Silence.
It fueled her frustration. It also told her she was on the right track.
“The patent prints confirm that Belkin touched that bloodied cradle door in ’86, Maddocks. He was there. He knew my mother. He knows what happened to my mouth. Seven years after I was found, he’s busted in a drug shoot-out with narcotics worth $9 million hidden in a cube truck. There’s a level of organized crime that goes into that kind of haul, too. Yet Belkin never snitches—never reveals the identity of his associates, one of whom shot and killed a VPD cop. Are you telling me that Belkin—or his group—was also involved in organized sex trafficking back then, in 1986? That my mother might have been trafficked …” It hit her. She placed a palm across her brow. “Jesus, Maddocks, I remember Polish words, a woman screaming at me in Polish to stay inside that cradle and stay quiet. We were foreign.” She swore as possibilities clicked into place. “When the forensic artist’s sketch of me ran in all the papers, no one came forward. Not one soul in this city, or even the country, came to claim me as family. We might not have even been in the country legally—that would explain the dead silence, wouldn’t it? That would explain why I couldn’t speak any English to the nurses … why my life could have been so bad that my kid memory wiped itself clean in an act of pure survival.”
Maddocks cursed on his end. Angie heard movement and what sounded like a door closing. The sound of the television grew suddenly muted. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, quieter. “Angie, I’m not going to tell you anything that’s not already out there. And the only reason I’m saying anything at all is because I need you to stand down, and I know that you won’t do it without some solid argument.” He wavered, then said, “When you return to Victoria, to the station, you’ll hear that one of the barcode girls was murdered in hospital while under MVPD guard—”
“What? Which one?”
“The eldest. She was the only one who talked to me. She gave a statement and was killed that same night, in her hospital bed. Her tongue was cut out while she was still alive.”
Angie swallowed, feeling ill.
“Then this interagency task force under the auspices of the RCMP swooped in and asserted jurisdiction—took her body right off O’Hagan’s table, kicked out our forensics guys, took possession of all evidence.”
Her heart quickened. “How’s Belkin connected?”
He cleared his throat. “Listen, I can’t—”
“Maddocks, don’t do this to me. Is there anything else in the public realm that you can clue me in to—anything I could conceivably have come across myself?”
“Angie—”
“Jeezus, come on, please! Give me something. Because there is no way in hell I’m going to just stand down now without a more compelling reason, Maddocks.”
Another curse. A beat of silence. Then he said quietly, “This will be in the media—public knowledge—a couple in Squamish burned to death in a house fire three nights ago. The fire is thought to have been caused by a propane line explosion.” He paused. “The deceased male was a paraplegic named Stirling Harrison. He was the innocent bystander who was injured in the 1993 Belkin drug shoot-out.” Another pause. “Follow Belkin’s legal counsel.”
Her mind hustled to join these disparate pieces into a cohesive picture, but she couldn’t. Not yet. But she could look this stuff up.
“Look, I know you, Angie. I know that you want to resist, to march to your own drum here, but I’m sticking my neck out. I’m telling you this because …” He swore again, viciously this time. “Because I think I’m coming to love you, okay? And I care, dammit. I want you around and in my life—I want to find you safely in Victoria when I get back. I want you around after your probation. I want to … to share”—his voice caught, turned hoarse—“spring, summer with you, Angie, get those kayaks out. Get out onto the water—work on the old boat, have barbecues on the deck, have you and Ginny there with me. I want to spend fall and next winter with you, dammit. I want a normal relationship when things settle down. I want us to see if this can work. And you need to stay alive.”
Shock slammed through her. Emotion pricked into her eyes.
His dream. The one he’s been trying to salvage. His old wooden boat, family … his vision of sailing up the coast. He wants me in it.
“Be there for me, okay? I’m here for you.”
Angie couldn’t speak—her voice was choked in a ball in her throat.
“I trust you,” he said quietly. “I trust you’ll do the right thing.”
I could screw up his career if I act on something privileged that he told me.
