The Kill Room

that her voice brightened at this. Good news for the case, good news for the jury—that their primary suspect would order one of his officers to do something so heartless. Not a word of sympathy for the victim, not a frown of concern.
    Sachs truly hated the woman at this moment.
    She continued, pointedly speaking only to Mel Cooper, “Lon’s agreed to keep it a motive-unknown case for the time being—like the IED at the Java Hut’s still officially a gas main explosion. I thought it was better not to let Metzger know how the investigation’s going.”
    Laurel was nodding. “Good.”
    Sachs stared at the whiteboards then began to revise them in light of what they’d learned. “Let’s give Lydia Foster’s killer the title Unsub Five Sixteen. After today’s date.”
    Laurel asked, “Anything more about the ID of the shooter, the man you followed to NIOS?”
    “No. Lon’s got a surveillance team on him. They’ll call as soon as they make an ID.”
    Another pause. Laurel said, “I’m just curious: Did you think about getting his fingerprints?”
    “His—”
    “When you were following the sniper downtown? The reason I’m asking is I was working a case once and an undercover detective dropped a glossy magazine. The subject picked it up for her. We got his prints.”
    “Well,” Sachs said evenly, “I didn’t.”
    Because if I had done that we’d have his fucking ID by now. Which we don’t.
    An impenetrably cryptic nod from Laurel.
    Just curious…
    That was as irritating as “if you don’t mind.”
    Sachs turned away from her, wincing slightly, and handed off the evidence from the Lydia Foster crime scene to Mel Cooper, who regarded the slim pickings with the same dismay that Sachs felt.
    “That’s it?”
    “Afraid so. Unsub Five Sixteen knows what he’s doing.” Sachs was looking at the photos of Lydia Foster’s bloody corpse, which she was downloading from the crime scene team in Queens and printing out.
    Lips tight, she stepped to one of the whiteboards and taped the pictures up.
    “He tortured her,” Laurel said softly but with no other reaction.
    “And took everything Lydia had about the assignment for Moreno.”
    “What could she have known?” the ADA wondered. “If he had a commercial interpreter with him on the business trip, he obviously wasn’t taking her to meet criminals. She’d be a good witness to testify that Moreno wasn’t a terrorist.” She added, “That is, would have been a good witness.”
    Sachs felt a burst of anger that the woman’s reaction was less about Lydia Foster’s death than that she’d lost a brick in the prosecution against Shreve Metzger. Then recalled her own dismay at seeing the body, part of which stemmed from her being too late to get solid information from the interpreter.
    The policewoman said, “I had a brief conversation with her earlier. I know she had meetings with Russian and Emirates charities and the Brazilian consulate. That’s all.”
    I never got the chance to find out more, she reflected. Still furious with herself. If Rhyme had been here, he would have speculated that there might be two perps. Shit.
    Forget it, she sternly thought. Get on with the case.
    She looked at Cooper. “Let’s see if we can make some connections. I want to know whether it was Bruns or the unsub who set the IED. You found anything from the Java Hut scene, Mel?”
    Cooper explained that there’d been very few clues but he had in fact made some discoveries. The Bomb Squad had delivered the information that the IED was an off-the-shelf anti-personnel device, loaded with Semtex, the Czech plastic explosive. “They’re available on the arms market, pretty easily if you have the right connections,” Cooper explained. “Most purchasers are military users, both government and mercenaries.”
    Cooper had run the latent prints Sachs had been able to lift at the coffeehouse and had sent them to IAFIS. They’d come back negative.
    The tech said, “You got me a lot of good samplars from the Java Hut but there wasn’t a lot of trace that could reasonably be attributed to the perp. Two things were unique, though, which means they might’ve come from our bomber. The first was eroded limestone, coral and very small bits of shell—sand, in other words, and it’s sand from a tropical location. I also found organic crustacean waste.”
    “What’s that?” Laurel asked.
    “Crab shit,” Sachs answered.
    “Exactly,” Cooper confirmed. “Though, to be