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

by Fynn Perry

  Twenty-One

  The next morning, Lazlo poured himself a second cup of precinct coffee to make up for the lost hours of sleep. At his desk, he opened his work email and logged into the test results database. The autopsy report on the Jane Doe found by the Hudson river had come in. The medical examiner had concluded it was death by drowning—but not in the Hudson. Lazlo felt some minor relief to read that the cuts to her stomach and the slicing-off of her tongue had been done post-mortem, but her death must still have been traumatically painful. She had been tortured in a manner consistent with waterboarding before being drowned in fresh water. Bruising on her arms and legs confirmed she had been restrained, and the water in her lungs had been regular tap water. The report mentioned the nose and mouth having been sealed with a silicone-based substance, though the seal between her lips had broken. The M.E. had theorized that the silicone plugs had been used to stop river water mixing with the clean water in the lungs and to keep the severed tongue and blood in place—presumably for the purposes of staging, and to prevent any doubt during an autopsy that she had been waterboarded before being dumped in the river. The exact time of death could not be ascertained and she had spent enough time in the Hudson for all evidence to have been washed away. It could only be estimated that her death from waterboarding had occurred between ten and twelve hours before the discovery of her body. That was not long after the email virus had arrived on Jennifer Miller’s computer.

  Lazlo’s thoughts were interrupted by a call from CSU. They had exhausted all testing and drawn a blank at the Hamilton murder site. Lazlo wasn’t surprised. He had spent over two hours at the derelict warehouse in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn where Hamilton’s burnt body had been found, trying to find clues. It had been an extremely professional job. El Gordito’s men were getting better and better at cleaning their kill sites. The Millers would have to accept that there was nothing that could be done about Hamilton’s murder for now––their testimony and photos wouldn’t stand a chance against the narco-gangster’s lawyer.

  At 10:35 p.m. that evening, Lazlo was back at the hospital, sitting in his car about eight parking spaces from the entry to the Skyview Developments site. He had been there for two hours, during which three more motorcycle couriers had arrived and departed.

  As he waited, he thought again about Mark Kendrick. His organs weren’t removed at the autopsy—they had been harvested before––that much seemed clear now. But why not simply let Kendrick just disappear like the other organ-trafficking victims? He would be yet another statistic among the thousands that go missing in New York City. Why go through the trouble of having his body discovered in a car accident, getting the cause of death falsely certified as the victim of the crash, and immediately cremating him? Lazlo could only think of one reason: El Gordito must have found out about his personal interest in the case, and knowing that he would pursue any lead connected to the drug lord or his businesses, the Mexican had attempted to close the case for him, period. The trail would have gone cold. In the long run, he would have had to accept that—had he not seen Kendrick’s body and met the Millers.

  Ahead of him, a blue panel van turned the corner into the street. It waited for the gates to open and disappeared inside. After an hour, it re-appeared and, like the van from the previous night, this one was heavily loaded. It drove past, and he waited for it to turn the corner before pulling out to follow. He sped up the street and turned into the side road. Seeing the blue van about twenty yards ahead, he slowed down to keep a discreet distance behind, again allowing other cars to come in between them.

  Just like the other van, this one took West 79th Street and then turned onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. This time he wasn’t called away, and he was able to follow the van through Battery Park and into the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. It looked like they were heading in the direction of Red Hook port and container terminal.

  The van didn’t enter the terminal but turned right into a road a quarter-mile earlier, coming to a stop outside one of the many tall, but narrow brick-built storage buildings. The buildings dated back a few hundred years but had all been modernized with the addition of large roller shutter doors that opened directly onto the street.

  Lazlo pulled up about ten yards away, killing his headlights. He grabbed his camera and made a mental note of the address of the building: it was 12A Portview Drive, Red Hook. The roller shutter door on the building began to open. Taking multiple snapshots of the brightly lit interior, he could see what looked like a shipping container with a refrigeration unit on the front and, next to it, a tilt-bed truck, used for transporting such containers by road. A guard, dressed in black, stood at the side of the doorway, trying to keep out of sight. Lazlo couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like he had a Heckler & Koch MP7 holstered over his shoulder. The van drove in quickly, and the roller door started its descent, shutting off Lazlo’s view.

  The proof of whatever El Gordito was up to at the medical center lay inside that refrigerated container and Lazlo already had an idea of how he was going to get inside it.

  The next day, arriving at the precinct, Lazlo found he’d had a couple of missed calls from David Miller. He would call back after he’d done some research on the Red Hook address. It didn’t take him long to find out from a few searches on the internet that a company called Green Container Port Services LLC had recently secured leases not only for the storage buildings along Portview Drive, but also for a section of waterfront and a dock-mounted crane at the cargo terminal.

  If there were bodies in the container he had seen last night, then El Gordito had found a way to ship them out of the country—and the only reason for doing that would be to use them as mules to ship his product. Anger shuddered through Lazlo at this discovery. El Gordito had already taken his new business international.

