Part 7 The Third Wife #3
With any new case, you have to start somewhere, and with those two connections, I figured this was the best place to begin.
‘Georgy, take me down to Coney Island, to the Huntington Project Tower at Brighton Beach.’
RIKERS ISLAND TO CONEY ISLAND
Greater New York City
26 December, 1400 hours
The drive from Rikers Island to Coney Island would take about an hour at this time of day, so as I cruised southward on the 278 with Georgy in his little red Toyota Yaris, with the towers of Manhattan on my right and the vast sprawl of Queens on my left, I made some calls.
(I also got Georgy to make a few calls, because I wanted to go back to 59West. The building would still be shut down—I mean, what with the multiple crime scenes and the fact it had also suffered an explosion on the 61st floor—but I figured that as Yasmina’s attorney, Georgy could find a legal reason to make that happen.)
As for me, call No. 1 was to Heidi.
She answered on the first ring.
‘Hey, little man. How’s your gal?’
‘The doctor says he plans to bring her out of her coma on the 28th,’ I said. ‘I’m calling for another reason. We have a new client. Yasmina Ivanova.’
I gave Heidi a brief summary of Yasmina’s case and her claim that she’d been set up.
Then I said, ‘I’m heading to Brighton Beach to see if I can talk to some Russians there.
Can you check out Wife No. 2, Shelby Cox and her daughter, Cassandra?
Maybe even go interview them, if they’ll see you.
See if you can find out if they were connected in any way to what happened on December 21st.’
Heidi said, ‘Apart from the fact that Cassandra was attached to the outside of a window and saw her brother fall to his death?’
‘Yes, apart from that.’
(I would have thought that was obvious.)
I added, ‘See if you can make contact with the nanny, Madison Barnes, too. She may have wanted to remove Yasmina from the picture.’
‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Heidi said and hung up.
As we passed by Brooklyn, I made another call.
‘You’ve reached the offices of the Tech Detect. How may I help you?’ a young woman’s voice answered.
‘Hi, I’m Sam Speedman, I worked with Monty the other day at 59West. I think he’ll remember me—’ I began.
‘Dr Speedman!’ the young lady at the other end of the line exclaimed. ‘Of course! Monty said great things about you. He said you were amazing during all that stuff in the tower. Let me see if he’s free.’
She put me on hold and then, a second or two later, put me through.
‘Sam,’ Monty Woods’s voice said. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’
‘Still in the hospital, but the doctor says she’ll be okay.’
‘Glad to hear it. What’s up?’
‘I’ve got a new client and I thought maybe you could help me out on the case.’
‘Who?’
‘Yasmina Ivanova. She says she was set up.’
Silence on the other end of the line.
I wondered what the Tech Detect was thinking.
Then he spoke.
‘Do the Feds know about this?’
‘Not yet.’
‘They won’t be happy.’
‘Probably not,’ I agreed.
‘Seriously, dude, the Bureau’s got itself a nice open-and-shut case right now: everything that went down in that tower was because the angry Ms Ivanova employed the Grandmaster. They’ll be pissed if someone says otherwise.’
‘Probably, yeah.’
‘Then I’m absolutely fucking in,’ the Tech Detect said.
‘You are?’ I said, a little surprised.
‘After that day ended, that Agent Hooper was a total fucking asshole. When I billed the Bureau for my time, he refused to pay. I tried calling him, but the prick wouldn’t even take my calls.
Unlike Special Agent Asshat Hooper and Merritt “the World’s Greatest Detective” Garrett, I wasn’t asked to go on every interview show from The View to Jimmy fucking Fallon, even though I risked my life in that tower, too.
Shit, that day didn’t do a single thing to help my business. ’
‘Then I should mention that Yasmina can’t pay for our services,’ I said. ‘Aristo King shut off her funds and right now she’s at Rikers Island.’
‘If it means sticking it to the Feds, I’ll work with you on spec. What do you need?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When you were in Aristo King’s bedroom, analysing his cell phone on the bed, did you happen to make a clone copy of his phone?’
More silence on the line.
For a tech whiz like Monty Woods, making a clone copy of a cell phone’s contents was quite easy and often one of the best ways to solve a case quickly. With a copy of someone’s phone, you could access text messages, emails and photos and get to the nub of a case super-fast.
‘You sure you’re not working for the Feds, Sam?’
‘Let’s just say I like Special Agent Hooper even less than you do.’
‘Okay, then, yeah, I totally did. But I never got a chance to look at it.
When you clone a phone, you also clone all the passwords and firewalls on it, and his phone had a shit-ton of security.
I finished making the clone just as all the craziness began—when that military drone rose up off the bed and shot all the windows in the bedroom and flew out.
