I got on my knees, pulled on the wire mesh until I had forced an opening in one of the squares that was wide enough to hold the head of the flashlight.
I picked up the Glock and played with it for a few seconds, until it felt almost comfortable in my hands. I opened the safety.
I braced myself against the low steel wall of the bucket, brought my eyes up to the level where the mesh hit the solid metal base, turned on the flashlight, and glanced quickly at the ground beneath me.
I could make out two figures. I could see the rifle barrel sticking out in front of one of them.
I stuck the tip of the Glock through the mesh, pointed it directly downward, and fired blindly six times. Then I dropped back down onto the floor of the bucket.
One of the men started screaming immediately. It was the sound of a person in pain, not just fear.
I heard his screams for only a couple of seconds. They were drowned out by the noise of four or five sirens on the radio cars speeding into place just across the river, inside the zoo.
FORTY-NINE
“Pick your head up, Coop,” Mike said. “I’m right below you. I need to see that you’re all right.”
“I’m good where I am. On the floor of the bucket.”
“Seasick yet?”
“Totally.”
“If that’s all you come out of this with, kid,” Mike said, “then you’re all right.”
“Can’t you make it stop swinging?”
“There’s a mechanic on the way to guarantee safe passage.”
It was about twenty minutes after I’d fired off my shots. I could hear the voices of all the cops who had responded to Mike’s call, and who were gathered after several of them took the perps away. They were scouring and securing the scene as best they could in the dark.
“I hit one of the guys, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“I didn’t kill him, did I?”
“No, but you didn’t kill any animals either. I’d call it a victory.”
“What did I hit?” I asked.
“The shooter’s foot. He dropped the gun and fell to the ground and was still here when we all trekked over.”
“Across the river?”
“In a rubber boat, kid,” Mike said. “I dinghied back to get you. I bet nobody’s ever done that for you before.”
Every time the wind came up, my bucket would swing uncontrollably.
“How far off the ground am I?” I asked. Mike knew how I hated heights.
“Eight, maybe ten feet.”
“I can’t wait much longer or I’ll lose it,” I said.
I sat up straighter, careful not to rock the bucket.
“We can do this,” I said. “I can open the door and a bunch of you guys can help me climb down.”
“I know you consider yourself a ballerina, but just sit still till they get this moving by a professional.”
I thought I was graceful enough to be able to extricate myself—with Mike’s help—before someone with an engineering degree was roused and reported in.
I unlatched the door and peeked out over the edge, then pulled back in immediately.
“I’ll never trust you again,” I said, collapsing back onto the floor. “I’m forty feet up, at least.”
“At least forty,” he said. “But things could be worse. You’re not dangling over Tiger Mountain.”
It was almost an hour before the workmen showed up. The tram was physically closer to the point of departure, so they figured how to get the bucket started again, going in reverse.
“Close your eyes,” Mike called out to me, as the car started to move.
“They’ve been closed since I was stupid enough to look out at you.”
“I’ll catch you when you land, Coop. Don’t kick the bucket along the way.”
FIFTY
“Everything aches,” I said.
Mike had opened a can of chicken noodle soup when we reached my apartment at midnight, and it had helped settle my stomach and my nerves.
Then I took a steaming hot bath and let him wrap me in a huge towel, holding me close to him, when I finally stepped out of the tub.
“Better rub something on those scratches on your face,” Mike said. “You’d think the bushes had fingernails on them, the way they scratched you.”
I covered my face with lotion, hoping the aloe would calm the red marks, and I dabbed some on Mike’s nose too.
Mercer and Vickee were waiting for us in the living room. They had helped themselves to drinks and mixed a vodka martini for Mike—crisp and cold—when we came out to join them. I was beyond alcohol at this point.
“Blood ivory,” Mercer said. “That’s the reason Paul Battaglia died.”
I stretched out on the sofa, taking a cashmere throw from the back of it, covering myself to stay warm.
“Was it Kwan?” I asked. “Was it George Kwan behind the whole thing?”
“Kwan was the puppet master, Alex,” Mercer said. “He was the man pulling all the strings.”
“And doing it for a very long time,” Vickee said, “cloaked in the respectability of his grandfather’s business reputation.”
“You’ll have to clear it up for me,” I said. “Did you get him today?”
“Nine tonight,” she said. “At JFK, on his way to Hong Kong.”
I put my head in my hands, shaking it from side to side as I looked down.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Kwan’s not talking,” Mercer said. “I’ll give you the pieces we’ve got so far.”
“Doesn’t matter if he keeps mum,” Mike said. “We’d only get the hard-luck story from this guy. Kid on the streets. Chinatown, Ghost Shadows. Killed a man by the time he was fifteen.”
“Yeah, so his grandfather takes over back in Hong Kong. Gives George the best of everything—including his own name—educates him, and sets him up in the family business,” Mercer said. “Kwan Enterprises. Legitimate—the real deal.”
“But this guy was always looking to break bad,” Mike said. “Am I right?”
