SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
IT WAS A LITTLE PAST 10 P.M., BUT THE WRECKAGE OF THE COMMERCIAL Center was illuminated like Dodger Stadium. There were klieg lights set up in the middle of the vast parking lot and along four city blocks of East Sahara, cops and agents walking the grid, looking for evidence and body parts. Special Agent Kristy Levine had been on her shift for over an hour, inside what was left of The Ponderosa, when Jacob Dmitrov was allowed past the yellow tape. She’d never seen him outside of Odessa, much less in paper booties and gloves and a zip-up disposable hazmat suit.
“This is necessary?” he asked.
“Depends,” Kristy said. She was also in full gear. “You want your skin to fall off?”
Jacob shook his head. “I have relatives in Chernobyl; they’re fine.”
“For now,” Kristy said. “Your father couldn’t make it?”
“He’s not a big fan of meeting with the FBI.” Jacob peered around the burned-out bar. “No way we can rebuild this, yeah?”
“Once they find the last eyeball and tooth,” Kristy said, “my guess is they level this entire wing. The bomb scattered so much hazardous material, plus the human remains. There’s no chance for these buildings. Be a nice insurance payout.”
“That’s one time,” Jacob said. “You don’t just build another bar and hope all the cops and hookers start coming. That’s a generational thing. Habit, you know? You ever come here?”
“No,” Kristy said. “I’m a Pour Decisions gal.”
“Nice place,” Jacob said. “Wouldn’t sell to us.” He shrugged. “So, what? I already told the cops what I know, which is nothing. We’re not in the habit of burning down our most profitable businesses, you know?”
“I don’t care about who burned this down,” Kristy said. “I want to know what was going on in the warehouse attached to the dental office.”
“Talk to the dentist.”
Kristy said, “We already detained him at McCarran coming home from vacation. He said to talk to you.” She flipped through her notebook. “Direct quote, was ‘Talk to those KGB fucks.’”
“Well, that’s not me.”
“But it is your father.”
Jacob was silent for a moment. “I need a lawyer?” he said eventually.
Kristy took her hood off. Unstrapped the N95 from her nose and mouth. Looked directly at Jacob. “You see me?”
“Yeah.”
“Honestly, I don’t give a shit about what you do, Jacob. I don’t give a shit what your father does unless it hurts regular people. You do your gangster shit to each other, fine. But a couple blocks away, little kid, ten years old, finds three eyeballs in his front yard. Goes running into his backyard to tell his mother, and there’s a human head floating in the pool. So now, Jacob, it’s my problem. You didn’t burn this place down? Great. You’re paid. But who pays that kid?”
Kristy’s cell phone rang. It was Poremba. “Give me ten minutes. You think on that question, and then we’ll see if you need a lawyer.”
KRISTY FOUND THE ONLY PLACE TO TAKE POREMBA’S CALL THAT SHE WAS sure wasn’t under surveillance or being filmed by one of the twenty news crews staked out around the Commercial Center: her car.
“I don’t have much time,” she said. “I’m about to break Jacob Dmitrov.”
Poremba said, “Matthew Drew is dead.”
“What?”
“He tried to ambush his former station chief, Kirk Biglione, and ended up getting shot in the head with his own gun.” Poremba so matter of fact, he could have been talking about getting his toilet fixed.
“Where?”
“The Salton Sea, this morning. It was all over the news. Where were you?”
“A Torah study group at Temple Beth Israel,” she said. “Jesus. What was Drew doing?”
“I don’t know,” Poremba said. “It doesn’t add up. Tell me what you saw at the Temple.”
She spent the entire day at Temple Beth Israel. Peered into every open door. Spoke to as many people as possible. Walked the entire campus of the Barer Academy. Circled the Performing Arts Center. Dipped her toes into the pool at the Aquatic Center. Even saw the Blue Room inside the funeral home, where grieving families could wait for their funeral to begin, met a nice man named Miguel who gave her a croissant and a map of the dead. Thousands of names. Maybe ten thousand. Including her own.
She watched a van from LifeCore pull up around 6:30 p.m., depart fifteen minutes later.
Business as usual.
Everyone very happy that Rabbi David Cohen was back.
