“Same as you asked, whose apartment is this, who is owner…”
“And then what?”
“He walk around. Sit down over there.”
She pointed to the other end of the room at the only non-modern piece of furniture, an ornate writing desk painted in white with twisted rose vines painted up each leg.
She said, “He open the drawer. Some of the owner’s papers are there. He look around inside. Then he take a book down from shelf.”
“Which book?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
I asked what color the cover was.
“White. Or maybe brown. I don’t remember. He put it back on the shelf.” She gestured with the knife, its point at shoulder height. “When he come back he had that look in his eye, like when he knows something no one else knows. Like when I first meet him…”
Her voice choked up. I reached out past the knife and put one hand on her shoulder, caught between an impulse to stroke her gently and one to shake her firmly. I wanted to comfort her—but I couldn’t indulge her grief just yet. There was too much I still needed to learn. What Owl had been doing in the city, what he’d come to see Elena for.
I prompted Elena, squeezing her shoulder lightly: “Go on. What happened then?”
“George say wake up, wake up, he get her on her feet. He walk her to the couch. He talk to her, feed her coffee—I make, full pot, and she drink, drink. I don’t hear everything they talk, but I can tell he’s using his persuasion on her.”
“His persuasion?”
“How he get people to do what he want. It was a nap he have.”
“Knack,” I corrected.
“Yes. He convince her she’ll be safer if she come with him. He walk her out the door. That was last I see him.”
“What time was that?”
“Little after seven in the morning.”
“Why go out so early?”
“He’d been here all night. My boyfriend is away, work all night at garage. George come over to help me to figure out…” She seemed to consider saying more but decided not to.
“Help you figure out what?”
“Not important,” she said, and before I could ask again she went on, “Tell me truth, did this woman hurt him, is that how he died?”
“No. It was an accident. She wasn’t even there. He left her back at his hotel room. She was waiting for him when I got there.”
“Then it must be the other person, the one he say been following him.”
“What do you mean? What other person?”
“You don’t know? He tell me it’s why he want to hire you.”
“Told you when?”
“He call me when he reach hotel room with woman. He say he’s picked up snake. No, not snake, what word he use…tail. Picked up tail.”
“He saw someone tailing him?”
“He say it’s just a feeling. But he trust his feeling.”
I nodded, remembering the way he’d sensed me looking at him from my window. I trusted his feelings myself.
She said, “He tell me he gonna hire you to find out who’s following him.”
Owl had said he wanted me to tag someone following one of the people leaving Yaffa. He just hadn’t mentioned that the person being followed would be him. And of course it didn’t play out the way he’d planned. When the time for the meeting came, Owl was dead, so he never showed up at Yaffa; and either his tail knew this and never showed either or else did show up, saw Owl wasn’t there, and left without my noticing. Unless I had noticed—unless the person Owl had been supposed to meet was Sayre Rauth and Jeff had been his mysterious tail…? But no. Jeff had been so incompetent at it, Owl would’ve spotted him in a heartbeat and a half. Maybe the blonde kid, FL!P? He’d tailed me earlier—and he’d been there when Owl’d had his accident. Or maybe it was the Russians in their Grand Cherokee…?
Elena was saying, “I knew something was wrong. I been frightened since he don’t call me…” And she started shaking again. I squeezed her shoulder harder, brought her back.
“Elena, I need to know, what was Owl helping you with?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why was he here? Did you ask him to come?”
Nothing.
“Was it the problem you’re having with your super?”
“What? I don’t—Luis? He’s a drunk. I know how to handle drunks.”
“He said you punched a hole in the wall.”
“Me?” She held up her small hand. It did look unlikely. “He do that himself,” she said. “He drinks, and he forgets what he did—so he blame me. But he is harmless, he’s no problem.”
“Then what was George helping you with?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Whatever it is, you know he wanted me to help, too.”
She looked at me a long moment.
“What does it matter to you?” she said. “If George hired you and now he is… You don’t need to do nothing more. It’s over for you.”
“It’s not over for you,” I said, the resolution warbling my voice, “so it’s not over for me. George came out of retirement to help you. He told me he owed you a favor and he wanted to repay it. It’s my job to repay it now. And in our line of work, we finish the jobs we’re hired for.”
“George owed me nothing,” Elena said. “I told him this a thousand times. He did more for me than I ever did for him. He got me into this country. I wouldn’t be here—wouldn’t be alive—if not for him. This is better life than I could ever hope for if I stayed in Ukraine.”
“That’s where you’re from? Ukraine?”
It was a stupid thing say. It put her back on guard just when she’d finally begun opening up. But a voice in my head kept whispering, Ukraine, Ukraine… something about Owl in the Ukraine… Then I had it.
“Hang on,” I said, “does this have something to do with that case with the kidnapped American girl?” I looked her over. She was in her early twenties now, she’d have been about the same age as that girl when it happened—which was also, I realized, roughly the age she’d been in the photograph with Owl. “I remember hearing a story,” I said, “about a case Owl had that took him to the Ukraine. Maybe ten years ago? I heard it from two different guys, actually. About how he helped rescue an American girl from a child pornography ring there.”
She was nodding, the knife she’d been gripping all this time finally lowered. I saw that the t-shirt bunched around her arm was soaked a dark red, but at least the stain had stopped spreading.
“The way I heard it,” I said, “he was hired by the grandparents of a missing girl who’d been abducted by her father. They’d sought custody after their daughter died the year before in a car accident. There were signs of sexual abuse by the father, as I recall, but the grandparents didn’t press for criminal prosecution as long as he didn’t contest their custody. They won the case—but lost their granddaughter. A month later the father kidnapped her and they both vanished without a trace.
“So the grandparents hired George Rowell. He tracked the girl down after photos of her surfaced on a child pornography website based in the Ukraine. He went over, learned that the girl’s father had involved her with, what was it, a child modeling agency?” Elena nodded. “But not the sort of modeling agency you’d want your child working for. It was all porn, right? Photographing and videotaping naked girls between the ages of seven and sixteen.”
“Six,” Elena said softly. “There was one girl who was six.”
“And you,” I said, “how old were you?”
“Eleven,” she said. “When I started.”
I thought back to being that age, what had I been up to? Moving my lips to an Encyclopedia Brown at the public library, not disrobing in front of a camera.
I cleared my throat and asked her, “These people kept you prisoner? Locked up?”