Fixed in Blood Page 22

  “Yeah, well, I’ll bet she’s having lots of new experiences.”

  Jennifer looked up, as though she might be able to see into the girl’s locked room through the ceiling. “She’s crying. Yelling. Didn’t eat anything.”

  “I’m not worried about that. It’s not like she’ll have to do a lot in the movie.”

  Jennifer looked away, twisting the cleaning rag in her hand.

  “Go on home.” He had calls to make. And he didn’t want to have any teenager see his reaction when the call finally came in that they’d found Maria.

  Jennifer folded the rag and put it on the windowsill. “I’ll go up and get the garbage left over from lunch.”

  “Leave it.” Boss Man wanted her gone. She was only a year or two older than Maria. It hurt to look at her. “I’ll get it later.”

  Jennifer didn’t move. She looked up at the ceiling again. Boss Man knew that look. He’d seen it on his Maria a few times. Something was going on and she didn’t want to be caught.

  But this wasn’t his daughter. This wasn’t the time for secrets.

  Boss Man cursed and turned toward the stairs. He climbed them as fast as his still-healing foot allowed. He listened at the girl’s door. She was talking to someone. Crying. He turned the knobs of the four deadbolts, threw open the door, and let out an angry roar at what he saw.

  The bitch was on the phone.

  Chapter 35

  “It is time to leave London.” Vadim Tokarev chewed his toast with his mouth open. Something Patrick would have died before doing, she thought. “Meeting went well. My men know expectations for next weeks.” He looked across the table. “What with women? You enjoy night?”

  Oh, yes, dear. Who wouldn’t enjoy an evening with two women whose English is even worse than yours? Who wanted nothing more than to slip into the nearest bathroom to snort a line of cocaine? Who stumbled through one of the finest museums in the world with all the excitement of watching corn grow? Both showing off their recently enhanced breasts in dresses tight and tawdry, giggling in unison to request “Club?”

  “It was pleasant enough.” She sipped her tea and looked out at the city she’d come to love. Patrick had preferred sunny beaches. She missed bikinis and gauzy frocks. But Tokarev always looked like he’d just stepped out of a shower whenever the temperature hit seventy degrees. Given his insistence upon bathing just twice a week, she took to choosing northern locales for their various encampments. While she missed sand between her toes, the gentility and grace London demonstrated filled an appetite left unsated since her life with Patrick had come to such a brutal end. “When were you thinking we should leave?”

  “Two days. You make plans. Go shopping one last time big. Money is in drawer.”

  I know where the money is, you ape. You keep fifty thousand euros in the drawer of my bedside table. If I spend so much as one for a newspaper, another mysteriously appears in its place. If I spend it all at a Sloane Street boutique, somehow the drawer is restocked upon my return. That is my fee. A pile of money. Never ending. Yet never reaching an amount that might encourage my escape.

  “Do you have somewhere in mind, my darling?” Patrick always let her choose. Each relocation brought them more excitement. More luxury and grandeur. But this one chose for himself. He’d announce and leave the details for her, allowing her to pick the grandest hotels and furnishings, but never the city itself.

  “We go home. Moscow.”

  Allie nearly dropped her teacup. Moscow was the first place he’d taken her. Back when Tokarev’s plans were to kill her in revenge for Patrick killing his favorite mistress. She’d tolerated the rapes, knowing it provided her a window of time in which to convince him of her value to him. What she hadn’t expected was the degradation. He’d held her for three days in a locked room. Naked. Cold. With a chamber pot, two bottles of water daily, and boiled potatoes every morning. Tokarev visited her as his whim or drunkenness dictated. Humiliating her in ways Patrick would have killed him for even thinking. But she pretended she liked it. She moaned in pleasure with each slap. Groaned in ecstasy as he manhandled her. Led him to believe she wanted him. It took every ounce of her will to maintain her sanity…to hold on to her plan.

  The fourth day he brought her a blanket. He spoke with her in broken English and she responded with flattery and gentle flirtation. By the end of the week, she was moved to a room with a bed and linens. There’d been a table for her to eat freshly prepared meals. The door was still locked, but she was alive.

