Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  She and John exchanged another longer glance while they waited for Lazlo to catch up.

  “Missing bodies with brain-dead symptoms . . .” Lazlo remarked slowly, his eyes growing larger as the magnitude of the connection dawned on him.

  “Looks like the penny has finally dropped for our friend,” John exclaimed to Jennifer.

  Lazlo focused back on the map and the location of the medical center, like a man who had finally seen the light. “By targeting only his clubs with the tainted pills, El Gordito gets a supply of young donors, almost guaranteed to have healthy organs and unlikely to have permanent, drug-induced damage like regular junkies.”

  “And the side-effect of violent behavior is the perfect smokescreen for the club staff to take victims out of the public area and out of sight of any witnesses,” David offered, to get Lazlo fully over the line.

  “Exactly!” said Lazlo. “The brain-death symptoms incapacitate the victim. Then the club staff does some kind of background check to see if the family is going to cause a shit-storm when the victim goes missing. If they decide YES, then the victim is dumped a distance from the club so it looks like they were simply thrown out of the club still alive. If they decide NO, the victim is hooked up to some type of portable life support and taken to the so-called research facility. All high-value organs are then extracted and sold on the black market to the highest bidder.” Lazlo continued his train of thought. “And they get rid of the bodies by burning them in El Gordito’s crematorium.”

  “That might work for a few unofficial cremations, but cremation on a large scale would eventually come out. There are regulations and checks in place for cremating bodies, and the excessive use of the chimney would attract attention,” David advised.

  Lazlo nodded, accepting his point. He stood for a second looking at the board. He placed one pin on Newstone, New Jersey, where the fulfillment center was located, and another out toward the hamlet of River Creek near Newstone, the location of the immigrant workforce settlement. He hadn’t known precisely where the latter was, but Hamilton’s camera had had built-in GPS, which had tagged the photo to the nearest-named point on the map.

  The isolated murders that he had suspected El Gordito of committing were making some sense now. They were strategic killings and part of a much bigger picture of corruption and murder, designed to smooth the way for new drug-manufacturing and organ-harvesting businesses. He had seriously underestimated El Gordito. His operation clearly went way beyond ruthless control of the largest distribution network of illegal drugs and opiates in New York. He was embarking on something enormous. He was manufacturing the latest and most addictive narcotic on the US market, had already made an impact on New York and was probably already spreading his product into neighboring states.

  “We’re at the same point as we were in the Eighties before cocaine flooded the US in an unstoppable wave through Miami,” Lazlo declared.

  Jennifer and David muttered their agreement. They were busy studying the images of El Gordito and his henchmen on the second bulletin board, hoping they would never have to meet them.

  “Leave all this with me,” said Lazlo, breaking the silence. “I’ve got to check out the fulfillment center and hospital myself before I can plan how to raid them.”

  “Be careful,” Jennifer said, her voice filled with concern.

  “Always,” he replied with a warm smile.

  David, Jennifer, and John left Lazlo’s brownstone with a sense that they had done all they could. Somehow, though, the results didn’t feel as good as they had hoped. Their plan to bring down El Gordito, and by so doing disqualify Santiago’s spirit from The Game, had already cost Hamilton his life. Now it could cost the detective his.

  Twenty

  Lazlo checked his watch. It was 5:03 a.m. He was sitting by a window on the eighth floor of a derelict building, looking out through a broken pane of glass at the delivery area of Hargreave Merciful Hospital. Since arriving by car two hours ago, he had seen nothing worth photographing, just the delivery of medical and janitorial supplies.

  He had figured that he wouldn’t find evidence of the illegal organ-harvesting in the hospital’s basement just by walking around inside. The donors would most likely be hidden in plain sight, arriving in one of the many ambulances to be fast-tracked through the ER by hospital staff on El Gordito’s payroll. It would be impossible to distinguish the legitimate patients from the illegitimate. But taking the bodies out of an illegal facility would require a discreet, ground-level loading/unloading area, ideally close to the hospital’s own delivery zone to enable mixing in the clandestine with the regular traffic.

