The Smoke had filled Metzger fast, though he didn’t call it Smoke then, didn’t call it anything. He proceeded to break at least four bones in the man’s body before the relief shot through him. More than relief — almost sexual.
Sometimes this memory came back, like now, when he happened to touch his hair. Nothing more than that. He remembered the man, his unfocused, slightly crossed eyes. The blood, the remarkably swollen jaw.
And the coffee vendor. No, just ram the stand, scald him, kill him, forget the consequences. The satisfaction would be sublime.
Help me, Dr. Fischer.
But there was no Smoke now. He was in an ecstatic high. Intelligence and surveillance experts were feeding him information about the Rashid operation.
The terrorist — the next task in the queue — was presently meeting with the Matamoros Cartel bomb supplier. Metzger would have given anything to modify the STO to include him as well but the man was a Mexican citizen and getting permission to vaporize him would have meant elaborate discussions with higher-ups in Mexico City and Washington. And heaven knew he had to be careful with them.
Budgetary meetings proceeding apace. Much back-and-forth. Resolution tomorrow. Can’t tell which way the wind is blowing…
He received another call about the progress of the UAV, under the command of Barry Shales in the GCS, the trailer outside Metzger’s window. The craft had launched not from Homestead, as in the Moreno operation, but from the NIOS facility near Fort Hood, Texas. It had crossed into Mexican airspace, with the Federales’ blessing, unlike with Moreno in the Bahamas, and was heading through clear weather toward the target.
His phone rang again. Seeing the caller ID he stiffened and glanced at his open door. He could see Ruth’s hands through the sliver of view into the ante office. She was typing. She had a small window too and sunlight glinted off her modest engagement and impressive wedding rings.
He rose and slid the door closed, then answered. “Yes.”
“Found her,” the man’s voice reported.
No names or code names…
Her.
Nance Laurel.
“Where?”
“Detention center, interviewing a suspect. Not on this case, something else. I’ve confirmed it’s her. She’s there now, pretty much alone. Should I?”
No ending verb to that sentence.
Metzger debated, added pluses and negatives. “Yes.”
He disconnected.
Maybe, just maybe this would all go away.
And he turned his attention back to Mexico, where an enemy of the country was about to die. Shreve Metzger felt swollen with joy.
CHAPTER 66
“Where’s Nance Laurel?” Sachs asked the rotund African American woman on the fifth floor of the New York detention center.
The Department of Corrections officer stiffened and glanced at Sachs’s badge with disdain. Sachs supposed her voice was a bit strident, the greeting rude. It hadn’t been intentional; Nance Laurel simply did this to her.
“Room Five. Box yo weapon.” Back to a People magazine. A scandal was breaking among some quasi-celebrities. Or maybe they were honest-to-God celebs. Sachs had never heard of them.
She wanted to apologize to the woman for her bluntness but couldn’t figure out how. Then her anger at Laurel returned and she slipped the Glock into a locker and slammed the door, drawing a criticizing breath from the lockup mistress. With a buzz the door opened and she stepped through into the grim corridor. It was deserted at the moment. This was the area where high-level prisoners — accused of serious felonies — discussed their cases with their lawyers and cut deals with the prosecutors.
The perfume here was disinfectant and paint and pee.
Sachs strode past the first several rooms, all of which were empty. At Interview #5, she looked through smeared glass and saw a shackled man in an orange jumpsuit sitting across from Laurel at a table bolted to the floor. In the corner was another D of C guard, a huge man whose nearly white shaved head glistened with sweat. His arms were crossed and he looked at the prisoner like a biologist examining yet another specimen of toxic but dead bug.
The doors were self-locking; you needed a key to open them from either side so Sachs banged on the door with her palm.
This must have been strident too, since everybody in the room jumped and swiveled. The guard had no gun but his hand dipped toward the pepper spray on his belt. He saw Sachs, apparently recognized her as a cop and relaxed. The prisoner gazed narrowly at Sachs and the look morphed from startled to hungry.
Sex crime, Sachs deduced.
Laurel’s lips tightened slightly.
She rose. The guard unlocked the door and let the ADA out, then he locked it again and returned to his watchful state.
The women walked to the end of the corridor, away from the door. Laurel asked, “Have you got something on Metzger or Shales?”
“Why ask me?” Sachs countered. “Since I’m not really in the equation.”
“Detective,” Laurel said evenly, “what are you talking about?”
She didn’t start with the news Sellitto had just informed her of, the suspension. She went chronologically. “You took my name off all the memos, all the emails. You replaced my name with yours.”
“I’m not—”
“Anything to help you get elected, right, Assemblywoman Laurel?”
Sachs withdrew the copy she’d made from Laurel’s secret files and thrust the sheet forward. It was a petition to put Laurel on the ballot to run for the office of assemblywoman in her district. The assembly was the lower house of the legislature in New York.
The woman’s eyes dipped. “Ah.”
Busted.
But an instant later she was gazing coolly back into Sachs’s face.
Sachs snapped, “You took me off the documents to take credit for yourself. Is that what this case is all about, Nance? ‘Your’ case, by the way. Not ‘our case’ or ‘the case.’ Because you wanted big media defendants to make a big splash. Forget Unsub Five Sixteen’s torturing innocent women. You don’t want him. You want the highest government official you can bag.
“And to make sure that happens you had me running around town digging up all the good things about Moreno I could find. Anything substantive on the case, you co-opted, put your name on it and took credit.”
The assistant DA, though, didn’t seem the least fazed. “Did you happen to look up my application to go on the ballot?”
“No, I didn’t need to. I had this, the petition with the signatures.” She lifted the photocopy.
Laurel said, “Those support the ballot application. You still need to submit one.”
Sachs was pinged by that feeling she sometimes got, a nagging concern, that she might have missed something at a crime scene. Something fundamental. She was silent.
“I’m not running for office.”
“The petition…”
“The petition was filed, yes. But I changed my mind. I never filed the application to run.”
More silence.
Laurel continued, “Yes, I’d wanted to run in the Democratic primary but the party felt I was a little too opinionated for them. I filed a petition to run as an independent. But as time went by I decided not to.”
Ping…
Now, curiously, Laurel’s eyes were averted. She, not Sachs, seemed the more uneasy. And her shoulders, usually completely upright, sagged. “Last winter I went through a very hard breakup. He was…Well, I thought we’d get married. I understand that those things don’t always work out. Fine. But it just wouldn’t go away, the pain.” Her jaw was set, her thin lips trembling. “It was exhausting.”