The Rich and the Dead (24 page)

This coming from a woman whose closet boasted enough sequins to turn Liberace's head.

“I don't know,” Lila said carefully.

Effie chattered on as Lila surveyed the visual map of the case she had created. She had surreptitiously taken hundreds of pictures of the future murder victims at the Fisher Island Club, where all the Janus Society were members. As she looked at the photos she suddenly saw a pattern, something she'd never noticed before.

Alexei.

Now the words were spilling out of Effie's mouth at an ever-quickening pace. “And so I'm going to, like, build a moat or something, and fill it with alligators, and—”

“Effie. Stop. I gotta go. We'll figure out what to do about Alexei when I'm back, okay?”

“No, it's not okay. This guy is going to totally murder me, and you're just going to—”

“Bye, Ef.” Lila hung up the phone. She hated to do it, but she knew Effie. In a state like this, she would go on talking all night, and she most likely wouldn't remember anything in the morning. And Lila needed to focus.

She ran down the stairs to the back porch, where she remembered seeing a few fishing poles. In a basket next to the poles, she found what she was looking for—spools of fishing line. She grabbed a fluorescent yellow spool and hurried back upstairs.

With the fishing line in hand, she went to a picture of Effie at the club frowning at a clearly drunken Alexei, who had his arm draped over her bare shoulder. Lila taped the line to the wall under the picture. Then she dragged the line to a photo of Alexei and Chase standing side by side at the bar, locked in what appeared to be a serious conversation. Then a picture with Sam Logan. Then one with Oluwa. Then Vivienne. With each new connection, Lila's heart pounded harder. After fifteen minutes of this activity, she stood back in the center of the room and marveled at what she saw. The yellow line wrapped around the room. She had a picture of every member of the Janus Society with Alexei. No one else could be linked to all twelve victims.

But what could it all mean? No one in the world knew who was in the Janus Society until their massacre revealed the truth.

Then she wondered, could Alexei have been part of the society? Why not? She hadn't considered the possibility of a thirteenth member, but it made such sense she wondered why she hadn't thought of it before. Maybe Alexei had snapped and killed all of his compatriots. After all, Effie, who wasn't afraid of anyone or anything, was terrified of Alexei.

Lila knew what she had to do. She had to pack all this evidence up, get in the car, and return to Star Island as fast as possible. She had a lead again, and nothing could stop her from chasing after it.

CHAPTER 25

T
HE MOMENT SHE
got back to South Beach, Lila hurried to dig up every single bit of information about Alexei Romanovich Dortzovich.

It turned out that he was born on October 7, 1975, in a small industrial city on the Black Sea in what was then the Soviet Union. He was born into poverty and orphaned at the age of five, when both his parents died in a car crash. Alexei was raised by his uncle, an uneducated auto mechanic. When he was eighteen, he joined the newly formed Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the penniless but highly trained military that rose out of the ashes of the Soviet Union. In the army, Alexei quickly rose through the ranks to serve in the Kremlin's elite special forces unit. He was a highly trained marksman.

After serving in the army for seven years, Alexei opened a small pig farm in Odessa. The pig business made him into a millionaire. Thanks to his riches and his strong connections to the Kremlin, Alexei then got into the booming oil business, which in a little less than a decade made him one of Russia's new class of oligarchs. Alexei relocated full-time to Miami in 2012, following his rumored connection to a Russian mafia money-laundering scheme that had moved four billion euros through one of his mining companies.

Lila rented a Ford Focus and tucked her blond hair up into a Miami Dolphins baseball cap, hoping to follow Alexei throughout the day and well into the night without being noticed. But that proved harder than she had anticipated. He had at least one bodyguard with him at all times, and his driver followed standard secret service protocol to avoid possible tails. Though she had years of experience keeping a mark in her sight, she had to really struggle not to lose Alexei's black Range Rover as it wove through Miami's streets.

On Thursday afternoon, Lila followed the SUV down to Ocean Drive. The car pulled over at Eleventh Street, and Alexei jumped out of the backseat, heading straight for the boardwalk. His two bodyguards followed him. Lila drove past then and, as quickly as possible, parked her car illegally on the next side street. She hurried back to the boardwalk on foot as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself.

The streets were clogged with the usual mix of tourists, drunken college kids, young bodies exhibited in barely-there bathing suits, and the eccentric derelicts and lunatics that make up the South Beach carnival of human beauty and grotesquerie. The glitter and doom of Miami were on full display.

Lila knew that Alexei wouldn't easily spot her in this mass of humanity, but she worried that he would, once again, elude her. It took her about twenty minutes of frantically searching the crowds before she caught sight of one of his bodyguards, an enormously tall and muscular man with dark black, pockmarked skin. Then Lila spotted Alexei. He was sitting on a park bench, flanked by his security, and talking to another man. Keeping her distance, she walked closer. She felt even more sure that her hunch about Alexei was right when she saw who he was sitting with—the one and only Chase Haverford.

Even with the crowds concealing her as they pulsed and pushed their way around her, Lila couldn't get close enough to the bench to overhear what Alexei and Chase were talking about. But she could see them well enough to know that they were arguing. Alexei's face was contorted with rage, his hands gesticulating wildly. Chase sat with his aviator sunglasses on and his head mostly down, never looking directly at Alexei. He appeared jumpy and self-conscious, like a man praying not to be recognized. Then Alexei sprang off the bench, spinning toward Chase.