  His chosen vantage point was the former psychiatric block in the hospital grounds, which the hospital had sold off to a residential developer. Whoever the developer was, they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to finish the development. In fact, they had done very little other than fence the site off and put down temporary road surfaces. The building was missing some windows and had been easy to break into.

  Only a cool wind blowing into his face was keeping him awake. Three hours earlier he had been in Newstone, New Jersey, just long enough to confirm the fulfillment center existed and to see the size of it. It had been easy to distinguish it from other buildings, as it had an almost endless flow of trucks passing to and from it. He estimated that in a building that size, with that amount of product going through, there must be north of thirty men like the armed guard he had seen in Hamilton’s photo. El Gordito wouldn’t skimp on armed men to protect his business. It would take a large team to raid the place, even if he was able to get a warrant, which wasn’t going to happen because the center wasn’t in his jurisdiction—and there was no point passing the case on to the force in Newstone, as he was sure that El Gordito would have someone on the payroll in the police department to tip him off.

  As daylight broke, things became clearer. Lazlo realized he had been looking at what the designer of the hidden facility had wanted him to see, and not what was actually there. The delivery zone was obvious, but next to it was an area of dense evergreen trees. He hadn’t paid attention to them before because they looked, well, just like trees. But now he could see that these trees had been planted together closely to create a screen. On closer inspection, Lazlo could see that behind them was a tall, steel fence, creating a secluded section of the grounds. It was practically invisible at ground level and barely visible at the height he was at. He scoured it with a telephoto lens, trying to zoom in on gaps in the foliage. The wind picked up, and more welcome, clean air blew into his face. It also caused the branches of the trees to sway more, offering larger gaps in the foliage and longer opportunities to check out the hidden area. All he could see, though, were fragments of a roller shutter door, similar to the one in the main delivery zone.

  As he began to think he was looking in the wrong place, he saw signs of movement. He caught a glimpse of two people: a woman and a man dressed in scrubs, who were smoking. Firing off a rally of photos, he captured what he hoped would be parts of a puzzle that he could piece together into something meaningful later.

  Ten minutes passed, and what looked like a motorbike courier in black clothing appeared within the moving gaps. All three people disappeared. Moments later, the courier reappeared, pulling a wheeled case about the size of a small airline carry-on. Lazlo fired off more shots. It could have been an insulated donor-organ box painted black. He heard the motorcycle start up, and seconds later saw the courier appear about ten yards away on the service road before disappearing behind the corner of the main hospital building. In the space of forty minutes, he saw three more motorcycle couriers come and go—then nothing.

  Lazlo made his way out of the abandoned psychiatric block and through the developer’s site which, in addition to bordering with the remainder of the hospital’s grounds, also bordered with the main road and a side street. Squeezing through a gap between the panels of the site fencing, he re-entered the hospital grounds and headed toward the visitor parking
lot where he had left his car. As he walked past the delivery road he had seen being used by the courier earlier, he noticed it was separated from the rest of the hospital grounds by a tall, chain-link fence. Part of its route brought it alongside the developer’s site where the construction site fence acted as a common boundary wall.

  Driving out of the parking lot and through the exit onto the main street, Lazlo saw that access to the delivery road was by a separate entrance and exit from the same street and was controlled via a security barrier and an intercom. It occurred to him that if someone wanted to bypass the security measures, they could do so by accessing the delivery road directly from the developer’s land by easily taking down and then reinstating sections of the temporary fence.

  With this in mind, and remembering that the developer’s land was a corner plot, Lazlo turned right onto the main street. He passed the point where the frontage of the hospital grounds ended and the development site started, marked by solid and seamless painted plywood-paneled fencing. It was covered with artist’s impressions of the finished condos and logos of Skyview Developments.

