The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  Semy hangs up. He makes his second call. To his lawyer, Viktor Abramov. Prison officials are not supposed to listen in to an inmate’s calls to his lawyer. As Abramov’s phone rings, Semy knows he is signing Roksana’s death warrant. The irony is not lost on him. After all these years, she’s not the one who escaped. She’s come full circle. The little floating shoe has found her after all these years. Mila’s ghost is drawing her twin home … and now their father will get her in the end.

  It all goes back to the beginning.

  CHAPTER 48

  Oly listens to the voice coming from Kelvin Maximum Security Institution. It’s being relayed via a complex rerouting system through his law firm’s Vancouver office. He stands at his office window, computing the incoming information while he watches his guests disembark from three of his boats that have docked in time for cocktails—a twenty-five-foot Welcraft, a thirty-foot Grady White, and a twenty-five-foot Trophy. His guests are all men, and they’re garbed in the all-weather suits supplied by his high-end luxury fishing lodge.

  Judging by the apparent weight of the coolers his guides are offloading, his staff managed to put his guests onto a good run of winter springs, halibut, or maybe Coho. Across the steel-gray water, on another island also owned by him, wreathes of mist finger through conifers that grow dense on slopes. A bald eagle circles lazily up high. He hopes his guides also managed to locate the orca pod sighted offshore yesterday. His guides carry the catch toward the stainless-steel cleaning stations at the end of the dock. Tonight’s meal of lobster and Alaskan king crab is being prepared by his chefs. The women are ready to give massages—and more, should guests desire—in the spa. His is one of the oldest and most established luxury fly-in fishing lodges along the Pacific Coast. A guaranteed five-star West Coast experience. The sea has always been the source of his bounty.

  “What name did she give?” he says quietly.

  “Roksana.”

  “She knows her old name?”

  “She’s starting to remember things. She recalls me—remembers that I gave her those high-tops with air pockets in the soles. She says there is old evidence from the cradle case crime scene currently being retested using new DNA technology. The RCMP have already matched her DNA to the dismembered foot. And fingerprints from the cradle already led her to Milo.”

  A sinister prescience fills his gut, of things coming full circle. Of inevitability. He reaches down and fingers the bone letter opener on his desk. “So … she’s been to see Milo?”

  “I … don’t know for certain.”

  “This is why loose ends can never be left, Semy.”

  “This is why I am calling you.”

  “What is her name?” he says again. “She must have an adoptive name.”

  “She only said Roksana.”

  Some of his guests are coming up the gangway now, making their way toward the main lodge building. The tallest guest, the one with black hair, the man from Dubai, is the guest he most needs to talk business with. The irony of that man’s presence here on this day that Semy is calling is not lost on him—it was the man’s cousin from Saudi Arabia who’d wanted Ana and the twins all those years ago.

  He repeats, “What name did she sign into Kelvin with? What did her ID badge say?”

  “I didn’t see her badge.”

  “Where does she live? What is her profession?”

  “I … it was a shock to see her. I didn’t ask. She didn’t say.”

  He swears to himself but says very calmly, quietly, “That’s all right. Relax. We’ll sort it all out. I appreciate the call.” He pauses. “What does she look like?”

  “Like Ana. Just like Ana. I thought it was Ana come back. But her hair—”

  “I know.” Her hair is the color of his own hair but darker. Same pale skin as his own. Pale-gray eyes like his. It was these features in duplicate that had intrigued his client from Saudi Arabia. The prince had paid top dollar for the twins. He’d had to return the payment when he was unable to deliver them. Thanks to Semy.

  “How tall?” he says quietly.

  “About five nine. Slender. She has the scar across the left side of her mouth.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing—nothing that she isn’t already remembering.”

  “Thank you, Semy.” He pauses, thinking that all those years ago, when he read in the papers about the angel’s cradle child and learned that she had no memory or language, he’d thought he was safe. He’d let it go. He shouldn’t have. “Goodbye, Semy.”

