Vanishing Act

by Linsey Lanier

  Parker smiled. “That’s flattering, but please don’t expect us to work miracles.”

  “No, I understand.” She looked away, her gaze following the hills along the horizon.

  Miranda had that uneasy feeling she’d had last night. Might as well be blunt. “Anastasia.”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a feeling you’re not telling us something.”

  She did not meet her gaze.

  “If there’s anything we should know,” Parker said, “you shouldn’t hold back.”

  Anastasia rubbed the arms of her coat with her gloved hands. “It is embarrassing.”

  “We’ve heard it all before.”

  She looked at Parker, then at Miranda with helplessness in her eyes. And then the words tumbled out. “I did not know about it when it happened. I was only ten. One day when I was asking Mama why Sasha left, she told me.”

  Her eyes grew moist.

  Miranda touched her arm. “You can tell us.”

  “She said—she said it a few years before the end of the Soviet era. Russian soldiers had come to town as they did from time to time. It was never a good idea to be in the streets when they were there, but Mama had gone to do some grocery shopping. She was getting into the car when one of the officers stopped her.”

  She put a hand to her mouth.

  Miranda felt her stomach twist. “What happened?”

  “She could not tell me the details. I do not think she remembered them. She did not want to. One soldier took her by the arms and dragged her into the road behind the stores. She said—they took turns with her.”

  Tears began to roll down Anastasia’s face.

  Miranda took both her hands and held them tight. “Did she report them to the police?”

  “How could she? You did not report Soviet soldiers to the police back then.”

  “What did she do?”

  “The only thing she could. She came home, cleaned herself up, and went about her work. A few weeks later, she realized she was pregnant. You see, she and Papa never knew if Sasha was his.”

  Miranda felt as if this strange world was spinning out of control. She knew what that poor woman felt like. She knew all of the things she must have gone through.

  “Papa never blamed Mama. He never stopped loving her. He said it was their lot. There was much rejoicing when Independence came. But he never stopped wondering about Sasha.” She drew in a breath. “And when he got angry with Sasha, he would say he was not his son.”

  “Is that what their last argument was about?”

  She nodded. “He called him the son of a Soviet pig. Sasha was so hurt, he could not take it anymore. And so he left home.”

  Miranda stared at Parker.

  His face was hard with anger at the men who had attacked a defenseless woman, but his eyes were filled with compassion for Anastasia and her mother. For the whole family.

  They had to find Sasha now. Or do all they could to learn what happened to him.

  “It sounds to me like Kiev is our best bet,” Miranda said to him.

  Parker nodded. “We can start back and try to see someone at the university.”

  “Thank you. Do not tell the family what I have said.”

  Miranda squeezed her hand. “We won’t. And we’ll keep in touch.”

  “I hope you find something.”

  “We intend to.”

  And with that, she turned and plodded back through the snow to the car with Parker.

  Chapter Nine

  Miranda was silent on the drive back to the city.

  Images of that poor woman being attacked by soldiers raced through her mind and became jumbled with those from her own dreadful past.

  The dark street in Chicago. Those rough hands that had pushed her down in the snow and ripped her clothes from her. The awful noises he’d made as he’d assaulted her. That black ski mask bobbing over her face, the dark eyes boring into her as she cringed in pain and terror.

  And then that musty basement in Jasper County. The vicious killer she’d faced. The vision of him on the Outer Banks. She’d seen the same lust in his eyes.

  And Mackenzie. Did her daughter know who her father was? What was that doing to her?

  Parker’s squeeze on her hand brought her out of her thoughts.

  She shook herself. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for.”

  She could see he was taking the news about Sasha hard, too.

  She shook her head in disbelief. “That poor young boy. Not to know who your father is. For the man you thought was your father to suddenly disown you.”

  “Pavlo was angry,” Parker reminded her. “Obviously, he didn’t mean what he’d said.”

  The father had seemed contrite.

  “But Sasha didn’t know that.” She stared at the snowy trees in the distance. “The boy might have gone out into the woods and killed himself with those herbs of his.”

  Parker drew in a heavy breath. “I think the neighbors would have found the body.”

  “Do you?”

  “The whole village was searching for him. They had dogs.”

  Animals that knew his scent. Parker was probably right. But if the search party had missed the body, they’d never find him now. After fourteen years, there wouldn’t be much left of it. With the cold winters here, even the bones would be gone.

  She thought back to their conversation with the family last night. “He left on a bicycle.”

  “And they never found that, either.”

  “Good point. But it’s a long way to the city. Maybe someone picked him up.”

  “That’s possible. Or he might have ridden his bicycle to a train station.”

  “And gone where?”

  They fell silent.

  Miranda had no idea how safe hitchhiking in Ukraine was back then. If someone had given Sasha a ride, he might have killed the young man and dumped his body in some river. Or he might have taken him into town where he went to a university and became a professor of mechanical engineering or electronics.

