Page 94 of King’s Ransom

(Sometimes, white collar crimes could be more complex, but even schemes like insurance fraud weren’t usually executed with much sophistication.)

Set-up cases were no different.

When someone’s set up, most of the time they’re framed by a person who is (a) close to them and (b) has a grievance with them, not some criminal mastermind playing four-dimensional chess from the shadows.

For women, it’s often their man’s ex-wife or ex-girlfriend (the woman scorned).

For men, it’s also often a romantic rival, but business rivals have to be considered, too.

In Yasmina Ivanova’s case, there were several women in her life who might have had motives to set her up, chiefly because at some time they’d all slept with her husband.

Winnie Tan, King’s Wife No. 1, was unlikely. Prior to December 21st, Yasmina had never met her. Winnie Tan had exited King’s life long before Yasmina had come along.

Wife No. 2, Shelby Cox, was a different story.

Yasmina had started sleeping with King while he had been married to Shelby.

It didn’t surprise me at all that Shelby had hostile feelings toward Yasmina. She’d have to be questioned.

Likewise, Yasmina’s former nanny, the 23-year-old Madison Barnes, who’d had a child with King while he’d been married to Yasmina.

Understandably, Yasmina despised her, even if this was exactly what Yasmina had done to Shelby Cox. I’d also have to speak with Madison Barnes.

And then, of course, there was Aristo King himself, the man with an evidently uncontrollable penis.

This was a long shot. Seriously, he was the richest guy in the world; he could divorce Yasmina with a single call to his lawyers, especially since he had a watertight pre-nup with her. Why even bother to set his wife up? He’d also lost a son on December 21st.

But you never knew.

Aristo King had actually gained something from December 21st: genuine sympathy in the media. The events of that day had totally reset the narrative about him and that was a win for a guy who’d suffered major image problems since his women-shouldn’t-vote controversy.

Either way, I wanted to look into him, too, and I had an idea for that.

I stared at two other entries I’d added to the diagram: two people who’d been at 59West on December 21st whose actions were still bothering me: the disappearing superintendent named Lenny and the guy who’d shoved me into the sauna and chatted with me.

The building’s superintendent had been in King’s penthouse at the start of the day, but then he’d oddly vanished in the middle of it all, only for me to see him in his white coveralls up on the 98th blow-through floor and later on the bottom floor of the penthouse, just before I was shut in the sauna by the other mystery man.

I wanted to find and speak with Lenny at some point.

After all that, there was one other group of people connected to all this and apparently quite closely to Yasmina.

The Russian mob out near Coney Island, led by Mr Roman Oberov at the Huntington Projects.

One: they’d blackmailed Yasmina for years.

And two: they had links to the Grandmaster, Sergei Kazan.

With any new case, you have to start somewhere, and with those two connections, I figured this was the best place to begin.

‘Georgy, take me down to Coney Island, to the Huntington Project Tower at Brighton Beach.’

RIKERS ISLAND TO CONEY ISLAND

Greater New York City

26 December, 1400 hours

The drive from Rikers Island to Coney Island would take about an hour at this time of day, so as I cruised southward on the 278 with Georgy in his little red Toyota Yaris, with the towers of Manhattan on my right and the vast sprawl of Queens on my left, I made some calls.