  He followed the fencing as it turned a corner into the side street he had seen earlier. As he drove along the narrow street, he found a double gate with ‘SITE ACCESS’ and ‘NO PARKING’ signs attached to it. If his theory was correct, and there was a secret connection between the development and the hospital’s delivery road, the traffic to and from the secret organ harvesting center would use these access gates.

  Lazlo moved his car to a position where he would be able to see any movement in and out of the gates in his rearview mirror.

  Bodies start decomposing within twenty-four hours of death, unless refrigerated, his coroner friend, Tom Stevens, had told him. That meant organ harvesting would probably have to take place during this time frame. A refrigerated truck for transportation of the bodies would be too conspicuous entering and exiting a construction site. They would have no choice but to go the un-refrigerated route. That would mean frequent, well-organized transport that wouldn’t look out of place. A larger panel van would be ideal. Then what would they do with the bodies? El Gordito had the crematorium, but as David Miller had pointed out earlier, he couldn’t be burning that many bodies without proper permits. So, perhaps he was dumping them in a landfill, but that would pose a risk of discovery . . . There was one more possibility, and as far-fetched as it seemed, he had seen evidence of it some years ago on a different drug case. It might be that the bodies were being used as drug mules.

  Forty-five minutes later, the white panel van emerged from the gates. He waited for it to pass. It was visibly sitting lower on its suspension than it had done before. It had gone in empty and come out definitely loaded with something heavy. Ten bodies, at 190 pounds each on average, would weigh close to the load limit on one of those vans.

  He saw the van take a left turn. Lazlo figured the driver had been trained to be cautious of being followed and was taking precautionary, evasive action. Lazlo avoided taking the turn and drove on to the next junction, where he took a left and then a right. He could see the van ahead, a few cars in front. The van turned onto a highway, and Lazlo let a few more cars get between him and the van before he settled into a leisurely drive with his cruise control activated. This should be an easy tail, he thought.

  He was just about to follow the van onto the exit to the Henry Hudson Parkway when his mobile rang.

  “What is it, Cousins?” Lazlo barked.

  You told me to let you know whenever we got another staged murder by a Mexican gang.”

  “Go on,” Lazlo encouraged, his voice softening. Police Officer Cousins was ambitious and willing to bend the rules if it would help his rise through the ranks and, so far, a little quid pro quo had worked out fine for both of them.

  “Well, come to the shoreline at Riverside Park between 147th and 152nd Streets. You’re gonna want to see this.”

  Lazlo hesitated to let the van go at first, but then figured if he was right about the setup, there would be more vans to follow tomorrow.

  He got to Riverside Park in less than ten minutes.

  Lazlo hustled over lawns toward the bank of the Hudson River. The lights of a police cruiser sparked and danced over the flowing water. They zapped along the strange rock sculptures that only adorned that particular section of the riverbank, and lit up in urgent red and blue flashes the pallid skin of a naked body that lay wedged between two boulders.

  Lazlo made his way carefully down the bank toward Cousins, passing between the decorative stacks of rock perched upon rock before crouching by the body of a female, possibly in her thirties. It was hard to judge her age as both her body and face were bloated. But what drew his attention were the deep cuts on her stomach. They were not the result of indiscriminate slashing—they formed letters: C-H-I-V-A-T-A.

  “It’s Spanish for a female ‘traitor’ or ‘snitch.’ You were right to call me. Who found the body?” Lazlo asked, glancing at Cousins.

  “It was an anonymous call.”

  “A hundred bucks says the press has been tipped off, too. This message is a demand for loyalty and is meant to be broadcast. Nothing like this happens on El Gordito’s territory without his say-so, or at least him knowing about it,” he muttered, taking photos with his phone.

  The victim’s face and body were covered with oily residue and dirt from the river. Snapping on a pair of latex gloves that he carried with him, Lazlo noticed her lips seemed tightly squeezed and stuck together with some kind of clear sealant.