“Right. That’s why he was positioning himself to grab a piece of the Savage dynasty, when it was beginning to crumble,” Mercer said. “It gave him all the global reach he needed, and he could get it done on the cheap because he already had deals going in China, India, Pakistan, and even in Africa.”
“What kind of deals?” I asked.
“The family had factories in some of the cheap labor markets,” Mercer said.
“I remember that, from the Savage investigation.”
“Well, George folded some drug dealing into the enterprise,” Mercer went on. “They were in all the right places for their legit businesses, but he saw the chance to seize on the drug connection to make an even greater fortune.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” I said.
“Don’t give us Shakespeare in the middle of the night, babe,” Mike said, stirring his drink with his finger.
“Ecclesiastes, Detective,” I said. “The Old Testament. My book.”
“Meaning what, in this case?”
“Kwan Enterprises has been around so long, I bet if you trace it back six or seven generations, we find George’s ancestors were involved in the opium trade, just as we suspected.”
“The dirty underbelly of the evolution of global trading,” Mercer said.
“Scores of families made their wealth trading opium through Hong Kong in the 1800s,” I said. “The Kwans, no doubt, just like the Delanos.”
“Delanos?” Mike asked.
“Yes. As in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s what made his grandfather rich,” I said. “It probably did the same for the early Kwan tradesmen. I bet it’s how they built the original export-import business.”
“I’m on it,” Vickee said.
“How about the animals?” I asked. “Do you have any idea how that started?”
“We don’t know when,” Mercer said. “But it’s all about supply and demand, like Deirdre Wright and Stuart Liebman both told us. The endangered species can be sold for a fortune, as we know, and the products—like horns and bones and tusks—are worth their weight in gold.”
“Or blood,” I said.
“Easy for Kwan,” Mike said. “Same markets, same shipments as his kilos of heroin, same porous borders in countries with corrupt politicians.”
I was playing back the mental tape of tonight’s encounter at the zoo. “How does he enlist a small army of workers here, like Henry Dibaba?”
“First of all,” Mercer said, “he can afford to pay them. There are kids like Dibaba all over this city, looking for their first dime.”
“But armed with rifles?”
“Pretty unusual. They do have an instructor, though, and they’ve been training at a shooting range in Brooklyn.”
“Tell me it’s Pedro Echevarria,” Mike said, high-fiving his friend. “Did I nail that one or not?”
“Indeed you did,” Mercer said. “There’s a whole bunch of sharpshooters in training, and I’ve got a good list of their names. All taking lessons from Echevarria.”
“The Grand Slam sheep hunter,” I said. “The man who was supposed to go shooting with Battaglia next week.”
“That dude, exactly,” Mercer said, giving me a thumbs-up.
“Now, how do you suppose he got mixed up with George Kwan?”
“It all came together in the record checks, once we had Kwan’s birth name, today.”
“How?” I asked.
“George Kwan—birth name Ko-Lin Kwan—told you his mother was Maria Alvarez,” Mercer said. “A Mexican woman George’s father met in LA when he emigrated here.”
“Yes. She left his father because of his gang involvement.”
“When his mother returned to LA,” Mercer said, “she married an old friend from Mexico, whose surname is Echevarria.”
It took me a few seconds to process the connection. “So Pedro is George Kwan’s half brother?” I said, leaning back against the soft sofa cushion.
“He is.”
“Kwan’s personal sharpshooter,” I said. “A blood brother, whom he could trust with every aspect of the deadly work.”
Mike was up and pacing. “We’ve got to get our hands on Pedro. He might have been given the order to kill Battaglia,” Mike said. “He certainly has the skill.”
“In custody as we speak,” Vickee said. “Loose hold, but we have him.”
“Why?”
“Pedro Echevarria was running Henry Dibaba and the Bronx bad boys,” Mercer said. “All his contacts were on Henry’s phone. In fact, Pedro and his driver were in the rail yards just after you two came face-to-face with Henry.”
“How’d that happen?” Mike asked.
“Because Henry had called him.”
“To tell him that we had found the stockpile of ivory,” I said. “That’s why it took Henry a couple of minutes to come back and confront us.”
“Lucky thing you two didn’t try to press on and go out through that gate,” Mercer said. “I don’t think Pedro would have missed you, given the chance to take a few shots. He just couldn’t catch up to the kids—Henry’s backup duo—when they started to chase after you inside the park.”
“So he’s charged with—?” Mike asked.
“Possession of the ivory,” Vickee said. “A federal crime. James Prescott is thrilled to have a piece of the action, you can be sure.”
“But Commissioner Scully believes Pedro Echevarria was the executioner,” Mercer said, getting up to come over and sit beside me. He picked up my hand and rubbed it between his two. “We’ve got an early match on an iris identification; that should be confirmed by morning.”
“Iris? The shooter’s eye?”
“TARU enhanced the video—and the eye was the only part of the killer that is identifiable. Vickee told us the shooter took off his sunglasses to aim at his target,” Mercer said. “I think we have Battaglia’s assassin.”
I bit my lip, fighting back tears for the second time tonight.