  Even if the worst case had happened, they had to do what they could to find his body. They had to try to give the family some closure, some peace.

  “We’ll assume the more positive scenario,” Parker said, a firmness in his voice.

  “That Sasha made it to Kiev and got into the university there?”

  “Correct.”

  It was the best approach. The professional in her knew that. And so while the woman in her grieved for Sasha and his family, she took out her phone and started a search.

  “This is interesting,” she said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “College is cheap here. According to this site, with a scholarship tuition is only a few thousand dollars a year.”

  “Still more than a penniless young man from the village without support from his family could afford.”

  “True.”

  She did another search, but this time the results made her shoulders sag.

  Parker made a turn onto a street with heavier traffic where rustic looking store fronts contrasted with drab apartment high-rises in the distance. “What did you find?”

  “They sure like to go to school around here. There are over forty institutes of higher learning in Kiev.”

  “My.”

  “Which one were the villagers talking about, Parker?”

  “It might have been any of them. But let’s start with the most prominent ones.”

  It was hard to tell which those were from the websites. “Wait. Where are we?”

  “Nearing one of the western-most districts of Kiev.”

  “Svyat-o-shyn?” She was certain she’d mangled the pronunciation of the word.

  Parker narrowed his eyes at the GPS map. “I believe so. Why?”

  “There’s something called the Institute for Problems of Material Sciences not far from here.” At least from what she could tell on the site. “It might be where Sasha went, since it’s the closest one to home
.”

  “But he wanted to get away from home.”

  “I mean it would be the first school he’d hit on his way into the city.”

  Parker considered that a moment. “I believe that facility would be a research institute.”

  “Really?”

  “From the name of it.”

  With a grunt, Miranda swept around on her phone some more. “You’re right. You need to be a professor or enrolled in another university. Seems to be a lot of research institutes here, too. History, Botany, Physics, Nuclear Research.”

  Letting out a groan, she put her phone in her lap.

  And then she thought of Anastasia’s tears and those Soviet soldiers and picked it up again.

  After a moment, she said, “Looks like there are several universities near our hotel.”

  Parker seemed pleased with that. “A reasonable place to start.”

  Especially when you had no idea what you were looking for. They were still about fifteen kilometers away, but it felt good to have a destination.

  She sat up, brightening. “Okay. First stop, Boris Grinchenko University.”

  Chapter Ten

  As they neared the city, the sky grew cloudy, as if it might snow soon.

  Traffic picked up. They passed red two-decker buses that reminded Miranda of England, long yellow taxi-share vans, and noisy eighteen-wheelers. She couldn’t figure out what the blue buses were for, but one thing was certain. The people of Ukraine loved colorful things. A nice contrast to the plain white-and-beige twenty-story apartment complexes that lined one side of the street for miles.

  After squinting at billboards she couldn’t read except for the numbers, Miranda let her gaze wander to the walkways below where men and old hunched over women in heavy coats and babushkas plodded along with bags of groceries in their hands.

  They made her think of Anya going into town for groceries all those years ago.

  Her stomach pulled as Parker took the loop around—a street whose name she couldn’t read on the GPS—and then the view was more of the same. Bare-branched trees and buses, tall buildings and shivering pedestrians on the snow covered sidewalks.

  Finally she saw a street sign she could read. They were on Peremohy Avenue. Wherever that was.

  She thought of Anastasia coming to the city to look for her brother years ago.

  “Orange Revolution. What was she talking about?”

  “It was a series of protests over vote rigging. I believe it would have happened the year after Sasha left home. There were charges of corruption and fraud against the government. It was bloodless, unlike some of the later protests.”

  “So Sasha probably didn’t die in the protests. If he was there. But wasn’t there some turmoil a few years ago?” She vaguely remembered hearing something about it on the news.

  Parker nodded. “As I recall, it wasn’t as bloodless. This country has had a long and turbulent history over the past twelve hundred years. Revolutions and wars, invasions, occupations. Much destruction, much rebuilding.”

  She wondered how Parker knew all those facts. “Sasha could have gotten involved in something like that, if he had a political bent.”

  “Yes.” There was doubt in Parker’s voice.

  “But we have nothing to indicate that.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  They were stabbing in the dark. Not a good practice. She needed to channel some of Parker’s famous patience.

  After another twenty minutes, the buildings grew taller. These structures were better taken care of, as well as set closer to the road. Occasionally they were broken up by shops with colorful roofs lining the streets.

  Soon, they were in the middle of a busy intersection surrounded by a myriad of variously shaped glass and stone buildings that reminded her of downtown Buckhead.

  Parker made a sharp angled turn, and the landscape changed again.

  Suddenly they were surrounded by gorgeous European architecture from the nineteenth century. There were fanciful windows with gothic arches, iron balcony railings, decorative accents on facades, and ornate entryways that seemed to lead to mysterious and beautiful places.