She pressed her hand over her mouth. She didn’t know how to handle this. His words, so rough with emotion, had come out of the blue, and they were dizzying and they stole all her breath and she couldn’t think. They stripped her to the core. A maelstrom of feelings burned in her chest—fondness, fear, sadness, ferocity. “I … I’ve got to go, Maddocks,” she said quickly and hung up.
Angie stood there, rain streaming down the windows as the sky grew blacker and lower and an evening mist crept in. A precipice—she felt as though she were balanced at the very edge of a cliff and below her was a black maw and she was being asked to lean in, and to let herself fall into that unknown.
Trust me.
He wasn’t just talking about the case. He’d asked her to take a leap, and she didn’t know if she could. Or even who she wanted to be. Whether she could be anyone at all if she did not have knowledge of who she really was. Her very sense of self-identity had been ripped out from under her when she’d learned that she’d been abandoned in that cradle, and then again when she’d been told that she’d had a twin. How could she love him, wholly, if she herself was broken?
She had to find her other half—her twin—first. She had to seek and define that dark shadow that haunted her whenever she looked in the mirror—the owner of that little lost foot.
An old rhyme came to mind, as it had before, usually after she’d hit the sex club on the hunt for an anonymous lay.
Fractured face
in the mirror,
you are my disgrace,
a sinner.
No. Not a sinner in the mirror. My sister. My missing half. My DNA. Out there somewhere.
Rain lashed suddenly against the library windows, and wind whistled through the building pillars outside. In the sound of the wind she heard the small voice whispering again.
Come … come playum dum grove. Help. Help me, Roksana.
Maddocks glared at his reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror, his hands braced on the vanity, his burner cell lying in front of him next to the basin, the television murmuring in the next room. He’d left the station to come and call Angie in privacy. He’d said stuff he hadn’t intended to. The words, feelings, had just come out of his mouth, almost of their own volition, and now they could not be put back or unheard. And while he hadn’t meant to say them, he meant them—he could not handle losing her, being responsible for not warning her. Like Takumi had not warned him of the dangers facing Sophia Tarasov and the other barcode girls.
But was it enough?
Would he regret not being harsher, more forcible? Giving her more information? Or less? Would he pay for not reporting to Operation Aegis what he knew from Angie—that Milo Belkin was connected to the 1986 cradle case and the disappearance of a little Polish girl, a twin whose foot had been found in Tsawwassen last week? And that Angie Pallorino and her sister and their mother might have been victims of Russian human trafficking involving Belkin and his accomplices?
Would it come back to bite him that he’d not reported to Aegis that Angie had visited with that inmate?
He dragged both his hands over his head, reminding himself that Belkin had been incarcerated for decades. It was unlikely that he was actively linked to anything directly relating to the Aegis investigation. It was simply his connection to organized criminals that put her in jeopardy—the fact the mob looked after their own and might have killed Stirling H
arrison and his wife to do so.
And if Pietrikowski got his act together, the DNA from Voight’s old case files would soon lead him to Belkin anyway.
Maddocks just had to trust that Angie would listen to him—that she’d see the links in the clues he’d given, see the danger, and shut up and sit tight.
CHAPTER 41
A female voice sounded through the library intercom. “The Vancouver Library will be closing in twenty minutes. If everyone could please finish off …”
But Angie barely heard. A dog with a bone now, she tuned out the woman’s voice and quickly punched into a search engine a series of keywords: HOMICIDE, SEX WORKERS, TONGUES CUT.
She hit ENTER.
A series of links to news stories populated her laptop screen, among them references to a mythological method of murder called the Colombian necktie. She ignored those links and clicked on a CBC news story out of Montreal. Last summer the naked and badly bruised body of an unidentified female had been discovered in a vacant lot with her tongue excised. She was a dancer employed by a Russian nightclub with known mob connections. There was speculation that the woman’s murder had been a mob hit, the excised tongue sending some kind of warning. Angie searched deeper for more news on this homicide, but she found nothing more in the media. Granted, her search was cursory, but on the surface it appeared that no arrests had been made, and there was no coverage of the body ever having been identified.