Lila heard him shout, “You are not the one who refuses me, asshole! Fucking, cocksucking asshole!”

At that, Chase stood up and, without even throwing a glance toward Alexei, walked away. The Russian stood there, stunned, his arms hanging heavy at his sides. Lila hustled back to Ocean Drive, where she passed by Alexei's SUV. His driver was in the car, leaning out the window trying to grab the attention of any one of the bikini-clad girls strutting by on wobbly high-heeled shoes.

F
OR A FEW
frenzied days in early December, Miami Beach turns its distracted attentions to the Art Basel festival, during which every artist, collector, gallerist, and artsy wannabe descends upon the city to buy, sell, pontificate, posture, and drink headache-inducing cheap white wine, all while complaining vigorously about the degraded and debased state of the art world. The convention center becomes a roiling sea of people in ridiculous glasses, eye-rolling and air-kissing and arguing. No one loved it more than Javier Martinez, who always hosted a festival kickoff party at his gallery.

“Darlings! Hello!” Javier exclaimed as Effie and Lila walked into the packed gallery. The cavernous main room had no light save for a few glass-encased voodoo candles weakly flickering on the floor. Turkish psychedelic music played so loudly that Lila could feel it reverberating through her body. “So glad you could make it,” Javier said as he gave them both perfectly executed air kisses.

As Lila's eyes adjusted to the dark, Javier finally came into clearer view. A dandy at the most casual of times, he was fully turned out tonight in a tight-fitting white suit with a robin's-egg blue silk shirt underneath, unbuttoned to his sternum, and a silver handkerchief tied jauntily around his neck. He looked like a perfect cross between Tom Ford and Tony Montana.

“Of course we're here!” Effie squealed. “Yours is always the best party of this whole dreadful week.”

“No party is a party without you, Effie, darling. Enjoy yourself! Be back in a second,” Javier called over his shoulder to them as he went on to air-kiss a tiny Japanese woman with a shock of red hair sitting stiffly upon her head.

Effie grabbed Lila's hand. “Let's circulate.”

Lila was still anxious to figure out Javier's connection to Sandoval, but doing it at this moment was an impossibility. She could barely hear herself think, let alone pick Javier's brain for clues.

Scattered throughout the gallery were eerily realistic life-size wax statues of people that, like the candles, were slowly burning from the top down. The human candles gave the place a haunted feel as Lila navigated through the rooms in the semidarkness, not knowing which people were real and which would, upon closer inspection, reveal their lit wicks and collapsing skulls.

Lila heard Effie gasp and turned to find her pointing at Alexei, who was on the other side of the room sandwiched between two scantily clad women gyrating to the music.

“I fucking hate that about Miami,” Effie said. “The moment you want to avoid someone, they're everywhere you look.”

Though Lila pretended she was unhappy to see Alexei, she was secretly thrilled he was here. He was the first real break she'd had in the case since she stepped out of that North Miami warehouse, and she needed to get as close to him as she could.

“Let me go talk to him,” Lila said. “I'll see if I can get any information out of him about buying the Star Island house.”

Effie grabbed her arm. “Camilla, don't.” Lila was taken aback when she saw that Effie actually looked frightened.

“You know me, right?” Effie asked. “There's not a lot of things that scare me. Not a lot of people I would back down from, right? Well, that man,” Effie said, gesturing to Alexei, “that man scares the shit out of me. Yes, sure, I want to know about his plans for the house, but I don't need you to find that out for me. That's what my lawyers are for.”

“Oh, quit it, Effie. Let me see what my feminine charms can do,” Lila said, assuming the pose of an empty-headed sex kitten—single finger on her pouting lips, hips jutted out to the side.

“Please,” Effie said, throwing her hands up in exasperated disgust. “Comrade Back Hair is all yours. Just know that I warned you.”

As Lila crossed the room toward Alexei, she could feel his eyes on her even as he was groping the woman pressed up against him. Lila made eye contact with him, holding for a few beats too long, letting him know she was interested. She noticed a pulse of excitement run through him as he returned her gaze. Lila stopped a few feet away, pretending to admire one of the human candles but continually looking in his direction. The wax statue was of a man sitting in an office chair. He had on a gray suit, and his head was melted all the way to the bottom of his nose.

Lila was startled when she felt someone standing behind her wrap his arm around her waist, which caused her to flinch, which, in turn, caused the arm to wrap tighter. The stench of a body sour from too much alcohol flooded her nose.

“I see you looking at me,” Alexei's thick Russian accent whispered into her ear.

“Don't flatter yourself,” Lila said, using both hands to try to pry his arm off her body. “I was just looking at the art.”

An enormous guffaw burst from Alexei's heavy lips. He still held her tightly. She could feel his crotch pressing into her. “This you call art?” he said, pointing to the flickering statue. He took his index finger and thumb, pinched them together, and shoved them into Lila's mouth, then withdrew them. Before she could say anything, he pinched the wick of the sculpture with his dampened fingers, extinguishing the flame.

“Hey, guy,” a shaggy man in skinny jeans said as he put his hand on Alexei's shoulder, “you can't touch the art.” Alexei whirled around, letting go of Lila, and forcefully pushed the man, who stumbled to the floor.