The Red Book

by James Patterson

  “It’s okay. He’s good to the kids. We’re making it work. Just—y’know, you wanna grab a drink sometime, I might answer the phone.” Giving me an out in case I’m not interested. I might be, but not right now.

  “Okay, so listen up,” Marsha says to me. “This isn’t a joke, this guy. I didn’t dig all that deep outside of the financial filings, which is what you needed me for. But I saw enough. And what I saw, well…” She nods toward the manila envelope in my hand. “The KB in KB Investors Group is a Ukrainian named Kostyantin Boholyubov.”

  “That’s a mouthful.”

  “Yeah, nobody can pronounce it. They call him Boho for short.”

  That’s what Valerie called him, in her attorney notes. Boho.

  “This guy ran the Ukraine secret police for a decade after the Soviet Union fell,” she says. “Supported the government, suppressed opposition. Surveillance, interrogations, torture, rape rooms. Had a militia that terrorized the country. Kinda guys who don’t knock before they come in. Kinda guys make people disappear, and nobody asks why, or they’re next. Amnesty International practically opened up a satellite office in Kiev to complain about him and his thugs.”

  “And I’ll bet nothing stuck.”

  “Not really, no. And now he’s gone legit. On paper, at least. Has his hands in a lotta stuff. Real estate, for one. Also runs a steel export company. Ships it to a lotta places, including America.”

  I wonder if there’s more than steel on those ships. “That must be why Nathan Stofer squeezed him out of the Stratton Tower project,” I say.

  She turns, gives me a look. “He didn’t squeeze nobody outta nuthin’.”

  “No, huh?”

  “KB Investors was one of the largest investors in the Stratton Tower,” she says. “Boho made millions.”

  “No shit. So the untimely death of Mr. Stofer—”

  “Was pretty friggin’ timely for General Boholyubov,” she says.

  “Okay, thanks, Marsh.”

  She touches my arm. “This guy keeps a personal security detail, Billy. When the secret police was broken up, he hired most of them. This guy doesn’t have a sense of humor. So you’re gonna step into his world? I’d bring body armor and a SWAT team.”

  Chapter 72

  VALERIE, THE GUN under her chin.

  Don’t come any closer, she says.

  What are you doing? Don’t—put the gun down, honey. Please, please put it away—

  She’s gone, isn’t she? You wouldn’t be here in the middle of the day—you wouldn’t have left the hosp—

  Yes, she’s gone. She just passed.

  And I wasn’t there.

  Give me the gun, Valerie. Give it to me.

  I can’t do this anymore.

  Yes, you can. You know what you can do? You can help me plan the funeral. So we can honor her, together. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

  I…can’t.

  Yes, you can. Give me the gun.

  Don’t—don’t come any closer.

  Give me the gun, Valerie. We’ll work through this together. I promise. Just—

  What are you—no, don’t come any—

  Give it to me!

  “No.” I pop off the bed, fall to the carpet. Pull the comforter off the bed and wrap it around me, trying to contain an uncontrollable shiver, the fog of the dream fading.

  No. That’s not what happened. I wasn’t there.

  No; they killed you, Valerie. They killed you.

  They killed you, and I’m gonna prove it.

  Chapter 73

  EVENTUALLY, THE chill inside me wanes, my pulse decelerates. I’m nothing but dried sweat. I grab my phone off the nightstand. Eight o’clock. Shit.

  I stumble to the shower, blast the hot water, run a dry razor over my face, let the water scald me, wash it all away.

  IAB and fucking COPA—the Civilian Office of Police Accountability—are done interviewing me. Don’t see how they can come back negative on me for shooting those two on the rooftop, guys who were about to shoot either me or Carla, all while protecting a major heroin mill, but with civilians and the suits at IAB, who collectively have probably never once had a gun pointed at them, you never know.

  I roll in at a quarter past nine.

  “Happened to you?” says the intake sergeant, Vitrullo. All these Italians behind their desks while the potato eaters go out and get shot at.

