I pocketed the card and went to take my leave with Emily. Looks like this house wasn’t a dead end after all, if my theory was correct. If I was wrong, well, then I just made Belyana and her worried mother suffer longer while we wasted valuable time.
“And last but not least,” Emily said, snatching one last paper she found resting on the coffee table. “License registration.”
I stopped in front of the door, sighing loudly at my kleptomaniac partner. “Do me a favor; don’t use my computer for any of that shit.”
Chapter Fifteen
We left Sokolov’s residence in the same manner we found it in—minus his documents of course—including the lock on the front door. Emily’s thieving skills were not to be fucked with. I drove us away without drawing any attention to what we did. My eyes repeatedly took glances at the rearview mirror verifying we weren’t being watched or followed.
“Where to now?” Emily asked me while sifting through the mess of papers.
“I want to check up on Jim before we head back home.”
“He’s got a computer in that safe house, right?”
“Probably.”
Her ears twitched, and her tail tucked into the leg of her pants probably did the same. “Can I use that too?” she said once again, reminding me of the papers she stole.
True, I told her not to use my computer for the theft of Sokolov’s identity. But Jim’s? “Aww fuck,” I groaned.
“I’ll be sure to jack someone else’s unsecured Wi-Fi, so it won’t link back to him.”
“If you find one.”
“It’s a high-rise place, there’s always that one sucker close by.” Her feline-like eyes scanned the documents longer. She remained fixated on one paper that looked like a financial statement. “Wow, this guy liked to withdraw a lot of cash.”
“Probably to pay his protection fees, pretty sure mobsters don’t accept payments with plastic.”
“They were recent, and more than enough to cover protection fees.”
It was pretty clear Sokolov was lonely and went out of his way to spend money on strippers, and probably offered extra for them to come home with him. That’s just how men like him are. But to not pay your protection fees to the Russian mafia? That was plain stupid. Pay your fees, then go to sink into the pink. Why he was obsessed with girls more than protecting his business and only source of income, was a question I couldn’t answer, the card in my pocket, however, yeah, that might be able to.
“Reika, where are we going?” Emily asked, and thank fuck she did.
My thoughts had me distracted. We ended up driving around aimlessly getting lost. We ended up driving along the roads closest to Brighton Beach, and adjacent to several high-rise apartments. We were far from Jim’s safe house in the area, and even further away from ours that we now called home.
It was time to get us back on track. I pulled our car back onto the correct roads, that’s when Emily shouted and pointed at a number of idle police cars with red and blue lights flashing. I didn’t think anything of it at first, this is New York after all.
I figured Emily was in the same position until she yelled. “Stop!” And frantically looked behind at a parked car we had passed seconds earlier. “That car, back up a little.”
I followed her instructions, setting our car into reverse, and stopping next to the idle car, not far away from the parked police cars. Emily looked at the plates of the car. I was impressed she was able to make out what was on the license plate, given the growing evening skies that fell upon us.
“Two sets of eyes are better than one,” Emily said, handing me the documents regarding Sokolov’s license registration.
Shit, there was no way . . .
The two of us discreetly exited and stood behind the idle car. The license plate and car were a match, this was Sokolov’s car. The hood of the car was cool, and so it hadn’t been in use for a while. Meanwhile, the cops further up were conducting a search, and upon closer inspection, as we lurked in the shadows, they had a portion of the beach closed off with police tape.
“I see a tarp, probably a dead body underneath,” Emily said.
I looked in the general area she was in and confirmed. Someone on the beach was dead and washed up along the shores. Sokolov owed money to the Russians, was friends with Leonid before, and after, he became possessed and allegedly joined the mob. Sokolov vanished, yet withdrew lots of cash recently, and now his car was idle at the beach with cops searching the area. Oh, and he wasn’t home. I was halfway through solving this rubric cube of a case. I just needed to figure out what became of Belyana and how her demonic tome and wall scribbling fit into all this.
We waltzed back to our parked car, acting like two bored girls out for a walk while I got my phone out and selected Gabe’s contact info.
The phone rang.
Gabe’s voice picked up three rings later. “Hello?”
“What do you know about cops at the beach?” I asked.
“Not much, this isn’t my precinct, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Unless it’s paranormal related, I won’t be involved. Nobody has connected me yet with any details. You think it’s our missing man?”
“Just curious is all.”
“If something comes up, I’ll let you know.”
I ended the call. I didn’t have time to wait for the cops to check things out then determine if its paranormal related or not. Even then, if it is a mob hit they would write it off as that, all while there was demonic shit going on with the mob and a missing girl that was connected to it all.
Fuck police procedures.
I put my phone back into my pocket as I faced my thieving partner. “Emily, you’re up.”
“Eh?”
“See if you can pluck any evidence.”
Her mudra hand gestures were swift, stringing together a complex combination of moves. The end result was her body melting away into a pile of clothes and a baseball cap on the ground, and out from that came a tabby cat, the Bakeneko shifter that Emily was. She darted off into the darkness, beyond the police tape and into the crime scene on the beach. If anyone saw her, she was nothing more than a stray cat getting in the way, one that would stealthily sneak under the tarp to see what was up.