“We need to get into the funeral home,” Poremba said. “Hold on. I’m going through TSA.”
TSA? “Are you coming here?” she asked after a moment.
“I land in four hours,” he said. “Go pick up Jerry Ford.”
“For what?”
“Arson,” he said. “Jaywalking. Figure it out. We need to get him off the streets before something bad happens. Get Dmitrov to say his name. That’s all you need.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Next week, I’m going to be appointed the head of the joint Organized Crime & Terrorism Task Force out of Las Vegas,” Poremba said. “His name is connected to that shit in New Jersey. I want him off the street and in an interrogation room by the time I get to Las Vegas.”
“Wait,” Kristy said, “why are you flying here now?”
“Two disgraced former FBI agents got in a gunfight,” Poremba said, “and the one thing they have in common is Sal Cupertine. They’ll backtrack Matthew to Las Vegas by morning if they haven’t already. We need to make sure we’re clean on this.”
“We. You said we.”
“I’m sorry,” Poremba said. “You were right.”
Shit.
“None of this is making sense. Tell me what happened.”
He told her what he knew, which was little more than the news reported. Matthew Drew ambushed Kirk Biglione at the Salton Sea, where Biglione was running corporate security for Gold Mountain Mining. Biglione disarmed him. Took him out.
“You knew Biglione?” Kristy said.
“Yeah.”
“He capable of that? Of disarming Matthew?”
“I don’t know. He was a top agent for a long time. It’s possible. But he’s in his fifties now.”
“You’re fifty,” Kristy said. “Could you take Matthew?”
“He’d break my fucking neck.”
“Why would Matthew Drew attack Kirk Biglione?”
“Revenge?” Poremba said. “He was ready to testify against him in his corruption trial. Biglione pled out and walked. Drew held him responsible for Hopper’s death and, by association, his sister’s.”
“Drew was qualified for assault-team work. He could have plugged Biglione from a thousand yards away. Could have blown up his car. Lee, this doesn’t add up. What did he need Kirk Biglione for? If he was out here searching for Sal Cupertine, doing the job you gave him, what could Biglione possibly have for him?”
Poremba stayed silent, thinking. In the background, Kristy heard a baby crying, an announcement for a flight to Tampa, and bits of mundane conversation as Poremba walked through the airport. Everyone going somewhere. No one aware of the world crumbling around them, all the time, every day. All of life was practical avoidance, making sure you didn’t think about all the terrible things working in the background.
“Why did you believe Matthew was framed for those murders?” Kristy asked.
“Because he had a code,” Poremba said. “He wasn’t a serial killer. He wanted Ronald Cupertine dead, and he was upset that he’d failed, but he had no reason to go after his wife and children. He was a good agent, Kristy. A good man. This case turned him inside out. He wanted Sal Cupertine to make it right for the family of those dead agents, so they’d have some sense of closure. And he wanted to avenge Hopper’s death. He wasn’t going to kill a family, bury them, dig them back up, and dump them two thousand miles away.”
“Okay,” Kristy said. “The only forensic evidence we have is that those people were killed using Drew’s gun, right? What else?”
“He stalked that whole family. We have an entire file of evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stalked Biglione, too.”
“But why would he want to kill him? If he had evidence against him, wouldn’t he be better served getting him arrested?”
“That already happened. He walked,” Poremba said. “Biglione was crooked. He protected Ronnie Cupertine for years. Protected the whole Family to keep the ecosystem in balance. Kept the cartels from moving in, kept the Russians from having too much influence, took out guys who needed it. Even controlled the prisons to an extent. This wasn’t revolutionary thinking. New York and Boston operated this way for years.”
“What changed?” Kristy said.
Poremba said, “Whitey Bulger and John Gotti. Bloods and Crips. Terrorists. Twenty-four-hour news. Take your pick.”
“Wait. Go back to something. You said Ronnie Cupertine’s family had been buried and dug back up?”
“Yeah,” Poremba said. “They were covered in dirt.”
“Dirt from where?”
“Forensics narrowed it down to half of southern Illinois.”
“But they were found in Portland, Oregon?”
“Affirmative.”
“Who could possibly move a bunch of body parts across state lines with no one noticing? Or caring? Who wouldn’t be afraid to do it?”
