Hurriedly, Maddocks opened the first attachment. It showed the names and photographs of five males, all in their late fifties or sixties. His heart quickened at the sight of the fifth one—a big, pale-complexioned redhead with light-gray eyes. Part of a tattoo was visible down the left side of his neck. His name was Olyeg Kaganov.
Maddocks clicked open the second attachment sent by Eden. He scrolled quickly to the intel brief on Kaganov. The man owned and operated the high-end Semko Fishing Lodge along with several fish farms in the Queen Charlotte Strait. He owned residences on the North Shore but spent most of his time at the lodge.
It was located on Semko Island, which lay north of Vancouver Island.
Fish farms.
When Angie had been taken back under hypnosis, she’d remembered docks. She’d mentioned fish farms. Maddocks replayed their conversation in his mind.
“There was water, ocean beyond the forest. A big building with a green roof where a red man lived. Docks. Several, making square shapes in the water. One with a building on it. I thought of them as fish pens.”
“Red man?”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“And the docks?”
“A fish farm maybe? They reminded me of the docks outside Jacob Anders’s lab buildings … The red man … I felt the red man was bad.”
He clicked open the images of Semko Fishing Lodge contained in the intel brief. Green-roofed log buildings filled his small cell screen. An aerial image showed docks in a grid pattern off the northeast of the island.
It fit—goddammit, it all fit! With Tarasov’s testimony, too. Tarasov and the five barcodes discovered aboard the Amanda Rose had been taken from the Port of Vancouver by a small boat to a remote holding facility along the coast somewhere. The flying time Tarasov had described from that holding location to Victoria was in the ballpark for the location of Semko Island.
Tarasov had also witnessed ink on the side of her hooded captor’s neck. Plus, Queen Charlotte Strait fed into the Strait of Georgia. Angie’s twin’s foot could have floated from Semko Island.
It all fucking fit, right down to the big “red man’s” pale-gray eyes. They were the exact color of Angie’s. Ice branched through his chest. Her father—Kaganov could be her father.
“Sir, the last five females are coming out of the second truck.”
Maddocks’s body snapped taut with adrenaline as his gaze ticked back to the screen. He watched as the last girls were being brought out of the vehicle—emaciated, heads bowed forward, their hair lank and dirty, obscuring their faces.
“Sir, the last two females are now being escorted into the club,” said the surveillance officer.
Maddocks’s thoughts shot to the hit man. He worked for someone. Olyeg Kaganov? He hadn’t inflicted a lethal wound while incapacitating Angie. That told Maddocks he wanted her alive. Why? To take her somewhere? To Kaganov?
“Sergeant,” said the officer, “the females are now all inside the building. I repeat, all inside. Awaiting order.”
When Maddocks didn’t answer, the officer turned in his chair to face him, his features tight with tension. “Sir?”
“Call it!” Maddocks barked as he spun around and made for the exit. “Give the go!” he yelled over his shoulder as he flung open the door. “Now!”
“Sir?”
He shoved through the door and left the room. He dialed Takumi as he hurried toward the building’s fire escape stairs. Takumi picked up instantly.
“I’ve given the ERT go,” Maddocks snapped. “Cargo is all inside. But a woman—an ex-cop—has been abducted from the club. Her name’s Angie Pallorino. She’s been independently investigating a case that appears linked to the barcodes. I believe Olyeg Kaganov, one of the men tied to ownership of Atlantis Imports, is directly involved in her kidnapping. Eden’s put out a BOLO on the kidnap vehicle. A black Audi. I’m flying up to Semko Fishing Lodge on Semko Island. Kaganov owns and operates the lodge. I think they’re taking her there. I’ll need backup.”
He had no proof, but he had to do something apart from waiting for the BOLO to result in a sighting. That alone was a crapshoot now. He had to trust his gut. He’d gotten her into this shit. Now he had to get her out. He believed that if the hit man wanted Angie alive, there was a helluva good chance she’d be transported to Semko.