  He hangs up. His gaze goes to his bookshelves, to a framed photo. Ana. At sixteen. Her tummy rounded with his progeny. His possession. Ana was the one he’d kept for himself for a while and who surprisingly bore him daughters in duplicate, which had intrigued the narcissist in him. For a time. Until a better offer came along. And then Ana had crossed him. She would not have been able to do it without Semy.

  His guests are entering the lodge now. No time to waste. He goes to his desk, unlocks a bottom drawer, and from it he removes a fresh burner phone. He will discard the phone once the contract he’s about to initiate is concluded. A separate phone for each contract. Always.

  He makes his call and leaves a message for his man. “I have another commission,” he says. “Times three. Top level.”

  Once his call is complete, he pours and downs a shot of vodka. He checks himself in the mirror, then goes to welcome his guests back from a successful day out on his charters.

  Downstairs everything is in impeccable order. Champagne, oysters, and vodka are all on ice. Music is discreet in the background. A woman in her early nineties comes shuffling around the corner, carefully carrying a silver platter of finely sliced smoked salmon. She is dressed all in black, and she shakily sets the platter upon the table beside the oysters.

  “Mama!” he says, opening his arms in a wide magnanimous gesture before clapping his big hands together. “It is marvelous, as usual.”

  As he speaks, the dark-haired man from Dubai enters the room. He turns to face the man. “Ahmed! Come, come on in and meet my mother, Elena, the ever-gracious hostess.”

  The old woman bows and then backs hurriedly away before Ahmed can address her.

  “And your beautiful wife?” Ahmed says. “She is not here this time?”

  “Irina is at our residence in the city. For her the remote luxury lodge life is fine enough, but only for a time—there is shopping to be done in the boutiques.” He laughs.

  Ahmed laughs, too. The other males enter, smiling, chattering about their catch.

  “Come, come, everyone. Let us go in and have a drink where the fire is warm.”

  As he leads his guests through, he feels his burner cell vibrate in his pocket.

  Message received.

  CHAPTER 49

  MONDAY, JANUARY 8

  Kjel Holgersen slipped on the grassy incline that sloped down to Duck Lake. It was from the muddy waters of the lake that the little blue Yaris registered to the Russian interpreter had been pulled yesterday morning. Divers had been dragging the silt-filled lake since in search of her body. Kjel had gotten word they’d found it. In his effort not to land on Jack-O, who was nestled in the pouch under his jacket, he fell hard on his skinny ass in thick black mud.

  “Fuck!” He struggled to push himself up, but his hands kept sinking almost a foot deep into slimy gunk. Rain pelted down. It made a slapping sound on the muck around him. Traffic sent a cloud of spray down from the highway above. Kjel managed to come upright and slip-slide the rest of his way down the slick long grass to where Leo stood with coroner Charlie Alphonse.

  Leo had managed to arrive ahead of him and was smoking, flicking his ash onto the wet ground, which irritated Kjel, because it made him want one and because it was a fucking stupid thing to do at a crime scene. Maybe bringing a dog wasn’t so cool, either, but what was he to do on short notice? He nodded to Leo, then the coroner. “Alphonse,” he said.

  “Detective. Nice weather we’re having, eh?�
� Alphonse looked up into the rain. “I’ve called O’Hagan. She’s on her way.”

  “Evidence of foul play?” Kjel said, trying to wipe his muddy hands off on his soaked jeans as he looked out over the brown rain-pocked surface of Duck Lake.

  “Dive captain called for homicide,” Leo said. “Not sure why yet—they located her at the far end over there.” He pointed his cigarette, which was going soggy in the rain. “Where the lake drains into a stream. That area is choked with reeds and bulrushes. Silt and shit at the bottom is like a meter deep. She was buried in it, which is why it took a while to locate her after her Yaris was found. Body must’ve floated out of the shattered window of the Yaris or something. Current at the lake bottom apparently flows that way.”

  “There comes O’Hagan now.” Alphonse nodded up toward the highway.

  Kjel turned in time to see the squat pathologist sliding down the bank on her ass, trying to hold her bag aloft. He laughed as she slid in.