  “Shoulda seen the other guy.”

  “Package for you,” he says. “Your partner took it.”

  She’s not at her desk upstairs. I find her in an interview room, watching a—

  Watching a video on the flat-screen.

  A courier approaches the SUV at the curb. Shots fired from the back window, the screen panning wide to show a massacre.

  I’m watching the K-Town shooting.

  Carla hears me, turns. “You freakin’ believe this?”

  “What…” I say. “How…”

  She shows me a big brown wrapper, words in black marker: Detectives Harney and Griffin.

  “Someone dropped it off at the front desk,” she says. “Must have seen our names in the papers, knew it was our case.” She holds up the remote and rewinds. “You gotta see this from the beginning.”

  She rewinds it. A 4Runner turning off Van Buren onto Kilbourn, heading north. Pulling up to the curb outside Shiv’s house, the courier in the Bears jersey—Frisk, they called him—approaching the vehicle. Camera zooms in on the license plate, tells us what we already knew. Then the camera moves up and tells us something we didn’t.

  Zooming in on the front-seat occupants. The windows slightly tinted, but the video quality far superior to anything a POD camera could give us, good enough to see two guys wearing baseball caps.

  Two white guys.

  “Those look like Imperial Gangster Nation to you?” she says. “Like they’d be partners with Prince Valentine and Junior Peppers?”

  No, they don’t.

  But they do look like the guys who shot at me two nights ago inside Shiv’s house.

  She lets the video keep playing, an explosion of gunfire from the back seat, Frisk shot in the back trying to escape, Shiv and Evie rattled with bullets on the front porch.

  “Can’t make out the back-seat shooter,” she says. “But that wasn’t the Nation, Harney.”

  I drop in a chair.

  “Someone was operating that camera,” she says. “Working it. Moving in and out.”

  She picks up a pencil, eraser end down, and uses it to push a piece of paper over to me. Trying not to touch it or infect it.

  I look at it without touching it. It’s printed off a computer, not handwritten:

  Latham took this. I don’t want to end up like him. He’d want you to see this.

  “Latham,” I say. “Any idea?”

  Carla shakes her head. Leans back in her chair, looks up at the ceiling. “You know what this means. You know what this means.”

  Yeah, I know what it means. But I’ve thought this for a long time. I just never told her. I wanted to handle this myself.

  But now she knows.

  “It means we didn’t solve K-Town,” she says.

  Chapter 74

  IT DOESN’T take long.

  An hour, tops, to figure out that the Latham in the note is Latham Jackson, who lived just up the street to the north of Shiv’s house. According to the notes from the canvass, his mother said he wasn’t home during the shooting, and on recanvass, Latham himself claimed not to have seen anything.

  It took less than an hour after that to learn that Latham died the same day as the recanvass, found dead only hours after one of our patrol officers interviewed him. The fucking detectives in the Eleventh didn’t bother to tell us, seeing it as a run-of-the-mill B and E in K-Town that SOS didn’t need to know about. Latham surprised the burglar, apparently, and the offender put two bullets in Latham’s chest and skedaddled with his video equipment.

  It makes sense. It might be true. But I don’t like it. Neither
does Carla.

  Doesn’t take us long, either, to get a look at Latham’s email account, courtesy of his mother. Latham sent this video of the K-Town shooting to his cousin Renfro, who works at the DMV. Renfro, obviously, is the one who delivered it to our station house.

  We pay him a visit at work downtown, the secretary of state’s office. He’s not so thrilled to be hearing from us, but we keep it on the down low, not flashing badges or anything, meeting him at his break time midafternoon outside 69 West. He admits he sent us the tape but swears up and down that Latham didn’t see anything live, only recorded it, so anything he knows, we know. Carla works him over a little, mentioning the idea of a blackmail scheme and how it would be a shame if Renfro didn’t help us right now. Renfro looks like he’s going to faint, but he swears there’s nothing more to tell. We decide we believe him.

