Rhyme looked out one of the remaining windows. There was a trim garden outside the room, dominated by a smooth-trunked tree that rose about forty feet into the air. He noted that the lower branches had all been trimmed back; the leaves didn’t start until about twenty or more feet off the ground. Looking straight over the garden, under the canopy of leaves, he could clearly see the infamous spit of land where Barry Shales had fired from, and where the men in the room now had nearly died.
He squinted up at the tree.
Well, we may just have a crime scene after all.
“Rookie!” Rhyme called.
“Sure, Lincoln.”
Pulaski joined him. Mychal Poitier did too.
“Notice anything odd about this scene?”
“One hell of a shot. That’s an awfully long way away. And look at that pollution he had to fire through.”
“It’s the same shooting scenario we saw yesterday from the other side of the water,” he grumbled. “Nothing’s changed about it. Obviously I’m not talking about that. I’m saying: Don’t you see something strange about the horticulture?”
The young officer examined the scene for a moment. “The shooter had help. The branches.”
“That’s right.” Rhyme explained to Poitier, “Somebody cut those lower branches so the sniper would have a clear shot. We should search the garden.”
But the corporal shook his head. “It is a good theory, Captain. But no. That tree? It’s a poisonwood. Are you familiar with it?”
“No.”
“It’s just like the name suggests, like poison oak or sumac. If you burn it, for instance, the smoke will be like tear gas. If you touch the leaves you can end up in the hospital from the irritation. They are flowering trees and very pretty so the resorts here don’t cut them down but they do trim all but the highest branches so people don’t touch them.”
“Ah, well, nice try,” Rhyme muttered. He absolutely hated it when a solid theory crashed. And, with it, any hope of a proper crime scene to search.
He told Pulaski, “Get some pictures, take samples of the carpet right outside the door, soil samples from the beds around the front sidewalk, dust the knobs here for prints. Probably useless but as long as we’re here…”
Rhyme watched the young man collect the evidence and slip it into plastic bags, documenting where it had been found. Pulaski then took perhaps a hundred pictures of the scene. He lifted three latent prints. He finished and deposited what he’d collected in a large paper bag. “Anything else, Lincoln?”
“No,” the criminalist grumbled.
The search of the Kill Room and the inn was perhaps the fastest in the history of forensic analysis.
Someone appeared in the doorway, another uniformed officer, skin very dark, face circular. He glanced at Rhyme with what seemed like admiration. Perhaps Mychal Poitier’s copy of Rhyme’s crime scene manual had recently made the rounds of the Royal Bahamas Police. Or maybe he was simply impressed to be in the same room as the odd cop from America who had in a series of simple deductions transformed the case of the missing student into a murder investigation.
“Corporal,” said the young officer to Poitier, with a deferential nod. He carried a thick folder and a large shopping bag. “From Assistant Commissioner McPherson: a full copy of the crime scene report and autopsy photos. And the autopsy reports themselves.”
Poitier took the folder from the man and thanked him. He nodded at the bag. “The victims’ clothing?”
“Yes, and shoes. Evidence that was collected here just after the shooting too. But I have to tell you, much has gone missing, the morgue administrator told me. He doesn’t know how.”
“Doesn’t know how,” Poitier scoffed.
Rhyme recalled that the watches and other valuables had vanished between here and the morgue, as had Eduardo de la Rua’s camera and tape recorder.
“I’m sorry, Corporal.”
Poitier added, “Any word on the shell casings?” He cast a glance through the window at the spit of land across the bay. The divers and officers with metal detectors had been at work for the past hour or so.
“I’m afraid not. It seems the sniper 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
He 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.