As for the day of the killing on 47th Street, he’d returned from running an errand for Mr. Patel when he walked in on the horrible scene. He’d called 911 and told them what he’d seen.
She added that Vimal knew nothing of the rough that was stolen, nor had there been any discussions with his mentor, Patel, about recent security issues. The man never mentioned to his protégé concerns about anyone casing the place or unusual calls. There’d been no drop-in customers who might be inquiring about diamonds but who seemed more interested in cameras or guards. Patel had never, as far as Vimal knew, had any rivalries in the business that might give rise to such violence. While Vimal didn’t know for certain, it was ludicrous that Patel had had any connection to organized crime or had borrowed money from a loan shark.
In answer to Sachs’s question, Vimal confirmed what they’d deduced: He was an amateur sculptor, hoping to make it big in the art world. This explained the other trace found at the scene: the jade and lapis.
A search of Adeela’s house for evidence shed by Unsub 47 during his home invasion revealed nothing. Nor had there been any sightings of the red Toyota.
Other inquiries, to use Edward Ackroyd’s charming Scotland Yard word, were not proving successful either. A check of hotel registrations revealed no guests under the name of Dobyns, nor any of the other aliases the AIS had discovered that Unsub 47 had used.
Homeland Security and the bureau had continued to check out terrorist threats—of which there were plenty but none involving C4 or lehabah devices smuggled into the country, fake earthquakes in downtown Brooklyn or fires nearby.
A systematic search for future targets—wood-based apartments and buildings within a half mile of the drilling site—revealed no lehabahs on the gas lines.
Edward Ackroyd had found no one trying to move the rough on the underground market.
Rhyme wheeled to the window and gazed out upon the gray, still day. Even the evergreens seemed muted, their color bleached away. Across the street, a man walked by, minding the icy patches. His dog—a small fluffy thing—pranced over them without a care in the world.
Rhyme closed his eyes in frustration.
Then, as sometimes—not often but sometimes—happens, a break in a case came unexpectedly.
It arrived in the form of Ron Pulaski, who stepped into the parlor, nodded greetings to Rhyme and Sachs and said, “May have something here, Lincoln. On Forty-Seven.”
To differentiate this intelligence from their other—clandestine—assignment, working for the defense attorney representing El Halcón.
“Well, I don’t have a fucking lead at all. So, what?”
“I was wondering who’d have a motive to stop the drilling. We talked about environmentalists. But that seemed too obvious. So I started looking into energy industry competitors.”
Rhyme said, more reasonably, “Good. Initiative. What’d you find?”
“Unfair trade practice complaint with the FTC against Algonquin Power.”
Well, this was interesting.
“Apparently the company hired an oppo lobbying firm—”
“A what?”
“Oppo firm. They dig up—or make up—information that trashes business competitors or political candidates you’re running against.”
“Oppo. Makes sense. Though for some reason, I dislike the term. Go on.”
“The firm was hired to discredit alternative energy sources—any technology that would siphon off income from traditional oil and gas electrical production. For instance, they planted rumors that wind farms kill seagulls. And that solar panels make roofs heavier and more prone to collapsing in fires—and injuring firemen. Employees actually left seagull corpses near wind farms—killed elsewhere—and published pictures of fires in buildings equipped with solar panels, even though the panels had nothing to do with the roofs’ collapsing.” He smiled. “And they looked into research as to whether—”
“Geothermal drilling created earthquakes.”
“Exactly.”
“Algonquin,” Sachs mused. “Who’d we see from the company on TV?”
It was Thom who recalled. “C. Hanson Collier. President or CEO.” The aide frowned. “But didn’t he say he supported geothermal?”
Sachs said, “He’d have to do that, wouldn’t he? Play innocent. And now that I think about it, didn’t he say something like it wasn’t likely there’d be earthquakes? It was generally safe. Damning with faint praise.”
Rhyme then tossed a glance toward her.
