Jeffery Deaver: The Kill Room

CHAPTER 4

HE WAS DISTRACTED MOMENTARILY by the smell of grilling fish, with lime and plantain, he believed. Something else, a spice. He couldn’t quite place it.

Sniffing the air again. What could it be?

Compact, with crew-cut brown hair, he resumed his casual stroll along the broken sidewalk—and dirt path, where the concrete slabs were missing altogether. He billowed out his dark suit jacket to vent the heat and reflected he was glad he hadn’t worn a tie. He paused again beside a weed-filled lot. The street of low shops and pastel houses in need of more pastel paint was deserted now, late morning. No people, though two lazy potcake dogs were lounging in the shade.

Then she emerged.

She was leaving the Deep Fun Dive Shop and walking in the direction of West Bay, a Gabriel Márquez novel in her hand.

Tan and sun-blond, the young woman had a tangle of hair, with a single narrow beaded braid from temple to breast. Her figure was an hourglass but a slim hourglass. She wore a yellow-and-red bikini and a translucent orange wrap around her waist, teasing. It fell to her ankles. She was limber and energetic and her smile could be mischievous.

As it now was.

“Well, look who it is,” she said and stopped beside him.

This was a quiet area some distance away from downtown Nassau. Sleepily commercial. The dogs watched lethargically, ears flopped downward like place-marked pages in a book.

“Hey there.” Jacob Swann removed his Maui Jims and wiped his face. Put the sunglasses back on. Wished he’d brought sunscreen. This trip to the Bahamas hadn’t been planned.

“Hm. Maybe my phone’s not working,” Annette said wryly.

“Probably is,” Swann offered with a grimace. “I know. I said I’d call. Guilty.”

But the offense was a misdemeanor at worst; Annette was a woman whose companionship he’d paid for, so her coy remark wasn’t as cutting as it might have been under different circumstances.

On the other hand, that night last week had been more than john–escort. She’d charged him for only two hours but had given him the entire night. The evening hadn’t been Pretty Woman , of course, but they’d each enjoyed the time.

The hours of their transaction had fled quickly, the soft humid breeze drifting in and out of the window, the sound of the ocean metrically intruding on the stillness. He’d asked if she’d stay and Annette had agreed. His motel room had a kitchenette and Jacob Swann had cooked a late supper. After arriving in Nassau he’d bought groceries, including goat, onion, coconut milk, oil, rice, hot sauce and local spices. He’d expertly separated meat from bone, sliced it into bite-sized pieces and marinated the flesh in buttermilk. By 11 p.m., the stew had simmered over a low flame for six hours and was ready. They’d eaten the food and drunk a substantial red Rhône wine.

Then they’d returned to bed.

“How’s business?” he now asked, nodding back to the shop to make clear which business he was talking about, though the part-time job at Deep Fun was also a feeder for clients who paid her a lot more than for snorkel rental. (The irony of the shop’s name was not lost on either of them.)

Annette shrugged her gorgeous shoulders. “Not bad. Economy’s taken its toll. But rich people still want to bond with coral and fish.”

The overgrown lot was decorated with bald tires and discarded concrete blocks, a few dented and rusted appliance shells, the guts long scavenged. The day was growing hotter by the second. Everywhere was glare and dust, empty cans, bushes in need of trimming, rampant grass. The smells: grilling fish, lime, plantains and trash fire smoke.

And that spice. What was it?

“I didn’t remember I’d told you where I work.” A nod at the shop.

“Yes, you did.” He rubbed his hair. His round skull, dotted with sweat. Lifted his jacket again. The air felt good.

“Aren’t you hot?”

“Had a breakfast meeting. Needed to look official. I’m just back for the day. Don’t know what your schedule is…”

“Tonight?” Annette suggested. And encouraged.

“Ah, I’ve got another meeting.” Jacob Swann’s face was not expressive. He simply looked into her eyes as he said this. No wince of regret, no boyish flirt. “I was hoping now.” He imagined they were hungry eyes; that’s how he felt.

“What was that wine?”

“That I served with dinner? Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I don’t remember which vineyard.”

“It was scrumptious.”

Not a word Jacob Swann used much—well, ever—but he decided, yes, it was. And so was she. The ropey straps of the bikini bottoms dangled down, ready to be tugged. Her flip-flops revealed blue nails and she wore gold rings on both her big toes. They matched the hoops in her ears. A complicated assembly of gold bracelets as well.

Annette sized him up too and would be recalling his naked physique, muscular, thin waist, powerful chest and arms. Rippled. He worked hard at that.

She said, “I had plans but…”

The sentence ended in a new smile.

As they walked to his car she took his arm. He escorted her to the passenger side. Once inside she gave him directions to her apartment. He started the engine but before he put the car in gear he stopped. “Oh, I forgot. Maybe I didn’t call but I brought you a present.”

“No!” She keened with pleasure. “What?”

He extracted a box from the backpack he used as an attaché case, sitting in the backseat. “You like jewelry, don’t you?”

“What girl doesn’t?” Annette asked.

As she opened it he said, “It’s not instead of your fee, you know. It’s in addition.”

“Oh, please,” she said with a dismissing smile. Then concentrated on opening the small narrow box. Swann looked around the street. Empty still. He judged angles, drew back his left hand—open, thumb and index finger wide and stiff—and struck her hard in the throat in a very particular way.

She gasped, eyes wide. Rearing back and gripping her damaged neck.

“Uhn, uhn, uhn…”

The blow was a tricky one to deliver. You had to hit gently enough so you didn’t crush the windpipe completely—he needed her to be able to speak—but hard enough to make it impossible to scream.

Her eyes stared at him. Maybe she was trying to say his name—well, the cover name he’d given her last week. Swann had three U.S. passports and two Canadian, and credit cards in five different names. He frankly couldn’t recall the last time he’d used “Jacob Swann” with somebody he hadn’t known well.

He looked back evenly at her and then turned to pull the duct tape from his backpack.

Swann put on flesh-toned latex gloves and ripped a strip of tape off the roll. He paused. That was it. The spice the nearby cook had added to the fish.

Coriander.

How had he missed it?

CHAPTER 5

THE VICTIM WAS ROBERT MORENO,” Laurel told them. “Thirty-eight years old.”

“Moreno—sounds familiar,” Sachs said.

“Made the news, Detective,” Captain Bill Myers offered. “Front page.”

Sellitto asked, “Wait, the Anti-American American? What some headline called him, I think.”

“Right,” the captain said. Then editorialized bitterly: “Prick.”

No jargon there.

Rhyme noted that Laurel didn’t seem to like this comment. Also, she seemed impatient, as if she had no time for deflective banter. He remembered that she wanted to move quickly—and the reason was now clear: Presumably once NIOS found out about the investigation they’d take steps to stop the case in its tracks—legally and, perhaps, otherwise.

Well, Rhyme was impatient too. He wanted intriguing.

Laurel displayed a picture of a handsome man in a white shirt, sitting before a radio microphone. He had round features, thinning hair. The ADA told them, “A recent picture in his radio studio in Caracas. He held a U.S. passport but was an expatriate, living in Venezuela. On May ninth, he was in the Bahamas on business when the sniper shot him in his hotel room. Two others were killed, as well—Moreno’s guard and a reporter interviewing him. The bodyguard was Brazilian, living in Venezuela. The reporter was Puerto Rican, living in Argentina.”