Mike was up and pacing. “We’ve got to get our hands on Pedro. He might have been given the order to kill Battaglia,” Mike said. “He certainly has the skill.”
“In custody as we speak,” Vickee said. “Loose hold, but we have him.”
“Why?”
“Pedro Echevarria was running Henry Dibaba and the Bronx bad boys,” Mercer said. “All his contacts were on Henry’s phone. In fact, Pedro and his driver were in the rail yards just after you two came face-to-face with Henry.”
“How’d that happen?” Mike asked.
“Because Henry had called him.”
“To tell him that we had found the stockpile of ivory,” I said. “That’s why it took Henry a couple of minutes to come back and confront us.”
“Lucky thing you two didn’t try to press on and go out through that gate,” Mercer said. “I don’t think Pedro would have missed you, given the chance to take a few shots. He just couldn’t catch up to the kids—Henry’s backup duo—when they started to chase after you inside the park.”
“So he’s charged with—?” Mike asked.
“Possession of the ivory,” Vickee said. “A federal crime. James Prescott is thrilled to have a piece of the action, you can be sure.”
“But Commissioner Scully believes Pedro Echevarria was the executioner,” Mercer said, getting up to come over and sit beside me. He picked up my hand and rubbed it between his two. “We’ve got an early match on an iris identification; that should be confirmed by morning.”
“Iris? The shooter’s eye?”
“TARU enhanced the video—and the eye was the only part of the killer that is identifiable. Vickee told us the shooter took off his sunglasses to aim at his target,” Mercer said. “I think we have Battaglia’s assassin.”
I bit my lip, fighting back tears for the second time tonight.
“It also fits with Echevarria running the Bronx kids,” Mercer said. “He’s the guy Henry Dibaba reports to, and it’s Dibaba who tried to kill you by firebombing Mike’s car.”
I nodded.
“It also fits with Battaglia’s plan to go to Montana and shoot with Echevarria in November,” I said. “It would give him a couple of days to get up close and personal with the man closest to Kwan. So very like Battaglia to try to wangle a way to get the inside track on someone.”
“Without knowing that someone—Pedro—was able to turn on a dime and kill the DA,” Mike said, “just for getting that close to the purpose behind Kwan Enterprises.”
George Kwan had woven a tangled web, and Paul Battaglia had become ensnared in it. So had Chidra Persaud. So had I.
“You’re safe again, Alex,” Mercer said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I attempted to smile, but forcing it was the best I could do.
There was so much to try to take in. This case had monstrously long tentacles that stretched from one side of the world to the other.
“Where does Chidra Persaud fit?” I asked.
“Right where you thought,” Vickee said, stepping to the bar to refill her drink. “She was in tax trouble up to her ears, in England, and about to start here. She had thoroughly researched Kwan Enterprises when they made a bid for part of her business. Persaud knew enough about endangered species—and the heroin highway—that she got Kwan’s dark side at once.”
“So she was using Paul Battaglia to buy insurance for her own case, by snitching on George Kwan,” I said. “Chidra Persaud is Diana, just like she claims to be. She took us to Montana so she could conflict James Prescott out of her case.”
“Game well played, for the lady,” Mike said. “And once George Kwan learned she was Battaglia’s snitch, then the DA was a dead man. For no good reason. For money, for wealth beyond his wildest dreams. For greed.”
“No wonder Chidra flew out of the country,” I said. “She must have realized that she was in grave danger too.”
“According to Charles Swenson,” Mercer said, “you’re right about that.”
“Paul called me three times while I was at the Met last Monday,” I said. “The first one was most certainly in response to Lily’s text telling him I’d said she shouldn’t sit down with him.”
“Another angle,” Mike said. “He probably thought Lily—Wolf Savage’s daughter—had something on George Kwan. Something bad from their business dealings.”
“No doubt. And once Paul thought I’d been talking to Kwan at the Met that night, he was loaded for bear,” I said. “Paul was trying to run the entire case, bring it to a boil, by himself. He thought I was out of bounds, and he was ready to punish me for it.”
“He was that way, Coop. You know he was.”
“Vain. I do know that,” I said. “So vain, so self-centered, that he was willing to die for something as foolish as protecting his turf, holding on to a case he was hoping for dear life to build because it had been such a personal effort.”
“I’ll finish sipping this and we’ll get out of your hair,” Vickee said.
“You don’t know how it helps me to have you here,” I said. “It’s been like living in a nightmare you can’t wake up from.”
“Mercer will stay with you two for a while longer,” she said. “My sister’s watching Logan. I need to get home.”
“Understood,” I said, still trying to puzzle out the details. “The whole animal thing is a mystery to me. Paul’s award for conservation, but his membership in Saint Hubertus, and in Persaud’s club.”
“Everyone at the animal foundation is sticking to the story that many of the best conservationists are hunters,” Mercer said.
“I can’t buy into that,” I said. “It’s oxymoronic.”
“Yet in the case of many of these men,” Mercer said, “it seems to be the truth.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, “it’s damn near impossible to hunt extinct animals. These guys have a real incentive to save some of them.”
“What becomes of all the ivory?” I asked.
“That will be up to the feds,” Vickee said. “That deserted area of the zoo seems to have been the perfect place to hide the tusks. No one ever had reason to go there, and Kwan’s drug dealers were able to protect it as well, from the rail yards, since the ivory had been smuggled into the country right with the drugs.”
“If anyone came across the stash—well, anyone but you two,” Mercer added, “it wouldn’t seem totally out of place to have old elephant tusks piled up on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo.”
“Where does it go now?” I asked. “Now that Kwan and his crew can’t sell it off anymore?”
“In Kenya, they gather tons of poached ivory,” Vickee said, “and then they set it on fire, in a huge display in the center of town. They destroy it, to prove there should be no market for it.”
“Even here in New York, two years ago, they did what’s called a ‘crush,’” Mercer said. “The ivory was crushed, in a public place, to send the same message as when it’s burned to ashes.”