“That’s why I want you to arrest Jerry Ford.”
“Right, right,” Kristy said, but then a Jenga tower started to come together in her mind, she could see it, block by block, stacking up . . . but it was teetering in the center. What was missing? “Or anyone who works for a funeral home and might want to send someone a message. Agent Hopper thought something was sideways. We know that he conducted interviews there, right?”
Poremba said, “That’s public record. I have no idea what he found. He never got in the place, but that’s why I encouraged Matthew to go back. We know there’s something wrong there. Money laundering, at the very least.”
“Hold on,” Kristy said. She dug into her purse, looking for the papers Miguel had given her this afternoon, the list of names buried at the Kales’s Home of Peace. “I went to the cemetery today, and they gave me a map to all the people buried there. Lee, there’s ten thousand names. Do you know how much money that is?”
“Millions.”
“It could be $100 million. My plot was $10,000. That doesn’t include a funeral. What if the reason the numbers don’t line up with LifeCore is because they’re not laundering money, they’re laundering bodies?”
Kristy thought about Ronnie Cupertine’s family, how maybe they’d been sent to the Kales’s Home of Peace, not to be harvested, but to be buried. They ended up in Portland because someone wanted them to be found. Wanted the world to know they weren’t missing. Wanted The Family to know their boss’s wife and children were chopped up like firewood. Wanted the FBI to investigate how the bodies got there in the first place.
Who would want that?
Not Jerry Ford. He wouldn’t want the FBI in his business.
Not Bennie Savone. Same reason.
“No,” Poremba said. “No. You’ve got it backward. LifeCore isn’t laundering bodies. The funeral home is.”
“If that were the case,” Kristy said, “they’d need to have the complicity of the Temple leadership. I don’t see that happening.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, Rabbi Kales is two hundred years old, and Rabbi Cohen is the most decent man I’ve ever met. How would they be getting the volume? You think Rabbi Kales and Rabbi Cohen are out on the streets collecting bodies?”
“No,” Poremba said. “Divorce yourself from your beliefs. Look at what we know about Temple Beth Israel. We know that it was the last place Jeff Hopper was seen. We know that Bennie Savone paid for its construction and that Rabbi Kales let him marry into his family, which isn’t exactly how most devout Jews work. We know that the rabbi previous to Rabbi Cohen was found floating in Lake Mead. What do you know about Rabbi Cohen?”
What did she know? He was about forty. His family was military.
“He’s just back from the hospital,” she said.
“For what?”
“He fell,” she said. “And had to have plastic surgery to fix his face.”
“Are you hearing yourself?”
She was. Even before the fall, he’d looked . . . different. Like his face had been made of puzzle pieces jammed into the wrong spots.
“I guess I don’t know much of anything.”
“Run him,” Poremba said. “Find out who did his plastic surgery. Get every driver’s license he’s ever had. Are you hearing me? I want to know where Rabbi Cohen went to elementary school. I want to know how his grandparents met.”
“Are you saying,” she said, “that Sal Cupertine has been here all along?”
“And Matthew figured it out,” Poremba said. “What other reason would he stay in Las Vegas? What other reason would he have to go after Biglione? He must have thought Biglione had something Sal needed.”
“I don’t see it,” Kristy said. She didn’t want to see it. Couldn’t imagine it.
“Sal Cupertine learned at the foot of Ronnie Cupertine,” Poremba said. “He was his father figure for the last thirty years of his life. So what did he learn? That if you snitched on yourself, you could control things. Those bodies of Ronnie’s family come through for burial. He sees them. He realizes Chicago has turned upside down, that if they’re killing Family members, someone is coming for him. So he has them dumped where they’d be found as a message. Come fucking get me. Not to the FBI, but to the killer. Killer knows where the bodies are supposed to be. FBI has no idea.” Poremba actually laughed. “It’s brilliant, really. Ronnie Cupertine’s wife and children were four bodies—how much were each worth? How much was it worth to the Native Mob or whoever in The Family iced them to have their hands clean, forever? Not have some bones pulled out of a housing development in Peoria in thirty years, scientists find a dot of foreign DNA on a scrap of clothes, you get yanked out of the assisted living facility to do the rest of your life in federal lockup, three hots and a cot and a catheter until the day you die. Priceless. That shit was priceless. And what better way to get rid of bodies than to bury them in a cemetery, two thousand miles away, where no one would ever look for them?”
