“A Gae Dokkaebi—a ghost,” she said, her fingers tightening around the pouch. “When I drink the tea, Wade’s quiet… but he’s still there. I can feel him inside my head. Scratching at the wall between us… but you want to hear something funny?”
He nodded, not exactly sure what he’d just agreed to.
“Last night, when you and I were together—Wade wasn’t there. Not just quiet—he was gone… I was truly and completely free of him for the first time in what feels like forever. So now I need you to tell me something, Michael. How am I supposed to walk away from the only person who’s ever given me peace? The only person who’s ever made me forget.” She jammed the pouch back into her pocket. “Because, I’ve gotta tell you, whatever Reyes said to you last night, whatever he threatened to do—it’s worth the risk to me. You’re worth the risk.”
He shook his head, opened his mouth even though he wasn’t completely sure about what was going to come out but before he could say a word, Ben walked into the room.
“Ready?” he said, adjusting the way his black leather jacket sat on his shoulders sat on his jacket. He bounced a look between the two of them. “I’ll just go wait in the—”
“No. I’m ready. Let’s go,” Sabrina said, shooting him one last look before she walked out the door.
54
“He’s afraid.”
It was Ben’s tone, more than his words that made her look at him. They’d been driving in silence for a while. Ben behind the wheel, her staring out the window. She cast a sidelong glance in his direction and frowned. “He’s an idiot.”
He laughed, the sound at total odds with the pensive expression that etched his usually neutral features. “He’s created quite the cluster fuck, I’ll give you that but he’s right to worry.” He shot her a quick look. “Reyes’ wife was pregnant when he killed her. Shot her right in front of our boy.”
She felt sick, her fingers closing around the links of the bracelet Michael had given her. “Was the baby his?”
“Michael’s?” Ben shook his head. “He’s surprising moral for an assassin. Lydia was only twelve when Reyes bought her from her father and married her. She was young—too young for anyone with a conscience. She was like a sister to him.”
She didn’t ask how he knew all this. She’d learned a long time ago that when Ben was involved there was no such thing as secrets. “Why would Reyes kill his own child? Everything I’ve heard about this guy tells me he’s a classic narcissist. Killing his child would be like killing himself.”
Ben’s jaw went tight. “Just because the baby wasn’t Michael’s doesn’t mean it belonged to Reyes.”
She stared straight ahead, fingers worrying along the links of titanium beneath them. A man like Reyes chose his underlings carefully. He’d find the perfect balance between cruelty and cowardice. No way one of his men would be stupid enough to have an affair with his wife… but someone who saw himself as his equal would.
“His son, Estefan,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Ben nodded. “Reyes kept them all on his island but he didn’t spent much time there. Not enough people to worship him for his tastes. When she got pregnant, Estefan knew Reyes would never believe the baby was his so very carefully and quietly pointed the finger at Michael.”
She imagined Reyes’ reaction to the news. Rage… but also humiliation. In a man like him, the latter would be a far more dangerous emotion. Bringing a man like Michael into the fold had been a power play. To own Cartero had been the ultimate show of supremacy and it had ended in his own betrayal—something that Reyes’ ego wouldn’t allow him to accept.
Ben spoke. “As luck would have it, the confrontation happened the same night he found out about his sister’s disappearance. He was leaving anyway but it meant he couldn’t go back for Christina.”
Christina. She remembered his face when he talked about her. He grieved her loss almost as much as he grieved Frankie’s. “Reyes just let him leave?”
Ben gave a snort. “Let him? No but there isn’t much that can stop Michael when he decides he’s going to do something—another slap in the face for Reyes. By the time he tracked him down, Michael was already under my father’s protection. Untouchable.”
“Until your father asked him to kidnap Leo Maddox.”
Ben smiled but it looked more like an angry show of teeth. “Bingo.” He parked the car and turned to look at her. “My father can’t be trusted. Sooner or later, he’s going to figure out that Michael lied to him about Leo being dead. If recovering him proves too costly or if it suddenly no longer serves him, he’ll abandon him and anyone else he’s sent in to retrieve him.”
“Even you?” she said, surprised to see what looked like pain flit across his face. He looked down at his hand for a moment—the one that was heavily scarred, curling his fingers around the knot of hard flesh in the center of his palm until he clenched it in his fist.
“Especially me.”
55
Sabrina led the way and Ben followed, through a heavy metal door, down a brightly lit corridor to a swinging door at the end of the hall.
She pushed her way through it and into a small room with a call button. She leaned on it, a faint buzzing erupting from the other side of the door. “That look always scares me,” she said and a few seconds later they were buzzed in.
“What look?”
“The look that says you’re planning something that no one else knows about.”
“Who? Me? Plan something?” He grinned at her. “I would never.”
“Liar, liar...” She pushed door open and stepped into another small, windowless room, dominated by a big desk and a bank of black metal filing cabinets. “Hey, Dean. New piercing?” Sabrina said jerking her chin at the skinny kid behind the desk. He nodded, tossing a mop of crow-black hair out of eyes rimmed with enough black eyeliner to give Ozzy Osborne pause.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, flipping the bull ring jammed through his septum up into his nasal cavity, hiding it completely. “Got it last week.”
