The Burial Hour (Lincoln Rhyme 13)

Rhyme wheeled slightly closer. She easily held his gaze. "I'll lay it out very succinctly, Charlotte. We have evidence placing you at the scene of Stefan's first kidnapping, in Brooklyn. The cold medicine. Pseudoephedrine."

Her eyes narrowed but only slightly.

This was the main insight Rhyme had had, the one that prompted his exasperated comment in the situation room not long before.

It's obvious, isn't it?

"We thought it was pseudo from meth cooking at the abandoned factory but, no, it was from the medicine you'd been taking for your cold. And, I'm sure, the composition will be the same as that." He nodded to the bottles in one of Sachs's plastic bags. "We can get a warrant and take hair samples to verify the presence of the drug in your system."

An inquiring glance at Spiro, who said, "Most easily."

How calm she was. Like a soldier who'd been expecting to be captured by the enemy.

"On the subject of hair, you have a short cut, dyed blond. Forgive me, but Ms. Clairol is involved, isn't she? We found similar strands at the Brooklyn kidnap site and on Robert Ellis's phone. I'm sure they'll be consistent with yours."

If she displayed any expression, she seemed curious how Rhyme and the others had unraveled the story. But only mildly curious.

Rhyme wasn't there yet, however. "Now, we have evidence placing you at Stefan's farmhouse here. Your shoes." Gazing at another of Sachs's evidence bags. "Looks like those tread marks're the same as prints at Stefan's. There'll be trace in the treads associated with the soil there."

He held up a hand, to nip quiet an impending question. "Please? I'll finish. Let's talk about the other charge against you: wrongfully implicating Garry Soames for sexual assault. And interference with judicial process." Another look at the law enforcers, a questioning furrow of brow.

Rossi said, "It would be interference with a police investigation--on the same pitch. And accusing someone of a crime wrongfully is a separate offense in Italy. Quite serious. As Amanda Knox learned."

Rhyme resumed. "Shoes again: These'll match the prints left outside Garry's window. And Ercole has collected soil from the site, which...well, again we'll check against trace in the shoes.

"Now, tire treads. A car mounted with Continental 195/65R15s tires had been parked behind Garry's apartment. And a car mounted with Continental 195/65R15s had been parked at the farmhouse. And there's a car mounted with Continental 195/65R15s parked a block away. A Nissan Maxima, with U.S. diplo plates on it, checked out to you from the embassy in Rome. The Nissan, by the way is parked next to Stefan's car, a two thousand seven Mercedes 4MATIC, mounted with the Michelins we've found at all the scenes.

"So. The Composer case and the Garry Soames case are linked. You are involved in both. Why? Because when you heard we had come from New York to help the police here, you knew you had to stop us, or at least slow us down. I'm not sure how you learned about the rape and that Garry was one of the people being questioned but it was easy enough: monitoring, or hacking, the Italian police reports, I'd imagine. You broke his bedroom window and sprinkled date-rape drug residue inside. You made the anonymous call implicating him. Then you called us in with a sob story about an innocent young American student wrongly arrested. To keep us distracted from searching for Stefan.

"And when that wasn't enough, you got your boy the hunting rifle. Stefan used that to 'discourage' us. Slow us down. I'm sure he wasn't shooting to hit anyone, just to make us think that he was willing to kill police, make us wary."

He grimaced and felt true regret. "I might've tipped to it a bit earlier: The shoe that Stefan lost struggling with Khaled Jabril's wife also had the date-rape drug on it. We--rather unfairly, I admit--gave one young officer hell for cross-contamination. But when I realized how diligent he'd been, I wondered if the Composer had been near a source of the date-rape drug. And obviously he had: you.

"And why did I start thinking about all of this in the first place?" Rhyme paused. Perhaps it was overdramatic, but this seemed appropriate. "It was the names, Charlotte. The names on the list." He turned to Dante Spiro.

"Yes, yes, Signorina McKenzie. At the farmhouse Detective Sachs found a list of the names of the victims Stefan was targeting. Ali Maziq, Malek Dadi and Khaled Jabril. Their names, their mobile numbers and the locations of the sites he was going to place them for his hanging videos. That is not how serial killers behave. No, you recruited Stefan to kidnap those men specifically. And why?"

Rhyme filled in the pause with: "Because, of course, you're a spy." He frowned. "I assume you people still call yourselves that, don't you?"

Chapter 57

Charlotte McKenzie's face continued to reveal nothing.

Rhyme originally thought that she was feigning innocence but that wasn't accurate, he realized. Hers was the expression of someone who, though guilty as sin, didn't care if she'd been nabbed or not. That image from before, a captured solider, came to mind again. With this qualification: a soldier who had already accomplished her mission.

Rhyme said, "I spoke to an FBI agent in New York an hour ago. I asked him to make some calls. I was particularly interested to know about a legal liaison officer with the State Department named Charlotte McKenzie. Yes, there was. But a little more digging and he hit a dead end. No specifics, no C.V. other than a generic resume. Which is exactly what happens, he told me, in a quote 'official cover' situation. Somebody apparently working for State is actually working for the CIA or another security agency. Legal liaison is a frequent official cover.

"I asked him to see about any U.S. security operations in Italy. A blank there too but he did find out at least that there'd been a lot of encrypted communications into and out of Naples. To and from some new government agency called the AIS. Alternative Intelligence Service, based in northern Virginia.

"Well, my theory: You're a field agent for this AIS and were assigned to interrogate three suspected terrorists in Italy, who'd come here from Libya, pretending to be asylum-seekers. It's happened before--an ISIS terrorist was arrested by Italian police in a refugee camp in Bari, the Puglia region--just last year."

Her eyes said, Yes, I know. Her mouth was silent.

"Now, I'm guessing the Alternative part of your organization means you use unusual methods to detain and

interrogate your suspects. You came up with the idea of using a serial killer as a cover for extraordinary rendition and interrogation. Somehow you learned about Stefan and thought he'd be a good pick for your project. You and another officer met with him in the hospital--pretending to be his aunt and uncle--and cut some kind of deal with him.

"The first snatch--in New York, the one the little girl witnessed--was fake all around. The victim was a fellow agent. You needed to make it seem like Stefan was really psychotic, with no particular interest in refugees. I thought that that kidnapping seemed odd. The vic's girlfriend never getting back to us. Robert Ellis never seemed particularly upset about nearly being hanged by a crazy man." Rhyme tilted his head to the side. "You had to be concerned that we were getting close to Stefan, when he was in the factory. Did you pull Fred Dellray and the FBI off the case? Make any phone calls to Washington?"