We came together, in a fierce messy climax.
Chapter 12 - Watching the fights
I texted Katherine I was going to be late while Skye was distracting me trying to do a basic knot on my tie. I walked into the Police Station with a smile on my face although my shift had officially started an hour earlier.
The upside of having no close friends on the Force was that no one asked me why I was smiling. When I got to our desks, I saw my partner's abandoned cup of coffee. It wasn't usual for me to get to work after her, but I could not have a better reason to be late. The note on my desk in Katherine's hurried handwriting just said "Captain's office".
When I stepped through the opened door both of them looked up from the screen with the same guilty expression on their faces, and the Captain slammed closed the lid of the laptop. What the hell were they watching? And why had they left the door open?
"The note said…" I tried to justify myself.
Katherine came next to me, and they both tried to act like nothing out of the ordinary happened.
"We got the DNA results for the skin under the victim's fingernails," Katherine said. "It wasn't Ben Stevenson, but it was a close relative."
"The warrant came from the judge. You have permission to dig up Stevenson's first wife," Captain Jackson said.
We were all adults. If they wanted to pretend there was nothing weird about the two of them huddled up before a computer screen, I wasn't going to make trouble for them. The two of them were the lower part of the top three people in the world I care about.
"We'll get on it," I said and turned to leave.
"Robinson, can you give us the room?"
My partner looked at the Captain with an inquiring 'Are you sure?' look that I knew all too well. He nodded, and Katherine walked out, closing the door behind her.
It didn't seem to be something work related. We'd been working together for almost ten years, but Captain Jackson and I had nothing outside work to talks about.
"I had a call from OCD. You were the lead detective on the murder of Tatiana Urmanova a few months ago. They might have to call you on the stand during the trial of the people who sanctioned her murder."
Not excellent news, but there was no reason for the Captain to tell me this alone. He couldn't know about my relationship with Skye. Could he? The guy had excellent instincts. Excellent for the most part, I amended my assessment thinking about my partner's crush on him.
"Ok," I said and waited for him to go on.
"The OCD sent us recordings of the fights."
"That's nice of them. They said they didn't have anything when we were actually investigating the murder and we were interrogating one of their undercover officers. Ok, I'll look-"
"One of ours," the Captain corrected me. "Detective Walker was under my command. She was only on loan to the OCD."
Detective Walker. Joanna Blanchard. My Skye. The woman was like Russian nesting doll. I wondered who she was under all those covers.
"You don't have to look at the videos at all. They didn't show you the recordings during your investigation, so there's no reason for you to watch any of the fights."
My eyes snapped to the laptop he and Katherine were looking at earlier. Tatiana was a different weight class, but she was on the same circuit as Skye. "Any of the fights." The OCD had sent more than Tatiana's fights. My mind jumped to the conclusion: Skye's fights.
"Walker?" I asked
He nodded.
"You worked closely with her, and I wanted to give you a heads up. The recordings they sent us… they're not just Urmanova's fights. They sent us all the fights they taped. The videos include the fighters' names and the dates in the titles. My advice is not to watch any of them, but if you do, watch only Urmanova's fights. "
"That bad?"
The Captain looked down, uncomfortable. "Yeah."
"Thank you for telling me, Sir."
He pushed a button and popped the DVD out of the laptop. He put it in its case and handed it to me.
At my desk, Katherine had the look of someone who was getting ready to talk a jumper off the ledge. She probably guessed there was something between Skye and me.
"I told him not to give it to you at all," she said.
"Why?"
"Why? Why? Because you're going to watch them."
"Are you seriously suggesting that I shouldn't? There isn't a day in my life when I don't see the results of the violence our fellow humans inflict on each other. I'm sure I can take looking at some fights."
"It's not the same. We don't see people getting killed. We see them when they're beyond fear or pain. And those are not just some fights," she said, looking pointedly at me.
So, she knew about Skye. Then she should also know that there was no way I could just walk away like the see no evil wise monkey.
"Katherine, come on! I was with you when we arrested her after she'd been tortured. When Bachman sew her wounds. I saw her in hospital when that whole mess ended. Why are you treating me like I'm a debutante who might faint at the sight of blood? "
"Because you care about the girl. And once you see that, you'll never be able to unsee it."
I did care about the girl. But I wouldn't be the cop I was if I could refuse to see the truth. And I wouldn't be the man for Skye, if I couldn't handle whatever she'd been through while undercover.
"At least don't watch it here," she said. "Go to our case room and close the door."
She was scaring me. I did as she said, I took the DVD and I walked in the room where we had all the materials for our current case. There was a computer hooked to a screen on the wall. I looked at the video files, and wondered if there was any reason to look at Tatiana's fights. The Captain was right, if I hadn't seen them during the investigation, it would do any good to know about them now. On the stand, I'd talk about my investigation.
