Lillian still wore her white blouse and brown slacks but Andrei had changed into lounging pants, leaving his torso bare. A glimmer of humor broke through her grim mood. She was so used to seeing Andrei in formal attire that the sight of his hard abs and broad shoulders almost seemed improper. Very enticing, she thought. She’d never cared for the bulging pecs of Schwarzenegger wannabes. Andrei was strong but sleek. Much more appealing.
He looked up and smiled when she entered the room. For a moment, she was taken aback by the sensual, gut-stirring response that simple gesture produced in her. Nonsense, she said to herself, any woman would find him appealing, half-undressed like that.
Lillian had ordered snacks from room service: cold sodas, a plate of nacho chips and a bowl brimming with popcorn. They had a movie ready to go on the Blu-ray: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; Tolkien was one of her favorites. Maria felt her throat catch. It was after two in the morning, and though they both must be dead tired, they’d arranged this to help get her mind off her troubles.
“What a great idea—thanks, you two.” They’d left a space for her to curl up on the oversized hotel sofa. She slipped in between them. Andrei took the remote and hit Play.
Andrei hadn’t seen the film before but Lillian had watched it ten times. “My dream,” she said, pointing to the images of the Shire, “is to live in a little cottage with a garden, in a quaint English village.”
“You can actually visit Hobbiton now, you know,” Maria said. “Although you’d have to go all the way to New Zealand.”
“Oh, good. I’ll go there someday, then. Maybe find a boyfriend as short as me.”
They all laughed; it helped to banish the earlier ugliness. Maria put her bare feet on Lillian’s lap and leaned against Andrei’s shoulder as they watched Frodo and Bilbo hatch their grand plans.
Maria sat up with a jerk. She’d drifted off. Andrei’s arm lay protectively around her, his hand resting on her waist. He reached over and swept her hair off her brow. “You dropped off right before they reached Rivendell.”
“Did Lillian go to bed?”
“Ages ago. No doubt dreaming of little men. Good thing there’s one of us to keep watch,” he joked. Andrei’s former sullenness seemed to have vanished and she was happy to have his goodwill back. She suddenly realized her robe had fallen open, revealing the tops of her breasts. How long had she lain that way? She grabbed the folds of terry cloth and closed them.
When he ran his hand down her hip, it felt warm, exciting. “Not to worry. Nothing I haven’t seen before,” he said.
And yet it was different. The two of them were alone. And against her better judgment, Maria felt turned on, wanting to feel his hands on her bare skin. “I’m going to climb into bed,” she said. She got up abruptly and, still holding the lapels of her robe shut, gave him a chaste peck on the cheek. “You’ll wake us in lots of time for the flight?”
“Sure thing,” he said. But Maria thought she’d caught a fleeting look of disappointment on his face.
They’d been away from New York for three days. Maria now counted eleven text messages from Reed Whitman. At first they were rather sweet, then increasingly insistent, and finally demanding. Why hadn’t he heard from her? Was she avoiding him? Was she no longer interested in his help? Back at home she dashed off a reply saying she’d been busy and would love to see him sometime soon. That she’d be in touch. The truth was she felt ambivalent about Reed. No question he had a magnetic draw, like a star pulling lesser planets into his sphere. And yet she found his possessiveness bordered on the claustrophobic, his self-confidence a little oppressive.
All thoughts of Reed disappeared when she picked up her voice mail messages. Trainor wanted to see her as soon as possible and this time, at his office. She left a message to say she’d see him in the morning.
CHAPTER 12
Maria chose her outfit carefully, conservative clothes that still made the most of her physical charms: a black pencil skirt and soft, dove gray sweater. She stuck her feet into low heels and donned her sunglasses. To act the part of an ingénue convincingly, she’d have to turn in one of her best Claudine performances. If you were going to outright flaunt the law as she did, you had to make sure all the appearances lined up perfectly. For this reason she was scrupulous about reporting all her earnings to the IRS under the umbrella of her event management company.
