The Kill Room

inference. A jury can find a man guilty of DUI hit-and-run, even if he’s found sober and denying the next morning, if a bartender testifies that he downed a dozen beers an hour before the accident and the jury takes that testimony as credible.
    Vehicle E-ZPass transponders, credit cards, RFID chips in employee badges, subway MetroCards, TSA records, Customs documents, traffic cameras and security cameras in stores…dozens of sources of information could be used to place suspects at scenes.
    He noted that Sachs was jotting quick notes. Good. They’d struck gold, he had a feeling.
    Something would pin Barry Shales to the Bahamas on May 9.
    Sellitto was looking at the chart and he echoed Rhyme’s thought. “There’s gotta be something. We know Shales’s the shooter.”
    Amelia Sachs disconnected the call and with an uncharacteristically bewildered expression said, “Actually, Lon, no, he’s not.”

CHAPTER 59
    A HALF HOUR LATER NANCE LAUREL was in Rhyme’s town house.
    “Impossible,” she whispered.
    Sachs said, “He’s not the sniper. Look for yourself.”
    And she tossed a number of documents on the table in front of Laurel with a bit more force than Rhyme supposed was necessary under the circumstances. On the other hand, clearly these two women were never destined to be friends. He’d been expecting a knock-down-drag-out between them the way a storm chaser eyes a pea-green overcast and thinks: Tornado’s brewing.
    What the Information Services operation of the NYPD had discovered was that Barry Shales had not been in the Bahamas on the day Moreno was shot. He was in New York City all day—in fact, he hadn’t been out of the country in months.
    “They ran a dozen searches, cross-referenced everything. I asked them to double-check. They triple -checked. Radio frequency ID chip scans of him going into the NIOS office at nine and leaving for lunch, I’d guess—about two. During that time he went to Bennigan’s, paid with a credit card. Handwriting scan is his, and then went to an ATM—the scan by the cash machine camera is positive. Sixty-point facial recognition. Returned to the office at three. Left at six thirty.”
    “May nine. You’re sure?”
    “Positive.”
    An odd sound, a snake’s hiss. The breath easing from Nance Laurel’s mouth.
    “Where’s that leave us?” Sachs asked.
    “With Unsub Five Sixteen,” Pulaski said.
    Sellitto added, “We have nothing to suggest he’s the sniper—he seems more like backup, or clean-up. But we have charges against him.”
    Rhyme said, “Here’s an alternative case. We forget the Moreno homicide altogether. We prove Metzger had Unsub Five Sixteen kill Lydia Foster and set the IED. At the least there’s your conspiracy charge. It’s probably likely to get Metzger murder two.”
    But Laurel looked doubtful. “That’s not the case I want.”
    “You want?” Sachs asked, as if she’d decided the ADA sounded like a spoiled little girl.
    “Right. My case is against Metzger and his sniper for conspiring to commit an illegal targeted assassination.” Her voice rose, the first edge Rhyme had heard in it. “The kill order was the whole basis for that.” She stared at the copy on the whiteboard as if it had betrayed her.
    “We can still nail Metzger,” Sachs countered petulantly. “Does it matter how?”
    Ignoring her, the ADA turned and walked to the window in the front of the parlor. She was staring out at Central Park.
    Amelia Sachs gazed after her. Rhyme knew exactly what she was thinking.
    I want…
    My case…
    Rhyme’s eyes swiveled to Laurel. The tree she was looking at was a swamp white oak, Quercus bicolor , a thick and not particularly tall tree that did well in Manhattan. Rhyme knew about it not because of a personal interest in arboriculture but because he’d discovered a minuscule fragment of a swamp white oak leaf in the car of one Reggie “Sump” Kelleher, a particularly unpleasant Hell’s Kitchen thug. The sliver, along with a bit of limy soil, had placed Kelleher at a clearing in Prospect Park, where the body of a Jamaican drug kingpin had been found, though the head had not.
    Rhyme was focusing on the tree when the idea occurred to him.
    He turned quickly to the evidence charts and stared for a long moment. He was vaguely aware that people were saying things to him. He paid no attention, muttering to himself.
    Then he called over his shoulder, “Sachs, Sachs! Fast! I need you to take a drive.”

CHAPTER 60
    T HE