The Kill Room

about. And who you met. But first of all, how many officers have you talked to about Robert Moreno?” He was concerned that somebody had called her after Amelia Sachs.
    She shook her head.
    Jacob Swann rested his left hand on the back of hers, tied tightly down. “That’s not a number. How many officers?”
    She made more bizarre sounds and then, when he brushed the knife against her fingers, she whispered, “No one.”
    She glanced toward the door. It meant she believed she could save herself if she stalled, to give the police time to arrive.
    Jacob Swann curled the fingers of his left hand and rested the side of the Kai Shun blade, pounded with indentations, against his knuckles. The razor edge lowered to her middle and ring fingers. This was the way all serious chefs wielded their knives when they sliced food, fingertips of the guide hand curved below and away from the dangerous blade. You had to be very careful when you cut. He’d sliced through his own fingertips on several occasions. The pain was indescribable; fingers contain more nerve endings than any other part of the body.
    He whispered, “Now, I’m going to ask you once more.”

CHAPTER 41
    T HE DRIVE TO THE SNIPER’S NEST on the outcropping of land near the South Cove Inn took considerably longer than it otherwise might have.
    Mychal Poitier gave Thom a complicated route to get to the main highway that led them to their destination—SW Road. The point of this evasion was to see if the gold Mercury was following them. Poitier assured him that the car did not contain officers of the Royal Bahamas Police Force conducting surveillance. The tail might have to do with Moreno or something else entirely. A well-dressed and vulnerable American in a wheelchair might simply have aroused the interest of thieves.
    Rhyme called Pulaski, who was still at the inn, and told him where they’d be. The young officer continued to wait for the maid who might have more information about the sniper’s intelligence gathering at the inn the day before the shooting.
    Once past the airport the traffic thinned and Thom sped up, piloting the van along SW Road and its gentle arc around the island, past manicured gated communities, past shacks decorated with laundry on lines and goats in pens, past swamps and then an endless mass of forest and greenery—Clifton Heritage Park.
    “Here, turn here,” Poitier said.
    They had arrived at a dirt road, which veered right and led through a wide, rusting gate, which was open. The road followed a narrow outcropping of land that extended a half mile into Clifton Bay. The spit was a few feet above sea level, dotted with trees and brush and scruffy bare spots, lined with a shore that was rocky in some places, sandy in others. The road was bordered with Do Not Swim signs. No explanation was given but the water was noxious, sickly green and singularly unappealing.
    Thom followed the road, which skirted the north edge of the spit, past the several commercial facilities Poitier had alluded to in the restaurant earlier. The first they passed, at the intersection of the unnamed drive and SW Road, was the public trash yard where several fires burned and a dozen people wandered about, picking for anything of value. Next was the tire recycling operation and finally the metal fabricating plant composed of several low shacks so unsubstantial that it looked as if a gentle breeze, forget a hurricane, could have blown them down. The businesses were identified by hand-painted signs. Fences were topped with barbed wire and tense dogs prowled the grounds, squat and broad-chested—very different from the potcake they’d shared lunch with.
    Clouds of smoke, yellow and gray, lingered defiantly, as if too heavy to be moved by the breezes.
    As Thom picked his way along the pitted road, the view to the right suddenly opened up and they were looking at the bay of azure water beneath a stunning blue sky and white clouds dense as wads of cotton. About a mile away was the low beige line of land and buildings that was the South Cove Inn and surrounding grounds. Somewhere along this north edge of the spit from here to the end, about a hundred yards away, the sniper would have set up his nest.
    “Anywhere here,” Rhyme said. Thom drove a short distance to a pull-off and parked. He shut the engine off and two sounds filled the van—some harsh rhythmic pounding from the metal factory and the faint crash of waves on the rocks that lined the shore.
    “One thing