Текст книги "The Kill Room"

Автор книги: Jeffery Deaver

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

CHAPTER 53

Amelia Sachs stood in the cul de sac behind the town house, Glock drawn, aimed toward where the dim canyon made a right turn and eventually joined the crosstown street.

The Chinese takeout she’d ordered was sitting on the cobblestones and she was in a combat shooting stance: feet planted parallel, toes pointed at your enemy, leaning forward slightly with gun hand gripping hard, other hand cradling the trigger guard for stability. Your dominant arm stiff; if the muscles aren’t taut the recoil might not eject the spent shell and chamber another. A jam can mean death. You and your gun have to be partners.

Come on, Sachs thought to her adversary. Come on, present! This was, of course, Unsub 516. She knew it wasn’t Barry Shales, the sniper; he was still under surveillance by Lon Sellitto’s team.

Several times today she’d noticed a light colored sedan – first, near Henry Cross’s office building on Chambers Street. Then on the drive here and again fifteen minutes ago. She hadn’t seen the car clearly but it was likely the same one that had been following her from Tash Farada’s house in Queens.

Noting the car pull into a space at the end of the block, she’d debated how to handle it. To call Central Dispatch or to approach him by herself on the street might have precipitated a firefight, a bad idea in this densely populated area.

So she’d decided to take him in the cul de sac. She’d bought the Chinese takeout to give him a chance to spot her. Before leaving, she’d slipped her weapon into the bag. Then she’d started across the street, careful not to present a target, and into the cul de sac, apparently focusing on her order but actually sensing from her periphery when the man would make his move.

She’d hurried to the bend in the cul de sac, aware that the car was approaching then stopping. At that point she’d turned, dropped the food and gripped her weapon.

Now she was waiting for the target to present.

Would he drive farther in? Probably not. Too easy to get blocked in, if a delivery or moving truck showed up.

Was he out of the car and moving fast toward her?

Palms dry, both eyes open – you never squint when you shoot. And you focus on two things only: your target and the front sight of your weapon. Forget the blade sight at the back of the receiver. You can’t bring everything into definition.

Come on!

Breathing steadily.

Where was he? Prowling forward, about to leap around the corner and drop into his own shooting stance?

Or what if he’d anticipated she was on to him? He might have grabbed a passerby to shove into the cul de sac as a distraction. Or use him or her as a shield, hoping that Sachs would react and shoot the innocent.

Inhale, exhale, inhale…

Did she hear a voice? A soft cry?

What was that? Easing forward, Sachs crept toward the other leg of the L. Paused, flattened against the brick.

Where the hell was he? Was his  weapon up too, pointed at exactly the spot where she’d appear if she stepped forward?

Okay, go. Just go low and get ready to shoot. Watch your backdrop.

One…two…

Now!

Sachs leapt into the main part of the cul de sac, gun up, and dropped into a crouch.

Which is when her left knee gave out completely.

Before she got a clear look at where the unsub might be waiting for her, she tumbled sideways onto the cobblestones, managing to lift her finger off the trigger before she pulled off a random round or two. Amelia Sachs rolled once and lay stunned, a perfect target.

Even her vision had deserted her. Tears from the pain.

But she forced herself to ignore the agony and scrabbled into a prone position, gun muzzle aimed down the cul de sac, where Unsub 516 would be coming for her. Aiming at her. Sending hollow point bullets into her.

Except that he wasn’t.

She blinked the moisture from her eyes, then wiped them fiercely with her sleeve.

Empty. The cul de sac was empty. Five sixteen was gone.

Struggling to her feet, she holstered her weapon and massaged her knee. She limped to the street and conducted a canvass of those on the sidewalk. But no one had paid any attention to light colored cars, no one had seen a compact man with brown hair and military bearing acting strangely, no one had seen any weapons.

Standing with hands on hips, looking west then east. All was peaceful, all was normal. A typical day on the Upper West Side.

Sachs returned to the cul de sac, fighting the limp. Man, that hurt. She collected the Chinese and tossed it into a Dumpster.

In New York City alleyways the five second rule about dropped food does not apply.

CHAPTER 54

“You were right, Captain,” Mychal Poitier called from the second story porch outside Annette Bodel’s apartment in Nassau. “The side window has been jimmied. Barry Shales or your unsub broke in here, either before or after he killed her.”

Rhyme gazed up, squinting into the brilliant sky. He couldn’t see the corporal, just the silhouette of a palm waving lethargically near the roof of the building in which prostitute student Annette had lived.