“It also fits with Echevarria running the Bronx kids,” Mercer said. “He’s the guy Henry Dibaba reports to, and it’s Dibaba who tried to kill you by firebombing Mike’s car.”
I nodded.
“It also fits with Battaglia’s plan to go to Montana and shoot with Echevarria in November,” I said. “It would give him a couple of days to get up close and personal with the man closest to Kwan. So very like Battaglia to try to wangle a way to get the inside track on someone.”
“Without knowing that someone—Pedro—was able to turn on a dime and kill the DA,” Mike said, “just for getting that close to the purpose behind Kwan Enterprises.”
George Kwan had woven a tangled web, and Paul Battaglia had become ensnared in it. So had Chidra Persaud. So had I.
“You’re safe again, Alex,” Mercer said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I attempted to smile, but forcing it was the best I could do.
There was so much to try to take in. This case had monstrously long tentacles that stretched from one side of the world to the other.
“Where does Chidra Persaud fit?” I asked.
“Right where you thought,” Vickee said, stepping to the bar to refill her drink. “She was in tax trouble up to her ears, in England, and about to start here. She had thoroughly researched Kwan Enterprises when they made a bid for part of her business. Persaud knew enough about endangered species—and the heroin highway—that she got Kwan’s dark side at once.”
“So she was using Paul Battaglia to buy insurance for her own case, by snitching on George Kwan,” I said. “Chidra Persaud is Diana, just like she claims to be. She took us to Montana so she could conflict James Prescott out of her case.”
“Game well played, for the lady,” Mike said. “And once George Kwan learned she was Battaglia’s snitch, then the DA was a dead man. For no good reason. For money, for wealth beyond his wildest dreams. For greed.”
“No wonder Chidra flew out of the country,” I said. “She must have realized that she was in grave danger too.”
“According to Charles Swenson,” Mercer said, “you’re right about that.”
“Paul called me three times while I was at the Met last Monday,” I said. “The first one was most certainly in response to Lily’s text telling him I’d said she shouldn’t sit down with him.”
“Another angle,” Mike said. “He probably thought Lily—Wolf Savage’s daughter—had something on George Kwan. Something bad from their business dealings.”
“No doubt. And once Paul thought I’d been talking to Kwan at the Met that night, he was loaded for bear,” I said. “Paul was trying to run the entire case, bring it to a boil, by himself. He thought I was out of bounds, and he was ready to punish me for it.”
“He was that way, Coop. You know he was.”
“Vain. I do know that,” I said. “So vain, so self-centered, that he was willing to die for something as foolish as protecting his turf, holding on to a case he was hoping for dear life to build because it had been such a personal effort.”
“I’ll finish sipping this and we’ll get out of your hair,” Vickee said.
“You don’t know how it helps me to have you here,” I said. “It’s been like living in a nightmare you can’t wake up from.”
“Mercer will stay with you two for a while longer,” she said. “My sister’s watching Logan. I need to get home.”
“Understood,” I said, still trying to puzzle out the details. “The whole animal thing is a mystery to me. Paul’s award for conservation, but his membership in Saint Hubertus, and in Persaud’s club.”
“E
veryone at the animal foundation is sticking to the story that many of the best conservationists are hunters,” Mercer said.
“I can’t buy into that,” I said. “It’s oxymoronic.”
“Yet in the case of many of these men,” Mercer said, “it seems to be the truth.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, “it’s damn near impossible to hunt extinct animals. These guys have a real incentive to save some of them.”
“What becomes of all the ivory?” I asked.
“That will be up to the feds,” Vickee said. “That deserted area of the zoo seems to have been the perfect place to hide the tusks. No one ever had reason to go there, and Kwan’s drug dealers were able to protect it as well, from the rail yards, since the ivory had been smuggled into the country right with the drugs.”
“If anyone came across the stash—well, anyone but you two,” Mercer added, “it wouldn’t seem totally out of place to have old elephant tusks piled up on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo.”
“Where does it go now?” I asked. “Now that Kwan and his crew can’t sell it off anymore?”
“In Kenya, they gather tons of poached ivory,” Vickee said, “and then they set it on fire, in a huge display in the center of town. They destroy it, to prove there should be no market for it.”
“Even here in New York, two years ago, they did what’s called a ‘crush,’” Mercer said. “The ivory was crushed, in a public place, to send the same message as when it’s burned to ashes.”
I closed my eyes, but all I could see when I did was the stockpile of ivory we had discovered tonight—tons of precious tusks, representing hundreds of dead elephants, loaded onto a giant mound in the Bronx wilderness. When imaginary flames started rising from the pile, licking the dark sky, I shook my head and opened my eyes, to erase the shocking visual.
“What if I hadn’t gone rogue last week?” I said, sinking back against the cushions as Mike changed places with Mercer.
“No what-ifs, Coop. This is real life, not fiction,” he said. “No what-ifs, no do-overs.”
“If Paul hadn’t seen me at the gala, he’d still be alive,” I said. “Maybe I do want a drink after all.”
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