Claudine (11 page)

“I’ll try to remember not to go topless when I’m out shopping, then. Too bad. With the hot weather coming up and all.”

He straightened up. “Listen, ma’am. I’m sorry this happened to you in our hotel. We’ll put you up in one of our exclusive suites for however long you were planning to stay. I’ll call a porter right now to take up your things.”

“My room’s across the hall,” Andrei said. “I’ll move to the suite as well.”

He handed Andrei his card. “Here’s my contact info. Hope the rest of your visit is—uneventful.”

“I don’t want to stay here tonight if we can help it,” Maria said to Andrei on their way to the suite. “It’s too late for the red-eye. Can you check and see if there’s anything else available?”
She wanted to put as much distance between them and the grisly doll as possible.

Andrei looked up the flight schedules on his phone. “Everything’s gone. Unless you’re willing to transfer and spend a couple of delightful hours at O’Hare, we’ll have to stick with the flight we’ve already got booked for noon tomorrow.”

She sighed. “Okay. That will have to do. Thanks for keeping the cops out of this.”

Andrei put his hand on her arm. “Maria, you can’t take any more appointments until we find out who’s doing this.”

She shook him off. “No way. I’m damned if I’m going to let this stop me.” Despite her bravado, in her heart she knew Andrei was right. But there were no leaves of absence in a business like hers, which was dependent on word of mouth and acutely sensitive to rumor. Taking a break would spell the end of her career. She refused to be forced into it.

As soon as they reached the suite, she ran a hot bath and sank thankfully into its foamy depths. She doubted she’d be able to sleep at all for the rest of the night and a bath was the next best thing. She set the water as hot as she could stand it, and the blood rose to the surface of her skin, turning it pink. When she reached for the soap she saw that the feather-shaped scar on her wrist had gone red with the heat. It stood out on her arm like a brand. She sat in the bath until the water cooled, then got out and toweled her hair dry. She emerged into the sitting area of the suite wrapped in one of the hotel’s fluffy white terry cloth robes.

Lillian still wore her white blouse and brown slacks but Andrei had changed into lounging pants, leaving his torso bare. A glimmer
of humor broke through her grim mood. She was so used to seeing Andrei in formal attire that the sight of his hard abs and broad shoulders almost seemed improper. Very enticing, she thought. She’d never cared for the bulging pecs of Schwarzenegger wannabes. Andrei was strong but sleek. Much more appealing.

He looked up and smiled when she entered the room. For a moment, she was taken aback by the sensual, gut-stirring response that simple gesture produced in her. Nonsense, she said to herself, any woman would find him appealing, half-undressed like that.

Lillian had ordered snacks from room service: cold sodas, a plate of nacho chips and a bowl brimming with popcorn. They had a movie ready to go on the Blu-ray:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
; Tolkien was one of her favorites. Maria felt her throat catch. It was after two in the morning, and though they both must be dead tired, they’d arranged this to help get her mind off her troubles.

“What a great idea—thanks, you two.” They’d left a space for her to curl up on the oversized hotel sofa. She slipped in between them. Andrei took the remote and hit Play.

Andrei hadn’t seen the film before but Lillian had watched it ten times. “My dream,” she said, pointing to the images of the Shire, “is to live in a little cottage with a garden, in a quaint English village.”

“You can actually visit Hobbiton now, you know,” Maria said. “Although you’d have to go all the way to New Zealand.”

“Oh, good. I’ll go there someday, then. Maybe find a boyfriend as short as me.”

They all laughed; it helped to banish the earlier ugliness. Maria put her bare feet on Lillian’s lap and leaned against
Andrei’s shoulder as they watched Frodo and Bilbo hatch their grand plans.

M
aria sat up with a jerk. She’d drifted off. Andrei’s arm lay protectively around her, his hand resting on her waist. He reached over and swept her hair off her brow. “You dropped off right before they reached Rivendell.”

“Did Lillian go to bed?”

“Ages ago. No doubt dreaming of little men. Good thing there’s one of us to keep watch,” he joked. Andrei’s former sullenness seemed to have vanished and she was happy to have his goodwill back. She suddenly realized her robe had fallen open, revealing the tops of her breasts. How long had she lain that way? She grabbed the folds of terry cloth and closed them.