This was the other crime scene he’d referred to. He’d known that Annette’s killer had to come here to find any information she might have had about him and his visit to South Cove last week. Poitier and his men had been here before – after she was reported missing – but merely to see if she, or her body, was present. The door locks had not been disturbed and the officers hadn’t investigated further.

“Probably afterward,” Rhyme called. Part of the questions during Annette’s torture would have been about address books and computer files that might have referenced him. Diaries too, of course. All of that would be gone but, he hoped, some trace of the unsub remained.

A small cluster of locals, faces tanned and faces black, were nearby, checking out the entourage. Rhyme supposed their words ought to be delivered more discreetly but twenty five vertical feet separated him from Poitier and so there was no choice but to shout.

“Don’t go inside, Corporal. Ron will handle it.” He turned. “Rookie, how we doing?”

“Almost ready, Lincoln.” He was suiting up in RBPF crime scene coveralls and assembling the basic collection equipment.

Rhyme didn’t even consider running this scene himself, though he’d earlier been tempted. There was no elevator in the building and it would be nearly impossible to carry the heavy wheelchair up the narrow rickety stairs. Besides, Pulaski was good. Nearly as good as Amelia Sachs.

The officer now paused in front of Rhyme as if expecting a briefing. But the criminalist offered simply, “It’s your scene. You know what to do.”

A nod from the young man and up the stairs he trotted.

* * *

It took about an hour for him to walk the grid.

When Pulaski emerged, with a half dozen collection bags, he asked Rhyme and Poitier if they wanted to review the evidence now. Rhyme debated but in the end he decided to take everything back to New York and do the analysis there.

Part of this was the familiarity of working with Mel Cooper.

Part was that he missed Sachs, a fact he wouldn’t share with another human being…except her.

“What are our travel options?” he asked Thom.

He checked his phone. “If we can get to the airport in a half hour, we can make the next flight.”

Rhyme glanced at the corporal.

“We’re twenty minutes at the most,” Poitier said.

“Even in the infamous Bahamian traffic?” Rhyme asked wryly.

“I have red lights.”

Pulaski headed toward the van, still in coveralls, booties and shower cap.

“Get into street clothes, rookie. I think you’d upset the passengers, dressed like that.”

“Oh, right.”

The flashing lights did help and soon they were at the terminal. They exited the van and, while Pulaski saw to the luggage and Thom arranged for the vehicle to be collected, Rhyme remained next to Poitier. The area was bustling with tourists and locals, and the air filled with dust and the endless bangs and catcalls of construction. And that constant perfume, trash fire smoke.

Rhyme began to speak, then found words had abandoned him. He forced them into line. “I’m sorry about what happened at the sniper nest, Corporal. The assistant commissioner was right. I nearly got you killed.”

Poitier laughed. “We aren’t in a business like librarians or dental workers, Captain. Not all of us go home every night.”

“Still, I wasn’t as competent as I should have been.” These words seared him. “I should have anticipated the attack.”

“I have not been a real police officer for very long, Captain, but I think it’s safe to say that it would be impossible to anticipate everything that could happen in this profession. It’s really quite mad, what we do. Little pay, danger, politics at the top, chaos on the streets.”

“You’ll do well as a detective, Corporal.”

“I hope so. I certainly feel more at home here than in Business Inspections and Licensing.”

A flashing light caught Rhyme’s eye and he could hear a siren as well. A police car was speeding into the airport, weaving through traffic.

“Ah, the last of the evidence,” Poitier said. “I was worried it wouldn’t arrive in time.”

What evidence could it be? Rhyme wondered. They had everything that existed from the Moreno sniper shooting, as well as from Annette Bodel’s apartment. The divers had given up searching for Barry Shales’s spent cartridges.

The corporal waved the car over.

The young constable who’d met them at the South Cove Inn was behind the wheel. Holding an evidence bag, he got out and saluted, the gesture aimed halfway between the two men he faced.

Rhyme resisted a ridiculous urge to salute back.

Poitier took the bag and thanked the officer. Another tap of stiff fingers to his forehead and the constable returned to the car, speeding away and clicking on the siren and lights once more, though his mission had been accomplished.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t you tell?” Poitier asked. “I remember in your book you instruct officers to always smell the air when they’re running the crime scene.”

Frowning, Rhyme leaned down and inhaled.

The fragrant aroma of fried conch rose from the bag.

CHAPTER 55

Susss, susss…

In his kitchen Jacob Swann sipped a Vermentino, a light pleasant Italian wine, in this case from Liguria. He returned to honing his knife, a Kai Shun, though not the slicer. This was an eight and a half inch Deba model for chopping and for removing large pieces of meat intact.

