The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

"I don't have a goddamn tan," he muttered.

"I think you do," Thom added.

It was nearly 8 a.m. Thom, Pulaski and Rhyme had arrived from LaGuardia airport late, nearly eleven last night, and the aide had insisted that Rhyme get some sleep immediately. The case could wait till this morning.

There'd been no argument; the criminalist had been exhausted. The dunk in the water had taken its toll. The whole trip had, for that matter. But that didn't stop Rhyme from summoning Thom the moment he'd awakened at six thirty with the pushbutton call switch beside the bed. (The aide had called the device very Downton Abbey, a reference Rhyme did not get.)

The parlor was humming now, with Sellitto, Cooper and Sachs present. And Ron Pulaski--who did seem to have a tan--was just walking through the door. Nance Laurel had a court appearance on one of her other cases and would arrive later.

Rhyme was in a new wheelchair, a Merits Vision Select. Gray with red fenders. It had been delivered and assembled yesterday, before Rhyme's return from the Bahamas. Thom had called their insurance company from Nassau and negotiated a speedy purchase. ("They didn't know what to say," the aide reported, "when I gave the reason for the loss as 'immersion in ten feet of water.'")

Rhyme had picked this particular model because it was known for off-road navigation. His old reticence to be in public had disappeared--largely because of his trip to the Bahamas. He wanted more travel and he wanted to work scenes himself again. That required a chair that would get him to as many places as possible.

The Merits had been pimped out a bit to make allowances for Rhyme's particular condition--such as the strap for his immobile left arm, a touchpad under his working left ring finger and, of course, a cup holder, big enough for both whiskey tumbler and coffee mug. He was now enjoying the latter beverage through a thick straw. He looked over Sellitto, Sachs and Pulaski, then studied the whiteboard, which contained Sachs's notations of the investigation in his absence.

"Time's a-wasting." He nodded at the STO order. "Mr. Rashid is going to meet his maker in a day or two if we don't do something about it. Let's see what we have." He now wheeled back and forth in front of the whiteboards containing the analysis of the evidence Sachs had collected at the IED scene at Java Hut and Lydia Foster's apartment.

"A blue airplane?" he asked, regarding that notation.

Sachs explained about what Henry Cross had told her. The private jet that seemed to be dogging Moreno around the United States and Central and South America.

"I've got one of Captain Myers's Special Services officers searching but they aren't having much luck. There's no database of aircraft by color. If it was sold recently, though, brokers might have sales literature with pictures. He's still checking."

"All right. Now, let's look at what we found in the Bahamas. Number one, the Kill Room."

Rhyme explained to Sachs and Cooper how unsub 516 or Barry Shales had ruined the scene at the inn, but he had some things, including the preliminary report that the local police had done, along with the photos, which Sachs now taped up on a separate whiteboard, along with the paltry crime scene report that the RBPF had originally prepared.

For the next half hour, Sachs and Cooper carefully unpacked and analyzed the shoes and clothing of the three victims who'd been in suite 1200 on the morning of May 9. Each plastic bag was opened over a large sheet of sterile newsprint, and each item of clothing and the shoes were picked over and scraped for trace.

The shoes of Moreno, his guard and de la Rua produced fibers identical to those in the hotel carpet and dirt that matched samples taken from the sidewalk and grounds in front of the inn. Their clothing contained similar trace as well as elements of recent meals, presumably breakfast; they died before lunch. Cooper found pastry flakes, jam and bits of bacon in the case of Moreno and his guard, and allspice and some indeterminate type of pepper sauce on the reporter's jacket. Moreno and his guard also had traces of crude oil on their shoes, cuffs and sleeves, probably from their meeting on Monday out of the hotel; there weren't many refineries in New Providence so maybe they had eaten dinner by the docks. The guard had some trace of cigarette ash on his shirt.

This information went up on the board and Rhyme noted but didn't dwell on any of it; after all, their killer had been a mile away when he'd fired the bullet. Unsub 516 had been in the hotel but even if he'd snuck into the Kill Room itself, none of that trace remained.

He said, "Now. The autopsy report."

No surprises here either. Moreno had been killed by a massive gunshot trauma to the chest, and the others by blood loss due to multiple lacerations from the flying glass, of varying sizes, mostly three or four millimeters wide, two to three centimeters long.

Cooper looked over the cigarette butts and the candy wrapper that Poitier's original crime scene searchers had found in the Kill Room but these yielded nothing helpful. The butts were the same brand as the pack of Marlboros found on the guard's body, the candy had come from a gift basket for Moreno when he arrived. The fingerprints that Pulaski had lifted, not surprisingly, were negative for hits in any database.

"Let's move on to the prostitute's apartment. Annette Bodel."

Pulaski'd done a good job, collecting plenty of trace from near where the killer had searched, along with samplars to eliminate any that was probably not from him. Cooper examined the items and, occasionally, ran samples through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He finally announced, "First, we've got two-stroke fuel."

These were smaller engines, two-strokes, like those in snowmobiles and chain saws, in which the lubricating oil is mixed directly with gasoline.

"Jet Ski maybe," Rhyme said. "She worked in a dive shop part-time. Might not be from our perp but we'll keep it in mind."

"And sand," the tech announced. "Along with seawater residue." He compared the chemical breakdown of these items with what was on the board for two of the prior scenes. "Yep, it's virtually the same as what Amelia found at Java Hut."

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at this. "Ah, a definitive link between Unsub Five Sixteen and the Bahamas. We know he was in Annette's apartment and I'm ninety-nine percent sure he was the one in the South Cove on May eighth. Now, anything linking him to Lydia Foster?"

Pulaski pointed out, "The brown hair, which is what Corporal Poitier said the man in the South Cove Inn had, the one who was there just before Moreno was killed."

"It suggests; it doesn't prove. Keep going, Mel."

The tech was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. "Something odd here. Some membrane, orange. I'll run part of it through the GC/MS."

Some minutes later he had the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.