I waited patiently next to my car. The waves of the waters hitting the beach line was a soothing sight and sound to my irritated mind. Emily carved an extra set of footprints on the sands as she approached, nobody saw her. When their backs were turned, she did the honors by lifting up the tarp with her paws and got up-close and personal with the victim underneath.
Nothing else happened afterward on Emily’s part. I guess it had to do with the pair of searching cops with their flashlights as they walked next to the tarp. All eyes needed to not be on the tarp so Emily could escape, especially if she fetched some evidence and had it grasped within her jaws.
There was a break in the movement of the cops. Emily saw it and bolted away like a cat chasing a mouse. She returned and, as I predicted, spat out a frozen object on the ground, before slipping under the pile of clothes, and returned to her human form. I held onto the frozen object she swiped from the tarp. It looked like a wallet encased in a ball of ice.
“Apparently, the body out there was found like this,” Emily said, pointing at the frozen wallet. “From what I heard the cops say, the body washed up on the beach like that.”
“A body frozen solid in this weather?”
“It could have been stuffed in a freezer beforehand, then disposed of last night,” Emily said. “But I did sense a tiny hint of Umbral energy radiate from it. Something else happened.”
My body began to radiate flames while I commanded a miniature flamethrower to melt away the ice that covered the wallet. The ice barely melted, despite the red and orange waves of flames jetting away from my hands. Emily was right, this wasn’t ordinary ice. It was ice created by talents like the ones I used during my escape. Only, I wasn’t the one that did this sucker in, whoev
er this sucker was. The answers to that were within the icy ball in my hands, a ball that was taking its sweet-ass time to melt.
“It’s taking me forever to melt this,” I revealed to her. “You know what this means, right?”
Emily grimaced, “I’m afraid I do,” she said, and stepped closer to Sokolov’s car, peering through the windows, searching for anything of value.
My hands pulled away at the cracks on the ice, slowly freeing the wallet from its icy grasp. My heart waited with anticipation for the puzzle part inside.
“I wonder who that man is.” It was Lexi’s voice in my head, shit, her silence had started to feel nice.
“Where the hell were you the other night?” I whispered to the alluring voice in my head. Yeah, I know, I’m fucking losing it.
“I was there, Reika,” Lexi’s voice said. “And you know that. I’m always with you.”
“And you couldn’t give me a heads-up that someone was going to taser me from behind?”
“It was necessary for the plan, Reika,” Lexi replied back. “Our plan.”
My head took a detour down memory lane, when Lexi spoke of her plans for the world. She manipulated me to help her achieve them with promises of making my body tremble with a level of pleasure I never felt, when her fingers entered inside me. I won’t lie, part of me wanted to experience that lust again.
Her voice faded away, and my head returned to the present normal as well as my ability to shake off her temptations. I went back to work breaking apart the ice, now it was significantly loosened. I felt the ice crack in half, and the leather texture of the wallet became free at last. Flipping through its contents, I slipped out a frost-covered ID card.
“That’s a familiar name,” I said to myself, grinning at the ID of one Arkady Sokolov.
Looking away from the evidence in my hand, I went to show Emily my discovery. She was nowhere in sight, the door of Sokolov’s car was wide open, however. I approached, catching Emily in the act of searching through the glove compartment.
“You just couldn’t wait to get in?”
“Fortune favors the bold,” Emily said, pocketing a fistful of quarters and dimes.
I showed her my discovery. We both carefully examined the contents of the wallet, her more so than me. She was quick to pluck out a handful of green slush-covered notes and counted them rapidly. “Six-hundred dollars cash, thank you, Mister Sokolov. That’s quite a bit of money to walk around with.”
My eyes rolled while Emily did her thing and cleaned the car of anything of value, including his phone. I ensured to snatch that out from her hands, its recent messages may shed more light on his activities before his run-in with the demon.
“Hey, that’s the latest iPhone!” Emily said, objecting. “People on Craigslist pay good money for that.”
“Get fucked.” I grinned, flipping through the contents on the phone, thankful there was no password.
I scrolled through the most recently sent and received calls and text messages first. The last message sent to Sokolov was the confirmation of his appointment with a woman named Anastasia, and the time and price for her services, that price being six-hundred dollars. Sokolov was paying money to a third party to hook him up with call girls.
I compared the number from the text message to the sexy business card found at his place. It was a match. Russian Dolls wasn’t a strip club, it was a service offering men ladies of the night, for the right price. Sokolov was one of their best customers and went out to get a piece of action every other night.
Then he got whacked by a demon.
Chapter Sixteen
Paying a visit to Jim had to wait. Instead, Emily and I did a solid ten miles over the speed limit, until we made it back to Midtown Manhattan, back to the paranormal investigations lab to be exact. Nighttime had fallen at that point, and I became worried the two of us might be too late as we barged in with our stolen evidence in hand.