When he ran his hand down her hip, it felt warm, exciting. “Not to worry. Nothing I haven’t seen before,” he said.

And yet it was different. The two of them were alone. And against her better judgment, Maria felt turned on, wanting to feel his hands on her bare skin. “I’m going to climb into bed,” she said. She got up abruptly and, still holding the lapels of her robe shut, gave him a chaste peck on the cheek. “You’ll wake us in lots of time for the flight?”

“Sure thing,” he said. But Maria thought she’d caught a fleeting look of disappointment on his face.

T
hey’d been away from New York for three days. Maria now counted eleven text messages from Reed Whitman. At first they were rather sweet, then increasingly insistent, and finally
demanding. Why hadn’t he heard from her? Was she avoiding him? Was she no longer interested in his help? Back at home she dashed off a reply saying she’d been busy and would love to see him sometime soon. That she’d be in touch. The truth was she felt ambivalent about Reed. No question he had a magnetic draw, like a star pulling lesser planets into his sphere. And yet she found his possessiveness bordered on the claustrophobic, his self-confidence a little oppressive.

All thoughts of Reed disappeared when she picked up her voice mail messages. Trainor wanted to see her as soon as possible and this time, at his office. She left a message to say she’d see him in the morning.

CHAPTER
12

Maria chose her outfit carefully, conservative clothes that still made the most of her physical charms: a black pencil skirt and soft, dove gray sweater. She stuck her feet into low heels and donned her sunglasses. To act the part of an ingénue convincingly, she’d have to turn in one of her best Claudine performances. If you were going to outright flaunt the law as she did, you had to make sure all the appearances lined up perfectly. For this reason she was scrupulous about reporting all her earnings to the IRS under the umbrella of her event management company.

That fact gave her a little comfort as she approached the three-story redbrick building. The 110th Precinct building on Forty-third Street sat in a nondescript section of Queens, just verging on the squalid. When she gave her name at the front desk, a uniformed cop ushered her into a bland second-floor interview room with brown veneer walls and faded industrial
carpeting. Five minutes later, Trainor and da Silva walked in and sat at the table across from her.

Maria’s stomach was already in her throat. She kept reminding herself she’d done nothing wrong, at least insofar as their investigation was concerned. It didn’t help.

“Good morning.” Trainor said. “Thanks for coming.”

Did the man ever smile? she wondered. “Whatever I can do to move things along—I’m glad to.”

“Good. Help me with something,” Trainor said.

She folded her hands in her lap, hoping he wouldn’t notice her nervousness and waited for him to continue.

“I’ll get straight to it. The murdered girl found with your ID was a prostitute working in the Bronx.” He flipped through a notebook that he’d brought in with him. “She was very young, probably trafficked into the state, and Romanian, just like you. Interesting coincidence—don’t you think?”

She had to stop herself from shrinking when he looked her straight in the eyes. She put on an engaging smile to hide how much his question had flustered her. “What? You think all Romanians know each other or something?” Trainor still didn’t crack a smile, so she tried another tack. “I was six years old when I was adopted. I’m an American citizen now. Surely you’re not suggesting any link between us just because we come from the same country?”

His lips tightened with his next words. “You’re associated with an Andrei Baranov—that right?”

Andrei? She thought of the scrupulous records she kept for the IRS. Andrei was listed as her business manager and his salary as an expense. They must have taken out a warrant to search those records.

Da Silva spoke up. “What’s Baranov’s relation to you?”

“Why are you concerned about Andrei?”

“Let’s just say he has ironclad ties to the Russian mafia in New York State,” Trainor said. “As in, one of their right-hand men. We’re talking tax evasion, contraband armaments and, what’s relevant here, the sex trade. Not very nice company for a grad student, is he?”

“I had no idea.”

Before she could get another word out, da Silva jumped back in. “You’re running some kind of ‘business enterprise’—if that’s the right term. Quite a different story from the one you told us at your apartment. I hope you’re not going to deny it this time.”