  The universe smiled on day ten. Tokarev was drunk when he came to her, carrying a bottle of champagne. Allie recognized the label. It was from a winery she and Patrick had visited often. Despite the $1,500-per-bottle price, they’d order cases of the wine and ship them wherever they stayed. She resented seeing their house wine in the hands of a barbarian. Tokarev demanded she get out of the bed. He wanted to teach her a dance from his homeland. He popped the cork. Allie was surprised there was no explosion of gas. No gurgling of wine celebrating its release. Tokarev didn’t notice. He was too busy looking for something to use as a glass for her. He found a paper cup on the window’s ledge, poured her a sloppy fill, and handed it to her.

  “We drink to music.” He held the bottle in his right hand and grabbed his crotch with his left. “Then we drink to this.”

  Allie brought the cup to her lips. It was the first wine she’d been allowed and she was eager to indulge herself with memories of a finer time. But as she inhaled, she didn’t catch the familiar floral aroma so associated with the champagne she adored. Instead she smelled something acrid and metallic. She looked into the cup. She should have seen dozens of trails of tiny golden bubbles reaching from the bottom of the cup to a healthy foam floating as if on air. Instead she saw large, gaseous blobs suspended in the center of the wine.

  Tokarev stood several steps away, unsteady on his feet, leaning back to take a swill directly from the bottle.

  “No!” Allie yelled. She flew across the room and knocked the bottle from his hands. Rage clouded his face in an instant. He drew back his fist.

  “It’s poison!” Allie spit out the words loud enough to break through his drunken haze. “The wine. If you drink it, you will die.” She pointed to the bottle, now on the floor, then put her hands over her throat, pantomiming someone in the throes of death.

  Tokarev dropped his fist. He looked at her with suspicion. Allie saw her chance. She embraced him. Rocked him back and forth like he was a long-lost cub of a lonely mother bear. She cooed words of endearment to him, stroked his hair, and led him to her bed, and for the first time she took the lead. She showed him a gentler way of making love. She exaggerated her responses to his clumsy moves. She feigned a release loud enough to convince any man he was a stallion. She knew she’d succeeded when he fell asleep in her arms.

  And when he awoke the next morning, she did it all again.

  There had been a bloody purge. Tokarev had the wine tested. He traced the source of the poison. He was relentless in the murders that followed, explaining to her, now his trusted confidante, that he must not only punish those who did, but warn those who might dare.

  By day twelve there were no locks on her doors. By day fifteen she was Tokarev’s only mistress. By day sixteen she was running his house.

  She’d been successful in Moscow. But she had no desire to return to the scene of her torture.

  “Moscow, darling? It’s still winter there. Why not stay here for a few more weeks? Allow summer to arrive in your home.”

  “No.” Tokarev slurped his coffee. “You have not seen dasha. It is, what is word?”

  “Country house, darling. It’s your country house.” Allie wondered what sort of hovel a man as crude as Tokarev might consider rustic.

  “Da! Country house.” He lowered his booming bass. “Our country house. You make pretty. Like classy woman live there. Make the women of my men push them work hard.” He smiled that way he did when he was about to show off a newly learned phrase. “You w
ill be Jackie O.”

  Allie forced a smile. The thought of reigning over a mob of knuckle-draggers and their coked-up whores from a hovel in the Russian wilderness didn’t captivate her. Her excitement throttle ran higher than that.

  “That sounds glorious, darling. I’ll build you the palace of the czars. What is my budget?”

  Tokarev snorted. “You and business words. You like too much. You want, you get. You like, I pay. No budget.”

  I pay, all right. My jaw is still sore from that beating last night. She’d build him his castle. She needed him. As cruel as he was, he brought protection…and endless streams of carefully allotted money.

