Yasmine Poole’s résumé was also impressive at first glance. A degree from the London School of Economics, followed by a year as an arbitrage trader with F. M. Mayer, then another year as an analyst with Wertheim and Company, and all of this by the age of twenty-eight. Which was young, but that didn’t especially bother Miles. It meant she would still be both hungry and malleable—two qualities that seemed to fall by the wayside as you got into your thirties.
His company, Taylor Financials, had never hired so much as a janitor, though, without doing an extradeep background check on the applicant, and it was what came out of the investigator’s report on Yasmine Poole that most intrigued Miles.
For one thing, her name wasn’t Yasmine Poole, at least not originally. She’d been born Yasmin Yakir, the child of a couple of New York right-wing activist Jews. When she was ten, her parents emigrated to Israel and settled in an illegal West Bank wildcat outpost. Two years later, when she was twelve, a Palestinian rocket destroyed their home while she was at school, making her an orphan. After that she was in a group home in Jerusalem until she turned eighteen, when like the rest of her countrymen she was required to join the army.
But whereas most Israeli women were assigned to support or staff billets, she was selected by Aman, their special ops branch, to be trained as an assassin. She’d served three years, but doing what exactly only God and the Israeli army knew for sure, because as good as Miles’s investigator was, he wasn’t good enough to penetrate their intelligence files.
“Actually,” the investigator told Miles, after he’d been summoned to fill out his report with a verbal and more personal evaluation, “I got the sense she was eased out of the army quietly, you know? After her three years were up. Like maybe she got to liking it just a little too much. The killing, if you know what I mean.”
Miles said nothing, and after a long silence the investigator went on, “Her commanding officer couldn’t decide whether she was crazy, or she just liked to play at being crazy. But whichever it was, I think she scared the holy bejesus out of him.”
The investigator paused again, and Miles still said nothing. Finally, figuring he was dismissed, the guy got up to leave. But at the door he stopped and said, “If you want my recommendation, boss, I say stay away from her.”
Instead, Miles had her in for an interview the very next day.
Her beauty literally stole his breath away. He’d long ago lost count of the number of actresses and models he’d fucked, and still he’d never had that happen to him before. Where the very sight of a woman closed up his throat so that he couldn’t inhale or exhale, just gape at her like a beached fish.
“So tell me,” he finally said, when he got his breath back, “what are you running from, Ms. Yasmin Yakir?”
He expected a gasp or at least a blush, but all he got was a little shrug that drew his eyes down to her breasts. “So, you did your due diligence on me and found a skeleton. Big whoop. We all got them.” She crossed her long legs, made sure he was looking, then added, “What are you running from, Mr. Marcario Tavoularis?”
It was so funny, he almost laughed out loud. He’d set out to shock her, and he ended up shocked. Not so much that she knew he’d changed his name from the Greek Marcario Tavoularis to the Waspish Miles Taylor, but that she’d gone to the trouble to find this out about him. He hadn’t tried all that hard to bury his working-class origins, but it would still have taken some digging.
But then she’d been in the Israeli intelligence, after all, or a form of it anyway. He was confident, though, that his real secrets, his bodies, were too deeply buried for her to have gotten even a whiff of their stink.
So he leaned forward and put a lot of mean into the smile he gave her. “What’s your point, Ms. Yakir or Poole, or whatever? That you’re smart and you got a set of balls? You think that makes us even?”
The smile she gave back to him made him hard. “No, Mr. Tavoularis, or Taylor, or whatever. When you kill your first man,” she said, “then we’ll be even.”
He wanted to wipe that smart-ass smile off her face by telling her about the big kill, but he didn’t. He told her about it eventually, though. Eventually he’d told her pretty much everything.
“DON’T FROWN AT me like that,” she said to him now.
She smoothed the deep crow’s-feet around his left eye with the tips of her fingers. “You think too much about things sometimes. Analyze and poke at them. Analyze and poke at me. Some people are simply born in love with the taste of blood.”
A door slammed down below and someone laughed, too loudly. Miles turned away from her and limped to the window to see what the noise was about.
The sun was long gone now, but enough light was still left in the summer sky to see that it was nothing, just three of the catering crew who’d come out onto the deck from the billiard room for a smoke. Tomorrow night he was throwing a party here at his beach cottage, an intimate gathering of fifty or so of the world’s superrich and famous.
My beach cottage. Hunh. Twenty rooms, stone fireplaces, wraparound verandas, ocean views, and a $12 million price tag—and here at the Vineyard they called it a “cottage.”
“Did I ever tell you, Yaz, that I was born and raised right here on the island?” Of course he’d told her, and probably more than once, but he went on anyway. “In a little town called Oak Bluffs. Five of us squeezed into a real honest-to-God New England cottage. Four tiny rooms built by some whaler a couple of centuries ago. It had a lot of gingerbread on the outside so the tourists all thought it was ‘cute,’ but inside, the linoleum floors were peeling and the old pipes froze and broke every winter. And there was never enough money for anything. My daddy—before he took off on us when I was thirteen—he ran the local gas station. He took care of the fancy cars of the rich summer families who thought of us as townies, when they bothered to think of us at all.”
