Cut and Run (15 page)

“How much did it go for?”

“Just shy of half a million dollars.”

“Born in South America, hung around with criminals and royalty, known for changing its identity and disappearing—sounds like Rodriguo might have found it irresistible.”

“Maybe so. Another possibility is a pearl called
La Huerfana
—the Orphan. It was briefly owned by Isabel de Bobadilla, the first female governor of Cuba.”

Calleigh nodded. “That would fit, all right. What's it worth?”

“Hard to say. It weighed in at thirty-one carats, was part of the Spanish crown jewels, and was said to be nearly flawless—but it was also supposedly destroyed when the Spanish palace in Madrid went up in flames in 1734. However, it wasn't the only artistic treasure on display there; the Spanish court had many masterpieces hanging on the walls. According to historical accounts, when monks from a neighboring monastery noticed the fire, they rushed into the burning castle, ripped as many canvases off the walls as they could, and threw them out the windows in order to save them.”

“You think one of the monks saved a little something for himself?”

“Anything's possible. But if such an item came up on the market, someone like Rodriguo would have found it extremely tempting.”

“Assuming that Rodriguo really was collecting art. And while we're making assumptions, let's not forget we're assuming that Fredo is really Rodriguo's son. Oh, and that Timothy Breakwash's death was a murder and not a suicide.” Calleigh sighed. “You know, so far this case is just a big old briar patch of assumptions. I would give a week of vacation days for some good, solid
evidence.”

“Find me some,” said Horatio, “and you can have mine.”

D
R. ALEXX WOODS
looked around her autopsy theater and sighed. She was tired, having worked almost nonstop for the last twenty hours, but that wasn't what was bothering her. She
hated
it when people died in large groups.

Not because of the inconvenience or the pressure, but because she felt that every body that passed through her care deserved her full attention, and when there were a lot of them all at once she had to make compromises.

And apologies.

“Okay,” she said to the corpse on the stainless-steel table. “Sorry, sweetie, but somebody has to be last. Looks like that's you.”

The body on the table was that of a man in his thirties. He had a prominent gut, with the kind of flabby arms and chest she'd seen on too many desk jockeys. The body had no gunshot wounds, unlike all the others from the yacht shooting; she noted again that his lips looked cyanotic and his skin pale. “What did you in, honey?” she murmured. “No visible signs of trauma—did you have a coronary in the middle of all the shooting? Too much excitement for a heart that needed more exercise and less time as a couch potato? Only one way to find out…”

She picked up a scalpel and made the first incision.

 

“What are you looking at?” asked Wolfe, walking into the layout room. “I thought you were going to go back and reexamine the boat.” Delko had a dozen different stacks of paper spread out on the surface of the light table.

“Thought I'd take a look at what we have on the shooting victims first. We've IDed every body, and all of them have priors. The Cubans are low-level gangbangers, while the Eastern European types have links to the Russian mob. All of them except this guy.” Delko picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Wolfe.

“Stanley Wolchkowski,” read Wolfe. “No priors, no known criminal connections—until now, I guess. Who is he?”

“He owns a chain of high-end supermarkets,” said Delko. “The kind that cater to people who don't do their own cooking. This really doesn't seem like his kind of crowd.”

“Maybe he provided the food. I seem to recall that buffet looked pretty pricy.”

“You don't usually invite the caterer along on a private cruise.”

“True,” Wolfe admitted. “But you
do
invite someone you're trying to negotiate a business deal with. Someone, say, who owns a trucking firm and has ties to the Italian mob.”

Delko frowned. “Who are you talking about?”

“Valerie Faustino. She owns a trucking company that distributes merchandise up and down the East Coast—and she has ties to the Luccini family.”

“Okay, that makes a certain amount of sense. It looks like whatever Dragoslav was planning, an alliance with the Luccinis was part of it.”

“Yeah—but how does Wolchkowski fit in?”

“Well,” said Delko, “for one thing, Wolchkowski was the only one who wasn't shot. He was the vic in the stateroom, on the bed.”

“We have a COD, yet?”

“Alexx is working on it. She's got a lot of bodies to process, though.”

“Don't let her hear you talk like that,” said Wolfe. “I called a vic a stiff in front of her once. Not going to do
that
again.”