“But the volume.”
“You saw the warehouse,” Poremba said. “Russian mob can hardly piss straight. A guy like Bennie Savone, a good real businessman, he’s probably franchising bodies. Don’t think about what’s been done before. Think about the next level. Twenty-first century. You’re a gangster. How do you make money with a cemetery?”
“You bury bodies,” Kristy said, “for whoever really needs to get rid of a body.”
What did it take to disinter a body?
Next of kin. A court order. Probable cause. That could take months. Years. And whose body, exactly, would you be disinterring? How would you ever know? They’d need to go one by one, through every name. And who is to say that there weren’t other bodies, not named?
Jews didn’t preserve their bodies. Simple pine boxes and a suit of clothes was all that stood between the dead and eternity.
And right then, Special Agent Kristy Levine saw through Jeff Hopper’s eyes. Saw him driving up to Temple Beth Israel, meeting with Rabbi David Cohen, asking him questions about Sal Cupertine, maybe looking out at the expanse of construction going on—the day school for preschoolers, the high school, the Performing Arts Center, the Aquatic Center, the expansion of the Jewish cemetery across the street—and knowing. Because Jeff Hopper understood Sal Cupertine wasn’t dead. Sal Cupertine hadn’t disappeared. Sal Cupertine was sent somewhere, to do a job, that only he could do, with his flawless Rain Main memory, with his penchant for killing without getting caught, and with Ronnie’s desire to have him out of the picture entirely.
Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t a cover.
Rabbi David Cohen was a job.
No one ever reported dead gangsters. It was outside the code. You left a body somewhere, it was because you wanted them found. Were Bennie Savone, his father-in-law, and Sal Cupertine operating a members-only cemetery for the underworld? Was that even possible?
“I’ll get Ford,” she said. “You figure out how to get the warrants to save my pension.” She paused. “And Lee? I know you cared about Matthew. I’m sorry.”
“He was a good agent,” Poremba said, “and we destroyed him.”
JACOB DMITROV FOUND THE ONLY NON-BROKEN BOTTLE OF SCOTCH IN THE Ponderosa and poured himself two fingers. “You want some?” he asked Kristy when she returned.
“I’m working,” she said. “Did you wash that glass?”
“Alcohol will kill the germs.” Kristy didn’t think that was true, strictly speaking, but Jacob clearly looked like he was going through some shit. “That story, about the boy, is that true?”
It wasn’t. “Probably see it on 20/20 next week,” she said.
“Me? I don’t get down with that shit, you know that.” Not anymore, anyway, Kristy did know that much. Jacob’s girlfriend disappeared under mysterious circumstances a year before. Since then, he’d been off of Kristy’s radar entirely, save for when she went to Odessa for a meal. “My father, that’s his business. I’m trying to live a better life now.”
“I’m not asking you to flip on your father,” Kristy said.
“I give you a name, you work it around a bit, you’ll get what you need, but you and me, we’re done. No more free lunches. Someone will blow up Odessa and then that will be war. Anonymous tip.”
“Fine,” Kristy said.
He took her notepad and pen, flipped to a blank page, wrote something, closed it, downed his scotch, stood up. “This place was a dump,” he said. “I’ll miss it.”
Once he was gone, Kristy found Jacob’s chicken scratch: Jerry Ford.
LIFECORE WAS LOCATED ON THE CORNER OF BONANZA AND LAS VEGAS Boulevard in the husk of an abandoned Safeway, only half a mile from Las Vegas Metro headquarters. Kristy could see the ghost of the grocery store’s logo embedded in the terra-cotta beneath the organ bank’s blinking blue neon sign, even medical facilities needing that hint of bling these days. The parking lot was stone empty, except for a tilting palm tree planted in a concrete island, a box marked “FREE Clean Needles!” on the ground beside a towering streetlight, and Jerry Ford’s Mercedes, parked diagonally across three spaces in front of the clinic. It was nearly midnight. Kristy had called Ford’s home number, but when there was no answer, she took a gamble and came to his office.
