A moment later, her cell phone gonged. Hall’s text flashed on the display: See you in 30. She was surprised and somewhat wary that he had responded so quickly.
Davie arrived in Hollywood a few minutes early and parked the Jetta on Wilcox in a neighborhood of small businesses and modest two-story apartment houses. The gnarled branches of the leafless trees lining the street reminded her of the fingers on a crone’s bony hands.
Davie glanced across the street at the familiar red brick Hollywood Police Station. The building’s floor plan was the same as Pacific’s, but where Hollywood’s detective squad room seemed cluttered and decrepit, Pacific’s was as neat and orderly as a corporate boardroom, thanks to the efforts of a former captain who’d spearheaded the makeover. Davie doubted he knew about the box of bones from an old Jane Doe case that Detective Giordano kept under his desk, but she assumed corporations had a few skeletons hidden in their boardrooms too.
Two men argued in front of the bail bond office across the street from the station. When they spotted Hall exiting the front door wearing a badge and gun, they moved their dispute inside.
As Davie climbed out of the heated car, cold air seeped under her jacket like a stealth fog. Hall dodged a passing car and jogged toward her, flashing the boyish grin that had once made her heart race.
The two of them had worked well together. She didn’t lecture him about eating junk food in the car. He didn’t complain when she swabbed the steering wheel with hand sanitizer. Over time, the free flow of their conversation drifted to his troubled relationship with his wife. He was separated and had already hired a divorce lawyer, but his wife refused to let go. She was texting him fifty times a day and calling him at all hours of the day and night. At first, Davie just listened. Male cops loved to dish dirt about their wives and exes; it came with the badge. One night after work, she and Hall had gone to a cop bar after end of watch for some “team building.” A few drinks later, they took the party to her place where, instead of comforting Spencer Hall with her words, she consoled him with her body.
At first she worried about their workplace romance, but she was single and his marriage was essentially over. The two were then assigned to different tables in the squad room. Neither had supervisory power over the other. Department brass understood that cops dated other cops and they mostly looked the other way.
The dysfunction caused by her parents’ divorce had made Davie cautious about relationships. But over the next couple of months, she and Spencer Hall had spent most of their free time together, going to movies and concerts, and taking long drives along the California coast. She made him think. He made her laugh. She even took him to meet her grandmother, something she had never done before. Grammy loved him. That’s when she realized she did too.
She’d thought the feeling was mutual.
She was wrong.
Her gaze glided down his familiar frame as he leaned toward the Jetta’s fender. Davie grabbed his arm. Her hand lingered for a moment on the soft wool of his suit jacket, as she inhaled the scent of leather and Ivory soap.
Davie didn’t want him to misinterpret the gesture, so she nodded toward the grimy fender. “This ride hasn’t been washed since dinosaurs roamed the earth.”
He nodded toward her clothes. “Looks like you had a run-in with a T. Rex yourself.”
She brushed trail dust off her pants. “More like a run-in with an Outlaw.”
“Good to see you haven’t changed,” he said. “I hear you’re kicking ass on the Nosova case.”
“Funny, I don’t recall friending you on my Murder Book page.”
The rugby scar near his right eye disappeared into the crease of his smile. “I stopped by Pacific yesterday to get my locker assignment. Vaughn was in the parking lot romancing a P-2, so I had a word with him. Watch out for that guy. He’s a player.”
She made a mental note to tell Vaughn to stop running his mouth about the case. “He’s got my back. That’s all I care about.”
“Don’t expect him to stick around to plan your retirement party.”
“Not every relationship is meant to last.”
Hall’s thumb touched his gold wedding band. “You work a partnership until it lives or dies. That way you have no what-ifs, no regrets.”
“You’ve been watching Dr. Phil again.”
“I’m seeing a shrink but not the TV kind. I guess you heard Becky and I are back together. She wanted to take another shot at the marriage.”
“Any fatalities?”
His smile seemed strained. “A few.”
She heard the grinding of metal and glanced across the street to see a black-and-white roll through the station’s security gate and disappear around the back of the building.
“Why Pacific?” she said. “You’ve avoided me for months and all of a sudden you want to be in my back pocket.”
He ran his hand over the cowlick she suspected he would never tame. “It’s closer to home.”
“Well. Congratulations. I hope you two can work things out.” She said the words but wasn’t sure she meant them.
Neither spoke for what seemed like a long time. Hall was the first to break the silence. “Vaughn said your victim is Russian. About a year ago, the bodies of several Russian girls were found in Northern California. Turns out they were hookers working for the Russian mafia.”
“What’s your point?”
“The dump sites were all bodies of water. Your victim was found in the sewer. The two cases could be related.”
She already knew about the Russian girls from reading department bulletins and resented Hall’s presumption of ignorance.
“April 2015,” Davie said, “a man fishing for bass in Clear Lake near Sacramento found the body of Tatyana Dashkov, age 19. She’d been shot in the head execution style. July 2015, two hikers spotted Larisa Kosikova, age 20, floating in the middle fork of the American River. She’d died of blunt force trauma to the head. October—”
“I know a guy at Robbery-Homicide with information about the case. I can put you two together if you’re interested.”
