Finders Keepers

by Shirl Henke

  Nancy desperately required the bolstering courage from a hit of coke. Mikhail thought she’d gone shopping at some of her favorite places in Bal Harbor, but once she learned he’d had that brat grandson brought to their house, she was too afraid to go home. The servant she’d spoken to sounded as if all were well, but she could never trust any of Mikhail’s staff. She was certain the boy would tell everything he’d seen and her husband would kill her.

  It was time for them to get away. The deal was supposed to go down this very afternoon. All her lover had to do was give the information to Pribluda’s men in Miami, pick up all those cool millions in negotiable securities and they were home free. The thought made her smile as she sniffed more of the lovely white powder from the glass tabletop where she’d carefully arranged it into long, neat lines.

  She’d been careful, changing taxis twice before picking up a car registered with false ID that she kept at a private garage on Collins. It was only a ten-minute drive from there to this trysting place, a small, very discreet hotel in Bal Harbor where her lover kept a suite. Nancy leaned back on the white velvet sofa and let the room spin lazily around her, finally enveloped in a haze of contentment. Soon they’d be on their way to Bimini on that lovely big Tiara that Alexi had rebuilt. She chuckled as she leaned down and took another hit. He worshipped speed.

  Nancy looked down at her Cartier watch, glittering with diamonds, squinting to focus her eyes on the time. The deal should be done by now. She knew her lover hated to see her using. Only one small line left. “Oh, well, might as well get rid of the evidence,” she said with a low chuckle and inhaled the last of it. She felt calmer, but knew vaguely that it was only because of the drug. Mikhail could be looking for her right now.

  They had to leave the country soon. Nancy stood up on unsteady legs, then stumbled at the edge of the low glass coffee table and nicked her shin. Damn, that would leave an ugly bruise. Holding on to furniture, she made her way into the bathroom to freshen up. “Have to get straight,” she muttered, deciding a good warm bath would help. She turned the tap on hot and poured a generous dollop of perfumed oil into the large round tub, recalling the last time they had used it.

  “We’ll have one custom built on a tropical island,” she said, pulling off her clothes and pinning her hair haphazardly atop her head. She dipped a toe in the water, smiled and climbed into the tub.

  He could see the trail of designer clothes from the sitting room to the bath and heard the roar of the tub. Nancy always did favor hot tubs, especially when she was spaced out. He grinned sharkishly and headed down the hall. He never disappointed a lady…but then, his darling Nancy was no lady.

  Leaning in the doorway, he crossed his arms and cocked his head so a lock of straight blond hair fell across his forehead. He knew it made him look like a young version of Don Johnson. “Hello, Nancykins.”

  “Damn, I left my cell in the car,” Sam said to herself. She watched Tess steer her friend’s boat into the Intracoastal, heading north toward Indian Creek Village. “Were you happy here when you first married Alexi?” she asked Tess.

  “It seemed like a fairy tale. A gorgeous husband who was famous, a lovely home and a father-in-law who treated me like a princess. Then, when Steve was born, everything was too good to be true…and it was. It took me a while to realize that Alexi was playing more than golf when he traveled without me, but I had my son and, you might find it hard to believe, but Mikhail, well, he seemed so supportive. Like the father I never had.” She gave a sad, ironic laugh. “And now he believes I killed his son and he wants to kill me in revenge.”

  Although she and Matt had agreed not to tell Tess about Alexi, Sam decided his wife should know about their suspicions, rather than face the shock if he did turn up alive. “Alexi might not be dead, Tess,” Sam said over the roar of the engine.

  Tess’s head whipped around. “What do you mean?”

  Sam explained what they’d learned about the insurance scam and phone calls. Tess stared straight ahead now, steering the Sea Ray with whitened knuckles. Finally, she murmured so low Sam could barely hear her, “I never knew he could be so vindictive. He hated his father’s life so much he’d do anything to get out—even sacrifice his own son in his place.”

  “We don’t know for sure, but—”

  “I know. Now it all makes sense. Alexi is alive.” Tess drew a ragged breath. “Let’s find that information and get Steve back from Mikhail. Then I hope the old devil does kill Alexi!”