That fact gave her a little comfort as she approached the three-story redbrick building. The 110th Precinct building on Forty-third Street sat in a nondescript section of Queens, just verging on the squalid. When she gave her name at the front desk, a uniformed cop ushered her into a bland second-floor interview room with brown veneer walls and faded industrial carpeting. Five minutes later, Trainor and da Silva walked in and sat at the table across from her.
Maria’s stomach was already in her throat. She kept reminding herself she’d done nothing wrong, at least insofar as their investigation was concerned. It didn’t help.
“Good morning.” Trainor said. “Thanks for coming.”
Did the man ever smile? she wondered. “Whatever I can do to move things along—I’m glad to.”
“Good. Help me with something,” Trainor said.
She folded her hands in her lap, hoping he wouldn’t notice her nervousness and waited for him to continue.
“I’ll get straight to it. The murdered girl found with your ID was a prostitute working in the Bronx.” He flipped through a notebook that he’d brought in with him. “She was very young, probably trafficked into the state, and Romanian, just like you. Interesting coincidence—don’t you think?”
She had to stop herself from shrinking when he looked her straight in the eyes. She put on an engaging smile to hide how much his question had flustered her. “What? You think all Romanians know each other or something?” Trainor still didn’t crack a smile, so she tried another tack. “I was six years old when I was adopted. I’m an American citizen now. Surely you’re not suggesting any link between us just because we come from the same country?”
His lips tightened with his next words. “You’re associated with an Andrei Baranov—that right?”
Andrei? She thought of the scrupulous records she kept for the IRS. Andrei was listed as her business manager and his salary as an expense. They must have taken out a warrant to search those records.
Da Silva spoke up. “What’s Baranov’s relation to you?”
“Why are you concerned about Andrei?”
“Let’s just say he has ironclad ties to the Russian mafia in New York State,” Trainor said. “As in, one of their right-hand men. We’re talking tax evasion, contraband armaments and, what’s relevant here, the sex trade. Not very nice company for a grad student, is he?”
“I had no idea.”
Before she could get another word out, da Silva jumped back in. “You’re running some kind of ‘business enterprise’—if that’s the right term. Quite a different story from the one you told us at your apartment. I hope you’re not going to deny it this time.”
This was beginning to feel less like an interview and more like an interrogation, as though she’d made all the wrong moves in a chess game and her queen was in peril. If they started investigating her, instead of the murder, she was finished. “I am a postgrad student at Yale. I can prove it.” She rummaged through her purse and slapped her student ID on the table. “To support myself, I run an event management company. Andrei assists me with that. And I do performance art in that context.”
Da Silva snickered. “They’re calling it performance art nowadays? That’s rich.”
Maria ignored him and stared at Trainor. “Am I on trial or something here? I don’t get why all these questions are about me.”
“Smudging the truth isn’t helpful, Ms. Lantos. The dead girl didn’t steal your ID. It was planted on her body. We think she was targeted because she was a young, beautiful Romanian who sold sex. No accident she resembled you so closely—was it?” She was about to protes
t but Trainor raised a hand to silence her. “This murder was a message to you. Now, I want you to think long and hard about my next question, okay? Have you crossed someone in the past, stiffed someone?”
Da Silva sniggered and Trainor shot him a warning glance.
“Are they paying you or your friend Andrei back? If so, you’ve picked a dangerous guy to get on the wrong side of.”
Maria cast her eyes down and said nothing for a moment, allowing a few tears to slide out. “This whole thing is terrifying. I’m afraid all the time now. If I had even the tiniest clue who it was, I’d tell you. Believe me.” She bit her lip and gave Trainor a beseeching look.
His voice softened a little. “Well, I want you to think hard about it. Let’s come up with some names.”
“I’ve tried and tried. I can’t think of anyone. Don’t you have any leads at all? No fingerprints? No DNA?”