She drummed her fingers on the desk. If this task force that Maddocks had been detailed to was top-level clearance, and if this missing-tongue murder fell under that task force purview, it was likely that further details—like a barcode tattoo, perhaps—would have been withheld from the media.
“The library will shutting in ten minutes. If everyone could please proceed with their books to checkout …”
Urgency crackled through her. She could pursue this from her hotel later, but she was unable to stop.
Follow Belkin’s legal counsel.
Hurriedly she typed, DEFENSE COUNSEL MILO BELKIN.
Angie clicked open the first news link in the search results—a news story covering Belkin’s drug bust trial. His defense counsel was Viktor Abramov of the firm Abramov, Maizel, and Dietch.
She typed into the search field, ABRAMOV MAIZEL DIETCH.
Surprise whipped through her as the results populated her screen. The same counsel had defended Belkin’s drug bust co-accused, Semyon Zagorsky. The firm, it appeared, was infamous for its defense of alleged Russian mobsters in high-profile trials in Montreal and in other parts of the country, including Vancouver.
Lawyers for the Russian mob? Is that what Maddocks was telling me? That Belkin and Zagorsky were known members of Russian organized crime, and their thug connections on the outside might have burned Zagorsky’s paraplegic victim to death?
Hurriedly, Angie typed, VIKTOR ABRAMOV. She narrowed the search field to the eighties and nineties. She clicked open a 1991 digitized news article from the East Side Weekly on an exotic dancer’s “mistake.”
Club Orange B Dancer Retracts Rape Allegations
EAST VANCOUVER: Days before East Vancouver resident Milo Belkin was due in court on sexual assault and battery charges, exotic dancer Nadia Moss told reporters that she had mistakenly identified her attacker, who raped and badly beat her with a baseball bat—breaking her nose, cheekbone, arm, and leg, and leaving her for dead in an alley near the club at which she worked. Moss had been due to take the stand at Belkin’s trial when she retracted her statement to police. East Van activists had taken up Moss’s cause and provided her with pro-bono counsel.
Vancouver police, however, are not looking for new suspects, said VPD media liaison Leanne Benton.
Moss, who is slowly recovering from her injuries, now works as a bar manager at Club Orange B. She told reporters she is thankful to her employers, who stood by her and who offered her a position that would help her recover fully from her injuries.
Belkin’s counsel, Viktor Abramov, said that his client has always maintained his innocence and is grateful that Moss had the courage to come forward and admit her error.
Angie frowned. A club promotion for Nadia Moss as payoff for withdrawing her assault and rape charges? She typed, SQUAMISH GAS EXPLOSION FIRE, DEATH.
Top of the list was a recent Vancouver Province article. She clicked it open and read.
Couple Die in House Fire
SQUAMISH: Firefighters responded to a blaze in the Valleycliffe subdivision in the early hours of Wednesday morning. A 9-1-1 call was received at 3:10 a.m. after residents in Eagle Street heard an explosion, then looked out of their windows to see the property of Stirling and Elaine Harrison fully engulfed in flames. The badly burned bodies of the Harrison couple were discovered in the aftermath of the blaze. Arson investigators were called in, but so far Squamish fire chief Eddie Beam is saying that it looks like a tragic accident.
A witness who tried to enter the burning house said he’d seen Elaine Harrison out on her lawn earlier, but she’d reentered the burning building in a bid to save her paraplegic husband.
Angie typed STIRLING HARRISON into the search field. Her heart kicked at what came up—articles referencing the November 20 drug bust twenty-five years ago and the arrests of Milo Belkin and his associate Semyon Zagorsky.
