Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“Chief, they’re bringing me my hazmat suit. I’ll call when we’re out and know the full extent of things.”

I hung up before he could challenge me. I went to the FBI van, where Mahoney, his chemists, and Sampson were climbing into protective suits.

“How many did you see?” Mahoney asked.

“At least five more bodies,” I said.

“Wait until the cable shows get hold of this,” Sampson said.

“They already have,” said Bree, coming up behind us and eyeing the hazmat suits. “Someone needs to talk to them.”

“Once we know what to tell them,” I said. “You coming?”

She made a sour face and shook her head. “I’d get claustrophobic in one of those things. And we don’t even know what’s in there yet.”

“Which is why we have to go look,” I said, and I kissed her.

I donned the hooded visor. The temperature outside was pushing ninety, and inside the suit, it had to be well over one hundred degrees as we started back into the factory. Sampson let the chemists go through the air lock first. I heard one of them inhale sharply.

“Be careful in here,” he said. “No sudden moves.”

“Believe me, there won’t be,” I said, and I ducked through the flaps of the air lock into a room set up as a sophisticated laboratory.

The FBI chemists were already studying the mind-boggling array of equipment and the various chemical processes that had been under way at the time of the massacre. Sampson and I went to the five dead people in the room, two women and three men, sprawled by various workbenches.

They wore hospital scrubs, lab goggles, booties, and surgical hats and masks. Every one of them was shot either through the head or square in the chest.

I scanned the floor all around, said, “I haven’t seen a cartridge casing yet.”

“No,” Sampson said. “They policed their brass, swept their way out.”

“Professional gunmen,” I said.

Mahoney and the chemists came over.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Pitts, one of the chemists, said, “It’s no Walter White setup, but this has the makings of a serious drug lab. Meth and ecstasy.”

“Any danger of this place exploding?” I asked.

“Lots of potential danger,” Pitts said. “But now that we know what we’ve got, we’ll start shutting down the reactions. Then we’ll do an inventory and take the samples we need. We’ll call for a full team to dismantle the entire lab and store it for trial.”

Trial. I couldn’t begin to think how long it was going to take to investigate this case, much less bring the killers to court. Sampson and I headed toward a second air lock at the other end of the laboratory.

We went through it, and in the next twenty minutes we found the rest of the illegal drug factory as well as twelve more bodies. Five females, seven males of various races and ages. Twenty-two dead in all.

Three of the females were found in a packaging room with long stainless-steel tables, large mortars and pestles, digital scales, hundreds of boxes of zip-lock bags, and four vacuum-sealing machines. Six kilos of raw meth were piled on the table. Sampson figured there was at least twice that amount already wrapped, sealed, and boxed for delivery.

“If this were a case of assassins hired by rival drug lords, you’d figure they would have taken the drugs with them,” Sampson said.

“Maybe they were after money,” I said. “An operation this size has to be generating millions in cash.”

In the last room we found the cash. On a pallet, there were banded fifty-dollar bills, similar to the ones we’d seen at Edita Kravic’s place, stacked three feet high and wrapped in cellophane. Next to that were two guys in their mid- to late thirties wearing suits and ties. Both had been shot between the eyes.

“Has to be at least a million dollars right there, and they leave it,” Sampson said. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“Revenge?”

“Maybe. Not one of the victims seems to have put up any kind of resistance. It’s as if every single one of them was surprised and killed with a single shot.”

“Which means suppressors on all the weapons.”

“Definitely.”

Sampson said, “Everything about this is scary smart and precise. The shooting. Picking up the brass. Sweeping as they left. The lack of a reason.”

“Oh, there’s a reason, John,” I said. “You don’t kill twenty-two people if you don’t have a damned good reason.”

An hour later, in the full heat of the day, Bree stepped up in front of a bank of microphones outside the factory fences.

“I know this has been frustrating, but we wanted to give you accurate facts and it took time to gather them,” she said in a clear, commanding voice. “We are dealing with multiple homicides in the unstable environment of an extremely large methamphetamine lab. Twenty-two are known dead.”

Gasps went up. Reporters started bellowing questions. Screams of horror and grief gathered force in the crowd beyond the media throng.

“Please,” Bree said, holding up her hands. “The bodies have been stripped of identification. Someone out there knows someone who worked in this factory — a wife, a mother, a friend, a husband, a father, a son or daughter.

“If you’re that someone, we ask that you come forward to identify the body and help us understand who might be responsible for committing these cold-blooded killings and why.”

The media went nuts and bombarded Bree with questions. She kept calm and told them essentially the same thing over and over again.

“Well done,” I said when she walked away from the microphones after promising to update them on the hour.

“Just have to know how to feed them,” Bree said. “Bit by bit.”

No one came forward initially, not even those people openly grieving. Then the bodies started leaving the factory in black bags, and the massacre was real, and their loss was heartbreaking.

Vicky Sue Granger was the first to talk. In her late twenties, she looked devastated, and she said she was sure her husband, Dale, was in there.

“He work in the lab?” Bree asked.

“Shamrock City,” she said weakly. “That’s what they called it. If you were lucky enough to get inside, and you worked hard, the money just came pouring—”

She stopped talking. I guess she figured the less she said about illegal cash, the better.

I said, “Who was in charge?”

Mrs. Granger shrugged, said, “Dale got in through T-Shawn, his cousin.”

Other relatives started coming forward once we’d moved the bodies to an air-conditioned space at the medical examiner’s office. Family after family was forced to walk down the line of corpses lying in open bags on the cement floor. One man was looking for his eighteen-year-old son. Two girls were there for their older sister. A grandmother broke down in Bree’s arms.

Dale Granger was there. He worked in packaging and had taken a bullet to the chest. His cousin Tim Shawn Warren, a part-time bouncer at a strip club, was one of the muscular guys who’d been strangled outside.

Few of the relatives wanted to talk. The ones that did come up to us claimed to know little of what their loved ones had been doing, only that they’d gotten jobs and suddenly had a lot of cash on hand.

Then Claire Newfield walked in. She saw her younger brother, Clyde, a guard with a broken neck, and became hysterical. When she finally got herself under control, she said Clyde had told her that he worked for scientists.

“He said they were like geniuses,” Newfield said. “They’d figured out a new way to make meth and they were going to rule the entire East Coast.”

“You have names?”