The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

He replaced it. "Rookie, you're in charge of these. Fill out the cards now."

"Will do." Pulaski jotted his name on the chain-of-custody cards.

Rhyme said, "We'll take good care of them, Corporal."

"Ah, well, I doubt the evidence will be useful to us. If you arrest this Shales and his partner, your unsub, I don't think your courts will send them back here for trial."

"Still, it's evidence. We'll make sure it's returned to you uncontaminated."

Poitier looked around the pristine room. "I'm sorry we don't have a crime scene for you, Captain."

Rhyme frowned. "Oh, but we do. And I suggest we get to it as quickly as we can before something happens to that one too. Propel me, Thom. Let's go."

CHAPTER 51

HE RESEMBLED A TOAD.

Henry Cross was squat and dark-complexioned and he had several visible warts that Amelia Sachs thought could be easily removed. His black hair was thick and crowned a large head. Lips, broad. Hands, wide with ragged nails. As he talked he would occasionally lift a fat cigar and stick it in his mouth to chew the unlit stogie enthusiastically. This was gross.

Cross said, with a shake of his head, "It sucks, Roberto dying. Sucks big time." His voice had a faint accent, Spanish, she supposed; she recalled Lydia Foster said he spoke that language and English perfectly--like Moreno.

He was the director of the Classrooms for the Americas Foundation, which worked with churches to build schools and hire teachers in impoverished areas of Latin America. Sachs recalled that Moreno had been involved in this.

Blowing up the balloons...

"Roberto and his Local Empowerment Movement were one of our biggest supporters," Cross said. He stabbed a blunt finger at the gallery of pictures on a scuffed wall. They showed the CAF offices in Caracas, Rio and Managua, Nicaragua. Moreno was standing with his arm around a smiling, swarthy man at a construction site. They were both wearing hard hats. A small group of locals seemed to be applauding.

"And he was a friend of mine," Cross muttered.

"Had you known him long?"

"Five years maybe."

"I'm sorry for your loss." A phrase that instructors actually teach you at the police academy. When Amelia Sachs uttered these words, though, she meant them.

"Thank you." He sighed.

The small dark office was in a building on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. The foundation was the one stop on Moreno's trip to New York that Sachs had been able to track down--thanks to the receipt from Starbucks she'd found at Lydia Foster's apartment. Sachs had checked the office sign-in sheet in the building that housed the coffee shop and found that on May 1 Moreno was visiting CAF.

"Roberto liked it that we're not a charity. We call ourselves a distributor of resources. My organization doesn't just give money away to the indigent. We fund schools, which teach people skills so they can work their way out of poverty. I don't have any patience for anyone with their hands out. It really irks me when..."

Cross stopped speaking, raised a hand and laughed. "Like Roberto, I tend to lecture. Sorry. But I'm speaking from experience, speaking from getting my hands dirty on the job, speaking from knowing what it's like to live in the trenches. I used to work in the shipping industry and one thing I noticed was that most people want to work hard. They want to improve themselves. But they can't do it without a good education, and schools down there were basically shit, excuse me. I wanted to change it. That's how I met Roberto. We were setting up an office in Mexico and he was in town speaking at some empowerment group for farmers. We kind of connected." The big lips formed a wan smile. "Power to the people...It's not a bad sentiment, I have to say. Roberto did his thing through microbusinesses; I do mine through education."

Though he still seemed more like the owner of a button factory in the Fashion District or a personal injury lawyer than a foundation director.

"So you're here about those drug assholes who killed him?" Cross barked. Chewed on his cigar ferociously for a moment then set it down on a glass ashtray in the shape of a maple leaf.

"We're just getting information at this point," Sachs said noncommittally. "We're looking into his whereabouts on the recent trip to New York--when he met with you. Can you tell me where else he went in the city?"

"Some other nonprofits, he said, three or four of them. I know he needed an interpreter for some of them, if that helps."

"Did he mention which ones?"

"No, he just came by to drop off a check and find out about some new projects we were putting together. He wanted something named after him. A classroom. Not a whole school. See, that was Roberto. He was realistic. He donated X amount of money, not a zillion dollars, so he knew he wouldn't have a whole school named after him. He was happy with a classroom. Modest guy, you know what I'm saying? But he wanted some recognition."

"Did he seem worried about his safety?"

"Sure. He always was. He was, you know, real outspoken." A sad smile. "He hated this politician or that CEO and, man, he wasn't afraid to say it on the air or in his blogs. He called himself the Messenger, the voice