She had followed him to the window and now she slipped her arm through his, leaned into him.
“And yet now those very same people,” she said, “are coming to your parties in this big ol’ house, their lips in a permanent pucker the better to kiss your ass, and you like it, Miles, and your ass likes it because it feels just so damn good.”
Miles laughed at the image she’d put into his head, but it was a bitter laugh. Even after all these years, after that dump of a house and his brute of a father, and the rich snobs who came to rub his face in it with their very existence—it all still festered.
They were quiet together a minute, then he said, “I’ve had this dream the last couple of nights. I’m a kid again, out in the backyard of the Oak Bluffs house, only instead of playing I’m trying to bury a dead body, and it’s raining so hard that, no matter how much dirt I shovel in the grave, the water keeps washing it away, exposing the bones.”
He turned to look at her. “And, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”
“No,” she said, and something was in her eyes, something hard and cold. “What I’m going to say is that you lied to me.”
“About what? And, anyway, are you going to tell me you’ve never lied to me? Everybody lies. It’s in our natures. Hell, the whole world spins merrily along in a circle fuck of lies.”
“Your big kill. You lied to me about the reason for it.”
“Funny, but that is one thing I haven’t lied to you about.”
“Call it a sin of omission then.”
He shook his head, feeling a little pissed now. “Still not following you.”
“The altar of bones.”
“The what? Yaz, I swear to you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Instead of answering, she lifted her left hand and he saw that she was holding one of those miniature tape players. At some point she’d put down her drink and picked up the player and he hadn’t noticed her doing it, and that bothered him. Was it those damn pain pills he’d taken for his knee, fuzzing up his head, or was he really losing it?
He knew about
the recording she’d made in the hospital, of course. She’d given him the gist of it when she used a burner phone to call him from Galveston on his secure line. How she’d taped the old man right before he croaked, spilling his guts to his priestly son, telling the boy all about the big kill and the home movie he’d had made of it. Only O’Malley didn’t have the movie anymore, had never really had the movie, because some woman called Katya Orlova had run off with it and disappeared.
Miles thought Yasmine had told him everything about O’Malley’s confession and what had gone down in Galveston, but now she pushed a button on the tape player. He hadn’t heard that voice in forty-eight years. Mike O’Malley’s voice.
And Yasmine hadn’t told him quite everything, after all, because he heard Mike O’Malley say, “It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill.”
MILES LISTENED THROUGH it to the end, until that familiar voice, an old man’s voice now, faded so it was barely intelligible, saying something that sounded like “I thought she’d died in the cave.” Then after a long pause, another voice said, half plea, half prayer, “Dad? Oh, God—”
Yasmine turned off the tape player.
“Is that it?” Miles asked.
She nodded. “He didn’t say another word after that. He slipped into a coma, and then it was bye-bye, Mikey.”
Miles didn’t say anything, just looked out the window at a sea that shone silver under the rising moon.
“You really don’t know what it is, do you?” Yasmine said. “This altar-of-bones thing.” She laughed, and he heard in her laugh the madness that always lived in her, just beneath the surface. “Oh, Lord, this is almost too funny, Miles. You went and killed—”
“No.” He thrust away from both her and the window, took a couple of steps, then turned back. “O’Malley did the killing.”
“And the Russian, Nikolai Popov, he did the planning. But you conned them into doing it. You were the big mastermind. Isn’t that what you told me? Only now it looks like you were the one who got played.”
He almost hit her. He got as far as lifting his arm for a backhanded slap, but the way she just stood there, ready to take it, even though she could see it coming … He could see she wanted him to do it. And that stopped him.
Anyway, the face he really wanted to smash wasn’t hers.
It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones…. What in hell was that? It almost sounded like a joke. If you didn’t know Nikolai Popov.
“You’ve got to find this Katya Orlova woman, Yaz. Find her, get the film, make her tell you all about this altar of bones.
“And then kill her for me, please.”
12
San Francisco, California
Back in the present
ZOE DMITROFF looked out the window of her Mission Street law office for any sign of the Impala. Puke brown with a dented front fender, it had been circling the block for over an hour now, slowing down every time it passed her door. It was too misty and rainy for her to see the face of the man behind the wheel, but she knew who it was. Manuel Moreno.
She knew what he wanted, too. He wanted his wife. His obsession. His punching bag.
“Yeah, well, those days are over for you, chump,” Zoe said out loud, feeling a little silly, but also more than a little creeped out by the circling Impala. By now the anonymous white SUV carrying Inez Moreno and her three-month-old daughter would be well on its way to a safe house out of state. Something Manuel shouldn’t have figured out until five hours from now, when his wife didn’t come home after the end of her nursing shift at San Francisco General. Yet here he was, and this was way more than a little creepy.
“It’s like he’s living inside my head and all I gotta do is even think about leaving him, and somehow he knows,” Inez had told her once. “He just knows.”
Outside, a tire squealed. Zoe tensed, then relaxed once she got a good look at the car that whisked past her window, spraying water. Not the Impala.
