Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

Which Metzger had dutifully done.

In a soft voice, a controlled voice, the NIOS director said, “You understand I’m not saying anything to you.”

Lon Sellitto—the senior law enforcer here—started to reply but Rhyme interrupted with a wry: “Invoking the Supremacy Clause, are we?”

“I don’t owe you any answers.”

Breaking his own vow of silence.

Suddenly Metzger’s hands began shaking. His eyes narrowed and his breathing seemed to come more quickly. This happened in an instant. The transformation was alarming. Fast and certain as a snake leaping from quiescence to fang a mouse.

“You think you can goddamn come in here…” He had to stop speaking. His jaw clenched too stridently.

He’s had emotional issues. Anger primarily…

“Hey, chill a bit, all right?” Sellitto said. “If we wanted to arrest you, Metzger, you’d be arrested. Listen to the man. Jesus.”

Rhyme recalled, with affection, the days when they had been partnered—Sellitto’s, not his own, artificial verb. Their technique wasn’t good cop/bad cop. But rather smooth cop/rough cop.

Metzger calmed. “Then what…?” He reached into his drawer.

Rhyme noted Sachs stiffen slightly, hand dipping toward her weapon. But the NIOS head withdrew only nail clippers. Then he set them down without clipping.

Sellitto deferred to Rhyme with a nod.

“Now, we have a situation that needs to be…resolved. Your organization issued a Special Task Order.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please.” Rhyme lifted an impatient hand. “An STO against a man who appears to have been innocent. But that’s between you, your conscience and—presumably—some rather difficult congressional hearings. That’s not our business. We’re here because we need to find somebody who’s been killing witnesses involved in the Moreno situation. And—”

“If you’re suggesting that NIOS—”

“Called in a specialist?” Sachs said.

Metzger flickered again. He’d have to be wondering, How did they know that term? How did they know any of this? He sputtered, “I did not and never have ordered anyone to do that.”

Spoken in bureaucratic euphemism.

To do that…

Sellitto barked, “Look at your wrists, Metzger. Look. You in cuffs? I don’t see any cuffs. You see any cuffs?”

Rhyme continued, “We know it was somebody else. And that’s why we’re here. We need you to help us find him.”

“Help you?” Metzger replied with a momentary smile. “And why on earth should I help people who are trying to bring down an important department of the government? A department that does vital work keeping citizens safe from our enemies?”

Rhyme offered a sardonic gaze and even the NIOS director seemed to realize the rhetoric was over the top.

“Why should you help?” Rhyme echoed. “Two reasons leap into my mind. First, so you don’t go down for obstruction of justice. You mounted a campaign to stop the investigation. You tracked down Moreno’s citizenship renunciation, presumably pulling strings at the State Department. It’d be interesting to see if you followed proper channels for that. We’re sure you had Barry Shales, NIOS staff and contractors that you do business with destroy evidence of the STO drone program, you dug up dirt on the investigators. You hacked phones, intercepted emails, borrowed signal information from your friends in Langley and Fort Meade.”

Sachs said in a gritty voice, “You stole personal medical records.”

She and Rhyme had discussed how Captain Bill Myers had gotten from her orthopedist the files about her condition. They concluded that somebody at NIOS had hacked the records and sent them to Sachs’s superiors.

Metzger looked down. A silent confirmation.

“And the second reason to help us? You and NIOS got set up—to murder somebody. And we’re the only ones who can help you nail the perp.”

Rhyme had Metzger’s full attention now.

“What are you saying happened?”

Rhyme replied, “I’ve heard some people suggest that you’re using this job to kill whoever you think is unpatriotic or anti-American. I don’t think so. I think you really believed Moreno was a threat—because somebody wanted you to think that and leaked phony intelligence to you. So you’d issue an STO and take him out. And that would give the real perp a chance to murder the real intended victim.”

Metzger looked off for a moment. “Sure! Moreno gets shot, the others in the room are stunned, scared. The perp slips inside and kills the man he’s really after. De la Rua, the reporter. He was writing an exposé, corruption or something, and somebody wanted him dead.”

“No, no, no,” Rhyme said, though he then conceded, “All right. I thought the same thing at first. But then I realized that was wrong.” This was delivered as a confession. In fact, he was still irritated he’d jumped to the conclusion about the reporter without considering all the facts.

“Then who…?” Metzger lifted his hands, confused.

Amelia Sachs provided the answer. “Simon Flores, Moreno’s bodyguard. He was the target all along.”

CHAPTER 85

DE LA RUA WAS A FEATURE WRITER for a business publication,” Rhyme explained. “We looked over all his recent articles and found out what he was working on. Human-interest stories, business analysis, economics, investment. No investigative reporting, no exposés. Nothing controversial.”

As for the reporter’s personal life, well, Pulaski had found nothing that might motivate a killer to take him out. He wasn’t involved in shady business dealings or criminal activities, had no enemies and hadn’t engaged in any personal moral lapses—there was no controversy about whom he was sleeping with (apparently only his wife of twenty-three years).

“So when I didn’t find a motive,” Rhyme continued, “I had to ask what was curious? I went back to the evidence. And a few minutes later something jumped out. Or, I should say, the absence of something jumped out. The bodyguard’s missing watch, which was stolen after the shooting. It was a Rolex. The fact of the theft was unremarkable. But why would a bodyguard be wearing a five-thousand-dollar watch?”

Metzger looked blank.

“His boss, Robert Moreno, wasn’t rich; he was an activist and journalist. He was probably pretty generous with his workers but paying enough of a salary for any of them to buy a Rolex? I didn’t think so. A half hour ago I had our FBI contact profile the guard. Flores had accounts worth six million dollars in banks around the Caribbean. Every month he got fifty thousand cash from an anonymous numbered account in the Caymans.”

Metzger’s eyes flashed. “The guard was blackmailing someone.”

You didn’t get to be head of a group like NIOS without being sharp but this was a particularly good deduction.

Rhyme nodded, with a smile. “I think that’s right. I remembered that the day of the attack at the South Cove Inn, there was another murder in the Nassau. A lawyer. My Bahamian police contact gave me the lawyer’s client list.”

Metzger said, “The guard was one of the lawyer’s clients, of course. The guard—Flores—left the incriminating information with the attorney for safekeeping. But the man being blackmailed got tired of paying or ran out of money and called up a hit man—this specialist—to kill the guard, kill the lawyer and steal the information, destroy it.”

“Exactly. The lawyer’s office was ransacked and looted after he died.”

Sellitto cast a wry glance at Metzger. “He’s good, Linc. He oughta be a spy.”

The director regarded the detective coolly, then continued, “Any ideas on how to find out who was being blackmailed?”