Chapter 59
And now?
Vimal Lahori climbed to the street, out of the oppressive, salt-scented atmosphere of the subway. The tunnel had featured a hint—just a hint—of urine too.
He inhaled deeply. The air was chill and damp, the sky was gray. He was walking past single-family homes, modest homes with trim yards. Populated by husbands and wives and young children, he knew—though there was no visible evidence of the kids. In the suburbs, yards like these were repositories of tricycles and toys. Not in the city.
There weren’t many people on the street here—a woman in a yellow raincoat and carting a grocery bag. A businessman. Both had heads down and shoulders lifted against the chill breeze. What kind of homes were they returning to? Vimal wondered. Pleasant, comforting, he bet. That this was pure speculation didn’t matter; he envied them because he wanted to envy them.
Pausing, he watched a sheet of newspaper float past on the wind. It settled near him on the sidewalk.
Laughing softly, he thought: Paper covers rock.
He crouched and studied the stone at his feet. On this block the walk was bluestone—laid a hundred years ago, maybe more. The name came not from the original color at the quarry—it was gray—but from aging. Over time the rock had transformed to reveal azure shades and sometimes green and red tones. He pressed a hand against one, wondering what it would be like to carve. In this particular piece he saw a bas-relief—a shallow three-dimensional figure of a fish. It would be a good complement to his sculpture The Wave. It would be an easy thing to sculpt. He would simply, like Michelangelo, remove the portions of the slab that were not the koi.
Rising to his feet again, he continued toward his house.
The pleasant thoughts of the fish and of his carving tools awaiting him at home were suddenly, and inevitably, dislocated by another image: Mr. Patel’s feet motionless on the floor of his studio, angling toward the ceiling. This memory kept recurring. Hour after hour. Then that image was in turn displaced by the memories of his own father locking him into the studio, Mr. Nouri’s son’s betrayal, Mr. Weintraub’s death, the police.
Diamonds. Diamonds were to blame.
He shivered briefly in anger.
Then the question rose once again: What now?
In a few minutes Vimal would see his father. What would the man say? Vimal’s desire to leave town was undiminished. But now he didn’t have the excuse to escape—the excuse that a killer was after him…and the excuse that he would be arrested for “stealing” Mr. Patel’s kimberlite, which apparently had no value, after all. The horror was over. And his father would put on the pressure to stay. Would Vimal have the courage to say no?
Safe from the killer. And yet no comfort. How cruel was this?
Well, he would say no. His stomach tightened at the thought. But he’d do it. He would.
He found himself walking more and more slowly. This subconscious braking almost amused him.
About two blocks from his house, he passed a driveway that ran to the back of a brick bungalow. He heard a man’s voice calling out. “Somebody, can you help me? I fell!”
Vimal glanced up the alley. It was the businessman he’d seen a moment ago. He was lying on the ground beside his car.
Yesterday he would’ve been suspicious. But now, with that Russian man dead, he wasn’t worried for his own safety. Not here. In Manhattan, in the Diamond District, he was always on guard. But in this part of Queens, no.
Muggers rarely looked like accountants and wore nice overcoats.
The man had slipped. His leg was bent and he was gripping the limb and moaning. He glanced toward Vimal and said, “Oh, thank God. Please, can you reach my phone? I dropped it under the car.” He winced.
“Sure. Don’t worry. Is it broken? Your leg?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it hurts to move it.”
Vimal was nearly to the man when he saw something in the bushes. It was a square of white.
A metal sign. He paused and leaned in. He read:
For Sale
Under Contract
The name of the brokerage firm was underneath it.
He glanced at the windows of the house. They were dark.
In a second, he understood that the man didn’t live here at all! It was a trap! He’d pulled the sign out of the front yard and hidden it so he could lure Vimal here.