  He sat for a moment, pondering how he could prove El Gordito was behind the leases. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had strict requirements for transparency in the ownership of any leaseholds and even the faintest odor of drug money would be a disqualifier. Green Container would probably stand up to scrutiny and he was still dead-ended regarding the owner of the medical research center, but he did have the name of the residential developer whose site was being used for clandestine access to it: SkyView Developments. He guessed it would probably also come up clean. Lazlo took out his phone and scrolled through his list of contacts to find the number of a person who, for a fee, had other means, not to be elaborated upon, at his disposal to find company information. As per established procedure, he didn’t call, he just texted the names of the companies he wanted to know more about:

  Green Container Port Services LLC & SkyView Developments LLC.

  In the space of a day, he would get everything he needed to know.

  David Miller was relieved to hear Lazlo’s voice on the phone after the two days of agreed radio silence.

  Lazlo tried to reassure him that the murder of Paul Hamilton, although upsetting, did not put his or his daughter’s life in danger. “You simply passed on information of suspicious activity that a client had made you aware of,” Lazlo said. “I’m only involving you in this investigation because you volunteered, and you might remember, or get, more key information from your source. But be sure that you can pull out anytime you want, Counselor, if you’re concerned about your and your family’s safety.”

  David didn’t answer immediately. He hadn’t been at work for the last two days because he’d stayed home with his daughter––trying to deal with their shared stress and near hysteria over the fact that even the NYPD had insufficient evidence to shut down El Gordito’s drug manufacturing and were clearly reluctant to risk another costly false arrest. Their hopes that they could thwart El Gordito and thus end that particular narrative being played out, making Santiago’s possession of his host a failure, and so banishing his spirit from the Earth, had floundered. Instead, they now had to wait to hear from Lazlo to what extent he could gradually cripple El Gordito’s
business. There was no guarantee, he thought bleakly, that those actions would be sufficiently annoying to distract Santiago’s spirit, at least temporarily, from coming after them.

  Then there was John’s mounting exasperation, which David could only hear about through Jennifer. He could only try to persuade John, through her, not to take matters into his own hands and to give Lazlo a chance.

  “I’m still on board,” David replied eventually. Then he asked Lazlo about his progress.

  “Let’s not talk over the phone. Be at my place at six.”

  As soon as David and Jennifer arrived at his brownstone, Lazlo corralled them straight into his war room. “I spent some time there and took photos of a hidden delivery area,” he said, pointing to Hargreave Merciful Hospital on his map. “There’s not much to see in each photo, but when I put the pieces together, I got a half-decent image of the faces of two of the medical staff.”

  David and Jennifer looked momentarily confused until Lazlo opened up his laptop and loaded up the photos from the pen-drive. He showed them a composite image he had put together of the people he’d seen receiving the motorcycle couriers.

  “That woman there is Dr. Schwartz, the head of the transplant teams,” John confirmed. Unfortunately, this wasn’t something that Jennifer could relay to Lazlo, as he’d wonder how she had this information. It was, after all, only John who had seen the medical staff at the medical research center in Hargreave up close.

  “Can you ID them?” David asked the detective.

  “Not from an image of this quality, but I can see if our IT guy can get the images enhanced enough to scan into our system. I had a look at the hospital website—but no luck.”

  Seeing their disappointment, Lazlo informed Jennifer and David of his observation that the vans were accessing what he believed to be a separate, hidden delivery area to the medical research center, accessible through the nearby residential development site, which allowed avoidance of the hospital’s delivery vehicle checkpoint.

  “So, the developer of the residential site is involved?” David asked.

  “That much, at least, is clear. I’ve got someone looking into the ownership of that company. I also followed one of the vans to this place,” Lazlo said, showing them next the photos of the storage facility near the Red Hook port in Brooklyn.

  “That’s a refrigerated container, isn’t it, one which can be transported by truck or on a cargo ship?” David suggested.

  “So, it could be used for transporting bodies?” Jennifer offered.

  “Your father’s right that it is refrigerated,” Lazlo replied. “And it’s possible some of the bodies are in there. The storage facility is being leased by the same company that has also leased a crane and section of the waterfront—so whoever owns those containers has the means to take them out of the country hidden among regular freight.”

  “Does El Gordito own that company too?” Jennifer questioned.

  “It’s more likely he’s bribed the owners of the company and someone in the Port Authority in order to run his operation through the port unchecked,” Lazlo responded.

  “What about the medical center where the organ harvesting is taking place? Did you find any connection to El Gordito?”

  “It’s not listed anywhere and, given the coverup with the construction permit, I think it’s safe to say that any licenses and ownership documents are buried deep. But I have someone who may be able to get to what we need to know. You just don’t want to know how,” Lazlo warned.

  “Understood,” David confirmed.

  “Now, I have to tell you some bad news,” Lazlo sighed. “We found the body of a Mexican woman in the Hudson yesterday. I matched her face with a photo that Paul Hamilton took of one of the Latino women in El Gordito’s workforce in New Jersey.”

  “The woman that he photographed so many times?” Jennifer asked.

  “I think so, although there hasn’t been a positive identification, yet.”

