by Dave Stanton
I kicked at the dirt edging the lot and vowed to not let Lillian McDermott get to me. I couldn’t tell if I was angrier at her or myself. My mouth was suddenly flooded with a sour taste, and I hawked a stream of saliva into the weeds. I stood there for a minute, trying to discount her verbal attack. Slowly, as I mulled the abrupt transformation of her voice, my ire receded. When she started cursing, it was as if another person was speaking. I could only assume the English professor with the deprecating attitude came from a far different background than she’d been portraying.
As I got in my truck and drove off, I wondered what Lillian McDermott would think when she saw my next case update and learned I’d spoken to the shrink she planned to see. She’d probably take exception to it, but that was her problem, not mine.
******
When I got to the Plaza lobby, I looked toward the food court, but then spotted Cody sitting at the casino bar with his daughter. I walked over and saw they were both drinking highballs, probably gin or vodka tonics.
“Cody, Abbey,” I said.
“Dirty,” Cody exclaimed eagerly, “pull up a stool, over there next to Abbey.”
Abbey wore tan slacks and polished black shoes with a steel toe and thick tread. They looked like standard issue footwear for patrolmen. I didn’t know if a female version was available, but apparently that didn’t concern Abbey. Her shirt was blue, and the sleeves were cut short. The muscles in her shoulders were more pronounced than I was used to seeing in a woman.
I sat next to her and watched while she hit off her drink through a straw. When she set it down, she said, “What’s your interest in the Volkov family?”
“The cars are registered to them?”
“You got it.”
“A lowlife pimp told me they deal in underage girls.”
“They run an escort service, but that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. They’re also suspected of money laundering, extortion, human trafficking, and of course, drugs.”
“Why not bust them for the escorts?” I asked.
“Prostitution is quasi-legal in Nevada. LVPD mostly ignores it unless it’s connected to other crimes.”
“I see.”
“What’s your plan?” she asked.
I crossed my arms and stared at the bottles behind the bar. “Follow them around, see what comes up.”
“I’d like to join you.”
I laughed. “No, sorry. No.”
“Hey, Dan,” Cody said. “You got nothing to worry about. Abbey wants to help nail these scumbags.”
“That’s all well and good, but Abbey, it’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?” she said.
“It could be dangerous, plus I don’t want to drag you into something that could screw up your internship.”
“What, are you suggesting you might break the law? Is that how it works for you private dicks?”
I took a breath and exhaled. “My rule book might be a little different than any police force’s. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“That’s well put, Dan,” Cody said, a grin on his face, and it occurred to me he’d probably been sitting at the bar for a while. “Very well put, indeed!”
At that moment my cell beeped, and I looked down and saw an alert indicating the black Charger was on the move. It was a little past five p.m.
“I need to get going,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Abbey said, her eyes ablaze. “Listen, I’m not a cop, I’m just doing a part-time internship. You want to bring the Volkovs down, I’ll look the other way if things get a little rough.”
“My job is not to bring the Volkovs down. I’m only looking at them as possibly holding a kidnapped girl. I want to recover the girl, nothing else.”
“I’ve got no problem with that. I want to be part of it.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Would you excuse me for a minute, Abbey? I’d like to speak to your father privately.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
I eased off my stool and walked behind Cody. “Come on,” I said. He followed me deeper into the casino until we found two chairs at a vacant card table.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I’m following the Russian mob, hoping to track down a kidnapped girl, and your daughter wants to tag along?”
“Hell, she wants to do more than tag along. Give her a gun and she’ll start blasting away.”
“Would you be serious, please? Can’t you talk some sense into her?”
He put his hand on the back of his neck and looked at me sheepishly. “I’ve been trying to impart my fatherly advice, but she’s really not interested. I guess I can’t blame her.”
“Well, I’m gonna go tell her thanks, but no, thanks.”
“Hold up, Dirt, think this through for a minute. Abbey is gung-ho to learn the business. Plus, she has access to police databases. She can give you the skinny on the Volkovs, save you a lot of time and energy. She’s already pulled their files.”
I shook my head. “Bad idea.”
“Look, what have you got planned for tonight? A little surveillance, right? Bring her along, as a favor to me, okay? Just one favor. What harm can come of it?”
For a moment I was stunned, as the realization set in that I could not turn down my best friend, a man who’d saved my life and had actually taken bullets meant for me. Then I suddenly thought, why not sidestep the issue, take the night off, just say, forget about the Volkovs for now, let’s go to the bar and have a few drinks. For an instant it sounded so tempting I felt the words ready to burst from my lips. But I swallowed the impulse, and it hit my stomach with a hollow thud.
“All right,” I said, hearing the defeat in my voice. “Get your gear and let’s go.”
“Me? Are you nuts? I’ve got dinner with Denise tonight.”
“What?”
“I really appreciate this, Dirt. Text me and let me know how it goes. I’m sure you and Abbey will be great together!”
******
Fifteen minutes later Abbey and I were in my truck. She wore a dark blue jacket that was free of insignia but looked police issue none the less.
