Death Benefit (38 page)

“I guess you trust me,” the voice said. “I now have one-point-five-five million dollars from you and I haven’t done shit. But I am a businessman, and I will fulfill my end of the deal.”

The man gave instructions for paying the rest of the money once the job was finished. The job would be done sometime in the next month. Edmund said nothing.

“But one more thing first. Something I need to know, otherwise I am afraid I won’t be able to go ahead.”

Edmund said nothing.

“Who gave you my phone number? Was it your partner, Mr. Russell Lefevre?”

“No.”

“So, who was it?”

Edmund was silent.

“I really want to know.”

So Edmund told him.

“Okay, thank you. Now release Mr. Mathews.”

From the front seat of the van, a man turned back toward Edmund. He was wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap but Edmund could see a livid scar on the man’s forehead running up toward his scalp. The man was holding out his right hand.

“Shake my hand, then we have a deal.”

The men shook hands, and Edmund heard nothing more, until March 25.

 

 

A
leksander Buda thought some more about the information he’d just received, and with his phone still in his hand, he called Edmund Mathews.

“Yesterday we followed to the letter the course of action you recommended, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it would. Someone I have on-site tells me he saw her going around today with a Geiger counter, her and that guy she hangs out with. You know what that means? It means someone’s seen through your brilliant plan.”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. As in what we are standing in up to our knees. Unless we do something right now, it’s going over our heads.”

The conversation was much too specific for Buda’s liking. But he felt he had to get the okay from the banker and make sure Edmund realized the price had gone up. The job itself shouldn’t be difficult, the girl was hardly being discreet, but he had a troublesome task to take care of. When he heard the girl’s name was Grazdani, he paused. It sounded Albanian to him, and he wanted to be very sure that killing an Albanian girl wasn’t going to step on anyone’s toes. He didn’t want to be the cause of a blood feud like there’d been in the 1990s. He’d have to snatch her, hold her, and put feelers out to see if there were any Grazdanis in the crews in the neighboring areas. But what were the odds?

“Okay,” Edmund said finally, feeling the same numbness he had felt when he agreed to the deal in the first place.

“There are two of them, actually,” Buda was saying. “It will be another ten percent.”

“Ten percent of the total or the balance?”

“Ah, ever the money guy,” said Buda. “The total.”

 

 

B
uda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.

“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”

“You see,” Genti said to Prek, “we should have done her when we had the chance. Like I said last night, knocking her around wasn’t going to be enough.” He turned to Buda. “She’s a tough bitch.”

“I can see that,” Buda said. Genti had been nursing a black eye all day. “Now this whole thing is about to go down the drain because of her. She knows what happened, God knows how. You gotta get back over there right now and take out her boyfriend and grab her off the street.”

“Boyfriend?” Prek said. “What boyfriend? You mean the kid she was hanging around with last night? Unless he’s with her when we grab her, I don’t know if we’d recognize him.”

“He’s the guy with his tongue in her ear!” Buda snapped. He was steaming, but he quickly realized Prek was right to be cautious. Killing the wrong man would be counterproductive.

“I’ll get a picture of him from the medical school database and send it to your phones. His name is . . . George Wilson,” he said, referring to a note.

“And remember, pick up the Grazdani woman,” Buda said. “And don’t touch her, you animal, unless she’s not related to anyone important, in which case she’s all yours. Understand, Genti? Word is she was in Rothman’s lab just a few minutes ago, poking around. Take her to the summer house and call me when you get there. And take Neri Krasnigi with you. It seems like the two of you can’t handle her.”

Krasnigi was relatively new to the crew, younger, inexperienced, and more vicious than either Genti or Prek. The two men were affronted by the order but didn’t show it.

As the men exited the trailer, Buda shouted after them, “Use the white van for the pickup and then dump it. Take the blue one to the house.”

Prek gave a thumbs-up sign and walked away.

Prek and Genti found Neri Krasnigi sitting in a battered old armchair at the back of the warehouse reading a German
Playboy
. Prek told him to follow, and the three men got into the white van. The plates were obscured with what appeared to be dried mud but which was actually cleverly painted plaster.

As they pulled out into Lorillard Place, heading quickly toward East Fordham Road, Prek filled Neri in on the afternoon’s operation. What they had in mind to pull off was a pair of Albanian specialties: a blindingly fast hit and snatch, in broad daylight if necessary. In the Albanian mind-set, it didn’t matter. Neri was excited; this would be his first official hit. They checked that their automatic pistols were loaded. Duct tape, blankets, balaclavas, two Columbia University Medical Center police uniforms, and a can of Ultane, a volatile, rapid-induction anesthetic, were piled into the back of the van.

The white van pulled into a garage and Genti got out and climbed into a blue van. Starting it up, he followed Prek in the white van. They parked the blue van near the George Washington Bridge and set out again in the white van toward Columbia University Medical Center.

 

 

U
nbeknownst to George Wilson, at the same time he was thinking about contacting the police, Pia was too. Not seriously, but it had crossed her mind. It was certainly true that if an investigation needed to be done, they were far more capable and could turn over rocks she couldn’t even approach. But then there was the issue of what she would tell them. Would she say that she’d picked up a few lonely alpha particles in a coffee cup and thought it was evidence of a grand conspiracy? Of course not. There was no doubt in her mind that she would not be taken seriously, which ultimately would increase her vulnerability rather than decrease it. The police would think she was crazy and probably call the dean, believing they were acting in her best interest. Of course, going to the police had another downside. They might be tempted to look her up in their computer, and even though bad stuff about her teenage years was not supposed to be there, it might be. No, she would not go to the police. Instead, as planned, she’d go to the OCME in a final attempt to figure out the affair. If that didn’t yield overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, she’d give up, just as she’d told George.

