the boredom of being with someone is exponentially worse than the boredom of solitude.

She was content with her independence and, if Rhyme weren’t in the picture, she’d be comfortable on her own – forever, if no one else came along.

Do what you want, she thought. Have the surgery or not. But do it for yourself. Whatever the decision, I’ll be there.

She watched him for a few moments more, a faint smile on her face. Then the smile faded and she walked to the parlor to meet the Overseer and deliver the news.

Saint Moreno might not be so saintly…

CHAPTER 21

As Sachs jotted on the whiteboards the information she’d learned on the drive with Tash Farada, Nance Laurel turned her chair toward the detective.

She’d been digesting what Sachs had told her. “An escort?” the prosecutor asked. “You’re sure?”

“No. It’s a possibility, though. I’ve called Lon. He’s got some of Myers’s portables canvassing to see if they can find her.”

“A call girl.” Laurel sounded perplexed.

Sachs would have thought she’d be more dismayed. Learning that a hooker had accompanied your married victim around New York wasn’t going to win the jury’s sympathy.

She was even more surprised when the ADA said offhandedly, “Well, men stray. It can be finessed.”

Maybe by “finesse” she meant she’d try for a largely male jury, who would presumably be less critical of Moreno’s infidelity.

If you’re asking if I pick cases I think I can win, Detective Sachs, then the answer’s yes…

Sachs continued, “In any case, it’s good for us: They might not have spent the entire time in bed. Maybe he took her to meet a friend, maybe she saw somebody from NIOS tailing them. And if she is a pro we’ll have leverage to get her to talk. She won’t want her life looked into too closely.” She added, “And it might be that she’s not an escort but is involved in something else, maybe something criminal.”

“Because of the money.” Laurel nodded at the whiteboard.

“Exactly. I was thinking possibly a terrorist co

“Moreno wasn’t a terrorist. We’ve established that.”

Sachs thought, You’ve  established that. The facts haven’t. “But still…” She nodded at the board too. “Never coming back to the U.S., the bank transfers, vanishing into thin air…A reference to ‘blowing up’ something in Mexico City.”

“It could mean a lot of things. Construction work, demolition, for one of his Local Empowerment Movement companies, for instance.” Still, the implications of the discoveries seemed to bother her. “Did the driver notice any surveillance?”

Sachs explained what Farada had said about Moreno’s looking around, uneasy.

Laurel asked, “Does he know if Moreno saw anything specific?”

“No.”

Nance Laurel scooted her chair forward and stared at the evidence board, her pose oddly parallel to Rhyme’s when he parked his Storm Arrow in front of the charts.

“And nothing about Moreno’s charitable work, anything that cast him in a favorable light?”

“The driver said he was a gentleman. And he tipped well.”

This didn’t seem to be exactly what Laurel was looking for. “I see.” She glanced at her watch. The time was getting close to 11 p.m. She frowned as if she expected the time to be hours earlier. For a moment Sachs actually believed that the woman was considering camping out for the night. But she began to organize all the piles of papers on her table, saying, “I’m going home now.” A glance at Sachs. “I know it’s late but if you could just write up your notes and what Agent Dellray found, then send them–”

“To you, on the secure server.”

“If you could.”

Wheeling back and forth in front of the sparse whiteboards and listening to the staccato, insistent typing of Amelia Sachs at the keyboard of her computer.

She didn’t seem happy.

Lincoln Rhyme certainly wasn’t. He sca

The case was nothing but hearsay, ambiguous and speculative.

Soft.

Not a single bit of evidence collected, evidence analyzed, evidence rendered into deduction. Rhyme sighed in frustration.

A hundred years ago the French criminalist Edmond Locard said that at every crime scene a transfer occurs between the perpetrator and the scene or the perp and the victim. It might be virtually impossible to see, but it was absolutely there to find…if you knew how to look and if you were patient and diligent.

Nowhere was Locard’s Principle more true than in a homicide like Moreno’s. A shooting always leaves a wealth of clues: slugs, spent cartridges, friction ridge prints, gunshot residue, footprints, trace materials at the sniper’s nest…

He knew  clues existed – but they remained out of reach. Infuriating. And with every passing day, hell, every hour , they grew less valuable as they degraded, were contaminated and possibly were stolen.

Rhyme had been looking forward to analyzing the recovered evidence himself with his own hand, probing, examining…touching . An intense pleasure that had been denied him for so many hard years.

But that possibility was looking more and more unlikely, as time passed with no word from the Bahamas.

An officer from Information Services called and reported that while there were many database hits for “Don Bruns” or “Donald Bruns,” none was ranked as significant by IS’s Obscure Relationship Algorithm system. ORA takes disparate information, like names, addresses, organizations and activities, and uses supercomputers to find co

He now glanced toward Sachs, her eyes fixed on her notebook as she typed a memo for Laurel. She was fast and accurate. Whatever afflicted her hip and knee had spared her fingers. She never seemed to hit backspace for corrections. He recalled when he started in policing, years ago, women officers never admitted they could type, for fear of being marginalized and treated like administrative assistants. Now that had changed; those who keyboarded faster could get information faster and were therefore more efficient investigators.