Джеффри Дивер - The Cutting Edge

Perfectly tidy? No. But a reasonable explanation for the boy’s death.

“Well?”

Vimal hesitated and then pointed to a spot on the map. It was not far away.

Krueger helped him back into the trunk, closed the lid and then drove out of the desolate parking lot. In twenty minutes they were at the dump site.

He drove through the wide gate, ignored by the few workers here, and the vehicle rocked slowly along a wide path, marred with deep tire treads. The yard was easily the size of a half-dozen soccer pitches. Hundreds of twenty- and thirty-foot-high piles of refuse rose like miniature mountains, composed of stone, plasterboard, metal, wood, concrete... every building material you could imagine. He supposed that salvage companies, for a fee, were allowed to prowl through the refuse and pick what might be valuable. He smiled to himself thinking that these companies would be delighted to find copper pipe and wiring, and ignore the diamond-rich kimberlite, which was the clue that somewhere in the ground not far away lurked material worth a million times more.

He parked behind one of these mounds, out of view of the highway, the entrance and the workers.

He climbed out of the Ford and pulled Vimal from the trunk.

Krueger lifted the knife. Vimal shied. “Just the tape,” the man told him. He sliced through it, freeing his hands. He put the knife away and displayed the gun in his waistband. “Run and I’ll use it.”

“No. I won’t.”

“Go on.”

They started through the dun and gray valleys, moving parallel to the water, where the barges were being filled with debris by bulldozers and dump trucks. The sound was overwhelming.

“Where?”

The young man looked around, orienting himself. “That way.” He nodded his head toward the waterfront. The two of them wove through the yard, Vimal pausing occasionally and gazing about, then continuing on, turning left and right. He muttered, “There’s been more dumping. A lot of it. It doesn’t look the same.”

Krueger’s impression was that the kid wasn’t stalling. He seemed truly confused.

Then he squinted. “That way. I’m sure.” Another nod.

They searched for ten minutes. Then Krueger paused. He glanced down and saw a bit of kimberlite in the rut left by a large truck tire. He pocketed it.

They were headed the right way.

What a grim place this was. The March weather had cast a gray pall over the earth, turning it to the shade of a corpse at a postmortem. Humid and cold, crawling up your spine, along your legs and thighs to your groin. It reminded Krueger of a huge open-cut diamond mine he’d been to years ago in Russia. A thought occurred to him: His job, of course, was to make sure that the pipe containing the kimberlite was never discovered, and no diamond-mining operation opened here. But what, he thought, might workers have found if a mine had opened? His evaluation was that the lode contained very high-quality gems.

Could it be that beneath the earth at the Northeast Geo Industries site there rested a diamond for all time? Krueger thought of two stones from his own country: The Cullinan, which when mined weighed over thirty-one hundred carats, making it the largest gem-quality diamond ever found. The stone was cut into more than one hundred smaller diamonds, including the Great Star of Africa, more than five hundred carats, and the Lesser Star of Africa, more than three hundred. Those two finished gems are part of the British Crown Jewels. Krueger’s favorite South African stone was the Centenary Diamond. The weight as rough was 599 carats. It was cut to more than 270. A modified heart-shaped brilliant, it was the largest colorless flawless diamond in the world.

Krueger’s role in keeping such a diamond buried would sting.

But this was his job, and he would see it through.

“Keep going,” he muttered to Vimal. “The sooner we finish, the sooner you can get home to your family.”

Amelia Sachs was just off the Brooklyn Bridge, a few minutes from the Northeast Geo operation, her destination. The Torino’s engine sang at a high pitch.

Rhyme’s thinking had been that Ackroyd — or whatever his name might be — didn’t want simply to kill Vimal Lahori. Not yet. He needed to find out where the boy had picked up the kimberlite on Saturday morning before he’d walked into the carnage at Patel’s. Ackroyd’s assignment would be to destroy or dump every bit of kimberlite he could find, before fleeing, and the one logical place for that would be the drilling site.

The operation was still closed, and Ackroyd and Vimal could wander it with impunity, as the boy pointed out where the kimberlite samples had been found.

She was about to exit the highway when her phone hummed. She tapped the Answer button, then Speaker, and set the phone on the passenger seat to downshift from fourth to third. The car skidded around a slow-moving van.

“I’m here.”

Lon Sellito said, “Amelia. I’ve got somebody who wants to talk to you. I’m patching her through.”

Her?

“Sure.” She eased off the gas.

A click and another. Then a woman’s voice. “Detective Sachs?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“I’m Adeela Badour.”

“Vimal’s friend.”

“Yes, that’s right.” The woman’s voice was concerned but steady. “Detective Sellitto called and told me Vimal has disappeared. You’re trying to find him.”

“Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“I don’t know for certain. But Detective Sellitto told me about the diamonds and the drilling. And that the man who might have kidnapped him was interested in some rocks Vimal had. Well, on Saturday, the morning he was shot, he called me from the subway. He was angry. Mr. Patel had given him a job — to go to a junkyard somewhere and prowl around to find something. Some particular kind of rocks.”

The kimberlite, Sachs understood.

“And when I saw him later that night, he had a piece of rock lodged under the skin.”

“Yes, the bullet hit a bag of stones he had. Lon, are you there?”

“Yeah, Amelia.”

Sachs said, “That’s where they’re going. He’s taken Vimal to the junkyard. To find the kimberlite. Not to the drilling site.”

“Got it. I’ll find out where Northeast Geo dumps their waste.”

“Get in touch with the site manager. A guy named Schoal. Or if you can’t get through to him, call the CEO. What was his name? He was on the news. Dwyer, I think.”

“I’ll get right back to you.”

Sachs asked, “Adeela, did Vimal say anything more about where he was on Saturday?”

“No.”

“Well, thanks. This’s important.”

“I gave Detective Sellitto my number. If you hear anything...” Now Adeela’s voice cracked. She controlled it instantly. “If you hear about him, please call.”

“I will. Yes.”

The young woman disconnected.

Sachs veered onto the shoulder to wait, earning two horns and a middle finger. Ignored them all.

“Come on, come on,” she whispered, a plea to Lon Sellitto. Her leg bobbed impatiently and she resolved not to stare at her phone.

She stared at her phone.

Then put it facedown on the bucket seat beside her.

Three excruciating minutes later Sellitto called back. Schoal had told him that all the stone scrap and drilling residue from the Northeast Geo operation in Brooklyn was hauled to C&D Transfer Station #4. On the water, east of Cobble Hill. He explained, “Hundreds of companies use it, from all over the city.”

“Got it,” she said. She slammed the shifter forward into first and popped the clutch, hitting the flow of traffic in three seconds and exceeding it in five.