The Kill Room

box from the backpack he used as an attaché case, sitting in the backseat. “You like jewelry, don’t you?”
    “What girl doesn’t?” Annette asked.
    As she opened it he said, “It’s not instead of your fee, you know. It’s in addition.”
    “Oh, please,” she said with a dismissing smile. Then concentrated on opening the small narrow box. Swann looked around the street. Empty still. He judged angles, drew back his left hand—open, thumb and index finger wide and stiff—and struck her hard in the throat in a very particular way.
    She gasped, eyes wide. Rearing back and gripping her damaged neck.
    “Uhn, uhn, uhn…”
    The blow was a tricky one to deliver. You had to hit gently enough so you didn’t crush the windpipe completely—he needed her to be able to speak—but hard enough to make it impossible to scream.
    Her eyes stared at him. Maybe she was trying to say his name—well, the cover name he’d given her last week. Swann had three U.S. passports and two Canadian, and credit cards in five different names. He frankly couldn’t recall the last time he’d used “Jacob Swann” with somebody he hadn’t known well.
    He looked back evenly at her and then turned to pull the duct tape from his backpack.
    Swann put on flesh-toned latex gloves and ripped a strip of tape off the roll. He paused. That was it. The spice the nearby cook had added to the fish.
    Coriander.
    How had he missed it?

CHAPTER 5
    T HE VICTIM WAS ROBERT MORENO ,” Laurel told them. “Thirty-eight years old.”
    “Moreno—sounds familiar,” Sachs said.
    “Made the news, Detective,” Captain Bill Myers offered. “Front page.”
    Sellitto asked, “Wait, the Anti-American American? What some headline called him, I think.”
    “Right,” the captain said. Then editorialized bitterly: “Prick.”
    No jargon there.
    Rhyme noted that Laurel didn’t seem to like this comment. Also, she seemed impatient, as if she had no time for deflective banter. He remembered that she wanted to move quickly—and the reason was now clear: Presumably once NIOS found out about the investigation they’d take steps to stop the case in its tracks—legally and, perhaps, otherwise.
    Well, Rhyme was impatient too. He wanted intriguing.
    Laurel displayed a picture of a handsome man in a white shirt, sitting before a radio microphone. He had round features, thinning hair. The ADA told them, “A recent picture in his radio studio in Caracas. He held a U.S. passport but was an expatriate, living in Venezuela. On May ninth, he was in the Bahamas on business when the sniper shot him in his hotel room. Two others were killed, as well—Moreno’s guard and a reporter interviewing him. The bodyguard was Brazilian, living in Venezuela. The reporter was Puerto Rican, living in Argentina.”
    Rhyme pointed out, “There wasn’t much of a splash in the press. If the government’d been caught with their finger on the trigger, so to speak, it would’ve been bigger news. Who was supposedly responsible?”
    “Drug cartels,” Laurel told him. “Moreno had created an organization called the Local Empowerment Movement to work with indigenous and impoverished people in Latin America. He was critical of drug trafficking. That ruffled some feathers in Bogotá and some Central American countries. But I couldn’t find facts to support that any cartel in particular wanted him dead. I’m convinced Metzger and NIOS planted those stories about the cartels to deflect attention from them. Besides, there’s something I haven’t mentioned. I know for a fact that a NIOS sniper killed him. I have proof.”
    “Proof?” Sellitto asked.
    Laurel’s body language, though not her facial features, explained that she was pleased to tell them the details. “We have a whistleblower—within or connected to NIOS. They leaked the order authorizing Moreno to be killed.”
    “Like WikiLeaks?” Sellitto asked. Then shook his head. “But no, it wouldn’t have been.”
    “Right,” Rhyme said. “Or the story would’ve been all over the news. The DA’s Office got it directly. And quietly.”
    Myers: “That’s right. The whistleblower capillaried the kill order.”
    Rhyme ignored the captain and his bizarre language. He said to Laurel: “Tell us about Moreno.”
    She did, and from memory. Natives to New Jersey, his family had left the country when the boy was twelve and moved to Central America because of his father’s job; he was a geologist with a U.S. oil company. At