She nodded and said to Pulaski, “Let’s go for a drive.”
* * *
Amelia Sachs had been here before.
Not long ago some individuals at Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light in Astoria, Queens, had been suspects in a series of crimes involving the New York City power grid.
Sachs and Rhyme had drawn the case.
The company, which supplied electric power and steam throughout much of the New York area, had its main facility and headquarters on the East River—across from Midtown Manhattan. The operation covered a number of blocks, with the main building—its façade was huge red and gray panels—rising two hundred feet above the streets. This, where the turbines were located, was the working heart of the complex, and massive pipes and electric wires—thick, inflexible cables—ran everywhere.
High above the street level, where Sachs, driving, and Pulaski were now pulling up to the plant, were four towering smokestacks, also red and gray, topped with blinking red lights as a warning to low-flying aircraft. In the summer the stacks seemed to exhale no vapor at all but today, with the March chill that just wouldn’t quit, wisps of steam trickled upward to dissolve in the dull white sky.
She braked the Torino Cobra to a stop and flashed her badge to the security guard at the main gate and told him she had an appointment with the CEO. The massive man, skin as pale as the overcast, glanced at her and Pulaski, who was in uniform. He made a call and, nodding to no one, told her where to park.
A second guard met them in a lobby and took them to the same place Sachs had been a few years before, on that prior case: the executive offices. The floor was right out of the 1950s, “modern” furniture upholstered in brown and white and tan, the designs geometric.
The art was black-and-white photos of the power plant over the years.
The employees here—mostly men—were dressed as if they too had been locked in time for seventy years. White shirts, dark ties, dark suits with jackets often buttoned. Hair was trim. Sachs imagined she could smell the Brylcreem her father wore, though surely this was a psychological, not an olfactory, sensation.
The guard deposited them in a waiting room outside the office of the CEO, C. Hanson Collier. He had not been head of the company when she and Rhyme had worked the prior case but she wondered if she’d passed him in the halls back then.
She glanced down at the kidney-shaped coffee table, on which sat copies of trade magazines. Electricity Transmission Monthly. Power Age. The Grid.
A limp Time, dated circa six months ago.
“How’re we going to handle it?” Pulaski asked.
“Rattle his cage,” Sachs said. “Let him know you found the memo. Watch his reaction.”
Sometimes you closed a case through DNA and trace evidence. Sometimes through a blink and a bead of sweat. A friend and colleague of Sachs and Rhyme was a state police investigator in California. Kathryn Dance. Her expertise was body language. Though not as savvy in the art of kinesics as Dance, Sachs, as a former street cop, had some talent at this esoteric skill.
They didn’t have many options, in any case. No forensics linked the CEO to the earthquakes or to Unsub 47. In fact, she knew that, if he was the mastermind, he would not personally be involved—other than making payment arrangements to the perp. And even that wasn’t certain. The oppo firm might have hired him themselves and sent Collier the bill for “media analysis and story placement.”
A precise young woman, in a brown suit, stepped into the doorway and asked S
achs and Pulaski to follow her. They navigated another long corridor, arriving finally at the CEO’s office. The assistant gestured them inside.
Collier looked like a former coal miner—a career guess that would not have been unreasonable, given that he now headed up a power company. But Sachs had done some homework and learned that prior to this gig he’d been CEO of a major clothing manufacturer. She supposed the principles of business apply equally whether you’re selling bras or voltage.
“Come on in, Detective. Officer.”
Hands were shaken and Collier gestured for them to sit. Same chairs, couches and coffee table as a few years ago.
“Now, what can I do for you?”
Sachs took the lead. “Mr. Collier, are you familiar with the stories about the earthquakes in Brooklyn?”
