“You’re sure?”
Who was this? A friend of the Russian?
“What do you—”
“Are you sure you’re not going to be sick?”
“No.”
The man bound his hands with silver duct tape and pulled him to the trunk. He seemed to be debating taping his mouth too but was probably worried that he might in fact puke once more and choke to death. He chose not to gag him.
Apparently the assailant was determined to keep him alive.
At least for the time being.
Chapter 60
Driving through a rugged part of industrial Queens, looking for a suitable place for what was next on the schedule.
Andrew Krueger knew, since he’d been released by the police, that they didn’t suspect him. And while he supposed Rhyme and Amelia were quite capable of figuring out the entire scheme given enough time, he knew that didn’t enter into their thoughts much at all, since they were frantically trying to find the next gas bomb. He had placed that one in an old wooden residential building—a literal tinderbox. The fake earthquake would rattle windows soon and not long after, the gas line would start to leach its delightful vapor. Then the explosion.
But Krueger no longer cared about scorched flesh; his only concern was the final question: Where had Vimal found the kimberlite he’d been carrying on Saturday?
Krueger pulled his rented Ford into an industrial park area and found a deserted parking lot of cracked asphalt and weeds. He looked about. No one nearby. No cars, no trucks. No CCTV, though he hardly expected any; the warehouse’s roof had collapsed years ago.
The boy had stopped pounding on the trunk and Krueger had the troubling thought that he might be dead. Could you suffocate in a trunk in this day and age? It seemed unlikely. Had one of the jostling bumps on the roadway or here broken his neck, some freak accident?
Damn well better not have.
He lifted the lid and looked down at Vimal Patel. He was doing fine—if that word could be used to describe somebody who was utterly terrified.
Unlike the late and unlamented Vladimir Rostov, Krueger wasn’t a sadist. He took no pleasure in the boy’s dread. Oh, he would kill anybody he needed to—setting the gas line fires in the apartments, for instance, or murdering Patel and Weintraub—not to mention Rostov himself. But he didn’t torture, at least not for pleasure. Death and pain were simply tools like a dop stick, a scaife turntable and diamond-infused olive oil for brillianteering.
But if he took no pleasure in the boy’s misery, neither did he feel an ounce of sympathy. His mission. That was all that mattered. Keeping the price of diamonds floating high, just shy of heaven.
He pulled the boy from the trunk.
“Please, what do you—?”
“Quiet. Listen to me carefully. Saturday, you walked into Patel’s shop with a bag of kimberlite.”
Vimal frowned. “You were there? You killed Mr. Patel?” Anger replaced the fear in his eyes.
Krueger brandished the razor knife and the boy grew quiet. “I asked you a question. Tell me about the kimberlite. How did Patel get it? Look, I can hurt you a lot. Just tell me.”
“All I know is somebody found a piece in Brooklyn where they were doing that drilling. In a scrap pile.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. A scavenger or somebody, I guess. I’m a sculptor. I do the same thing at construction sites. I pick around for rocks. He probably saw the crystals and thought it might be valuable. He just picked Mr. Patel at random to sell it to.”
“And how did you end up with that bag?”
“Mr. Patel wanted more. I went to look for them but the company? The one doing the drilling? They’d had everything hauled off to a scrapyard.”
Vimal was continuing. “Mr. Patel had me go to the yard to look. I went four times, or five. I finally found a pile of it. That was on Saturday. I was bringing some back to show him.”
Krueger asked, “How much kimberlite was there?”
“Not much.”
“What do you mean by not much?”
“A dozen bigger pieces—about the size of your fist. Mostly fragments and dust.”
“Where is this yard?”
“Near Cobble Hill. C and D Waste Transfer Station Number Four.”
Construction and demolition, Krueger supposed.
“What’s Cobble Hill?”
“A neighborhood. In Brooklyn.”
Krueger said, “Where?” He called up a map on his phone and the boy glanced down but then gazed off.
Krueger said, “Look. Don’t worry. Killing you wouldn’t fit my plans. The one taking the blame for this whole thing, a fellow from Russia, he’s already dead. For you to die now, that means the police would start looking for another suspect. You’re safe.”
A nod. He was miserable and angry but he saw the logic.
Faulty logic, though it was: Of course, the boy would be dead soon…and the killer identified as a partner of Rostov’s, another—a fictional—Russian. After killing Vimal, Krueger would rip his clothing, as if he’d fought with his assailant. He’d then plant a bit of evidence here, near the body, things he’d taken from Rostov’s motel—tobacco from a Russian cigarette, a few ruble coins—that would appear to have been scattered in the struggle. And he’d leave a prepaid phone somewhere nearby, too. The phone, free of fingerprints, had a dozen or more calls to Dobprom and various random numbers in Russia embedded in memory. Krueger had placed the calls himself after he’d shot Rostov.
Perfectly tidy? No. But a reasonable explanation for the boy’s death.
“Well?”
Vimal hesitated and then pointed to a spot on the map. It was not far away.
Krueger helped him back into the trunk, closed the lid and then drove out of the desolate parking lot. In twenty minutes they were at the dump site.
C&D Transfer Station #4
He drove through the wide gate, ignored by the few workers here, and the vehicle rocked slowly along a wide path, marred with deep tire treads. The yard was easily the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches. Hundreds of twenty-and thirty-foot-high piles of refuse rose like miniature mountains, composed of stone, plasterboard, metal, wood, concrete…every building material you could imagine. He supposed that salvage companies, for a fee, were allowed to prowl through the refuse and pick what might be valuable. He smiled to himself thinking that these companies would be delighted to find copper pipe and wiring, and ignore the diamond-rich kimberlite, which was the clue that somewhere in the ground not far away lurked material worth a million times more.
He parked behind one of these mounds, out of view of the highway, the entrance and the workers.
He climbed out of the Ford and pulled Vimal from the trunk.
Krueger lifted the knife. Vimal shied. “Just the tape,” the man told him. He sliced through it, freeing his hands. He put the knife away and displayed the gun in his waistband. “Run and I’ll use it.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Go on.”
They started through the dun and gray valleys, moving parallel to the water, where the barges were being filled with debris by bulldozers and dump trucks. The sound was overwhelming.
“Where?”
The young man looked around, orienting himself. “That way.” He nodded his head toward the waterfront. The two of them wove through the yard, Vimal pausing occasionally and gazing about, then continuing on, turning left and right. He muttered, “There’s been more dumping. A lot of it. It doesn’t look the same.”
Krueger’s impression was that the kid wasn’t stalling. He seemed truly confused.
Then he squinted. “That way. I’m sure.” Another nod.
They searched for ten minutes. Then Krueger paused. He glanced down and saw a bit of kimberlite in the rut left by a large truck tire. He pocketed it.