Rhyme spat out, “Look at the STO—there’s a period after ‘Kill Room,’ not a comma! ‘Suite twelve hundred’ doesn’t modify it. They’re separate places.” He continued, “Okay, this is all making sense now. What’s the one problem with drone strikes?”

“Collateral damage,” Sachs said.

“Exactly. A missile takes out terrorists but it also kills innocent people. Very bad for America’s image. NIOS contracted with Walker Defense to come up with a drone that minimizes collateral. Using a precision rifle with a very big bullet.”

Sellitto said, “But they fucked up. There was collateral.”

“The Moreno assassination was a fluke,” Rhyme said. “Who could’ve anticipated broken glass would be lethal?”

Sellitto gave a laugh. “You know, Amelia, you were right. This was a million-dollar bullet. Literally. Hell, given what drones cost, it’s probably a ten-million-dollar bullet.”

“How’d you guess?” Nance Laurel asked.

“Guess?” Sachs offered acerbically.

But Rhyme didn’t need any defense. He was delighted with his deduction and was happy to explain:

“Trees. I was thinking of trees. There was poisonwood leaf trace on the bullet. I saw the tree outside the window of the suite. All the branches up to about twenty-five feet or so were cut back—because the hotel didn’t want anyone touching the leaves. That meant the bullet struck Moreno at a very steep downward angle—probably forty-five degrees. That was too acute even for a shooter on the spit to aim high to correct for gravity. It meant the bullet came from the air.

“If Shales fired through the trees, that means he was using some kind of infrared or radar sighting system to quote see Moreno through the leaves. I was also curious why there was no pollution on the slug—from the fumes and crap in the air over the spit. A hot bullet would have picked up plenty of trace. But it didn’t.”

Pulaski said, “By the way, Lincoln, they’re UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. Not drones.”

“Thank you for the correction. Accuracy is everything. You’re a wealth of knowledge.”

“Discovery Channel.”

Rhyme laughed and continued, “It also reconciles why Mychal Poitier’s divers didn’t find any spent brass. It’s out to sea. Or maybe the drone retains the spent shells. Good, good. We’re moving ahead.”

Cooper said, “And he was a lot closer than two thousand yards. That’s why the high velocity of the bullet.”

Rhyme said, “I’d guess the UAV couldn’t’ve been any more than two or three hundred yards out, to make an accurate shot like that. It’d be easy for people on the ground to miss it. There would have been camouflage—just like with our chameleons. And the engine would’ve been small—two-stroke, remember. With a muffler you’d never hear it.”

“It launched from Walker’s airstrip in New Jersey?” Pulaski asked.