  Steve sat at the computer, gazing aimlessly at a periodic table of elements on the screen, trying to concentrate on his chemistry assignment. He had been in special accelerated classes for gifted children ever since he was tested in early grade school. His grandfather had insisted, over his mom’s objections, that he be sent to an elite academy and have private tutoring. He’d liked the advanced placement classes in the public school system and hated losing his friends, but he’d done as his grandpa and father had insisted.

  His grades had always been outstanding…until the last few months when they started to slip. Moving to California to hide with his aunt, he had missed a lot of classes, but after everything that he’d learned and all that was going on right now, he just couldn’t concentrate. Still, unless the chem assignment was completed, he wouldn’t be allowed to swim or do anything around the house that might enable him to slip out and search for his aunt and cousins.

  He focused on the jumble of letters, searching for the ones he needed when suddenly, it hit him. “Ohmigosh,” he breathed, putting the two elements together to form the lettered design that fit beneath the infinity symbol on that awful tattoo he’d seen. It all made sense now in a weird sort of way. He was almost certain who was with Nancy on that yacht! Grandpa would go crazy!

  But who could he tell? The old man would have them both killed and his mom and her family would still be prisoners. He gulped. No, it would be worse than that, a fact he’d been trying not to think of until now. No, he had to find another way. The computer in his room was not hooked into the system downstairs. He had no Internet access for the same reason the phone had been taken away.

  That got him to thinking. He couldn’t convince any of Mikhail’s employees to let him near a phone, but since he was assigned to do homework, maybe he could get Kiski or Reena—both Russian women adored their boss’s grandson—to let him use a linked computer to complete his chemistry assignment. His fingers flew over the keys as he began erasing all the tables and charts from the program on his computer. Grabbing up his books and papers, he headed downstairs.

  His grandfather was out for a meeting in the Brickell district, so he wouldn’t interfere. Several of the big men with obvious bulges in their suit jackets watched him as he made his way toward the kitchen. Steve knew if he tried to go outside, they’d follow him. He gripped his books and papers like a dutiful student and said in Russian, “I need a snack. Homework makes a guy hungry.” One of the thugs glowered at him but the other grinned and practiced his broken English.

  “Yes. Books, they are hard work. Go, eat.”

  He smiled back and struggled to control his breathing as he walked down the hall to the kitchens. Kiski, the old cook, disliked computers so she wouldn’t know what he was doing, but she was too shrewd and knew him too well. He couldn’t fool her. But Reena, her assistant in the big Renkov kitchen, was young and sweet—fresh off the boat from St. Petersburg. He put on his best worried expression and walked into the small cubicle where she was making up grocery lists for a big dinner party her boss planned for next week.

  Matt tucked Jenny and her agile little dragons in a motel off Biscayne, threatening them within an inch of their lives if they so much as peeked out the broken blinds at the deserted parking lot of the joint. “I have to meet your sister and let her know you’re safe. She’s worried sick and might do something really crazy if she thinks Mikhail still has you. Understand?”

  “Oh, please, Matt, I know I made a really dumb mistake back in California, but I swear I w
on’t do it again.” She looked over at the girls with the sternest expression he’d ever seen on her face and said, “Tiff and Mellie will stay quiet until this is over. Won’t you, girls?”

  Something about the tone of their mother’s voice—or the life-and-death struggle they’d experienced in that rat-infested basement—had taken a little of the starch out of them. “We’ll wait here,” Tiff said grudgingly. “But I still don’t see why we can’t come and help you. If it hadn’t been for us, you’d of never been able to beat those two big men.”

  She had him there but he was damned if he’d encourage her. “I appreciate the diversion, but right now the best thing is for you to stay safe. This’ll all be over in a little while. I promise.”

  “Soon?” Mellie piped up. “This place is icky and the television doesn’t work.”

