The Kill Room

took the brass with him and we still can’t find where the nest was.”
    A shrug from Poitier. “And any hits on the name Barry Shales?”
    As they’d driven here Poitier had had his intelligence operation see if Customs or Passport Control had a record of the sniper entering the country. Credit card information too.
    “Nothing, sir. No.”
    “All right. Thank you, Constable.”
    The man saluted then gave a tentative nod to Rhyme, turned and, with impressive posture, marched from the room.
    Rhyme asked Thom to push him closer to Poitier and he peered into the shopping bag, noting three plastic-wrapped bundles, all tightly sealed, attached to which were chain-of-custody cards, properly filled out. He clumsily reached in and extracted a small envelope on top. Inside was the bullet. Rhyme estimated it as a bit bigger than the most common sniper round, the .338 Lapua. This was probably a .416, a caliber growing in popularity. Rhyme studied the bit of deformed copper and lead. Like all rounds, even this large caliber, it seemed astonishingly small to have caused such horrific damage and stolen a human life in a fraction of a second.
    He replaced it. “Rookie, you’re in charge of these. Fill out the cards now.”
    “Will do.” Pulaski jotted his name on the chain-of-custody cards.
    Rhyme said, “We’ll take good care of them, Corporal.”
    “Ah, well, I doubt the evidence will be useful to us. If you arrest this Shales and his partner, your unsub, I don’t think your courts will send them back here for trial.”
    “Still, it’s evidence. We’ll make sure it’s returned to you uncontaminated.”
    Poitier looked around the pristine room. “I’m sorry we don’t have a crime scene for you, Captain.”
    Rhyme frowned. “Oh, but we do . And I suggest we get to it as quickly as we can before something happens to that one too. Propel me, Thom. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 51
    H E RESEMBLED A TOAD.
    Henry Cross was squat and dark-complexioned and he had several visible warts that Amelia Sachs thought could be easily removed. His black hair was thick and crowned a large head. Lips, broad. Hands, wide with ragged nails. As he talked he would occasionally lift a fat cigar and stick it in his mouth to chew the unlit stogie enthusiastically. This was gross.
    Cross said, with a shake of his head, “It sucks, Roberto dying. Sucks big time.” His voice had a faint accent, Spanish, she supposed; she recalled Lydia Foster said he spoke that language and English perfectly—like Moreno.
    He was the director of the Classrooms for the Americas Foundation, which worked with churches to build schools and hire teachers in impoverished areas of Latin America. Sachs recalled that Moreno had been involved in this.
    Blowing up the balloons…
    “Roberto and his Local Empowerment Movement were one of our biggest supporters,” Cross said. He stabbed a blunt finger at the gallery of pictures on a scuffed wall. They showed the CAF offices in Caracas, Rio and Managua, Nicaragua. Moreno was standing with his arm around a smiling, swarthy man at a construction site. They were both wearing hard hats. A small group of locals seemed to be applauding.
    “And he was a friend of mine,” Cross muttered.
    “Had you known him long?”
    “Five years maybe.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss.” A phrase that instructors actually teach you at the police academy. When Amelia Sachs uttered these words, though, she meant them.
    “Thank you.” He sighed.
    The small dark office was in a building on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. The foundation was the one stop on Moreno’s trip to New York that Sachs had been able to track down—thanks to the receipt from Starbucks she’d found at Lydia Foster’s apartment. Sachs had checked the office sign-in sheet in the building that housed the coffee shop and found that on May 1 Moreno was visiting CAF.
    “Roberto liked it that we’re not a charity. We call ourselves a distributor of resources. My organization doesn’t just give money away to the indigent. We fund schools, which teach people skills so they can work their way out of poverty. I don’t have any patience for anyone with their hands out. It really irks me when…”
    Cross stopped speaking, raised a hand and laughed. “Like Roberto, I tend to lecture. Sorry. But I’m speaking from experience, speaking from getting my hands dirty on the job, speaking from knowing what it’s like to live in the trenches. I used to work in the shipping