"I would, yes."
Poitier pushed the iPad close to Rhyme. "And you, Captain, might wish to look at some pictures in the photo gallery of our beautiful scenery here."
As the corporal turned to Thom and they struck up a conversation Rhyme began scrolling through the gallery.
A picture of the Poitier family, presumably, at the beach. A lovely wife and laughing children. Then they were at a barbecue with a dozen other people.
A picture of the sunset.
A picture of a grade school music recital.
A picture of the first page of the Robert Moreno homicide report.
Like a spy, Poitier had photographed it with the camera in the iPad.
Rhyme looked up at the corporal but the cop ignored him, continuing to share with Thom the history of the colony, and with the potcake dog more lunch.
First, there was an itinerary of Moreno's last days on earth, as the corporal could piece it together.
The man and his guard, Simon Flores, had arrived in Nassau late Sunday, May 7. They had spent Monday out of the inn, presumably at meetings; Moreno did not seem like the sort to swim with the dolphins or go Jet Skiing. The next day beginning at nine he had several other visitors. Shortly after they left, about ten thirty, the reporter Eduardo de la Rua arrived. The shooting was around eleven fifteen.
Poitier had identified and interviewed Moreno's other visitors. They were local businessmen involved in agriculture and transport companies. Moreno planned to form a joint venture with them when he opened the Bahamian branch of his Local Empowerment Movement. They were legitimate and had been respected members of the Nassau business community for years.
No witnesses reported that Moreno had been under surveillance or that anyone had shown any unusual interest in him--other than the phone call before he arrived and the brown-haired American.
Then Rhyme turned to the pages of the scene itself. He was disappointed. The RBPF crime scene team had found forty-seven fingerprints--other than the victims'--but had analyzed only half of them. Of those identified, all were attributed to the hotel staff. A note reported that the remaining lifted prints were missing.
Little effort had been made to collect trace from the victims themselves. Generally, in a sniper killing, such information about the spot where the victim is shot wouldn't be that helpful, of course, since the shooter was a distance away. In this case, though, the sniper had been in the hotel, albeit a day earlier, and might even have snuck into the Kill Room to see about vista and shooting angles. He could easily have left some trace, even if he didn't leave any prints. But virtually no trace had been collected from the room, only some candy wrappers and a few cigarette butts beside an ashtray near the guard's body.
However, the next pages on the iPad, photos of the Kill Room itself, were illuminating. Moreno had been shot in the living room of the suite. Everything and everyone in the room was covered with shards of glass. Moreno lay sprawled on a couch, head back, mouth open, a bloodstain on his shirt, in the center of which was a large black dot, the entrance wound. The upholstery behind him was covered in dark blood and gore, from what would have been a massive exit wound caused by the sniper's bullet.
The other victims lay on their backs near the couch, one a large Latino, identified in the photo as Simon Flores, Moreno's guard, the other a dapper bearded balding man in his fifties, de la Rua, the reporter. They were covered with broken glass and blood, their skin torn and slashed in dozens of places.
The bullet itself was photographed lying on the floor next to a small sandwich board evidence location card bearing the number 14. It was lodged in the carpet a few feet behind the couch.
Rhyme flipped the page, expecting to see more.
But the next image was of the corporal with his wife again, sitting in beach chairs.
Without looking his way, Poitier said, "That's all there is."
"Not the autopsy?"
"One has been done. We don't have the results."
Rhyme asked, "The victims' clothing?"
Now he regarded the criminalist. "At the morgue."
"I asked my associate at the South Cove to track down de la Rua's camera, tape recorder and anything else he had with him. He said they went to the morgue. I'd love to see them."
Poitier gave a skeptical laugh. "I would have too."
"Would have?"
"Yes, you caught that, Captain. By the time I inquired about them they were missing, along with the victims' more valuable personal effects."
Rhyme had noticed in the picture of the bodies that the guard wore a Rolex watch, and a pair of Oakley sunglasses protruded from his pocket. Near the reporter lay a gold pen.