The Death Box(91)
“Where’s Pinker now?” Roy asked.
Rayles glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes ago Robert was arrested coming out of a downtown health club. He loves his workouts, but I hear most federal prisons have excellent gyms these days.”
The requested jail transport was arriving, a faded blue bus with smoked windows. There was a lot of sorting out to be done. Kazankis was at the end of the line, side-whispering to a couple of men, heads bowed like a prayer session, but I figured they were getting stories straight.
The line shuffled toward the bus as a Miami-Dade sergeant wrote their info on a clipboard. When I walked to Kazankis he produced a convincing sigh of relief.
“Thank God you’re here, sir. Surely you know I’m an innocent man.”
“I’m uncertain of what I know, Mr Kazankis.”
“I never suspected the terrible things those men were doing. I’m sick at what I’m hearing happened. Those poor, poor people.”
“Sure. Illegals traveling a thousand miles to be deposited a thousand yards away. A Redi-flow tank has its guts replaced with seating. Your employees driving the truck.”
“They’re ex-cons, Detective. I’m a victim of scoundrels. Men I thought I’d saved from sin, like poor Paul Carosso.”
I nodded toward the false plant atop the semi-trailer. “One of the drivers of the truck built to hold illegals was Thomas Scaggs, who supposedly watched Paul Carosso get mysterious packages. Scaggs said he was able to see all this because he worked in the tower. Yet he was caught driving a truck with a tricked-out concrete plant.”
A pause to re-calibrate. “I-I made Thomas a driver a few days ago, Detective. At his request. I missed what was happening. It sickens me to my soul.”
I put my hands in my pockets and rocked on my heels. “You somehow missed a human-trafficking operation that brought in how many people annually, Mr Kazankis? One hundred? Five hundred?”
“I sit in the office and make schedules. I gave my men too much leeway and some fell into old ways. I trusted them to the fullest and they repaid me with deceit.”
“The story ain’t working for me, Mr Kazankis,” I said. “Someone’s gonna talk. You think maybe it’ll be Pinker?”
I waited for him to freeze at the name, but he stayed cool, giving me rumpled-brow curiosity and a four-beat pause. “Pinker? Who’s that? I have no idea who you’re talking about, sir. Never met a man with that name.”
After speaking to Rayles I figured we might use Pinker to directly incriminate Kazankis. But if Mr Redi-flow was telling the truth, that road was gone. It hit me that a schemer like Kazankis likely used a middleman to communicate with the HS turncoat. He could spout that never met the guy shit into a lie detector and the needle wouldn’t flicker. Like everything I was learning about Kazankis, he was a brilliant strategist.
“How about Orlando Orzibel?” I asked. “He’s your knife-kissing enforcer, right.”
My shot in the dark drew the rumpled-brow again. “Orlando worked here a few years ago. As far as I know he’s not been in any trouble since. But I haven’t seen him in months.”
“Which came first?” I asked, angry that Kazankis was finding an answer to everything. “The redemption project or the trafficking business? Hell, it doesn’t really matter: You’re a soulless piece of garbage whose only god is money, and you found a way to invest in human misery. Oh, and it brought you into contact with a lot of naïve young girls. You do the preacher act with them, or do you play Daddy?”
A twitch; I’d hit a nerve somewhere. Kazankis’s eyes moved left and right, making sure we were the only two people within earshot. “You’re a big Boy Scout, aren’t you?” he whispered, his voice as cold as death. “My lawyers are gonna piss in your mouth, Ryder. I’ll end up suing you for false arrest.”
When I turned, he was staring straight ahead, as if he’d never uttered a sound. A cold wind began to blow across my spine: I imagined Kazankis on trial, his select hardcase employees taking the heat without ratting, part of an upended honor system. I saw Kazankis blubbering on the stand, invoking God and all the angels, not to mention personal testimony from men honestly claiming salvation through the ministry. All it took was one doubtful juror and the scumbucket was back in business with the FCLE hauled through the mud for terrorizing a modern-day Samaritan whose only crime was trusting those he tried to heal.
The probability was real and even a mid-level lawyer might pull it off.
I pushed Kazankis toward the bus, only barely avoiding wringing his neck. “Put this trash in the can,” I told the sergeant as Gershwin sauntered up, hands in his pockets.