Susss, susss, susss…

He stroked from side to side, on the Arkansas whetstone, his personal style for sharpening. Never in a circle.

The hour was around 8 p.m. Jazz played on his turntable. Larry Coryell, the guitarist. He excelled at standards, his own compositions and even classical. “Pavane for a Dead Princess” was an unmatched interpretation.

Aproned, Swann stood at the butcher block island. Not long ago he’d received a text from headquarters complimenting him on his work today, confirming that he’d made the right decision to delay the attack on Sachs. Shreve Metzger had provided yet more info but there was nothing more to do at the moment. He could stand down for the evening. And he was taking advantage of that.

The lights were low, the shades and curtains drawn.

There was, in a way, a sense of romance in the air. Swann looked at the woman sitting nearby. Her hair was down, she wore one of his T shirts, black, and plaid boxers, also his. He believed he could smell a floral scent, laced with spice. Smell and flavor are inextricably linked. Swann never cooked anything of importance when he had a cold or a sinus infection. Why waste the effort? Eating at a time like that meant the food was simply fuel.

A sin.

The woman, whose name was Carol Fiori – odd moniker for a Brit – looked back. She was crying softly.

Occasionally she’d make the uhn uhn uhn  sound, like earlier. Carol was the jogger who had approached him in the alleyway earlier and ruined his chance to disable Amelia Sachs. A throat punch and into the trunk she’d gone. He’d driven off quickly, returning home. He’d get the detective later.

Once back in Brooklyn, he’d dragged Carol into the house. While she initially said she was traveling with “friends,” she was actually single and touring the United States on her own for a month, thinking of writing an article about her adventures.

Alone…

He’d been debating what to do with his trophy.

Now he knew.

Yes, no?

Yes.

She’d given up staring at him pleadingly and whispering pleadingly and now turned her damp eyes to the Deba as he sharpened susss, susss.  She shook her head occasionally. Swann had bound her wrists and legs to a very nice and comfortable Mission style chair, à la Lydia Foster.

“Please,” she mouthed, her eyes on the blade. So the pleading wasn’t quite abandoned.

He examined the knife himself, tested the edge carefully with his thumb. It gave just the right resistance; perfect sharpness. He sipped more wine and then began to remove ingredients from the refrigerator.

When Jacob Swann was a boy, long before college, long before the military, long before his career after  the military, he came to appreciate the value of meals. The only moments when he could count on spending time with his mother and father involved preparing and eating supper.

Bulky Andrew Swann was not stern or abusive, simply distant and forever lost in his schemes, obligations and distractions, which derived mostly from his job in the gambling world of Atlantic City. Young Jacob never knew exactly what his father did – given his own present career, Andrew might have been on the enforcement side of things. That genetic stuff. But the one thing that Jacob and his mother knew about the man was that he liked to eat and that you could get his attention and hold it through food.

Marianne was not a natural cook, probably had hated it. She’d begun to work on her skills only after she and Andrew started dating. Jacob had overheard her tell a woman friend about one of the first meals she’d served.

“Whatsis?” Andrew had demanded.

“Hamburger Helper and lima beans and–”

“You told me you could cook.”

“But I did.” She’d waved at the frying pan.

Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound.

So she’d bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work.

In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pan sautéing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn’t learn first principles and rules (it’s all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she’d never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted – though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren’t over, at all.

Unlike her son, Marianne stressed mightily before and during the preparation of each meal and invariably had more than one glass of wine. A bit of whiskey too. Or whatever was in the cabinet.

But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew’s presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee – Andrew didn’t sip – he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fuck a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fucking.

After school or weekends, if he wasn’t slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too.

Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Marianne seemed to think that a boy would be more inclined to use a knife than an egg beater.

“Look at that, honey. Good job. You’re my little butcher man!”

He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine.

Now Swann looked at the woman strapped to his chair.

He continued to be angry that she’d ruined his plans that afternoon.

She continued to cry.

He returned to preparing his three course dinner for tonight. The starter would be asparagus steamed in a water vermouth mixture, infused with a fresh bay leaf and a pinch of sage. The spears would rest on a bed of mâche and be dotted with homemade hollandaise sauce – that verb being key, “dotted,” since anytime yolk meets butter, you can easily overdo. The trick about asparagus, of course, is timing. The Romans had a cliché–doing something in the duration it took to cook asparagus meant doing it quickly.

Swann sipped the wine and prepared the steamer liquid. He then trimmed the herbs from his window box.

