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

to put El Gordito in a shitstorm with his buyer when he finds he’s been sold short. Now stick to the fucking plan!”

After a beat, Brown seemed to acquiesce.

Lazlo stripped off the latex gloves and placed them in another evidence bag for burning later. He stood for a second looking at the body. At least when she had been stitched together, she still had some modicum of dignity. Now she looked ripped open, plundered, even savaged. He had neither the skills or time to sew her back up, to restore the respect she deserved.

He got his phone out and took a few photos, ensuring he had the remaining bags in the body cavity in frame. Then he zipped the cadaver back up in the bag.

The three of them exited the container. The light extinguished automatically, like the ones in household fridges. The second container clearly hadn’t been used yet. Inside, it had the same setup with shelves for more bodies, but the refrigeration and lighting hadn’t been switched on.

“Looks like they’re expecting an upturn in business,” sighed Cochrane as all three snapped their night-vision goggles back on and quickly exited the building, carefully stepping over the tripwire and re-locking the door.

Back in the van, Levine showed them the feeds from the cameras. They were all working perfectly in night-vision mode.

Fifteen minutes later, as they kept watch, the feed from a camera on the roof of the van showed two sets of headlights approaching along Kendle. A black sedan and a blue van pulled up in front of the building. A guard dressed in black stepped out of the sedan and unlocked the personnel door to the building, entering and closing the door behind him.

“He remembered about the tripwire,” said Cochrane, smiling.

They watched the feed from the cameras inside. The lights were switched on, and the cameras blinked from night-vision to normal view just in time for them to see the guard disconnecting the tripwire. He then opened the large shutter over the vehicle entrance.

“These guys aren’t the usual drug muscle—the explosives, and the way the way they’re set up shows they’ve got military experience,” said Levine.

“We wouldn’t be this close if I had any doubts,” said Cochrane. “That place is rigged to blow the whole street to hell!”

The blue van now backed in through the opened shutter. The occupant or occupants waited for the shutter to close before exiting the van. Just one person came out— another guard with a gun holstered across his chest.

“Heckler & Koch MP7s with a suppressor,” commented Brown.

“Recognize anyone?” asked Cochrane.

“No, but I’ll run it through image enhancement,” replied Lazlo.

They watched the delivery of eight more bodies, then the van exited the storage facility and drove away.

Cochrane went back into the building briefly with his ladder and collected the cameras.

On the drive back to Queens, Lazlo checked the plates of the sedan and the van on the on-board computer. One set were registered to a Toyota Prius owned by an elderly couple in Miami, the other to a VW Beetle owned by a twenty-year-old Bostonian.

Lazlo arrived back at his Brownstone around 11:00 p.m. John was eager to find out what he had discovered. He didn’t have to wait long. Lazlo went straight to his computer and connected a pen-drive. The footage showing the delivery and storage of body bags in a refrigerated container was damning, but not as damning as the photos of the girl’s body uploaded from Lazlo’s phone. John finally felt a sense of relief that it wasn’t just him who had seen what El Gordito was doing. Now, an NYPD detective was also in the know.

On his way into the precinct the next morning, Lazlo received a text from Genna. It stated that the scientist had emailed him the test results of the blood sample that had been recovered from the murdered chef, Ignacio Felix.

Once he’d reached his desk, Lazlo also received some unexpected good news: his captain had sent out a text informing everyone at the precinct that he would be in Denver for the next few days attending to his mother, who had been taken gravely ill. This would make bringing in El Gordito a lot easier once he’d also gotten rid of his bitter rival, Detective Caleb Richards, who had been assigned to take over any new evidence against El Gordito.

Genna had e-mailed a DNA profile of the blood sample he had taken from the chef’s tooth, and reported that he’d already run the profile against the police database. There had been no match, which didn’t surprise Lazlo, since DNA samples from El Gordito and his top lieutenants had never been collected. The only way forward was for Lazlo to obtain swabs of saliva from the drug lord and his men at the precinct, then have Genna match the profiles against the sample collected from the dead chef’s body.

One of the powers of the police, which Lazlo had frequently used in his career, was the right to arrest suspects based on probable cause, without the need of an arrest warrant. Probable cause wasn’t defined in any statute—it was defined through case law. The circumstances of its use had to be weighed in the context of the rights of the individual under the Fourth Amendment. Lazlo knew the definition well. An arrest under probable cause could be made if supported by a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person’s belief that certain facts were probably true. Well, who else would murder his chefs after a failed health inspection?

A voice from behind Lazlo broke his concentration. “Dan! Screwed up any more cases yet?”

The voice had a softer Texas twang than Caleb Richards and belonged to someone simpatico to Lazlo. It was his partner, Peter Markle, who sauntered over to sit at the desk opposite Lazlo’s. He had just returned to the precinct following a two-month transfer to Chicago PD, where his expertise had helped on a serial killer case.

Lazlo knew Markle had