“I’m hoping McEllis can help.”
He was a slim, earnest-looking man—okay, “dowdy” came to mind—who was here, Sachs explained, to look over the maps and the details of the prior fires and see if he could help them narrow down the search for the devices.
Sachs said, “I’m thinking that he’d plant them close to fault lines in the area, if he wanted the quakes to look authentic. If so, maybe Don can point them out.”
The detective shrugged. He didn’t seem enthusiastic. His phone hummed. “City Hall. Jesus.” He took the call and stepped aside.
McEllis asked to use one of the computers to load some geological maps of the area. Cooper directed him to one. He wanted to see too where the previous gas bombs had been set, and Sachs pushed toward him the whiteboard on which was taped a map of the city. The fires were marked in red and they made a rough ellipse around what was the epicenter: the geothermal drilling site near Cadman Plaza. McEllis called up the geological diagrams of the area and began poring over them.
Cooper and Sachs both dressed in gowns and face masks and began to look over the evidence that had been collected at Blaustein’s jewelry store and Rostov’s motel in Brighton Beach.
Rhyme had some information too. After Sachs had sent him the unsub’s identity, he had contacted Daryl Mulbry at AIS once more, requesting details on the killer. The man had sent a report summarizing what he could find on short notice. Vladimir Ivanovich Rostov. The forty-four-year-old’s history was Russian military and then FSB—one of the successors to the KGB—and then for the past ten years a “consultant,” whose clients included some of the big Russian quasigovernmental organizations, like Gazprom, the oil and gas company, Nizhny Novgorod Shipping, which made oil rigs and tankers and—significantly—Dobprom, the biggest diamond-mining company in Russia.
Mulbry had learned that Rostov had worked in the Mir mine, in Siberia, from ages twelve through twenty. “Fellow’s a bit off, from what we could learn. Rumors that he killed his uncle, who was in a mine shaft with him. Head crushed with a rock, but there wasn’t any rockslide. The police tended to look the other way when it came to the biggest employer in the region. His aunt died too, not long after that. Apparently one night, she got trapped on the roof of the building, locked out of the access door. No one could figure what she was doing there. She was wearing a flimsy nightgown and no shoes. It was December. The temperature was minus twenty. The authorities looked the other way on that one too. There were complaints that she’d been ne podkhodit, not appropriate, with some youngsters in the building.”
Quite a background, Rhyme reflected.
Mines. Well, that explained the obsession with diamonds…and Rostov’s interest in the fake earthquakes at the geothermal site.
The spy had added that Rostov was non grata in Germany, France, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Taiwan, suspected of assault, extortion and illegal business practices, as well as a number of financial crimes. Witnesses would not come forward with statements, so he’d never been brought to trial; he was simply told to leave and not come back. In Kraków, Polish authorities detained him after a report that he sexually assaulted a woman and beat her boyfriend. He was quietly released after some intervention by Moscow.
At the jewelry store, she’d found the man’s real Russian passport—in the name of Rostov—plus a forged passport in the name of Alexander Petrovitch, the .38 Smith & Wesson, loose .38 and 9mm Finocchi rounds—the latter for the Glock—ski mask, cloth gloves, the bloodstained utility box-cutting knife, cigarettes and lighter, cash (dollars, rubles and euros). No keys to the Toyota, though there was no guarantee that the red car outside Adeela’s house had been Rostov’s. He didn’t have a mobile on him, either.
He had no room keys on him but a fast canvass of motels and hotels in the area revealed that one Alexander Petrovitch was staying at the Beach View Residence Inn in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which Sachs had searched carefully. But she didn’t find much. More .38 ammunition, junk food, bottles of Jack Daniels, the actual passports of the other identities that Mulbry had learned of. No computers or telephones, car keys or trace of or references to lehabahs, the gas line IEDs, or to where they might have been planted.
And no rough diamonds worth five million dollars.
Where were the stones? And Rostov’s electronics? She supposed he kept everything, hotel key included, in the Toyota, in case he needed to make a fast getaway. The car key was likely hidden in the wheel well. After Breaking Bad, the TV series, a surprising number of perps had been doing this.
The lack of leads, she’d explained to Rhyme, had inspired her to conscript the geologist—a bit of a desperate move, she admitted. Though a reasonable one, in Rhyme’s opinion.
Sachs transcribed the sparse evidentiary finds on a whiteboard and stepped back, hands on hips, worrying a thumbnail with an index finger. Staring, staring, staring.
Rhyme was doing the same. “Anything more?” he called to Cooper.
“Just checking the last of the trace from the hotel room. Should be a minute.”
But what would that show? Possibly some substance from a shoe print unique to where he’d planted a bomb. But what a long shot that would be.
He grimaced in frustration. A glance toward McEllis. “Anything, Don?”
The engineer was hunched forward, studying both the online geological maps and the hard-copy one that depicted the previous fires. He said, “I think so. He seems to have set the bombs along the Canarsie fault. See? It goes through downtown Brooklyn, near Cadman Plaza, then into the harbor. It’s two miles long, but most of that’s underwater. About a half mile is on land.” McEllis indicated a line through the densely populated borough.
Hell, Rhyme thought, too many basements to search. “We’ve got to narrow it down more.”
Mel Cooper called, “Got the last of the trace. Nothing pins Rostov to a particular place. Tobacco ash, ketchup, beef fat, soil associated with Brighton Beach geography. More kimberlite.”
Without looking up from the map, McEllis asked, “Kimberlite?”
Rhyme said, “That’s right. Our unsub picked some trace up at the first shooting. It’s on his clothes and shoes. He’s left it at a couple of the scenes.”
“Then you mean serpentinite. Not kimberlite. They’re in the same family.”
“No, it’s kimberlite. There’re diamond crystals embedded,” Cooper said, looking up. “I thought that made serpentinite into kimberlite.”
“It does,” McEllis whispered. “But…well, can I see a sample?”
Cooper looked toward Rhyme, who nodded.
The tech prepared a sample and set it on the stage of the compound microscope.
McEllis sat on the stool, bent forward and began adjusting the light above the stage. He focused. Sat back, looked away. Then back to the eyepiece. He used a needle probe to poke through the dust and fragments. His eyes remained against the soft rubber eyepieces but his shoulders rose, as did his heels, slightly. His body language suggested he was looking at something significant. He sat back and gave a soft laugh.
“What is it?” Sellitto asked.
“Well, if you found these rocks in New York City, then you’ve just rewritten geological history.”
Chapter 58
Kimberlite,” Don McEllis was telling those in the parlor. “You could call it the elevator that carries diamonds to the surface of the earth from the mantle—the part that’s just below the crust. Where diamonds are formed.”