She didn’t need his guy. She had her own contacts. “No, thanks.”
He ignored her icy tone. “You have a suspect?”
“Why all this interest in my case?”
“Just making conversation.”
“I didn’t come here to brainstorm homicide theories.”
He let out a frustrated sigh. “Look, Vaughn told me you think I started those rumors about you. I know how you feel—”
She cut him off midsentence. “You couldn’t possibly know how I feel.”
In reality, she had no thoughts at all, only a pain deep in her chest because she had liked Spencer Hall before she’d loved him, and now she’d lost not only his affection but also his friendship.
“Maybe not, but—”
“People are saying I panicked the night of the shooting and almost got you killed. That’s crap and you know it.”
He held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender. “It wasn’t me, Davie.”
She wanted to believe he wasn’t talking trash about her, but after the shooting, Hall had abandoned her when she needed him most. She no longer trusted him.
“If not you, then who?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
Cold air seeped into her bones. “Right. Let me know when you find out.”
She slipped into the front seat and cranked the Jetta’s heater up to Hell. The tires screeched as she peeled away from the curb. In the rearview mirror, she could see Spencer Hall’s gaze boring into the back of her head. Again she wondered why he’d offered unsolicited advice about the Nosova case. He was up to something.
22
While she’d been out in the field, somebody had used her desk again. The manuals on her shelf had toppled over like so many dominoes. She put them upri
ght and went in search of the Russian translator. She found him sitting at an empty desk in Burglary. He was a probationer who looked eighteen but had to be at least twenty-one to be on the job. His father was a New Yorker born to Russian parents. His mother was from Moscow so he was fluent in Russian. The department paid him a stipend for use of his language skills.
According to the clock on her cell phone, the time in Kiev was ten p.m. the following day. It wasn’t a good hour to call, but there was no good time to tell a parent his daughter was dead. She told the officer to put the call on speakerphone so she could listen to the nuances in the man’s voice, rather than just having words interpreted by a rookie cop. She gave him a list of questions to ask and dialed the number Lucien had given her.
A man identifying himself as Anya’s father answered on the third ring. He sounded sleepy or drunk or both. When the translator informed him that his daughter had been murdered, there was silence on the line.
The translator waited until the father processed the information before proceeding. What followed was a series of questions from Davie’s list, followed by labored translations. The gist of the conversation was that the father had been a colonel in the Russian army and was now retired and living in Kiev.
“Ask him if he ever worked as a chef in Moscow.”
After a brief conversation, the officer shook his head. “He said he’s been in the military all his adult life. He’s a soldier not a cook.”
The father went on to explain that when Anya was sixteen, he and his wife divorced and she soon remarried another man. According to Colonel Nosova, Anya’s new stepfather didn’t want her around, so she stayed in Kiev with him but visited her mother in Moscow at least once a year.
“Ask if his wife ever danced with the Bolshoi or worked as a curator at the Louvre.”
The officer posed the question, which was followed by a one-word answer she recognized without translation: Nyet.
Davie considered the parallels between Anya’s broken family and her own. It made her feel that she and the victim shared a common history. Except Anya had lied to everybody about the details of her life. Her father was not a chef and her mother was not a ballerina for a Russian ballet company or a curator at a museum. And maybe Anya was not as naïve as everybody thought she was.
Colonel Nosova said his daughter was a good girl who wanted to make a success of her life. She had never been in trouble with the law. Eventually she became impatient with the gloomy Ukrainian winters and the dead-end life in Kiev. About nine months ago, she answered an ad in the local newspaper. Anya met with a woman who told her she would make a lot of money as a model in the US. The agency would pay for her airfare and all other expenses for the first three months. Anya would pay them back when the money started rolling in.
She had been excited, but her father was wary. His daughter was only nineteen. He seemed torn between holding on to the past and releasing her to find a future. In the end, he let her go.
The father couldn’t remember the name of the woman who had made the arrangements but thought the agency was called Moscow Models. In the first four months Anya was in L.A., he didn’t hear from her. He worried but thought she was just busy establishing her career. In the fifth month, she began to call once a week. There was nothing in their last conversation that caused him concern. When the translator gave the father Davie’s phone number and told him how to arrange shipment of the body back to Kiev, Colonel Nosova’s calm facade crumbled. Davie could hear him sobbing as the call ended.
Davie wondered what Anya had been doing in the four months between the time she arrived in L.A. and the date she had moved in with Troy Gallway. From the way her father spoke about his daughter, they seemed close, and yet she hadn’t called him. That seemed odd— unless she’d been working for Grigory Satine, and he had prevented her from communicating with the outside world.
After the translator left, Davie searched the Internet and law enforcement databases but found no evidence that Moscow Models existed. The my1lana license plate number Falcon had given her belonged to a corporation called Basic Imports located in the 4000 block of Sepulveda Boulevard. The vehicle was leased. When she cross-referenced the address, it came back to A to Z Liquors, not a modeling agency. Experience had taught her that hiding company ownership is child’s play to the determined.