  “How long are the flights from Moscow to Seattle, darling? If I’m going to be wrapped up building our new home, I’m thinking I need to drop in on my little enterprise there. Staz does a wonderful job being my eyes and ears, but there’s nothing like the boss being there to make sure things stay running according to plan.” She immediately regretted using the word “boss.” “I learned that from you, darling. I’m learning so much from this little project you let me have.” She hoped that was enough to erase her faux pas.

  Tokarev smiled again. “Is no more project. Is done.” He reached into his jacket pocket and slid a square velvet cube across the polished table. “Open.”

  Allie did as she was told. Her gasp was immediate. A solitary diamond, an inch square, sparkled atop a platinum band encrusted with half-carat diamonds. The light streaming in through the windows burst into swirling, twinkling rainbows when it hit the gems.

  “I don’t know what to say, darling. This is exquisite. Like the queen’s jewels.”

  “Better.” Tokarev beamed. “Czarina jewels. No more Seattle. You build me czar’s house. You will be czarina. Next project is babies. Seattle done.”

  A chill ran up her spine and stabbed into the base of her skull.

  “We marry. Soon,” Tokarev announced from across the table.

  Allie took several long breaths, forcing a smile as thoughts swirled through her mind.

  “I’m surprised, my darling. I have one request.”

  “You are czarina now. No ask. Tell and is yours.”

  “A party. Here. In London. A grand party with all your lieutenants and their women. We’ll announce our plans.” She lowered her eyes in the bashful way he liked. “You are the czar. I am the czarina. They are our subjects.”

  Tokarev considered her request. He banged his fist on the table.

  “A party! A party for my czarina. Three days from now.” He pushed himself away from the table, his napkin still unused. “Then go to Moscow. Build house and make babies.” He crossed the room to leave, calling over his shoulder.

  “Party for my czarina. No budgets.”

  Chapter 36

  Lydia opened the door to Mort’s Subaru and turned to step out.

  “I should come up,” Mort said.

  She didn’t want him in her hotel room. She didn’t want him to see her break the law. “No. I’ll get what I can from Delbe’s call. You get those search warrants.”

  Mort looked like an unsure father dropping his daughter off at a rock concert. “I can get Mick and Jimmy working on those.”

  Lydia stepped out of the car. “Every second I spend down here on the street is a second we’re not finding Delbe. Now go.”

  “How much time do you think you need?”

  Lydia knew her equipment. “Not long.”

  Mort looked at his dashboard clock. “Let’s plan on meeting in ninety minutes. That give you enough time?”

  Lydia glanced at her watch. “Plenty. I’ll meet you at your office.”

  “I’ll send a squad car to pick you up.” Horns blared behind them, demanding an end to their curbside conversation.

  “I’m four blocks away. The walk will do me good.” She closed the door and crossed the sidewalk. The doorman tipped his hat to her as she walked past. Lydia took the elevator to the ninth floor and looked both ways before entering her room. Once inside, she double-bolted the door.

  She threw her jacket and purse on the bed and pulled her cell out of her pocket. She checked the screen. No other calls. Her mind raced back to Delbe’s frantic, tear-filled terror. The background sound of a door bursting open accompanied by a man’s roar. The line going dead. Lydia had been able to make out only a few words between Delbe’s gasps, but one screamed in urgency.

  Movie.

  Delbe was able to choke out through her tears that she didn’t know where she was.

  Movie.

  If they were right, and Charlie Fellow was using his payday loan operation as a front for enticing debt-ridden customers into prostitution, Delbe was in trouble enough. But now Fellow was about to make her the star in his next snuff film.

  Lydia went to the closet and punched in a four-digit code to open the in-room safe. She pulled out a gray hard-shelled case, ten inches long and five inches deep. Anyone who saw it might assume it held the special pieces of a wealthy woman traveling with her jewelry.

  Lydia took the case to the table by the window. She sat and entered another set of digits, seven this time, into a keypad on the side of the case. That allowed her to open a sliding façade on the top, revealing a small screen. She placed her right palm over it. Four seconds later a green light glowed and the clasps on either side of the case snapped free.

