Eye of the Storm (16 page)

Paddy left the bed to gather her into his arms. She wasn’t weeping, although her entire body trembled. He wished she would cry, let out some of the pain.

But that wasn’t his Rosa. The best he could do for her—the only thing he could do for her—was hold her tight.

DRAKE WAS STILL
staring at the phone in his hand when Jimmy joined him out in the hallway. “What did Kasanov want? Were you able to get proof of life?”

“He wants her.” Drake nodded toward where Alicia waited inside her salon. “And I have a feeling she knows it.”

“Yeah, she’s playing this much too cool,” Jimmy agreed. “Why hasn’t she called her lawyer or the mayor or whoever, fry our asses already? She didn’t even seem surprised to see us.”

“I need to know what’s really going on here. What Kasanov’s game really is.”

“What did he tell you?”

Drake had an eidetic memory when it came to visuals and his auditory skills were almost as good. He repeated Kasanov’s demands verbatim. Jimmy shook his head as if trying to rattle his brain cells into forging new connections. “You’re not giving her to him, of course.”

“What makes you so certain?” Drake hated to admit it, not even to Jimmy, but if he thought for one second he could trust Kasanov, he’d sacrifice Alicia in a heartbeat.

“For one, you’re not an idiot. You know it’s some kind of set-up. For another, either your mom or Hart caught wind of you making a stupid ass move like that, they’d kick your butt from here to Norway and back again.”

Drake’s lips tightened, but he nodded a grudging agreement. “But now we know it’s personal. Something between her and Kasanov.”

“And you. Something he thinks you slacked off on—a case?”

“I never worked any case involving the Eastern European mob or Alicia Fairstone. Hell, I never even heard of Alicia until she approached my manager about
Steadfast
.”

“Yeah, but what else could it be? Romero is running all your past cases to see if there were any ties to the arson last night. Let’s see if throwing Kasanov and Alicia’s names into the mix pops something.”

“In the meantime, what do we do with her? It’s obvious Kasanov’s people are watching her.”

Jimmy scowled. “I say we arrest her as a material witness and haul her privileged ass down to the station house. With the holiday, no matter how much money she has, no judge will hear her case until Tuesday at the earliest.”

“If we’re wrong, it’s a good chance it will mean our jobs.” Drake was perfectly willing to take the risk, but he couldn’t let Jimmy. Jimmy had a family to support.

Jimmy didn’t even bother answering. Instead, he strode back into the salon and pulled his cuffs out.

<<<>>>

TURNED OUT THEY
didn’t need the handcuffs. As soon as Jimmy told Alicia they wanted to bring her in for further questioning and would arrest her as a material witness if need be, she seemed almost relieved. Instead of calling her attorney, she’d grabbed a coat and bag and followed them meekly out the door.

The only time she’d appeared at all apprehensive was during the short walk from her front door to the car. Guilty, every cop instinct in Drake’s body screamed. But of what?

He felt better once they were safely inside the Zone 7 station house. Not relaxed, but at least able to divest enough of the apprehension that had hijacked his nerves so he could concentrate. Jimmy escorted Alicia to an interview room—he was much better at getting guilty consciences to unburden their secrets than Drake was—while Drake went in search of Romero, the arson investigator.

He found him in the briefing room where they worked major cases. With Romero were Janice Kwon and Don Burroughs, fellow detectives from Drake’s squad. The room lacked the fancy technology the feds boasted but made up for it with dedication. Romero in particular was bleary eyed—he’d clearly been working the case ever since Drake left him earlier this morning.

“Cleared the list you gave me,” he greeted Drake. It was better than empty words of sympathy.

Drake looked past him to where Janice was erasing names off a white board. Burroughs worked a computer at the table across from where Romero was surrounded by stacks of paper case files and murder books. “Still can’t find any connection between any of your collars and Kasanov.”

“Add Alicia Fairstone to the mix,” Drake told them. He’d called the feds from the car and had them running their own data search, but some things wouldn’t show up in the national databases. “Kasanov called, said Alicia had to pay for a crime—something he blames me for not solving.”

“I reviewed your open cases,” Kwon said. “There’s nothing tied to Kasanov.”