“Of course. Very odd.” He unbuttoned his dark-gray suit. The American flag pin in the buttonhole of his lapel was upside down. “Speculation that somebody’s using explosives to mimic quakes. Nobody’s sure why. Maybe to get the geothermal plant shut down. That’s what the journalists are saying. Industrial sabotage.” More wrinkles folded into his creased, pale face; it was naturally patterned, not from the sun. It was as if he still worked—and even lived—deep underground. “And why are you here exactly, Detective? Is it why I think?”
“The memo. The FTC complaint against Algonquin.”
Collier was nodding. “You know, those dead birds? Nobody killed them. Our firm hired somebody to drive around and find dead seagulls. Can you imagine some intern, first day on the job? ‘Need dead birds, kid.’ Though the fact is the windmill blades do kill them. The firm just added a few extras—for effect. And the fires with solar panels? That’s a known fact. The pictures weren’t exactly of ceilings that collapsed because of the panels. But what’s a little license among capitalists? You’re thinking we’re setting the explosions to make it look like the drilling was causing earthquakes.”
“Are you? Your oppo firm researched it. That was in the memo.”
“It was in the memo. But if you heard me on TV, which I guess you did, you’ll recall I was defending Northeast and geothermal drilling.”
“That’s not answering my question. Are you sabotaging the site?”
“No. Is that enough of an answer for you?”
“What about the oppo firm?”
“Fired them a year ago. The bad publicity wasn’t worth it. A couple of dead seagulls. Died of natural causes. You should have seen the hate mail we got.”
“Which,” Pulaski said, “might have taught you to be more careful.”
“No, Officer, it taught us to be smarter—in how we deal with alternative energy. We don’t try to run them out of business.”
He dug up a company brochure from his desk drawer and dropped it in front of them. Opening to the first page he tapped a passage. Algonquin’s wholly owned subsidiaries included three wind farms in Maine and a solar panel manufacturing operation.
“We buy them.” He opened another drawer, extracted a thick legal document and dropped it with a loud smack in front of her. “We’ll keep this one secret, you don’t mind. It’s not public yet.”
Sachs looked at the front page of the document.
Purchase Agreement
WHEREAS, Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light, Inc. (“Algonquin”), desires to purchase twenty percent (20%) of the outstanding common stock (the “Shares”) of Northeast Geo Industries, Inc. (“Northeast”), and Northeast desires to sell the Shares to Algonquin,
NOW THEREFORE, in consideration of the mutual obligations herein recited, the parties hereto do agree as follows:
She didn’t bother to flip through it. “You’re buying stock in the company?”
“Eventually, if it’s profitable, we’ll buy the rest. It has to prove itself. Deep-drilling geothermal—tapping into volcanic reserves—for electrical generation is profitable. Near-surface drilling on a large scale? The jury’s still out on that. Do you have a furnace at home or a heat pump?”
“Furnace.”
“Exactly. Heat pumps’re for wimps. Geothermal’s a heat pump. But there’re a lot of ecological wimps out there. So I’m hoping our investment will pay off. We’ll see.”
Sachs’s phone hummed with a text. She looked down at it.
She stood up. Pulaski glanced her way and rose too.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Collier.”
“Ms. Evans will show you out.” He said nothing more, didn’t rise. He opened a folder and began reading.
The assistant appeared and escorted them down the hall.
As they walked into the parking lot, out of earshot of the employees, the young officer whispered, “We just going to let it go, like that? He showed us a contract. He might’ve had it printed out in case somebody called him on the earthquake plot. How do we know he’s not behind it?”
“Because of this.”
Sachs showed him her phone, the text she’d just gotten from Lon Sellitto.
“Oh. Well. We’re going to New Jersey?”
“We’re going to New Jersey.”
Chapter 48
This is a place where earth meets water in stark and stunning beauty.
This is a place where the rocks take on the texture and sheen and contradiction of art.
This is a place where brush, bush and trees rise along sheer cliffs with the effortless ease of smoke.
This is a place where someone whose life was devoted to the earth might, fittingly, die.
The body of Ezekiel Shapiro, in a fire department rescue basket, was now being winched to the top of the hundred-foot cliff of Palisades Park.
