Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

He knew that there was something off about Shreve Metzger—the temper, those moments when control left him, the intel reports that just didn’t seem right, the lectures about the sanctity of America. Hell, when he started a pro-U.S. tirade he sounded an awful lot like the flip side of Robert Moreno.

Only nobody pumped a .420 boattail into the NIOS director.

And to order in a specialist for clean-up, to set IEDs and kill witnesses.

Torture …

Suddenly, sitting in this grim place, wafting of urine and disinfectant, Barry Shales realized he was overwhelmed. Years of hidden guilt were flooding in to drown him, the ghosts of the men and women in the infamous queue, people he’d killed, were swimming toward him now, to drag him under the surface of the inky blood tide. Years of being someone else—Don Bruns, Samuel McCoy, Billy Dodd…Occasionally, at the store or in a movie theater lobby, when Marg called his real name, he hesitated, not sure who she was talking to.

Just give up Metzger, he told himself. There was plenty of information on his Don Bruns phone to put the NIOS head away for a long time—if it turned out he’d played with the evidence and hired a specialist to eliminate witnesses here. He could give Laurel the encryption code and the backup keyfile and the other phones and documents he’d kept.

A memory of the lawyer came back. He didn’t like the man one bit. Rothstein had been retained by a firm in Washington, it seemed. But he wouldn’t say which one. When they’d met after Laurel had left, the attorney had suddenly grown distracted, taking and sending several text messages as he explained to Shales how the case was going to proceed. It seemed that his attitude had changed: as if whatever he said or did, Shales was fucked.

It was odd that the man hadn’t known much about Shreve Metzger, though he was very familiar with NIOS. Rothstein seemed to spend more time in Washington than here. His advice at this point had been simple: Don’t say a word to anybody about anything. They would try to make him cave, Nance Laurel was a duplicitous bitch, you know duplicitous, you know what I mean, Barry. Oh, don’t trust a thing she says.

Shales had explained that Metzger may have done some pretty bad things in trying to cover up the case. “Like, I think he might have killed somebody.”

“That’s not our issue.”

“Well, it is,” Shales said. “It’s exactly our issue.”

The lawyer had received another text. He regarded the screen for a long moment. He said he had to go. He’d be in touch soon.

Rothstein had left.

And Barry Shales was brought down here and deposited, alone in the silent, pungent room.

Moments passed, a thousand heartbeats, an eternity, when he heard the door at the far end of the corridor buzz open. Footsteps approached.

Maybe it was a guard to summon him to another meeting. With whom? Rothstein? Or Nance Laurel, who would offer him a solid plea bargain.

In exchange for giving up Shreve Metzger.

Everything told him he should do it. His brain, his heart, his conscience. And think of the torture of living this way: seeing Marg and the boys through a greasy glass window. He’d never see the kids learn sports, never see them on holiday mornings. And they’d grow up enduring the torment and taunting of having a father in prison.

The hopelessness of the situation bore down on him, surrounded him and strangled. He wanted to scream. But the consequences were his own fault. He’d made the decision to join NIOS, to kill people by pushbutton from half a world away.

But ultimately it came down to this: You didn’t give up your fellow soldiers. Right or wrong. Barry Shales sighed. Metzger was safe, at least from him. Cells like this one would be his home for the next twenty or thirty years.

He was preparing to give Nance Laurel the news she didn’t want to hear when the footsteps outside stopped and the door clanked open.

He gave a brief humorless laugh. The visit was not, it seemed, about him at all. A solid African American guard was delivering another prisoner, who was even larger than the turnkey, a huge man, unclean, hair slicked back. Even from across the room the man’s body odor spread out like ripples on a calm pond.

The man looked Shales over with a narrow gaze and then turned to watch the guard glance at them both, close the cell door and walk off down the hall. The new prisoner hawked and spit on the floor.

The drone pilot rose and moved to the far corner of the cell.

The other prisoner remained where he was, head turned away. Yet the airman had the sense that he was aware of every move of Shales’s hands or feet, every shift on the bench, every breath that he took.

My new home…

CHAPTER 81

YOU’RE SURE?” LAUREL ASKED.

“Yes,” Rhyme said, “Barry Shales is innocent. He and Metzger weren’t responsible for de la Rua’s death.”

Laurel was frowning.

The criminalist said, “I…there was something I didn’t see.”

“Rhyme, what?” Sachs asked.

He was watching Nance Laurel’s face grow still once more; this was how she responded to pain. Her prized case was again dissolving before her eyes.

Nothing’s going to stop me now…

Sellitto said, “Talk to me, Linc. The fuck’s going on?”

Mel Cooper remained silent and curious.

Rhyme explained, “Look at the wounds.” He expanded the autopsy picture, focusing in on the lacerations on the journalist’s face and neck.

He then moved another photo next to it: the crime scene itself. De la Rua lay on his back, blood streaming from the same cuts. He was covered with shards of glass. But none of them was actually sticking into a wound.

“Why wasn’t I thinking?” Rhyme muttered. “Look at the measurements of the lacerations on the autopsy report. Look at them! The wounds’re just a few millimeters wide. A glass shard would be much thicker than that. And how could they all be so uniform? I saw them but I didn’t see them.”

“He was stabbed to death,” Sellitto said, nodding.

“Has to be,” Rhyme said. “A knife blade is one to three millimeters in width, two to three centimeters in depth.”

Sachs: “And the killer tossed some glass onto de la Rua’s body to make it look like he was killed accidentally as collateral damage.”

Sipping his sweet coffee, Sellitto muttered, “Pretty fucking smart. And he killed the guard too, the same way. Because he’d be a witness. But who did it?”

Rhyme said, “Obviously. Five Sixteen. We know he was near suite twelve hundred around the time of the drone strike. And remember that a knife’s his weapon of choice.”

Sachs said, “Well, we also know something else: Five Sixteen’s a specialist. He wasn’t doing this for the fun of it. He’s working for somebody—somebody who wanted the reporter dead.”

Rhyme said, “Right, his boss is the one we want.” His eyes were on the chart once more. “But who the hell is he?”

“Metzger,” Pulaski said.

“Maybe,” Rhyme said slowly.

Laurel said, “Whoever it was knew Moreno was going to be in the Bahamas and that an STO was going to be executed. And when.”

“Rookie, you get on the motive issue. You’re our Argentinian reporter maven. Who wanted him dead?”

Pulaski asked, “Find out what stories he was working on, controversial ones?”

“Well, yes, of course. And feathers he’d ruffled. But I also want to know his personal life—people he knew, investments he’d made, family, vacation places he went to, real estate he owned.”

“You mean everything? Like who he was sleeping with?”

Rhyme muttered, “I’ll let you get away with a preposition at the end of that sentence but I won’t allow the improper pronoun.”