  “Now what?” Carla says. “Solving K-Town so fast stopped a riot. We let it out that we got it wrong, that riot’s gonna happen. But we can’t ignore it, either.”

  “Talk about riots,” I say. “Imagine if it came out that we had a video of white guys shooting up that house and sat on it, let a couple black guys take the fall.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting we sit on it,” she says. “I was suggesting we investigate quietly. Like, real quietly. Like, Sosh and Rodriguez don’t need to know. Not until we can be sure. We can’t let this out until we’re ready to arrest those white guys, whoever they are.”

  Keeping Mat and Sosh in the dark is fine by me. I wanted Carla in the dark, too.

  I catch Carla staring at me, her eyes squinting in the sunlight. Or one of her eyes, I should say; the other is all but swollen shut, the left side of her face still puffy and purple, tape and gauze still across her cheek.

  “You’ve been thinking this for a while, haven’t you?” she says to me. “That’s why you’ve been so interested in the identity of our Jane Doe. You think this murder is about her, not drugs or drug turf.”

  “Me? No. I don’t think that.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s why you’ve been so secretive. Searching the house behind my back. Searching Shiv’s phone, finding those calls to Romania—”

  “On my own time is all,” I say.

  But she’s warming to her idea. “This girl—Evie, right? She was trafficked. That’s what we think, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think the traffickers killed her? Those white guys in the car were sex traffickers?”

  “Getting way ahead of ourselves, Detective.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She doesn’t look convinced. “Seems like you’re way ahead of me, though. What happened to no more secrets?”

  I open my hands. “What do you want me to say? I’m learning all this at the same time as you.”

  I’ve found, over time, that I can bullshit with the best of ’em on the job, certainly when I have a suspect in an interview room or some skell on the street.

  Up close and personal, I don’t wear the same poker face. Valerie could read me like a book. So can Patti.

  “Come clean with me, Harney,” Carla says.

  “I am. I have.”

  “If you’re worried about Prince Valentine—look, he was selling dope,” she says. “He was violating his probation. He ran when we knocked on his door. And he shot at you first. Even if he didn’t do K-Town, it was still a righteous shooting—”

  “What, you think I’m covering my ass? Covering up a mistake? Gee, thanks a lot, Carla. If I was doing that, the last thing I’d be doing is reopening the case and looking at Evie. I’d want this case wrapped up and put behind ten locked doors.”

  Absolute truth, and not a bad comeback. Until a hint of triumph plays on Carla’s face and I realize she played me.

  “My point exactly,” she says. “You aren’t locking it behind ten closed doors. You’re reopening it and looking at Evie. So maybe it’s time you told me why.”

  “Jesus, you missed your calling,” I say, exasperated. “You shoulda been a lawyer.”

  She allows for that. She goaded me into an admission.

  “Well, then I only have one further question of the witness,” she says. “Tell me, Harney, once and for all, what the hell is going on?”

  Chapter 75

  I TOLD her, but I didn’t tell her.

  I told her what she’d already figured out—that I suspect that Evie, not a bunch of drug dealers, was the target in the K-Town shooting.

  But I didn’t tell her anything else. I didn’t tell her that the same human garbage that killed Evie may have killed my wife. She doesn’t need to know that.

  That part I will handle myself.

  “Yeah,” Carla says, her face up close to the screen of the footage from two nights ago, the POD camera at Van Buren and Kolmar. “Yeah, looks like the same guys from the front seat of the 4Runner.” She sits back in the chair. “So the same guys in the front seat of the shooter’s car come back to the house and try to hide all evidence of Evie from us. I mean, shit, Harney.” She throws up her hand. “This thing had nothing to do with drugs or turf. It’s all about a girl with a black-lily tattoo on her ankle.”

  “So now you know everything,” I say.

  Everything except how this involves Valerie. Or General Boholyubov.

  But she knows enough. Enough to quietly reopen the K-Town investigation.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks.

  Because I wanted to find these assholes myself. Because maybe I’m not interested in bringing these slimeballs to justice in the traditional way, with arrests and indictments and prison sentences.

