The Kill Room

come.
Supplemental information: Journalist, interviewing Moreno. Born Puerto Rico, living in Argentina.
Victim 3: Simon Flores.
COD: Gunshot wound, details to come.
Supplemental information: Moreno’s bodyguard. Brazilian national, living in Venezuela.
Suspect 1: Shreve Metzger.
Director, National Intelligence and Operations Service.
Mentally unstable? Anger issues.
Manipulated evidence to illegally authorize Special Task Order?
Divorced. Law degree, Yale.
Suspect 2: Sniper.
Code name: Don Bruns.
Information Services datamining Bruns.
Voiceprint obtained.
Crime scene report, autopsy report, other details to come.
Rumors of drug cartels behind the killings. Considered unlikely.
Crime Scene 2.
Sniper nest of Don Bruns, 2000 yards from Kill Room, New Providence Island, Bahamas.
May 9.
Crime scene report to come.
Supplemental Investigation.
Determine identity of Whistleblower.
Unknown subject who leaked the Special Task Order.
Sent via anonymous email.
Contacted NYPD Computer Crimes Unit to trace; awaiting results.
    Hands on her hips, Amelia Sachs studied the whiteboard.
    She noted Rhyme glance without interest at her flowing script. He wouldn’t pay much attention to what she’d written until hard facts—evidence, mostly, in his case—began to appear.
    It was just the three of them at the moment, Sachs, Laurel and Rhyme. Lon Sellitto had gone downtown to recruit a specially picked canvass-and-surveillance team from Captain Bill Myers’s Special Services operation; with secrecy a priority, Laurel didn’t want to use regular Patrol Division officers.
    Sachs returned to her desk. She didn’t do well sitting still and that was largely what she’d been doing for the past two hours. Confined here, the bad habits returned: She’d dig one nail into another, scratch her scalp to bleeding. Fidgety by nature, she felt a compulsion to walk, to be outside, to drive. Her father had coined an expression that was her anthem:
    When you move they can’t getcha…
    The line had meant several things to Herman Sachs. Certainly it could refer to his job, their job—he too had been a cop, a portable, walking his beat in the Deuce, Times Square, at a time when the murder rate in the city was at an all-time high. Fast of foot, fast of thought, fast of eye could keep you alive.
    Life in general too. Moving… The briefer you were a target for any harm, the better, whether from lovers, bosses, rivals. He’d recited those words a lot, up until he died (some things, your own failing body, for instance, you can’t outrun).
    But all cases require backgrounding and paperwork and that was particularly true in this one, where facts were hard to come by and the crime scene inaccessible. So Sachs was in desk job prison at the moment, plowing through documents and canvassing—discreetly—via phone. She turned from the board and sat once more as she absently dug a thumbnail into the quick of a finger. Pain spread. She ignored it. A faint swirl of red appeared on a piece of intelligence she was reading and she ignored this too.
    Some of the tension was due to the Overseer, which was how Sachs had come to think of Nance Laurel. She wasn’t used to anyone looking over her shoulder, even her superiors—and as a detective third, Amelia Sachs had a lot of those. Laurel had fully moved in now—with two impressive laptops up and running—and had had even more thick files delivered.
    Was she going to have a folding cot brought in next?
    The unsmiling, focused Laurel, on the other hand, wasn’t the least edgy. She hunched over documents, clattered away loudly and irritatingly at the keyboards and jotted notes in extremely small, precise lettering. Page after page was examined, notated and organized. Passages on the computer screen were read carefully and then rejected or given a new incarnation via the laser printer and joined their comrades in the files of People v. Metzger, et al.
    Sachs rose, walked to the whiteboards again and then returned to the dreaded chair, trying to learn what she could about Moreno’s trip to New York on April 30 through May 2. She’d been canvassing hotels and car services. She was getting through to human beings about two-thirds of the time, leaving messages the rest.
    She glanced across the room toward Rhyme; he was on the phone, trying to get the Bahamian police to cooperate. His expression explained that he wasn’t having any more luck than she was.
    Then Sachs’s phone buzzed. The call was from Rodney