"Why?" she demanded.
"Because I think it's your sister, and I'm hoping you're marginally less inclined to murder me if there's a nun in the room."
"I could keep her waiting in the hall, let her in after I'm finished."
"That's true. Hard to explain, though."
"I hate you," Bridgett Logan informed me, tossing the knife onto her couch, and moving out of sight again, this time to answer the door. I heard her greeting her sister, a mock cry of "Cashel! What a surprise! Come in, come in!" and took the time to get up enough to move the knife from the couch to the coffee table, setting it beside the pistol.
Cashel came into sight first, Bridgett following her. Together, there was no mistaking the family resemblance, though Cashel was an inch or two shorter than her older sister's six feet, her eyes more gray than blue. She was wearing a tan blazer over a white blouse and black slacks, removing the coat as she entered. I could see the lapel pin on the blazer, the tall and thin rectangle with the engraving of a rolling hillside, a cross at its summit, the symbol of her order.
She smiled when she saw me, and unlike Bridgett's, it was genuine. "Atticus."
"Hello, Sister."
Her eyes caught the implements of death and pain on the coffee table, and the smile shrank, turned wry.
"Looks like you were correct," Cashel said.
I shrugged.
Bridgett, nostrils flaring, glared at her sister, then at me, then back to her sister.
"You knew he was here? You knew he was in New York?"
"We met for coffee this morning," Cashel said. "He said it might be best if I stopped by."
Bridgett rounded on her sister, eyes blazing. "You know who he is? What he's become? This isn't the Boy Scout I told you about all those years ago."
"I'm not sure he ever was," Cashel replied, moving to the couch.
"You set me up." Bridgett bounced her look between her sister and me once more, then decided she was angrier at me, which I thought was more than fair. "You fucking set me up."
"Yeah," I confirmed. "But I have a reason."
"It had better be a damn good one."
"It is to me," I said. "I need your help."
"You have no right to ask for my help, Atticus! It's been, what, seven years? You made your choice back then. You made your decision, you walked away from everyone you knew, everything you were. You chose the bad guy over us. You have no right."
"Not everything is black and white," I said.
"Oh, forgive me, I thought murder was wrong, I thought it was, what's the word?" Bridgett turned to her sister. "What is it again, Sister? Oh, right! It's a sin! It's a fucking sin!"
Cashel made a slight face. I suspected Bridgett was being liberal with her profanity simply to annoy her younger sibling.
"God detests the sin," Cashel pointed out. "Not the sinner."
"Do you know what he's become?" Bridgett demanded. "Do you know what he does?"
"You don't know what I do," I pointed out.
"You're a fucking assassin, Atticus," Bridgett said. "Spin it however you like, you kill people for money, that makes you a fucking goddamn assassin."
Cashel looked at me.
"I'm not," I said. "Despite what your sister may have convinced herself of, I do not sell what I can do. Have I killed people? Yes. Will I do it again? If I have to, yes. I'm not proud of it. I'm not eager for it. But that's how it is."
Bridgett ran a hand up the side of her face, into her hair, taking a fistful of it to tug. She let it go, shaking her head.
"I think you should listen to what he has to say," Cashel told her sister.
"You don't know what he did." Bridgett let her hair go, shoulders slumping. All of her seemed tired, suddenly, and her voice went soft. "You don't know how many of our friends died because of what he did, because of the choice he made."
Cashel reached out for her sister's hand, gave her fingers a squeeze. "Listen to him."
Bridgett snorted wearily, then nodded.
"Alena's in a hotel in Odessa," I said. "She won't be there much longer, she's looking for a place to move to, to hole up. She's alone, and I need someone I can trust to be with her, to help keep her safe."
Bridgett's expression turned to incredulity, the fatigue dissipating in a new wave of outrage.
"Fuck you."
"She needs help."
"Fuck you!" Bridgett appealed to her sister. "You know who he's talking about? You know who this woman he's talking about is? Even if you believe what he's telling us about himself, he can't say the same about her-"
"She's pregnant," I interrupted.
Over coffee, when I'd told Cashel that Alena was pregnant, her response had been one of genuine pleasure.
Bridgett, not so much. I might as well have punched her, the reaction was so immediate and so physical. Her head snapped back, came around to stare at me. Her mouth opened, lower lip working, and then she closed it again. She backed up, bumping into the kitchen counter, put a hand on one of the barstools there. After a second, she took the seat.
"Yours?" she asked, finally.
"Yeah."
"She's having your baby?"
"Yeah."
She shook her head once more, muttering, before she said, "You don't need my help. That woman, pregnant? Anyone fucks with her they'd be dead twice before they hit the ground."
"I need someone with her I can trust. Someone who can back her up if it comes to that."
"And is it going to come to that?"
"I don't know. There's a chance. I've made some people very angry lately."
"Not including myself."
"More recently."
"Why can't it be you?" There was the edge of new suspicion in the question. "She's having your baby, after all."
"Because I have to find someone first," I said. Most of what I told Bridgett about Tiasa Lagidze I'd already told her sister when we'd met for coffee in the Bronx that morning. After arriving at Kennedy the night before, I'd checked into a hotel near the airport, traveling under the Anthony Shephard ID. Jet lag had me up before five, and I'd used my laptop to find a phone number for Cashel Logan, a Sister of Incarnate Love. It hadn't taken long, but I'd waited until after seven before putting in the call, asking to meet her.
Bridgett listened without comment, but with visible emotion. When I described the women I'd seen in Turkey, the girls I'd found in the brothel in Dubai, the fury writ itself large on her face.
"I've done some counseling with victims of trafficking," Cashel said. "It's increased substantially in the last couple of years, as more and more cases have come to light, as law enforcement has become more aware of the crime."
"There was that case in New Jersey," Bridgett said. "Last year, it made the Times."
"Yes. And the arrests in Kansas and Florida."
"This girl could be anywhere in the world," Bridgett told me.
"Maybe. Some places more likely than others. I've got a lead I need to chase down."
"The experience is uniformly brutal, but it is survivable," Cashel said. "You can recover from it, make a life again. But the longer the slavery, the harder the recovery. And the younger the victim, the more damage that has to be undone."
"So you're going to rescue the girl, and you want me to protect the little lady?" Bridgett asked. "That's why you're here?"
"If you want to put it like that," I said.
"Once upon a time, you knew a lot of bodyguards," Bridgett said. "I'm not a bodyguard, I'm a private investigator. Why haven't you asked them? Or did you do that already and they all told you what I'm inclined to tell you?"
"I thought about it," I answered. "But I can't trust them the way I can trust you."
"You son of a bitch."
"I've got nobody else."
"And whose fault is that, Atticus?"
"No one's but my own."
"You would say that." She glared at me for a long time, then slid off the barstool. "Fuck it. I've always wanted to visit Ukraine. I'll go pack."
We watched her disappear back into her bedroom.
"This girl, Tiasa," Cashel said. "I may be able to help her, or at least put you in contact with people who can, wherever you find her. If you find her."