The Kill Room

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.

CHAPTER 56
    Y OU’VE GOT A TAN,” SELLITTO SAID.
    “I don’t have a tan.”
    “You do. You oughta wear sunscreen, Linc.”
    “I don’t have a goddamn tan,” he muttered.
    “I think you do,” Thom added.
    It was nearly 8 a.m. Thom, Pulaski and Rhyme had arrived from LaGuardia airport late, nearly eleven last night, and the aide had insisted that Rhyme get some sleep immediately. The case could wait till this morning.
    There’d been no argument; the criminalist had been exhausted. The dunk in the water had taken its toll. The whole trip had, for that matter. But that didn’t stop Rhyme from summoning Thom the moment he’d awakened at six thirty with the push-button call switch beside the bed. (The aide had called the device very Downton Abbey , a reference Rhyme did not get.)
    The parlor was humming now, with Sellitto, Cooper and Sachs present. And Ron Pulaski—who did seem to have a tan—was just walking through the door. Nance Laurel had a court appearance on one of her other cases and would arrive later.
    Rhyme was in a new wheelchair, a Merits Vision Select. Gray with red fenders. It had been delivered and assembled yesterday, before Rhyme’s return from the Bahamas. Thom had called their insurance company from Nassau and negotiated a speedy purchase. (“They didn’t know what to say,” the aide reported, “when I gave the reason for the loss as ‘immersion in ten feet of water.’”)
    Rhyme had picked this particular model because it was known for off-road navigation. His old reticence to be in public had disappeared—largely because of his trip to the Bahamas. He wanted more travel and he wanted to work scenes himself again. That required a chair that would get him to as many places as possible.
    The Merits had been pimped out a bit to make allowances for Rhyme’s particular condition—such as the strap for his immobile left arm, a touchpad under his working left ring finger and, of course, a cup holder, big enough for both whiskey tumbler and coffee mug. He was now enjoying the latter beverage through a thick straw. He looked over Sellitto, Sachs and Pulaski, then studied the whiteboard, which contained Sachs’s notations of the investigation in his absence.
    “Time’s a-wasting.” He nodded at the STO order. “Mr. Rashid is going to meet his maker in a day or two if we don’t do something about it. Let’s see what we have.” He now wheeled back and forth in front of the whiteboards containing the analysis of the evidence Sachs had collected at the IED scene at Java Hut and Lydia Foster’s apartment.
    “A blue airplane?” he asked, regarding that notation.
    Sachs explained about what Henry Cross had told her. The private jet that seemed to be dogging Moreno around the United States and Central and South America.
    “I’ve got one of Captain Myers’s Special Services officers searching but they aren’t having much luck. There’s no database of aircraft by color. If it was sold recently, though, brokers might have sales literature with pictures. He’s still checking.”
    “All right. Now, let’s look at what we found in the Bahamas. Number one, the Kill Room.”
    Rhyme explained to Sachs and Cooper how unsub 516 or Barry Shales had ruined the scene at the inn, but he had some things, including the preliminary report that the local police had done, along with the photos, which Sachs now taped up on a separate whiteboard, along with the paltry crime scene report that the RBPF had originally prepared.
    For the next half hour, Sachs and Cooper carefully unpacked and