Her interview with Anya’s father reminded her that she hadn’t called her grandmother as she had promised. She checked her watch. One fifteen. Grammy should be back from lunch by now so she dialed her number.
Her grandmother’s voice sounded breathless, agitated. “Rose Miller wasn’t at lunch today.”
“Maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”
“I think she died. I was looking out the window this morning and saw an ambulance drive away. It didn’t use its siren.”
“That doesn’t mean Rose was inside.” Davie meant the words to calm her grandmother even though her assumption was reasonable.
“After lunch, I asked the nurse what was going on. She told me Rose moved out. Rose Miller is my friend. She wouldn’t move out without telling me.”
“Why would the nurse lie?”
“They’re all afraid to talk to us old people about death because they think we’ll get depressed. Don’t they know at my age I’ve learned how to mourn?”
Davie glanced up and saw Giordano limp out of Lieutenant Bellows’s office.
“I’ll find out about Rose and let you know.”
“Can you take me to the funeral? I’d like to pay my respects.”
“Sure, Grammy, but I have to go now.”
“Back to work?”
“Back to work.”
As soon as they finished their goodbye ritual, she called the manager of Grammy’s assisted living facility and learned that Rose Miller had died in her sleep the night before. The funeral was the following day. Davie didn’t want to tell her grandmother the bad news on the telephone, so she asked the manager to send somebody to her room to tell her the truth about her friend.
“Tell her I’ll pick her up in time for the service.”
Davie hung up the phone just as Giordano limped passed her desk. His face was flushed, as if his blood pressure were primed to explode. He slammed a stack of papers on his desk.
“You okay, boss?”
“Bellows says our homicide clearance rate sucks, and the captain is tired of being slammed by the command staff every time he goes to a COMPSTAT meeting. He wants us to review cold cases and pull together enough evidence to file with the DA’s office.”
COMPSTAT, short for Computer Statistics, was a program used to analyze crime trends and make division captains more accountable for lowering area felonies and misdemeanors in all categories. Those who attended the meetings dreaded listening to commanders berate them for any uptick in the city’s crime rates.
“Does he know we just got two fresh homicides? How are we supposed to review cold cases?”
“He knows.” Giordano pulled a notebook from the shelf above his desk. Under his breath, he mumbled, “Fucking crybaby.”
“I have some new leads in the Nosova case.”
“Good. Make an arrest and get Bellows off my ass.”
“First I need to talk to somebody who knows about the Russian mafia.”
“No shit. You think the mafia is involved?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”
Giordano thumbed through an old-fashioned Rolodex he kept in his desk drawer. He handed her a card with a handwritten phone number on it next to the letter Q.
“Call Reuben Quintero. He’s our go-to guy for all things Russian. He used to work Robbery-Homicide, but last I heard he was assigned to CCD. ”
Davie thought of CCD as just another example of the department’s fascination with alphabet soup. It stood for Commercial Crimes Division and was formed from a merger between the former Financial
Crimes Division (FCD) and Burglary Auto Division (BAD), which everybody called BAD Cats.
Davie copied the number onto her telephone sheet and returned the card to Giordano. “Thanks, boss.”
“Keep up the good work, kid. Let me know if you need help.”
23
Davie waited for Detective Giordano to return to his desk before dialing Quintero’s number. He answered after one ring. She briefed him on the case. “I’d like to show you some surveillance photos. See if you recognize anybody.”
“Not this week,” he said. “I’m getting ready to file a case I’ve been working on for months. Until that happens, I don’t have time for anything else.”
“I’m looking for information I needed yesterday.”
“You hinterland dicks think you rule the planet. I got news for you: you don’t.”
She figured Quintero was a munchkin and the snub made him feel taller. She wanted to tell him that Giordano believed divisional detectives were the best in the department, but escalating the rhetoric wouldn’t solve Anya Nosova’s murder. She decided to save it for another day. Given Quintero’s attitude, she was sure that day would come.
“A young woman is dead. I need to know who killed her.”
Quintero blew a long stream of air into the telephone’s receiver. “Be here by two or you’ll be talking to the door.”
She wondered if the door might be the lesser of two evils.
It took her forty-five minutes to negotiate traffic on the 10, not the twenty Quintero had dictated. She parked on the street across from the new Police Administration Building, an angular structure of smoky glass, sharp corners, and a maze of muted interior hallways. There was an underground garage, but it was off limits to all but the privileged and the powerful.
Quintero was waiting for her outside. She smiled when she saw that he was short. He was also wiry and intense, the sort of person who could pull an all-nighter cramming for a final exam without the benefit of caffeine. He had dusky skin and close-cropped black hair that reminded her of a harbor seal. She guessed he hadn’t been a rookie for at least twenty years, but he looked as physically fit and healthy as an academy boot—except for the smokes.
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