Stirling Harrison had indeed been the innocent bystander who’d caught a ricocheting .22 slug in the back, which had put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
“The library doors are closing …”
Angie scanned quickly through the articles, heat prickling over her skin as she read. Shortly after receiving the news that her husband would never walk again and that he would lose his high-paying job as a BC Hydro technician who worked at high elevations repairing and maintaining the province’s hydro towers, Elaine Harrison tearfully vowed to a journalist that she and her husband, a young father, would give the most powerful of victim impact statements at Semyon Zagorsky’s sentencing. Zagorsky was the one, she’d told the reporter, who’d been shooting the .22 pistol in the East Vancouver gun battle.
Elaine Harrison had additionally promised that she would push her husband’s wheelchair into every single parole board hearing that Zagorsky ever qualified for—and she and her husband would both make it known to the parole board how Zagorsky had destroyed their livelihood and their family as they’d known it.
Angie searched deeper, then froze.
Semyon Zagorsky was currently incarcerated at Kelvin Maximum Security Institution in the BC interior. He was up for a parole board hearing in two days. And this time, his victims—Stirling and Elaine Harrison—would not be present to object. Because they were dead.
Angie punched in the name SEMYON ZAGORSKY.
A news photo from the time of his arrest took shape on her monitor.
Her heart beat in her throat. She stared at the image. Could not breathe. A high-pitched ringing began in her ears, and her vision narrowed, a halo of blackness closing in as she swirled down, down, down … into that dark place of her childhood where Alex had taken her with hypnosis. Suddenly she was there again, among the giant cedars, running on sunlight, upon dandelions, salt wind through her long hair, her dress billowing like a tent in the breeze. Glimpses of blue ocean between the trunks. Little shoes ahead of her—she was chasing them. Legs, white under a pink dress with frills, pumped ahead of her, darting through the emerald grass.
“Mila!” she called. “Stop, Mila, wait…” A tinkle of childish laughter. “Berries, berries, blackberries … baskets … two little kittens …”
“Happy birthday, little ones!” The male voice stopped the scene dead. Everything went gray. Then out of the grayness the box came at her. Shoe box. Bound by a big pale-purple ribbon. Huge hands held it, hair on the backs of those hands. A crab drawing on the inside of one wrist. Pretty crab. Pale-blue crab, like a spider. And suddenly she was looking at the underwater footage on Jacob Anders’s live feed, and down from the corner swooped the octopus. Slamme
d over the Dungeness crab. Killed it and devoured it a mushrooming cloud of silt with sea lice scattering.
Fear closed a noose around Angie’s throat. Slowly, very slowly, she glanced up from the blue crab on white skin, all the way up. Into the eyes of the man who was offering her the box with the purple ribbon. Twinkly eyes. Blue like the crab. Bright blue. Friendly. Kind. She looked deep into the piercing, sparkling blue eyes … and right into the face that was staring out of her computer.
A hand slammed down on her shoulder. A voice boomed in her ears, inside her head. “For my Mila, and a matching pair for Roksana.” He had a smile so big and broad. It put warmth in her heart. But … all of a sudden she was running from him. Terror in her stomach. The forest and sunshine and ocean spiraling into a kaleidoscopic vortex, sucking her away … and she was in the snow … Running … She saw those shoes running in the snow … Home, home, home, got to get HOME … “Alex, get me HOME!”
Uciekaj, uciekaj! … Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! … Siedz cicho! A flash of silver, pain … Angie screamed …
“Ma’am. Ma’am.” The hand shook her shoulder harder. “Are you all right?”
She blinked. Her gaze shot up. It was the librarian. A young guy. Dark hair. Worry in his face. “Do you want me to call for help?”
“I … I, God, no.” She jerked to her feet. Her skin was wet. She could smell her own sweat, fear on herself. She slapped closed her laptop and started blindly gathering up her things. “I’m fine.”
“You screamed.”
“I … I’m so sorry.” She quickly slipped her laptop into her tote along with her notebooks and files. She shrugged the bag handle over her shoulder. “I’m really sorry. I must have fallen asleep and had a bad nightmare.” She scooped up her coat and hurried down the stairs, making for the library exit. She pushed out the doors, her face red-hot.
The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2) Page 24