The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

"Rhyme, what?" Sachs asked.

He was watching Nance Laurel's face grow still once more; this was how she responded to pain. Her prized case was again dissolving before her eyes.

Nothing's going to stop me now...

Sellitto said, "Talk to me, Linc. The fuck's going on?"

Mel Cooper remained silent and curious.

Rhyme explained, "Look at the wounds." He expanded the autopsy picture, focusing in on the lacerations on the journalist's face and neck.

He then moved another photo next to it: the crime scene itself. De la Rua lay on his back, blood streaming from the same cuts. He was covered with shards of glass. But none of them was actually sticking into a wound.

"Why wasn't I thinking?" Rhyme muttered. "Look at the measurements of the lacerations on the autopsy report. Look at them! The wounds're just a few millimeters wide. A glass shard would be much thicker than that. And how could they all be so uniform? I saw them but I didn't see them."

"He was stabbed to death," Sellitto said, nodding.

"Has to be," Rhyme said. "A knife blade is one to three millimeters in width, two to three centimeters in depth."

Sachs: "And the killer tossed some glass onto de la Rua's body to make it look like he was killed accidentally as collateral damage."

Sipping his sweet coffee, Sellitto muttered, "Pretty fucking smart. And he killed the guard too, the same way. Because he'd be a witness. But who did it?"

Rhyme said, "Obviously. Five Sixteen. We know he was near suite twelve hundred around the time of the drone strike. And remember that a knife's his weapon of choice."

Sachs said, "Well, we also know something else: Five Sixteen's a specialist. He wasn't doing this for the fun of it. He's working for somebody--somebody who wanted the reporter dead."

Rhyme said, "Right, his boss is the one we want." His eyes were on the chart once more. "But who the hell is he?"

"Metzger," Pulaski said.

"Maybe," Rhyme said slowly.

Laurel said, "Whoever it was knew Moreno was going to be in the Bahamas and that an STO was going to be executed. And when."

"Rookie, you get on the motive issue. You're our Argentinian reporter maven. Who wanted him dead?"

Pulaski asked, "Find out what stories he was working on, controversial ones?"

"Well, yes, of course. And feathers he'd ruffled. But I also want to know his personal life--people he knew, investments he'd made, family, vacation places he went to, real estate he owned."

"You mean everything? Like who he was sleeping with?"

Rhyme muttered, "I'll let you get away with a preposition at the end of that sentence but I won't allow the improper pronoun."

"Sorry. I should've said, 'with who him was sleeping,'" the young officer fired back.

Laughter all around.

"Okay, Ron, I probably deserved that. Yes, everything you can find."

For an hour, then two, Pulaski, with Sachs helping, dug into the journalist's personal life and career and downloaded what articles and blog posts of his they could find.

They printed out everything and brought it to the table in front of Rhyme.

The young officer spread the material out and the criminalist began reading through those that were in English. Then he summoned Pulaski. "Ron, I need you to be Berlitz."

"Who?"