  None of that sounds so good.

  I say this instead: “Like you said, it’s a heater case. The solve prevented a riot. Before I reopened the case officially, I wanted to be sure.”

  “Yeah, but you could’ve told me. You should’ve told me.”

  A smirk plays on her face.

  “You didn’t trust me,” she says.

  I didn’t trust anybody. But now she knows. I have no choice.

  “Let’s bring in the Bureau,” she says. “Clara Foster, the agent working on human trafficking on that joint task force. She seemed okay.”

  “The FBI? No,” I say.

  “Why not? Evie’s from Romania, right? Or looks like, at least? This is an international human-trafficking ring, Harney. The Bureau could give us all sorts of resources we don’t have.”

  Yeah, more people who will stop me from handling things my way.

  “We don’t need Fuck Buddies Incorporated taking this over and cutting us out,” I say. “This is our case. If we made a mistake, we’ll correct it.”

  She doesn’t like it, but at least she doesn’t question my motives. I’m parroting what most cops would say in my position. Nobody in the department trusts the feds, and the feeling is mutual.

  “Fine,” she says. “Then we do this, just the two of us.”

  Chapter 76

  THE AIRPORT is just outside Plainfield. Disco needs GPS to find it.

  The jet has already arrived, a sleek, metallic blue, sitting alone out on the runway, gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

  “He’s here already,” Disco says into the phone.

  “He didn’t say why?” asks Augustina.

  No, he didn’t say why. He just told Disco to come alone.

  Disco parks his car and walks over to the tarmac.

  The door opens. A staircase lowers. His heartbeat ratchets up.

  He doesn’t have a piece with him. Thought about it, but they’d take it off him anyway.

  He did wear his best suit, though.

  Inside the jet, General Kostyantin Boholyubov sits in a plush leather seat, legs crossed. Dressed in a silver double-breasted suit, crimson tie knotted perfectly, silver cufflinks, Ferragamo loafers shining like mirrors.

  Disco stands at attention and salutes. “General.”

  “At ease, Colonel.” The general looks away, as if embarrassed by the show of military display. It’s been over for te
n years now. The hardheaded general is the same person, with the same tactics, but now he’s immaculately coiffed.

  If Disco hadn’t saluted, though, the general would’ve been furious.

  Behind the general are three members of his private security. Two of them, whom Disco doesn’t recognize, are armed with Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders. The third, Milton, was Boho’s deputy when the general ran the Berkut, the secret police.

  Another man stands at attention by the pilot’s door, bigger than any of the other men, wide and tall, a neck like a tree stump, a shock of red hair on top with the sides buzzed. To face the general, Disco has to turn his back on this redheaded thug.

  Three in front, one behind.

  “I have a question for you, Colonel,” says Boho. “But first, I’d like you to do something for me.”

  “Anything, General.”

  “I want you to strip off your clothes.”

  A shudder runs through Disco. “My…clothes.”

  “Yes.” The general raises the glass from his armchair, takes a sip of his single-malt Scotch. Always was a big fan of single malt.

  “General—”

  “Your clothes are still on, Colonel. Perhaps I wasn’t clear.”

  Two of the thugs behind Boho stand. That makes three of them standing, if you count the redhead behind him.

  Disco loosens his tie. Unbuttons his shirt. “General, if I have done something wrong…” Trying to avoid a tremble in his voice.

  Boho smiles at him, holds eye contact. Doesn’t move an inch.

  Disco removes his jacket, tie, shirt, undershirt.

  “Everything,” says Milton, his deputy, his coal-black eyes gleaming.

  Disco strips to his underwear. Doesn’t make eye contact with Milton, but Milton says it anyway, once more: “Everything.”

  Disco looks to the general for relief, for mercy, but Boho stares back at him with that stony expression, his blue eyes shiny.

  Disco wiggles out of his underwear.

  Maybe they just wanted to see if he was wearing a wire. Now that they can see he isn’t, they’ll let him put his clothes back on.