  He looked at the dingy room and wondered if it wouldn’t have been wiser to spend the last of his waning cash on fancier digs for them. But cash in a good hotel raised flags that he didn’t dare chance. Sam had figured it right. She always used cheap flops like this when transporting “patients.”

  Sam. Clever, devious woman. Not the time to be thinking of that, Granger, he reminded himself. He knelt down in front of Mellie and promised solemnly, “Soon. Just wait here. Okay?” When she nodded, he grinned and added, “You might try using the beds like trampolines.” She brightened at once.

  Jenny threw up her hands. “They always do that every time I take them on a trip.”

  “From the looks of these beds, I don’t think they’re in any danger of hitting their heads on the ceiling,” he said dryly.

  Matt left the girls giggling on their dandy new toys under Jenny’s watchful eyes, wishing fervently that her brains were as good as her vision. He walked back to the Charger and gave the door a good kick. Still stuck tight as a stripper’s ass. Why was it that a little thing like Sam could whack the damned lock into submission and a big guy like him couldn’t? “Because I don’t drive pieces of crap,” he muttered with a dandy oath, dealing the recalcitrant door another smashing blow.

  This time it popped open. He climbed inside and struggled with the ignition, cursing Obregon’s mechanical genius and worrying about being late when the women returned to the marina. What if they took it into their heads to do something as dumb as Jenny might? Like try a face off with Mikhail Renkov? No, Sam was too smart for that.

  The damn junker finally turned over. He put it in Reverse. The trouble came when he tried to move it through the missing gear. He just didn’t have Sam’s touch. A teenage kid wearing raggedy cutoffs and high-tops sniggered as the car choked to a stop. He was joined by a second boy with enough body piercings to set off a metal detector at half a mile. As Granger struggled to get the car away from the motel, he hoped they’d remember the dumb Anglo who couldn’t drive and not the women and kids he’d checked into the room.

  He was just pulling into the marina when the encrypted cell Tess had given him beeped. Opening it, he expected to hear Sam or Tess’s voice. Steve Renkov was the last person he would’ve guessed to be on the other end. “Where are you?” he asked, cutting short the boy’s inquiry about his mother.

  “At my grandpa’s house in Aventura. He’s away and I sneaked a cell phone from Reena’s office,” the boy whispered. “Are my mom and Aunt Jenny and the girls safe?”

  “I just got your aunt and cousins parked in a safe place. Your mom’s with Sam. How the hell did you get this number?” Matt asked, worried that the boy was being set up.

  “Oh, that was easy once I got on the Net. I just e-mailed Uncle Jerry—he’s not really my uncle but he’s an old friend who works in silicon valley. I knew Mom would get phones that couldn’t be traced from him. We have a code so he knew it was okay to send me her number.”

  “Good work. Your family’s safe. All you have to do is sit tight until we wind this up and everything will be okay,” Matt said with relief. This kid was the polar opposite of his fruit-cake auntie. “How about it?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Matt could practically hear the boy take a deep breath and swallow for courage before he replied.

  “Mr. Granger, I figured out who Nancy was with on that yacht…”

  Chapter 19

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Patowski put down the phone and looked over to his partner’s desk.

  Ross Garten’s expression shifted from boredom to interest as he shoved his chair away from the computer where he was filing a report on a gang-related stabbing just north of Liberty City last night. “What’s our favorite fibbie done now, Pat?”

  “Gomez struck pay dirt. Guess who arranged for his long-lost brother from Russia to get into the US of A via Canada?”

  “Mikhail Renkov has a brother?”

  “Not him,” Pat replied patiently. He knew he and Gomez hadn’t kept Ross as up-to-date as they should have. Ross hated the FBI. “His son, Alexi. The brother was born to Mikhail’s first wife. They divorced and Mikhail married the golden boy’s mother, then took Alexi and left the old country, two wives and his first son behind. Some bad blood between them over the older son’s mother.”

  “I doubt Mikhail Renkov was ever a model husband,” Garten said dryly. “And I bet Alexi wasn’t trying to patch up an old family feud when he slipped his long-lost bro into the country, either.”

