“Damn,” LaMoia said. He pulled the Jetta out onto wet streets. The sky this time of year was worse than a leaking faucet.
“His caviar business is important to him. We can assume that’s where the seventeen million came from in the first place: some undeclared profits.”
“You think it was his money?”
“I think it was. But his main message was a story about magpies.”
“What-pies?”
“Birds. He took the long way around to explain to me that the Hayes crime scene, the cabin, is a cheap imitation. His guys turned their backs, and somebody took Hayes.”
“You buy that?”
“There’s a second interpretation. This may just be me being paranoid.”
LaMoia waited.
“Liz and I drove the kids out to Kathy’s-my sister’s-in the middle of the night, Tuesday night. We literally took them out of our nest. Maybe I blew it. Maybe we were followed. Maybe he’s warning me not to try to move them again or he’ll take action the next time. Maybe he doesn’t know where they are and he’s looking for me to panic and lead him to them. We both know the Russians have a reputation of working the family when the going gets tough.” Boldt recalled an unsolved child murder, and the suspicion of Russian involvement.
“Holy shit,” LaMoia breathed.
“That’s why I’m likely to make a call asking about the possibility of lifting this lockdown. And I’m going to talk to Bernie about cross-comparing every single piece of evidence from that cabin against Danny Foreman’s crime scene. I think what just happened in there was that Yasmani Svengrad confessed to us that Alekseevich is our guy, but that he didn’t do Hayes at the cabin. My bet is, Svengrad wants Hayes as badly as, or worse than, we do.”
“The merger. The deadline.”
“That’s it,” Boldt said, but his main thought was that this still put Liz squarely in the center.
FOURTEEN
LIZ COULDN’T SPEND TIME IN the house with the kids gone. She’d left for work earlier than usual, wrung out by waiting for the phone to ring and by the eerie silence of an empty home. Lou called with an invitation to lunch. It hit her hard because they were both too busy for such extravagances, which meant this had to be of the utmost importance. It also occurred to her that she was probably the last person in the world her husband wanted to sit down to lunch with, and this both broke her heart and made her all the more curious and fearful of his reasons.
Somewhat typical of Lou, he chose Bateman’s, a semi-underground lunch joint that made the freshest turkey sandwiches in the city but at the expense of atmosphere. She walked to the cafeteria, despite a light mist in the air that others might have called rain, not only aware of, but glad for, the man and woman in trench coats who followed behind her. Bobbie Gaynes and Mark Heiman were both familiar faces to her-and yet seeing them surprised her, for they were among the very best of Lou’s detectives. By assigning these two to watch her, Lou sent her a message, intended or not, of just how serious he took the threat to her safety. As the three of them reached the restaurant, Gaynes peeled off and crossed the street, entering a mystery bookshop from where she would watch Bateman’s and any activity on the street. Heiman followed inside and ate at a table nearby, a cell phone/walkie-talkie on the table in plain view.
But not too nearby. Lou wanted his privacy. After moving through the line, they took a table well away from Heiman, so the detective couldn’t overhear.
Liz worked on a bowl of chili, picking out chunks of meat and setting them on the plate. Lou deconstructed a turkey and cranberry on wheat and dug into it with a plastic fork. It struck her that neither of them could simply eat what had been served.
He spoke in the practiced voice of a man used to talking in the third row of a courtroom while the trial was under way. “You and I have barely had five minutes to catch up.” His tone suggested apology and so she braced for more bad news. Not the kids, she thought, presuming he would not wait for a lunch meeting if whatever it was had to do with them. Lou pushed some cranberry jelly onto a piece of white meat and ate the combination. He washed it down with hot tea.
“We don’t know how it all fits together, or for that matter, even if it all fits together, but there are some things you need to know.” He told her about the blood evidence at the cabin, and how forensics would be the clincher, but that he couldn’t say exactly what had gone on out there. He warned her that if her latent fingerprints surfaced, they would have to deal with it, that such a discovery might signal the end of their keeping the affair secret, and that he wanted her prepared for that eventuality.
“The tape?”
“Danny Foreman shot that tape of you two.”
She calmly set down the spoon. Either the chili had landed on an empty stomach, or this news was about to make her sick.
“It’s a surveillance tape that he suppressed,” Lou explained. “He didn’t think it relevant at the time, which is cop speak for his not wanting to get you in trouble.” He told her the lab had discovered both Paul Geiser’s and Danny Foreman’s prints on the outside of the cassette. “And another partial that belonged to an INS green card holder-a Russian.” He covered the difficulty of connecting a partial print legally to an individual, but how the discovery of a Russian cigarette ash at the Foreman assault had helped confirm suspicions and led them to a distributor. This, without naming names. “What you need to know, Liz, is that this man, this importer, he plays rough. The Russian mafia is famous for coming after one’s family as a means of pressure.”
“The LaRossas,” she said.
“Yes. The Russian… I saw him late yesterday… told me this tale-the story’s unimportant-that may mean that he, they, I’m not sure, followed us out to Kathy’s. May know where Miles and Sarah are.” He lowered his head.
She felt made of stone. Frozen, both from motion and in terms of cold. She knew exactly what he was telling her, and yet her mother’s sense of protection tried to reinterpret whatever it was so that it wouldn’t come out the way it had sounded. The way he meant it. She finally said, “I want to hear the story.” “It’s not important,” he repeated.
“I… want… to… hear… the… story.”
“I screwed up, Liz. I’m sorry. I did everything I could to avoid being followed.”
She understood then that he took this as a failure on his part. She wanted to forgive him, placing little importance on how it had happened, but then reconsidered and felt angry he’d let them be followed. It felt so wonderfully good to deflect the blame for some of this onto him-even if only briefly. But within seconds she felt awful about gloating over his shame, knowing these problems had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own past, and this realization and the combined guilt ate into her all the more deeply. She pushed the chili aside distastefully. “The story,” she said again.
He took a moment to explain the tale of the magpie waiting for the empty nest. “We can’t be sure,” he added quickly, “that it has anything to do with the kids. It could very well have been his way of denying responsibility for what happened to Hayes at the cabin. We know Danny Foreman was lured away from the cabin. It’s not inconceivable that this man I’m talking about… his guys were lured away as well, or even followed Foreman when they should have stayed on Hayes. It’s not clear. I want to emphasize that.”
“We’ve got to get them out.”
Lou had the audacity to shake his head no. “That’s not an option.”
She’d never felt this kind of cold, even through her illness, never anything close to this sense of removal and distance. “Why? Kathy can take them somewhere. Boise. Reno. Someplace far away.”