Takumi started to object, but Maddocks killed the call before Takumi could order him to stand down.
Maddocks knew what Takumi would say—that Operation Aegis needed to move slowly on Kaganov—get proof that Kaganov and the other men were actually behind the barcode imports, secure the requisite warrants so that charges would stick in court. Yeah, this was a gamble. It could cost his job. It could cost prosecution of those men down the line.
But if he didn’t act, it could cost Angie’s life.
If he was wrong, if a patrol car picked up the Audi while he was en route to Semko, that was okay—local law enforcement could handle it from there. That base would be covered. In the meanwhile, time was running out. If Kaganov really was Angie’s father, and if he was aware from the news that she was now remembering her past and coming after him, she didn’t have long to live.
If she was even still alive.
Maddocks burst out of the stairwell door at the rear of the building. Cold rain kissed his face as he ran toward his unmarked car parked in a back alley a few blocks down. As he got into his vehicle, he made another call. To a pilot friend.
CHAPTER 54
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9
Angie came around slowly, confusion clouding her brain. She struggled to place what was going on, where she was. She’d blacked out.
Why? How long? What had happened?
She tried to move her tongue. It felt too large. Her mouth was dry, tasted metallic. Her skull, her brain, her entire body pounded in pain with each beat of her heart. Carefully she opened her eyes, wincing sharply against light filtering down through a window up high. Near the ceiling. With bars.
A chill of recognition cut through her core.
I’ve been here before. What is this place?
Angie closed her eyes again and tentatively touched her fingertips to the base of her skull. They came away sticky. Blood? Hers? She groaned as she tried to move her head, to reopen her eyes. Her neck felt as though it might be broken. The muscles in her injured arm were afire.
She gave up for a moment, just lying there, trying to figure it out.
She’d gotten a call—that’s what had happened. From Nadia Moss. Just as she’d left the Russian club. Moss had whispered over the phone that she’d wanted to meet Angie in private, outside the club in the back alley, where she planned to take a smoke break—she couldn’t talk inside. Too risky, she’d said. Moss had sounded desperate.
Tension whipped through Angie. She fought to open her eyes again, to wake fully, to recall with clarity what had happened next.
Nadia had opened the back door into the alley. She’d called Angie over to the lighted doorway. Angie had been grabbed by the neck from behind … then a Taser. It had to have been a Taser. After that she recalled nothing, just blackness, apart from a vague recollection of being inside a vehicle at some point, something made of cloth over her head. Then … a thudding sound, a vibrating sensation. Chopper? A snatch of memory came to her—the feeling that she was inside a helicopter, flying during the night. It had been dark. Cold. A faint glow had come from electronics, maybe an instrument panel. Her hands and feet had been bound. She moved her legs now. Unbound, she realized. Her boots were still on. Hands were free, too. She tried to inhale deeply through her nose. She recognized the smell of this room.
I’ve definitely been here before.
Alarms clanged through her. Then Angie stilled. She felt a presence. Someone is inside the room with me. Tentatively, she sucked air in through her nose again, and she could smell him. An odor of perspiration underscored by a faint thread of masculine aftershave.
“Welcome home, Roksana.”
Electricity shocked through her body. Angie stopped breathing as she was whirled back, back in time. She was in the dank, dim room, the place Alex had taken her with hypnosis.
“I … was lying on a bed. In a dark room. There was someone with me in the darkness, holding my hand. A female. Her skin was cool. Soft. She was singing sweetly, gently, like a lullaby … those words about two little kittens. In Polish. Then she suddenly stopped singing. Someone had come in. I was scared. The room went blacker … There was a man in the room on top of her. Big, big man.”
“On top of who, Angie?”
“I … don’t know. The lady singing. He was grunting like a dog on her, and she was crying softly. Very scared. Wasn’t nice. Horrible.”
Angie lurched up. Her world reeled. Nausea surged up her throat, and she gagged. She was on a bed. She patted the surface around her, still unable to focus properly.