Kristy hadn’t spent much time in this part of town, which was surprising since it was only three miles from the FBI field office, but she didn’t have much of a reason to hang out in the city’s old graveyard district, miles of dead Las Vegans interred on what used to be the edge of town but was now smack in the middle. Once, though, she stopped to check out the grave of Sonny Liston, her father’s favorite boxer. Kristy thought it would be some ornate affair, but it was just a flat gravestone carrying Liston’s given name—Charles “Sonny” Liston—his dates—1932 to 1970—and a simple statement: A Man. There were fresh flowers and an American flag resting on the grave.
The Jews held prime property in the old joints, Moe Dalitz made sure of that, but now, instead of rolling sand dunes, they stared at the Neon Graveyard and a skate park covered in North Town Gangster Crips and East Side 13 Killers tags, the two gangs fighting for streets they’d never own, streets that in a few years would probably be condos and townhouses and Quiznos franchises. Could be Las Vegas would do like San Francisco and move all the graves out of official city limits, or at least the headstones, pave this shit over and build a stadium.
Shitty as it was, this area was only five miles from the fountains of the Bellagio, ten miles to Temple Beth Israel, thirteen miles and you were swimming in the deep end of the pool at Kristy’s condo, but right here? You could be in any city in any state. Chicago. Rochester. Detroit. Didn’t matter. They all ended up taking on the same veneer. Kristy used to not care about such things, but now it seemed like another symptom of the world’s bigger problems. She spent years in military intelligence battling drug cartels around the world, ended up in the FBI taking on organized crime in all its guises, and now . . . they were giving away clean needles in a parking lot in Las Vegas. There was no drug war. Not really. It was just people trying to earn a living, earn a dying, or earn an imprisonment. It was useless. It would always be useless.
Kristy got out of her car, walked over to Jerry’s Benz, half expecting to see Jerry slumped over with a bullet through the back of his head, but all she found was a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the holder, and Jerry’s cell phone charger sitting on the dash.
Kristy put a hand on the hood.
Cold.
“You with the Jews?”
Kristy looked up. Next door to the old Safeway was a five-story apartment building called the Silver Suites, which wasn’t silver, and Kristy doubted the suites part, too. A young man stood out front wearing a puffy white-and-red UNLV jacket, even though it wasn’t cold. He walked across the parking lot, stood on the other side of the Mercedes.
“You could say that,” Kristy said.
“Mr. Ford said you might be by. This is for you,” UNLV said. He had a slight accent, like maybe he’d come over from Russia as a kid and still hadn’t lost the lilt of the language. He slid a manilla envelope across the hood, Kristy catching it before it hit the ground. Kristy opened it up. It was filled with cash. Maybe fifty grand. “Said it was a bonus for February.”
“When was this?”
“Couple days ago. Friday.”
Shit. It was Sunday morning now.
Kristy stared at this kid. He was maybe twenty-two. So not a kid. A young man. When Kristy was twenty-two, how many bodies did she have on her sheet? A dozen? Twenty? Four years of service at that point. All of it legal, of course, but it didn’t stop her from thinking she’d done some horrible things for the government, if not by her own hand then by saying, “Kill this man.” “Kill this woman.” “The subject can be found here. He should be neutralized.” She’d do that and then get dinner afterward, and it was just a day at the office.
She imagined killing this kid. Of having the easy compunction to take a life, even now.
It was impossible. And yet, Matthew Drew was dead. A man she talked to days ago. Sal Cupertine was out there, somewhere, still putting bodies in the ground. There were ten thousand bodies in a cemetery that should only have a few hundred, maybe a thousand. Where was the value of a human life?
Now this kid. Who thought she was a bagwoman for flesh.
“Anyone else show up?” Kristy asked.
“Nope.”
“You’ve been sitting here watching, 24-7?”
“I got spotters,” he said. “Someone showed up, they’d get me.”
Kristy looked past the kid. A window on the third floor was open. A little girl, maybe eight, watched, a camera in her hands.
“That your kid?”
“Niece.”
“She takes a photo of me,” Kristy said, “I’m going to have everyone in that building under arrest before breakfast.”
The kid put two fingers in his mouth, eyes still on Kristy, and whistled. The window closed. The blinds went down.
“You a cop?” he asked.
