The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

Life in general too. Moving... The briefer you were a target for any harm, the better, whether from lovers, bosses, rivals. He'd recited those words a lot, up until he died (some things, your own failing body, for instance, you can't outrun).

But all cases require backgrounding and paperwork and that was particularly true in this one, where facts were hard to come by and the crime scene inaccessible. So Sachs was in desk job prison at the moment, plowing through documents and canvassing--discreetly--via phone. She turned from the board and sat once more as she absently dug a thumbnail into the quick of a finger. Pain spread. She ignored it. A faint swirl of red appeared on a piece of intelligence she was reading and she ignored this too.

Some of the tension was due to the Overseer, which was how Sachs had come to think of Nance Laurel. She wasn't used to anyone looking over her shoulder, even her superiors--and as a detective third, Amelia Sachs had a lot of those. Laurel had fully moved in now--with two impressive laptops up and running--and had had even more thick files delivered.

Was she going to have a folding cot brought in next?

r /> The unsmiling, focused Laurel, on the other hand, wasn't the least edgy. She hunched over documents, clattered away loudly and irritatingly at the keyboards and jotted notes in extremely small, precise lettering. Page after page was examined, notated and organized. Passages on the computer screen were read carefully and then rejected or given a new incarnation via the laser printer and joined their comrades in the files of People v. Metzger, et al.

Sachs rose, walked to the whiteboards again and then returned to the dreaded chair, trying to learn what she could about Moreno's trip to New York on April 30 through May 2. She'd been canvassing hotels and car services. She was getting through to human beings about two-thirds of the time, leaving messages the rest.

She glanced across the room toward Rhyme; he was on the phone, trying to get the Bahamian police to cooperate. His expression explained that he wasn't having any more luck than she was.

Then Sachs's phone buzzed. The call was from Rodney Szarnek, with the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit, an elite group of thirty or so detectives and support staff. Although Rhyme was a traditional forensic scientist, he and Sachs had worked more and more closely with CCU in recent years; computers and cell phones--and the wonderful evidence they retained, seemingly forever--were crucial to running successful investigations nowadays. Szarnek was in his forties, Sachs estimated, but his age was hard to determine for sure. Szarnek projected youth--from his shaggy hair to his uniform of wrinkled jeans and T-shirt to his passionate love of "boxes," as he called computers.

Not to mention his addiction to loud and usually bad rock music.

Which now blared in the background.

"Hey, Rodney," Sachs now said, "could we de-volume that a bit. You mind?"

"Sorry."

Szarnek was key to finding the whistleblower who'd leaked the STO. He was tracing the anonymous email with its STO kill order attachment, working backward from the destination, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, and trying to find where the leaker had been when he sent it.

"It's taking some time," the man reported, over a faint 4/4 rock beat of bass and drum. "The email was routed through proxies halfway around the world. Well, actually all the way around the world. So far I've traced it back from the DA's Office to a remailer in Taiwan and from there to Romania. And I'll tell you, the Romanians are not in a cooperating mode. But I got some information on the box he was using. He tried to be smart but he tripped up."

"You mean you found the brand of his computer?"

"Possibly. His agent user string...Uhm, do you know what that is?"

Sachs confessed she didn't.

"It's information your computer sends out to routers and servers and other computers when you're online. Anybody can see it and find out exactly what your operating system and browser are. Now, your whistleblower's box was running Apple's OS Nine two two and Internet Explorer Five for Mac. That goes back a long time. It really narrows the field. I'm guessing he had an iBook laptop. That was the first portable Mac to have an antenna built in so he could've logged into Wi-Fi for the upload without any separate modem or server."

An iBook? Sachs had never heard of it. "How old, Rodney?"

"Over ten years. Probably one he bought secondhand and paid cash for it, so it couldn't be traced back to him. That's where he tried to be smart. But he didn't figure that we could find out the brand."

"What would it look like?"

"If we're lucky it'll be a clamshell model--they came two-toned, white and some bright colors, like green or tangerine. They're shaped just what they sound like."

"Clams."

"Well, rounded. There's a standard rectangular model too, solid graphite, square. But it'd be big. Twice as thick as today's laptops. That's how you could recognize it."

"Good, Rodney. Thanks."

"I'll stay on the router. The Romanians'll cave. I just need to negotiate."

Up with the music, and the line went dead.

Sachs glanced around and found Nance Laurel looking at her, the expression on the ADA's face both blank and inquisitive. How did she manage that? Sachs told the woman and Rhyme about the cybercrime cop's response. Rhyme nodded, unimpressed, and returned to the phone. He said nothing. Sachs supposed he was on hold.

Laurel nodded approvingly, it seemed. "If you could document that and send it to me."

"What?"