by Ninie Hammon
“I’m sorry … I … just not tonight, okay? It’s too much. Too fast. I can’t … Bethany needs time to adjust. Please.”
María took a deep, shuddery breath.
“In the morning. Tomorrow. Come back and get us in the morning. We’ll be …” She choked out the next words, making a sound like the familiar wheeze from years ago. “… ready to leave at nine o’clock.”
Every fiber of Bailey’s being wanted to scream, “No!” They couldn’t wait. It was too dangerous. They had to go right now.
But did they? There was just one way to find out, and though she knew it would only add to the insanity, she said it anyway.
“Your dress for opening night of The Nutcracker — where is it?”
She might as well have hit María between the eyes with a wrecking ball.
“My dress? How could you possibly …?” She couldn’t finish the question because the rest of the words had fallen out of her head onto the floor.
“I’m so sorry, but I have to know. Where—?”
“I’m … picking it up tomorrow. Why …?”
“There’s so much to explain and I’ll tell you everything. There’s just no time to do that now.”
So they didn’t have to come with her right this minute. T.J.’s text had said the police hadn’t arrested Mikhailov yet. He still thought Bailey was dead. She was as safe from him now as she had been every day of the past two years.
Nobody goes looking for somebody they think is dead.
María and Bethany were still safe, too. For now.
The truth still in the husk was that Bailey didn’t want to wait. Not a single second longer. She wanted them to come right now because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them. Of seeing them both … seeing Bethany … for the first time since …
And then just walking away.
Leaving them and walking away.
It would be the hardest thing she’d ever done.
The part of Bailey that might or might not be related to Oscar’s presence in her brain harrumphed loudly in her mind.
That’s a load of crap.
Bailey Donahue had done a whole lot of things harder than this in the past two years. But none of them had hurt as bad.
“Okay, in the morning, then.”
She knew if she didn’t get up right then and walk out the door she would never be able to leave at all.
Then it hit her.
“No, wait!”
María looked shocked and Bethany was surprised into silence.
“I … please. I want to …”
She took her phone out of her pocket and tossed her coat back onto the couch.
“I … they took my phone, threw it into the car with the body of the homeless woman and … all my pictures were in it.”
When she said the word pictures, the aching and longing and pain in the word came from the deepest recesses of her heart.
“I didn’t have a single … not even one picture of Aaron. Or Bethany. I want to …” She lifted the phone up. “Can I take a picture. Please.”
She watched emotions play over María’s face and told herself that when she could, she would remember the moment, conjure up the image again and try to determine what all the emotions had been.
María leaned over and lifted Bethany’s chin.
“Hey sugar, this nice lady wants to take our picture. Can you smile for her?”
Bethany shook her head and buried her face in María’s chest.
“Aw, come on, honey. I know you have a smile. Remember the secret one I gave you? The one I told you to keep in your pocket so you could pull it out and put it on whenever you were sad? You have that one, don’t you?”
Bethany looked up at María and nodded. She wiped the back of her hand across her nose, did nothing but smear it, so María used the hem of the little girl’s shirt to wipe her face.
Bailey had punched the button on her camera as soon as she pointed the phone at them and it was recording it all, a video. Then when the two of them were ready, María looked up.
“Smile, sugar.”
Bethany smiled and her whole face lit up like a rocket. A flare. A shooting star across the night sky.
Bailey switched from video to photo, punched the button, saved the memory safe in her phone.
She stood then, turned purposefully toward the door and felt her knees turn to bags of water, unable to hold her up.
Oh, how she didn’t want it to be like this.
She walked on legs she couldn’t feel across the living room. If she turned around. If she turned back around …
Then María was beside her, holding the coat she’d left on the couch.
“… cold out there,” she said. And something else about … “your pocket …” but her words were so tear-clotted they were almost unintelligible.
“Mommy!” Bethany cried.
She’d been left in the chair when María leapt up to get Bailey’s coat and she sounded as bereft as if she’d been set on an ice floe and shoved out into the Arctic Ocean to be eaten alive by walruses.
“Tomorrow,” Bailey managed to say, as María opened the door and stood holding it, openly crying now.
“Nine o’clock,” María said, nodding. “We’ll be ready to go.”
Then Bailey was standing in the hallway, the closed door behind her, feeling as lost and alone as she’d felt that day when she walked from room to room in a featureless house in—
Stop it!
She shouted the words at herself so loudly inside her head she was surprised no sound came out in the hallway.
She had seen María and Bethany. She would see them in the morning … and then she would never … never be separated from them again.
Bailey shoved her arms into the coat María had handed her. Didn’t button it or get her gloves out of the pocket, just rushed down the stairs and out the front door, wanting to get as far away as possible before she started to cry.
Chapter Twenty
“How many times, you think?” T.J. gestured with his chin to the closed door of the bedroom off the living room of the suite of rooms they’d taken at the Sheraton Plaza. They could hear muffled voices. The same muffled voices, over and over.
“A hundred, maybe.” Brice considered. “More. Two hundred.”