This was beginning to feel less like an interview and more like an interrogation, as though she’d made all the wrong moves in a chess game and her queen was in peril. If they started investigating her, instead of the murder, she was finished. “I
am
a postgrad student at Yale. I can prove it.” She rummaged through her purse and slapped her student ID on the table. “To support myself, I run an event management company. Andrei assists me with that. And I do performance art in that context.”

Da Silva snickered. “They’re calling it performance art nowadays? That’s rich.”

Maria ignored him and stared at Trainor. “Am I on trial or something here? I don’t get why all these questions are about me.”

“Smudging the truth isn’t helpful, Ms. Lantos. The dead girl didn’t steal your ID. It was planted on her body. We think she was targeted because she was a young, beautiful Romanian who sold sex. No accident she resembled you so closely—was it?” She was about to protest but Trainor raised a hand to silence her. “This murder was a message to you. Now, I want you to think
long and hard about my next question, okay? Have you crossed someone in the past, stiffed someone?”

Da Silva sniggered and Trainor shot him a warning glance.

“Are they paying you or your friend Andrei back? If so, you’ve picked a dangerous guy to get on the wrong side of.”

Maria cast her eyes down and said nothing for a moment, allowing a few tears to slide out. “This whole thing is terrifying. I’m afraid all the time now. If I had even the tiniest clue who it was, I’d tell you. Believe me.” She bit her lip and gave Trainor a beseeching look.

His voice softened a little. “Well, I want you to think hard about it. Let’s come up with some names.”

“I’ve tried and tried. I can’t think of anyone. Don’t you have any leads at all? No fingerprints? No DNA?”

“We’re working on it.” Clearly he had no intention of sharing any information with her. He tapped his pen on his notebook. He had large, powerful hands with blunt nails. “We’re going to need your computer,” he said. “And your cell phone.”

She blanched. “Don’t you have to get a warrant for something like that?”

“Not if the person concerned is anxious to be cooperative and gives those electronics to us voluntarily. Like you just said you wanted to be,” da Silva added.

She had no choice. If she insisted on a warrant, she’d just be digging herself in deeper. “All right.” She opened her bag and got out her tablet, reached into a side pocket for her cell phone and handed them both to Trainor.

“This is it?” he asked. “Just this tablet and your phone?”

“I have an old desktop at home that I keep only for word processing. All my wireless goes through the tablet or the cell. I
can always get a new phone but I have to have my tablet back. My research and writing’s on it.”

Trainor waved his large hand. The hairs stuck out on his rough knuckles. “I’ll get one of our clerks to download it all. You want to stick around? Shouldn’t take long, then you can have them back.”

Maria followed Trainor glumly as he escorted her to the door. She tramped downstairs to the station lobby to wait. For an hour she watched the comings and goings absently, the cops casting odd glances her way. Her pulse pounded erratically. If they suspected she was a prostitute, why hadn’t they arrested her? Did they want to expose her well-known clients first? The stories about Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss flashed through her mind. While Fleiss ended up in federal prison, her male clients were given a pass. Fleiss’s privileged background made her a target for the other inmates and she’d been forced to fight for her life in jail. If Maria ended up in prison, she’d fall apart with the shame of it all.

Was that her stalker’s motive after all? Fleiss had been outed by rivals. Had one of Maria’s clients hidden his savage side? Become spiteful and hatched this whole scheme to destroy her? She’d been so careful. But it happened. In the early days she’d known call girls who’d been ruined by vengeful clients or other prostitutes.

A female clerk interrupted her thoughts. “From Detective Trainor,” she said, holding out a clear plastic bag containing her tablet and cell phone. Maria stammered her thanks and hurried out of the station.

She congratulated herself on two things. She’d been scrupulous about using her tablet only for school-related work. They’d
find nothing of any interest on it. And she’d been smart enough to take her second cell phone to the interview, the one she used primarily for personal contacts. Her business cell, with a completely different server, was safe at the apartment. She rarely even looked at it. Andrei managed the client list and the correspondence. She’d wipe it clean the second she got home. She and Andrei kept their phones synced and Andrei maintained a digital file with all of their client information. He’d assured her it was deeply buried and totally inaccessible to anyone but the two of them.