  Jennifer’s eyes welled up and the first of several tears fell down her cheek. “He must have talked to her, and now they’re both dead.”

  “The murders will constitute a message showing that El Gordito demands absolute loyalty,” Lazlo explained. “It’s how the drug gangs operate. Of course, we probably won’t be able to identify her officially. She most likely came in illegally, and El Gordito kept hold of her passport. Getting her identified by the Mexican authorities would likely take months.”

  “The bodies are stacking up, and you can’t do anything about arresting El Gordito?” Jennifer pleaded.

  “We don’t have anything that pins the woman’s death on El Gordito, except Paul’s photo of her working at the warehouse. That scumbag’s lawyer will easily discredit the photo as evidence.”

  “What about the logistics center in New Jersey—can’t you just raid it?”

  “Not without a warrant. And I’m afraid the evidence I have isn’t sufficient to enable me to get one.”

  They all fell silent.

  “OK, let’s just take a step back and try to work out the size of El Gordito’s operation, because to move this forward, I need to know what I am dealing with,” Lazlo said, grabbing a piece of paper and a pen. “If everything your anonymous source has said is true, then El Gordito is shipping the pills out hidden in household products like washing machines. Assuming each truck can carry twenty-five standard pallets and, on each pallet, you can fit twelve washing machines…that’s . . . three hundred washing machines per truck. Right?”

  David and Jennifer shrugged in agreement.

  “Let’s say, conservatively, there are a thousand pills packed into each washing machine. He’s not stupid, so he’s not going to pack drugs into every machine on the truck in case the truck gets stopped by the police and the outermost cargo is checked for some reason.”

  While Lazlo paused, John gave Jennifer a look that indicated Lazlo’s thinking was on the ball.

  “So, for argument’s sake, let’s assume only thirty-five percent of the machines have the pills and they are located in the middle pallets. Now, I’m guessing he’s selling wholesale at twenty bucks per pill and the current street value of similar drugs is forty. That means each washing machine contains twenty thousand dollars’ worth of pills at wholesale price.” He paused as he wrote some numbers down. “So, with thirty-five percent of the cargo containing drugs, each truck has around two and a half million dollars of pills on board! You can bet, at that value, he has each one followed! Now, let’s say it takes four hours to unload the clean cargo and then load the truck with the drug cargo. That’s five trucks per twenty-four hours with some wiggle room per bay. There are fifteen bays from what I could see. So, if my math––.”

  “Seventy-five trucks are leaving the facility every twenty-four hours with $188M of pills in total,” Jennifer interjected. She had always been good at math.

  Lazlo’s eyebrows shot up in surprise at the speed and content of her answer. “Hell, at that rate, he’s probably got the Tri-State covered and is spreading out through the road network, one state at a time. That kind of money will soon make him practically untouchable thanks to his power over corrupt officials, lawyers, and judges,” Lazlo exclaimed, exasperated. “All we might be able to get him on at this point is the illegal workforce—but we’re going to need a lot more than that to bring the drug operations to a halt.”

  “What if we weaken his organization bit by bit, so he starts making mistakes?” Jennifer suggested. “You know, in connection with some unrelated legal issues, like trumped-up code violations, without giving his lawyers grounds for harassment.”

  Lazlo looked at her curiously. “Interesting...We could target his places of business, bury him in inspections, and try to get some of his men caught on misdemeanors. If he can’t make deliveries to his dealers and partners, he’s going to be under a lot of pressure,” Lazlo said, liking the idea. “I’ve got some buddies in immigration and in the health department who may be able to help.”

  Lazlo’
s phone buzzed. He had just received a text message from his mysterious informer. The text was brief and read:

  Green Container Port LLC & SkyView Developments LLC controlled and financed by Miguel Vargas a.k.a El Gordito through a series of shell companies.

  “Just as I thought, El Gordito controls the port storage warehouse and the development site next to the hospital.”

  “So, what now?” David asked.

  “I’ll do a sneak and peek at the storage facility near the port. It’s far easier to get into unnoticed than the medical facility, and it has less security. Obviously, this will have to be done off-book. You don’t need to know the details, but I’ll organize it.” As he stared at them for a moment, realizing that outside of El Gordito’s network, David and Jennifer Miller were the only people who knew of the existence of El Gordito’s secret drug and organ trafficking operations, he asked, “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  David and Jennifer shook their heads in sync.

  “We need to find somewhere safe for you to stay. Somewhere that El Gordito and his men can’t find you. I can’t be certain any more that he won’t see you as a loose end and come after you.”

  Lazlo shrugged off their apparent lack of emotion at this devastating news and continued. “I could get you into a safe house, off the record, but it would mean trusting a few other people in order to deactivate the alarms and cameras and to take you completely off-grid.”

  Jennifer looked at John, who was standing behind Lazlo and shaking his head.

  “It’s too dangerous,” John said to her. “Santiago will find out somehow. We can’t trust anyone, not even Lazlo. I have somewhere for you both to stay. Just tell him you already have a safe place.”