More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

She went up two flights of steep, narrow steps.

The site of the murder was a large bedroom decorated in French provincial style. The furniture and art were undoubtedly expensive but Sachs found that there were so many flourishes and scrolls and draped cloth — in gaudy yellows and greens and golds — that the room set her on edge. A designer’s room, not a homeowner’s room.

Near the far window was the bed, ironically underneath an old painting of shot birds on a kitchen table. The bedclothes were on the floor, flung there by the medical crews attending to Ronald Larkin, she supposed. The sheet and pillows revealed a large brown bloodstain.

Sachs stepped closer and wondered if there’d been—

“Any slug penetration?” Rhyme asked.

She smiled. Those words were going to be the next in her thoughts. She’d forgotten he was seeing exactly what she was.

“Doesn’t seem to be.” She could find no bullet holes on Larkin’s side of the bed. “We’ll have to check with the medical examiner.”

“Tells me he might’ve used fragmenting bullets.”

Professional killers sometimes bought or made rounds that broke apart when they hit flesh — to cause more damage and be more likely to inflict fatal wounds. Fired from this close — about six feet away — you would have expected a normal slug to continue through the skull and exit.

“What’s that?” Rhyme asked. “To your left.”

“There we go.” She was looking at a bullet hole in the side of a gilded bedside table, bits of fiber protruded. Sachs picked up the pillow. The slugs had pierced it and continued on. She found another hole in the wall. And on the floor a smaller bloodstain, from the wife’s wound, she supposed. There were bits of dull lead on the floor. “Yep. Frags.”

She shook her head.

“What’re you doing, Sachs? You’re making me dizzy.”

“Oh. Forgot we’re attached, Rhyme. I was just thinking about the slugs. The pain.”

Fragmenting bullets tend to be less numbing than regular rounds and cause more agony as the pieces fan out in the body.

“Yes, well.” Rhyme added nothing more.

Sachs would take samples and photos later. Now she wanted to get a sense of how the crime had occurred. She stepped outside onto the small balcony — the home of three more drought-stricken plants. It was clear where the killer had stood, aiming through the window. He might’ve intended to break in and shoot from closer but had been deterred by the locked windows and French door. Rather than waking his victims by trying to jimmy the lock he’d smashed the glass and fired through the hole.

“How’d he get there? From the roof?” Rhyme asked. “Ah, no, I see. What the hell’s on the hook?”

Sachs was wondering the same. She was gazing at a grappling hook, from which a rope dangled into the backyard garden below. She examined the hook.

“Cloth, Rhyme. Flannel. Looks like he cut a shirt up.”

“So nobody’d hear it make contact when he threw it. Clever boy. I assume it’s a knotted rope?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?” She looked over the balcony at the thirty-foot black rope. The cord had knots tied in it about every two feet.

“Even the best athletes can’t climb a rope thinner than about an inch. You can climb down one but not up. Gravity — one of the four universal forces in physics, by the way. It’s the weakest one, but it still works pretty damn well. Hard to beat it. Okay, Sachs, walk the grid and collect the collectibles. Then come on home.”

* * *

“Been having a dis-cussion with one of my buddies. Here we are, all cozy in BK. Hey, hey, smile when I’m talking ’bout you.”

Fred Dellray was on the other end of the phone, in Brooklyn apparently. Rhyme could picture him with one of his CIs. The tall, lanky FBI agent, with piercing eyes as dark as his skin, ran a network of confidential informants — the chic term for snitches. Much of Dellray’s work nowadays was counterterrorism and he’d developed a number of international connections.

One of whom was apparently discussing rumors with Dellray about the Ronald Larkin killing. (Though CIs never really discussed anything with the agent. Either they told him what he wanted to know or they didn’t, and in the case of the latter, good luck.)

“Word is goin’ ’round, Lincoln, that this shooter is a serious pro-fessional, know what I mean? Just in case you couldn’ta figured that one out on your own. I mean, money, money, money. No dollar a-mount but think way outside the Wal-Mart price tag for a kill.”

“Any details on the shooter? Description?”

“Only deets are: U.S. citizen but may have other passports. Spent a lot of time overseas, trained in Europe, word is. Africa, and Middle East connections lately. But then all the bad boys do.”

“Mercenary?”

“Most likely.”

Rhyme had assisted in several cases involving mercenary soldiers, one not too long ago, in fact, an arms importing scheme in Brooklyn. Rhyme had dealt with many types of criminals in his career but he’d found the mercenaries to be, on the whole, far more dangerous than your average street thug, even those in the mob. They often felt a moral justification in killing, were extremely smart and often had a worldwide network of contacts. Unlike a punk in Tony Soprano’s crew, they knew how to slip across borders and disappear into jurisdictions where you’d never find them.

“Any thoughts on who hired him?”

“Nup, not a skinny li’l fact on that one.”

“Working with backup?”

“Dunno. But lots of ’em do.”

“Why was Larkin hit?” Rhyme asked into the speakerphone.

“Ah, that’d be the other un-known….” He apparently turned aside to say something to his snitch, who replied in a fast, eager-to-please voice, though Rhyme couldn’t make out his words. Dellray came back on. “Sorry, Lincoln. No reasons my good friend here heard about. And I know he’d share with me. ’Cause that’s the kinda friend he aspires to be. Wish I had more for you, Lincoln. I’ll keep lookin.”

“Appreciate it, Fred.” They hung up.

He turned to the man sitting on a stool next to him and nodded a greeting.

Mel Cooper had arrived when Rhyme was on the phone with Dellray. He was a slightly built, balding man somewhere in his thirties, precise of movement (he was a champion ballroom dancer). Cooper was a forensic lab technician, based in the Crime Scene headquarters in Queens. Rhyme, who’d hired the tech at the NYPD years ago, occasionally still shanghaied him to work on cases here in the town house. He now shoved his thick glasses up on his nose. They discussed the mercenary angle, though Rhyme could see that the news didn’t mean much to him. Cooper preferred dealing with the information provided by microscopes, density gradient units and computers to that offered by human beings.

A prejudice that Rhyme largely shared.

A few minutes later the criminalist heard the front door open and Amelia Sachs’s confident stride on the marble. Then silence as she hit the carpet and finally a different sound on the wood floor.

She stepped inside, bearing two cartons of evidence.

A smiling greeting to Mel Cooper, then she kissed Rhyme and set the cartons down on an examining table.

Cooper and Sachs both pulled on powder-free latex gloves.

And they got to work.

“Weapon first,” Rhyme said.

They pieced together the bullets and learned that they were.32 caliber, probably fired from an automatic — Sachs found bits of fireproof fiber that would have come from a sound suppressor, and silencers are not effective with revolvers, only autoloaders or single-shot weapons. Rhyme noted again the killer’s professional quality that