  “It would give us an answer to the DNA question,” Patowski said. “After he entered New York via Buffalo, he vanished like a puff of smoke. No proof he saw Alexi before he disappeared, but I bet he did—at least once.”

  “That’s cold, man. His own brother,” Garten said.

  Just then the phone rang and Pat picked up. Immediately, his partner knew he was onto something even bigger than the news Special Agent Gomez had given him. “We have probable cause to search Mikhail Renkov’s place in Aventura,” Patowski said, hanging up and rubbing his hands like a ten-year-old itching to take his first punch in a schoolyard fight. He dialed the Dade County Courthouse for a warrant, then waited while he was transferred to Judge Morely’s office. “We have that skunk now.”

  “How’d you do it?” Garten asked.

  “I didn’t. The old man’s grandson just called 911 from that waterfront palace and told them he’d been kidnapped by his gramps.”

  They grinned at each other. “We gonna let the fibbies in on the arrest?” Ross Garten asked his partner.

  Sam and Tess sneaked into what had formerly been her palatial mansion of a home in Indian Creek Village. If she was upset with losing all the material splendor of her old life, Tess didn’t show it. Instead she determinedly walked through rooms already searched by the Miami-Dade PD and FBI task force.

  “Any ideas about where Alexi might have stashed something that the cops missed?” Sam asked.

  “Only one and it’s a long shot. I stumbled on it by accident a couple of years ago. A hidden room.”

  “Jeez, you mean like in some kind of Gothic novel?” Sam was intrigued as she followed Tess up the curving foyer staircase and down a long hallway to what was obviously the master suite.

  “Remember, his father built this place and he’s Russian. They’re always paranoid, especially when they used to be KGB. I don’t think the authorities would’ve been able to find this.” She walked across the room, ignoring the huge canopied king bed and went into one of the his-and-hers marble baths at the other end. The urinal and workout benches told Sam that this had been Alexi’s domain. She watched as Tess slid her hand along the edge of the slab of serpentine countertop at the side of the sink. When Tess hit the right spot, Sam heard a slight hissing noise and turned her head to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors lining the workout area.

  One of the glass panels rotated neatly, allowing enough room for a good-size man to slip through. “Open sesame,” Tess said bitterly.

  “How did you find it?”

  “Alexi was always very secretive when he worked out in here. I used to wonder why since he was such an exhibitionist in every other way
. One day he didn’t lock the door. I’d come in to get a sweater out of my closet and could see through a crack in his bathroom door. When I heard the noise, I came closer and saw him press that button and the glass open. But then he saw me out of the corner of his eye and closed it at once. We had quite a fight over that. He told me it was something his father had designed, fireproofed to keep important papers in for his business—which by then I already knew wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up.”

  “Did he threaten you if you mentioned it to anyone?” Sam asked.

  Tess nodded. “Of course. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, either. I was too frightened for Steve to say anything.”

  “If he knew you knew about this place, I doubt he’d put anything you could use against him here,” Sam said.

  Tess’s shoulders slumped. “That’s what I thought, but since the boat lead didn’t work out, this is all there’s left. I’m sure the police haven’t checked it.”

  Sam went first, fumbling until she found the light switch. The room was small and sparse—and made of solid steel panels lined with lead. “Old Mikhail sure went to some trouble to keep this place a secret. I bet his house in Aventura is filled with little nooks like this,” she said as she began to pull open file drawers. “Shit! The stuff’s all written in Russian,” she said, slamming a drawer in disgust.

  “I think he kept all his records in Russian. Most of the help is Cubano or Honduran.”

  “Not likely to read Russian,” Sam said. “Not that most Anglos could, either.”

  “Steve does,” Tess said with a catch in her voice.

  “We’ll get him back for you—and the rest of your family.” Sam prayed that her assurances weren’t false. She was worried about that big newsman, too. He’d taken on a really dangerous enemy and he wasn’t even armed. Forcing herself to think practically, she said, “I think I’ll give my old friend at Miami-Dade a call and let him know what we found. Patowski will find someone who reads Russian, you can bet the farm on it.”