  “Oy there, Doc, nice entry. Glads to see I’ms not the only one with style.”

  O’Hagan muttered a curse as Kjel offered her a muddy hand to help her to her feet.

  She adjusted the bill of her cap marked CORONER after she came upright. “Where is she?”

  “Bringing her up at the far end,” Alphonse said.

  They watched in silence in the pelting rain as three divers broke the surface and began swimming the body of the Russian translator toward the bank. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered along the top near the road where the barrier was damaged and where tire treads gouged muddy earth and uprooted grass, showing where the Yaris had left the road.

  “What’s that?” O’Hagan said.

  “What?” said Kjel.

  “Under your jacket.”

  “Master Jack-O.” He grinned.

  “Maddocks’s dog?”

  “Yep.”

  “Where’s Maddocks?” she said.

  “Gots a big case in the big smoke.”

  “Mainland?”

  “Yup. Surrey. His old stomping grounds.”

  The pathologist eyed him. “To do with the barcodes?”

  Kjel nodded, his attention going back to their floater. “There she comes now.”

  The divers brought their DB in floating facedown. She wore a tan-colored sweater and a tweedy skirt. Stockings. No coat. No shoes. Her hair drifted around her, brown like the water. Alphonse turned and waved up to the body removal guys to come down from the bank with their metal litter basket and body bag. Flashes popped as the crime scene photographer snapped images of the decedent being guided in.

  The divers slipped and sloshed as they struggled to walk the body through the silt and reeds along the shore. A duck squawked and scattered from rushes, little wings flapping like crazy as it tried to lift its fat body off the water. Morning commuter traffic hissed along the wet highway up above. Life going on as normal. People heading to offices, kids to school.

  They brought her up onto the slick grass, turned her over. Her mouth gaped. A black weed hung out of it. Her skin was garish white, covered in slime. Her eyes stared milky and sightless up into the drumming rain.

  “Shit,” Kjel said. “That’s her all right—the Russian interpreter who helped us with Sophia Tarasov.” He squatted down next to the body alongside O’Hagan, taking care not to squash Master Jack under his jacket. The pathologist wiped her hands on a cloth from her bag and struggled to snap on her gloves in the rain. Gently, she moved wet hair off the woman’s face and neck. Kjel tensed.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. “Her throat’s been slit. Clean across.”

  “Almost to the spinal column,” O’Hagan added. She moved the hem of the woman’s shirt aside, made a nick under the rib, and inserted her thermometer. She read the liver temperature. “Postmortem interval could be seventy-two hours or more. Hard to say without knowing the temps at the bottom of that lake. I’ll know more when I get her into my morgue.”

  “So she coulda died Friday,” Leo said as he stood a safe distance behind Kjel. The old homicide cop never got too close to a DB if he could help it. “When her car bust through that barrier and came down that bank?”

  “Yeah,” Kjel said, leaning closer to the body. “But I don’t see a corpse with a slit throat and no shoes driving that Yaris through any fucking barrier.” He pointed to a small, circular, reddish-black wound, purulent-looking, on the inside of the woman’s wrist. “What’s do you reckon that is, Doc? Burn, maybe?”

  O’Hagan drew back the sleeve, revealing more marks of similar shape along the tender white flesh of the decedent’s inner arm. “Consistent with cigarette burns.” Her hand stilled. Kjel saw it at the same time.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  The interpreter was missing a pinkie finger and a ring finger on her right hand.

  “Cut clean off above the knuckles.” He glanced up at Leo. “Looks like she was tortured. And resisted. And he had to burn her and take more than one finger.” He fell silent, thinking.

  The barcode girl. Sophia Tarasov—that’s who the interpreter’s killer wanted. That’s how he’d known where to find the girls in the hospital and how he’d known which one had talked to Maddocks. And this innocent civilian had fought with her life to keep the information from him. To keep Tarasov safe. But she’d lost. They’d all lost.

  He wiped water from his face with his sleeve. “Better get her into your morgue, stat, Doc, because my bets is this body is gonna be snatched off your table like Tarasov was.”

