More Twisted

after all the military training he felt most comfortable addressing people by rank. He himself was simply Carter. To the people who hired him, to the people he worked with. Carter.
    On the TV a commentator was mentioning that Ronald Larkin’s wife had survived the attack. She was described as a material witness.
    “Hmm.” Carter grunted.
    When Carter was overseas on his “security” assignments, he often relied on journalists for information. He was amazed at how much sensitive material they gave away, in exchange for what he told them—which was usually just a bunch of crap.
    A second newscaster came on and the story turned into one about all the good done by the Larkin Foundation, how much money it gave away.
    Carter had been involved with a lot of really rich people. Only a couple of sheiks in the Mideast had as much money as Ronald Larkin, he believed.
    Oh, there was that French businessman . . .
    But, like Larkin, he wasn’t rich anymore. He was dead.
    “Larkin had come to town to meet with executives from other nonprofits about merging their organizations into a super-charity to consolidate their efforts in Africa, where famine and illness are rampant. And now let’s go to our correspondent in the Darfur region of Western Sudan, where . . .”
    Yadda, yadda, yadda. Carter shut the set off, the remote a tiny thing in his massive hand.
    Carter was then listening carefully to the captain, who was pretty troubled.
    After a moment of silence, Carter said, “I’ll take care of it, Captain. I’ll make sure it gets done right.”
    After he hung up, Carter walked into his bedroom and looked through the closet, where he found a business suit. He started to pull on the navy-blue trousers but then stopped. He replaced the suit in the closet and picked one that was a size 48. It was much easier to carry a gun inconspicuously when you wore a suit that was one size too large.
    Ten minutes later he was in his forest-green Jeep Cherokee, heading toward Manhattan.

    Robert Kelsey, a balding, fit businessman, was the operations director for the Larkin Foundation, which meant his job was to give away about three billion dollars a year.
    “It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
    Rhyme agreed, after the man explained: government regulations, tax laws, Washington politics, Third World politics and, perhaps the most daunting of all, fielding requests from the thousands of people and organizationswho came to you, needing money for their heartbreaking causes—people you had to send away empty-handed.
    The man was on the same couch as Kitty Larkin an hour before. He too had that distracted, disheveled air of someone wakened early with tragic news and was as yet unable to fully absorb it.
    “We’ve got some evidence, a few leads,” Lon Sellitto said, “but we don’t have a clear motive yet. You have any ideas who’d want him dead? Mrs. Larkin didn’t have any thoughts on that.”
    Lincoln Rhyme was rarely interested in a suspect’s motives—he considered them to be the weakest leg of a case. (Evidence was, of course, to him strongest.) Still, obvious motives can point you in the direction of good evidence that will get a conviction.
    “Who’d want him dead?” Kelsey repeated with a grim smile. “For a man who gave away billions to kids who were starving or sick, you’d be amazed at how many enemies he had. But I’ll try to give you an idea. Our big drives for the past couple of years have been getting food and HIV drugs to Africa and funding for education in Asia and Latin America. The hardest place to work has been Africa. Darfur, Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia . . . . Ron refused to give money directly to the government. It’d just disappear into the pockets of the local officials. So what we do is buy the food here or in Europe and ship it to where it’s needed. Same with the medicine. Not that that cuts out corruption. The minute a ship docks, there’ll be somebody with a gun helping himself to your rice or wheat. The baby formula’s stolen and either soldor used to cut drugs. And the HIV medicine’s transferred into new bottles and sold across the borders to people with money to pay the going rate. The sick ones it was intended for get watered-down versions. Or sometimes just water.”
    “That bad?” Sellitto asked. “Jesus.”
    “Oh, yeah. We lose fifteen, twenty percent a year of our African donations to theft and hijacking. Tens of millions. And we’re luckier than most charities over