When his mother left them – wine plus eighty two mph without a seat belt – sixteen year old Jacob took over the cooking.

Just the two of them, dad and son.

The teenager did the same as his mother, corralling Andrew with meals, the only differences being that the boy enjoyed the act of cooking and was far better than his mother. He took to serving serial courses – like a chef’s tasting menu – to stretch out the time the men could be together. One other difference emerged eventually: He found he liked the cooking better than the hour or so spent consuming the meal; he realized he didn’t really like his father very much. The man didn’t want to talk about the things that Jacob did: video games, kickboxing, wrestling, hunting, guns in general and bare knuckle boxing. Andrew didn’t want to talk about much at all except Andrew.

Once, when Jacob was eighteen, his father returned home with a beautiful, a really beautiful blonde. He had told the woman what a good cook “my kid is.” Like he was showing off a tacky pinkie ring. He’d said to Jacob, “Make Cindi here something nice, okay? Make something nice for the pretty lady.”

Jacob was well aware of E. coli  by then. Yet as much as he wanted to see twenty four year old Cindi retch to death, or at least retch, he couldn’t bring himself to intentionally ruin a dish. He received raves from the woman for his chicken Cordon Bleu, which he made not by pounding the poultry breast flat but by slicing the meat into thin sheets to enwrap the Gruyère cheese and – in his recipe – prosciutto ham from Parma.

Butcher man…

Not long after that, terrorism struck the nation. When Jacob enlisted in the army, the question of aptitude and interests came up but he didn’t let on he could cook, for fear he’d be assigned to mess hall kitchens for the next four years. He knew there’d be no pleasure in cooking steam table food for a thousand soldiers at a time. Mostly he wanted to kill people. Or make them scream. Or both. He didn’t see a big distinction between humans and animals for slaughter. In fact, think about it, beef cattle and lambs were innocent and we sliced them up without a second thought; people, on the other hand, were all guilty of some transgression or another, yet we’re oh so reluctant to apply the bullet or knife.

Some of us.

He regarded Carol once more. She was very muscular but pale. Maybe she worked out in gyms mostly or wore sunscreen when she ran. He offered her some wine. She shook her head. He gave her water and she drank half the bottle as he held it.

His second course for this evening would be a variation on potatoes Anna. Sliced and peeled russets, layered in a spiral and then cooked in butter and olive oil, with plenty of sea salt and pepper. In the middle would be a dollop of crème fraîche, which he whipped up with, of all things, a little – very little – fresh maple syrup. To finish, black truffle slivers. This dish he made in a small cast iron skillet. He would start the potatoes on the stove then crisp the top under the Miele’s broiler.

Potatoes and maple and truffles. Who would have thought?

Okay, he was getting hungry.

When Jacob was in his early twenties, his father died of what could be called gastric problems, though not ulcers or tumors. Four 9mm rounds to the belly.

The young soldier had vowed revenge but nothing ever came of that. A lot of people might have killed the man – Andrew, it turned out, had been up to all kinds of double crosses he should have known were not a good idea in Atlantic City. Finding the killers would have taken ages. Besides, truth be told, Jacob wasn’t all that upset. In fact, when he hosted a reception after the funeral, the murderer might very well have been among the business associates who’d attended. There was, however, some subtle vengeance played out at the event. The main course was penne alla puttanesca, the spicy tomato based dish whose name in Italian means “in the style of a whore.” He’d made it in honor of his father’s present girlfriend, who wasn’t Cindi but could easily have been.

Tonight, Jacob Swann’s third course, the main course, would be special. The Moreno assignment had been difficult and he wanted to pamper himself.

The entrée would be Veronique style, which he prepared with grapes sliced into disks and shallots, equally thin, in a beurre blanc sauce – made with slightly less wine (he never used vinegar) because of the presence of the grapes.

He would slice the very special meat into nearly translucent ovals, dredge them in type 45 French pastry flour then quickly sauté them in a blend of olive oil and butter (always the two, of course; butter alone burns faster than an overturned tanker).

He offered Carol more water. She wasn’t interested. She’d given up.

“Relax,” he whispered.

The liquid was boiling in the asparagus steamer, the potatoes browning nicely under the broiler, the oil and butter slowly heating, off gassing their lovely perfume.

Swann wiped down the cutting board he’d use to slice the meat for the main course.

But before getting to work, the wine. He opened and poured a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a Cloudy Bay, one of the best on the planet. He’d debated about the vineyard’s fine sparkling wine, the Pelorus, but he didn’t think he could finish a whole bottle alone, and bubbles, of course, don’t keep.