“Welcome home, Roksana,” he said again. The voice was low, deep. Sonorous. Terror rose inside her. She swallowed, then blinked frantically. I know that voice. I know it.
Her vision focused. She could see the wall opposite her and the barred window up high. She managed to turn her head sideways toward the source of the voice. The pale light coming in through the window shone on a big man. Red hair. Bushy red beard. Pale skin. Pale-gray eyes.
The red man. Bad man. It was him.
“Who … who are you?” Her voice came out hoarse. “Where am I?”
He reached forward and combed his thick fingers through her hair, snaking a lock around his hand. He angled his head, and Angie saw the blue crab ink on the side of his solid neck. “Gorgeous,” he whispered. “You grew up so beautiful, my girl.” He touched his fingertips to her lips, tracing her scar. She jerked back against the wall.
“Get your hands the fuck off me!”
He grinned. Light danced in his eyes. “This is where I bring all my girls, Roksi. Do you recall? This is where I kept the two of you and your mother. I wanted to bring you back here, for you to wake up and see it, and to remember it, and to remember me. I wanted to see and touch you, too, to look into your eyes and have you look back into mine.” He studied her. “My progeny,” he said quietly. “Resourceful girl. After all these years, you find me. You find my club. Very well done, Roksi. You are indeed my child.”
Bile surged into her throat. She could see it—in his complexion. His hair. The light-gray shade of his eyes. She’d found him. She’d found her biological father. And he was the red man. A monster.
“What … what’s your name?” she whispered.
He smiled. “Oly. Olyeg Kaganov.”
“My mother?”
“My whore once. Pretty little thing from Poland. Fell pregnant at sixteen.”
Angie’s chest crunched with emotions. She glared at him, trying to really see him, to absorb his face, the shape of his body, his smell. Trying to understand him. Her dad.
“You killed her. You killed my mother, didn’t you?”
His smile changed into something darker.
“Ana,” she said quietly. “That was her name—her name was Ana.”
“Very good. You get this from Semy?”
A pure white hatred filled her heart. It leaked a familiar burn into her blood, and the old taste of rage filled her mouth. It came with sharp, clear edges and restored clarity to her brain. It sliced through her system hand in hand with the pain beating through her body.
“Anastazja Kowalski,” he said quietly. “Daughter of Danek Kowalski, a political activist who was imprisoned and then killed during the lead-up to Solidarity in Poland.”
A grandfather. I had a grandfather, and his name was Danek Kowalski.
Angie focused fiercely on this news. She had family. In Europe. She was going to get out of this room, out of this prison of her past. She was going to find the rest of her family. She was going to let them know what had happened to Ana.
“Ana told me that her mother died when she was little,” he said, his gray eyes locked on her own. “Her father raised her solo. She was fourteen when the violence erupted in Poland and her father was taken. That’s when the traffickers got her. Here, see?” Zagorsky reached for a framed photo resting on the small table beside the bed. He held it out to her.
“Take it.”
Angie snatched it and stared. A young woman looked back at her. Barely sixteen. A heavily rounded belly. She was a mirror of Angie when she’d been a teen herself—apart from the long, dark, wavy hair and a more olive-toned complexion. Tears pooled in Angie’s eyes. She began to shake.
“I thought you also might like to go and see the old fish pens and crab pots again, before we say goodbye.” He paused. “Roksi.”
Her gaze shot back to him. “Goodbye?” she whispered, tears blurring her vision and obscuring his big face.
“A full family reunion of sorts. It will be fitting, I think, for you to end your life there, where your mother and sister died. Because you see, my Roksana, everything always comes back to the beginning.” He drew a gentle circle in the air with his meaty hand. “As it should. But this time”—he grinned—“no shoes that can float.”
Angie gagged. She tried to get up, but her world spun again and she slumped back hard against the wall, breathing heavily. “What … what did you do to them? How did you kill them?”
“Come, I’ll show you.” He held out his hand to her. “It’s time.”
She couldn’t move. She’d vomit, pass out—she couldn’t afford to black out again. She had to stay present, fight this.