“You need to lose the coat and shoes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re trying to look like a cop, and that’s a problem.”
“What, are we going undercover?”
“If you want to call it that. I don’t want to give the people I’m following reason to suspect they’re being watched.”
“Until when?”
“Hopefully never.”
“Well, you’ll need to take me to my place, then.”
I drove five miles south, toward the UNLV campus, and parked in front of a nearby apartment building. “Make it quick, please,” I said.
She went inside, and I checked my phone. The black Charger had returned to the Café Leonov. My app showed it had traveled down the block to a strip mall. The trip had only taken twenty minutes.
Abbey returned promptly. She had traded her polished black shoes for low heels and wore a brown jacket that was stylish but not flashy.
“Good enough?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine,” I said, pulling from the curb. “The license plate numbers I sent—give me the rundown.”
She removed a pad of paper from her purse. “The limo is Serj Volkov’s. Twenty-nine years old. I pulled his record.”
“How about the other two?”
“The Dodge Charger is also registered to Serj Volkov. The Ford belongs to Lexi Voronin. He’s on parole, has a long record.”
“You took their files from the squad room?”
“No, but I took pictures of every page, then printed them out. Here,” she said, holding up a manila folder.
I raised my eyebrows. “Nice work.”
She didn’t respond, but when I glanced over her eyes were smiling.
We drove a mile to the Café Leonov and parked across the street. It was nearing 6:30, and the restaurant was lit up, the parking lot scattered wi
th cars. The limo, Charger, and the older Ford were parked off to the side.
“I’d like to know who owns this joint,” I said. “I’ll do a search when I’m in front of my computer.”
“I bet I can find out quicker than you,” she said. “I can probably do it on my phone.”
“I doubt it,” I said, but five quiet minutes later she said, “I got it. It’s owned by a company, no individual listed.”
“Figures.”
“Why?”
“Organized crime members always try to hide their property from the government. They hide behind dummy corporations. It helps them launder income and stay off the radar.”
“I’ll see if I can find out more about this company.”
“Do it later. Instead, tell me everything you’ve learned about the Volkovs and Lexi Voronin.”
“You could try asking politely.”
I looked over and tried to smile.
“How familiar are you with the Russian Mafia?” she asked.
I stared at the restaurant, watching another car pull in. “Not very,” I admitted.
“Lucky for you, I’m writing a paper on the subject, so I’ve been studying their history. You interested?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“All right. The Russian mob never achieved the pop culture status of the Italian Mafia, but the scope of Russian organized crime make the Italians look like small potatoes. The Russian crime families go back to the seventeen hundreds, but really developed during the Soviet era, which began in 1917. Lenin, the original leader of communist Russia, tried to wipe out the gangs, but he died in 1924. Stalin took over, and his solution was to send millions of suspected criminals to the gulags. It was there the gangs became better organized, forming into regimented groups with bosses and ranks.”
“Okay, and then?”
“So, check this out: when World War Two started, the Russians needed more soldiers, so they offered the millions of crooks in the gulags their freedom if they’d fight for the Soviets. But this was against the anti-government policy of the Bratva, which is what the crime gangs called themselves. It means brotherhood in Russian. Many of the Bratva couldn’t resist the opportunity to leave the gulags, but Stalin royally screwed them by sending them back after the war. The hardline mobsters who’d stayed in the gulags saw them as traitors, and labeled them cyka, Russian for bitch. The cyka were forced to the bottom of the gang food chain, and eventually they banded together and formed their own families. This resulted in eight years of prison warfare between the original families and the upstarts. The gulag guards encouraged the daily killings, as they saw it a convenient way to keep the prison population under control. Nice, huh?”
I shrugged, keeping my eyes on the restaurant.
“When Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev became the Soviet leader, and he released eight million inmates from the gulags. The gangs hit the streets and soon realized the communist government was so corrupt it made more sense to work with them rather than against them. Then Brezhnev became the Soviet leader in 1964, and the corruption grew even worse. The criminal underworld became so entrenched in Soviet commerce that they basically ran Russia jointly with government officials. By the 1980s, the Soviet economy was predominantly a black market.”
“But the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties, right?” I said.
“Right,” Abbey said, her voice growing more animated. “And that’s when the shit really hit the fan. The end of communism and the emerging capitalism basically awarded the Russian economy to the mobsters. Ex-KGB goons and Afghan war criminals went to the crime bosses for jobs. Ever since, Russia has been, for the most part, a criminal state.”
“But what about Russia’s current leader, Trump’s buddy, Vladimir Putin? Has he done anything about it?”
Abbey laughed sarcastically. “He’s ex-KGB and has been running the show there for the last eighteen years. His personal net worth is hard to verify, but some estimates put it at somewhere between forty and eighty billion dollars. Draw your own conclusions.”
“He ain’t making that much on a politician’s salary.”
“No kidding. Putin may be the richest crook in the history of the world.”