Drake knew that. He and Jimmy had one of the best clearance rates in the city; the few cases they hadn’t closed were long cold. A John Doe found naked under a bridge with his skull bashed in two years ago. A junkie who’d OD’d of a hotshot delivered by her ex, but the DA said they didn’t have enough probable cause to charge the man. A carjacking that had ended with the victim in a coma for the past fourteen months.

Romero looked up from the file he was reading. “There was one thing I wanted to ask you about. A hit and skip fatality from a few months ago.”

Drake remembered the case. “The CMU student? That wasn’t my case—belongs to Jo Anderson over at traffic.”

“But your name was on a few of the witness statements.”

“Sure, I was the on-call detective that weekend, got things started. Then Jimmy and I helped out with the canvass.” He nodded to Burroughs. “Don, you were there as well.”

“Yep. Poor kid, had all sorts of reflector shit on his bike and still some sonofabitch ran him down. I remember there were no skid marks, no sign the driver stopped at all.”

“Jo’s team was able to narrow the vehicle’s make and model down to Jaguars sold in the past two years,” Romero told them.

“Good for her. Did she make an arrest?” Drake asked.

“No. But one of the Jaguar owners she spoke to was—”

Shit. “Alicia Fairstone.”

“Bingo. No sign she was involved, no damage on her vehicle—but it was days later before anyone got around to talking to her.”

Electricity surged around the room as the cops shook off their fatigue and became energized by the lead, no matter how slim.

“Tell me about the victim,” Drake said.

“Anton Lavelle, nineteen. Studying computer security. No arrests, no warrants, nothing at all in NCIC.”

Drake paced to the white board where Janice wrote Anton’s name and particulars in her precise printing. He circled the table and ended standing behind Romero, who was leafing through the case file.

Romero made it to the end of the file that contained all the handwritten notes and other paper detritus that even in this computer age still drove an investigation. “Nothing much here. Lived alone. Friends and professors all said he was a quiet guy, nice, reliable, really smart but not obsessed with anything except school and biking.”

Burroughs typed on the computer. “Nothing here either. I’ll get Jo Anderson on the line. Maybe there’s more that didn’t make it into the file.”

“Next of kin?” Drake asked

Romero flipped back to the front of the file. “That’s weird. None listed. Looks like his emergency contact was his landlady and she made all the funeral arrangements.”

Drake frowned, the myriad of pieces swirling through his brain. “Let’s see if the feds can make any sense of this.” He called Prescott. “Can you run Anton Lavelle? See if there’s a connection to Kasanov?”

“Let me give you to Taylor.”

Drake gave the FBI agent the particulars, his words punctuated by the sound of keys being tapped at lightning speed. “I’m wondering if this kid is somehow related to Kasanov.”

“No sign of it on the surface,” Taylor answered. “But you said Anton was studying cyber-security? Maybe we need to dig deeper.”

Then it clicked. “You said Kasanov was close to going out of business because he couldn’t compete with the mobs who’d turned to cyber-crime. Maybe Anton was his lifeline back to solvency?”

“Looking at the kid’s grades, he had the skills. Oh, lookee here,” the agent’s voice up ticked in excitement. “His high school transcripts are fake. So is his birth certificate. Looks like there’s no real record of Anton Lavelle before he came here to start college.”

“He had to come from somewhere.”

“Not as far as I can tell. I’m running his photo and prints through the Homeland Security facial recognition database—if he came here from another country, we’ll find it. Might take some time, though.”

Drake stared at the photo of Anton from the file. Not the postmortem one, but the one from his college ID. In his mind he superimposed Nickolai Kasanov’s image. Same cheekbones, same cleft chin, same brow line and deep-set eyes.

“I think he might be related to Kasanov. Maybe his grandson?”

“You think Kasanov sent him here to learn the skills necessary to save the family business only to have the kid get killed in a hit and run?”

“I know it’s thin, but it’s all we’ve got.” Drake paused as Janet Kwon handed him a printout. “The plot thickens. Apparently his landlady—the one who took care of his remains and was listed as his only emergency contact—doesn’t exist either.”

“Makes sense. If Anton was family, Kasanov would never send him here alone. What’s her name?”