His grin vanished. His eyes turned hard. He took the framed photo out of her lap and returned it to the bedside table. Surging to his feet, he reached around to his back and brought out a pistol. He pointed the muzzle at her, then waved it toward the door. He was tall—well over six feet. Built like a lumberjack. Massive thighs. Abs that looked rock hard. Pecs bulging beneath his shirt and biceps that strained against his sleeves. Olyeg Kaganov might be in his sixties, but her father was still a Goliath.
“Go on. Get up. Move. We’re going to take a little walk through the forest where you liked to play with Mila.”
The sound of her sister’s name speared a jolt of electricity through her. Angie locked her gaze on his as she slowly inched her left hand around her hip to feel the back pocket of her jeans.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I took the phone. And the small knife.”
As he turned sideways, she caught sight of his knife—a massive hunting blade sheathed on his belt.
He reached down, grabbed her upper arm, and yanked her to her feet. She gasped, eyes watering in pain. But she refused to cry out. Up close she could really smell him—and she remembered his scent in the way that a prey animal recalls the smell of the predator that hunts it. A smell she’d learned to fear as a child. He pushed her, and she stumbled toward the door—the same door she’d opened with Alex’s magic key. Except now she had no key, no special word she could utter to return “home,” back to the safety of Alex’s living room.
Zagorsky reached for the handle and flung the door open wide. Angie blinked blindly into the brightness, trying to orient herself.
“Walk.” He rammed the muzzle of his pistol into her lower back. “That way, along the dirt path and down into the forest.”
She tried to put one foot in front of the other as she exited through the door, but she staggered forward, almost falling to her knees. Angie stopped. Breathing hard, she righted herself, then attempted once more to negotiate the uneven and twisting path that lay in front of her. As they moved into the trees, the ground underfoot grew springy with moss. She heard a plane engine up high, and she squinted into the sky. A small craft with floats and props flew overhead in the white-gray heavens, then disappeared beyond the tops of trees, oblivious to what was occurring in the forest below.
The path led into a grove of old-growth cedars that towered overhead, branches drooping low, bark hanging in shredded red strips from trunks that spanned wider than the arms of two men joined. Moss an
d colored lichens grew over rocks. Angie stopped as the sound of a woman singing reached her through the forest.
Little berries, black berries, two gray kittens …
The trees above her swirled. Branches rustled. This was it. This was the place. Her and Mila’s place.
A child laughed. Angie spun to the source of the sound. In the shadows beneath the cedars, she glimpsed a wash of pink. The little girl was there, peeping around a fat trunk, her long red hair swaying toward the ground. The girl smiled.
“Mila?” Angie whispered, holding her hand out toward the child. But the girl ducked back behind the trunk and vanished into the forest.
Kaganov laughed. “Yes, this is where Semy brought you two to play.”
Buy time. I can’t match him physically. I have no weapons. I need my wits—that’s all I have now. Play him. Buy time to come up with a plan.
She turned to face him. He towered above her, and she tried not to look at the weapon aimed at her chest or the knife at his hip. Instead she focused her eyes on his.
“Who is Semy to you?” she said. My father’s got ego. He brought me here because he wanted me to see him, for me to be impressed by and in awe of and afraid of him. He’s a narcissist who wants to show off. Appeal to his ego.
“My cousin from the Little Odessa side of the family,” he said. “By going to visit him at Kelvin, you signed his death warrant. Same with Milo Belkin.”
“What do you mean?”
He gave a half-assed shrug with his big shoulder. “Had to have them killed. Loose ends. Need to tie them all up now that you started messing in things.”
“They’re dead?”
A slow smile crossed his face. Bastard was enjoying this. Play it, Angie, play him.
“How … how did you do it?”
“I have contacts. On the inside.”
“Is that how you know that I visited Semy and Milo?”
“No. Semy phoned to tell me. He did it to buy continued protection for his own family, even though he knew his phone call would kill him. And you. That’s how much the asshole cared about his family.”
The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2) Page 31