“How’re we doing, Mel?”
“Give me a minute.”
“You’ve had plenty of them. What’s going on?”
The massaging sensation stopped, but this was due not to the migration of her hand but because she’d stepped away and was helping Cooper prepare a slide for examination under the microscope.
Rhyme looked over the updated evidence chart for the hundredth time.
The answer was there. It
The evidence, the minuscule bits of trace, held the key.
Rhyme glanced at the clock.
“Mel?”
Without looking up from the Bausch and Lomb, the tech repeated patiently, “It should only be a minute.”
But every minute that passed meant that the killer was sixty seconds closer to escaping.
Or, Rhyme feared, sixty seconds closer to murdering once again.
Carter was sitting in his green Jeep, looking over Brooklyn from a spot near the South Street Seaport.
He was sipping coffee and enjoying the view. The tall-masted clipper ship, the bridges, the boat traffic.
Carter had no boss except the people who hired him, and he kept his own hours. Sometimes he’d get up early — four a.m. — and, when the Fulton Fish Market was still operating, drive here. He’d wander past stalls, staring at the tuna, the squid, the flounder, the crabs. It reminded him of seaports overseas.
He was sorry the fish market had closed. Financial problems, he guessed. Or unions maybe.
Carter had solved a lot of union problems in his day.
His cell phone rang. He glanced down at caller ID.
“Captain,” he said in a respectful voice.
He listened carefully, then said, “Sure. I can do that.” He disconnected and placed a call overseas.
Carter was glad he didn’t have to go anywhere for a few minutes. A small cargo ship was steaming up the East River and he enjoyed watching its progress.
“
Carter began a conversation, not even aware that he’d lapsed into French.
Kitty awoke to a phone call.
She picked it up. “Hello?”
Peter Larkin’s voice said, “Kitty. How are you?”
She’d seen plenty of pictures of him, but only met the man once, at the wedding. She remembered him clearly: tall, lean, with thinning hair. He resembled his brother only in facial structure.
“Oh, Peter, this is so terrible.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“I suppose.” She cleared her throat. “I was just asleep, and I was dreaming about him. I woke up and for a minute I was fine. Then I remembered what had happened. It’s so terrible. How are
“I can’t even think. We didn’t sleep on the plane….”
They commiserated for a few minutes more, then Peter explained they were at the airport and their luggage had just arrived. He and his wife would be in the town house in an hour or two. His daughter, a college student at Yale, was already there.
Kitty glanced at her watch, the one Ron had given her. It was simple and elegant and probably worth ten thousand dollars. “Why don’t you get some rest tonight and I’ll come by in the morning.”
“Of course. You have the address?”
“It’s somewhere. I… I don’t know where. I’m just not thinking straight.”
He gave it to her again.
“It’ll be good to see you, Kitty.”
“Family has to be together at times like this.”
Kitty went into the bathroom and washed her face in icy water, rinsing away the last dullness of sleep.
She returned to the room and gazed at herself in the wall mirror, thinking how different she looked from the woman she really was. Not Kitty Larkin at all, but someone named Priscilla Endicott, a name lost behind a lengthy string of aliases.
When you were a professional killer, you couldn’t afford to be yourself of course.
A left-wing radical in the United States, an advocate — and occasional practitioner — of political violence, Priscilla had moved overseas after college, where she’d floated among several underground movements and ended up helping out political terrorists in Ireland and Italy. But by the age of thirty she realized that politics don’t pay the bill, at least not simpleminded communist and socialist politics, and she decided to offer her talents to those who’d pay: security consultants in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When even that didn’t pay enough, she changed her line of work again, keeping the title but taking on a whole new job description, which she described as “problem solver.”
Four months ago, while sunbathing at a pool in the United Arab Emirates, she’d gotten a phone call from a trusted contact. After some negotiation, she’d been hired, for $5 million U.S., to kill Ron Larkin and his brother and wife, the three people instrumental in overseeing the Larkin Foundation.
Priscilla had changed her appearance: weight gain, dyed hair, colored contact lenses, strategic collagen injections. She became Catherine “Kitty” Biddle Simpson, created a credible biography and managed to get close to Larkin through some charities in Los Angeles. She’d spent plenty of time in Africa and could discuss the region intelligently. She even knew a great deal about the plight of the children, having turned a number of them into orphans.
Kitty laid on the charm (and a few other skills, of course), they began dating and she looked for a chance to complete her contract. But it wasn’t easy. Oh, she could’ve killed him at any time, but murdering a very public and popular man like Ronald Larkin, not to mention his brother and sister-in-law too, and getting away, of course, was much harder than she’d thought.
But then Ron Larkin himself provided a solution. Amusing her no end, he proposed to her.
As his wife she’d have complete access to his life, without the security people around, and his brother and sister-in-law would automatically trust her.
The first thing she said was, “Yes, dear, but I don’t want a penny of your money.”
“Well…”
“No, I’ve got my father’s trust fund,” she’d explained. “Besides, honey, what I like about you isn’t the dollar signs. It’s what you do for people. And, okay, you got a decent body for an old guy,” she’d joked.
Under those circumstances, who could possibly suspect her?
Then after a bout of marital bliss (occasional sex, many rich dinners, countless boring businesspeople), it was time to act.
On Tuesday night they’d arrived at LaGuardia (flying on a private jet, she could bring her guns and the other accoutrements of her trade with her), driven to the town house and gone to bed. At 4:30 a.m., she’d dressed and pulled on latex gloves, screwed the suppressor onto the barrel of her favorite.32 automatic and stepped outside onto the balcony, feeling the cool, electric smell of New York City air in the morning. She’d distributed the planted evidence — the trace she scattered around to lead the police off — then rested the grappling hook on the railing, tossed the rope over the side. She’d returned to the window, cracked the pane and fired — hitting Ron three times and sending the fourth and fifth rounds into her own pillow.
Then she called 9–1–1, hysterical, to report the attack. After hanging up she’d unscrewed the back of the television, put the gun, silencer, ammunition and gloves inside, and with her cuticle scissors, slit her arm and jammed a fragment of shattered bullet into the wound. Then she staggered downstairs to await the police. Ron’s brother and sister-in-law would arrive as soon as possible, of course, and she’d kill them too, making it look like the same man was behind their deaths.
