Death Benefit (44 page)

But there was one unit left unchecked: Berti Ristani’s crew based in Weehawken, New Jersey. Ristani was a particularly nasty customer, willing to do just about anything to make a name for himself. Buda realized he hadn’t seen the guy in a year. He thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make the visit himself for political reasons in addition to providing an alibi for tonight, just in case. Buda grabbed his car keys and set out for Weehawken. He knew he didn’t need to call ahead. Ristani could always be found in the same place.

 

 

D
etective Captain Lou Soldano was frustrated. He was standing inside the taped-off area of the street that marked the McKinley crime scene. A full crime-scene unit had combed the area for clues, but none were to be found. They hadn’t even found the shell casing from the gun that was used to shoot the student. All they had was a shopping bag with a device one of the techs identified as a Geiger counter that the woman had been carrying when she was abducted.

Officers were taking statements from witnesses, hoping to get information on the perpetrators and on the van they had used. The reports he’d heard were wildly contradictory, from the men’s heights to their clothing. One witness swore that only two men had been involved, while all the others claimed three. The one thing they agreed on was that all the men had been wearing ski masks. The van was described consistently as dirty white, but they had nothing on the make or license plate.

George Wilson had given the most detailed account, and even told Lou something important and most likely related. He said that Pia had been assaulted in her dorm room the previous night and threatened with violence, which now had come to pass. When asked why she didn’t report the incident, George said she was afraid of the police because of her childhood experiences. He said that he had encouraged her to go to the police on multiple occasions. When asked why he didn’t report it himself, George said because he respected her wishes and privacy, and she had asked him not to.

Lou’s frustration was not only over the paucity of evidence at the scene. He was also frustrated that the local precinct of the NYPD hadn’t blanketed the area with personnel after Lou had specifically sent out a message to do so. He had given them the description of Pia from Jack and Laurie with the added information that she was carrying an umbrella and a canvas shopping bag. He had hoped that the police or the Columbia hospital security would have been able to pick her up. He had wanted to detain Pia not just to learn exactly what she knew but also for her protection, and now the bad guys had beat him to the punch. If the local boys had done what he had asked, the snatch-and-killing might have been avoided.

The only part of the operation that seemed to be going right was the radiation angle. Lou knew that the ME’s office had notified the relevant authorities about the possibility of alpha radiation at four sites in New York City: Columbia University Medical Center, the OCME itself, and the two funeral homes where the bodies of Dr. Rothman and Dr. Yamamoto were taken. But the ME wasn’t able to mobilize law enforcement. Soldano had had to do that, and his task force was still more on paper than in the field.

One of the other things that had frustrated Lou was how long it had taken to get a photo of the Grazdani woman. Lou himself had called Columbia hospital security to confirm that Pia was indeed a medical student. Lou had also asked for Pia’s details, as well as a recent photo, which the hospital security had trouble getting because it was locked up in the office of the dean of students, and the dean was unavailable. So it wasn’t until after the abduction that the photo was sent out to law enforcement. That was akin to locking the barn door after the horses were stolen.

“God damn it,” Lou said out loud for the umpteenth time. Nothing about the case seemed to be going well. The sole positive development was that a white van had been located that was believed to be the vehicle involved in the abduction. At that moment another team of forensic experts was going over it. Lou had no idea if it would lead to any clues, but he was hopeful. Meanwhile an APB had been put out in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Lou was hoping they’d get lucky. But he doubted that would be the case. Lou’s intuition was telling him that organized crime was involved big-time. He knew for sure that this wasn’t a kidnapping for money—meaning he feared for Pia’s life.

All of a sudden several news vans showed up and parked just beyond the crime-scene tape. As their antennae rose, their doors burst open and a bevy of cameramen and journalists alighted.

Lou groaned. He knew this was going to be a media circus, and he wondered how long it was going to take before the mayor got involved.