  At that moment, he heard tires screeching to a halt, the sound of approaching footfalls, and the growl of orders being given in a Texas drawl. Lazlo continued his investigation, regardless. He forced the lips open, breaking the seal. It was some kind of silicone gel, and her nostrils were filled with the same substance. As he opened the mouth farther, thick, putrid blood spilled out to reveal something floating in the aperture. It was her severed tongue. He recoiled.

  The footsteps drew closer, accompanied by, “What the hell? Lazlo, is that you?”

  Lazlo closed the victim’s mouth and slipped his gloves off, letting them drop to the ground. He put his foot over them as he stood up. He turned around to see a fellow detective and one of his biggest critics, Caleb Richards, red-faced as usual, with his thick neck sticking out of a polo shirt. Obviously, he had dressed in a hurry.

  “Are you shittin’ me? What the hell are you doing at my crime scene?” he accused.

  “Just happened to be driving past and saw the cruiser by the shore. Figured at this time of night it could be a body. With all the cuts in the number of patrols, figured I could help an officer out.”

  “Sure, you were just passing by at two in the morning,” Caleb said, shooting a suspicious look at Officer Cousins, who couldn’t help but flinch. “Get the fuck out of here. You’re a fucking liability, Lazlo! It’s a wonder the force still has money to pay salaries after you got us sued so many times.”

  Caleb Richards turned to look at Cousins. “Find out when CSU will get here,” he shouted. Then, hearing a commotion, he turned around to see a group of people coming down the grassed area toward him. “Shit! How did the press get here so quick?”

  Lazlo took the opportunity to bend down and retrieve the gloves from under his foot and to slip them into his leather jacket pocket. “Have a great evening!” he said, smiling to Richards as he turned to walk back to his car.

  “Watch yourself, Lazlo. If I find out you’re screwing around in El Gordito’s files, I’ll make sure the captain has your badge!” Richards shouted after him.

  Lazlo responded with a rearward-facing, middle-finger salute.

  Back in his hidden war room, Lazlo plugged in the pen drive containing the photos he had copied from Jennifer Miller’s portable drive and found the headshot photos of the Hispanic workers. He pulled all the ones of women into a separate file and then compared each one with the photo he’d taken on his phone of the Jane Doe from the Hudson river.

 
Comparing a side headshot of a living person taken at night with a full-frontal view of the pale, water-bloated face of a dead person wasn’t easy. Not only had the photos been taken at different angles, but the puffy skin made matching difficult—but not impossible. He knew what to focus on: the distances between the eyes, nose, and mouth, the so-called Golden Ratio used by plastic surgeons. These characteristics didn’t change in the early stages of decomposition. The monochrome of the night-vision photograph actually helped by doing away with facial colors. He whittled down the number of photographs to just one, and he was 95% sure he had found the immigrant woman that Paul Hamilton had followed and photographed five times. In all likelihood, her tongue had been cut out, and the word ‘CHIVATA’ carved into her chest because she had spoken to the reporter.

  He sat back in his chair with no doubt remaining in his mind that El Gordito had killed both Hamilton and the woman. Remembering the photos he had taken at Hargreave Merciful Hospital, he plugged the memory card from his camera into his computer. He found the photos of the hidden loading area, then magnified and focused in on the faces that the camera had caught through gaps in the swaying branches. After cutting and pasting the images into a blank document, he moved them around until he had a patchwork image of a woman and a man both dressed in green scrubs. The man was also wearing a surgical cap with a printed pattern. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like it had skulls on it.

  As he’d suspected, he couldn’t match the faces to the bio headshots on the hospital’s website. Which was a pity because if the guy in the cap with the skull pattern on it was a surgeon at the hospital, he would have shown up for sure. Hospital websites always showed their list of surgeons with bios. Maybe the anomaly was due to some administrative error, but he thought it unlikely. He then searched the website for any mention of a privately-owned medical research center located at the hospital. When that failed to turn up anything, he expanded his search by using a search engine, but again without success. He would have to go back to Hargreave tomorrow and follow another van to see what was really going on. It would be another long day and night, he thought.