Lincoln Rhyme 10 - The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  “A diver’d be good.”

  “Our official divers wouldn’t be available, Captain,” Poitier said regretfully. “Since this, of course, isn’t even an investigation.”

  “Just an island tour.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Rhyme wheeled close to the edge and looked down.

  “Careful there,” Thom called.

  “But,” Poitier said, “I dive. I could come back and see if there is anything down there. Borrow some of the underwater lights from our waterside station.”

  “You would do that, Corporal?”

  He too peered into the water. “Yes. Tomorrow, I—”

  What happened next happened fast.

  Finger-snap fast.

  At the sound of clattering suspension and a hissing, badly firing engine, Rhyme, Thom and Poitier turned to look at the dirt road they’d just driven down. They saw the gold Mercury bounding directly toward them, now with only two occupants in it.

  And Rhyme understood. He glanced back, seeing the man in the gray T-shirt, the litterer from the pickup truck, race across the narrow road and tackle Poitier as he was drawing his gun. The weapon went flying. The assailant rose fast and kicked the gasping corporal in the side and head, hard.

  “No!” Rhyme cried.

  The Mercury squealed to a stop and two of the men they’d seen following earlier leapt out—the one with the dreads in the sleeveless yellow shirt and his partner, shorter, wearing the green T. The man in green ripped Thom’s phone from his hand and doubled him over with a blow to the belly.

  “Don’t!” Rhyme shouted—a cry as involuntary as it was pointless.

  The man in the gray T-shirt said to his partners, “Okay, you see anyone else?”

  “No.”

  Of course, that’s why he was on the phone. He hadn’t come here to pitch out trash at all. He’d followed them and used the phone to let the others know their victims had arrived at the killing site.

  Poitier gasped for breath, clutching his side.

  Rhyme said firmly, “We’re police officers from the United States. We work with the FBI. Don’t make this worse on yourself. Just leave now.”

  It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

  The man in gray walked toward Poitier’s pistol, lying in the dust ten feet away.

  “Stop,” Rhyme commanded.

  The man did. He blinked at the criminalist. The other attackers froze. They were looking at the Glock in Rhyme’s hand. The pistol was unsteady, for sure, but from this distance he could easily send a bullet into the torso of the assailant.

  The man lifted his hands slightly, rising. Eyes on the pistol. Back to Rhyme. “Okay, okay, mister. Don’t do with that.”

  “All of you, step back and lie down on the ground, facedown.”

  The two who’d been in the car turned their eyes on the man in gray.

  Nobody moved.

  “I’m not going to tell you again.” Rhyme wondered what the recoil would do to his hand. He supposed there might be some damage to the tendons. But all he needed after the shot was to keep the weapon in his grip. The others would flee after he’d killed their leader.

  Thinking of the Special Task Order. No due process, no trial. Self-defense. Taking a life before your enemy did.

  “You gonna shoot me, sir?” The man was studying him, suddenly defiant.

  Rhyme rarely had a chance to meet adversaries face-to-face. They were usually long gone from the crime scene by the time he saw them, which was usually in court where he was an expert witness for the prosecution. Still, he had no trouble staring down the man in gray.

  His partner, the one in yellow, the one with the impressive muscles, stepped forward but stopped fast when Rhyme spun the gun toward him.

  “Hokay, easy, mon, easy.” Hands raised.

  Rhyme aimed again at the leader, whose eyes were fixed on the weapon, his hands up. He smiled. “Are you? Are you going to shoot me, sir? I’m not so sure you are.” He stepped forward a few feet. Paused. And then walked directly toward Rhyme.

  There was nothing more to say.

  Rhyme tensed, hoping the recoil wouldn’t damage the results of the delicate surgery, hoping he could keep the weapon in his hand. He sent the command to close his index finger.

  But nothing happened.

  Glocks—dependable, Austrian-made pistols—have a trigger pull of only a few pounds pressure.

  Yet Rhyme couldn’t muster that, couldn’t deliver enough strength to save the life of his aide and the police officer who’d risked his job to help him.

  The man in gray continued forward, perhaps assuming Rhyme lacked the fortitude to shoot, even as he tried desperately to pull the trigger. Even more insulting, the man didn’t approach from the side, he kept on a steady path toward the muzzle that hovered in his direction.

  The man closed his muscular hand around the gun and easily yanked it from Rhyme’s.

  “You know, you a freak, mon.” He braced himself, put his foot in the middle of Rhyme’s chest and pushed hard.

  The Storm Arrow rolled back two feet and went off the rocky edge. With a huge splash, Rhyme and the chair tumbled into the water. He took a deep breath and went under.