 

 

F
irst Will McKinley was unlucky—twice, in fact—and then he got lucky twice. Will was unlucky to have been involved in the Rothman case to begin with—to be found on the street with Pia and mistaken for George, resulting in his being dealt with as an annoying tagalong who knew too much. Will was also unlucky that Neri Krasnigi’s gun had fired at all. When Neri had cleaned and loaded his gun earlier that day, he hadn’t been as careful as he thought. A few sizable pieces of grit had been stuck to the first bullet he loaded and lodged inside the chamber. Under different circumstances, or if the pieces of grit had been just slightly bigger, perhaps the gun would have blown up in Neri’s face rather than misfiring slightly and dispatching the bullet at perhaps fifty percent of usual velocity. That was lucky.

Will was lucky again, if someone shot in the head can be said to be lucky. Will had turned his head so that he was hit in the temple, not the forehead, meaning the bullet made a complete transit through his frontal lobe, a kind of injury that had seen miraculous recoveries in the past. It might also be considered fortuitous that he’d been shot a hundred yards from a major trauma center, where expert help was immediately available. A superb team of doctors had treated Will within minutes of his being shot and continued to monitor him closely. He was now in a medically induced coma, hooked up to an array of monitors and life-giving machinery. Everyone was hoping Will’s luck would not run out.

 

 

P
rek drove carefully into Green Pond, a private summer lake community in Morris County in northern New Jersey. What could have been an hour’s drive had taken nearly two, partly because of traffic, partly because Prek kept the van well under the speed limit, even on the open stretches of road. Some of the items in the van would have taken a lot of explaining if the vehicle was involved in a traffic stop.

The Green Pond that lent its name to the town was actually a lake. This night its surface was dark as the moon had yet to rise. Prek navigated the twisting, hilly eastern shore road where the few homes, sitting at the end of long driveways, were mostly hidden by dense, leafless hardwood forest. There were just a handful of homes on the cliffs on the western side, which could be reached only by boat. The village itself lay to the north. After a mile or so the road wound closer to the lake and to the dwellings along the shore. Some of the homes belonged to year-round residents and their windows glowed with warm incandescent light and the occasional flash and flicker of the ubiquitous big-screen TVs. At the southern end of the lake were a number of summer cottages and they were dark, with their docks stacked in neat piles and their boats under tarps.

Prek pulled into the driveway of Aleksander’s waterfront cottage, which was situated on a peninsula at the very southern end of the lake facing out onto a cove a couple of hundred yards in diameter. Aleksander had been drawn to the house by its private location on a spit of land. He had been delighted to find out that for seven or eight months of the year, the houses and cottages on either side of his on the eastern cove were dark and deserted with their heating systems off and pipes drained. There were only two houses on the western side of the peninsula, and they were also empty except during the summer months. Buda loved the place because of its serenity, particularly in the winter when the lake froze up solid.

Prek parked in back of the house facing the road, found his key and opened up, turning on the lights and the oil-fired heat.

“Honey, I’m home,” Prek called out, laughing.

The closer they had got to this sanctuary, the brighter the mood in the van had become. Prek was positively gleeful that everything had gone so well. The boss was sure to be very pleased.

The three men unloaded the rolled-up carpet that contained Pia and brought it quickly inside. The front door opened directly into the living area, where there were two leather couches, one black, one brown, facing each other in the center of the room in front of a fieldstone fireplace. Prek moved a low coffee table scattered with automobile magazines to the side so that Genti and Neri could set down the carpet roll containing Pia. They then unrolled her until she lay sprawled, facedown, on the room’s massive fake oriental.

Prek called Buda. He wanted to tell his boss that they’d arrived and all was well. He also hoped to get the okay to finish up with Pia. It was a perfect night, quiet and dark, to dump a body in the large swamp that extended for almost a mile from the southern end of the lake into a protected virgin forest surrounding a government arsenal called Picatinny. It was the kind of wilderness whose remoteness would come as a surprise to most residents of New York City. It had certainly proved useful to the Buda crew on more than one occasion.

