Nance Laurel looked mystified. “You didn’t look anything up. Cynarine, Glycyrrhiza…I’m sorry, but how do you know all this?”

Cooper shoved his black glasses higher on his nose and said, as if it were obvious, “I work for Lincoln Rhyme.”

Chapter 45

CHAPTER 45

FINALLY A BREAK: They caught the shooter’s real name.

Captain Myers’s Special Services surveillance team had followed the sniper from NIOS headquarters to his home. He’d gotten off in Carroll Gardens and walked to a house that was owned by Barry and Margaret Shales. A motor vehicle search had returned a picture of Shales. It was clearly the same man whom Sachs had been following that afternoon and taken a picture of with her mobile phone’s camera.

Barry Shales was thirty-nine. Former military—retiring as a captain in the air force and decorated several times. The man was now working civilian as an “intelligence specialist” with NIOS. He and his wife—a teacher—had two children, boys in elementary school. Shales was active in his Presbyterian church and volunteered at the boys’ schools, a reading tutor.

Learning this bio, Sachs was troubled. Most of the perps she and Rhyme pursued were hardened criminals, serial offenders, organized crime bosses, psychotics, terrorists. But this case was different. Shales was probably a devoted civil servant, probably a decent husband and father. Just doing his duty, even if it happened to involve shooting terrorists in cold blood. Upon his arrest and conviction, a family would be destroyed. Metzger might have been using NIOS for his own delusional approach in safeguarding the country and using a specialist for clean-up. But Shales? He might have been just following orders.

Still, even if he hadn’t been the one who’d tortured and killed Lydia Foster, he was part of the organization that possibly had.

Sachs called Lon Sellitto and told him of their discovery. Then she placed a call to Information Services, requesting every fact they could dig up on Barry Shales—most important where he’d been and what he was doing on May 9, the day of the shooting.

The lab phone rang and Sachs, noting the caller ID, hit speaker. “Fred.”

She wasn’t worried that Unsub 516 was tapping this particular phone line; Rodney Szarnek had sent over a device he called a “tap-trap,” which could detect anyone’s listening in. The monitor showed that the conversation was private.

“Amelia. Is it true what I’m hearing? Your friend and mine is sunning himself in the Caribbean.”

His astonishment was so exaggerated that Sachs had to smile. Cooper did too. Nance Laurel did not.

“He sure is, Fred.”

“Why oh why do my assignments take me to the prime vacation spots of the South Bronx and Newark? While Mr. Lincoln Rhyme’s on a beach, courtesy of the city of New York? Where’s the fairness in that? Is he enjoying those sissy drinks with umbrellas and plastic sea horses?”