 

“The alimentary tract,” Alexx said into the microphone of her recorder, “is extremely distended. There are also signs of hypersecretion, suggesting a possible cholinergic crisis leading to respiratory failure.”

She collected the stomach contents, noting the color and consistency, then took a blood sample for tox screening. She already had a theory about what killed him, but she wouldn't know for sure until certain tests were performed; she sent a sample of the stomach contents to the lab for gas chromatography.

She looked down at the body and shook her head. “Poor baby. You really liked your food, huh? From the condition of your liver and your heart, you liked a few drinks to go with it, too. If you didn't cut back on the fat and alcohol, a heart attack probably would have got you in a few years, anyway.”

She started closing him up. “But you don't have to worry about any of that now. No stairmaster for you, no low-fat yogurt or early-morning jogging or diet soda. All you have ahead of you is a little embroidery, and then a nice, long rest…”

 

“What's next?” asked Delko. He took a long sip of his coffee.

Wolfe took a last bite of his sandwich and swallowed before answering. “I'm going to try to track down Jorge and the boat. I have a hunch that the guys who planned the robbery might have a better idea of what they were looking for than Pace Birmingham did.”

Delko nodded and signaled the waitress for the check. “Yeah, I get the feeling they didn't trust him with any more information than they had to.”

“If I get something useful, I might be able to use it as a lever to pry something about the deal out of Valerie Faustino. Right now, her lawyer's got her mouth locked up like Fort Knox. How about you?”

Delko finished his coffee and got to his feet. “Alexx sent me the stomach contents of Stanley Wolchkowski. I'm going to run some tests.”

“Well, whatever he ate,” said Wolfe, looking down at his half-eaten sandwich, “I'll bet it was better than this.”

“Don't be too sure.”

The tests Delko ran came back positive for the presence of a chemical known as TTX. Delko studied the results, nodded, and put in a call to a local ESL school the police department occasionally used. He was going to need a translator—his Russian was pretty good, but he only knew a few words of Japanese.

 

The translator's name was Michiko Kotosaya. She was a shy, slightly plump woman in her twenties, whose English was flawless. She wore jeans and a pink T-shirt with a cartoon robot on it, and sat next to Delko in the interview room.

On the other side of the table sat Yamada Osamu, the cook from the
Svetlana 2
. He was dressed in more casual clothes now, but he still looked as nervous as he had when Delko had first seen him huddling in the ship's freezer.

“Mister Osamu,” said Delko. “How long have you worked for Mister Dragoslav?”

Michiko translated and listened to Yamada's reply. “He says he's never worked for him before. This was a favor he was doing for Mister Dragoslav.”

“I see. Who do you normally work for, Mister Osamu?”

“I work for a restaurant in Manhattan,
Fujikawas
.”

“I've heard of that place. Very expensive. You must make a good living.”

“I studied the preparation of
sashimi
for many years in Japan. I am licensed to prepare
tessa,
as few chefs in America are.”

“Tessa? What's that?”

“It is also known as
fugu sashi
.”

“Fugu? The poisonous fish?”

“Yes. Prepared correctly, it is not dangerous.”

Delko knew about fugu. Considered a delicacy in Japan, it was made from the flesh of the pufferfish and contained a chemical called tetrodotoxin. Fugu poisoning caused total muscular paralysis; voodoo priests in Haiti used it to immobilize people so thoroughly they appeared to be dead, which inspired stories of zombiehood when the victim was later seen alive.

Not all of those poisoned with tetrodotoxin survived, though. If the paralysis was severe enough to affect the respiratory system it would cause asphyxiation. Chefs who prepared the food had to be specially licensed, and serving certain parts of the fish was illegal.

Delko nodded. “Mister Osamu, we found a chemical called TTX in the stomach of a man named Stanley Wolchkowski on the
Svetlana 2
. You might know it better as tetrodotoxin—and it was what killed him.”

When Michiko had finished telling him, Osamu bowed his head, a look of immense shame on his face. When he spoke, it was haltingly, his voice breaking.