As expected, there wasn’t a lot of activity inside, save for Charles sitting at his computer playing World of Warcraft—on company time at that—and probably oblivious that he should have clocked out and gone home. Not that I was complaining, for we needed his help, especially since nobody else was around in the lab.
“Charles,” I called out to him, tossing him the ice-cold wallet. “Same deal as before.”
Charles grimaced and moaned about having to logout from his game in the middle of some raid. “Another hush-hush search, Reika?” he said.
“You know it. By the way, what did you find out about the last one?”
Charles turned back to his computer when the desktop appeared. He brought up a number of files and scanned images, drawing the two of us closer to the screen. “The tome and dagger you slipped me earlier was coated with Umbral energy from an external source,” Charles said.
“Meaning?”
“The owner of the tome wasn’t a demon. If that was the case, there’d be more Umbral energy on the pages as well as demon-contaminated blood on the stains. Whoever owned the tome and dagger was human and had a demon approach when they used it.”
“Why do I get the feeling Belyana wasn’t telling bedtime stories to demons with that tome,” I said, giving the image of the tome on his computer a hard look.
“Get this.” Charles’ fingers rapidly typed across the keyboard. “There was a body brought into the coroners the other day of a man that leaped out his hotel room. Apparently, his body had been partially frozen. Makes you wonder, how does a frozen body leap out of a window?”
“Was this the man found at Water and Wall Street?”
“The very same one, yes.”
“Fuck.”
“You know him?”
“Wayne, yeah, kinda.”
“Well, your Wayne friend had a fight with a demon before getting pushed out that window. The ice found on his body was confirmed to have been formed by Umbral magic. Now this is where it gets interesting, whoever was responsible for splashing Umbral energy on that tome was the same demon that attacked your friend Wayne.”
“How do you know?”
“Residual Umbral energy left behind from magic is like DNA. Its signature is unique to the type of demon that used it.”
“And what type of demon are we dealing with?”
“One I’ve never encountered. The Umbral signature doesn’t match anything in my database.”
“Just to be straight,” Emily chimed in. “We are talking about a different corpse, right?”
“Yeah, we are.”
“Okay,” Emily said. “Because that wallet we found, came from a frozen body found at the beach.”
“The presence of Umbral energy means it was water-based talents,” I added.
“I’ll do my thing with the wallet,” Charles said, returning to his computer. “But from what you just said, don’t be surprised if the same demon was responsible for that, too.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“About the connection between this and the tome? No, our deal was this was off the record,” Charles said to me. “But your friend Wayne? Yeah, the paranormal team knows its demonic related, it’s how I was able to discover the Umbral on the body in the first place. And honestly, I really think we should bring this to their attention—”
“I’ll handle it; just find out what you can about that wallet. I want to know if the owner was a demon or a victim of one. And also . . .” I handed Charles the Russian Dolls business card. “Pull up that website; I want to see it on a screen bigger than my phone.”
Charles complied with my request, keying in the website. Seconds later it loaded, showing the same neon-pink and black colors the business card had. Photos upon photos loaded, depicting young scantily clad women with the hottest stuff you could find at Victoria Secret. Fake tits, real ones, long hair, short hair, black hair, blonde, brunette, redhead, whatever you desired, there was an option. Beads of sweat could be seen rolling off of Charles flushed face. I could only imagine what was going on inside his pan
ts.
“I’m regretting this already,” Charles’ concerned voice said. “They call this not safe for work for a reason.”
He wanted to exit the site. I needed him to stay and scroll through the dozens of girls offering their services, like sirens in the night wailing to unsuspecting sailors. We found Anastasia’s profile, the girl Sokolov sought to visit before his end, and the girl he saw on a regular basis, assuming she was available.
“Well, shit,” my voice blurted, cutting away at the silence that fell upon us all.
“What do you guys got there?” Emily said, resting her head on my shoulders. “That the missing girl?”
“Looks like it, yeah,” I said, shaking my head. Anastasia was Belyana, the missing girl.
“And you’re looking at her nude pics on this site?” Emily snorted.
“Well, mission accomplished, you found your missing girl,” Charles said, clicking the website off, and cleaning his browser’s history. “Looks like she ran away.”
My face winced. “To be a sex worker?”
Charles shrugged. “It happens.”
I wasn’t buying it. Belyana became obsessed with the occult, damn near turning her bedroom into a demonic shrine and keeping it a secret from her adopted mother. And for what? To run away and become a sex worker? Charles’ theory didn’t explain why Sokolov and Wayne ended up dead, clearly by the hands of demons. Sokolov who went to visit Belyana AKA Anastasia like usual but didn’t make it.
“Charles,” I said to him with a more charming and captivating voice. “What would it take for you to be hush-hush, on this project?”
Charles rubbed his hands together facing me with a nerdy smile. “Well . . .”
I smiled back. “How about that date you wanted?”
“With you?”
“Does it have to be?”
Wrath of the Demon Girl Page 10