Shit. Vimal turned fast but by then the man was on his feet and snagging him, spinning him around. He wasn’t a large man, and his eyes, the color of yellow agate, were placid. Still, when he slammed Vimal into the side of the car, the blow stunned him. The assailant easily dodged Vimal’s sloppy, swinging fist and dropped him to his knees with a fierce blow to the gut. Vimal held up a wait-a-minute hand and vomited.
The man looked around to make sure they were alone. He said, “You going to be sick again?” An oddly accented voice.
Vimal shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
Who was this? A friend of the Russian?
“What do you—”
“Are you sure you’re not going to be sick?”
“No.”
The man bound his hands with silver duct tape and pulled him to the trunk. He seemed to be debating taping his mouth too but was probably worried that he might in fact puke once more and choke to death. He chose not to gag him.
Apparently the assailant was determined to keep him alive.
At least for the time being.
Chapter 60
Driving through a rugged part of industrial Queens, looking for a suitable place for what was next on the schedule.
Andrew Krueger knew, since he’d been released by the police, that they didn’t suspect him. And while he supposed Rhyme and Amelia were quite capable of figuring out the entire scheme given enough time, he knew that didn’t enter into their thoughts much at all, since they were frantically trying to find the next gas bomb. He had placed that one in an old wooden residential building—a literal tinderbox. The fake earthquake would rattle windows soon and not long after, the gas line would start to leach its delightful vapor. Then the explosion.
But Krueger no longer cared about scorched flesh; his only concern was the final question: Where had Vimal found the kimberlite he’d been carrying on Saturday?
Krueger pulled his rented Ford into an industrial park area and found a deserted parking lot of cracked asphalt and weeds. He looked about. No one nearby. No cars, no trucks. No CCTV, though he hardly expected any; the warehouse’s roof had collapsed years ago.
The boy had stopped pounding on the trunk and Krueger had the troubling thought that he might be dead. Could you suffocate in a trunk in this day and age? It seemed unlikely. Had one of the jostling bumps on the roadway or here broken his neck, some freak accident?
Damn well better not have.
He lifted the lid and looked down at Vimal Patel. He was doing fine—if that word could be used to describe somebody who was utterly terrified.
Unlike the late and unlamented Vladimir Rostov, Krueger wasn’t a sadist. He took no pleasure in the boy’s dread. Oh, he would kill anybody he needed to—setting the gas line fires in the apartments, for instance, or murdering Patel and Weintraub—not to mention Rostov himself. But he didn’t torture, at least not for pleasure. Death and pain were simply tools like a dop stick, a scaife turntable and diamond-infused olive oil for brillianteering.
But if he took no pleasure in the boy’s misery, neither did he feel an ounce of sympathy. His mission. That was all that mattered. Keeping the price of diamonds floating high, just shy of heaven.
He pulled the boy from the trunk.
“Please, what do you—?”
“Quiet. Listen to me carefully. Saturday, you walked into Patel’s shop with a bag of kimberlite.”
Vimal frowned. “You were there? You killed Mr. Patel?” Anger replaced the fear in his eyes.
Krueger brandished the razor knife and the boy grew quiet. “I asked you a question. Tell me
about the kimberlite. How did Patel get it? Look, I can hurt you a lot. Just tell me.”
“All I know is somebody found a piece in Brooklyn where they were doing that drilling. In a scrap pile.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. A scavenger or somebody, I guess. I’m a sculptor. I do the same thing at construction sites. I pick around for rocks. He probably saw the crystals and thought it might be valuable. He just picked Mr. Patel at random to sell it to.”
“And how did you end up with that bag?”
“Mr. Patel wanted more. I went to look for them but the company? The one doing the drilling? They’d had everything hauled off to a scrapyard.”
Vimal was continuing. “Mr. Patel had me go to the yard to look. I went four times, or five. I finally found a pile of it. That was on Saturday. I was bringing some back to show him.”
Krueger asked, “How much kimberlite was there?”
“Not much.”
“What do you mean by not much?”
“A dozen bigger pieces—about the size of your fist. Mostly fragments and dust.”