“Nice,” Sabrina said with a half-smile, scribbling a tethered ball-point across the sign-in sheet. She handed the clipboard to Ben and he took it, following suit.
“I heard you were back with homicide. New partner?” Dean said, dropping clear plastic box on the desk while giving Ben the once over.
“No—transfer. I’m just showing him around,” she said, pulling her SIG off her hip and ejecting the magazine before depositing it into the box. “Dr. Black here? I have an appointment.”
Dean nodded. “She’s in her office. You too,” he said, nudging the box at Ben, his eyes widening to the size of softballs as he pulled his pair of Desert Eagle .40s from his double shoulder holster. He popped the magazines and placed them in the box, giving the lab tech a slight smirk.
“Holy Dirty Harry, Batman,” Dean muttered, hitting a button mounted to the wall next to his desk. A few seconds later the lock on a second door popped. This one leading to another, interior corridor.
“Mandy is a… friend, so please—play nice,” Sabrina said to him as she led the way down the hall.
“Is she hot?”
She stopped in front of the half-open door and turned on him. “I’m being serious, Ben. I don’t want her involved in any of this.”
“Then you shouldn’t have called her,” he said, shouldering his way past her to wrap his knuckles against the door jam.
Over Ben’s shoulder she could see Mandy’s sunny blonde head, bent over a stack of paperwork. As soon as he knocked the head popped up to reveal a freckled nose and a pair of sharp green eyes. “Hotness has been established,” he said loud and clear, forcing her to dig elbows into his ribs as she pushed her way to the front.
“Hey, Mandy—don’t mind him,” she said, planting herself in between Ben and the woman behind the desk. “He was raised by wolves.”
“Hey,” Mandy said, her eyes settling on Ben immediately. There was no doubt she’d heard what he said. “I didn’t know you were bri
nging company.”
“Me either,” Sabrina said, sweeping a hand through the doorway to usher him inside. “This is—”
“Ben. Ben Shaw,” he said, holding his hand out and she took it, looking him straight in the eye. “And I wasn’t raised by wolves.” He shot her the grin over their joined hands. “I was raised by a cold, emotionally unavailable mother and a father whose plot to take over the world kept him too busy for a game of catch,” he said, catching her hand to press it between his own.
“Dr. Black,” she said, her tone a touch too cool to be considered polite. “Nice to meet you,” she said, sitting back in her chair, effectively removing her hand from his. As soon as the door clicked shut the smile fell away. She produced a set of keys and used one of them to open the bottom drawer on her desk. She pulled out a manila envelope and tossed it on the desk.
“Thanks,” he said, picking up the envelope
Mandy shot a look at Sabrina before narrowing her eyes at Ben, her cool professionalism wiped away to reveal something a bit more challenging. “Who are you again?”
“I’m the guy in the top hat with the bullwhip, organizing this circus,” he smiled. “And I’m gonna need DNA and tissue samples in addition to what you’ve got going in the envelope.”
She laughed at him.
Ben bounced a look between her and Mandy, utterly confused. “Did I say something funny?”
“Mandy… please.” Sabrina said, causing the other woman to fall silent. She regarded them both for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Okay,” she said, not sounding happy about it. “It’ll take some work but I’ll get them. I’ll bring them by later.”
Ben could have the requested samples delivered to his doorstep in less than thirty minutes but he was pretty sure that pointing that out wouldn’t win him any points. “Thank you,” he said, ready to leave.
“Since you suddenly seem so interested in who he is, maybe you’d like to hear what I found before you go.” Mandy cocked her head at the pair of chairs across from her desk and they sat. “The boy was approximately seven years old and I estimate that he was abducted no more than a week or two ago.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“X-rays show several fractures—hairline and spiral—on his arms and legs. Probably from struggling against being repeatedly grabbed and forcibly moved. All of these fractures were made at roughly the same time and re-modeling suggested that the injuries were sustained no more than two weeks ago. Whoever he is, he was abducted after Leo Maddox.”
“Sexual assault?”
Mandy shook her head. “My initial examination was negative for sexual assault.”
The same couldn’t be said for Alex Kotko. Experience, both professional and personal, told her exactly how much the boy had suffered. She knew better than anyone that even though he was dead, the boy in Mandy’s autopsy room had been the lucky one.
“I also found this,” Mandy said, pulling a photo from the envelope. It was a picture of a tattoo, magnified to show the detail.
Ф
“It’s Cyrillic. The letter F—on the back of his neck, hidden under his hairline. It’s small. No bigger than a penny and it’s been there for a while. The ink has had time to settle into the skin, a lot longer than a few weeks. Even without running DNA or prints, I could have told you that the boy you found isn’t Leo Maddox.” Black tucked the picture back into the envelope. “I can’t tell you much more about it without running the tattoo through our database.”
“Thank you for your time,” Ben said as he stood, giving her a look that was undeniable. He knew something and he wasn’t going to share in front of Mandy.
Sabrina shot him a questioning look before following suit, rising slowly from her seat. “Thanks, Mandy,” she said.
