“Right, right,” Kristy said, but then a Jenga tower started to come together in her mind, she could see it, block by block, stacking up . . . but it was teetering in the center. What was missing? “Or anyone who works for a funeral home and might want to send someone a message. Agent Hopper thought something was sideways. We know that he conducted interviews there, right?”
Poremba said, “That’s public record. I have no idea what he found. He never got in the place, but that’s why I encouraged Matthew to go back. We know there’s something wrong there. Money laundering, at the very least.”
“Hold on,” Kristy said. She dug into her purse, looking for the papers Miguel had given her this afternoon, the list of names buried at the Kales’s Home of Peace. “I went to the cemetery today, and they gave me a map to all the people buried there. Lee, there’s ten thousand names. Do you know how much money that is?”
“Millions.”
“It could be $100 million. My plot was $10,000. That doesn’t include a funeral. What if the reason the numbers don’t line up with LifeCore is because they’re not laundering money, they’re laundering bodies?”
Kristy thought about Ronnie Cupertine’s family, how maybe they’d been sent to the Kales’s Home of Peace, not to be harvested, but to be buried. They ended up in Portland because someone wanted them to be found. Wanted the world to know they weren’t missing. Wanted The Family to know their boss’s wife and children were chopped up like firewood. Wanted the FBI to investigate how the bodies got there in the first place.
Who would want that?
Not Jerry Ford. He wouldn’t want the FBI in his business.
Not Bennie Savone. Same reason.
“No,” Poremba said. “No. You’ve got it backward. LifeCore isn’t laundering bodies. The funeral home is.”
“If that were the case,” Kristy said, “they’d need to have the complicity of the Temple leadership. I don’t see that happening.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, Rabbi Kales is two hundred years old, and Rabbi Cohen is the most decent man I’ve ever met. How would they be getting the volume? You think Rabbi Kales and Rabbi Cohen are out on the streets collecting bodies?”
“No,” Poremba said. “Divorce yourself from your beliefs. Look at what we know about Temple Beth Israel. We know that it was the last place Jeff Hopper was seen. We know that Bennie Savone paid for its construction and that Rabbi Kales let him marry into his family, which isn’t exactly how most devout Jews work. We know that the rabbi previous to Rabbi Cohen was found floating in Lake Mead. What do you know about Rabbi Cohen?”
What did she know? He was about forty. His family was military.
“He’s just back from the hospital,” she said.
“For what?”
“He fell,” she said. “And had to have plastic surgery to fix his face.”
“Are you hearing yourself?”
She was. Even before the fall, he’d looked . . . different. Like his face had been made of puzzle pieces jammed into the wrong spots.
“I guess I don’t know much of anything.”
“Run him,” Poremba said. “Find out who did his plastic surgery. Get every driver’s license he’s ever had. Are you hearing me? I want to know where Rabbi Cohen went to elementary school. I want to know how his grandparents met.”
“Are you saying,” she said, “that Sal Cupertine has been here all along?”
“And Matthew figured it out,” Poremba said. “What other reason would he stay in Las Vegas? What other reason would he have to go after Biglione? He must have thought Biglione had something Sal needed.”
“I don’t see it,” Kristy said. She didn’t want to see it. Couldn’t imagine it.
“Sal Cupertine learned at the foot of Ronnie Cupertine,” Poremba said. “He was his father figure for the last thirty years of his life. So what did he learn? That if you snitched on yourself, you could control things. Those bodies of Ronnie’s family come through for burial. He sees them. He realizes Chicago has turned upside down, that if they’re killing Family members, someone is coming for him. So he has them dumped where they’d be found as a message. Come fucking get me. Not to the FBI, but to the killer. Killer knows where the bodies are supposed to be. FBI has no idea.” Poremba actually laughed. “It’s brilliant, really. Ronnie Cupertine’s wife and children were four bodies—how much were each worth? How much was it worth to the Native Mob or whoever in The Family iced them to have their hands clean, forever? Not have some bones pulled out of a housing development in Peoria in thirty years, scientists find a dot of foreign DNA on a scrap of clothes, you get yanked out of the assisted living facility to do the rest of your life in federal lockup, three hots and a cot and a catheter until the day you die. Priceless. That shit was priceless. And what better way to get rid of bodies than to bury them in a cemetery, two thousand miles away, where no one would ever look for them?”
“But the volume.”
“You saw the warehouse,” Poremba said. “Russian mob can hardly piss straight. A guy like Bennie Savone, a good real businessman, he’s probably franchising bodies. Don’t think about what’s been done before. Think about the next level. Twenty-first century. You’re a gangster. How do you make money with a cemetery?”
“You bury bodies,” Kristy said, “for whoever really needs to get rid of a body.”
What did it take to disinter a body?
Next of kin. A court order. Probable cause. That could take months. Years. And whose body, exactly, would you be disinterring? How would you ever know? They’d need to go one by one, through every name. And who is to say that there weren’t other bodies, not named?
Jews didn’t preserve their bodies. Simple pine boxes and a suit of clothes was all that stood between the dead and eternity.
And right then, Special Agent Kristy Levine saw through Jeff Hopper’s eyes. Saw him driving up to Temple Beth Israel, meeting with Rabbi David Cohen, asking him questions about Sal Cupertine, maybe looking out at the expanse of construction going on—the day school for preschoolers, the high school, the Performing Arts Center, the Aquatic Center, the expansion of the Jewish cemetery across the street—and knowing. Because Jeff Hopper understood Sal Cupertine wasn’t dead. Sal Cupertine hadn’t disappeared. Sal Cupertine was sent somewhere, to do a job, that only he could do, with his flawless Rain Main memory, with his penchant for killing without getting caught, and with Ronnie’s desire to have him out of the picture entirely.
Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t a cover.
Rabbi David Cohen was a job.
No one ever reported dead gangsters. It was outside the code. You left a body somewhere, it was because you wanted them found. Were Bennie Savone, his father-in-law, and Sal Cupertine operating a members-only cemetery for the underworld? Was that even possible?
“I’ll get Ford,” she said. “You figure out how to get the warrants to save my pension.” She paused. “And Lee? I know you cared about Matthew. I’m sorry.”
“He was a good agent,” Poremba said, “and we destroyed him.”
JACOB DMITROV FOUND THE ONLY NON-BROKEN BOTTLE OF SCOTCH IN THE Ponderosa and poured himself two fingers. “You want some?” he asked Kristy when she returned.
“I’m working,” she said. “Did you wash that glass?”