Normally the Latino neighborhood bustled with activity, but on this wet and chilly February afternoon few people were out and about. Paco G., who sold fake-leather handbags from a stand on the corner, was already packing it in for the day. Even Tía Juanita, who usually lived in the alley in back of the bodega next door, had given up picking through the trash for cans and bottles and set off to find a shelter.
A Muni bus pulled up to the stoplight, wipers flapping, exhaust belching out a cloud of smoke. Zoe craned her head to look around it. Still no Impala. Maybe he’d given up, too.
Except that men such as Manuel Moreno never gave up.
She turned away from the window and finished clearing off her desk of the case files she’d been studying. When she was done, she put on her black leather bomber jacket and slung the oversize Tumi satchel she used as a combination purse and briefcase over her shoulder. She turned out the lights and headed for the door.
Zoe’s office was in a small Victorian-style storefront, sandwiched between the bodega and a T-shirt shop. She got as far as the second step of the front stoop, then the Impala whipped around the corner, nearly knocking down a bike-messenger boy, and screeched to a stop at the fire hydrant.
Manuel Moreno flung open the car door and got out. He was a weedy man, with a scraggly goatee and small, tight eyes.
“Where’s Inez?” he shouted, coming right at her, getting up into her face. “Where’s my wife?”
“I don’t know where she is,” Zoe said, and that was no lie. She’d set the system up that way herself because you couldn’t be ordered by a court by tell what you didn’t know.
Manuel’s mouth curled, and he leaned into her, so close she could have counted the individual hairs on his pathetic chin. “Inez is a scared little rabbit. She’d never do this on her own. You know where she’s at, lady, and before I’m done with you, you’re gonna be beggin’ me to let you tell me.”
Out the corner of her eye, Zoe saw a silver Ford Taurus pull up, the kind of car that in this neighborhood shouted la policía so loudly it might as well have been painted black-and-white. It double-parked alongside the Impala, and two plainclothes cops—a man and an Asian woman—got out.
Zoe knew the man, Inspector Sean Mackey of Homicide, and he never brought her anything but bad news. But right now she wanted to throw him a ticker-tape parade.
“You might want to cool it,” she said to Manuel. “‘Cause there’s a big, badass cop standing right behind you.”
The man snorted. “Yeah, right. What do I got—stupid written all over my forehead?”
“Well, since you asked …”
Inspector Mackey slammed the flat of his big hand down hard on the Impala’s hood. Moreno whirled, almost tripping over his own feet.
“Hey, what the—”
“Better watch it, tough guy,” Mackey said. “The lady’s got a black belt in tae kwan do. She can kick your ass so bad you’ll be pissing blood for a week.”
“She can kiss my ass, is what she can do.”
Mackey stepped into Moreno’s space. His voice, though, was soft and smooth as whipped cream. “You might want to go on home now. Take a nice long shower, then pour yourself a brewski and chill for a bit.”
Moreno clenched his fists, but he brushed past Mackey and went to his car. He jerked open the door, got inside, and revved up the engine. Then he poked a finger out the window at Zoe. “You tell Inez we ain’t finished. Not by a long shot.”
“Whoever this Inez is,” said the female cop, as they watched the Impala pull out into traffic, “she better not get within a mile of that guy. At least not until he settles down a bit.”
Zoe didn’t comment. Sometimes the police sympathized with her cases. Sometimes they didn’t.
“You okay, Zoe?” Mackey said.
“I’m fine, Mack. Thanks for showing up when you did, though.”
“Aw, you’d have taken him.”
Zoe shrugged. “Maybe. He was pumped.” She held out her hand to the female cop. “
I’m Zoe Dmitroff.”
“Wendy Lee,” the woman said, laughter and curiosity bright in her eyes. “Mack was filling me in about you on the way over here.”
“Really?” Zoe looked at Mackey, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She wondered what he’d said about her. He was a good-looking guy, square-jawed and nicely ripped, and there’d always been this little frisson of attraction between them. But it was never going to go anywhere because he flat out couldn’t handle what her mother did for a living.
“And I saw that report Channel 4 news did on you a couple of days ago,” Wendy Lee was saying. “About how you’ve set up an underground-railroad-type service to help get women and kids get away from the assholes in their lives.”
“Sometimes she helps them get away,” Mackey put in, a little edge to his voice. He didn’t always approve of what she did for a living either. “Sometimes they pump a shotgun round into the asshole’s chest instead or bury a meat cleaver in his head, and then she helps them walk on the murder rap.”
“Sometimes,” Zoe said, “when the system fails you, a meat cleaver might seem like your only recourse.”
“And who gets to decide when that line’s been crossed? Who gets to decide when killing the guy becomes a … How did you put it? Oh, yeah. An only recourse.”
Wendy Lee grinned at her partner. “I think the reporter did mention something about that, too, Mack. Only the way he put it, Ms. Dmitroff not only specializes in battered-wife and partner syndrome as a defense, she works pro bono to free those poor women already convicted and shipped off to prison for murdering their abusers during previous, less enlightened times.”
Mackey snorted. “There you go.”
“So moving right along,” Zoe said. “What brought you guys out here anyway?”
Altar of Bones Page 10