Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

“I talked to the driver who took you two around the city on May first. He said you had some general conversations with Mr. Moreno too.”

“That’s right. He was very social.”

Sachs found her heart pounding a bit faster. The woman could be a well of information.

“You and he met how many people on the latest trip?”

“Four, I think. Some nonprofit organizations, run by Russians and some people out of Dubai, and at the Brazilian consulate. He also met somebody by himself. That man he was meeting spoke English and Spanish. He didn’t need me so I waited at Starbucks downstairs in the office building.”

Or maybe he didn’t want you to hear the substance of that meeting.

“I’d like to come over and talk to you.”

“Yes, anything I can do to help. I’m home for the day. I’ll find all my transcripts for the job and organize them.”

“You keep copies of everything?”

“Every word. You’d be surprised how many times clients lose what I send them or don’t back them up.”

Even better.

Just then her phone hummed with an incoming text, marked urgent. “Hold on a second, please,” she told Lydia Foster. And read the message.

Bruns’s phone in use. Voiceprint checks—it’s him. Tracking in real time. He’s in Manhattan at moment. Call Rodney Szarnek.

—Ron

She said, “Ms. Foster, I’ve got to follow up on something but I’ll be there soon.”

CHAPTER 37

RHYME HAD JUST FINISHED HIS KALIK BEER at Hurricane’s restaurant when he heard a voice behind him.

“Hello.”

Mychal Poitier.

The corporal’s blue shirt was Rorschached with sweat and his dark slacks, with the regal red stripe, sandy and dotted with mud. He carried a backpack. He waved to the server and she smiled, surprised when he took a seat with the disabled man from America. She put in an order without asking him what he wanted and brought him a coconut soft drink.

“I am late because, I’m sorry to say, we have found the student. She died in a swimming accident. Excuse me for a moment. I will upload my report.” He took an iPad in a battered leather case from the bag and booted it up. He typed some words and then hit the send button.

“This will buy me a little time with you. I’ll tell them I’m following up on several other issues regarding the loss.” He nodded at the iPad. “Unfortunate situation,” he said and his face was grave. It occurred to Rhyme that Traffic, his first assignment, and then Business Inspections and Licensing had probably not provided much opportunity to experience firsthand the tragedies that fundamentally change law enforcement officers—that either temper or weaken them. “She drowned in an area of water that generally isn’t dangerous but she’d been drinking, it seems. We found rum and Coke in her car. Ah, students. They believe they are immortal.”

“May I see?” Rhyme asked.

Poitier turned the device and Rhyme studied the pictures that slowly slideshowed past. The body of the victim was starkly white from loss of blood, and water-wrinkled. Fish or other creatures had eaten away much of her face and neck. Hard to guess her age. Rhyme couldn’t recall from the poster. He asked.

“Twenty-three.”

“What was she studying?”

“Latin American literature for the semester at Nassau College. And working part time—and, of course, partying.” He sighed. “Apparently to excess. Now, I’ve called her family in America. They’re coming to claim the body.” His voice faded. “I have never made a call like that before. It was very difficult.”

She had a trim figure, athletic, a modest tat on her shoulder—a starburst—and she favored gold jewelry, though a silver necklace of small leaves surrounded her neck, now stripped of skin.

“A shark attack?”

“No, barracuda probably. We rarely get shark attacks here. And the barracuda were just feeding, after she died. They’ll occasionally bite a swimmer but the injuries are minor. She probably got caught in the riptide and drowned. Then the fish went to work.”

Rhyme noted the worst damage was around the neck. Stubby tubes of the carotid were visible through tatters of flesh. Much of the skull was exposed. With his fork Rhyme speared and then ate some more conch.

Then he slid the iPad back to the officer. “I assume, Corporal, that you are not here to arrest us.”

He laughed. “It did occur to me. I was quite angry. But, no, I’ve come here to help you again.”

“Thank you, Corporal. And now in fairness I’ll share with you everything that I know.” And he explained about NIOS, about Metzger, about the sniper.

“Kill Room. What a cold way to put it.”

Now that he knew Poitier was, more or less, on his side, Rhyme told him that Pulaski was waiting to speak to the maid at the South Cove Inn to learn more about the sniper’s reconnaissance mission the day before he shot Moreno.

Poitier grimaced. “An officer from New York is forced to do my job for me. What a state of things, thanks to politics.”

The server brought the food—a hot stew of vegetables and shreds of dark meat, chicken or goat, Rhyme guessed. Some fried bread too. Poitier tore a piece off the bread and fed it to the potcake dog. He then pulled his plate toward him, tucked his napkin into his shirt, just where the chain that led to his breast pocket was affixed to a collar button. He keyboarded on the iPad then looked up. “I will eat now and while I eat I can tell Thom about the Bahamas, the history, the culture. If he’d like.”

“I would, yes.”

Poitier pushed the iPad close to Rhyme. “And you, Captain, might wish to look at some pictures in the photo gallery of our beautiful scenery here.”

As the corporal turned to Thom and they struck up a conversation Rhyme began scrolling through the gallery.

A picture of the Poitier family, presumably, at the beach. A lovely wife and laughing children. Then they were at a barbecue with a dozen other people.

A picture of the sunset.

A picture of a grade school music recital.

A picture of the first page of the Robert Moreno homicide report.

Like a spy, Poitier had photographed it with the camera in the iPad.

Rhyme looked up at the corporal but the cop ignored him, continuing to share with Thom the history of the colony, and with the potcake dog more lunch.

First, there was an itinerary of Moreno’s last days on earth, as the corporal could piece it together.

The man and his guard, Simon Flores, had arrived in Nassau late Sunday, May 7. They had spent Monday out of the inn, presumably at meetings; Moreno did not seem like the sort to swim with the dolphins or go Jet Skiing. The next day beginning at nine he had several other visitors. Shortly after they left, about ten thirty, the reporter Eduardo de la Rua arrived. The shooting was around eleven fifteen.

Poitier had identified and interviewed Moreno’s other visitors. They were local businessmen involved in agriculture and transport companies. Moreno planned to form a joint venture with them when he opened the Bahamian branch of his Local Empowerment Movement. They were legitimate and had been respected members of the Nassau business community for years.

No witnesses reported that Moreno had been under surveillance or that anyone had shown any unusual interest in him—other than the phone call before he arrived and the brown-haired American.

Then Rhyme turned to the pages of the scene itself. He was disappointed. The RBPF crime scene team had found forty-seven fingerprints—other than the victims’—but had analyzed only half of them. Of those identified, all were attributed to the hotel staff. A note reported that the remaining lifted prints were missing.

Little effort had been made to collect trace from the victims themselves. Generally, in a sniper killing, such information about the spot where the victim is shot wouldn’t be that helpful, of course, since the shooter was a distance away. In this case, though, the sniper had been in the hotel, albeit a day earlier, and might even have snuck into the Kill Room to see about vista and shooting angles. He could easily have left some trace, even if he didn’t leave any prints. But virtually no trace had been collected from the room, only some candy wrappers and a few cigarette butts beside an ashtray near the guard’s body.