  He came to his feet. They watched in silence, rain drumming and plopping on water and mud as the body was bagged and carefully placed into the litter basket, and the body guys slipped and staggered up the steep grassy bank with their cargo.

  Jack-O wiggled inside his pouch. Kjel opened up his zipper and peered in. “Okay, ol’ boy, I’ll take yous for a pee as soon as we gets outta here.”

  As they started up the bank, O’Hagan held Kjel back and said quietly, “What’s the deal with Angie?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “All’s I heard is she got axed.” He glanced up at Leo, who was grabbing fistfuls of slimy grass as he tried to haul his fat hairy ass up the bank.

  CHAPTER 50

  Maddocks set his triple-shot coffee on his desk in the Surrey incident room and shrugged out of his jacket. He draped it over the back of the chair. He had not been able to sleep. Angie was not taking his calls, which was bad news. He was about to phone the MVPD social media desk to check on her when his cell rang.

  He grabbed it. Caller ID showed Holgersen, not Angie.

  “Yeah?” he said, connecting his call as he took a seat and reached for his coffee.

  “Divers found her body—the Russian interpreter.”

  Maddocks stilled his coffee midway to his mouth.

  “What?”

  “Yep—she’s dead. She never did make it across the island to go watching storms or nothing. They pulled her little Yaris outta Duck Lake off the highway on the way to Sooke yesterday. Divers found her body this morning. Like mud soup, that water.”

  “She went off the road?”

  “Murdered, by all appearances—throat cut clean across, almost down to the spinal column.” A pause. “She was tortured, boss—cigarette burns and two fingers cut off.”

  Maddocks swallowed and slowly set his coffee cup down. “Tarasov’s killer,” he said quietly. “That’s how he got to her. That’s how he found her. Through the interpreter.”

  “That would be my working hypothesis. He followed the interpreter, forced her to phone her office with some ruse about going away for the weekend, then tortured her for info on the barcodes.”

  “How did he find the interpreter in the first place?”

  “Figure he’s been watching us, boss. Them Russians gotta know we gots their barcode merch. I reckon they’s been tailing our investigation to find where we stashed the girls. O’Hagan’s waiting on word from you. She wants confirmation that this one is hers, or if once you pass on this news to your task force the
y’re gonna be nabbing the DB off her table like they did Tarasov.”

  Ice seeped into his veins. He rubbed his brow and glanced up at where Takumi was talking to another officer across the room. “Dot every i and cross every bloody t, Holgersen, because you’re right. The moment I pass this on to Takumi, it’s outta your hands. They’re going to want everything you got.”

  “Yous getting anywheres over there in Surrey, then?”

  “Moving forward. Any witnesses yet? Anything that places our Tarasov suspect near, or with, the interpreter?”

  “Nothing so far. Your task force has all the CCTV footage from the hospital, so we can’t go looking there to see if the interpreter was followed after she left the Tarasov interview with us.”

  “I’ll get that hospital footage pulled up on this end.” Maddocks’s gaze shot to the incident room door as it was flung suddenly open. Rollins from Project Gateway burst into the room, two officers hot on his heels. Takumi waved them over. They all bent heads in urgent conversation. Takumi reached fast for a phone, placed a call. Something was going down.

  “I gotta go. Tell me quick, is Jack-O okay?”

  “Ol’ Master Jack ain’t wanna go back to you, boss. Living the high life here.” He hesitated. “Pallorino good?”

  A jab of fear. “Why?”

  “Because of what happened—”

  “What happened?”

  “She gots the guillotine. Vedder terminated her.”

  Maddocks’s brain reeled. Fear sliced deeper. “You mean she’s not there? Not at the social media desk?”

  “I thoughts you knew, boss.”

  Christ. “Did Vedder—anyone—say anything about why she was terminated?”

  “Mums the words here.”

  “Call me stat if you hear anything.” Maddocks killed the call, took a gulp of tepid coffee, and surged to his feet. He went straight to Takumi and drew the man aside. He informed him about the Russian interpreter.