Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

a search engine, but again without success. He would have to go back to Hargreave tomorrow and follow another van to see what was really going on. It would be another long day and night, he thought.

Twenty-One

The next morning, Lazlo poured himself a second cup of precinct coffee to make up for the lost hours of sleep. At his desk, he opened his work email and logged into the test results database. The autopsy report on the Jane Doe found by the Hudson river had come in. The medical examiner had concluded it was death by drowning—but not in the Hudson. Lazlo felt some minor relief to read that the cuts to her stomach and the slicing-off of her tongue had been done post-mortem, but her death must still have been traumatically painful. She had been tortured in a manner consistent with waterboarding before being drowned in fresh water. Bruising on her arms and legs confirmed she had been restrained, and the water in her lungs had been regular tap water. The report mentioned the nose and mouth having been sealed with a silicone-based substance, though the seal between her lips had broken. The M.E. had theorized that the silicone plugs had been used to stop river water mixing with the clean water in the lungs and to keep the severed tongue and blood in place—presumably for the purposes of staging, and to prevent any doubt during an autopsy that she had been waterboarded before being dumped in the river. The exact time of death could not be ascertained and she had spent enough time in the Hudson for all evidence to have been washed away. It could only be estimated that her death from waterboarding had occurred between ten and twelve hours before the discovery of her body. That was not long after the email virus had arrived on Jennifer Miller’s computer.

Lazlo’s thoughts were interrupted by a call from CSU. They had exhausted all testing and drawn a blank at the Hamilton murder site. Lazlo wasn’t surprised. He had spent over two hours at the derelict warehouse in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn where Hamilton’s burnt body had been found, trying to find clues. It had been an extremely professional job. El Gordito’s men were getting better and better at cleaning their kill sites. The Millers would have to accept that there was nothing that could be done about Hamilton’s murder for now––their testimony and photos wouldn’t stand a chance against the narco-gangster’s lawyer.

At 10:35 p.m. that evening, Lazlo was back at the hospital, sitting in his car about eight parking spaces from the entry to the Skyview Developments site. He had been there for two hours, during which three more motorcycle couriers had arrived and departed.

As he waited, he thought again about Mark Kendrick. His organs weren’t removed at the autopsy—they had been harvested before––that much seemed clear now. But why not simply let Kendrick just disappear like the other organ-trafficking victims? He would be yet another statistic among the thousands that go missing in New York City. Why go through the trouble of having his body discovered in a car accident, getting the cause of death falsely certified as the victim of the crash, and immediately cremating him? Lazlo could only think of one reason: El Gordito must have found out about his personal interest in the case, and knowing that he would pursue any lead connected to the drug lord or his businesses, the Mexican had attempted to close the case for him, period. The trail would have gone cold. In the long run, he would have had to accept that—had he not seen Kendrick’s body and met the Millers.

Ahead of him, a blue panel van turned the corner into the street. It waited for the gates to open and disappeared inside. After an hour, it re-appeared and, like the van from the previous night, this one was heavily loaded. It drove past, and he waited for it to turn the corner before pulling out to follow. He sped up the street and turned into the side road. Seeing the blue van about twenty yards ahead, he slowed down to keep a discreet distance behind, again allowing other cars to come in between them.

Just like the other van, this one took West 79th Street and then turned onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. This time he wasn’t called away, and he was able to follow the van through Battery Park and into the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. It looked like they were heading in the direction of Red Hook port and container terminal.

The van didn’t enter the terminal but turned right into a road a quarter-mile earlier, coming to a stop outside one of the many tall, but narrow brick-built storage buildings. The buildings dated back a few hundred years but had all been modernized with the addition of large roller shutter doors that opened directly onto the street.

Lazlo pulled up about ten yards away, killing his headlights. He grabbed his camera and made a mental note of the address of the building: it was 12A Portview Drive, Red Hook. The roller shutter door on the building began to open. Taking multiple snapshots of the brightly lit interior, he could see what looked like a shipping container with a refrigeration unit on the front and, next to it, a tilt-bed truck, used for transporting such containers by road. A guard, dressed in black, stood at the side of the doorway, trying to keep out of sight. Lazlo couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like he had a Heckler & Koch MP7 holstered over his shoulder. The van drove in quickly, and the roller door started its descent, shutting off Lazlo’s view.

The proof of whatever El Gordito was up to at the medical center lay inside that refrigerated container and Lazlo already had an idea of how he was going to get inside it.

The next day, arriving at the precinct, Lazlo found he’d had a couple of