I looked for Joanna Blanchard's first fight, and pressed play. It was hard to watch Skye getting hurt, but she won her first fight in under fifteen minutes. She won the second one in five minutes. The third in under ten minutes. I thought I was getting used to seeing her get hit and hit someone else. To see blood on her face. To hear the thud of the full contact between bones and flesh.
During her sixth fight with a woman whom the announcer had called 'The Tigress', Skye got hit really bad. She didn't defend against the kick to the side of her head and she fell to the floor. She got another two vicious elbows to the side of her head before she managed to scramble to her feet. Her opponent lunged at her again, but by some miracle, Skye avoided the punch, and turned the tables. She took the other woman down and they rolled around on the floor until she got behind her opponent. With a level of strength that didn't seem natural, the Tigress stood up, with Skye on her back. Skye stayed there, her arms and legs wrapped around the other's body as if she was glued to her. Despite the numerous and violent attempts she made to throw her off, Skye didn't let go. The Tigress rammed Skye's back into the steel cage again, and again, and again. I could see the pain on Skye's features. I expected her to fall to let go of the woman's neck and fall to the ground.
My eyes were fixed on Skye's face. I was gripping the edges of the desk, praying that it would end soon. The Tigress pushed back with ferocity, pressing Skye's back into the steel cage. Skye went very pale and opened her mouth to scream in agony. I didn't even notice the falling woman tapping Skye's forearm. I just saw that the referee running to them and placing a hand on Skye's forearm. Skye let go and both women fell to the floor. The crowd roared and only Skye stood up. And then I saw that the back of her t-shirt was soaked in blood.
When the referee raised her arms and the voice boomed announcing the winner, I looked at the time stamp, and I felt sick to the stomach. I remembered that night. I had fucked her over the table where I had Sunday dinner with my family. I remembered guessing there was something wrong with her back. I hadn't thought it was anything as bad as what I saw.
That had been her last visit to my house. The last time w
e had sex until the day before.
Although I didn’t think it was possible, the seventh fight was worse. I watched Skye get beaten to a pulp, and losing her first fight. The eighth fight ended in another loss for Skye, but at least it was mercifully short.
Chapter 13 - Viktor's shadow
The time code of the last Joanna Blanchard video was the same night I got a call from an OCD agent, John Deacon. Skye's handler. Apparently, Skye had given him my name as the only person in New York she trusted with her safety. Deacon told me that Skye had to remain undercover for her own protection, and that no one could know who she really was. The OCD suspected that people in their own organization worked for the Russians.
I kept staring at the date of the video, unwilling to press play. I knew the consequences of that match. The swelling on her temple. The dislocated jaw. The broken cheekbone. The internal injuries that took hours of surgery to repair. But I had to watch it.
The match was every bit as brutal as I had feared. And it was painfully one-sided. I knew that Skye had entered the match with cuts and bruises from the torture. The signs didn't show, her torturers had known just where to cut her so that the marks would be hidden under the shorts. I had peeked when Bachman sew her wounds. I had seen the same cuts on Tatiana's upper thighs. The autopsy report listed so many broken organs, I had lost count. Luckily, some of the damage was postmortem. I clenched my jaw and kept watching. Skye was getting beaten up and in an official game, with decent rules, the referee might have intervened. No one stepped in, and she kept taking the punishment. Several times I thought she was done. I couldn't believe that Skye won. I never thought about the result of the match. I was out of my mind when I had to stay outside the operation room, waiting to hear if she survived. Then waiting by her bedside, praying that she would wake up.
When the referee raised her arm, I could see that some of the blood seeping through her shorts. Some of the cuts Doctor Bachman had sewn earlier that day had opened up. Blood trickled down the outside of her thighs.
When she walked out, I noticed that Viktor Petrov was at the door of the cage when it opened. He was one of the men responsible for her torture. Three days after that fight I had arrested him and Ilya Mishin for Tatiana's murder. I expected the video to end when something at the edge of the screen caught my eye.
I had to replay the last few seconds of the recording several times to be sure of what I saw. Skye walked out of the cage with slow, unsteady steps. She seemed to favor her left leg, and when she swayed, Petrov caught her. He held her upright.
Then he cupped her head in his huge hands for a few seconds. He asked her something. I couldn't tell if she answered. He kissed her on the lips and Skye folded to his chest. She might have fainted, or her legs might have given out. The last thing I could see before the video cut off was Petrov picking her up in his arms.
I went back through the other matches, and I spotted Viktor Petrov in the front row or next to the cage door each time. The video always cut off before Skye exited the cage, so there were no other images with the two of them. But the one I had seen was more than enough.
I ignored Katherine's questioning look when I came out. I tried to dive back in the Stevenson case, to look over the list of names and call them to ask for the information I needed. For the first time in years, my mind didn't obey me. It kept showing me images from Skye's matches. And the kiss.
It probably hadn't meant anything. Besides, what right did I have to be jealous? She had done more than I could expect by coming out of that world to see me when she did. So what if she had found comfort in a guy who turned out to be a murderer?