“Natasha Mulo, age forty-nine.” He gave Taylor the particulars. “Kwon just ran her and can’t find anything, like she’s a ghost.”

“I’ll keep working here, but I’m not sure it helps—where’s our leverage to use any of this to get your mom and Hart back?”

Drake glanced at the door leading back out to the squad. “Down the hall. I hope.”

ROSA GATHERED HER
people, sending as many as she could out to warn her hidden refugees, while she, Paddy, Dex, Fernando, and Matilde, the woman who ran the brothel, gathered in the dining room and tried to prepare for the worst.

Paddy stood on the other side of Rosa as they stared out the window. A police wagon,
panier a salade
Rosa’s people called the bowl-shaped vans, passed on the street below, its wheels raising plumes of mud and water so high it was rendered invisible. Rain pelted the windowpanes, mixing with the fog. It was as if the bright and raucous Marseilles he’d come to know had suddenly been transported into a gray, barren dreamscape populated only by ghosts.

The view outside didn’t worry him as much as Rosa. Her face and body hidden from the others by the thick drapes, he sensed her dejection and despair as she pressed a hand against the glass.

Behind them the others kept up their funeral dirge, bemoaning their fate alternating with outlandish ideas for escape or protestations of how they’d never be caught alive. Empty words all of it.

The door crashed open and Bernard Lavelle, one of Rosa’s lieutenants, ran inside. “They picked up Varian Fry, his entire office staff. Most of his refugees as well.”

“All to the
Senaia
?” Fernando, the Basque, asked.

“Loaded up in a
panier a salade
and carted off to the docks.” Bernard didn’t join the bedraggled group around the table. Instead, he leaned against the still open door. Staring at Rosa, a challenge in his eyes. Paddy was glad Rosa had her back to Bernard, although her posture stiffened as if she felt his gaze.

During his time here, he’d learned that Bernard was a gypsy, like Rosa, but from a different clan. For some reason, that seemed to give the man the idea that he was superior to Rosa. More than that, Barnard often had a possessive attitude about Rosa—Paddy had come across them screaming at each other in their own language, followed by Barnard stalking away after hurling insults at Paddy.

Despite the fact that he was married, it was clear Barnard wanted more from Rosa than she was willing to offer. And that he resented Paddy for gaining her favor.

“I told you,” Dex said, his voice filled with false joviality as he reached for the last of the bottle of Armagnac. “When a dictator comes to town, the best thing to do is to flee for the country.”

“Any word on when Petain is due to arrive?” Rosa asked, still staring out into the fog.

“No,” Bernard answered. “He’s coming by private coach, so the train station is in an uproar.”

That got her attention. She turned her head to glance over her shoulder at him. “But they haven’t stopped the trains?”

He shrugged. “How could they? He might not even arrive for another day.”

She nodded even though she was already turned back, focused on the street below. It was empty—no cars, no pedestrians, not even any beggars or street urchins. Eerily silent as the fog rolled in, so thick it was impossible to see the buildings directly across from them.

“Haven’t seen a pea soup like this since I left home,” Paddy said, more to fill the silence than anything else. “Glad I’m not sailing in it, you’d be blind and lost to the selkies.”

He waited for her to ask what a selkie was, hoping to distract her with a story. Instead, she straightened, her hand pressed against the glass curling into a fist. She turned to face him, not just her head, her entire body. Stared at him as if they were the last two people alive on the planet. At that moment, the weight of her gaze on him, he rather wished they were.

Then he spotted the slow smile curling her lips and crinkling her eyes. “You, Padraic Hart,” she said in a low tone, “are the most brilliant man I’ve ever met.”

Before he could answer, she whirled to the assembly. Her energy was contagious as they all stirred to life, looking to her for salvation. Paddy marveled at the sight—these men, most battle-tested, all older than her by a half a decade or more, and they didn’t think twice about letting her lead.

“Bernard,” she ordered, “get back to the station, keep an eye on things there. Anything you can do to increase the chaos, distract the guards and police, do it. Nothing big, just little things that will keep them off-balance.”

“You can’t be thinking of using your usual route, the train to Toulouse,” he protested. “It’s too dangerous.”