The Kill Room
Tell me what you think about those entries, knowing that the docosahexaenoic acid and the C 8 H 8 O 3 are, respectively, caviar and vanilla.”
The aide stood for a moment, looking over the charts. His face shifted into a smile. “Familiar…Hold on a minute.” He went to a nearby computer and pulled up the New York Times . He did some browsing. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he was looking at. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“Ah, could you share the interesting part?”
“The other two scenes—Lydia Foster and the Java Hut—have traces of artichoke and licorice, right?”
“Right,” Cooper confirmed.
He spun the computer for them to look at. “Well, combine those ingredients with caviar and vanilla and you have a real expensive dish that’s served at the Patchwork Goose. There was just an article about it in the Food section recently.”
“Patchwork…the fuck is that?” Sellitto muttered.
Sachs said, “It’s one of the fanciest restaurants in town. They serve seven or eight courses over four hours and pair the wine. They do weird things like cook with liquid nitrogen and butane torches. Not that I’ve ever been, of course.”
“That’s right,” Thom said, nodding at the screen. It appeared to be a recipe. “And that’s one of the dishes: trout served with artichoke cooked in licorice broth and garnished with roe and vanilla mayonnaise. Your perp left traces of those ingredients?”
“That’s right,” Sachs said.
Sellitto asked, “So he works in the restaurant?”
Thom shook his head. “Oh, I doubt it. You’re committed to working six days a week, twelve-hour days at a place like that. He wouldn’t have time to be a professional hit man. And I doubt it’s a customer. I don’t think the ingredients would transfer or last more than a few hours on his clothes. More likely he made the dish at home. From the recipe here.”
“Good, good,” Rhyme whispered. “ Now we know Unsub Five Sixteen went to the Bahamas on May fifteenth to kill Annette Bodel, set the IED at Java Hut and killed Lydia Foster. He was probably the one at the South Cove Inn just before Moreno was shot. He was helping Barry Shales prep for the killing.”
Sachs said, “And we know he likes to cook. Maybe he’s a former pro. That could be helpful.”
Cooper lifted his phone and took a call; Rhyme hadn’t heard it ring and wondered if the tech had the unit on vibrate or if he himself was suffering from water on the ear from his swim. Lord knew his eyes still stung.
The crime scene tech thanked the caller and announced, “We ran the bulb of the brown hair that Amelia recovered from Lydia Foster’s. That was the results of the CODIS analysis. Nothing. Whoever the unsub is, he’s not in any criminal DNA databases.”
As Sachs wrote their latest findings on the whiteboard Rhyme said, “Now we’re making some progress. But the key to nailing Metzger is the sniper rifle and the key to the rifle is the bullet. Let’s take a look at it.”
CHAPTER 57
A LTHOUGH PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ELIMINATING each other with firearms for more than a thousand years, the forensic analysis of guns and bullets is a relatively new science.
In probably the first instance of applying the discipline, investigators in England in the middle of the nineteenth century got a confession from a killer based on matching a bullet with the mold that made it. In 1902 an expert witness (Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less) helped prosecutors convict a suspect by matching a bullet test-fired by the suspect’s gun to the murder slug.
However, it wasn’t until Calvin Goddard, a medical doctor and forensic scientist, published “Forensic Ballistics” in 1925 that the discipline truly took off. Goddard is still known as the father of ballistic science.
Rhyme had three goals in applying the rules Goddard had laid down ninety years ago. First, to identify the bullet. Second, from that information to identify the types of guns that could have fired it. Third, to link this particular bullet to a specific gun of that sort, which could be traced to the shooter, in this case Barry Shales.
The team now turned to the first of these questions. The bullet itself.
Gloved and masked, Sachs opened the plastic bag containing the bullet, a misshapen oblong of copper and lead. She looked it over. “It’s a curious round. Unusual. First, it’s big—three-hundred grain.”
The weight of the projectile fired from the gun—called a slug—is measured in
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