“We’re working on it.” Clearly he had no intention of sharing any information with her. He tapped his pen on his notebook. He had large, powerful hands with blunt nails. “We’re going to need your computer,” he said. “And your cell phone.”
She blanched. “Don’t you have to get a warrant for something like that?”
“Not if the person concerned is anxious to be cooperative and gives those electronics to us voluntarily. Like you just said you wanted to be,” da Silva added.
She had no choice. If she insisted on a warrant, she’d just be digging herself in deeper. “All right.” She opened her bag and got out her tablet, reached into a side pocket for her cell phone and handed them both to Trainor.
“This is it?” he asked. “Just this tablet and your phone?”
“I have an old desktop at home that I keep only for word processing. All my wireless goes through the tablet or the cell. I can always get a new phone but I have to have my tablet back. My research and writing’s on it.”
Trainor waved his large hand. The hairs stuck out on his rough knuckles. “I’ll get one of our clerks to download it all. You want to stick around? Shouldn’t take long, then you can have them back.”
Maria followed Trainor glumly as he escorted her to the door. She tramped downstairs to the station lobby to wait. For an hour she watched the comings and goings absently, the cops casting odd glances her way. Her pulse pounded erratically. If they suspected she was a prostitute, why hadn’t they arrested her? Did they want to expose her well-known clients first? The stories about Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss flashed through her mind. While Fleiss ended up in federal prison, her male clients were given a pass. Fleiss’s privileged background made her a target for the other inmates and she’d been forced to fight for her life in jail. If Maria ended up in prison, she’d fall apart with the shame of it all.
Was that her stalker’s motive after all? Fleiss had been outed by rivals. Had one of Maria’s clients hidden his savage side? Become spiteful and hatched this whole scheme to destroy her? She’d been so careful. But it happened. In the early days she’d known call girls who’d been ruined by vengeful clients or other prostitutes.
A female clerk interrupted her thoughts. “From Detective Trainor,” she said, holding out a clear plastic bag containing her tablet and cell phone. Maria stammered her thanks and hurried out of the station.
She congratulated herself on two things. She’d been scrupulous about using her tablet only for school-related work. They’d find nothing of any interest on it. And she’d been smart enough to take her second cell phone to the interview, the one she used primarily for personal contacts. Her business cell, with a completely different server, was safe at the apartment. She rarely even looked at it. Andrei managed the client list and the correspondence. She’d wipe it clean the second she got home. She and Andrei kept their phones synced and Andrei maintained a digital file with all of their client information. He’d assured her it was deeply buried and totally inaccessible to anyone but the two of them.
Word-of-mouth recommendations were supreme in her business and not even a whiff of suspicion, whether from jealous wives or journalists, had ever touched any of her customers. She had a sterling reputation for discretion, another factor that fueled demand for her services. She could not afford to have the police on her back.
But clearly, they were on Andrei’s. Maria had never inquired too deeply into his business before he came to work for her. Still, it was a shock to hear he’d been tied up that directly with the mafia. It didn’t match the kind person she’d come to know. People were always full of surprises.
Her mind drifted back to the evil verse left underneath the photo by her stalker. Worm music. The words underneath the photo kept returning to her like a scratch on a record. And Siret. Only a few people knew the exact name of the town where the orphanage she’d spent those dark months was located in, or the age she’d left it at. She had a good idea where the information came from. That afternoon she meant to find out for sure.