  The water was not as deep as he’d thought, the darkness was due to the pollution, the chemicals and waste. The chair dropped ten feet or so and came to rest on the bottom.

  Head throbbing, lungs in agony as his breath depleted, Rhyme twisted his head as far as he could and with his mouth gripped the strap of the canvas bag hanging from the back of the chair. He tugged this forward and it floated to just within his reach. He managed to wrap his arm around it for stability and undid the zipper with his teeth, then lowered his head and fished for the portable ventilator’s mouthpiece. He gripped it hard and worked it between his lips.

  His eyes were on fire, stinging from the pollutants in the water, and he squinted but kept them open as he searched for the switch to the ventilator.

  Finally, there. That’s it.

  He clicked it on.

  Lights glowed. The machine hummed and he inhaled a bit of wonderful, sweet oxygen.

  Another.

  But there was no third. Apparently the water had worked its way through the housing and short-circuited the unit.

  The ventilator went dark. The air stopped.

  At that moment he heard another sound, muffled through the water, but distinct: Two sounds, actually.

  Gunshots.

  Spelling the deaths of his friends: one he’d known seemingly forever and one he’d grown close to in just the past few hours.

  Rhyme’s next breath was of water.

  He thought of Amelia Sachs and his body relaxed.

  CHAPTER 42

  N O.

  OH, NO.

  At close to 5 p.m. she parked in front of Lydia Foster’s apartment building on Third Avenue.

  Sachs couldn’t get too close; police cars and ambulances blocked the street.

  Logic told her that the reason for the vehicles couldn’t be the death of the interpreter. Sachs had been following the sniper for the past hour and a half. He was still in his office downtown. She hadn’t left until Myers’s Special Services surveillance team showed up. Besides, how could the sniper have learned the interpreter’s name and address? She’d been careful to call from landlines and prepaid mobiles.

  That’s what logic reported.

  Yet instinct told her something very different, that Lydia was dead and Sachs was to blame. Because she’d never considered what she realized was the truth: They had two perps. One was the man she’d been following through the streets of downtown New York—the sniper, she knew, because of the voiceprint match—and the other, Lydia Foster’s killer, an unsub, unidentified subject. He was somebody else altogether, maybe the shooter’s partner, a spotter, as many snipers used. Or a separate contractor, a specialist, hired by Shreve Metzger to clean up after the assassination.

  She parked fast, tossed the NYPD placard on the dash and stepped out of
the car, hurrying toward the nondescript apartment building, the pale façade marred by off-white water stains as if the air-conditioning units had been crying.

  Ducking under the police tape, she hurried up to a detective, who was prepping a canvass team. The slim African American recognized her, though she didn’t know him, and he nodded a greeting. “Detective.”

  “Was it Lydia Foster?” Wondering why she bothered to ask.

  “Right. This involves a case you’re running?”

  “Yeah. Lon Sellitto’s the lead, Bill Myers’s overseeing it. I’m doing the legwork.”

  “It’s all yours, then.”

  “What happened?”

  She noticed the man was shaken up, eyes twitching away from hers as he fiddled with a pen.

  He swallowed and said, “Scene was pretty bad, I gotta tell you. She was tortured. Then he stabbed her. Never seen anything like that.”

  “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 palpa
ted 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?

  And she apologized to Lydia Foster a second time, for having this selfish thought.

  Outside, she stripped off the overalls and deposited them in a burn bag; they were streaked with Lydia’s blood. She used cleanser on her hands. Checked her Glock. Scanned the area for any threats. All she saw were a hundred black windows, dim cul-de-sacs, paused cars. Each a perfect vantage point for the unsub to be standing to target her.

  Sachs was about to hook her phone holster into place too but she paused. Thinking: I really want to talk to Rhyme.

  She hit speed dial on her most recent prepaid mobile; it was his number. But the call went right to voice mail. Sachs thought about leaving a message but hung up. She found she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say.

  Maybe just that she missed him.

  CHAPTER 43

  LINCOLN RHYME BLINKED. His eyes stung like hell and in his mouth were conflicting tastes, the sweetness of oil and the sourness of chemicals.

  He’d just come back to consciousness and was, to his surprise, not coughing as much as he thought he ought to be. An oxygen mask was over his mouth and nose and he was breathing deeply. His throat hurt, though, and he guessed he had been coughing plenty earlier, when he’d been dead to the world.

  He looked around, noting that he was in the back of an ambulance, excessively hot, parked on the spit of land where the attack had taken place; he could see the South Cove Inn in the distance, over the choppy blue-and-green bay. A stocky medic with a round black face was leaning forward, manning a flashlight, examining his eyes. He removed the oxygen mask to study Rhyme’s mouth and nose.