The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Sit.”

  I did, happy to let someone else be in charge. He worked quickly and expertly, cleaning and dressing the wound.

  “Drazen’s got some technical operators,” I said. “These guys were pros.”

  “How many?”

  “Two for sure. Maybe three.” I didn’t know if the one we had scraped off the Humvee in the garage had been a third man or the Taser man. “They had all the gear. Masks and night-vision goggles and armor. All kinds of firepower. Bat belts. They were definitely Velcro guys. Owwww. ”

  “Hold still.” He dabbed at the gash on my head, which had become the primary focus of all my nerve endings. “Voices?”

  “I didn’t hear any. They weren’t talking, and there was too much other noise.”

  He put the lid on the bottle of peroxide and found the trash can for the pile of bloody cotton balls that had accumulated from his ministering. “They were not Drazen’s men,” he said. “He knew nothing of what happened.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “I spoke to him. He told me.”

  “But they were looking for Rachel. I mean, I think they were. They were looking for someone, and they were ready to take me out, so it must have been her.” I started to stand up, but a wave of nausea put me right back down. “He must be lying to you, Bo.”

  “He wants Roger Fratello. He wants you to find him. Why would he kill you?”

  I looked into his face, trying to detect whether he believed what he was saying or whether he believed it because Drazen had told him to. All I saw was a lot of stress in his eyes and deep creases in his thick forehead.

  “If they weren’t Drazen’s men, then who were those guys?”

  “I don’t know. When my men got to the address you gave me, there were no bodies.”

  “No bodies? It’s been, like, an hour. Are you sure they were at the right place?”

  “As you said, technical operators. There were no shells or weapons or bodies. They cleaned up.”

  I leaned back against the tank and thought about it. If it wasn’t Russians, there was only one other possibility. “Blackthorne.”

  Bo had found a large adhesive bandage. He peeled off the back and centered it over the cut. “Who is Blackthorne?”

  “It’s a what, not a who. A private military firm. Army for hire.”

  “Yes, yes. We had many such groups in my country. That is how the Croats beat the Serbs.” He perked up at the memory. “Their militia was trained by one of your American companies.”

  “Blackthorne had a car parked outside Rachel’s house. They’re all ex-military and intelligence. These guys must have been from Blackthorne.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Rachel.” This time when I got up, I managed to stay on my feet. “And she’s about to tell me why.”

  Harvey and Rachel were still in the kitchen when we went downstairs. I settled in at the table with them with a big glass of cold water and a bunch of ibuprofen. Bo went off to make calls. He was still working his way off the Boston PD’s “person of interest” list. Looking across the table at the newly constituted couple, I was almost afraid to begin.

  “Rachel, why is Blackthorne after you?”

  “Who’s Blackthorne?”

  “A private military firm.”

  “Mercenaries?” She looked at Harvey. “French Foreign Legion? That kind of thing?”

  “No,” Harvey said. “These are private firms that provide military services for profit.”

  “They can do that?”

  “It is sometimes appropriate for governments to transfer some of their public responsibilities to the private sector.” Harvey’s measured tone was a nice balance to Rachel’s increasing shrillness. “It can be more efficient on many fronts, including cost.” Harvey looked at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “I think that’s who came after us at the house.”

  “That’s terrific,” Rachel said. “That’s just great. First the Russians, and now I get to have a bunch of mercenaries on my ass.”

  “You have no idea why?”

  “Not a clue.”

  I could have pushed harder, but there was so much to cover. I moved on. “You killed Vladislav Tishchenko.”

  “In self-defense.” They said it in stereo.

  “We’ll talk about that in a second. Let me just get all the facts out first. You killed him, but Drazen thinks Roger Fratello did it. He’s looking for Roger to, I don’t know, exact his revenge, and he thinks Harvey can tell him where to find him. It’s possible he thinks this because some mole inside the FBI tipped him off. That’s pure speculation, but it could make some sense, because we know the FBI also thinks that Harvey can help them find Roger.” I pulled out the only unoccupied chair at the table and put my feet up. “The FBI wants Roger because he tipped off his Russian—actually, Ukrainian—business partner, who I assume is Drazen Tishchenko, that there was an FBI agent undercover at Betelco. Drazen then either killed this agent or had him killed. Is that true, Rachel?”

  I looked at her, hoping that our fracas in Acton would have convinced her the time for bullshit had passed.

  “Drazen was in Betelco,” she said. “That part is true, but I don’t know anything about the FBI agent except that he died.”

  “It wasn’t natural causes, Rachel. He was missing his head and his hands when they found him, which, according to the FBI, scared off any other potential witnesses in the Betelco case. That sounds like Drazen to me. What do you think?” Her neck stiffened. Either she was surprised by the news, or she just didn’t like being reminded.

  “Yes.” She spoke precisely. “It sounds like something Drazen would do, but I had nothing to do with it. And I wouldn’t.”

  “Even if it meant you would have gone to jail?”

  “I wouldn’t have done anything like that no matter what.” Harvey put his hand on the table next to hers, and the two of them entwined fingers. She did sound convincing.