“Two hundred sounds about right.”
Bailey had first played the video for them after she stumbled into the back seat of the car parked around the corner from María’s apartment, and sobbed uncontrollably for maybe a minute.
Clearly, Bailey’d been devastated. But not freaked-out devastated. Not something-horrible-happened devastated. Just unutterably-sad devastated. Her first meeting with María and Bethany in two years had not gone well, but she had met with them. She had found them, seen them, spoken to them. They were all right.
If they hadn’t been, Bailey would have been a whole other level of devastated. Brice knew her well enough to know from her body language the instant he saw her hurrying down the street toward the car, her hood thrown back, her coat unbuttoned, that she’d been through an emotional wringer. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
She’d calmed herself then. Literally grabbed hold of her emotions, clenched her fist around them, the way you’d put a clamp on a spurting artery to stop the blood flow instantly. Then she’d told them what happened.
When she’d described reaching out and grabbing the little girl as she ran to her “mommy” with her arms open, Brice had wanted to take Bailey into his arms and comfort her as much as she’d wanted to hug the little girl.
“I screwed it up,” she’d said. “My bad.”
T.J. reached over and used his thumb to wipe a single tear that was sliding down her cheek.
“The tears a mama cries for her child — them’s blue tears. They’s a special kind, got special healing power in ‘em.” He’d smiled what looked — to Brice at least — like a genuine smile. “It wasn’t ‘your bad.’ You done good. Wouldn’t a’made no difference
what you done or said, wasn’t no good way in the world to do what you had to do. It was gonna be too much for a body to take in all at once no matter how it went.”
They’d both consoled her as best they could, made it clear they were sure her sister and daughter would be perfectly safe for one more night right where they were — both of them aware that though their safety was the most important consideration, it wasn’t the only one. Seeing them … and then leaving them there. That had ripped Bailey’s guts out.
Then she’d shown them the video. The young woman consoling the child — a beautiful little girl who was the image of her mother. Of Bailey. No, of Jessie Cunningham. The little girl wiping her face, looking into the camera and smiling.
She’d shown them the still shot she had taken.
Brice was no good with a camera, always seemed to capture everybody with their eyelids at half mast, or their mouths agape, looking ridiculous at best and just plain unrecognizable at worst.
But the picture Bailey showed them, a single frame, taken with trembling hands, looked like it’d been taken by a professional photographer. The young woman’s face was open, sincere and easy to read. She was upset but holding it together. Brice saw strength there that he instantly respected and admired.
The little girl was as adorable a child as he had ever seen. The lighting was shadowy, so her eye color was indiscernible, but he could tell her eyes weren’t the dark hazel of her mother’s. Bailey’d said she had her father’s eyes. Aaron’s eyes. Robin’s egg blue. But she’d also said the little girl was the image of her father and that wasn’t true. She looked just like Bailey. He could have picked them as mother and daughter out of a crowd of a hundred people.
That was the first time she played the video. She’d played it over and over again, staring at it mesmerized in the back seat of the car, while T.J.’d called around and gotten them a suite of rooms at the Sheraton and they’d checked in. Brice in his Kavanaugh County Sheriff’s uniform had raised a few eyebrows. Though he wasn’t about to admit that he’d been freezing in the car, when he’d stopped at the hotel gift shop to get basic overnight supplies for T.J. and Bailey — toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, etc. — he’d also purchased a ridiculously overpriced Boston sweatshirt. With that over his t-shirt and Kevlar vest, he’d be warm enough until they got back on the plane tomorrow morning.
They’d ordered room service. Bailey’d taken a bite or two out of her sandwich and now she was in the bedroom watching the images again and again.
“Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock can’t come quick enough for that girl,” T.J. observed, as he ate the remainder of his supper and all that Bailey had left untouched on her plate. Dobbs had told Brice once that T.J. could eat anything, anywhere, any time. Said it was a skill he’d learned growing up in a home where he wasn’t sure where his next meal was coming from and honed during years of military service. Dobbs had nailed that one.
“She won’t sleep a wink tonight, you know that, don’t you?”
“Duh.”
“You can go on to the room whenever you want. I’m going to crash here on the couch.” Brice wanted to be there, near … in case she needed something.
“I’ll stay for a bit, too.”
T.J.’s phone pinged with an incoming message and Brice’s pinged a few seconds later. Dobbs. Brice opened the message and found that it held an attachment of the full report from the private investigator, Zankoski. The message that accompanied the report was only half a dozen words long, but it chilled Brice to the bone: You’re not going to like this.
Brice read the whole report through, beginning to end. Then read it again, slower this time. He had been impressed with how thorough Zankoski had been in August, when Dobbs had hired him to track down the identity of the little girl Bailey had painted. He’d gotten all the pertinent information, everything he’d been paid to collect. Then he’d provided even more, he’d dug deeper and unearthed the strange details of the case, the details that should have set off every cop’s gut alarm Brice had. Eventually, he did piece it all together, but it was a heartbeat too late to do him any good.