“He has a family somewhere, looking for him,” Mandy said, her troubled gaze bouncing between her and Ben before landing on the packet of papers on her desk. “I can’t just leave him in cold storage, waiting until you’re finished with whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Forty-eight hours,” Ben blurted out. “That’s all we need.” He swiped the documents and pictures off the desk, along with a business card from its holder. “Mind if I take one? I might have some questions later.”
Mandy cocked an eyebrow at him. “Be my guest.”
“Thank you,” he said, latching onto her arm and pulling her along on his way out the door.
_______
She didn’t speak again until they were in the car.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or are you going to make me guess?” she said, fastening her seat belt with a quiet click.
Ben said nothing, just worked the gear shift into reverse and backed out of the parking space slowly, trying to give himself time to think. Seeing that tattoo on the back of that kid’s neck changed everything.
“Ben?” She sounded impatient but also a little apprehensive. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He blew out a long breath, eyes focused on the road ahead. “That tattoo on the kid’s neck. Dr. Hotness is right—it is a Cyrillic F. It also happens to be the mark of Sergey Filatov.”
She let out a low whistle. “Sergey Filatov? The Sergey Filatov?” she said, leaving little doubt that she knew exactly who he was. Between being Livingston Shaw’s pawn and the dinner companion of a Korean mobster, her new life had given Sabrina the education of a lifetime.
“Yup. That’s him,” he said evenly, gripping the wheel so tight he was sure he was about five seconds away from ripping it off the steering column.
Sergey Filatov.
“So maybe Michael had it wrong. Maybe the kid wasn’t abducted by Reyes’ crew. Maybe he had nothing to do with—”
“No, you don’t get it.” He cut her a hard look. “Michael was right—that kid has everything to do with what’s going on here.”
She gave him a confused frown. “Okay…”
“Filatov doesn’t mark the people he buys and sells. He’s too smart for that.” Ben shook his head. “That mark is reserved for immediate members of the Filatov family. It labels them as untouchable.” He could feel the tension gathering in his shoulders and neck as the implications of what he was about to say came crashing down on them both. “If that kid is sporting it then he’s important.”
“Is he that crazy?” Sabrina said. “Is Reyes crazy enough to kidnap a close relative of a Russian mob boss?”
Not a Russian mob boss. The Russian mob boss. As Pakhan, Sergey Filatov ran it all. Unlike most organized crime syndicates, the Russians operated as a single entity. There were no factions. No competition within the family. As far as the Russians were concerned, Sergey Filatov was God.
He shook his head. “I doubt it. Reyes is a barely functioning sociopath but he’s not stupid.”
“Then the question is: who hates Reyes enough to abduct a close family member of Sergey Filatov and drop him in the middle of his operation?” Sabrina said, her tone telling him she understood just how dangerous the situation was.
“I don’t know,” he said, cutting her a quick glance. “But I bet Michael has a pretty good idea.”
56
Michael powered up Ben’s laptop and logged on to the secure conferencing site that FSS used to conduct long-distance meetings. Using his partner’s laptop would make it less likely that the meeting would be monitored but it wouldn’t make a difference in whether or not Leon Maddox would agree to speak to him.
“Hey,” Lark said from the doorway, a file folder in his hand. “I got that stuff Ben asked for.” He walked in and tossed the folder on the table next to the laptop. “Some pretty heavy shit in there—Shaw finds out we’re poking around in his business, ain’t none of us gonna make it outta this one. Junior included.”
He waited for Lark to make his exit before flipping the file open but it didn’t take him long to realize he was right. Is Livingston knew what they were up to—what they knew—he’d kill them all.
The lap
top let out a chime a second before an image of who he was sure was the senator’s aide filled the monitor, her flirty smile fading when she saw who was on the other side of the screen. “Oh, you’re not—”
“No, I’m not. Mr. Shaw is attending to other matters, so I’m keeping his appointment with the senator,” he said, carefully avoiding the use of his name. Maddox might know who he was but that didn’t mean his staff did.
“Let me see if the Senator is available.” She placed him on hold, the display going dark.
Michael sat back, swiping a hand over his face. Knowing Shaw, he was already halfway here. He didn’t have time to sit around while some politician decided to grace him with his presence or not.
“Fuck this,” he muttered, scrolling the mouse pad over the disconnect icon.
“I agree, Mr. O’Shea.”
He winced, looking up to see Leon Maddox staring at him from Ben’s computer screen. “Sir. I was just—”
“Going to hang up on me, so let’s cut the crap, shall we?” Maddox barked, his tone brusque. “I was expecting you and Mr. Shaw to arrive yesterday afternoon. I take from the San Francisco area code that you were waylaid by what I can only imagine to be a break in my grandson’s disappearance.”
“Yes, sir. Ben received a report from a contact of his that a young boy matching Leo’s description was found in an abandoned house.” He didn’t know how to say the rest. He’d never had to do this before.
“Is he dead?” Maddox said plainly, his gruff words at complete odds with the stark grief in his eyes.
The Sabrina Vaughn series Set 2 Page 21