  Parker turned down a side road and stopped the car near a lovely pale peach-colored building with symmetrical white concrete trim and flourishes around its stately windows and cornices.

  “This is Boris Grinchenko University, I take it?”

  “It is.”

  She’d only known that because they were in a parking space. “What do we do now?”

  “It might be possible to find the registrar’s office.”

  “You think they could have a record of Sasha?”

  “If he was a student here.”

  A big if, but they could ask. “Okay. Let’s see if we can find someone to help us.”

  Parker got out and came around to open the door for her. A gentlemen’s habit she could never break him of, even on a case.

  “As it’s a university,” he said, “I expect most people on the staff will speak English.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  They trudged over the sidewalk and up the white steps that had been cleared of snow, and Parker held the large arched doorway open for her. They stepped inside to a wide hall with whitewashed walls and a dark polished floor.

  The place smelled old, and the air was warm and dry, prompting them to remove their fur hats.

  Miranda looked up at a huge old-fashioned clock in a recessed area opposite the entryway. It told her it was just before one. Everything was dead still.

  This wasn’t an administrative building.

  “Classes must be in session,” she said under her breath.

  Parker nodded. “Let’s go this way.”

  He turned left and headed down the hall under a barrel-vaulted ceiling, where tall arched windows were spaced along one side, overlooking the lane where they’d parked. Tall arched doors stood along the opposite side.

  Elegant bronze numbers beside each door told her nothing about what was taking place inside. One-Twelve. One-Fourteen. One-Sixteen. Beneath each set of numbers was a slot for a card. Each card had neatly typed Cyrillic lettering. No clue there.

  Suddenly a bell rang, the doors opened in unison, and hordes of youthful students spilled noisily out into the hall, jabbering in unintelligible words.

  Miranda held onto Parker so as not to get pushed over by the crowd. “What do we do now?”

  “Let’s find a teacher.”

  She fought her way upstream toward one of the doors, and when the last few students had exited, she stepped inside.

  It was a large room.

  Blue chairs were tucked under rows of modern-looking table-like desks placed at an angle. Light poured in from the far wall where windows were hung with elegant peach-colored drapery that would have been more suited to a hotel room instead of a university classroom.

  A huge map of Ukraine was spread across the back wall. An equally large world map covered the front wall.

  At the desk stood a short roundish man in a herring bone coat with a well trimmed beard and glasses, pecking at a laptop.

  Geography professor? Or maybe he trained travel agents.

  He looked up and started when he saw her and Parker standing there. Ukrainian words tumbled out of his mouth in a low threatening tone.

  Must be saying he was calling Security.

  Parker moved toward the man with a casual gait. “Dobryy den’. I’m so sorry to disturb you, sir. Do you happen to speak English?”

  Still flustered, the man stroked his tie. “English? Why, of course. What is it you want? You are not students.”

  Too old for that.

  “We’re private investigators from America,” Miranda said, getting straight to the point.

  The man looked more shocked than if she’d said they were spirits from another world come to take him away.

  “Private investigators? From America? Is this a joke one of my students is playing on me?”

  “Unfortunately, I’
m afraid it’s no joke,” Parker told him. “We’re looking for a young man who disappeared a few years ago. We have reason to believe he might have come to Kiev and enrolled in a university.”

  Looking bewildered, the professor pushed his glasses up his nose and plopped down into a chair. “The university? How many years ago?”

  “About fourteen, as far as we know.”

  “That is a long time ago.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  He rubbed his beard. “He would have to go through admissions. We have a strict enrollment process. Certifications, examinations.”

  “We understand he did well in his exams in his village,” Miranda offered.

  “He is Ukrainian, then? We have students from all over the world.”

  “Yes, he’s from a village about forty kilometers to the northwest.”

  The teacher nodded and gazed up at one of his maps, as if he could find the boy there.

  Miranda pulled out her phone and held the photo of Sasha out to the man. “This is a picture of him about the time he went missing.”

  The professor looked at it, then shook his head. “He looks the same as most other students I teach. They become a blur after a while. Besides, I have been teaching here only five years."

  Okay, then. She stuffed her phone back in her pocket.

  The professor reached for his laptop. “You should try the Admissions office.”

  Parker gave him his most patient smile. “Can you direct us there?”

  “Of course.” He hopped up from his chair, went to the window, and pointed. “It’s that building with the white columns. Second floor.”

  Graciously Parker nodded. “Thank you for your help.”

  And they turned to go.

  Miranda didn’t bother giving the professor a card.

  He couldn’t have known Sasha.

  Chapter Eleven

  Back outside they passed scores of jeans-and-boot clad students hurrying off to the next class. With backpacks slung over thick coats, they navigated their way through the snowy paths.

  Ordinarily Miranda would have stopped to question them, but these kids had probably been four or five when Sasha left home.

  Repressing the feelings of futility coursing through her, she marched with Parker over the curving walkway and up the steps to the portico with the white ionic columns.