Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

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 connection.”

“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 scanned the boards again. The goddamn boards…

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 connections that traditional investigation might not. Rhyme was only mildly disappointed with the negative results. He hadn’t expected much; government agents at that level—especially snipers—surely would swap out their covers frequently, use cash for most purchases and stay off the grid as much as possible.

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.

Sachs’s expression, however, suggested that of a put-upon secretary.

Thom’s voice: “Can I get you—?”

“No,” Rhyme snapped.

“Well, since the question was directed toward Amelia,” the aide fired back, “why don’t we let her answer? Can I get you anything to eat, drink?”

“No, thanks, Thom.”

Which gave Rhyme a certain sense of petty satisfaction. He declined Thom’s offer too. And he returned to brooding.

Sachs took a phone call. Rhyme heard music tinning from her phone and knew who the caller was. She hit speaker.

“What do you have for us, Rodney?” Rhyme called.

“Lincoln, hi. Moving slowly but I’ve traced the whistleblower’s email from Romania to Sweden.”

Rhyme looked at the time. The hour was early morning in Stockholm. He supposed the body clock of geeks operated on its own time.

The Computer Crimes Unit cop said, “I actually know the guy operating the proxy service. We had a running argument about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a year or so ago and we played hack against each other for a while. He’s good. Not as good as me, though. Anyway, I charmed him into helping us, as long as he doesn’t have to testify.”

Despite his sour mood at the moment Rhyme had to laugh. “The good old boy network is alive and well—literally, a network .”

Szarnek may have laughed too, though it was hard to tell because of the music that filled in the gaps between his words.

“Now, he knows for sure that the email originated in the New York area and that no government servers were involved in any of the routing. They were sent from a commercial Wi-Fi. The whistleblower might’ve bootlegged somebody’s account or used free Wi-Fi at some coffee shop or hotel.”

“How many locations?” Sachs asked.

“There are about seven million unprotected accounts in the New York area. Give or take.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, but I’ve managed to eliminate one.”

“Only one? Which?”

“Mine.” He laughed at his own joke. “But don’t worry, we can shrink the number down pretty fast. There’s some code we have to break but I’m borrowing supercomputer time at Columbia. I’ll let you know ASAP if I find something.”

They thanked the cop. He returned to his awful music and beloved boxes, Sachs to her angry keyboarding and Rhyme to the anemic whiteboards.

His own mobile rang and he gripped the unit, noting that the area code was 242.

Well, this is interesting, he thought and answered the call.