This report was just as thorough and documented. It was their good fortune that Zankoski’s law enforcement career in Milwaukie had been preceded by a brief stint with the New York City Police Department. He still had friends there and one of them had followed Zankoski’s example, had set up a private investigator business — in Boston.
Brice smiled. Cops and former cops were a tight group. If you “know a guy who knows a guy,” you can often dig out all manner of things. Like before, Zankoski had included information he’d hadn’t been paid to find out, other details he’d gotten his Boston friend to chase down on his own. The basic information contained nothing Brice didn’t already know about Mikhailov. The extra added attractions did.
As Dobbs had predicted, Brice didn’t like it one bit.
When he looked up from his second perusal of the report, T.J. was looking at him. Brice said only one word, the only one necessary.
“Crazy.”
“Yep. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” T.J. shook his head. “Ain’t bad enough the monster’s a killer, now he’s a lunatic killer. Of course, in my book that’s kinda an oxymoron anyway.”
The report had described conversations with members of Mikhailov’s operation — not the higher-ups, just the foot soldiers, the minions. Even what little they knew had been chilling.
It seemed clear to the mafia boss’s organization that something was very, very wrong with the boss. He’d always been vicious, but over the course of the last couple of years in Russia, his depravity had grown on some order of magnitude to a level intolerable even in the circles in which a man like a mafia boss traveled.
He’d always been totally devoid of morality or pity — or humanity — but he had been a disciplined man, rising up through the ranks of the organization because he was both ruthless and practical. He employed all manner of brutality, torture and murder as a means to an end. He got what he wanted, suffered not a peep of opposition, ruled with an iron fist. Did it all dispassionately.
Brice remembered Bailey’s description of the tape recording she’d listened to in the police station, Mikhailov talking to an informant. She’d said he displayed no emotion whatsoever, described killing the family members of his enemies as if he were reading the assembly instructions for a backyard barbecue grill.
In the past two years, that had changed. He was seen in fits of violent rage, was so paranoid he literally had bodyguards whose job it was to protect him from his other bodyguards. He indulged in the most brutal violence as if he enjoyed it.
The single most chilling story had been the still unconfirmed tale of what had happened to his only son, Ivan, the young man who had gotten drunk and run a red light, crashing into a car, killing a young mother and her infant son. The crash that had led to the death of Aaron Cunningham, some nameless homeless woman, and had launched Jessie Cunningham into the desert of a seemingly endless exile in the Witness Protection Program.
The boy was not seen for months after the accident. Then he appeared — clean and sober — in Moscow. About two months ago, he vanished again, however, and rumor had it that his father had caught him drinking again and had beaten him to death with a fireplace poker.
Mikhailov also seemed to be suffering from intermittent hearing loss and vision problems.
“I’m thinkin’ Zankoski’s last suggestion sounds like the best guess.”
“He is the kind of man who’d have to worry about a thing like that.”
“Yeah, and the symptoms match, too. I seen it before, busted a guy once who was crazier’n a outhouse rat — sudden mood changes, paranoia, uncontrollable rage and depravity.”
“Advanced stage syphilis.”
“That’d be my read on it.”
“He was dangerous enough as a simple mafia killer. Now, he’s a mad dog.”
“Had ought to be shot down like one, too — on sight.�
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“I’m not sure Bailey needs to know—”
“Bailey already knows,” said a voice from the open doorway of the bedroom. The men turned and saw her standing there, phone in hand, her face a white mask.
“If you’re concerned that report is going to upset me, don’t be. There are no degrees of monstrosity. He murdered Aaron, shot him. Just … shot him. Twice. There’s nothing he could do that’s worse than that.”
T.J. crossed to where she was standing in the doorway, her hands instinctively clasping her upper arms, hugging herself.
“How about you curl up in this here chair. I’ll get the blanket off the bed. You ain’t gonna go to sleep in that bedroom all by yourself anyway. Least in here, you got company.”
She looked at him gratefully and nodded.
Brice went to the bedroom and stripped off the blanket, then wrapped it around her when she curled up in a ball in the chair.
“We’ll both be right here,” Brice told her. “T.J. already owes me the deed to his house, and we’re going for double or nothing.”
T.J. humphed. Bailey smiled a little, then closed her eyes. Cuddling her phone to her like she wanted to be cuddling her little girl.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the space of half an hour, María McKessen’s life had gone from orderly, neat and tidy, planned out, happy and safe to unmitigated chaos. That fast.
Of course, Bailey’s life had gone from happily married mother to on-the-run fugitive in less time than that.
Bailey.
María still had trouble believing it. So much trouble, in fact, that after Bailey left, she ran to the window, watched her come out the front door of the building and run off down the street, her coat unbuttoned, hood thrown back, black hair tumbling in the wind.
She had run down the street. María understood why. If she hadn’t run, if she hadn’t propelled herself forward, she wouldn’t have been able to go at all. María had seen that, watched Bailey grinding her jaw as she got up off the couch to leave. Every step was lifting a thousand-pound weight.