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

by Fynn Perry

  Jennifer gave John a look meaning Are you sure?

  “Yes!” John pressed.

  “We have a place. We don’t want anyone to know about it,” she said awkwardly, glancing at David, whose look said he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Lazlo picked up on her father’s confusion. “I need to get some papers from another room. It’ll give you two time to agree where you’ll be staying,” he said as he got up and left them alone.

  “What are you talking about, Jen?” David asked immediately. Lazlo was out of the room.

  “That’s what I was about to ask John. Dad, wait, a second.”

  She turned and looked at John expectantly.

  “My father bought a second apartment in the building where we live in Brooklyn Heights,” John enthused. “He was trying to rent it, but his asking price was too high, then he got a ridiculous offer from an overseas buyer who put down a large deposit to hold it for two months until the guy comes to New York to finalize the deal. So now it’s off-market, empty, and fully furnished with still a month to go. You can stock it up with food and hide out there. It’s comfortable.”

  Jennifer repeated John’s words to David. He looked at her for a moment and then gestured like there was no other choice. “Thank you, that’s extremely generous,” he finally said, not knowing where in the room to direct the words.

  A few moments passed, and Lazlo returned. “All done and agreed?” he said, smiling. “How will I contact you, to know that you are OK?”

  “Tell him you’ll get a burner phone and call him every week,” John advised.

  Jennifer confirmed to the detective that she would call and that she had Lazlo’s number.

  Twenty-Two

  While David and Jennifer were parking David’s car out of sight in a long-term, multi-story parking deck near the apartment building in Brooklyn Heights, John had gone to his father’s penthouse apartment on the twelfth floor to get the keys to the rental. Being able to pass through doors and walls hadn’t lost its novelty or usefulness. His superpowers, however, didn’t extend to an ability to make solid objects like keys pass through the door with him, and he found himself having to exit the apartment by opening the door and passing through it with the keys like a mortal.

  As he walked up to the door of number twelve, three floors below his father’s apartment, he saw Jennifer and David already waiting with the wheeled suitcases they had packed back at their house.

  David watched the keys and card approach, as if under their own steam, in a gentle backward and forward swaying motion. They stopped swaying and moved forward in an upward arc and dropped into Jennifer’s outstretched open hand. “I really can’t get used to this,” he muttered.

  Jennifer opened the door to the apartment, expecting to see something special. As they had approached, driving along Piedmont Street, John had pointed out the building. It was a sleek, modern condo sitting among immaculately maintained and architecturally rich pre-war buildings and manicured greenery. Extending out from the main entrance was a long Manhattan-style canopy in a cool gray, with the name ‘Kingston Residences’ printed on either side of it. At the end of this, dressed in full uniform, was, according to John, one of the nicest, most charming people he had ever met––Jake the doorman.

  “Wow, this is swanky!” said Jennifer as she walked through the apartment’s foyer and headed between sleek furniture in the living room toward the balcony and the view of the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges. “And your father has a bigger place in this same building?”

  “About twice the size, with a view on the harbor from a terrace.”

  “Why the hell are you going to my school? You could go to any of the best schools in Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan!”

  “My dad never went to a private school back home, and neither did I. We both decided nothing would change when we came to New York,” John said and added, “I’ll leave you to walk around and get used to it, but there’s one important feature you should know about…there’s a safe room.”

  “Like in the movie Panic Room with Jodie Foster?”

  “Not exactly—safe rooms look a bit different now.”

  “Where is it?” Jennifer responded with some trepidation as she imagined hiding in a windowless cell, scared out of her wits.

  “Follow me.” John led Jennifer and David through the master bedroom and into a huge walk-in closet. It was spacious and lined with doors, two large padded chairs and a footstool. At the far end was a doorway to the master, en-suite bathroom. They glimpsed marble finishes and a freestanding bath.

  John stopped in the middle of the closet.

  “So, is the panic—I mean safe room, behind one of these doors?” Jennifer asked.

  “No.”

  “So where is it?”

  “You’re standing in it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The walls have Kevlar and steel plate in their construction, and so does the door between the bedroom and the closet. There are no windows, and there’s a separate ventilation system. Try closing the door to the bedroom.”

  Jennifer looked for the door. It took her a moment. It was hidden in a recess in the wood paneling of the wall. It swung easily like any other door, but the clunk as it shut against the frame betrayed its abnormally heavy weight.

  “A ten-point locking mechanism with no keyhole or handle on the other side. Once in here, only you can open the door from this side. Nobody else, not the police or the fire department, can enter. Turn the top knob below the handle.”

  As she did so, the door locked into place with the sound of sliding bolts.

  “The apartment used to belong to a Russian businessman. He has a room like this in his apartment in Moscow. It seems nobody now wants to slum it, even when under siege,” he said, smiling. “Behind some of those doors are a TV, bar and refrigerator.” John paused. “But that’s not all! Turn the knob below the handle counter-clockwise.”

  She did. There was the sound of bolts retracting, and a panel within the door, almost as big as the door itself and containing the door handle and locking knobs, tilted slightly outward about a central, vertical axis.