In the chill early evening, their breath easing in visible wisps from their mouths, Sachs, Pulaski and a number of New Jersey state troopers stood watching the fire department and rescue team. They were beside Shapiro’s car, which was surrounded by protective yellow tape.
Suicide is, after all, a crime.
It had not been the police but insurance man Edward Ackroyd who’d made the discovery that Shapiro had hired Unsub 47.
When Ackroyd told Sellitto what he’d found, the lieutenant had sent patrol cars to Shapiro’s office and home but apparently the environmentalist had seen them and realized that the authorities had learned about the plot.
He’d posted a suicide note online, driven here and killed himself.
Shapiro had hired Unsub 47 for two missions. The first was to close down the geothermal drilling as environmentally unsound. The second was to single out Jatin Patel for attack and robbery. The diamond cutter was apparently known for working on stones from mines that displaced indigenous people and polluted villages and rivers. The stolen rough, Ackroyd had learned, would be sold by 47 and the proceeds given to Shapiro, who would distribute it to environmental organizations to help the unfortunates.
I don’t think tree huggers use C4 very much…or burn down buildings with people inside…
Mel Cooper had been wrong.
Shapiro’s suicide note made clear, though, that he’d miscalculated. He’d wanted to scare the city, sure. The deaths by fire were not his idea, but had been the brainchild of the madman he’d hired—somebody who shared his fury at the destruction of the earth, but who had decided, on his own, to plant a series of incendiary devices to kill and injure.
Perhaps the deaths, though unintended, had been what pushed him to take his own life.
“Hey, Amelia.”
She turned to see a tall, blond officer, about her age. He was in uniform—dark slacks with an orange stripe down the outseam and a powder-blue shirt and tie. Latex gloves and booties too. Ed Bolton was a sergeant with the Crime Scene Investigation Unit of the New Jersey State Police’s Major Crime Bureau. He now pulled off the cornflower-blue accessories and stuffed them into his pants pocket.
Knowing that Bolton had run the scene was a relief. He’d have done as thorough a job as she would have.
She introduced him to Pulaski, who asked, “How’d you get onto it?”
&nbs
p; “Trooper saw the car here and ran the plate. There was an area-wide out after you guys found he was behind those earthquakes and murders on Saturday and Sunday.”
“Positive ID? It’s Shapiro?”
“Uh-huh. One of our tac people rappelled down. Did a field FR. It’s him. Prints were on file after an arrest at a protest rally a few years ago. Pretty crazy, faking earthquakes.”
She asked, “So how does the scene look?”
“Nothing says anything other than suicide. No wits. And he drove here from the city, so no tollbooths.”
All the bridges and tunnels were toll-free entering New Jersey. There was no toll-taker video of someone else driving Shapiro’s car, with the activist in the trunk, for instance. That was improbable, of course. No one would have a motive to kill him—except, she supposed, Unsub 47, if he’d decided to keep the diamonds for himself. But even then, why kill Shapiro, why not just take the diamonds and go back to Russia?
And if he’d truly wanted to murder Shapiro, he wouldn’t’ve staged it. He would simply have shot the man, at a time and place of his convenience. The Russian was clever but apparently cared little for nuance.
Sachs asked, “The evidence’s gone to Hamilton?”
The state police’s crime scene headquarters.
“That’s right. We’ll get you copies as soon as we can, autopsy too.”
Sachs and Pulaski watched the basket in which the body was strapped breach the top of the cliff. Two muscular firefighters, one a man, one a woman, pulled it closer, unhooked the cable and carried the body to a waiting ambulance.
The view of Manhattan from here was spectacular in clear weather. Now the haze made the place look dystopian. Not many lights shone through the gray fog, though you could see the outlines of buildings large and buildings small. It seemed like a ghost town.
“Let’s run his house,” Sachs said, “see what we can find.”
Chapter 49
The Cutting Edge Page 29