  “Okay, so everyone is looking for Roger. As a way to protect Harvey, I have committed to Drazen that I would find Roger for him. At the time, I had no idea that doing that would put your life, Rachel’s life, at risk. Your life would be at risk because Roger didn’t really kill Vladi. He knows that you did and would presumably use that tidbit as a way to save his own life, if forced to choose. Is all of that right?”

  Neither raised an objection. “Good. That means we have a conundrum. Find Roger and save Harvey, or leave him lost and save Rachel. My goal is to save you both…and me, of course.”

  “How do you expect to do that?”

  “First, I need all the facts, starting with Betelco. I want to understand your relationship, Rachel, with the Tishchenko’s. Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”

  She hesitated, so I rephrased. “Susan Fratello says you brought the Tishchenko’s into Betelco. She said you talked Roger into killing a pending deal to sell Betelco at a fair price in order to do it. Is that true?”

  I thought one of Harvey’s almost useless legs would pop up and bang the table. “I beg your pardon?”

  He looked at me, I looked at Rachel, and then we both looked at Rachel.

  “All right, here it is. The cold, hard truth. It’s true. I did bring Drazen in.”

  Harvey’s chin dropped about half an inch as he turned away. It wasn’t much, but enough to convey his disappointment. She brought her other hand up so that she was holding his hand with both of hers. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to get him to look at her. “I had no choice.”

  Gee, that was a shocker.

  “It was my husband. My sweet, stupid, degenerate gambler husband. Gorgeous to look at, but…” She couldn’t suppress a wistful smile before she must have realized it was Harvey’s hand she was holding. “I never should have left you, baby. I didn’t know what a good thing I had.”

  “What about Gary?” We needed to stay on point.

  “Drazen likes to buy gambling debts. He looks for anyone he consider
s to be useful to him, like lawyers and accountants and cops. People on the inside of successful companies. Gary had a big debt we couldn’t pay. Drazen bought it and then told us he would kill him if I didn’t do what he said.”

  “What did he ask you to do?”

  She tried again to make eye contact with Harvey. He didn’t seem to be able to look at her, but he also hadn’t pulled his hand out of the knot of interlocking fingers and thumbs where she had tied herself to him. “Identify targets of opportunity for him. He had a lot of money coming into the country, and he needed legitimate places to wash it. He wanted it where no one would look for it.”

  “You did this with other companies?”

  “I had no choice.”

  It made sense. As an auditor for midsize firms, she would have been in the perfect position to know who was vulnerable to a Drazen pillaging. “You figured out how badly Roger needed cash and brought the Russians in. Is that right?”

  “Roger begged me to bring them in. He was all upset about the company going down, his father’s business and the family legacy and all that crap. At least, that was what he said at the time. He knew I had…connections. He asked me to hook him up. I told him he was better off with the deal he had, but he wouldn’t listen, and he wouldn’t leave me alone, so I did what he asked. I introduced him to Drazen’s people. Drazen came in and recapitalized him.”

  “What did Drazen get in exchange?”

  “He got to use the company for various things.”

  “Such as?”

  “What you’d expect. Laundering money. Shipping stuff around the world using Betelco as cover.”

  “How much did Roger know?”

  “Turns out good old Roger knew exactly what he was getting into. Not too long after they came in, he started giving me the cold shoulder. I didn’t see him much anymore. If you want to know the truth, I think he used me to get them in there, because once they were in with all their dirty cash, he started stealing it.”

  “Stealing Drazen’s cash sounds like a risky strategy.”

  “It put me in a very bad position, because if Drazen found out, he would have blamed me.”

  “Let’s see, you screwed your lover, Roger, over by bringing in your Russian investors, then got worried that Roger was about to screw you back?”

  “Exactly. I got the feeling he was about to take his dough and disappear and leave me holding the bag. I couldn’t let that happen. Drazen would have thought I was in it with him from the start. I had to know what he was up to, so I went through the books and…the books, if you know what I mean. I figured out where he was hiding the money. That night that it all came down, Roger and I were supposed to meet at the offices to talk about it.” She glanced again at Harvey and pitched her voice to him and him only. “That’s why I was there. I didn’t have any choice, baby. They would have killed Gary.”

  The implications of doing what she had done to protect the man for whom she’d left Harvey, while she was sleeping with another man, seemed to elude her. “Anyway, he never came, but Vladi did. That’s the night it all went down.”

  “That’s the night Vladi died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Vladi was like Drazen’s puppy dog. He followed him around and did errands for him. From what I heard, he was his bodyguard back wherever they came from. Vladi took a bullet for him more than once. Anyway, I was there at the offices working late that night when Vladi showed up. I was by myself, and all of a sudden, this big, hairy, smelly piece of crap whacked out on coke and God knows what else walks in, sees me, and starts drooling. I knew I was in trouble. He’d been up for days drinking and snorting and gambling and whoring. He thought I was just part of the package, a cute young thing sitting right there for the picking. I tried to talk to him, but those people—Russians, Ukrainians, whatever—to them, a woman is for screwing or beating or maybe both at the same time. He was on me before I had time to scream. He bent me backward over Roger’s desk and put his tongue down my throat.”

  Harvey was listening closely. The healthy coloring in his face had been temporary. He was as pale as ever.