“You a UNLV student?” When the kid didn’t answer, Kristy said, “How do you know Jerry?”
“I do favors for him.”
“How long?”
“Couple years.”
“What kind of favors?”
“Come on,” the kid said. “You know.”
“Where you from?” Kristy asked. “Your accent.”
“Ukraine. But it was still USSR then.”
“Ah,” Kristy said. “Do you also work for Mr. Dmitrov?”
The kid looked surprised but said, “He got us here. So I do favors for him, too. You know him?”
“I know him,” she said. So Jacob was right. “Have you seen Mrs. Ford? Is she somewhere safe?” Kristy asked.
“Mr. Ford said she left him.”
“Yeah,” Kristy said, “but I’m asking if she’s safe.”
“Yo,” the kid said, “I don’t do favors like that.”
“What’s your name?” The kid hesitated, so she said, “What do your homies call you?”
“Pool Boy,” he said.
“You stay in the Silver Suites?”
“I manage it.” When Kristy seemed dubious, he said, “Mr. Ford owns it. I get to stay for free if I fix shit.”
“Okay,” Kristy said. “Mr. Ford. He inside?”
“Guess so.”
“You sure he didn’t leave?”
“Pretty sure.”
“You hear something?” Kristy asked.
“Naw,” Pool Boy said. “But you get close enough, there’s a smell.”
Kristy looked back at the former Safeway. It was huge and filled with old body parts. It wasn’t necessarily true that it was Ford’s body making the smell.
“Did he leave you keys?”
Pool Boy reached into his pocket, took out a key ring, jingled them. There was one for the Benz, one for the house, one for LifeCore. “Told me if you didn’t show up, I could take the car.”
“You been inside?”
“Naw, ma’am.”
“Be real honest with me,” Kristy said, “because if you left DNA in there, you’re going to have a problem.”
“Might have looked around, seen if there was anything worth moving, you know. Found some weird shit.”
“Touch anything?”
“Naw, I got out quick.” He pointed over his shoulder. “My niece used the bathroom.”
“You let your niece in?”
He shrugged. “If she was with me,” he said, “I could talk my way out of it.” Not a bad idea, actually. “I took a laptop.”
“One?”
“Two.”
“Two?”
“Okay,” he said, “like five.”
Jesus fucking Christ. She counted out $10,000, folded the bills up, handed them over. “Dump the laptops,” she said. “And I need the keys. I want you and your niece to go on a long vacation, okay?”
Pool Boy pocketed the cash, handed over the keys, but then said, “What about your DNA?”
“It’s okay,” she said, “I’m an FBI agent.”
KRISTY WALKED THROUGH A MAZE OF EMPTY CUBICLES—MAYBE THIRTY OF them—family photos, coffee cups still in place. It was like the staff of LifeCore had been raptured. Computer screens still glowed blue in the dim fluorescent light of the old Safeway. Phones periodically rang, even though it was the middle of the night. The dead, they don’t keep a clock, Kristy supposed. Copy machines and printers clicked and hissed and sighed. Somewhere, a fax spewed out pages. Sweaters hung off the backs of chairs.
The stench was overwhelming.
She only smelled anything like this once, a few days ago, when she opened that freezer. The facilities were not being maintained, and that meant it was little more than a corpse farm.
And yet, everywhere, signs of life.
A bulletin board announced a company softball game at Bruce Trent Park in Summerlin against the Palm Northwest Cemetery Workers and a potluck for Emily’s birthday, and then, smack in the middle, was a bright yellow Missing poster for Melanie Moss, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. They were on every streetlight and telephone pole in the city, her face smiling out into forever, alive and well.
Which is perhaps why Kristy had the distinct feeling she wasn’t alone. Kristy didn’t believe in ghosts, not really, but as she made way her way toward Jerry Ford’s office, the stench of death getting more overpowering with each step, she couldn’t stop feeling . . . what? Residual energy? Maybe it was thirty years of people walking around Safeway picking up the sustenance of their lives. Or maybe it was that LifeCore had transformed Safeway’s intricate system of freezers into housing for a jambalaya of the dead: arms, legs, sheets of skin. Eyes, livers, kidneys. All the stuff that made a human a human? It was all stored in what used to be the meat lockers and frozen-food storage, T-bones and Swanson’s chicken dinners replaced by the very parts of human life.