“Where is this yard?”
“Near Cobble Hill. C and D Waste Transfer Station Number Four.”
Construction and demolition, Krueger supposed.
“What’s Cobble Hill?”
“A neighborhood. In Brooklyn.”
Krueger said, “Where?” He called up a map on his phone and the boy glanced down but then gazed off.
Krueger said, “Look. Don’t worry. Killing you wouldn’t fit my plans. The one taking the blame for this whole thing, a fellow from Russia, he’s already dead. For you to die now, that means the police would start looking for another suspect. You’re safe.”
A nod. He was miserable and angry but he saw the logic.
Faulty logic, though it was: Of course, the boy would be dead soon…and the killer identified as a partner of Rostov’s, another—a fictional—Russian. After killing Vimal, Krueger would rip his clothing, as if he’d fought with his assailant. He’d then plant a bit of evidence here, near the body, things he’d taken from Rostov’s motel—tobacco from a Russian cigarette, a few ruble coins—that would appear to have been scattered in the struggle. And he’d leave a prepaid phone somewhere nearby, too. The phone, free of fingerprints, had a dozen or more calls to Dobprom and various random numbers in Russia embedded in memory. Krueger had placed the calls himself after he’d shot Rostov.
Perfectly tidy? No. But a reasonable explanation for the boy’s death.
“Well?”
Vimal hesitated and then pointed to a spot on the map. It was not far away.
Krueger helped him back into the trunk, closed the lid and then drove out of the desolate parking lot. In twenty minutes they were at the dump site.
C&D Transfer Station #4
He drove through the wide gate, ignored by the few workers here, and the vehicle rocked slowly along a wide path, marred with deep tire treads. The yard was easily the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches. Hundreds of twenty- and thirty-foot-high piles of refuse rose like miniature mountains, composed of stone, plasterboard, metal, wood, concrete…every building material you could imagine. He supposed that salvage companies, for a fee, were allowed to prowl through the refuse and pick what might be valuable. He smiled to himself thinking that these companies would be delighted to find copper pipe and wiring, and ignore the diamond-rich kimberlite, which was the clue that somewhere in the ground not far away lurked material worth a million times more.
He parked behind one of these mounds, out of view of the highway, the entrance and the workers.
He climbed out of the Ford and pulled Vimal from the trunk.
Krueger lifted the knife. Vimal shied. “Just the tape,” the man told him. He sliced through it, freeing his hands. He put the knife away and displayed the gun in his waistband. “Run and I’ll use it.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Go on.”
They started through the dun and gray valleys, moving parallel to the water, where the barges were being filled with debris by bulldozers and dump trucks. The sound was overwhelming.
“Where?”
The young man looked around, orienting himself. “That way.” He nodded his head toward the waterfront. The two of them wove through the yard, Vimal pausing occasionally and gazing about, then continuing on, turning left and right. He muttered, “There’s been more dumping. A lot of it. It doesn’t look the same.”
Krueger’s impression was that the kid wasn’t stalling. He seemed truly confused.
Then he squinted. “That way. I’m sure.” Another nod.
They searched for ten minutes. Then Krueger paused. He glanced down and saw a bit of kimberlite in the rut left by a large truck tire. He pocketed it.
They were headed the right way.
What a grim place this was. The March weather had cast a gray pall over the earth, turning it to the shade of a corpse at a postmortem. Humid and cold, crawling up your spine, along your legs and thighs to your groin. It reminded Krueger of a huge open-cut diamond mine he’d been to years ago in Russia. A thought occurred to him: His job, of course, was to make sure that the pipe containing the kimberlite was never discovered, and no diamond-mining operation opened here. But what, he thought, might workers have found if a mine had opened? His evaluation was that the lode contained very high-quality gems.