And yet… to kiss him after he had tortured her… The man who had killed her roommate? The woman who was the closest thing she had to a friend in that world… The reasonable part of me said that she hadn't kissed him. He had kissed her and she'd been too hurt to push him away. Or maybe she was smart enough to know that she couldn't afford to piss of a killer while she was so weak.
The unreasonable part of me was seething with jealousy. She hadn't come to my bed since her sixth match. She had broken all contact with me for twenty-five days. Maybe she hadn't needed me because she had found someone more appropriate to satisfy her needs.
I told myself that even if she did have sex with him, it didn't mean anything. All that mattered was that she had come out alive from an undercover mission into the Russian mafia.
It had always bothered me the leniency the OCD had shown the two killers. Tatiana Urmanova's murder was solved, but her killers had gotten away with a penalty far easier than they deserved. I wondered if Skye's personal feelings had anything to do with the OCD's willingness to give them a pass on a gruesome murder.
I shook my head. I was losing my mind. Skye couldn't advocate for a light sentence for a man who tortured her. Could she?
*
It turned out that my testimony wasn't necessary in the case of the Russian mafia bosses. Skye on the other hand spent several hours on the stand, three days in a row. She called me from her hotel room each evening, asked me about my day and my cases, and she listened. She never asked me to come over again, and I respected her wish.
The same thing happened each of the three nights. She would fall asleep while I spoke. When I knew she was asleep, I whispered.
"Good night, baby."
She called me from Los Angeles a week later. I could hear the change in her voice. She had shaken off some of the darkness. We talked about her new position in Narcotics. I shared some of my own experience working in that department.
"Good bye, Nick," she said at the end.
"Good bye, Skye."
I wondered if that was going to be the last time I heard from her.
Chapter 14 - The Russian connection
We were in Captain Jackson's office, with the door closed. The dead body we investigated was just a head that had been delivered to our station in a gift box. It didn't take us long to identify her. When we got to the victim's apartment, all we found were traces of lye in the bathtub.
"This has the markings of a Russian mafia hit," Katherine said.
"If the Russians put a hit on him. The killer is probably already out of our jurisdiction," I said.
"What do you propose doing?" the Captain asked us.
"We should reach out to our contacts in OCD. They might know something about it," I suggested, thinking about calling John Deacon.
"The OCD will give you the run around for weeks," the Captain said. "Why don't you try talking to someone who knows the Russian mafia from the inside."
"I don't think detective Walker has this level of information," I said.
"The focus of her investigation was the illegal fights, and the unlicensed gambling." Katherine added.
I was glad she said that. Maybe Skye could help, but I didn't want to call her. I did not want to ask her anything that had to do with that horrible mission.
"I wasn't thinking of Walker," Captain Jackson said. "You are the ones who arrested Urmanova's murders. People in that line of work have a habit of knowing each other by reputation. If they recognize the signature, they might give you a name."
"That's right," Katherine agreed. "And since they're both in our backyard, we can offer them some perks if the DA agrees."
Perks? I didn't feel like doing any favors for the monsters who tortured two girls and murdered one of them. Even if I didn't really care about Tatiana on a personal level, the idea of making life easier for her murders bothered me in principle. It bothered me in a very concrete way that they were also the men who tortured Skye. And one of them… one of them was maybe my rival.
It was insane to think that. There was no competition between me and Viktor Petrov. For one thing, probably none of us meant anything to Skye other than a temporary release from fear. I shoved the thoughts away. Skye was out of my life.
We agreed that we were going to talk to the DA and visit Viktor and Ilya in prison with something to offer in return for their cooperation.
>
While we waited for a response from the DA's office, I took the time to look over the visitors' log. I was relieved to find that Skye was not on it. Another relief came after checking the calls log. All numbers were accounted for; relatives, lawyers, known figures from the Bratva. Nothing from Skye.
*
Viktor Petrov looked even more fit than the last time we met. Even beneath the prison uniform, I could see that he had bulked up since we arrested him. Especially the arms and chest seemed huge. He probably didn't get much chance to exercise his legs in his tiny cell.
"I am detective Woods. This is detective Robinson. We'd like to ask you some questions about some former associates."
He looked at me intently, not even glancing at Katherine. Thinking back at the number of conjugal visits he got, he probably wasn't desperate to be near a woman. I tried to put a label on his stare. He was curious about me. I moved through the room as I sometimes did during interrogations, to keep the suspect off balance. His eyes followed me, measuring me up and down with cold, calculating interest. I wondered if life in prison had changed his sexual proclivities or maybe it had simply given him an excuse to see the other side. I discarded the hypothesis. His interest wasn't sexual, but it was personal.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
I sensed Katherine being just as surprised as me. He didn't refuse from the beginning. No macho posturing about not being a rat. I saw the dark and cold intelligence behind the huge muscles. He wanted information from us, he didn't have to answer anything. There wasn't anything he could do with it. The Russians knew we were investigating the case.
Haunting Woods Page 5