  There were so many different ways I thought I would die that night.” Rachel’s voice had softened. She was sounding as exposed as she must have felt lying across that desk. Harvey patted her on the arm. “I was scared out of my mind, so while he was groping me, I started looking for his gun. I knew he’d be carrying. He was so far gone when I found it, he didn’t notice. I shot him.”

  “What kind of gun?” I asked her.

  Her eyes flashed. “What difference does that make?”

  “Do you know how to disengage the safety on an automatic? Can you do it while you’re bent over a desk being raped?”

  “You do a lot of things you didn’t think you could when you’re about to die. I found the gun, and I stood him up, and I shot him.” Her voice had turned brittle, but it wasn’t strong. Even though she was angry, there was still something vulnerable about her, and I couldn’t tell whether it was harder to feel for her or not to feel for her.

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  I turned to Harvey. “This is where you came in.”

  “Very well.” He shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and began. “It happened four years ago in March. I remember, because it had been a long winter already, and it was still so very cold. It was evening. I was on my way to see a client, a man who owned a chain of dry cleaners. I was doing his taxes.”

  This might have been one level of detail more than I needed, but too much was better than too little. I let him carry on.

  “My coat was on, and my hand was on the knob of the door when the phone rang. It was a rule. Once I had my coat on, I would never answer the phone. For some reason, that day I waited, and when the machine picked up, I heard Rachel’s voice.” He gave her a shy, sideways glance. “She was crying.”

  “You broke your rule.”

  “Yes, thank God. She said she was in trouble and needed my help.”

  I wanted to ask if he’d bothered to ask what kind of trouble, but there was no point. Nothing could have drawn Harvey in more than having a chance to be of service, especially to Rachel. “What happened then?”

  “I went to the address she gave me. It was an office building in Cambridge. Roger Fratello’s office. She was on the fourth floor. The elevator was out of order, and I had difficulty climbing the stairs. The more I tried to hurry, the harder it became.”

  I pictured him trying to make those stairs, crawling on his hands and knees if he had to, to get to her.

  “When I got there, she was sitting in a chair, shaking like a frightened animal. Vladislav Tishchenko was dead on the floor. She told me she had killed him. There was blood.” He closed his eyes. “There was much blood.”

  “Keep going.”

  “It was a nightmare. The entire scene was a nightmare. We rolled the body in…in large plastic bags Rachel found in a janitor’s closet and carried it down the stairs. We put it into the trunk of the dead man’s car. There was money in the trunk, packs of currency and lots of it. I had to move it to fit the body in. I put it in a bag Rachel found that was in the front seat.”

  “Was this the money that ended up in Brussels?”

  “I assume it was.”

  “Then this explains how your prints got on it. You handled it to put it in the bag.” I looked at Rachel. “Did you ever touch it?”

  “Harvey handed it to me in a bag. I never touched it.”

  “And you gave it to Roger when you helped him run. Is that it?”

  They looked at each other. “Yes,” Rachel said quickly. “That’s exactly it.”

  I made a mental note to come back to that point. Something wasn’t right.

  “All right, Harvey. You had this body in the trunk. What then?”

  “I drove Rachel home. I helped her clean up and dispose of her bloody cloth
es, and then I drove the body out of town and buried it.”

  “You buried Vladi?”

  “Yes.”

  “By yourself?”

  “I was not so feeble then as I am now. What else was I to do?”

  I raised an eyebrow at Rachel. That was all it took to bring her back to her posture of snide self-defense. “I had blood on my clothes. We also had one car too many. We had to take my car home. But while I was there, Gary woke up. There was no way I could go out again.”

  “That was convenient. Did you ever tell Gary what had happened?”

  “I never did.”

  “You just left Harvey to clean up your mess.”

  Harvey cleared his throat and waded in. “Nothing she could have done would have changed what I did.”

  I tried to picture the logistics. If they took her car home, that left them with Vladi’s, and Harvey’s still at Roger’s office in Cambridge. “You said you drove Vladi in his own car. What did you do with it?”

  “I drove it to the Alewife Park-and-Ride. I wiped off the fingerprints and took the T into Cambridge. Then I walked to my car and drove it home.”

  That meant the Cambridge police or the transit authority had found that car. “Neither of you was ever questioned in the investigation?”

  Rachel shrugged. “As far as they wanted to know, Roger did it. Vladi disappeared, and then Roger disappeared. They didn’t look too far past him.”

  “What did Drazen think?”

  Rachel smiled. “He believed what they believed, and he believed me. I told him I had seen Roger kill Vladi. It was the least I could do to that bastard.”

  Their story made sense. I couldn’t find any major holes. But then the two of them looked at each other, and I saw something pass between them. They no longer shared the same home, the same name, or the same monogrammed sheets, but Rachel and Harvey still had the ability to understand each other without words. It was one of the vestiges that endure after the end of an intimate relationship. There was more they hadn’t told me.

  “What’s the rest?”

  Rachel caught the inside of her cheek between her teeth but said nothing. I looked at Harvey. I did not want him to be hiding things from me. Finally, he spoke. “Roger had the incident on video.”