The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

She resumed the tail and called Szarnek back. The tech cop said, "Okay, he's disconnected now."

Sachs watched the man slip his phone into his pocket. He was making for a ten-or twelve-story building on the gloomy canyon of Rector Street. Rather than entering through the front door of the structure, though, he walked around the side into an alleyway. Halfway down that narrow avenue, he turned and, slipping an ID card lanyard over his neck, walked through a gate into what seemed to be a parking lot, bejeweled with serious razor wire.

Staying to the shadows, Sachs had Szarnek transfer her to Sellitto. She told the detective that she'd found the shooter and needed a surveillance team to keep on him.

"Good, Amelia. I'll get somebody from Special Services on it right away."

"I'll upload some pictures of him. Have them contact Rodney. He can keep tracing the phone and let them know when he's on the move again. I'll stay here with him until they show up. Then I'll go interview Lydia Foster."

"Where are you exactly?" Sellitto asked.

"Eighty-Five Rector. He went through a gate at the side of the building, a parking lot. Or maybe a courtyard. I didn't want to get too close."

"Sure. What's the building?"

Sachs gave a laugh. She'd just noticed a subtle sign.

National Intelligence and Operations Service.

She told Sellitto, "It's his office."

CHAPTER 39

TERRIBLE NEWS: THAT NICE Mr. Moreno was dead.

In her apartment on Third Avenue, Lydia Foster now made a cup of Keurig coffee, picking hazelnut flavored from the hundreds of capsules, and returned to the living room, wondering when that policewoman was going to be here.

Lydia had liked him quite a bit. Smart, courteous. And quite the gentleman. She knew she was pretty well built and had been described as attractive, but unlike some men using her services as an interpreter, Mr. Moreno hadn't flirted once. On the first translating job for him, several months ago, he'd shown her pictures of his children--adorable! Which men do sometimes as a prelude to trying to pick you up, which Lydia found incredibly tacky, even for the single dads. But Mr. Moreno had followed the pictures of the bambinos with a picture of his wife and announced that he was looking forward to their wedding anniversary.

What a nice man. Polite--holding the car door for her, even though they had a chauffeur. Moreno had been charming. And talkative. They had some engaging conversations. They were, for instance, both fascinated with language. He was a writer for blogs and magazines and a radio host, while she made her living interpreting other people's words. They'd spoken about similarities between languages and even technical aspects: nominative and dative and possessive cases, as well as verb conjugations. He told her he disliked English intensely, though it was his mother tongue, which she found curious. One may not like the tonal quality of a tongue for being too harsh--German or Xhosa, for instance--or be dismayed at t

he difficulty of achieving fluency, like Japanese, but to dislike a language in general was something Lydia had never heard of.

He characterized it as random and lazy (all the irregular constructions), confusing and inelegant. It turned out that his real objection was a bit different. "And it's rammed down the throats of people throughout the world, like it or not. Just another way to make other nations dependent on the U.S."

But Mr. Moreno had been opinionated about a lot of things. Once he'd started lecturing about politics, you couldn't dislodge him. She found herself steering away from those subjects.

She'd have to tell the detective that Mr. Moreno had seemed concerned for his safety. He'd looked around quite a bit as they'd driven through the city and walked to their meetings. Once, they'd left one meeting and were on their way to another when Mr. Moreno had stopped suddenly.

"That man? Haven't we seen him before, outside the other office? Is he following us?" The person he noted was a young, somber-faced white guy, looking through a magazine. That alone struck Lydia as odd, something out of an old-time detective film, where a PI pretends to read a newspaper on the street while spying on a suspect. Nobody lounges on the streets of New York, browsing through reading material; they check iPhones or BlackBerrys.

Lydia would be sure to tell the police officer about the incident; maybe that man had something to do with Mr. Moreno's death.

Digging through Redweld folders, she assembled her notes from the assignments she'd had with Mr. Moreno over the past few months. She'd saved everything. As an interpreter, she worked with the police and court system from time to time. She had gotten into the habit of being very conscientious about retaining all her files in such cases because a mistaken phrasing of a detective's question or a suspect's answer could easily result in an innocent man being convicted or a guilty one going free. This diligence carried over into her commercial interpreting assignments too.

The police would get nearly a thousand pages of translated material by and about the late Mr. Moreno.

The intercom buzzer rang and she answered. "Yes?"

"Ms. Foster, I'm with the NYPD," a male voice said. "Detective Sachs spoke to you earlier? She's been delayed and asked me to come by and ask you a few questions about Robert Moreno."

"Sure, come on up. Twelve B."

"Thank you."

A few minutes later a knock on the door. She looked out through the peephole, to see a pleasant-looking man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He was holding up a leather wallet containing a gold badge.

"Come on in," she said, unbolting and unchaining.