The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(110)
The minute Krueger’s interview with the police was done, which he didn’t think would take very long, he would hurry to Rostov’s room, scrub it of evidence, then ditch the Russian’s burner phones, computer and car.
The police car now arrived at the precinct house and Krueger climbed out. The detective directed him toward the front door.
“This way, Mr. Ackroyd. Now, just to let you know. You’re not being arrested. No fingerprinting or pictures. Any of that. It’ll just be an interview is all.”
“Thanks, Officer. I truly appreciate your words of reassurance. What happened, well, it was pretty upsetting.” He thought about wiping faux tears from his eyes but decided that would be out of character.
Chapter 57
Amelia Sachs returned to Rhyme’s town house with several things.
The first was a collection of evidence from Vladimir Rostov’s hotel in Brighton Beach and the dealer’s store where she’d nearly lost a finger to the crazy Russian’s knife.
The second was a New York state mining inspector.
Rhyme glanced toward the man they’d spoken to before, Don McEllis, without much interest and reseated his gaze on the evidence cartons that Sachs was carting in. She noticed the direction of his eyes and said, “Not going to be easy, Rhyme.”
Referring to their urgent mission: finding out where the next gas bombs had been set.
“I’m hoping McEllis can help.”
He was a slim, earnest-looking man—okay, “dowdy” came to mind—who was here, Sachs explained, to look over the maps and the details of the prior fires and see if he could help them narrow down the search for the devices.
Sachs said, “I’m thinking that he’d plant them close to fault lines in the area, if he wanted the quakes to look authentic. If so, maybe Don can point them out.”
The detective shrugged. He didn’t seem enthusiastic. His phone hummed. “City Hall. Jesus.” He took the call and stepped aside.
McEllis asked to use one of the computers to load some geological maps of the area. Cooper directed him to one. He wanted to see too where the previous gas bombs had been set, and Sachs pushed toward him the whiteboard on which was taped a map of the city. The fires were marked in red and they made a rough ellipse around what was the epicenter: the geothermal drilling site near Cadman Plaza. McEllis called up the geological diagrams of the area and began poring over them.
Cooper and Sachs both dressed in gowns and face masks and began to look over the evidence that had been collected at Blaustein’s jewelry store and Rostov’s motel in Brighton Beach.
Rhyme had some information too. After Sachs had sent him the unsub’s identity, he had contacted Daryl Mulbry at AIS once more, requesting details on the killer. The man had sent a report summarizing what he could find on short notice. Vladimir Ivanovich Rostov. The forty-four-year-old’s history was Russian military and then FSB—one of the successors to the KGB—and then for the past ten years a “consultant,” whose clients included some of the big Russian quasigovernmental organizations, like Gazprom, the oil and gas company, Nizhny Novgorod Shipping, which made oil rigs and tankers and—significantly—Dobprom, the biggest diamond-mining company in Russia.
Mulbry had learned that Rostov had worked in the Mir mine, in Siberia, from ages twelve through twenty. “Fellow’s a bit off, from what we could learn. Rumors that he killed his uncle, who was in a mine shaft with him. Head crushed with a rock, but there wasn’t any rockslide. The police tended to look the other way when it came to the biggest employer in the region. His aunt died too, not long after that. Apparently one night, she got trapped on the roof of the building, locked out of the access door. No one could figure what she was doing there. She was wearing a flimsy nightgown and no shoes. It was December. The temperature was minus twenty. The authorities looked the other way on that one too. There were complaints that she’d been ne podkhodit, not appropriate, with some youngsters in the building.”
Quite a background, Rhyme reflected.
Mines. Well, that explained the obsession with diamonds…and Rostov’s interest in the fake earthquakes at the geothermal site.
The spy had added that Rostov was non grata in Germany, France, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Taiwan, suspected of assault, extortion and illegal business practices, as well as a number of financial crimes. Witnesses would not come forward with statements, so he’d never been brought to trial; he was simply told to leave and not come back. In Kraków, Polish authorities detained him after a report that he sexually assaulted a woman and beat her boyfriend. He was quietly released after some intervention by Moscow.
At the jewelry store, she’d found the man’s real Russian passport—in the name of Rostov—plus a forged passport in the name of Alexander Petrovitch, the .38 Smith & Wesson, loose .38 and 9mm Finocchi rounds—the latter for the Glock—ski mask, cloth gloves, the bloodstained utility box-cutting knife, cigarettes and lighter, cash (dollars, rubles and euros). No keys to the Toyota, though there was no guarantee that the red car outside Adeela’s house had been Rostov’s. He didn’t have a mobile on him, either.
He had no room keys on him but a fast canvass of motels and hotels in the area revealed that one Alexander Petrovitch was staying at the Beach View Residence Inn in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which Sachs had searched carefully. But she didn’t find much. More .38 ammunition, junk food, bottles of Jack Daniels, the actual passports of the other identities that Mulbry had learned of. No computers or telephones, car keys or trace of or references to lehabahs, the gas line IEDs, or to where they might have been planted.