Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

“Torture?” she asked in a whisper.

“Sliced the skin off her fingers. Slow.”

Jesus…

“How did he get in?”

“Some reason, she let him in. No signs of break-in.”

Dismayed, Sachs now understood. The unsub had tapped a line—probably the landline she’d used near Java Hut—and learned about the interpreter. He’d fronted he was a cop, flashing a fake badge, saying he worked with Sachs; he’d know her name by now.

That conversation between Sachs and Sellitto was Lydia Foster’s own personal Special Task Order.

She felt a burst of breathtaking anger toward the killer. What he’d done to Lydia—the pain he’d inflicted—had been unnecessary. To get information from a civilian you needed only to threaten. Physical torture was always pointless.

Unless you enjoyed it.

Unless you got pleasure in wielding a knife, slicing precisely, skillfully.

“Why’d you get the call?” she asked.

“Fucker cut her so much, she bled through the ceiling. Neighbors downstairs saw blood on the wall. Called nine one one.” The detective continued, “The place was ransacked. I don’t know what he was looking for but he went through everything she had. There wasn’t a single drawer untouched. No computer or cell phone either. He took it all.”

The files on the Moreno interpreting assignment, probably already shredded or burned.

“CS on the way?”

“I called a team from Queens. They’ll be here any minute.”

Sachs had a set of basic crime scene gear in the trunk of the Torino. She returned to the vehicle and began to pull on the powder-blue overalls and booties and shower cap. She’d get started now. Every minute that passed degraded evidence.

And every minute that passed let the monster who’d done this get farther and farther away.

* * *

WALKING THE GRID.

Garbed like a surgeon, Amelia Sachs was moving through Lydia Foster’s apartment in the classic crime scene search pattern, the grid: one pace at a time from wall to wall, turn, step aside slightly and return. And when that was done you covered the same ground in the same way, only perpendicular to your earlier search.

This was the most time-consuming method of searching a scene but also the most thorough. This was how Rhyme had searched his scenes and it was the way he insisted those working for him did too.

The search is perhaps the most important part of a crime scene investigation. Photos and videos and sketches are important. Entrance and exit routes, locations of shell casings, fingerprints, smears of semen, blood spatter. But finding crucial trace is what crime scene work is all about. Merci, M. Locard. When you walk the grid you need to open up your whole body to the place, smelling, listening, touching and, of course, looking. Scanning relentlessly.

This is what Amelia Sachs now did.

She didn’t think she was a natural at forensic analysis. She was no scientist. Her mind didn’t make those breathtaking deductions that came so quickly to Rhyme. But one thing that did work to her advantage was her empathy.

When they’d first started working together, Rhyme had apparently spotted within her a skill he himself did not have: the ability to get into the mind of the perpetrator. When she walked the grid she found she was actually able to mentally become the killer or rapist or kidnapper or thief. This could be a harrowing, exhausting endeavor. But when it worked, the process meant she would think of places in the scene to examine that a typical searcher might not, hiding places, improbable entrance and escape routes, vantage points.

It was there that she would discover evidence that would otherwise have remained hidden forever.

The techs from Crime Scene in Queens arrived. But, as before, she was handling the preliminary work alone. You’d think more people made for a better search but that was true only in an expansive area like those involving mass shootings. In a typical scene a single searcher is less distracted—and is also aware that there’s no one else to catch what he misses, so he concentrates that much harder.

And one truth about crime scene work: You’ve only got one chance to find the critical clue; you can’t go back and try again.

As she walked through the apartment where Lydia Foster’s corpse sat, head back and bloody, tied to a chair, Sachs felt an urge to speak to Rhyme to tell him what she was seeing and smelling and thinking. And once again, as when walking the grid at Java Hut, the emptiness at being unable to hear his voice chilled her heart. Rhyme was only a thousand miles away but she felt as if he’d ceased to exist.

Involuntarily she thought again of the surgery scheduled for later in the month. Didn’t want to consider it, but couldn’t help herself.

What if he didn’t survive?

Both Sachs and Rhyme lived on the edge—her lifestyle of speed and danger, his physical condition. Possibly, probably , this element of risk made life together more intense, their connection closer. And she accepted this most of the time. But now, with him away and her searching a particularly difficult scene involving a perp all too aware of her, she couldn’t help but think that they were always just a gunshot or heartbeat away from being alone forever.

Forget this, Sachs thought harshly. Possibly said it aloud. She didn’t know. Get to work.

She found, though, that her empathy wasn’t kicking in, not on this scene. As she moved through the rooms, she felt blocked. Maybe like a writer or artist who couldn’t quite channel a muse. The ideas wouldn’t come. For one thing, she didn’t know who the hell the killer was. The latest information was confusing. The man who’d done this wasn’t the sniper, but, most likely, another of Metzger’s specialists. Yet who?

The other reason she wasn’t connecting was that she didn’t understand the unsub’s motive. If he wanted to eliminate witnesses and hamper the investigation, then why the horrific torture, the precise knife cuts? The slashes where he flayed off skin, leisurely, it seemed? Sachs found herself distracted as she stared at the strips of flesh on the floor below the chair where Lydia was tied. The blood.

What did he want?

Maybe if Rhyme had been speaking into her ear, working the scene with her via radio or video, it might be different, insights might leap out.

But he wasn’t, and the killer’s psyche eluded her.

The search itself didn’t take long. Whatever his motive, Lydia Foster’s killer had been careful—wearing rubber gloves. She could tell this from the wrinkles in some of the blood smears, where he’d touched her body while slicing her skin. He’d been careful to avoid stepping in the blood and so there were no obvious shoe prints, and an electrostatic wand sweep of the non-carpeted floor revealed no latents. She collected trace, a few receipts and Post-it notes, stuffed into the pockets of jeans hung on the bathroom door. But this was all the documentary evidence Sachs could track down. She processed the body, noting again the appalling wounds, small but precise, as the unsub had flayed the skin from the woman’s fingers. The single, fatal stab wound through the chest. There seemed to be bruises around the site of the incision, as if he had firmly palpated her flesh to find an entrance to her heart free of bones.

Why was that?

Sachs then radioed down to her colleagues to let them know they could come upstairs for the videos and stills.

At the door she paused, glancing back for one last look at Lydia Foster’s body.

I’m sorry, Lydia. I didn’t think!

I should have considered that he’d tap the landlines near Java Hut. I should have thought there might be two perps.

Sachs had another thought too: She regretted being too late to get the information that the woman would have provided. The details the interpreter had known and the records she had were clearly crucial. Otherwise, why interrogate her?