To Prek’s irritation, Buda didn’t pick up. Prek didn’t leave a message; Buda would see the missed call and know Prek was trying to reach him.

Prek’s annoyance was exacerbated when it dawned on him that despite all their planning, they’d forgotten to bring any food. There was a store up the road about five miles north, but Prek didn’t think it was a good idea for any of them to show their faces in a public spot, not when they were going to be disposing of a body. Prek went into the kitchen, such as it was, and looked in the fridge. There was one carton of milk with a past-due date. The cupboards were even more depressing. There was an open box of cold cereal, but one corner was chewed off and mouse droppings could be seen.

Discouraged, Prek reentered the living room. There was a sudden silence. Prek could tell Genti and Neri had been talking about something and had stopped abruptly.

“What is it?” Prek asked.

The two men were looking at Pia. There had been a disagreement.

“How long before she wakes up?” Neri said.

“She’s got ten milligrams of Valium in her, so she’s going to be sleeping it off awhile,” Prek said. “She’ll start to wake up, but she’ll be very groggy. We can always give her another shot if need be. Buda didn’t answer his phone.”

“She’s beautiful,” said Neri.

“Our young friend here was just telling me what he’d like to do to her,” said Genti. “I suppose we could all take turns, maybe even be interesting to watch. What do you think, Prek? We should have done it when we were in her room last night.”

“I like my girlfriends to participate,” Prek said. “And anyway, we’re not doing anything till I hear from Buda that she’s safe to get rid of. Remember, she’s got an Albanian name. We got to be sure we wouldn’t be stepping on someone’s honor, if you know what I’m saying.”

“Oh, come on, Prek,” Genti said, “what are the odds of that? There’s two hundred fifty thousand Albanians in the area, and this is one girl. I’ve never seen anyone that good-looking related to any of us. She sure doesn’t look like your sister.”

Genti and Neri laughed. Prek didn’t. He had a premonition there was going to be trouble after everything had been going so smoothly.

Neri and Genti were sitting on separate couches. Neri looked like a dog in heat, practically panting while adjusting himself. He was looking alternately at the supine Pia and at Genti, who he believed was in his corner as far as having sex with the woman was concerned. Genti Hajdini had come up through the crew’s ranks at the same time as Prek, but Buda entrusted Prek with more responsibility and bigger jobs. As a consequence, Prek made more money than Genti, and when Buda wasn’t around, Prek called the shots. He knew this was something Genti resented, but it rarely was an open problem between them. Prek knew that Genti was still miffed about not being allowed to have his way with Pia the previous night.

“The boy did good tonight,” Genti said, pointing at Neri and making a shooting sound. Genti and Neri laughed again, then stopped and Genti looked at Prek. “Maybe we should reward him. Maybe we should reward all of us.” There was a heavy silence in the air.

“Who made you the boss, anyway?” Neri said quietly.

Prek looked from Neri to Genti and back again. Neri was still wearing the black jacket he’d had on when he shot the boy in the street and Prek assumed he still had the gun in an inside pocket. Genti might be armed too, for all he knew. His own gun was in the glove compartment of the van. Did he really think Neri and Genti would gang up on him and take him out? In this crew, as Prek and Genti both knew very well, stranger things had happened. Turning his attention back to Neri, Prek held his frankly impertinent gaze.

“Buda said I’m the boss when he’s not around.”

Pia let out a groan.

“Listen, you assholes! Buda told me we wait until he’s sure there is no family connected with this woman. You go and mess with this woman and Buda finds out she’s someone’s daughter or niece and you two haven’t been able to keep it in your pants? The uncle or father, whoever he is, is not going to be happy. He’s going to be unhappy with Buda and that means Buda is going to be very unhappy with you.”

“She’s unconscious,” Neri said. “Out of it. She won’t even know, at least not for sure. It’s such a waste. Like it’s a crime.”