CHAPTER 13
When Jewel Welland hit her midthirties, she was divorced and alone, so she decided to adopt a child. The idea of being able to simply select one and avoid all the pain and mess of childbirth appealed to her orderly mind. Dire conditions in Romanian orphanages has been much in the news in those days and Jewel had swooped down on one of the orphanages like an avenging angel. She paced between the filthy cots, examining the infant offerings. Most of the boys and girls were ruined by neglect and by years confined to their cots. With no stimulation, barely ever experiencing a kind human touch, many of the children waved their hands in the air as the only way they knew how to communicate. Jewel would try a tentative smile at those she thought might be interesting. The children would stare back at her with wide-open eyes and slack, dribbling mouths as if she were a cartoon character. Those who regularly burst into fits of temper or tried to clamber out of their beds had their wrists firmly clamped to the cot struts. All of them, Jewel decided, were too far gone. Impossible to mold any of these into an acceptable son or daughter, let alone one who might excel.
The stink of the place overwhelmed her from the start. Jewel’s expensive heels slipped on brown floors damp with urine. She held a perfumed tissue to her nose to staunch the smell of sheets stained with mucus and feces. She’d wanted to save a child who’d endured some of the worst deprivations but now realized it had been a mistake to come.
She was about to tell the matron accompanying her that she’d changed her mind when they passed a small room. She glimpsed a cot pushed against a back wall. It was the only piece of furniture and the cement floor was pitted and soiled. In one corner she could see a nest of some kind, dozens of long, dark, slippery insect bodies swarming in and out of a crack in the cement. They were feasting on excrement. Jewel turned her head away in disgust.
Kneeling on a dirty mattress, staring at them through the high struts of the crib, a cherubic face caught Jewel’s attention, matted blond hair twisting down the child’s bare shoulders, and two wide eyes, a heavenly green. The worn material of the mattress was so stained that the original pattern of the fabric was barely discernible. It had split around the outside seam and the stuffing protruded.
The girl had contorted herself into a painful position, her right wrist tied securely with thin cable to the crib’s top bar. She was naked. With her free hand the girl reached through the gap in the struts, opened and closed her fingers. The gesture was a parody of welcome. She was not a toddler. Jewel judged the child to be around five or six years old.
She stopped in her tracks and removed the tissue from her nose. “Who’s that?”
“Older girl.” The matron replied. “Trouble child. You don’t want her.”
“What kind of trouble? Is she mentally deficient?”
“Da. She has a bad mind. Screams at night. Won’t keep quiet.”
Jewel saw this as a positive sign. It showed the child had normal reactions to extreme deprivation. She walked closer. The girl’s eyes were clear and wary. The vacant expression she’d seen on the other children’s faces was miss
ing. “How long has she been here?”
The matron held up five fingers. “Since January. Five months only.”
“She must be able to talk, then.” Jewel touched the small hand and the girl shrank back in fear.
She noticed a band of bruises on the girl’s arm, a cluster of darker ones around the wrist secured by the rope and more bruising at the top of her thighs. “She’s been beaten.” Jewel said accusingly.
“I don’t know that. They might have to. She tries and tries to get out.”
“Why doesn’t she have any clothes on?”
The matron shrugged her shoulders. “She tears them off and wets on them. Then throws them on the floor. Bad girl. Animal.”
So her bed won’t be drenched in pee, you idiot, she thought. That showed the child had a clear working mind. And better, a desire to keep herself clean.
“What happened to her parents?”
“Criminal people. Executed.”
The girl kept her eyes glued on her visitors. Jewel thought she detected a faint glimmer of warmth. She turned to the matron. “Is there somewhere you can give her a bath? A hand wash even? And some clothes, comb her hair? Then bring her to me. I may be interested in taking her. I’m willing to be generous.”
One week later Maria Lantos was on her way to Providence, Rhode Island. Jewel hired a nurse to accompany them, fearing the child might burst into the temper tantrums the matron described. It proved unnecessary. Maria was a quiet little mouse, afraid of everything. This enlivened Jewel in a different way. At the law firm, Jewel was admired for her single-mindedness. Once she’d mapped out a course of action, she was unstoppable. She managed her cases carefully, choosing only those she knew she would win. To create an intelligent, well-balanced daughter out of such deprivation presented a challenge. Jewel believed Maria was a case she could win.
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