“What was up there?” she asked the cop guarding the back. Half a dozen investigators were cataloging every piece of evidence in full hazmat suits, Kristy suddenly feeling very underdressed.
“Dental office,” the cop said. He was young, maybe twenty-five, looked like he’d be better suited to guarding a frat house at UNLV. “But I don’t know about the rest of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re saying there was a full warehouse up there, too, but I don’t know. Nothing on the mall registry but the dentist.”
Kristy tried to imagine the layout in her mind. She’d get the blueprints later. The second floor had largely collapsed into the Red Lantern—there were slabs here and there, hanging perilously—and the roof was gone entirely. But she could imagine it well enough, a dental office and then some kind of vast storage area that had been converted into an industrial warehouse, which was not coded for this area. This was all retail, business, medical, and food, no light industrial at all. If these freezers had ended up out here, they must have been either blown through the roof or out the back wall.
That’s a shitload of force. She went around the back of one of the freezers. Still intact, save for the ripped-out wiring and tubing. It was about six feet tall, four feet wide, probably weighed over seven hundred pounds. They’d been scorched, but these were stainless steel; the fire would have needed to burn at 3,000 degrees to melt them. That would take jet fuel and time. Firefighters were on-site within ten minutes, but the chemical nature of the fire kept them at bay for twenty minutes, enough time for the whole place to be destroyed, which was also a good indicator of accelerants.
Why would a dentist need industrial freezers?
“Anyone open these up yet?” Kristy asked.
“Yeah,” the cop said. “You got a soft stomach?”
“I’m an FBI agent,” Kristy said.
Cop put his hands up. “Everyone here is something. I’m just telling you, don’t throw up on the evidence.”
Kristy snapped on gloves, pulled open one of the freezer doors, and found about two hundred pounds of fire-grilled human organ meats.
“Fuck!”
Kristy slammed the door shut again. She met the cop’s eyes. He wasn’t laughing, but he wanted to. “Quit fucking laughing,” she said anyway.
KRISTY DIDN’T GET BACK TO HER OFFICE UNTIL AFTER LUNCH, NOT THAT SHE was going to eat ever again. At least not meat. She could see herself becoming vegan, soon.
Her phone started ringing as soon as she sat down. It was Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba. He was in Chicago, or at least that’s what his caller ID said. “Just saw you on MSNBC,” Poremba said. “Nice hair.”
“Didn’t consider soot when I put it on this morning,” Kristy said.
“I like the way it framed your face,” Poremba said.
“When I get off the phone,” Kristy said, “I’m going into HR.”
“Surprised the office gave you the call,” Poremba said.
“They didn’t,” Kristy said. “I took it.” No one in the Vegas shop thought she was ready to be back to work, and maybe she wasn’t, but they couldn’t stop her from showing up. They could, instead, ice her out, or worse, have her running down joint task forces with the postal cops or the private-railway dicks, who ended up falling under FBI jurisdiction, too. Hobos stealing the mail was a federal crime, after all. But Lee Poremba ran the joint Organized Crime & Terrorism Task Force, which essentially allowed the FBI to use the Patriot Act on domestic targets if they thought there was some terror nexus. And what didn’t have a terror nexus these days? He operated primarily out of Chicago, which meant he spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas chasing down the tendrils of cases involving The Family and whatever was left of The Outfit, the two main crime families operating west of Yankee Stadium, each of whom had long used Las Vegas to wash their money, and then all the 9/11 bullshit. The New York families still had some sway in town, but that was mostly in the girl business, which was beneath the care of the FBI these days.
“What’s your impression?”
“Gonna be a bad couple weeks for the mosques in town,” Kristy said. “We should get some people on the inside. God knows what might happen.”
“And then?”
“And then they’ll give up, quietly announce it’s an arson job, which it is,” she said. “But for no reason I can figure. Dental office upstairs is billing a million five a year, they’re renting the space, and every chair and tool in the place is financed. Dentist is in Tahiti on vacation, which is a little convenient.”
“Little bit,” Poremba said. “What’s his background?”
“Here’s where it gets tricky,” Kristy said. “Came over from Russia in 1989. Almost 100 percent of his clientele are local Eastern Europeans. Dr. Yuri ‘Jack’ Belsky. Known associates include Boris Dmitrov and about a hundred ex-KGB fucks currently splitting their time between Las Vegas and county jail.”
“You don’t say.”
“So I’m thinking, initially, okay, maybe he owes the Russian mob, maybe they’re running a pill business out of his shop, he’s about to go to the cops, they blow the place up.”
“But that only hurts them,” Poremba said.
“Right. But then I start walking the place and nothing makes sense. There’s body parts for a mile around—I’m not kidding, a mile—but come to find, almost half of them have been embalmed. And the ones that aren’t embalmed have been stored in giant freezers. I’m getting the blueprints, but I think most of the second floor was a huge walk-in freezer. Some kind of cadaver farm. Not registered anywhere. So. That’s gotta be for a reason. Either that or there’s a serial killer operating in Las Vegas on an industrial scale.”
“What’s the terror squad saying?”
“Crew flew in from D.C. overnight. They’ve got their heart set on a cell doing a dry run on a dirty bomb.”
“And the bodies?”
“They’re advancing a notion that the cell wanted to see what the potential damage would be if the bomb went off when the center was full but without hurting anyone first.”
“And no one noticed them bringing in a hundred human heads?”
“Dentist has been on vacation since last week. Could have been doing it every night at 3 a.m. It’s plausible, if unlikely.”
“Any other evidence of this cell’s profound empathy?”
“Two calls,” Kristy said. “One was 911 on a fake cop shooting, which got every cop and firefighter running across town and away from this explosion. Next was a call to The Ponderosa, the bar downstairs, telling them there was a gas leak and to get out. As it was, the entire bar had emptied out for the man down. All seems part of the plan.”
“Let me guess,” Poremba said, “burner phone?”