“That’s somebody else’s problem. How about filling me in on Serj Volkov and Lexi Voronin?”
She put her folder on her lap and licked a finger. “You might think I’m appalled by the history of Russia,” she said. “And while that’s true, it really hits home when you learn two guys like this are running around our streets.”
“Hold on,” I said, as the three men I’d followed the night before came out of the Café Leonov. I grabbed my binoculars and handed them to Abbey. “Recognize them?”
“The older one, no,” she said, as they walked toward the white limo. “The tall guy with the crew cut looks like Serj Volkov. The dark-haired one is definitely Lexi Voronin.”
“Looks like Lexi’s the driver,” I said.
“That’s odd,” Abbey said.
“Why?” I started my truck.
“He did a year in state prison for computer fraud, related to money laundering. It says he has an accounting degree.”
“Someone’s got to do the driving,” I said.
“He was also suspected of two murders, and arrested for one, but there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.”
“Bean counter, killer, driver. He wears a lot of hats. Anything in his jacket involve prostitution or child porn?”
“No.”
“How about Serj?”
“He has two arrests for assault. Both times the charges were dropped. The victims and witnesses all recanted their statements.”
“That’s not an encouraging sign.”
“Get this: I knew one of the victims, Chris Towne. He was a student here. His family owned a junkyard, and the Volkovs wanted the business, but the family wouldn’t sell. So, Serj Volkov attacked Chris with a baseball bat. Broke his arms and legs. He was on the UNLV tennis team, but now he’ll be lucky to walk normal again.”
“Did the Volkovs get the junkyard?”
“The family sold out and left town. But when I checked, the business wasn’t registered to the Volkovs.”
“It’s called ‘fronting points.’ Like I said before, mobsters try to avoid legal ownership of their businesses, especially if they’re hiding cash flow from the IRS, as they always are. So they get someone they can control to sign the paperwork. This makes it more difficult for prosecutors to trace their income.”
“I know what fronting points means,” Abbey said.
The limo turned onto the boulevard, and I gave them a hundred yards before following. When we reached The Strip, they turned left, and a minute later they turned onto the road leading to Mandalay Bay. I turned off my headlights and tailed them at a distance.
“They’re heading to the main entrance,” I said. “When we get there, I’ll get out and keep an eye on them, and you go park my truck. I’ll text you where to meet me.”
“Why don’t I follow them and you park?” Abbey said.
“Have you ever tailed anyone?”
“How hard can it be?”
“Following someone is easy. The hard part is not being made.”
Abbey didn’t look happy about it, but before she could reply we came around a bend and I saw the limo stopped at the brightly lit reception circle. The pear-shaped, bearded man and the crewcut blond Abbey thought was Serj Volkov climbed out.
I stopped on the side of the road. “Go park and come to the casino,” I said, then hopped down to the street.
The two Russians went through the glass doors, and I quick-stepped, catching up to them as they reached the end of the lobby and entered the casino. I had no doubt they were here to conduct business of some sort, but I wasn’t particularly optimistic about tailing them around this joint. If they were truly dealing in underage girls, this seemed an unlikely place to learn about it. They might be just heading over to the Red Square for a free dinner and drinks. For m
e, that would mean sitting around for a wasteful hour or two.
Or not, I reminded myself. You don’t know what you don’t know, my first boss used to say. He was an older man, a friend of my late father’s, and of all the lessons he taught me, that one sentence is what I most often remember. His approach to investigative work was stealthy, methodical, and infinitely patient. When less disciplined investigators hit dead ends, he would persevere, probing from different angles until something cracked. He rarely failed to solve a case.
We traversed the gaming floor, but instead of heading across to the Red Square, the two men stopped at a circular bar in the middle of the casino.
At the bar were three women. Two of them could have been sisters; they both were large breasted blondes. Their big hair might have been phony, but they had the same prominent chin and deep set eyes.
I sat at a slot machine. The two blondes were quite pretty and had a distinctive look I thought was definitely Eastern European. The other woman was a dark Latina with flowing locks of black hair. All three wore short skirts and spiked heels. They were obviously prostitutes, which struck me as strange, because the upper echelon of Vegas casinos had banned hookers from their floors years ago. While this wasn’t a law, it had been communicated plainly to those in the trade, who, for practical reasons, gravitated elsewhere.
Serj Volkov and his older counterpart, who acted like he was in charge, stood talking to the call girls. The conversation appeared civil but not necessarily friendly. One of the women handed an envelope to Serj. He peeked at its contents and frowned, then said something to the pear-shaped man. He shook his head and spoke to the ladies, who became stone-faced.
My phone buzzed, and I saw Abbey’s text message: where are you?
I texted her back, but when I looked up, the men were on the move.
The casino floor was somewhat crowded but not as congested as it might be later in the evening. The flow of meandering people made it easy to follow the men without risk of being spotted. When we reached the far end of the floor, I texted Abbey: red square restaurant.
I was leaning on a counter next to a ticket office outside the restaurant when she showed up a minute later. Her face was flushed from the quick walk.