Could it be that beneath the earth at the Northeast Geo Industries site there rested a diamond for all time? Krueger thought of two stones from his own country: The Cullinan, which when mined weighed over thirty-one hundred carats, making it the largest gem-quality diamond ever found. The stone was cut into more than one hundred smaller diamonds, including the Great Star of Africa, more than five hundred carats, and the Lesser Star of Africa, more than three hundred. Those two finished gems are part of the British Crown Jewels. Krueger’s favorite South African stone was the Centenary Diamond. The weight as rough was 599 carats. It was cut to more than 270. A modified heart-shaped brilliant, it was the largest colorless flawless diamond in the world.
Krueger’s role in keeping such a diamond buried would sting.
But this was his job, and he would see it through.
“Keep going,” he muttered to Vimal. “The sooner we finish, the sooner you can get home to your family.”
Chapter 61
Amelia Sachs was just off the Brooklyn Bridge, a few minutes from the Northeast Geo operation, her destination. The Torino’s engine sang at a high pitch.
Rhyme’s thinking had been that Ackroyd—or whatever his name might be—didn’t want simply to kill Vimal Lahori. Not yet. He needed to find out where the boy had picked up the kimberlite on Saturday morning before he’d walked into the carnage at Patel’s. Ackroyd’s assignment would be to destroy or dump every bit of kimberlite he could find, before fleeing, and the one logical place for that would be the drilling site.
The operation was still closed, and Ackroyd and Vimal could wander it with impunity, as the boy pointed out where the kimberlite samples had been found.
She was about to exit the highway when her phone hummed. She tapped the Answer button, then Speaker, and set the phone on the passenger seat to downshift from fourth to third. The car skidded around a slow-moving van.
“I’m here.”
Lon Sellito said, “Amelia. I’ve got somebody who wants to talk to you. I’m patching her through.”
Her?
“Sure.” She eased off the gas.
A click and another. Then a woman’s voice. “Detective Sachs?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“I’m Adeela Badour.”
“Vimal’s friend.”
“Yes, that’s right.” The woman’s voice was concerned but steady. “Detective Sellitto called and told me Vimal has disappeared. You’re trying to find him.”
“Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“I don’t know for certain. But Detective Sellitto told me about the diamonds and the dr
illing. And that the man who might have kidnapped him was interested in some rocks Vimal had. Well, on Saturday, the morning he was shot, he called me from the subway. He was angry. Mr. Patel had given him a job—to go to a junkyard somewhere and prowl around to find something. Some particular kind of rocks.”
The kimberlite, Sachs understood.
“And when I saw him later that night, he had a piece of rock lodged under the skin.”
“Yes, the bullet hit a bag of stones he had. Lon, are you there?”
“Yeah, Amelia.”
Sachs said, “That’s where they’re going. He’s taken Vimal to the junkyard. To find the kimberlite. Not to the drilling site.”
“Got it. I’ll find out where Northeast Geo dumps their waste.”
“Get in touch with the site manager. A guy named Schoal. Or if you can’t get through to him, call the CEO. What was his name? He was on the news. Dwyer, I think.”
“I’ll get right back to you.”
Sachs asked, “Adeela, did Vimal say anything more about where he was on Saturday?”
“No.”
“Well, thanks. This’s important.”
“I gave Detective Sellitto my number. If you hear anything…” Now Adeela’s voice cracked. She controlled it instantly. “If you hear about him, please call.”
“I will. Yes.”
The young woman disconnected.
Sachs veered onto the shoulder to wait, earning two horns and a middle finger. Ignored them all.
“Come on, come on,” she whispered, a plea to Lon Sellitto. Her leg bobbed impatiently and she resolved not to stare at her phone.
She stared at her phone.
Then put it facedown on the bucket seat beside her.
Three excruciating minutes later Sellitto called back. Schoal had told him that all the stone scrap and drilling residue from the Northeast Geo operation in Brooklyn was hauled to C&D Transfer Station #4. On the water, east of Cobble Hill. He explained, “Hundreds of companies use it, from all over the city.”
The Cutting Edge Page 35