  “What the hell is that?” David remarked, almost simultaneously with Jennifer.

  “It’s easier to just show you,” John said. “Push against the panel, just above the handle.”

  As she did so, it swung out, perfectly balanced, and settled at an angle roughly perpendicular to the rest of the door, creating an opening on either side of its axis.

  “Step through one of the openings into the bedroom,” He paused as they all stepped through the gap between the open panel and the rest of the door. “Now pull on the handle to swing the panel round, so the locking knobs and handle now face onto the bedroom. It should click into place in the frame.”

  A solid click confirmed it was secured.

  “That locks the panel in place but now the locking knobs and handle are on this side. Lock it all down with the first knob.” He waited until another click confirmed it was locked. “To stop anybody else from opening it from this side, you need to enter the six-figure code on the keypad next to the light switch. The code is 7-4-5-6–8-9. “

  She keyed it in, making a mental note of the number, hoping that her life and that of her father’s would not depend on her remembering it.

  She and David stood dumbfounded. “I’m confused. John, why would your father have––” Jennifer didn’t finish.

  “It works as a safe room and a prison!” David interrupted, suddenly realizing how useful the combination could be.

  “It seems the previous owner wanted the option to hide from, or to imprison, intruders. It’s kind of creepy,” John explained. “Don’t worry—he never lived here.”

  Jennifer didn’t have time to respond.

  Moving back toward the living area, David suggested they go through the checklist that they had drawn up back at home. He had already called the office and said he had been taken ill. The same excuse had been g
iven for Jennifer at her school. They had burnt their SIM cards, and Jennifer had closed all her social media accounts. They were now off-grid and would only buy groceries with cash, visiting stores by rotation.

  All Jennifer and David could do was hope, now, that the raids planned by Lazlo on El Gordito’s businesses would divert Santiago’s attention from the two of them. However, John had no intention of sitting around waiting. He would now shadow Lazlo to make sure he was doing everything possible to close down El Gordito’s operations, and he was determined to take matters into his own hands if required.

  After they had made sure they were all on the same page with the plans, John reluctantly said good-bye, not knowing when he would see them again.

  When John caught up with Lazlo at the precinct, the detective was finishing the last report of the day. The mobile phone on his desk rang and John, hovering behind him, caught a glimpse of the name Frank Mathers on the screen. He listened in. The conversation was short.

  “It’s done,” Mathers said.

  “Frank, I owe you one.”

  “Damn right! Check your email in ten.”

  Lazlo continued writing the report until the email came in from Mathers.

  John could hardly believe the subject line. It read: CLOSURE OF DNA AND MAYHEM NIGHTCLUBS.

  A smile rapidly spread across Lazlo’s face as he opened the message. John noticed that according to the message footer, Frank Mathers was a team leader in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene or, simply, NYC Health, according to its logo. The message was addressed to a lengthy list of people, most with the police department’s @nypd.org endings to their email addresses, and it stated that an unannounced inspection by the health department of the restaurants in both clubs had taken place. Both had received a Grade C and had been forced to close due to scoring over twenty-eight points for sanitary violations. Attached were photos of Grade C cards posted in the windows and entrance doors to the clubs.

  “Think you can mess with me, asshole?” Lazlo muttered, looking at the hairy hog’s head on the office wall that had been christened after the drug lord.

  John considered the timing perfect. It had just turned 6:00 p.m. Closure this early on a Friday evening would make El Gordito lose the entire weekend’s takings and also make it difficult for his lawyer to challenge the hygiene ruling until Monday. It wouldn’t be a major annoyance to him, in itself, but it was a start, and together with other raids it could put pressure on his businesses. Pressure that could lead him to making a mistake large enough for the NYPD to hang him with.

  John headed back to Lazlo’s brownstone to rest. He thought about going to see Jennifer but decided against it. If Santiago’s spirit or, more likely, one of his spirit henchmen were on the lookout for him, John could inadvertently lead them to her and her father.

  Lazlo had decided to go out for a celebratory drink with colleagues. John didn’t want to listen to cops ranting, and a bar didn’t seem the safest place for him, so he made his way to the secret war room and passed straight through the mirrored door. He took a moment to look at the map on the ‘crazy wall’ again and particularly at the locations of the fulfillment center in New Jersey, the hospital in Manhattan, the storage facility in Brooklyn, and the two nightclubs in Manhattan. Two out of his five businesses hit and now on the NYPD’s radar, John thought.

  He crashed on the couch in the living room and fell into a light doze. A few hours later he heard Lazlo return and noted, from a clock on the wall, that it was 2:00 a.m. John followed him up the stairs, waited for Lazlo to get into bed, and then lay down on a nearby antique chaise lounge from which he could keep an eye on the detective.

  Lazlo’s mobile phone started to ring just two and half hours later at 4:30 a.m. Despite his lack of sleep, Lazlo moved toward his ringing phone with remarkable agility. “Talk to me,” he said in a dry voice.

  John moved closer to listen to the caller.

  “The raid was at four-thirty this morning. We made thirty arrests; all seem to be Mexican nationals, but with no passports or other ID, we can’t be sure. We searched all the houses. They came up clean except for some weed and several rifles, which were handed over straightaway.”

