Page 6 of Love of the Egoist
He’d found the nearest hotel, and the next morning had gone to the Sabah Agriculture Park.
Showing possible suspects’ pictures to the staff, the ones he filtered out as the most suspicious, Kuon had heard the soft voice of the ex-owner’s wife, coming from behind him.
“Oh, this is Moritz, what a sweet man. And how dearly he cares for flowers.”
The old lady, who probably hadn’t been able to get up from her wheelchair without help for the last twenty years, had been the only lead that brought him to Moritz Pichler’s house. The man who bought ten pounds of seeds more than twenty years ago. The man who visited this park every year since but only once had used a direct flight from Vienna to Kota Kinabalu.
Kuon immediately returned to Austria. Following protocol, he called his partner before making contact and interrogating the suspect. And he would have waited for his partner, if only 45-year-old Moritz Pichler, confident in his own anonymity, hadn’t left his house. Carrying two heavy garbage bags, he’d disposed of his burden in the trunk of his car.
When the suspect had vanished back indoors, Kuon had picked the lock of the trunk and opened the thick black garbage bags. Intestine and internal organs, senselessly wasted, looked unrealistic under the bluish street lights. His hands turned black with cold blood and loud drums had started beating in his head.
Kuon vaguely remembered knocking the door down, entering the house, pulling out his Glock and pointing it at the baffled man. He didn’t have to explain anything to the Gardener. The man hummed and nodded toward the plain door that led downstairs.
The clinical, spotless basement had been permeated with the strong smell of bleach. White bloodless skin and colorless hair, along with eyes clouded with death, paralyzed him for a moment. Depersonalized, with split open guts, three women were being used as flower beds. Kuon didn’t remember much about the basement or what the Gardener had said back then, but in this sterile kingdom of bloodless dolls he did remember blooming orchids.
He’d pulled the trigger without thinking. Everything had been blurred, but he remembered how shaky he’d been and how the gunshots echoed in a half-empty basement. One after another, deafening him, until his partner’s hands seized him from behind and pushed him down.
It’d been his first time firing a gun at a human being and only by a true miracle none of his bullets had hit the target, given he was an excellent marksman.
The investigation was long and exhausting. Although charges had not been pressed against him, and despite ending The Gardener’s reign of terror, Kuon had been required to transfer to a different department.
At first, he’d been disappointed with himself for losing his shit and the position he’d worked so hard to get. He understood he was lucky not to be in jail himself, but that didn’t help much with the sinking depression. His frustration spanned for weeks. Always presuming he lived to put murderers in jail, Kuon, robbed of life’s purpose, hadn’t known how to keep living and what to do next.
The Organized Crime Unit wasn’t his first choice. He felt degraded, but at least, he still had a chance to protect people and make this world a better place. This thought was little consolation. What helped was the dossier. The dossier that had changed something inside his heart forever.
His new boss forced the case upon him, and he hadn’t been in a position to say no. He’d reluctantly opened the file, read it once, then again and again. He’d read it so many times that he’d memorized each and every line. The realization had fallen upon him; everything that had ever happened to him was so he could put this monster behind bars.
He’d become obsessed with the man known as the Black Duke. The man in the picture was the epitome of pure evil; handsome as the Devil and sly as a fox. He was one of three who held Austria in his fist.
Divided between three criminal organizations, Vienna was a nest of chaos. Three men stood at the top of this shady world. They were known as theThree Kings.
Patrice—the White Prince—had the ability to cut a good deal with the Devil himself and had never treated anything or anyone seriously. Despite dealing with weapons and drugs, he always had buttons to push to make the police drop any investigations.
Gray—the Kingmaker—was deeply tied up in politics. Only God knew what deals he had with the government. The police never went after him even though he ran the best brothels in the country, dealt in weapons and drugs, and shielded the best hackers in the world. He owned a network of banks, his own cryptocurrency, and had influence over the stock market.
And the last of them was Yugo—the Black Duke of Vienna—who didn’t refuse anything. Illegal weapons, drugs, murders, kidnapping, pornography, sex trade, organ trafficking, slavery; all were part of his portfolio.
Kuon’s head had been buzzing with thoughts of this man. He’d been so engrossed in the idea of catching him that nothing else mattered. The food he’d eaten was tasteless, the air hadn’t filled his lungs, and countless flings had lasted less than a week.
For months, Kuon had tried to get close to this man and failed.
Yugo was untouchable. Always cautious, he never made a mistake. Getting into his circle was impossible. Yugo rarely met any of his subordinates. No orders came directly from him, but everything was executed by his three dogs:
Rudolph—human trafficking;
Gustavo—drugs;
Tobias—weapons.
The pyramid structure of the organization, limited every person to only three people under their care, making it impossible to get to the top. Everyone within this organization only directly knew their supervisor, three subordinates, and two of their colleagues. Once a branch was compromised, Yugo severed it without mercy. At that point, every investigation met a dead end.
Only trusted people had a chance to get into Yugo’s close circle, but even there, the Black Duke never gave direct orders, at least that’s what Kuon had heard.
Tracking one branch, Kuon had almost given up all hopes when luck had smiled upon him.
Working undercover in a small bar and making some contacts with drug dealers, he’d left through the back exit, following a man he’d been tracing for weeks. The man that, as he’d learned, had been developing a new channel of heroin trafficking for Yugo. Exiting the bar, the man had dropped a small piece of information during the phone call aboutworking tomorrow; the wordboatsreached Kuon’s ears. The puzzle had clicked inside his head, and the next morning he’d set up a river block over the Danube that had resulted in the seizure of a large quantity of heroin coming from Bratislava.
This is how he’d met Andy—the heroin trafficker he’d arrested that day. Terrified of jail, he’d agreed to become Kuon’s informant and served him well for four months. At least Kuon thought so, right until the point when he’d realized the man had never fed him anything the Black Duke didn’t want him to know.