‘Then those kids were attached to the outside of the windows, and the two wives were put in the chopper on the roof, and then you guys found him out at Sleepy Hollow. But I still have it on a hard drive, yeah.’
I said, ‘I can’t shake the feeling that everything that went down at 59West was personal, and usually personal means an angry lover.
Now, Aristo King had a whole lot of women in his life, including four that we know of: three wives and a nanny.
He also had a two-way mirror in his bedroom.
Guys who have two-way mirrors usually have them for one reason. ’
‘You think Aristo filmed his sexual conquests through it?’ Monty said.
‘Yes, and I reckon he did it with his cell phone. Can you check your clone of his phone for sex videos? I want to know who he’s been sleeping with lately.’
‘It’ll take some time to crack the passwords, but sure, can do. Next?’
‘How are your darknet skills?’ I asked.
‘Let’s say they’re above average.’
Guys like the Tech Detect lived in the darknet.
(Formerly known as the dark web, the darknet was a nasty corner of the internet that you accessed using a special kind of search engine program called Tor.
On it, one could find all kinds of illegal stuff for sale: child pornography, snuff films, drugs, -military-grade weapons.
Oh, and contract killers and kidnappers like the Grandmaster.)
I said, ‘I imagine whoever hired the Grandmaster did it via the darknet.’
‘I would agree,’ Monty said. ‘In fact, I’ve already been there. After December 21, I checked it out, just to see what the chatter was about the Grandmaster.’
‘And?’
‘Are you kidding? The darknet fucking loved it. They were thrilled by what this cat did. I mean, snatching the W.O.R.M. and putting him through hell and making all of us jump through hoops, that makes a guy a legend in the cyber world.’
I said, ‘Can you do some more digging there about the Grandmaster? See if you can find out where he was hired on the darknet, so we can find out who hired him.’
‘Will do.’
I changed tack.
‘What do you know about the QuantumSpeed-7 chip that the kidnapper wanted delivered to the cemetery?’
‘It’s major shit, is what I know. Cutting-edge quantum stuff; the best code-cracking chip ever made. The QuantumSpeed-7 is a game changer.’
‘The presence of the QuantumSpeed-7 chip in all this really confuses me,’ I said. ‘Everything else that happened at the tower looked personal. It matched the narrative of a woman scorned paying the Grandmaster to exact revenge. But not the QuantumSpeed-7 chip. It suggests industrial espionage.’
‘I know,’ Monty said.
‘It also went missing at the cemetery,’ I said. ‘Still hasn’t been found, so far as I know. Can you find out who would want to deprive Mr King of his latest piece of world-changing tech? Maybe folks are talking about that in the really dark corners of the darknet.’
‘I’ll take a look,’ Monty Woods said.
My car swung around a wide curve on the Belt Parkway and the skyline of Coney Island came into view.
Project towers, plus the outline of an amusement park: a rollercoaster and a parachute-drop tower; the famous Luna Park.
‘Thanks, Monty. Great to be working with the famous Tech Detect. I gotta go. I’ve just arrived at my next stop.’
‘Nice to be working with the famous Detective,’ he said. ‘Where are you going anyway?’
‘To pay a visit to some Russian gangsters.’
Huntington Project Tower
Brighton Beach, NY
26 December, 1450 hours
Brighton Beach is known to many New Yorkers as ‘Little Odessa’ because of its sizeable population of Russian and Eastern European immigrants.
But in a city that has seen many of its historically working-class neighbourhoods get gentrified almost beyond recognition—looking at you, Brooklyn—Brighton Beach has remained resolutely blue collar.
This might be the result of all the project towers that loom over its streets.
There are many of them—tall, bulky and architecturally ugly—and they aren’t going anywhere soon, and rich yuppie--hipster-bankers from Bushwick don’t want to live near the projects and their ethnically colourful residents.
All of which is to say that Brighton Beach—along with its neighbour, Coney Island, with its retro amusement park and cheesy tourist attractions—remains an ode to an older era of less affluent New York neighbourhoods.
And in neighbourhoods like that, criminal gangs and their bosses flourish.
Gang lords like Roman Oberov.
Now, you might ask, how does one get a meeting with a Russian gang boss like Oberov?
You ring his doorbell.
I pressed the buzzer for the top-floor apartment of the Huntington Project Tower.
A gravelly Russian-accented voice answered through the -(reinforced steel) intercom. ‘What do you want?’
‘My name is Sam Speedman, I’m a private detective working for Yasmina Ivanova. I want to talk to Roman Oberov about Sergei Kazan, the Grandmaster, and what happened at Aristo King’s penthouse five days ago.’
There was a short pause.
Then, bzzzz, the front door beside the intercom unlocked.
‘Floor 19,’ the voice said.