  John quickly realized that the caller was not talking about a raid on the fulfillment center but the workers’ village. Genius! thought John. Under the current administration, nobody would question a random raid on a housing settlement of illegal immigrants by the ICE. The Newstone police force obviously hadn’t been given a heads up. Perhaps the ICE knew not to trust them.

  El Gordito had just lost an enormous part of his workforce for the most critical and fundamental part of his operation: the manufacture and packing of the drugs into legitimate goods. Without the production line in particular, there was a significant risk of orders not being satisfied, and his clients would not be forgiving. He would start to make mistakes. Maybe Lazlo had a workable plan after all.

  Guilt suddenly soured his enthusiasm as he realized that this minor victory had major consequences for the workers. Their conditions may have been degrading, but now their only livelihoods had been taken away from them and their families.

  For a moment, he wondered if the observers of The Game would find his guilt entertaining.

  As soon as Lazlo sat down to the breakfast he had prepared, another incoming call flashed up. John recognized the voice as belonging to Mathers from NYC Health.

  “El Gordito’s lawyer is, of course, disputing the closure, and the hearing with the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings has been moved forward to Monday.” Mathers continued. “I’m getting heat on this from above, and the message is that the clubs need to be re-opened Monday.”

  “Fuck!” Lazlo shouted and after thanking Mathers for the information, ended the call. He pondered the problem for a moment and then called the one officer in the force who was willing, as a favor, to bend the rules for him, in return for Lazlo giving him interesting work above his grade.

  “Cousins?”

  “Yes,” came the reply.

  Lazlo expressed his gratitude again for the heads up on the floater in the Hudson before asking him for another favor. “DNA and Mayhem got raided for food violations yesterday. I want you to check the whereabouts of the head chefs. If I know El Gordito, they’re going to be made to pay for this.”

  An hour and a half later, Cousins called back with the addresses of both El Gordito’s chefs.

  Lazlo listened and replied. “Force the door if you have to, but get inside those apartments and call me back when you’re inside.”

  Twenty minutes passed before Cousins was on the line again. He was breathing fast. “This one’s dead, detective. I found him lying on the floor in his vomit. Looks like poisoning. The meal is still here on the table…” There was a brief pause with the sound of suppressed gagging before he continued. “It’s got roaches and other bugs in it. I’m sending photos to your phone.”

  “Stay on the line, Cousins,” ordered Lazlo as his phone chirped and he opened up the files he’d just been sent.

  John moved in to take a closer look. The first photo showed a male body lying on a tiled floor in a near fetal position. The victim’s eyes and mouth were wide open as a result of massive strain from what looked like heavy retching. Vomit had pooled by his open mouth and a close-up shot showed the presence of cockroaches and flies in it. Next was a photo of a plate of linguine with the same insects mixed into it.

  “This is excessive punishment, even by El Gordito’s standards,” Lazlo commented as he looked at the final two photos that showed ligature marks around the wrists and ankles. “He’s gone out of his way to show his anger by staging the murder scene––the chef apparently poisoned by his meal––the bugs being added to make a point about the health department finding insects in his kitchen. They didn’t kill him, so I’m guessing we’ll find something like strychnine in his system. Call it in and go to the Mayhem chef’s apartment. It’s bound to be the same story there.”

>   Lazlo hung up and went through the contact list on his phone. He would need another favor from his forensic pathologist friend, Tom Stevens.

  “Don’t hang up, Tom!” Lazlo said as soon as he heard an angry yell at the other end of the line.

  John then heard shouting through the phone. Whoever ‘Tom’ was, he was upset and saying he had been put through a load of crap because of a complaint of trespassing against him after he and Lazlo had inspected Kendrick’s body without a warrant at a crematorium owned by El Gordito. John recalled Lazlo’s description of the double set of stitches on Kendrick’s body.

  Lazlo waited patiently for Stevens’s rant to stop. “See! You didn’t get fired, Tom. If you do this one more thing for me, you will not only be vindicated, but you will have helped to close one of the biggest crime operations this country has seen,” he encouraged.

  There was more shouting.

  “Look, all you have to do is examine a couple of bodies for evidence. I can’t trust the M.E. not to miss something, especially when it comes to El Gordito. Come on, Tom, this is important!”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know the exact time, but it will be today. This case is too high-profile to wait for an autopsy on Monday.”

  There were more comments on the other end of the line, but now the shouting had stopped. Lazlo finished the conversation with, “OK, I’ll text you the details. Lucy Walker is on reception at the morgue. She’ll let you in, no questions asked.”

  Lazlo put his phone down next to his plate and was finally able to take a bite out of the salmon and cream cheese bagel he had prepared. He picked his cup of now-lukewarm coffee and went to pour it out and make himself a fresh one.

  Over the sound of his vibrating espresso machine, as it forced hot water through freshly ground and tamped beans, he heard his phone ping. Cousins had sent a text confirming that the chef of Mayhem had been found dead in the same way. Lazlo confirmed receipt by a return text and finished his breakfast before settling into one of the large couches in the living area to watch the news on TV.