Which was an unsettling notion.
She stole a glance over her shoulder. Nothing but cubicles.
Kristy unlocked Jerry Ford’s office and found his body on a fake leather sectional, across from his desk and an entire wall of ancient CCTV monitors, none of which were turned on. He’d been dead for a while. Three days at least, judging from the decomp. There was a plastic bag zip-tied around his neck, his face either purple or disappearing, the poor son of a bitch more meat than man. Kristy stared into Jerry’s now-sunken and clouded eyes, tried to imagine all the turns in his life that had led him to this moment.
Jerry Ford, though, was long gone. Not that she’d ever known him. She’d seen his wife at Temple plenty of times. Stephanie even picked her up from the infusion center one day and they talked about their favorite old characters on General Hospital back in the day, Stephanie going on about Rick Springfield, Kristy more of a Jack Wagner fan. The kind of conversation you have when you think you’re going to die.
So Kristy did the only thing that seemed right, even though she knew Ford wasn’t really a Jew: she picked up a pair of scissors from Jerry’s desk, pulled her blouse out from her jeans, snipped the corner of the garment off, rending it, as was Jewish custom, in grief and anger at the dead. The body would rot away. The body was already rotting away. The soul would continue, somewhere. That was the Jewish belief. But it didn’t quell in Kristy the anger she felt toward Jerry, what all this might mean.
Kristy put the envelope of cash on Jerry’s desk, then sat down on the other side of the sectional, where it seemed Jerry’d been living, a stack of Styrofoam food containers on the low coffee table in front of it, a colony of coffee cups, clothes, medication, including an empty bottle of Ambien, which Kristy figured was in Jerry’s dried-up bloodstream, and a stack of legal paperwork. Including, she saw, an unopened letter from the FBI’s field office in Chicago.
Jerry’s cell phone was on a small coffee table. She grabbed a Kleenex, picked it up; one bar left. She scrolled through his calls until she found Stephanie’s cell phone, which she dialed.
“Baby?” Stephanie said by way of greeting. She sounded relieved.
“No,” Kristy said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, this is Special Agent Kristy Levine.”
“From . . . Temple?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, “but I’m not calling in that capacity.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Ma’am,” Kristy said, “are you in Las Vegas?”
“No.”
“Where are you, ma’am?”
“Jerry told me not to tell anyone,” she said.
“Ma’am,” Kristy said, “you know me. You know I’m an FBI agent. I’m trying to help you.”
“He told me I couldn’t trust the FBI,” she said. “That there are corrupt agents trying to get him. And then I see the news and it’s nothing but corrupt agents. So. No. I’m fine. What do you need, Agent Levine? Why do you have my husband’s phone?”
“Ma’am,” she said, then stopped. “Stephanie. Stephanie, listen to me. Your husband has taken his life. I’m worried your life is in danger. Your husband is in business with some very bad people. And some very bad things have started to happen because of it. You need to tell me where you are so I can send someone out to protect you.”
She pulled the phone from her ear.
Stephanie Ford had hung up on her. She redialed. Straight to voice mail, which was full.
Poremba wouldn’t be landing for another two hours.
If she called this in now, she’d be out front doing interviews all morning, then stuck in a conference room explaining how she ended up inside LifeCore, would probably be on paid administrative leave by 5 p.m. Sal Cupertine would be long gone.
Kristy grabbed the envelope filled with money and headed outside.
SHE FOUND POOL BOY ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE SILVER SUITES. HE WAS walking out of his apartment with two suitcases. At least he could take direction.
He set his bags down, put his hands up. “I’m leaving, like you said,” he said.
“That’s good,” she said. She peered into his apartment. His niece was asleep in front of the TV, which was playing The Wizard of Oz on DVD. She handed him the envelope filled with cash and the keys. “Why don’t you hold on to these things.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as it takes you to spend the money.”
“What do I have to do for it?”
“Anyone asks, I was never here.”
“I’m not gonna be here, anyway. And I don’t know your name.”
“Lotta bald ladies come around this way?” In the apartment, the flying monkeys were beginning to rain across the sky in search of Dorothy.