Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

He characterized it as random and lazy (all the irregular constructions), confusing and inelegant. It turned out that his real objection was a bit different. “And it’s rammed down the throats of people throughout the world, like it or not. Just another way to make other nations dependent on the U.S.”

But Mr. Moreno had been opinionated about a lot of things. Once he’d started lecturing about politics, you couldn’t dislodge him. She found herself steering away from those subjects.

She’d have to tell the detective that Mr. Moreno had seemed concerned for his safety. He’d looked around quite a bit as they’d driven through the city and walked to their meetings. Once, they’d left one meeting and were on their way to another when Mr. Moreno had stopped suddenly.

“That man? Haven’t we seen him before, outside the other office? Is he following us?” The person he noted was a young, somber-faced white guy, looking through a magazine. That alone struck Lydia as odd, something out of an old-time detective film, where a PI pretends to read a newspaper on the street while spying on a suspect. Nobody lounges on the streets of New York, browsing through reading material; they check iPhones or BlackBerrys.

Lydia would be sure to tell the police officer about the incident; maybe that man had something to do with Mr. Moreno’s death.

Digging through Redweld folders, she assembled her notes from the assignments she’d had with Mr. Moreno over the past few months. She’d saved everything. As an interpreter, she worked with the police and court system from time to time. She had gotten into the habit of being very conscientious about retaining all her files in such cases because a mistaken phrasing of a detective’s question or a suspect’s answer could easily result in an innocent man being convicted or a guilty one going free. This diligence carried over into her commercial interpreting assignments too.

The police would get nearly a thousand pages of translated material by and about the late Mr. Moreno.

The intercom buzzer rang and she answered. “Yes?”

“Ms. Foster, I’m with the NYPD,” a male voice said. “Detective Sachs spoke to you earlier? She’s been delayed and asked me to come by and ask you a few questions about Robert Moreno.”

“Sure, come on up. Twelve B.”

“Thank you.”

A few minutes later a knock on the door. She looked out through the peephole, to see a pleasant-looking man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He was holding up a leather wallet containing a gold badge.

“Come on in,” she said, unbolting and unchaining.

He nodded a greeting and stepped inside.

As soon as she closed the door she noted that there was something wrong with his hands. They were wrinkled. No, he was wearing flesh-colored gloves.

She frowned. “Wait—”

Before she could scream he struck her hard in the throat with an open hand.

Gurgling, crying, she dropped to the floor.

CHAPTER 40

HE SOMETIMES WONDERED ABOUT PEOPLE, Jacob Swann did.

Either you were conscientious or you weren’t. Either you scrubbed every bit of scorch off your copper-bottomed, stainless-steel sauté pan or you didn’t. Either you went the distance with the soufflé, and saw it rise five inches over the top of the ramekin, or you said to hell with it and for dessert served Häagen-Dazs, spelled in faux Scandinavian but made in the U.S. of A.

Standing over a crumpled, gasping Lydia Foster, he was thinking of Amelia Sachs.

She’d been smart enough to destroy her cell phone (and it was destroyed, not simply castrated, his tech people had learned). But then she’d made the mistake of calling Detective Sellitto back from a pay phone only about twenty-five feet from Java Hut. By the time she called, those same tech gurus at headquarters had rammed a tap on this phone—and several others nearby.

(While of course officially claiming they didn’t know how to do it and, even if they had known, never would.)

Sometimes your Miele oven conks out—just before you’re ready to slip the lamb roast in, natch—and you have to improvise.

Sure enough, Sachs had delivered to Lon Sellitto—and inadvertently to Jacob Swann—the vitals about Lydia Foster.

He now moved through the apartment quietly, verifying that they were alone. He probably didn’t have a lot of time. Sachs had said she’d be delayed but presumably she’d call or arrive soon. Should he wait for her? He’d have to consider that. She might not show up alone, of course. There was that and while he did have a pistol, shooting, as opposed to cutting, was the sloppiest (and least enjoyable) way of solving problems.

But if Sachs was alone? Several options presented themselves.

Slipping the knife away, he now returned to the interpreter, grabbed her by the hair and collar of her blouse and dumped her in a heavy dining room chair. He tied her to this with lamp wire, cut with a cheap utility knife he carried— not the Kai Shun, of course. He never even used the blade to slice string for tying beef roulade, one of his favorite recipes.

Tears streamed down her face and, gasping from the throat-punch, Lydia Foster shivered and kicked.

Jacob Swann reached into his breast pocket and removed his Kai Shun from the wooden scabbard. Her reaction, the terror, didn’t deepen. We are dismayed only by the unexpected. She would have seen this coming.

My little butcher man…

He crouched beside her as she sat making ungodly sounds and shaking madly.

“Be still,” he whispered into her ear.

He thought of the Bahamas, yesterday, of Annette uhn-uhn-uhn ing in a clearing near the beach, surrounded by silver palm and buttonwood trees strangling to death from orange love vines.

The interpreter didn’t comply exactly but she calmed enough.

“I have a few questions. I’m going to need all the material about your assignments for Robert Moreno. What you talked about. And who you met. But first of all, how many officers have you talked to about Robert Moreno?” He was concerned that somebody had called her after Amelia Sachs.

She shook her head.

Jacob Swann rested his left hand on the back of hers, tied tightly down. “That’s not a number. How many officers?”

She made more bizarre sounds and then, when he brushed the knife against her fingers, she whispered, “No one.”

She glanced toward the door. It meant she believed she could save herself if she stalled, to give the police time to arrive.

Jacob Swann curled the fingers of his left hand and rested the side of the Kai Shun blade, pounded with indentations, against his knuckles. The razor edge lowered to her middle and ring fingers. This was the way all serious chefs wielded their knives when they sliced food, fingertips of the guide hand curved below and away from the dangerous blade. You had to be very careful when you cut. He’d sliced through his own fingertips on several occasions. The pain was indescribable; fingers contain more nerve endings than any other part of the body.

He whispered, “Now, I’m going to ask you once more.”

CHAPTER 41

THE DRIVE TO THE SNIPER’S NEST on the outcropping of land near the South Cove Inn took considerably longer than it otherwise might have.

Mychal Poitier gave Thom a complicated route to get to the main highway that led them to their destination—SW Road. The point of this evasion was to see if the gold Mercury was following them. Poitier assured him that the car did not contain officers of the Royal Bahamas Police Force conducting surveillance. The tail might have to do with Moreno or something else entirely. A well-dressed and vulnerable American in a wheelchair might simply have aroused the interest of thieves.

Rhyme called Pulaski, who was still at the inn, and told him where they’d be. The young officer continued to wait for the maid who might have more information about the sniper’s intelligence gathering at the inn the day before the shooting.