When Pia had reached the street coming from the hospital cafeteria, her intention had been to head down to Broadway to take the subway downtown. But feeling the temperature and noticing that the rain had increased, she decided to take a quick detour back to the dorm for a better coat and an umbrella. She knew the subway would get her only so close to the OCME and that she’d end up walking. How far, she had no idea.

In the dorm she hesitated outside her door, just as she and George had done outside his earlier. Being attacked in her room the previous night made her paranoid. She didn’t know how the men had gotten into her room.

Repeating what she and George had done, after silently unlocking her door, she opened it suddenly, prepared to flee if needed. She also carefully checked her bathroom to make certain it was empty. It was.

With a warmer, rain-resistant coat and an umbrella, Pia set off on her way to the subway. She had put the Geiger counter in another shopping bag to make it easier to carry. She checked the time. It was almost four, so if she was going to make it to the OCME before it closed, she had to get moving.

Walking quickly in the darkening day, Pia passed the Black building. She went another fifty feet along West 168th Street when she saw two hospital security police up the street, walking toward her. She stopped. She couldn’t see them well in the fading light with mist rising off the pavement, but she could see their uniforms well enough. They were the same uniforms her attackers had worn the previous night. To make matters worse, they seemed approximately the same height and build.

Fighting the urge to flee, Pia stopped dead in her tracks. Ahead to her right was a porte cochere for the hospital. Pia considered racing to it and into the hospital where she could vanish into the crowds, but she’d hesitated too long. She’d have to pass the security guards before she got to the entrance.

She looked behind her and saw there were surprisingly few people on the street. She thought about dashing back to the Black building but thought that if the men wanted to catch her, they probably could before she got inside. Turning back around, she eyed the approaching guards. They seemed to be staring intently at her. She froze, suddenly remembering a similar scene imbued with the same fear and dread.

She was thirteen at the time and had been at the Hudson Valley Academy for Girls for maybe a year. The stress of constantly being on guard, the fear of being attacked at any time, wore on Pia. A couple of times she’d cracked and tried to run away from the school, and she did so again. This time she got lost and had to spend a harrowing moonless night in the woods surrounding the school grounds. The night wore on and on and hummed with threat. Pia tried and failed to make her way back to the academy in the hope of breaking back in before anyone realized she was gone.

Pia had spent the hours before dawn slumped against the trunk of a tree, dozing fitfully. She arose at first light and walked east toward the sun until she found herself on an unfamiliar street winding downhill. It was then that she saw two policemen in the middle distance. They were implacably and threateningly walking toward her, staring at her unblinkingly, silent like automatons. Pia froze, as if by standing as still as possible they might not see her. When they were within ten feet of her, they parted, one walking to her left, one to her right. Perhaps they hadn’t seen her! Perhaps they weren’t looking for her at all! But when the men came alongside her, they suddenly lunged at her, roughly grabbing an arm each. Once again she was a prisoner of the state, totally vulnerable.

Now the same feelings flooded Pia’s brain. The security guards were coming at her with the same silent intensity, drilling her with their beady eyes. Pia stood stock-still and closed her eyes. Just like the Eden Falls policemen, the men parted right in front of her and went on either side . . . and moved on. The man to her left brushed past her upper body, then turned and said something—was he apologizing or saying “Get out of the way,” or making a lewd remark? Pia didn’t know. She breathed out with relief, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

Pia was embarrassed by the depth of her paranoia. She shivered and a chill ran down her spine. The unnerving episode had taken only seconds. She wiped perspiration from her forehead and then hurried on toward Broadway. By the time she passed the hospital entrance, her breathing and pulse were almost back to normal. On Broadway she relaxed further as there were significantly more people. She felt safer there—she was safer there. In the near distance loomed the subway entrance swallowing pedestrians like an insatiable monster. A gust of wind blew the umbrella she was holding almost out of her hand, and she fought with it for a moment to get it under control. Once she did, she closed it and hurried forward to the stairs.

 

 

H
oly shit, there she is!” Genti shouted, pointing, as Prek made the right-hand turn from Broadway onto 168th Street running between the Columbia University Medical Center on the left and the Armory on the right. Genti’s glance had alighted on the woman carrying a shopping bag when the wind blew her umbrella, threatening to lift her into the air. He saw her face clearly, and it was the Grazdani girl, no doubt about it. She was walking quickly toward the subway entrance. “Stop!” Genti shouted as Prek slowed.

“Who’s with her?”

“No one, I didn’t see no one,” shouted Genti. “Let me out. Wait for me here.”

Genti, who was riding shotgun, leaped from the van the moment Prek was able to stop. He ran after Pia, who he guessed was maybe twenty yards ahead of him, making her way toward the subway entrance. As he ran, Genti checked that the gun was secure in his jacket pocket. He wasn’t certain what he’d do if he caught up with her—should he shoot her in the street? Grab her and bring her back to the van?

He just knew the one thing he couldn’t do was lose her.

Genti watched Pia disappear from his view as she descended quickly into the station while he weaved in and out of the cars, gypsy cabs, buses, and vans on the busy corner of Broadway and 168th Street. He reached the subway entrance and rushed down the stairs but couldn’t see her. Was she catching the A train or the 1? Probably the express train, the A, he thought. He was desperately looking ahead for her, half pushing people out of the way.

“Excuse me, excuse me.” He didn’t want to get too aggressive: New Yorkers were liable to get aggressive right back at you. Genti rarely rode the subway and didn’t have a Metro card that he could swipe to get through the turnstiles, and he certainly didn’t have time to stop and buy one from a machine. Hoping there were no cops looking out for fare dodgers, he followed a schoolkid and pushed through the turnstile behind him.