“Yes. It was my fault. When I saw the moonfish, I could not resist telling Mister Dragoslav that it belongs to the same family as the pufferfish, and is sometimes eaten as a delicacy also. He was amused, and told one of his passengers, who was knowledgeable about food and considered himself a gourmet. The passenger asked that I prepare some for him. Foolishly, I agreed, though I have never prepared moonfish before. Now, I am responsible for his death.”

Delko sighed.
An accident,
he thought. If Osamu's intention was to murder Wolchkowski, he wouldn't have used a thousand-pound moonfish to do it—a chef like Osamu had access to real fugu, which would have proved more tempting to a sophisticated palate than a parasite-riddled bonefish. And if Dragoslav had wanted Wolchkowski dead, simply shooting him and dumping him over the side would have been quick and easy.

Looking at the anguish on Osamu's face, Delko knew it was sincere. The man had risked his professional reputation and another's life on his skill, and he had lost. Even if he didn't spend time in jail, his career was over and he would live with guilt and shame for the rest of his life. He honestly felt sorry for the man.

Which made what he had to do next that much harder.

He put a harshness he didn't feel into his next words. “That's quite a coincidence, Mister Osamu. One man just happens to die of an accidental poisoning while fourteen others are shot on the same boat? The boat of a known gangster?”

“I know nothing of that. My dishonor is my own.”

“No, Mister Osamu. What will be your own is the needle they'll put in your arm when you're executed for murder.”

Michiko hesitated before translating, clearly disturbed.

“Say it,” Delko told her tersely.

She did. His reaction was what he'd hoped; stark disbelief and fear.

“But I did not mean to. It was not murder.”

“Tell it to a jury, Yamada. You think they'll believe you, or what I put in my report?”

“Why would you say this? I had no reason to kill this man.”

“I say this because you're not telling me the whole truth, Yamada. You know what kind of man Dragoslav is, and you know why he was out on that boat. You tell me that, and maybe my report won't make you sound like a cold-blooded killer.”

There was a long silence while Osamu considered Delko's words. Delko waited. The look Michiko gave him made him feel like dirt, but Delko's job was to solve cases; right now, his best chance of doing that was to put pressure on Yamada Osamu. Of all the survivors of the shootout—all the nondrugged ones, anyway—he was the one most likely to talk.

Finally, Osamu began to speak. His voice was soft, and he was obviously choosing his words carefully.

“It is true that I know of Mister Dragoslav's reputation. There are others of his kind in Japan, and it is to them that a member of my family owes a favor. By doing this favor, I am canceling a debt. However, the debt is now satisfied. I will tell you what I can, but I know very little.”

“Do you know what the purpose of the meeting was?”

“I do not.”

Of course he wouldn't. He's just a specialized chef, brought in for show.
Delko tried another approach. “Did you see anything odd or unusual aboard the ship?”

“I saw that many of the men carried guns. I believe several of the young women were prostitutes. Until the shooting began, I saw nothing out of the ordinary.”

“How about the moonfish? Were you there when it was brought aboard?”

“Yes. It was brought aboard once we were a considerable distance out at sea, transferred from another boat. I assumed it had been caught by them.”

“So the other boat was a fishing boat?”

Osamu frowned before replying. “No. It was a freighter of some kind.”

“Do you remember the name of the ship?'

“I'm sorry. I do not.”

“How was the fish brought on board?”

“They used a crane—there is a hatch that opens directly into the galley. The fish was lowered, then taken to the refrigerated area. I was told to leave the galley, and was not allowed back for half an hour.”

“Mister Osamu, this next question is important. Did you notice anything on the ship that hadn't been there before the fish was brought on board? Anything new, anything you noticed for the first time?”

Osamu gave the question careful consideration, his brow wrinkled in thought. At last, he spoke.

“There was one thing. There were a number of large, square white buckets with lids—the kind that can hold around five gallons of water. They were stacked together, one nested inside another. They were present at the beginning of the journey, but later they had vanished, along with their lids. A small detail, but a careful chef knows the location and use of every item in his kitchen.”

So if something was hidden in the fish, it might have been transferred to the buckets. We didn't find anything like that on the ship
—
so what happened to them?
He shook his head. It looked like the only option he had left was to tear apart the
Svetlana 2,
piece by piece.