  Lydia opened the case and entered her fourteen-digit-and-symbol passcode into the small keyboard mounted in the bottom half of the case. The upper half was split into two LED screens, each with a sweeping line turning circles around nothing. She pressed a button and waited until five red lights blinked on in rapid succession to signal she had successfully made connection with the communication center housed in the locked lower level of her Olympia home. She pressed another button and the screen just above the keyboard asked if she wanted to orient on her existing location. Lydia touched the “yes” option and the left upper screen’s sweeping arm was replaced by a detailed street map of Seattle with a red arrow pinpointing the location of her hotel.

  She pulled a cord from the base of the remote access, plugged its free end into her cellphone, and watched the screen in the base of the remote. Two heartbeats later a listing of her past calls appeared. She touched the line to highlight the most recent: Delbe’s call. Another heartbeat later the right upper screen’s sweeping arm was replaced with a map of its own. This one showed a street map of Olympia and its red arrow indicated the address of Lydia’s answering service.

  Delbe had called the number Lydia gave to all her patients. In emergencies, the service contacted Lydia and relayed the call forward. No matter where the original call came from, it would be funneled through her service.

  So far her equipment had done nothing more than any number of apps could do. Lydia had accessed free and common information and had broken no laws.

  But so far, she had gained nothing. She needed more. She needed to know where Delbe’s call originated.

  Lydia entered commands into the keyboard. The screen in the base of her remote asked her a series of questions. She answered them in turn, entered the secured communication program of her answering service, and instantly broke dozens of state and federal laws.

  Had she wanted, she could have accessed any call coming to or originating from that system. Any call to any lawyer, physician, dentist, veterinarian, or politician who used her service was now available to her. Should she desire, she could isolate any call and trace it back to its source. Lydia had chosen her answering service for a number of reasons, one of them being their audio record of every incoming call. When she had opened her practice, she’d found that feature valuable. If a distraught patient abruptly hung up while the operator reached out to connect Lydia, she was able to listen to the electronic recording, know who had called, and evaluate the nature of their emergency.

  Lydia examined the list of incoming calls on the screen. She scrolled down to the time her service had contacted her. Fourteen calls were made to the serv
ice in the two minutes prior to Lydia receiving the call. She isolated them, entered several more commands, and highlighted the first on the list. She opened a side compartment, pulled out a pair of headphones, and slipped the buds into her ears. Then she touched the number she’d highlighted.

  “All Service Answering,” a young female voice announced. “How can I—”

  Lydia clicked off. It had been a male operator who put Delbe’s call through to her. She highlighted the second number on the list. Again a female operator answered. Lydia clicked to the third.

  “All Service Answering.” This time a male voice spoke. “How may I direct your call?”

  “This is Cynthia Henson. I’m trying to reach my contractor. That bathroom shower head is leaking again and I—”

  Lydia clicked off and went on to the fifth call on her list. Again, a female operator. A male operator picked up on the sixth call.

  “All Service Answering. How may I direct your call?”

  “I need to speak with my son-of-a-bitch lawyer. He’s got me paying—”

  Lydia clicked off. She glanced at the clock. Every tick meant Delbe was enduring something that terrified her. Every tock meant Delbe was closer to whatever movie had her frantic with fear. She was glad to hear a male voice pick up the seventh call on her list.

  “All Service Answering. How—”

  “Dr. Corr…Doc…Dr. Corrig…” Lydia listened as Delbe’s terrified voice interrupted the operator. She was impressed he was able to decipher who Delbe wanted through her sobs. Lydia clicked off. She had the target call. She entered more commands, this time directing her powerful communication surveillance equipment to pinpoint the location of Delbe’s call.

  The upper right screen offered a red and yellow grid against a green background. Highlighted cell towers traced the route of Delbe’s hysterical reach-out. Lydia leaned in, reexamining what she didn’t expect to see. The cell towers ended, of course, in Olympia, the location of Lydia’s office and her answering service. But it was where the relay began that surprised her. She traced her finger over the grid to make sure she was reading it correctly.